(Part 2) Reddit mentions: The best christian church history books

Hi /u/iwillyes, I'm glad you're here! Let me start by talking a bit about what the Reformed tradition of Christianity is.

The Reformed Tradition is a branch of Protestant Christianity that developed during the Reformation in Switzerland, Scotland, France and the low countries. John Calvin was (and is) the most influential theologian in the Reformed tradition. While we share many similarities with Anglicans, Baptists and Lutherans we are usually seen as a distinct strand. We disagree on the meaning of both Baptism and the Eucharist, for example (in both regards Lutherans are closer to Catholics). Pentecostals and Anabaptist are quite different.

In terms of what makes the Reformed different from other Protestant groups, I love this quote by Cornelius Plantinga:

>>Our accents lie more on the sovereignty of God, on the authority of Scripture, on the need for disciplined holiness in personal Christian life, and finally, on Christianity as a religion of the Kingdom.

That emphasis on the sovereignty of God over all things is in my mind what most clearly distinguishes the reformed tradition. Part of that is understanding God to be sovereign in salvation - what is commonly known as the five points of Calvinism. Basically we believe that because of we are dead in our sin, man is utterly unable to do anything to save himself - even unable to turn to God. It is only through God's grace of drawing us to him that we are able to have the faith that saves us. This means that we contribute nothing to our own salvation - it is entirely a work of God.

In the U.S. there are two main groups of Reformed churches: Presbyterians (the Scottish Reformed) and the Dutch Reformed. Historically Scottish Reformed have put a bit more emphasis on personal piety (the Puritans are part of this group) while the Dutch Reformed have put slightly more emphasis on declaring the Lordship of Christ over all creation. But, we are very, very similar. The Reformed tradition is a deeply confessional one. We hold to historic documents that describe what we understand scripture to teach on a wide range of matters. The Presbyterians hold to the Westminster Confession of Faith and the Dutch Reformed hold to the Three Forms of Unity. While different documents, the two sets of confessions essentially teach the same doctrine.

In terms of churches the large (100k+ members) Presbyterian denominations in the US are the Presbyterian Church (USA), the Presbyterian Chrurch in America. the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, and ECO: A Covenant Order of Presbyterians. The PC(USA) is a more "liberal" church while the others are more "conservative" to varying degrees. The two large Dutch Reformed denominations are the Reformed Church in America and the Christian Reformed Church. There are also many smaller Presbyterian and Reformed denominations. Many of them are part of the North American Presbyterian and Reformed Council.

What complicates things a bit is that in recent years, many Christians in other traditions have started using "reformed" to mean they have a Calvinistic view of salvation, even if they don't fit into the broader reformed tradition in other ways. You will find a lot of Baptists who have a Calvinistic view of salvation, but not of the sacraments or the church, for example. This sub tends to attract both the more conservative branch of the Reformed tradition as well as those who just have a Calvinistic view of salvation.

In terms of books, my number one recommendation for you is Letters to a Young Calvinist: An Invitation to the Reformed Tradition by Jamie Smith. It's a quick easy read best digested in small parts. It does a great job of providing an overview of the Reformed tradition that is accessible, theological, and pastoral. It's aimed at those who have a 'come-to-Calvin' moment from within other theological traditions (Smith was pentecostal), but would benefit everyone.

Also read through some of the Reformed Confessions. The best place to start is with the Heidelberg Catechim and the Belgic Confession. If you want a more modern approach, I'd encourage you to also read the Christian Reformed Church's Contemporary Testimony Our World Belongs To God, too.

Other good "intro" level books:

• Reformed: What It Means, Why It Matters by Bob DeMoor. This is more of a booklet that a full book. It'd be a great option for a newcomers class at church.
  
  
• Deep Down Faith by Cornelius Plantinga. This one is a devotional aimed at young adults, but an excellent explanation of Reformed Faith.
  
  
• Chosen by God by R.C. Sproul. This is the book that made me a Calvinist. Best explanation and defense of TULIP out there. Sproul's The Holiness of God is anothe excellent choice, as are all of his books.
  
  
• Calvinism in the Las Vegas Airport: Making Connections in Today's World by Richard Mouw. Another book focused on TULIP. This one's goal is to show how the doctrines of Grace affect the way we live out our lives and correcting common misunderstandings about Calvinism.
  
  
  Once you feel ready for higher level stuff, I recommend:
  
  
• Reformed Theology by Michael Allen. If you want a book that covers the breadth of Reformed Theology at a deep level than Smith or DeMoor, this is for you (think intro college level).
  
  
• Reformed Catholicity: The Promise of Retrieval for Theology and Biblical Interpretation by Michael Allen and Scott Swain. This book is a clarion call: “to be Reformed means to go deeper into true catholicity, not to move away from catholicity.” A must read.
  
  
• Reformed Dogmatics (Abridged) by Herman Bavink. My appreciation for Bavink grows every time I read him. This abridged version is much cheaper and more accessible than the full four volume edition.
  
  
• Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion by John Calvin. This one needs no explanation. Get this one if you want to splurge for a nice reference edition, the Beveridge Translation is available for much less (and free online).
  

Mormonism and Islam claim to have the authentic teaching of Jesus, but only ours can be traced back to Jesus in history. Irenaeus of Lyons, writing in the late 2nd Century, considers the public succession of bishops going back to Jesus to be the guarantee of authentic Christian doctrine:

> 1. It is within the power of all, therefore, in every Church, who may wish to see the truth, to contemplate clearly the tradition of the apostles manifested throughout the whole world; and we are in a position to reckon up those who were by the apostles instituted bishops in the Churches, and [to demonstrate] the succession of these men to our own times; those who neither taught nor knew of anything like what these [heretics] rave about. For if the apostles had known hidden mysteries, which they were in the habit of imparting to the perfect apart and privily from the rest, they would have delivered them especially to those to whom they were also committing the Churches themselves. For they were desirous that these men should be very perfect and blameless in all things, whom also they were leaving behind as their successors, delivering up their own place of government to these men; which men, if they discharged their functions honestly, would be a great boon [to the Church], but if they should fall away, the direst calamity.

In brief, one of the most persuasive arguments to me for Catholicism over other forms of Christianity, or over non-Christian religions which claim to be the heirs to Christ's teaching, is that when you read the writings of those closest to Christ in history, they sound like Catholics; certainly more like Catholics than like members of any Protestant denomination. Protestant polemicists may charge that this or that doctrine which is Catholic dogma today is not explicitly attested until such and such a century, and it's true you don't find every last Catholic doctrine fully developed right away, but even just reading the very earliest Christian writings outside the New Testament itself, you find Catholic doctrines difficult to reconcile with Protestantism. They say that the bishop, with his priests and deacons, represents the authority of God, because of the succession of clergy instituted by Christ, and all should be united with the bishop in the Eucharist, which is a sacrifice.

