this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
1143 points (100.0% liked)
196
18220 readers
341 users here now
Be sure to follow the rule before you head out.
Rule: You must post before you leave.
Other rules
Behavior rules:
- No bigotry (transphobia, racism, etc…)
- No genocide denial
- No support for authoritarian behaviour (incl. Tankies)
- No namecalling
- Accounts from lemmygrad.ml, threads.net, or hexbear.net are held to higher standards
- Other things seen as cleary bad
Posting rules:
- No AI generated content (DALL-E etc…)
- No advertisements
- No gore / violence
- Mutual aid posts are not allowed
NSFW: NSFW content is permitted but it must be tagged and have content warnings. Anything that doesn't adhere to this will be removed. Content warnings should be added like: [penis], [explicit description of sex]. Non-sexualized breasts of any gender are not considered inappropriate and therefore do not need to be blurred/tagged.
If you have any questions, feel free to contact us on our matrix channel or email.
Other 196's:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Fun Christianity detail.
All three Synoptics (Mark, Matthew, Luke) have Jesus telling his followers they aren't allowed to bring purses or money to minister.
This naturally would have prevented monetary collections.
But then in around 54 CE, 20 years after Jesus is killed, a guy who never met him and was known to be persecuting his followers shows up in areas outside his jurisdiction telling people he's one of them now and to ignore any versions of Jesus he doesn't approve of. He even acknowledged that people were saying he was doing evil in the name of good (Romans 4:8).
He argued with the church in Corinth that their belief "everything is permissible" was wrong and on top of it argued that he was entitled to make a living off his ministering, while then asking for monetary donations "for the poor in Jerusalem" (but in other letters we see he was also enriched himself with donations).
Eventually the gospel of Luke had Jesus at the last supper straight up like "Hey guys, remember when I said you can't carry purses? Let's 180° that."
I say eventually because the likely earliest version of that text we have was the one preserved by 'heretics' following Marcion, and their copy of Luke is missing that part at the last supper.
Christianity as canonized was in at least one way exactly opposite what had likely been the actual command of a historical Jesus. Out of all the various sects, the one which succeeded was not the one with divine editorial oversight, but simply the one with the most adaptive policies for sociopolitical success (such as fundraising to the point they eventually became endorsed by the emperor of Rome).
Additionally, other sects deemed heretical (with their texts eventually banned on penalty of torture and death) were also vehemently against profiteering by religious officiants:
TL;DR: It's so much worse than most people realize, especially Christians, who arguably should be made the most aware.
So many of Paul's teachings were shitty, too. My wife and I have a joke that if you're reading something shitty from the new testament it's probably Paul. Basically told people to only get married if they couldn't control their horniness too.
After I saw a paper on increased personal reference (i.e. talking about yourself) in writings by vulnerable narcissists, I analyzed the relative personal reference across all the Epistles and the undisputed Pauline letters cluster together significantly higher than the undisputed non-Pauline ones.
So it's worth considering if Paul was a vulnerable narcissist, prone to expressing both shame and grandiose intermittently as long as the focus was on him.
You can also see the charming multiple places he swears he's not lying, such as Galatians 1:20 or my favorite in Romans 9:1 where he swears to the Holy Spirit (though I must note all of Romans 9 is missing in Marcion's version, and this kind of swear he's telling the truth is repeated in 1 Timothy which is almost certainly a 2nd century forgery).
Paul even declared himself lawless in 1 Cor 9:20 and acknowledged converting by signs and wonders - which is a curious degree of overlap with the description of the "lawless one" in 2 Thessalonians 2 (projection much?).
There were other traditions of early Christianity that were much, much more interesting - particularly with the hindsight of modernity. But they lie buried under the efforts of Paul and those following after him.
Also, tangentially I get the creepiest vibe from Paul's language around being 'Father', his oft conflicts with towns he's residing in, and his described relationship over time with the much younger Timothy. It's worth remembering that as early as the 2nd century the Roman satirist Lucian is positioning the early church as providing refuge for someone who was in trouble for molesting a young boy.
I'm not much of a fan of Paul, to say the least. (Though I do think he was brilliant at manipulation, like most narcissists.)
He was little more than a good PR operation. He was less concerned with getting the message right than he was with getting the *name* out there.
The final scene in the much-maligned Passion of the Christ illustrates this pretty beautifully.