Do You Believe In What The Bible Sez?

Most of Jesus's words in the Bible were ghostwritten according to a report by a group of 77 biblical scholars, who call themselves the Jesus Seminar.

Jesus did not say about 80% of the words attributed to Him in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, claim these researched scholars in a 575 page book entitled - The Give Gospels: What did Jesus Really Say?

According to the scholars:

* Jesus never claimed to be the Messiah and did not predict the end of the world.

* Jesus probably did share a symbolic last meal with His disciples just before His death. But Jesus's words in the Bible comparing Himself to the bread and wine that He passed around the table, probably were written by His followers.

* The Lord's Prayer, which the Bible says Jesus composed, also was compiled by Christians after his death.

An Excerpt -

"The image that comes out of our work is not a Jesus who was an apocalyptic visionary as much as He was a social revolutionary. And that is a massive step in our understanding of Jesus," says John Dominic Crossan, a co-founder of the Jesus Seminar in 1985 and professor of biblical studies at DePaul University in Chicago.

The group expects some church goers to be shaken by its conclusions, said Robert Funk, Crossan's co-chair.

"I can't imagine anyone wanting to have in faith that cannot withstand the tests of historical fact," Funk said.

At seminar meetings, the scholars examined all four of the Bible's gospels as well as a fifth ancient document, the Gospel of Thomas, which was discovered in Egypt in 1945.

Jesus left no written texts and none of the original gospels have survived. Instead the scholars studied and compared hundreds of ancient copies of the gospels.

They counted some of the Jesus's sayings because the versions conflicted sharply from one document to another. Other sayings appeared to be well meaning additions by church leaders after the death of Jesus. Some were eliminated because they did not fit properly into the chronology of Jesus's life.

The new image of Jesus that emerges, Funk said, is of "an itinerant sage. He wandered around and had no permanent address as far as we can tell.

"He seems to have been a social radical and he had a good sense of humor. He seems to have said a lot of things with a twinkle in His eye, like telling people that they should not be concerned about the speck in their neighbor's eye when they've got a whole timber stuck in their own."

************

In summation... I think the Bible has great meaning within in pages, it relays a good message, but it's a storybook.

I mean Socrates was merely an invention of Plato, but his words still have great meaning. There are no 'forms' and there never was a cave of shadows, but it is an accurate description of how we think.

All allegory has meaning. Sadly, literals strip every ounce of meaning away. A literal story says nothing, points to nothing, means nothing.

Meaning is an artful thing, full of doubts and hypothesis drawing on anecdotes and experiences. Even a false conclusion has more meaning than a belief. Beliefs are empty, unquestioned, frozen in time. An abstract death ritual performed pre-mortem. All beliefs are wrong by definition. All doubts correct. Faith is an excuse for those that already know better but don't want to accept it.

I was raised Catholic, I attended the dreadful sunday school and long masses every damn Sunday for the first 10yrs of my life. Research the history of religion. For those Dan Brown fans there, you've already been enlightened on several things proving the good book inaccurate. I don't believe in a higher power and I sure as hell don't believe non-Christians are bound for hell. Give me a break. I believe in a man named Jesus who spread excellent messages, but he was not the son of God, savior of the Jews, or risen from the dead.

So come December 25th, don't wish him a happy birthday. The date of December 25th comes from Rome and was a celebration of the Italic god, Saturn, and the rebirth of the sun god. It was noted by the pre-Christian Romans and other pagans, that daylight began to increase after December 22nd, when they assumed that the sun god died. These ancients believed that the sun god rose from the dead three days later as the new-born and venerable sun.

This was done long before the birth of Jesus.

[mama]

God bless candygirl.