Even more importantly, the New Testament itself testifies to the visible unity Christ wanted for his Church. He prayed at the Last Supper that the apostles, and all who would believe in him through their word, might all be one, so that by their unity, the whole world might see that he was sent by the Father. Paul urges that there be no divisions among us, and that we not split into factions named after their founder. The visibly united Catholic Church looks more like the Church as described in the New Testament than the multitude of Protestant denominations, even if there are not 30,000 of them as frequently claimed.

To judge between Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy in such a way is a little more difficult than between Catholicism and Protestantism. Some people here will openly tell a person thinking of converting to Catholicism or Orthodoxy that they think Orthodoxy is close enough. But, for one thing, I think it is important to maintain communion with the See of Rome, which was recognised from the first centuries as "preeminent in love" above all other sees. In the text already quoted above, Irenaeus of Lyons goes on:

> 2. Since, however, it would be very tedious, in such a volume as this, to reckon up the successions of all the Churches, we do put to confusion all those who, in whatever manner, whether by an evil self-pleasing, by vainglory, or by blindness and perverse opinion, assemble in unauthorized meetings; [we do this, I say,] by indicating that tradition derived from the apostles, of the very great, the very ancient, and universally known Church founded and organized at Rome by the two most glorious apostles, Peter and Paul; as also [by pointing out] the faith preached to men, which comes down to our time by means of the successions of the bishops. For it is a matter of necessity that every Church should agree with this Church, on account of its preeminent authority, that is, the faithful everywhere, inasmuch as the tradition has been preserved continuously by those [faithful men] who exist everywhere.

We should not necessarily draw extravagant conclusions about Irenaeus' faith in papal infallibility from this text. Irenaeus may only mean it is necessary to agree with Rome because it is necessary to agree with all of the apostolic sees, of which Rome is one. But his piling up of praises ("very great, very ancient, and universally known") and citation of Rome's double apostolic foundation do suggest he has chosen the most eminent example, and not merely an example. Theologians can argue about whether Scriptural and patristic evidence justifies the Catholic dogmas of today on the papacy, but at a basic level, it's clear Rome had an important role in the early Church, and that is more consistent with what is found today in the Catholic Church than in the Orthodox Church, which will not be associated with Rome at all.

Oh, I didn't address the issue of Canonicity. And this is an area that even I have heated arguments with like-minded Christians about. In the interest of full disclosure, I am a Salvationist (read: Methodist), but with a Southern Baptist/Pentecostal background. So my label reads "Arminian", but my heart is decidedly Calvinist...

I won't go all into the history of why we wound up with the books of the Bible that we have (Bruce Metzger did the best work IMO on the subject), except to say that the canon of the OT Scriptures was pretty much set in stone as early as 400 years before Jesus (around 400 AD). (There are liberal theologians who will debate this, and they are free to do so.)

As for the New Testament, because of the intense persecution of the early Christian church, it is nothing short of a miracle that we have ANY original writings of the apostles. But we have (as I understand it) about 23,000 mss copies extant, handwritten, from the original works.

Here's where it gets iffy, and forgive me for waffling just a bit...it just depends on what you believe.

I believe that God is fully capable of communicating with us in what ever form or fashion is necessary to get the message to us. Some of my more conservative friends believe that the canon of the NT was ordained, set in stone, and all revelation ceased after the writing of the Book of Revelation (~AD 90).

I'm not so sure. I believe God COULD have authored other works, and Paul PROBABLY wrote other letters that didn't make it into the New Testament (Ex. Paul's letter to the Laodiceans, see Col. 4:16). Why would that letter (if it was an original writing by Paul) not be included in the NT?

And I believe that there are people today who regularly speak with God, and hear from God. In fact, Jesus says,

> My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me: (John 10:27, KJV)

(The NIV softens the language somewhat and says, "My sheep LISTEN to my voice..." which I am suspect of the change from active to passive voice...but that's just me. There is a substantive difference between 'hearing' and 'listening'. It shifts the focus from God to man.)

So as I understand it, one of the hallmarks of being one of "His sheep", is the ability to "hear His voice", i.e. discern His thoughts and attitudes above the din.

Does that ONLY include the written word? Or can it mean the spoken word, or any other mode of transmission?

If we expand the definition to include God's revelation PAST the New Testament, then what gauge should we use for reliability? I mean, what makes the Mormon Bible (for example) NOT inspired (when they clearly teach that it is), and other teachings possibly inspired?

I like what Walter Martin, in his "Kingdom of the Cults" says. He points out that we should always judge newer revelation in light of older revelation. And this is what was done throughout the New Testament as well. Paul and the other writers of the NT canon consistently leaned on the OT as proof of their inspiration.

So too, we should, if we feel we are "hearing from God", then that inspiration should be scrutinized by what we KNOW to be inspired (the Old and New Testaments). If the new revelation does not line up PERFECTLY with the older revelations, then we can be certain it was not inspired by God (because God cannot lie, and does not change His mind).

So here is where my Calvinism comes out. I think that God purposefully inspired the writing of the individual letters of the New Testament, but that He also guided the process of what letters to include, and which to exclude. Yes, He had to use flawed humans to do His work, as He always does. But I feel that the end product was exactly as he pre-ordained.

Are there other "inspired" non-canonical works? I'm almost certain of it. But the letters that we DO have we are certain ARE inspired, with no "wiggle-room" for doubt. And doubt is the enemy of faith. (Matt. 14:31, Heb. 10:38, others).

Okay, this is still a very broad question, but one of the best experts to go to on this subject (in my opinion) is professor Daniel Wallace of Dallas Theological Seminary. Dr. Wallace is currently heading up the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts where he and his team are compiling all known ancient manuscripts and digitally photographing and labeling them so that other scholars can study and read them online. In the process of doing this, he and his team are discovering a number of previously unknown manuscripts (for instance, a possible 1st century fragment of Mark that will be published in scholarly journals this year).

In this talk on the subject, Dr. Wallace mentions Metzger's thorough and extensive academic-leaning work Canon of the New Testament, and the cheaper, more popular level book Reinventing Jesus co-authored by Wallace, J. Ed Komoszewski, and M. James Sawyer. You might also be in interested in Dr. Wallace's New Testament: Introductions and Outlines where he goes into both critical and tradtional examinations of the NT and their inclusion into the canon.

