BluePhantom
Educator (of liberals)
- Thread starter
- #61
Hmm. Very interesting stuff. I've never heard some of these stories.
Well that's kind of the thing. Most people don't know these stories because historically you would get killed for speaking of them. There is a reason why apocryphal books are so rare. You would get killed for having them. This is also why when we find these rare books they are stuffed in jars and buried or hidden. They were buried so no one would know that the owner had them and then 2,000 years later someone is digging for fertilizer (as was the case with the Nag Hammadi texts) and suddenly there are these books no one has ever seen. We knew they existed because other texts referred to them but we didn't have them. For example we have writings from very ancient church fathers talking about the Gospel of Thomas. We knew it existed at some point but it had been lost to history. We didn't know what the Gospel of Thomas actually said. We didn't know for perhaps 1,800 years. Then in 1945 a guy was digging in the desert and found a jar. In it was the fucking Gospel of Thomas that had been buried by someone almost 2,000 years ago to hide it so he would not get killed for having it. Suddenly, all these references by other Christian authors start to make sense because NOW we have the Gospel of Thomas!!!!
So there are so many things that we don't know about what ancient Christians believed and when one starts to dig there is a great opportunity for learning that can enhance one's faith and love for God. But many people find it really threatening because those texts are very different. They talk about a very different Christianity than they grew up believing. It's scary to consider such things because you put your entire theological creed on the line.
You think that's scary, try wondering about the existence of God! You know, you're supposed to have "faith" to get into Heaven. Otherwise . . . hot potatoes.
Well but consider what I said about Satan earlier. There was no concept of hell in early Judaism either. Hell developed with the concept of Satan. If God was the Lord of heaven and Satan was the antithesis of God there must be the antithesis of heaven. Hell was born. But just like in the original Judaism where Satan didn't exists, neither did hell. Hell got invented as the concept of Satan developed. The words traditionally translated into "hell" in the Bible don't even mean that in the original languages of Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic. The concept of hell didn't arise until centuries after the death of Jesus.
That's also why I don't believe in hell. It was made up to identify the realm of Satan who in turn was made up to explain suffering. It had the added benefit of terrifying the hell out of the peasant to get them to behave themselves.