/lit/ - Literature

ok.

>>19599244
>>19599211
dubs for jesus

>>19599211
Ecclesiastes and the Psalms are other great books. Job also helps with much needed humbling.

>>19599266
>>19599244
>>19599211
ITS A MIRACLE

>>19599275
Yes. They may have value. But if they condradict the synoptic gospels the teachings of christ take presidence

>>19599244
>>19599266
I'm thinking based

>>19599211
>It's not a new idea
You're right, it's not, yet you felt compelled to post it. Curious.

>>19599211
You can't understand the Gospels without taking into account the Old Testament, as well as the expositions of Christ's teaching by the Apostles in their writings and in Sacred Tradition. If you read the Gospels and pay attention, you'll see that constant reference is being made to the Old Testament. Jesus constantly emphasises how He came in order to fulfil the Scriptures, how He is the fulfilment of all the Prophets and the Law. The Gospels are not merely related to the Old Testament, they are inseparable from it.

>>19599479
You don't make any sense. Is /lit/ only for novel ideas? Because you can delete 99.9% of the posts on /lit/ if that's your problem.
I posted "its not a new idea" as I wanted my post to have a degree of credibility instead of anons thinking I pulled it out of my ass.
There's a long and interesting history concerning the
provenance and construction of the Bible and how it relates to the actual teachings of christ.

>>19599518
>The old testament should be an appendix in the Bible to give the teachings of Christ some context.
yes. Hence "The old testament should be an appendix in the Bible to give the teachings of Christ some context."

>>19599518
How is the Parable of the Sower require the Old Testament to be understood?

>>19599580
How does*

>>19599580
this. The teachings of christ are self-evident.

>>19599560
It's not an appendix it's an integral part of Christ's teaching and the Gospels. It's like watching Godfather 2 without watching the first one.
>>19599580
If you wish to understand the whole of the Gospels, from a theological, historical, moral, and literary perspective, you have to understand both.

>>19599621
>If you wish to understand the whole of the Gospels, from a theological, historical, moral, and literary perspective, you have to understand both.
O. K.

>>19599211
>Matthew 5:17-18
>John 10:35
>Matthew 15:3
>Mark 7:13
You gotta read it all. Its all important to understand fully.

>>19599275
I see Job more as a book about man's individual and inescapable struggle with his relationship to God. It's almost like you may as well consider your life and everyone you know as a matrix simulation--them dying is just to teach you a lesson about fidelity to God rather than the tragedy it appears. (He can also make them reappear in a new and better form, as well.) This general theme (minus the inane matrix business of mine) finds the strongest reputation in middle European Protestantism than any other version of Christianity or any other related religion.

is it against jesus to say that some people just shouldnt be helped, whether its senile old people that need their diapers changed and cant remember their own name, junkies that will hurt anybody that gets in their way just to get their fix and dont care about anything else anymore, direct opposition of christ that will inevitably threaten you or your family, barely coherent bumbling schizophrenics some combination of all of the above

>>19601346
By helped do you mean saved in the eternal sense?

>>19601395
no i mean materially, hospitalized, nursed, housed etc

I respect Christianity to the extent that I may have even practiced it at points in my adult life.

That being said, the Old Testament is an absolute masterpiece of literature.

I think Christians mangle and mutilate it beyond recognition when they retroject their own theology into it, or scour it for types. Augustine turned it into an absolute monstrosity, for example reading Elohim as the Trinity and the serpent as Satan.

If you allow the texts to be themselves, and listen to them sincerely as of their own voice, you can begin to discern in the Hebrew Bible as a whole a vast arc of ideas developing about God, man and life. Absent from all of these is any particular sense of Heaven and Hell, which I find remarkable. There is only Sheol, the realm of the Dead, the void, the pit, the end.

That single fact makes the OT more convincing to me than Christian theology, with its ridiculous presentation of human life as a brief moral and spiritual drama unfolding between Heaven and Hell (and Maybe Purgatory).

Specific works, such as Job, are absolutely first rate works of literary genius.

Basically the OT is unbelievably based but it takes some time and some reading before you start to get it. It contains a delightful variety of religious pessimism and optimism, and a rich array of poetic, dramatic, prophetic, narrative and ritualistic genres. Quite a bit of it is absolutely bleak, which I find appealing. I greatly appreciate its emphasis on the capriciousness of God, who tramples all human sense of justice into dust, but occasionally fulfills it. I find it religiously convincing that the OT couples such an idea of God with sincere and pious devotion.

It is very strange to me that Christians went through the trouble of developing the idea of a Trinitarian God in order to bridge the OT and the NT when the OT contains thematic ideas which are essentially irreconcilable with Christian theology.

In other words, if you read the Bible backwards then the first 90% becomes an Appendix, but if you read it forwards the last 10% becomes refuted.