For just a basic outline on canonicity of the NT, most of the books of the NT had to be early (so published in or around the 1st century), had to be authored by an Apostle or someone close to the Apostles. Early on there wasn't much concern for canonicity in the early church. Most of the early church used the Septuagint as their Bible, and just didn't think of the later writings in quite the same way as we do, but they recognized their inspirational nature and valued them. Then a heretic named Marcion came along and formed his own canon. He felt that the God of the Old Testament was evil, and so decided to remove anything pro-Jewish, he reworked Luke, and did a number of other things. The early church was pretty freaked out about this, and decided that they needed to compile an authoritative list of books/letters to ward off heretical manipulation of what had already been received as inspired and authoritative.

One of the early examples we have of the early canon can be found in the Muratorian fragment dating to approx. 170 AD. It includes most of the books of the NT excluding James, Hebrews, and 1 and 2 Peter. A number of the ECFs (early church fathers... important post-Apostolic Christian writers) mention the authoritative books of the NT by name. The Gospels are mostly anonymous (there are a few internal indicators in Luke and John about who authored them), but the ECFs handed down to us the authorship of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. No other authors in the ancient writings were substituted for the name of the traditional authors. By the time Constantine came into power, and made Christianity the state religion, the canon had been closed and pretty much all the major books accepted for a long time with a little bit of disagreement between books like Revelation and Hebrews and a couple of the Pastorals. A number of councils in the 4th century pretty much settled the matter. The earliest complete manuscript copies we have date from around this period as well, so Codex Vaticanus 325-350, Codex Sinaiticus in 330-360, Codex Alexandrinus 400-440, Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus 450.

Something else should be mentioned about the Gospels. Matthew, Mark, and Luke share many commonalities with one another. So much so, that most scholars believe these books depend on one another in some way. These Gospels are called "synoptic", that is syn-together, or same and opsis-view (like where we get the word "optic" for optic nerve). John is so unlike the synoptics that he's usually handled separately from them, and is also considered later than the others.
Now these similarities aren't so surprising with Luke, Luke tells us that his book is a compilation of testimony (Luke 1:1-4), but that doesn't really explain, for instance, how Matthew is so similar to Mark.

An early church father named Eusebius quotes from an earlier Bishop named Papias about the compilation of the Gospels. Papias lived in the 1st and early 2nd century, and was a student or a hearer of the Apostle John. Papias says,

>Mark having become the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately whatsoever he remembered. It was not, however, in exact order that he related the sayings or deeds of Christ. For he neither heard the Lord nor accompanied Him. But afterwards, as I said, he accompanied Peter, who accommodated his instructions to the necessities [of his hearers], but with no intention of giving a regular narrative of the Lord's sayings. Wherefore Mark made no mistake in thus writing some things as he remembered them. For of one thing he took special care, not to omit anything he had heard, and not to put anything fictitious into the statements. [This is what is related by Papias regarding Mark; but with regard to Matthew he has made the following statements]: Matthew put together the oracles [of the Lord] in the Hebrew language, and each one interpreted them as best he could. [The same person uses proofs from the First Epistle of John, and from the Epistle of Peter in like manner. And he also gives another story of a woman who was accused of many sins before the Lord, which is to be found in the Gospel according to the Hebrews.]

Many modern scholars don't exactly agree with Papias' rendition of things though. The prevailing theory in academia today is the source theory, and in particular the source theory called Markan Priority. Basically its argued that Mark is the simplest, and thus earliest of the synoptics, and that Matthew and Luke knew of and borrowed from Mark as a source for their books. But there also commonalities in Luke and Matthew that are not found in Mark, so its theorized that along with Mark there was probably another book or at least a common tradition shared between them that has since been lost to history. This book or sayings have been labeled "Q", which comes from the German word "quelle", which means "source". ALSO, Matthew, Mark and Luke have completely original material that they share with no other books. Now, there are some scholars (currently in the minority) that buck against this source hypothesis, that reject Q, and suggest Matthean priority. Basically Matthew was first, and Mark borrowed from Matthew, and Luke borrowed from Mark and Matthew. This is called Augustinian Hypothesis.

As for the Old Testament, that's a whole nother story. The OT was compiled throughout centuries. It should probably be kept in mind that academia for the OT is very very secular compared to that of the NT. I'm not really sure what the poster US_Hiker was on about in his reply to you, but anyways, its theorized that the books of the OT weren't written and edited in the periods they claim to be written and edited. The prevailing theory for the OT is called the Documentary Hypothesis. For a long time, the accepted hypothesis was labeled JEPD, and this stands for the following sources: Yahwist (or Jawist), Elohist, Deuteronomist, and Priestly. Its a pretty confusing theory that says that writers of the Old Testament regularly redacted and changed the order of the OT during different periods. And that the OT was compiled from approx. 950-500 BC. The theory has been manipulated and altered a number of times, especially when embarrassing archaeological finds like the silver scrolls found at Ketef Hinnom pushed some writings far further back than were expected by scholars. In my opinion, a great, very thorough, slightly academic book to read on modern theories about the Old Testament would be professor Richard S. Hess' Israelite Religions: An Archaeological and Biblical Survey.

Concerning archaeological finds, or the lack thereof for say, the Exodus, I think one's presuppositions have a lot to do with what you accept or not. If you're an unbelieving archaeologist, you might expect to find some noticeable traces of an enormous group of people wandering the desert for 40 years. So far, we can't find any. But, if you're a believer who agrees with Genesis that God provided for these people with manna from heaven that rotted away if stored up, or of clothes that miraculously never wore out, then you're not going to find a whole lot in a desert. There are a handful of scholars that also believe the entire Egyptian dating system that scholars use as a measuring tool for the pre-Roman world is off by a few dynasties. One of the better known archaeologists known for his new chronology of the Egyptian period is egyptologist David Rohl. His ideas are currently on the fringe, but seem to be gaining some traction. His book Pharaohs and Kings: A Biblical Quest is a beautiful and very interesting book on the subject.

Ok, so, sorry that was so long, but like I said, this is a very very broad subject. If you have any questions, let me know.

Have a terrific day!

There’s a lot of good responses here already but I wanted to offer some resources and ideas that have helped me.
First of all, despite what the new atheists say, you don’t need faith to believe in God, which is why there are so many deists in academia. The weight of the scientific evidence alone is enough to conclude that there must be some kind of intelligence behind reality. This includes the fine-tuning argument, a variation of which convinced Antony Flew, a life long atheist academic and strong critic of religion to change his mind about God and embrace deism, and quantum mechanics, which doesn’t prove God’s existence but rather undermines materialist assumptions about the fundamental nature of reality. These findings have convinced others in the scientific community such as lifelong atheist, Richard Conn Henry, a professor of theoretical physics at MIT to embrace deism.
So just based on what’s happening with physics, it’s reasonable to believe that there’s some kind of intelligence behind reality. However, this in no way proves the existence of the God of the Bible.
To support the Christian view of God you can look at the evidence for the reliability of New Testament accounts. This is where faith comes in. You have to decide whether or not you believe that Jesus actually rose from the dead. Obviously, there isn’t a scientific way to definitively prove whether or not an historical event happened. But if you want support for the idea that miracles happen and are relatively common, even today, I’d recommend Craig S Keeners magisterial 2 volume work “Miracles” which details hundreds of modern day miracle accounts.

