The Bible Is A Forgery

Originally posted by mayabong
Turn the other cheek
Give to Ceasar what is Ceasars.

Do you know the context in which those philosophies were written, and what the core morals of those stories teach?

Have you read them in context? If you have not read them in context, how did you conclude that those lines were added in support of Rome?

Mark 12:14-17

14And when they were come, they say unto him, Master, we know that thou art true, and carest for no man: for thou regardest not the person of men, but teachest the way of God in truth: Is it lawful to give tribute to Caesar, or not?

15Shall we give, or shall we not give? But he, knowing their hypocrisy, said unto them, Why tempt ye me? bring me a penny, that I may see it.

16And they brought it. And he saith unto them, Whose is this image and superscription? And they said unto him, Caesar's.

17And Jesus answering said unto them, Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's. And they marvelled at him.

What do you think that says in it's entirety?

Do you see a bias towards Rome? Or, do you see a bias towards God?

Is money, wealth, and power more important to you than your soul?

Originally posted by mayabong
Turn the other cheek
Give to Ceasar what is Ceasars.

How about this one...

Mark 5:39

Eye for Eye
38 “You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’[h] 39 But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. 40 And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. 41 If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles. 42 Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.

What do you think it says?

Do you see a bias towards Rome?

Are your possessions (objects) more important to you than your composure? What is more important to you? Money? or, resilience towards those who inflict fear and harm?

Where is this bias in favor of Rome?

Originally posted by OrphenFire
reply to post by adjensen

 

No. Where have you been? Constantine created Roman Catholicism to spare his Empire from fracturing into chaos. He used his state religion as a tool to unite and appease both Christians and Pagans of old Rome.

How convenient, then, that the Christianity that he "created" had so much in common with proto-Orthodoxy, which existed a hundred years and more prior to his birth. What's your explanation for that? Did Constantine have a time machine among his seemingly infinite resources that people tend to attribute to him?

Thus the many, many persisting Pagan traditions within Christianity.

Care to share some of these? Since you've emphasized "many" so much, I suppose a dozen examples ought to do it. Forget about Christmas, that doesn't trace back to Constantine, sorry.

Show me examples of manuscripts, which predate biblical scripture. Then show me their counterparts written in biblical scripture. Outside of these historical lessons, no one has provided anyone with comparisons. Give us line by line comparisons between other texts and their counterparts in the bible.

Although I personally know of such things, I want to see if the original poster can find them. Since this thread was his/her deceleration against Christianity, lets see specifics in support of the original poster's theory.

If the original poster cannot give us an analytical critique, I declare this thread as a means to carry out a witch hunt.

Copy and paste scripture and examples, but use your own words to make a solid debate.

I don't want to see --- 'because this book or site said so'.

Where is the proof?

(I already know where to find these answers, does the original thread owner know?)

reply to post by leejohnbarnes


Hate to break it to you but no one has said God ever written the bible...

Originally posted by adjensen

Originally posted by OrphenFire
reply to post by adjensen

 

No. Where have you been? Constantine created Roman Catholicism to spare his Empire from fracturing into chaos. He used his state religion as a tool to unite and appease both Christians and Pagans of old Rome.

How convenient, then, that the Christianity that he "created" had so much in common with proto-Orthodoxy, which existed a hundred years and more prior to his birth. What's your explanation for that? Did Constantine have a time machine among his seemingly infinite resources that people tend to attribute to him?

Thus the many, many persisting Pagan traditions within Christianity.

Care to share some of these? Since you've emphasized "many" so much, I suppose a dozen examples ought to do it. Forget about Christmas, that doesn't trace back to Constantine, sorry.

1. The symbol of Pisces.
2. The use of candles in mass.
3. The chanting of prayers.
4. The prayer to and worship of many icons. (idolatry)
5. The obsession with Sunday. (sun worship)
6. Easter is named for the goddess Eostre or Eastre, a goddess of the dawn. The dawn of a new day, a new week and a new season, Spring.
7. Days, months and seasons all correlating with astrology.

That's just seven off the top of my head.

reply to post by SaberTruth

I don't know about the rest of the fellow Christians in this thread, but... it looks like we somehow wound up in a parallel universe where research doesn't matter, fallacies are facts, and unbelievers just keep repeating the same fiction over and over and over no matter how many times we refute them. And all they come back with is "No you didn't!"

Exactly, A few posts above yours is yet ANOTHER post about how the Romans decided what books were to be in the Bible at the council of Nicea in 325. I'm almost tired of showing that myth to be false. It seems like yet another person will claim the same blatantly false information tomorrow in another thread.

