"What did he believe and who taught him?"
There has been something of a gap since my last blog. It's hard to come up with new ideas that do not sound like i am repeating myself. So much of this info builds on previous knowledge and without explaining an idea over and over the reader becomes lost. My blog follows a fairly unorganized path as it is, so original content is a bit difficult to provide.
I have been trying to think of a way to simplify things and lay down a foundation for your own learning and exploration of the subject. i'd like to take a moment and describe the path ive walked to come to the conclusions i have.
I attended a christian school for grades 5-8. There we were required to memorize a verse or section of the bible every night. eventually we covered it from cover to cover. We studied the highlights and discussed all the main talking points. This ignited the my flame. I became somewhat interested in the history of religion. I began to read and study on my own, no more so than the average christian though.
Through out my self studies and reading, the book of revelation kept bugging me. There began my journey. I decided to get to the bottom of why this book bothered me so. I mean, at the end of a series of stories that were not much more than a collection of geniologies and laws is this vividly detailed book filled with all sorts of horrible imagery. It just didnt fit. Why did the writer of this book have such a different style than that of his co authors?
I wont go into the answers here, we can touch on that later. But i discovered who the writer was, why he wrote the way he did, what his socio-political influences were. What was the context of the times he was writing in. I found that i no longer believed what was in the book of revelation, and to my surprise i found that much of christian scholarship felt the same way. In fact, some denominations do not even include the book of Revelation in their cannon.
By my senior year in high school, i took a class called Bible History. This secular class showed me the correlation of the biblical stories to its contempary religions and nations. I learned how the timeline of the bible fits into the timeline of world history. Things didnt jive. And he was born an obsession.
With my curiosities about Revelation already quelled, i decided that was the best place to start. Moving backwards through the new testament, i studied the authors of each of the books, and what time and setting he/they lived in. I began to gain an understanding of what they believed, and what they actually wrote. And the one question i kept asking was "who taught him that?"
"What did he believe and who taught him?" became the formula. The new Testament ultimately narrows down to "Jesus" as the answer to that question although if you will read my blog on the Pauline Docterine you will find the answer is not a straight forward answer. The old testament on the surface gives you pretty linear list of the teachings of the Word of God. But just as the Jesus teachings, you find that the story is not always as it seems.
Ten years after i moved past Revelation i have found my answers to "What did he believe and who taught him?" i am satisfied with what i know of the credited authors of the bible. BUT.....i have found a new question to ask. "who created that character and what did he believe?"
Most say Homer's Illiad and the Epic Cycle are the greatest work of fiction ever written. Aelxander the great, Xerxes, Hadrian, The Ceasers, The kings of Italy and England, all claim the bloodline of Priam. Even Mehmet II after sacking constantinople claimed his victory in the name of Troy, destroying the greeks and finally avenging the fallen of the city. The story has been taken as absolute fact. But we now know that is not the case. We know that the events spoken of in the epics did not occur as told. That the sack of troy was just one small step in a greater campaign by Hattusa, and that it may not have been the greeks attacking Troy at all, but the other way around. Homer took true events, and real people, and fabricated a mesmerizing story around them. One that has captured the minds of people for 3000 years. For it was around 850 BC that homer stitched his bard together.
It is of no coincidence that the bible stories were mapped out in much the same manner around the same time frame(800-600 BC). The authors of the bible took 3 distinctly different stories and merged them into a single epic tale. Using names and places already familiar to the people to which it was told.
However, the writers of the bible failed to diligently stitch their story together. Rather than a seemless flow of continuity, as with homer, the bible is a more of a patch work, with overlapping stories, and people and events taking place in cities that were destroyed long before the authors set the back drop of their story. They use phrases, and words that should not be in the lexicon of the time.
These little nuances showed me that the bible was not written by the hands of those to whom the stories are credited too. Take for instance the tale of the exodus in the Torah, the 1st 5 books of the bible. These stories should of taken place some time between 1200 and 900 BC. The next story after the torah is Joshua, Moses' successor. It is claimed that he, through the help of God destroyed the walls of Jericho. The problem is that Jericho's walls fell 1650-1550 BC. During the time frame in which the story was penned, the rubble of the walls would of been well known to the hebrew people. The cause would not of been known. The Authors take credit for the fallen walls through the story of Joshua and use it to show the power of God.
That was just the most obvious of the mistakes made by the sculptors of the story. Homers job was made easy by a united history. He did not have to weave multiple histories together. The hebrew are a melting pot of caananite cultures and those that mapped out a path to a united history took on a large and cumbersome task.
With this figured out....i could then get back to "what did he believe and who taught him?" with the addendum of "what was his motive?"
It's been a tough and arduous path, but it has led me to a greater understanding of the bible. And there is plenty more road ahead.