Other reading:
The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard who was a professor of philosophy for many years at USC, helped me to understand my faith at a deeper level, which has helped immensely. It turns out it’s much easier to believe in something when it actually makes sense to you.

On Guard by William Lane Craig explains many of the logical proofs that other commenters have offered here, which are great but can be really difficult to understand without spending a good amount of time with them.

Atheist Delusions by David Bentley Hart: Hart is a leading Orthodox theologian and philosopher who spends a lot of time talking about the logical incoherence of materialism. All his stuff is great but it’s difficult.

This is just a small sample of what’s out there in terms of apologetics but it’s a start. There’s enough that you could spend your entire life reading compelling arguments for the God’s existence. However, the most effective way to strengthen your faith, in my opinion, is to see how effective the teachings of Jesus are for yourself, to ACTUALLY DO what he says and see how it transforms your life first hand. This is how you make your faith unshakable. Nothing beats personal experience.

Elaine Pagels is a great contemporary scholar of Christian religion, and particularly textual and historical explication. Her The Origin of Satan is fascinating, and The Gnostic Gospels is a solid survey of some of the lost branches of early Christian tradition.

Gershom Scholem is one of the last century's great explicators of Judaism and mysticism, particularly the Kabbalah. I doubt there's a book he's written that isn't worth reading, but the best place to start may be his book On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, particularly the chapter on the relation of mystical experience to community norms.

Speaking of Kabbalah, it's recent popularity speaks poorly of what is an otherwise venerable and serious tradition of symbolism and ethical concern. If you're interested in spiritual literature, it's probably not a bad idea to take a stab at the Zohar. There's an abridged translation by Scholem out in paperback, but you're probably better off with this edition.

That comes, incidentally, from a series of books issued by a Catholic publisher, Paulist Press, under the name Classics of Western Spirituality, which is generally excellent. So far as I know, it's the only press currently printing some truly classic historical texts, so their catalog is worth browsing. They're particularly good, as you might suspect, on early Christian texts -- I don't know where else you'd go for something like Carthusian Spirituality -- but they also have Sufist, Judaic and non-mainline texts. In particular, I'd say pick up the Pseudo Dionysus.

While we're on the subject of early Christian writers, there's The Desert Fathers, The Cloud of Unknowing, Revelations of Divine Love -- the last of which is a notable early example of feminine Christian spirituality.

On the more modern end, there's Simone Weil, the tragic Marxist-cum-Catholic. I'd recommend either Waiting for God or Letters to a Priest]. While we're talking about modern Christian theology, we should note three of the most important names of the 20th century: Paul Tillich, Rudolf Otto, and Tielhard de Chardin. The books to start with, respectively, are Dynamics of Faith, The Idea of the Holy, and The Divine Milieu.

Shifting away from Christianity, another major name in 20th century theology is Martin Buber, the Jewish German mystic. His I and Thou is the most generally applicable and was widely influential in existential circles, but he also wrote widely on issues of Jewish identity.

More in the mainstream of Jewish tradition, there's the Talmud, although the sheer size of the writings that full under that name are the sort of thing that scholars give their lives over to. For our purposes, something like Abraham Cohen's Everyman's Talmud will generally suffice.

And finally, I just recently bought The Three Pillars of Zen, which is widely held to be the best practical introduction to the topic available in English. There are a bewildering amount of books on the subject, but without some sort of framework for understanding their relation to the historical traditions, it can be nearly impossible to sort out which are worth while.

EDIT: Forgot linking by reference isn't working; fixed with inline links.

May God bless you, brother. You are struggling! As such, you are an example to many around you.

There is a story in the Orthodox Christian tradition about a poor village, somewhere in the country in Russia - sometime long ago, in the time when the country was occupied by the Mongols. For years, the villagers struggled with poor crops, illness, Mongol raids, bad weather, etc. Then one year, there was a great crop, no one got sick, the Mongols stayed away, and the weather was pleasant, with just the right amount of rain and just the right amount of sunshine. All of the villagers were happy, except for some woman, who could be found in the Church crying. When they asked her what was wrong, she cried out, "God has abandoned us!"

Another story comes out of Greece, retold by a Greek monk from the island of Mt. Athos. Apparently there was one particular monk that had a drinking problem. He neglected all the work he was assigned, skipped going to church sometimes, and stayed in his cell and drank either wine he had stolen from the church or something stronger he had stolen from the mainland. He would get drunk in the afternoon, but in the morning he would arise with tears and beg forgiveness and try to stay sober that day ... and fail. Eventually this monk died and an elder elsewhere on the island who knew him heard about it. When the other monks brought him the news, tears of joy filled his eyes and a smile came over his face. Those around him were astonished and gently reprimanded him: "Elder, this man was a great sinner! Why are you happy for him?" The elder answered, "No, you don't understand. This brother struggled with his passion his entire life and never gave up struggling until the very end. The angels are receiving him with gladness today!"

I'm sorry if these stories seem kind of silly or disconnected to you. If so, I apologize. The point I was trying to make is that often trying to follow God calls our attention to things in ourself that we otherwise would give no care about. I can witness to this personally. Becoming a Christian (specifically, an Orthodox Christian) did not make me a better person nor take away all of my passions and temptations. On the contrary, in some cases the temptations grew stronger. But when I was a complete apostate, I gave no care at all to these things - I even was proud of them, and would try to outdo my sinfulness when the right opportunities arose, just to see how far into the dark I could go. But now you and I recognize our sinfulness, and we find it painful. We are finally putting it into the right context.

When we think badly of ourselves when we fall as you describe, sometimes there is a little bit of pride involved. We thought we were a better person than that, no? But actually, what we are learning - what God seems to be teaching us - is that we are weak, and that without Him we can do nothing (John 15:15).