Uuuuugh. They need to make a stickied thread in this forum with the truth about Nicea, it's getting ridiculous.

reply to post by leejohnbarnes


I really. really appreciate what you are saying. Yet must question. After all your probings you start your post with God did not write this nor did Jesus as if either were a true corporeal being that had just been mis-represented. Neither were true so in a sense you can neither represent nor mis-represent them. It is still knitting fog.

In a time where most could not read nor write except the privileged. A time where accounts could only be recreated from memory in a terrain where food was scarce, water was scarce, and disease was rampant. Knowledge of the world and its workings was at best, infantile. The simplest event today could be a "god-like event" without the knowledge of it's workings (Imagine seeing a tornado or feeling an earthquake with no prior knowledge of such things and their works) and a very narrow view of the world as referenced to surface area. A book of all answers in desperate times by uneducated(in comparison with present) "scholars". Should we not consider the common sense of today's reality as compared to times of old? At what point do we come to terms with the frightening aspects of our own mortality instead of grasping at ideals laid forth 2000+ years ago in a downtrodden fear based society? We scoff in school at those silly Greeks who believed in a god for every unexplained phenomena (wind for example). How is any other religion really any different? Discussing this of course brings a full shutdown of a normal persons logical tendencies. (question=refer to book disputed for answer. Asking of personal opinion=refer to book disputed for opinion.) If anyone feels the same as I, they are aware of the level of frustration in trying to cite any example that would prove contradictory to the story. Circles, ambiguous answers, and centuries of blatant genocide have been the responses most common. Imposed as "proven" fact since infancy without the actual proof of anything besides a book that consistently raises more questions than actual answers written by the very ones who could not know the answers to those questions. So I cannot, by the nature of reasoning and logic that this god (Invisible man who lives in the sky and grants wishes [prayers] to only those choses) gave me as inherited right, trust in the source of this debate.

Now Pretend you didn't read this.
Pretend you didn't really just pull your fingers out of your ears and stop screaming lalala, even for a moment. Pretend....we are good at this.




Thank you if you made it this far.

Originally posted by adjensen

Originally posted by dalan.
But after learning about the Roman Council of Nicaea I was blown away. I remember learning that the original books of the Bible were many and varied. Including books such as the Gospel of Thomas, the Book of Enoch, the Gospel of Judas...etc

So the Romans formed their Council of Nicaea and a bunch of high ranking Roman Officers decided what canon would be added into their state-sanctioned "Bible." They saw the Christian religion as an excellent tool of control.

Good grief.

THE COUNCIL OF NICAEA HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THE BIBLE! What does it take to get that fact through some of the thick heads around here? I can understand people getting confused by the fiction of The Da Vinci Code but, come on. Spend fifteen minutes reading an actual factual accounting of the Council and even the most dimwitted person will realize that it had nothing to do with the Bible.

And, as an aside, the Romans already had a quite effective means of control -- it was called the Roman army, so they had no need of Christianity. You'd be better served to argue that Christianity caused the downfall of Rome. That, at least, required a voluminous work by Augustine (City of God) to refute.

LOL, see what I mean? The Dan Brown lie has reached epic proportions. A simple Encyclopedia check on "First Council of Nicea" would show anyone that the claims that the council had anything to do with the Biblical cannon is blatantly false.

Let's look at it this way:

Even if the Bible is somehow written by God and somehow everything in the Bible is true.

So what?

People don't HAVE to accept it just like religious people don't accept science.


I think none of this crap matters anymore.

I don't care about where we came from or what the meaning of life is.

I got school and a job to worry about. I need to keep living and get wealthy before an energy crisis kills us all.

Originally posted by die_another_day
Let's look at it this way: Even if the Bible is somehow written by God and somehow everything in the Bible is true.

So what?

It was inspired by the word of God, but it was written by the hand of man.

Major flaw in the original poster's opening statement.

reply to post by adjensen

When one is talking about historical facts, a 100 year error is not "valid enough."

LOL!!! That would be similar to let's say, 2,000 years from now people are looking for information of WW II and looking for it amongst information from 1841-1845 A.D. and stating dogmatically that WW II never happened because there was no proof found.



Why is it that the Gnostics are the only group that thinks their texts are older than they are? Even atheists don't date them to the first century! Heck, the FIRST man to mix Gnosticism with Christianity was Justin Martyr and he was born sometime around 100 A.D. The book of Revelation was written in 95 A.D.

Originally posted by OrphenFire
1. The symbol of Pisces.

You mean ichthus? Nope, pre-dates Constantine.

