Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Emile Vidrine who wrote (730132)	3/8/2006 1:37:58 PM
From: Kevin Rose	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

The New Testament has even fewer surviving texts. Scholars think that not until years after Jesus' alleged death that its authors wrote the Gospels. There exists no evidence that the New Testament came from the purported original apostles or anyone else that had seen the alleged Jesus. Although the oldest surviving Christian texts came from Paul, he had never seen the earthly Jesus. There occurs nothing in Paul's letters that either hints at the existence of the Gospels or even of a need for such memoirs of Jesus Christ. The oldest copy of the New Testament yet found consists of a tiny fragment from the Gospel of John. Scholars dated the little flake of papyrus from the period style of its handwriting to around the first half of the 2nd century C.E. The language of most of the new testament consists of old Greek. Interestingly, there existed many competing Christian cults in the early years after Jesus' alleged death. Some sects saw the universe in dualisms of goodness and sin, of light and darkness, God and the Devil. Other Christian sects performed odd rituals, some of which involved the swallowing of semen, thought of as a sacred substance. Many other Christians also wrote mystical stories and by the second century there existed more than a dozen Gospels, along with a whole library of other texts. These include letters of Jesus to foreign kings, letters of Paul to Aristotle, and histories of the disciples. In one of these secret Gospels, it describes Jesus taking naked young men off to secret initiation rites in the Garden of Gethsemene. There lived Christian Gnostics (knowers) who believed that the church itself derived from the Devil to keep man from God and from realizing his true nature. In those first centuries of Christianity orthodoxy did not exist and when an organized orthodox church finally came, it got defined, almost inadvertently, in argument against many of the Gnostic sects. So the idea of the Bible as a single, sacred unalterable corpus of texts began in heresy and later extended and used by churchmen in their efforts to define orthodoxy. One of the Bible's most influential editors, Irenaeus of Lyon, decided that there should only exist four Gospels like the four zones of the world, the four winds, the four divisions of man's estate, and the four forms of the first living creatures - the lion of Mark, the calf of Luke, the man of Matthew, and the eagle of John. In a single stroke, Irenaeus had delineated the sacred book of the Christian church and left out the other Gospels. Irenaeus also wrote what Christianity did not include, and in this way Christianity became an orthodox faith. A work of Irenaeus, Against the Heresies, became the starting point for later inquisitions. There has existed over a hundred different versions of the Bible, written in most of the languages of the time including Greek, Hebrew and Latin. Some versions left out certain biblical stories and others contained added stories. The completed versions of the old and new testament probably got finished at around 200-300 C.E. although many disputed the authenticity of some books which later ended up as Apocrypha (uncanonical or of questionable authorship). For example, the book of Ecclesiasticus appears in the Catholic Bible but not in Protestant versions. At around 405 C.E. Jerome (Eusebius Hieronymous) finished translating all the Old and New testament books into Latin (Vulgate Bible) which provided the Roman Catholic church added power. The Vulgate Bible went through several revisions up until the early 1900s! nobeliefs.com