Again, based on my own personal experience, when you get up after you fall, never assume that you will not fall again. Ask God for help and forgiveness, move forward, and don't look back on what just happened. Adopt an attitude of poverty of spirit (Matthew 5:3ff), and I think things may go better. And avoid asking God why these temptations come to you. Everything that happens in our life happens for a purpose. A sports athlete does not get stronger without gradually lifting more weight, and a spiritual athlete does not get stronger without struggling with obstacles that appear in his or her way. Another Orthodox story: Someone once asked a monk what they do in the monastery. He said, "We fall, we get up. We fall, we get up. We fall, we get up."

I think the other suggestions you've been given also make sense. Personally, I think my particular tradition is best equipped to handle struggling with the passions, but we do not deny that there is grace in other Christian faiths. I might recommend one book by an Australian layman, Breaking the Chains of Addiction: How to Use Ancient Eastern Orthodox Spirituality to Free Our Minds and Bodies From All Addictions, which writes in a pretty down to earth way of the Scriptures and teachings of the Church Fathers that relate to not only "hard" addictions, but also to dealing with everyday passions like anger, envy, etc. I think you might also find The Desert Fathers: Sayings of the Early Christian Monks helpful.

May God keep you! Christ is in our midst.

1. While aggelos is a fair transliteration of άγγελος I would opt for the phonetic pronunciation angelos; it's a bit more familiar to the English word and faithfully represents how it would have been spoken. Also, I'm not sure if this is possible on your blog but you should italicize Greek words written in the English alphabet. Also, you should make a standard, either write words in Greek or give a transliteration; don't do both. These are silly formatting issues that would make it more visually appealing.
   
   
2. If you could add a copy of BDAG that would be a great reference to talk about the nuance of Greek words. While wikitionary gives you a useful parse that you run with BDAG will explain how often that parse is used in the biblical text. Also, I think your analysis of the word in general needs some work. You appeal to a pericope from John that doesn't include genea at all. Also, you don't mention how in Matthew's gospel every other use of genea, excluding the genealogy prologue, is clearly a reference to the literal generations of people during Jesus' ministry (See Matt. 11:16; 12:39, 41, 42, 45; 16:4; 17:17). Your appeal to other biblical passages and theur use of genea is also difficult when you don't engage the issue of how the author consistently uses the word. While theologically we may believe the Bible to be inspired by God we should also recognize that it was penned by men who had their own nuanced writing style.
   
   

3. I somewhat like what you're saying and how you're taking a theological approach to interpretation. However, is there any evidence that directly links this passage to the theological concept of after-life and resurrection? Honestly, to use an analogy from Star Wars, your argument seems like Obi-Wan's arguement for misleading Luke about Darth Vader/Anakin, "It's true from a certain point of view." If you can you should make that point of view as explicit as possible. If such an explicit understanding can't be explained in the primary text than you should at least address what some critiques of your theory would be.
   
   
4. Another thing I appreciate is that you use some historic Christian scholars to emphasize your arguement, but it feels like cherry picking. I admit I honestly don't know the answer to this, but are commentators earlier than Chrysostom who provide a similar interpretation? How about between Chrysostom and Theophylact? You don't need to quote everyone but if you indirectly reference other sources as giving similar interpretations it would strengthen your arguement.
   
   
5. Similar idea as in number 3, if you think appealing to the Old Testament use of the word generation is important to understanding this passage is there textual support? You can say that Matthew is departing from his patterned use of genea and appealing to an understanding of 'generation' from the Hebrew Bible, but if you don't have evidence to back that claim it's hard to be convinced.
   
   Overall, I like what you have to say I just wish you were saying it better. There's a journal article coming out sometime either this year or next that is similar to yours. I believe it's the Journal of Biblical Literature, but I'm not certain. If you're interested I'll double check. The author has a similar dislike for N.T. Wright and R.T. France's understanding of the passage, but goes in a bit of a different direction. The biggest thing is that he appeals to the Hebrew Bible to explain 'generation', and uses solid evidence to link this passage to the Hebrew Bible.
   
   I'd just like to say, good job on dealing with a difficult passage. Have a good one.

Hey, /u/Eskoe. I'm no longer busy, for now.

To begin with Hinduism, /u/wza recommended me Shankara's Crest-Jewel of Discriminiation. I purchased it and have yet to read it, though I do recommend you read about Adi Shankara, as well as the school of Hindu philosophy he expounded, Advaita Vedanta. The three canonical texts of the school (and of all Hindu schools of philosophy) are available on Project Gutenberg: the Upanishads, the Brahma Sutras and the Bhagavad Gita. Visit /r/hinduism if you have questions specific to Hinduism. In fact, two of the most recent posts are ascetic:

It is not the fulfillment of a desire that makes you happy it is only the contentment that makes you happy ~ Sri Swami Tattvavidananda

and

If you want to pursue yoga you must do away with all forms of indulgence ~ Sri Swami Tattvavidananda

Now, Buddhism. Of course, read about the Buddha, who lived a life of much asceticism, and read the Dhammapada, a short Buddhist text available on Project Gutenberg. This list of notable hermits includes numerous Buddhist ascetics you may enjoy reading about. Also read about Buddhist monasteries and monks. In terms of "warrior asceticism", you may like to read about Shaolin Monastery. I personally enjoy reading about Bodhidharma, the Buddhist monk credited for transmitting Ch'an (known in Japanese as Zen) to China. Legend has it that, "he also began the physical training of the Shaolin monks that led to the creation of Shaolinquan". Visit /r/Buddhism if you have questions specific to Buddhism.

Before I stray from Eastern philosophy, read about dousing:

> Some Japanese ascetic practices, as with Shinto misogi practices, include dousing. This is seen, for example, with some Aikido martialists. Morihei Ueshiba was known to practice cold water misogi.

> Kamakura, Japan has a temple whose Nichiren Buddhist priests in training practice a ritual of 100 days of fasting, meditation and walking which ends with stripping to loincloths and dousing with ice cold water.

If I recall correctly, I discovered the above through reading about samurai, which seems in line with your "warrior asceticism". (A personal anecdote: It wasn't long after reading that that I began having regular cold showers.)

Now, Western philosophy. Read about Cynicism and the Cynics. In particular, Antisthenes, Diogenes of Sinope and Crates of Thebes. Chapters on each can be found in Diogenes Laertius' Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers.

Read also about Stoicism and the Stoics. In particular, Seneca the Younger, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. Texts by each can be found here. Epictetus' Enchiridion is a short Stoic text, similar to the Buddhist's Dhammapada. Marcus Aurelius' Meditations is seemingly the most popular Stoic text, though. However, in comparison with Cynicism, Stoicism seems more like simple living than asceticism. In terms of "warrior asceticism", besides the article in my previous comment, read this, a list of books which seem to link Stoicism and the military. Visit /r/Stoicism for questions specific to Stoicism.

