On Sep 22, 2009, at 3:20 AM, Charlie Bell wrote:
I agree with Bruce that in general lessons ascribed to Jesus are
about love and acceptance of the other.
That's the widely perceived view of them, yes. Doesn't totally hold
water if you actually read the New Testament, but yes - if people
tried to act a bit nicer to each other we'd be better off.
The New Testament comes from a variety of sources and at least a
couple of major generations of editing and translation, though. See
the research done by the Jesus Seminar, which did a lot of work on
tracking down authenticity of the gospel texts virtually word by word,
with interesting and somewhat revealing results. Among other things,
there were some appallingly bad translators working for King James,
and one in particular whose work was of such poor quality that they
could actually trace which passages he worked on by characteristic
errors. ("Camel through the eye of a needle" was one of his more
spectacular goofs.)
There was also a lot of content rejected from the canonical Bible
around the time Christianity ceased to be an underground religion and
became an official state religion, under Constantine, most notably at
the First Council of Nicaea, and a lot of the content that *was*
included tended to be more supportive of the idea of centralized
church authority, based on surviving examples of books omitted from
the canonical version. So, I find the New Testament less than
authoritative as a whole in terms of how well it conveys the message.
Others may disagree.
There are entire dissertations' worth of theological discussion under
this rock, though, and a lot of the subject is rather controversial,
particularly within circles where belief in the literal truth of the
entire Bible is an article of faith. But that's the tip of the
iceberg ..
"Almost nothing that trickles down is fit to consume." -- Davidson Loehr
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