The New Testament was originally a fanfic. Jesus wanted to be divine, so invented a story in which he was the main character and the son of God.

>>19601534
Profoundly stupid post. Jesus did not compose the Gospels. The epithet, "Son of God" is pre-Christian and was applied to, for example, David. It is debatable how much this implied divinity during the first century.

>>19601554
>Jesus did not compose the Gospels
You weren't there

>>19601578
Neither were the Gospel writers... maybe. Also, how could Christ write about his own death? I guess he could but that would only validate his resurrection.

>>19599211
friendly reminder to /lit/ that eternal life is the free gift of God with no strings attached. if you want to receive it and be 100% sure of going to heaven, watch this gospel video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpOv_kvk4M8

it's easy to be saved so don't miss out anons

>>19601628
>comments disabled

>>19601454
tell me more please

>>19602434
There is no way to fit it in a forum post my man. That's at least 800 years of history and thousands of pages of distinct writings by a bewildering range of writers in several languages and places, forming a unity anyhow.

A basic acquaintance with the structure (TaNaKH) and the history of Israel from David to the Captivity are good places to start.

Northrop Frye's lecture series available on Youtube is fantastic, as far as I can tell.

As with anything, the more you read and study, the more you get a sense of depth and breadth.

>>19601628
>Protestants and John 3:16

>>19599211
False. The Barnabas Gospel is the least corrupted.

>>19601628
Lol were it so easy. That's the prime indication your religion is false.

>>19602547
kek, it's the closest scriptural verse to "Jesus loves you and wants a personal relationship with you in particular" which is a deeply non-Biblical sentiment.

>>19602567
>The Barnabas Gospel is the least corrupted.
muslimshit detected

>>19602721
Watch your tongue, idolater. Why do you think your favorite gospel is the correct one and not the others?

>>19601009
It's more of a "God knows better. Stop trying to be more just than him or whatever you may think."

>>19601454
Good post. I don't entirely agree with you, but good post

It would certainly be less time consuming to read the Bible of it was just the synoptic gospels.

>>19599211
Its not a new idea its the marcionism heresy, which started in the second century.

Some of the most are Proverbs and Psalms.

>>19601454
What you're actually doing is reading your modern ideas into it
You contradict all extant early Jewish thought on the Bible
Worse yet is your retarded reading of the NT

>ctrl F Babylon
>0 results
LOST SHEEP INDEED NGMI

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>>19599266

>>19599211
Okay Markion
We get it
You think YHWH was a meanie and that's understandable
The OT was mostly just nationalistic propaganda in the minds of its authors
But with the coming of Christ, it is imbued with new meaning as all the tropes of the ot are subverted

>>19603604
I suppose I am a product of my time like anyone else, yes. I read and make considerations based on modern Biblical scholarship. For example I find source and redaction criticism and general consensus of date ranges supplied by handwriting/material/grammar analysis specialists extremely helpful. I cannot imagine why anyone would ignore that scholarship outright simply because it is relatively new. Much of it is not even based on modernist assumptions such as positivism, but is just a product of highly organized, far-reaching and meticulous cataloguing. Many important documents in NT studies simply sat in dark corners of libraries for centuries until specialists found them in the 19th century.

To be honest my favorite method is literary analysis. I have become a much better reader by trying to crack open English poems. I am not by no means particularly skilled here but it seems to me the most helpful method of understanding much text. It is also an approach that huge portions of the Bible-reading world simply do not undertake, for whatever reason. Books like Job are impossible to read without some sense of literature, where Satan is a purely literary device meant to show the reader that Job is in fact blameless before he begins debating with the three friends who all keep claiming evil accrues to sinners. It is absurd how many people misread this and draw ridiculous conclusions about the nature of evil, or the pettiness of God, as a result.

Finally, the Talmudic rabbis are a branch of a tree, and so is Christianity, and they share roots. Other branches are at Qumran, in Philo, by way of Bar Kokba. None takes any kind of absolute precedence over the others. All offer sincere interpretations. It is not too much of a reach to say that Dante or Dostoevsky, Joseph Smith or Joel Osteen, are also among the branches. Read and compare them all, and see for yourself who keeps the flame most ardently.

>>19601454
Add also the incorporation of AssyroBabylonian mythology into Judaic myth, e.g. the Flood

>>19605376
Oh certainly, the Hebrews borrowed heavily from their neighbors, from Abraham and on. They absorbed a good deal of Phoenician and Egyptian before turning to the Babylonian and Greek. All cultures borrow, so Rome was Etruscan and Greek, and ultimately bowed to a Jew from Galilee. How odd.

Well they made it all their own. They never abandoned the Covenant, and they wrestled all the way with God. What a God he is, and what a people he has!