Stoicism is said to have inspired much of Christian literature. I recently read The Imitation of Christ and very much enjoyed it - it is very ascetic and is available on Project Gutenberg. Read about the Desert Fathers. In particular, Anthony the Great. I purchased The Desert Fathers: Sayings of the Early Christian Monks and have yet to read it in its entirely but have liked what I've read hitherto. Read also about Francis of Assisi. A biography of his is available on Project Gutenberg. Read about Leo Tolstoy (that's right, Tolstoy, an ascetic). This is where I recommend you his books, on the world's behalf. Read his books.

As you shall read, Leo Tolstoy is very much inspired by Arthur Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer is inspired by many of the above philosophies, in particular, the Eastern philosophies, though he is very much a Western philosopher. He is best known for his text, The World as Will and Representation. Arthur Schopenhauer is probably the name here most popular in this subreddit. So, ask here for questions specific to him.

I'd exclude the Transcendentalists this time around, as they seem less ascetic and more advocates of simple living. However, because another user recommended them in this post of yours, I shall include them. One Transcendentalist is Ralph Waldo Emerson, best known for his essay, Self-Reliance, which is available on Project Gutenberg. Another Transcendentalist is Henry David Thoreau, who is best known for his text, Walden, and his essay, Civil Disobedience, which are both available on Project Gutenberg, here and here.

That is the reading material I'd recommend you. I have video material, too.

I'd recommend you the series, Extreme Pilgrim. Part One: China can be seen here (which may feature your "warrior asceticism"), Part Two: India, here, and Part Three: Egypt, here. Part Three: Egypt features a man named Father Lazarus El Anthony, a former Marxist/atheist university lecturer who became a Christian hermit. You can watch a series about him here.

I apologise that my comment doesn't tackle much "warrior asceticism", but rather, asceticism generally. However, if you tackle the above, I expect you'll encounter much "warrior asceticism" where I have not. Good luck with your reading, /u/Eskoes. You have me drained.

Welcome to the sub and also welcome to the sometimes terrifying, sometimes hilarious, sometimes just downright perplexing field of apologetics and counter-apologetics. Skeptic vs Christian? Well, we're all looking for the truth, so hopefully you can learn a bit from each of us here and make up your own mind once you feel that you have enough perspective and enough of the relevant facts.

Here are my answers to your questions (trying to be brief!):

1) Is the bible inerrant?

By inerrant I take it to mean that you are referring to what most conservative Evangelical churches say about inerrancy. For a good grasp on what most churches in America mean when they put the word "inerrancy" into their written 'statement of belief' please read the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy.

In my understanding of inerrancy there are plenty of "loopholes" and one can always push back and say we simply don't have enough evidence or enough knowledge to say for certain that there is or is not a problem. I talk about this more on my blog (see: http://kch.me/no-contradictions-allowed/ ), but basically if you come at the text with the assumption that there are no errors (specifically no internal contradictions) then it will be very hard to admit that there are any in the text, even where another reader (someone who doesn't make such an assumption) would be quick to point some out.

Some basic contradictions often brought up are the differences between the two Creation stories in Genesis (slowly read Genesis 1, noting the order and how things occur, then slowly read and take notes on Genesis 2...scholars posit that the reason for this is that these two chapters originally came from separate documents and it is accounted for in the Documentary hypothesis)

Another basic, narrative-level contradiction (just simple differences between stories) is how the death of Judas is described. Did he die of hanging or of sudden disembowlement? Who purchased the field that he died in? Acts gives one account while the ending of Matthew gives another account. Again, I'd suggest reading both accounts one at a time, slowly, taken notice of the details mentioned in each version and the order in which events are said to occur.

Those may not be "deal-breakers" for accepting Christianity, but the moment that you can admit that there is even 1 error (whether because of an admitted contradiciton between two parts of the Bible or because of a falsehood identified in the Biblical text--saying a wrong historical data point or something based on primitive knowledge of biology or cosmology [stars are "fixed" in a round dome above earth, earth is flat etc]) then I think it is improper to continue to try and call the text inerrant.

2) Is the bible to be taken literally? This question obviously only refers to the New Testament. If the answer to this question is "yes", then how would one explain Mark 16:17-18?

That specific passage is actually pretty easy to dismiss since most modern translations now acknowledge that it most likely was not part of the original gospel. There's a whole long history about how it got into the text in the first place and why it is in the King James and some other older translations. If that sort of stuff interests you, I'd highly recommend checking out Misquoting Jesus, which describes how scholars determine the actual text of the Bible and specifically focuses on the New Testament (you can probably find a copy through local library).

Some passages of the Bible are clearly intended as allegories (such as most of the parables of Jesus and also some of the very obvious allegories within Ezekiel and other OT books). Still, other passages seem like they could not possibly be taken as allegories or metaphors such as the story of Jesus' baptism by John the Baptist which seems like it is intended to be understood as a straightforward historical account (though there are some differences between how some gospel writers, especially John, view this event). Other parts are more ambiguous. What exactly is the gospel of John getting at when it calls Jesus the "son of God"? How can such a strong theological point be understood from a historical perspective? Or, look at some of the events in the life of Jesus which seem to be over-loaded with symbolic meaning like when he feeds the multitudes (on two separate occassions)...does the fact that there is symbolic significance to these stories (repeating the actions of God feeding the Israelites in the wilderness as one example) mean that the authors recording these stories did not believe that they actually happened? IMO, there are definitely some gray areas throughout the Old and New Testaments when it comes to such tricky interpretive issues.

3) If the bible is not to be taken literally, instead if it is to be more of an allegory, then how am I supposed to know? How do I know when Jesus is talking to his disciples if he is really talking to me? Is Jesus ALWAYS talking to me in the bible? How does one differentiate?

The answers you will get on this question will vary wildly but they will pretty much be dependent upon what specific verse you are citing (or what set of parallel verses) and also upon the tradition of the person you are asking. I mentioned the parables earlier, and that's an area where most would at least agree that the parables aren't literal accounts of anything (maybe the parable of Lazarus can tell us something about heaven/hell, but it isn't clear). BUT, different Christian commentators would still disagree on the exact meaning and nuance of some of these stories. One that is more hotly debated is the parable of the sower...Arminians and Calvinists will hotly contest the understanding of this passage since it is seen to impact their debates over whether or not one can lose their salvation.