2. The use of candles in mass.
3. The chanting of prayers.

Candles and chanting are the exclusive content of pagans? Sorry, fail.

4. The prayer to and worship of many icons. (idolatry)

The veneration of icons is predominantly an Eastern Orthodox, not Roman Catholic, phenomenon, and involves neither the prayer to, nor worship of, an icon. If you're going to claim something, at least understand the fundamentals behind it.

5. The obsession with Sunday. (sun worship)

Do you think that the Latin, Greek or Hebrew word for the big old ball in the sky is "sun"?

etc, etc, etc.

reply to post by adjensen

the Revelation of John is viewed by some to be a Jewish apocalyptic text,

Well, that's obvious. After Chapter 4:1 when the church is raptured it's virtually all Jewish in nature on Earth, it's Daniel's 70th week. The Tribulation is the "time of Jacob's trouble".

reply to post by leejohnbarnes



Good topic.
There are things which I agree with and disagree with.

The Bible is not the word of God.
Jesus did not write the Bible.
Nor did God.

No where in the bible does it say that it was written by God or Jesus. Its pretty evident that the bible is a product of a prophetic tradition stretching across back millenia. Long before there was a Roman empire.

It makes better sense to understand the bible as a series of ancient documents strung together. So there is a good chance that many forgeries made it into the original pool of material that later on went to be biblical canon.

(christians) are Constantians in that they worship the state religion created by Constantine

I agree with this statement. Many "christian" beliefs originate in decisions taken by the council of Nicea (through vote). Christians essentially have let people foriegn to the semitic spritual tradition decide what christianity has to be.

*more to come later*

reply to post by OrphenFire

No. Where have you been? Constantine created Roman Catholicism to spare his Empire from fracturing into chaos. He used his state religion as a tool to unite and appease both Christians and Pagans of old Rome.

Where do you get your information from?? lol Constantine only made Christianity legal. It was Constantine's 2nd successor who made Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire.

Where do these absurd myths originate from??? Doesn't anyone think to check the historical facts first?

Originally posted by Jax27
"this post is another useless attack on Christianity" - I hate to be blunt or offensive, but there is no such thing as a useless attack on any religion. Religion should be met with hostility and violence. Superstition might be the downfall of man unless we stop it.

Really? So if I told you that, while I don't consider myself strictly a "Christian" but I try to follow the teachings of Jesus, and through him his apostles, as laid out in the Christian bible, such as "love your neighbor as yourself", "help those in need", etc, you would meet me with hostility and violence? How ironic.

/TOA

Originally posted by NOTurTypical
Why is it that the Gnostics are the only group that thinks their texts are older than they are?

Probably because it doesn't make any sense for Gnosticism to arise out of the theology of Marcion, Valentinus, and the other Gnostic (and pseudo-Gnostic - Marcion probably thought the Gnostics to be heretics) theologians. After all, if you want to claim that someone had secret knowledge to pass on, you kind of missed the boat if they died 100 years before you came up with that idea.

Thus, the claim, for example, that the Gospel of Thomas was written by Jesus' twin brother Judas, when this is obviously not the case. It wasn't uncommon for this sort of thing to happen (my personal favourite pseudepigraphical work being "The Acts of Paul", because I'm a big fan of Thecla, lol) but it doesn't help one's case for authenticity and validity.

reply to post by adjensen


I understand the etymology behind the words, but you for some reason fail to recognize the significance.

Ichthus is a pagan symbol that was adopted by Christianity to represent the age of Pisces, the age of Jesus Christ. Ichthus became synonymous with Christianity, though it comes from Paganism. Now, you don't seem to understand that forms of paganism were the first religions to ever exist. Different faiths evolved over time but they all worshiped the sun, for it brought the new day and new life to the Earth. Of course prayers and chants aren't exclusive to paganism, it was adopted by every subsequent religion, Christianity not exempt. Roman Catholics pray to the virgin Mary and to the saints, though they twist this into that they are "asking Mary and the saints to pray for them". It's the same thing. They pray before idols. Now, here are the days of the week in English and where they come from.

Sunday - the Sun (the god prime of pagans)
Monday - the Moon, the Sun's sister (Norse paganism)
Tuesday - Mars, the god of war
Wednesday - Mercury, the god of merchants and trade
Thursday - Thor, Norse god of thunder (awesome movie, watch it)
Friday - Venus, goddess of beauty
Saturday - Saturn, god of harvest and the father of Jupiter

These names are all steeped in astrology and paganism. Not all of it has to do with Constantine, obviously. But the fact remains, Christianity is full of pagan traditions.