Another big area of disagreement when it comes to interpretation is the Sermon on the Mount. Those in the Anabaptist traditions (itself a pretty broad group but thinking mainly of Mennonites and Amish here) see Jesus' radical commands here quite literally...some Christians will not swear oaths, even in a court of law, because of what Jesus says here. Mennonites and other pacifist Christians refuse to serve in the military or the police and even consider personal self-defense sinful because it would violate Jesus' command to "turn the other cheek." Other groups though will down-play the significance of what Jesus is saying here or they will insist that nothing Jesus said is relevant because he was speaking to the 1st century Jews before his death and this was a different "dispensation" and in fact the specific commands which Christians are required to follow are all found in Paul's later epistles ( see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperdispensationalism )...this view and similar theologies would also say that we can't look to certain parts of Scripture to give us an example of how the church should behave, since God had not yet fully revealed his plan for the church. This stuff can get tricky real quick and like I say a lot depends upon the tradition that is used to filter the text. I think that some of the NT writers disagreed with each other and now that they are all part of one unified canon different methods have been proposed which try to harmonize all of the diverse teachings and make sense of them together, which is (part of) why there are so many diverse Christian denominations each claiming to have the truth and yet each pointing to one authoritative Scripture.

4) How many gods do you believe in? Is Jesus a god? Is his heavenly father a god? Are they the same person? Is the Holy Ghost a god? How does this relate to your views on the Trinity?

I don't believe in any gods. I'm an atheist. On some gods I simply don't know enough either way to judge the claim while for certain specific deities I assert that the existence of such a being is either downright impossible (due to logical absurdities or historical flaws) or is extremely implausible and extremely unlikely based upon knowledge we now have.

I will say that I think it is possible to be a fulfilled, devout Christian without buying into everything that modern fundamentalism teaches (namely an "inerrant" Bible, eternal conscious torment for the wicked and a very specific formula for "how to be saved and go to heaven").

I wish you well on your journey and hope that you find satisfactory answers to your questions. Peace and Freedom :)

EDIT: I'm noticing that some atheists here are recommending the Skeptics Annotated Bible. Please don't waste your time with that website...you are going to find that the SAB is rather ahem uncharitable when it comes to presenting what it sees as contradictions or problems.

As someone who dated the daughter of one of Exxon's top advisers from the 50s-60s* who was also probably very high up in the most powerful fundamentalist christian political cult in the US, yes, they are the definition of evil. I also started my environmental engineering career fighting against Exxon in litigation. They are some of the nastiest motherfuckers in the O&G industry, I have poured through thousands of pages of discovery of internal emails as support for the cases I worked on.

EDIT: Since people are asking, here is the beginning of your rabbit hole adventure into the most powerful fundamentalist Christian political cult in the United States:

Yeah, his name was Paul Temple, he died a couple years ago. I guess he was with Exxon from 1954 to 1961. Here's his wikipedia:

>From 1954 to 1961 he was an international petroleum concessions negotiator for Exxon.

>He helps fund The Fellowship Foundation, a U.S.-based religious and political organization founded in 1935 by Methodist minister Abraham Vereide.[5][6] Paul N. Temple was an insider "core member" of the Fellowship Foundation and/or Institute for Christian Leadership since the 1940s.

And here's the link to the book that was written about the "Fellowship Foundation."

https://www.amazon.com/Family-Secret-Fundamentalism-Heart-American/dp/0060560053

Here's a fun NPR story on it: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120746516

If you want to go down a rabbit hole, they organize the National Prayer Breakfast every year, which all the most powerful politicians and business leaders attend...

Here's the Wiki for the "Foundation":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fellowship_(Christian_organization)

>D. Michael Lindsay, a former Rice University sociologist who studies the evangelical movement, said "there is no other organization like the Fellowship, especially among religious groups, in terms of its access or clout among the country's leadership."[13] He also reported that lawmakers mentioned the Fellowship more than any other organization when asked to name a ministry with the most influence on their faith.[2] Lindsay interviewed 360 evangelical elites, among whom "One in three mentioned [Doug] Coe or the Fellowship as an important influence."[13] Lindsay reported that it "has relationships with pretty much every world leader—good and bad—and there are not many organizations in the world that can claim that."

>Rob Schenck, founder of the Washington, D.C. ministry Faith and Action in the Nation's Capital, described the Family's influence as "off the charts" in comparison with other fundamentalist groups, specifically compared to Focus on the Family, Pat Robertson, Gary Bauer, Traditional Values Coalition, and Prison Fellowship.[16] (These last two are associated with the Family: Traditional Values Coalition uses their C Street House[16] and Prison Fellowship was founded by Charles Colson.) Schenck also says that "the mystique of the Fellowship" has helped it "gain entree into almost impossible places in the capital."

>Former Senate Prayer Group member and current Kansas Governor Sam Brownback has described Fellowship members' method of operation: "Typically, one person grows desirous of pursuing an action"—a piece of legislation, a diplomatic strategy—"and the others pull in behind."[25] Brownback has often joined with fellow Family members in pursuing legislation. For example, in 1999 he joined together with fellow Family members, Senators Strom Thurmond and Don Nickles to demand a criminal investigation of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, and in 2005 Brownback joined with Fellowship member Sen. Tom Coburn to promote the Houses of Worship Act.

You want to learn about where Christian fundamentalist conservatism in the US comes from? Start with the Fellowship.

And yes, I dated his daughter for over 2 years and we almost ended up engaged. I am glad that did not happen.

EDIT2: Fun fact: Hillary Clinton is an esteemed member:

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2007/09/hillarys-prayer-hillary-clintons-religion-and-politics/

>Through all of her years in Washington, Clinton has been an active participant in conservative Bible study and prayer circles that are part of a secretive Capitol Hill group known as the Fellowship. Her collaborations with right-wingers such as Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) and former Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) grow in part from that connection. “A lot of evangelicals would see that as just cynical exploitation,” says the Reverend Rob Schenck, a former leader of the militant anti-abortion group Operation Rescue who now ministers to decision makers in Washington. “I don’t….there is a real good that is infected in people when they are around Jesus talk, and open Bibles, and prayer.”

>When Clinton first came to Washington in 1993, one of her first steps was to join a Bible study group. For the next eight years, she regularly met with a Christian “cell” whose members included Susan Baker, wife of Bush consigliere James Baker; Joanne Kemp, wife of conservative icon Jack Kemp; Eileen Bakke, wife of Dennis Bakke, a leader in the anti-union Christian management movement; and Grace Nelson, the wife of Senator Bill Nelson, a conservative Florida Democrat.

>Clinton’s prayer group was part of the Fellowship (or “the Family”), a network of sex-segregated cells of political, business, and military leaders dedicated to “spiritual war” on behalf of Christ, many of them recruited at the Fellowship’s only public event, the annual National Prayer Breakfast. (Aside from the breakfast, the group has “made a fetish of being invisible,” former Republican Senator William Armstrong has said.) The Fellowship believes that the elite win power by the will of God, who uses them for his purposes. Its mission is to help the powerful understand their role in God’s plan.

As far as history and basic texts, I think the Gnostic Bible edited by Willis Barnstone really helped me. It was pretty comprehensive, provided many different strains and lines of thought, original texts, and succinct objective description of context and history.
The Gnostic Bible: Revised and Expanded Edition https://smile.amazon.com/dp/1590306317/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_C9G8BbNYAPVYJ-- probably easy to find in any library lending program.

So far as practice and discipline... I am sure I don't do enough. It is always too easy to let life get in the way. I try to do mindfulness exercises, that and prayer and meditation, but I try to keep it in bounds... A few minutes at night and morning. The best practical practice I ever had was my first couple of years in AA, actually... Which is obviously not for everyone. But for my the practical exercises in the Big Book moved me spiritually much farther than anything else... Far further than any church ever had been able to. And it got me out if myself, too. In all honesty, probably time for me to go through the 12-Steps again, clear away some of the detritus that has gathered.

Not really very impressive, I'm afraid. I enjoy reading the more sophisticated stuff, pondering the deep meaning and what lies below the cloak... But I've found I no longer trust it. Too easy, seems to me, for corruption to enter whenever I get that deep into things. My flawed understanding gets in the way of the truth of my heart, and I fall in love with building castles and gardens out of the various theories and descriptions... and I get lost in it. Which is why I wonder about all the stuff contrasting children of light with children of corruption. Seems to me that anything that excludes groups of people from even the hope of salvation is far from the Divine I recognize, and I wonder if others haven't fallen into the trap I myself do. So until I have deepened my practice to the point where I am not subject to corruption and fancy, I try to keep it simple as I can.

> Christian here, and I am honestly looking to find what atheists believe is the best evidence against christianity or the Bible.

The best argument against it is that there is no credible evidence to support it in the first place. This might not agree with your current thinking but I will politely challenge you to come up with the best evidence you think demonstrates that Jesus is/was the Earthly avatar of the creator of the universe.

The bible itself is not evidence. The bible is the claim. Consider that there is no evidence outside the bible from the time the bible takes place that supports the existence of Jesus. All the mentions of Jesus outside the bible occur many decades after he was supposed to have lived. Worse, the gospel accounts are anonymous.

We know enough about the history of the bible from a literary perspective to know that it was written by men. (See my notes at the bottom of this comment.) What you think of the bible today is a collection of documents that was edited and copied repeatedly, then voted on by the Council of Nicaea - some books were omitted from the canon even though they are referenced by other books in the bible that are canon.

A few things worth pointing out:

• If you accept evolution, then there was no first human. If this is the case, then where did original sin come from?
  
• The Exodus did not happen. Even Jewish religious scholars almost universally agree that the evidence that should be there just isn't.
  
• Think about why Mary and Joseph had to travel in order to be counted for the census. Romans were far more efficient than that and were interested in where people lived, and not where they were born. The short answer is that the prophecy required Jesus to be born in Bethlehem, so the census was used as an excuse to explain why he was born there and not in Nazareth, where his parents lived. The bible is filled with these kinds of odd things.
  
  Those are three things off the top of my head. Here's one list that has many more. Another list. One more.
  
  In the end though, there's no credible evidence for anything supernatural in any religions. I don't believe in Jesus or Yahweh or Zeus or bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster for the same reasons - no credible, compelling evidence.
  
  Edit:
  
  Some additional resources as I think of them.
  
  
• A History of God by Karen Armstrong. Summarised in video form here. Details how Yahweh went from being one god in the Hebrew pantheon to the one true god of Abraham. There originally were several gods mentioned in the books that would become the bible, but were replaced by Yahweh. This explains a lot of really unusual things about Yahweh as a literary character. For instance, the first commandment suddenly makes sense - it was intended to cement the supreme authority of Yahweh in a time when many people were polytheists.
  
  
• Check out Bart Ehrman's work, such as Misquoting Jesus. It's a great introduction to textual analysis.
  
  
• Lastly, if you're still here and have not angrily closed your browser window in frustration, I strongly urge you to check out Qualia Soup's video titled The Burden of Proof. It demonstrates why it is your job to support your claims, rather than it is our job to disprove them. The person who makes a claim (ie, a god exists) is the person responsible for providing support for that claim.

There are several very famous Catholic apologists who converted after reading about Church history and reading the works of the Church Fathers. Peter Kreeft is one such person. Scott Hahn is another (although his main impetus was finding Catholic doctrines in scripture rather than from reading the fathers).

There is a book called "Surprised by Truth" edited by Patrick Madrid which features the stories of 11 or so evangelicals who became Catholics and several of them had reading the fathers as a turning point.

Jimmy Akin has a book called The Fathers know best which could be a very good introduction (I haven't read but I very much appreciate Jimmy Akin's apologetic efforts, he has a very gentle and patient persona with a thorough and systematic approach).

Pope Benedict XVI spent a few years of his papacy talking about a different church father every Wednesday and he walked his way through all the major fathers from the late 1st century (Clement of Rome) to the 12th century (Peter Lombard). Ignatius Press has compiled all these talks into two volumes. Church Fathers: From Clement of Rome to Augustine and Church Fathers and Teachers: From Saint Leo the Great to Peter Lombard.

I have read Benedict's introductions to the fathers and I enjoyed them immensely. He doesn't supply many quotations from them but he does give you an overview of their life and times, the focus of their theological works, and the significance of their works for us today. I profited a lot from reading them.

There is a work called The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the face of God by Robert Louis Wilken which is also a very useful overview of Christian theology in the first 7 centuries. His focus is less on the individual personalities of the fathers but more on the current of their thought and the intellectual climate that it was developing in. He covers liturgy, doctrinal development, Christology, faith and reason, interpretation of scripture, moral theology, arts and literature and a bunch of other stuff if I remember rightly. I profited from this book even more than the Pope Benedict ones I reckon.

There are so many awesome texts out there!
I'm really partial to the character of Enoch, and the more weird, apocalyptic sorts of books. I'll throw a few of those out there for your perusing pleasure.
I'm using two Wiki links to give a general overview of the two texts I'll talk about, but please


The Book of Enoch, or First Enoch - this book is regarded as canon by Christians in Ethiopia/Eritrea, but not by other churches. I think it is particularly interesting because Enoch is taken around on a grand tour of the cosmos: he sees the world, up into the heavens, and even down to Sheol. It's pretty cool to read how people reckoned the cosmos worked back then. There are weird visions of angels, a few parables and even an astronomical calendar text thrown into the mix.


Slavonic Enoch, or, Second Enoch is unrelated to First Enoch (i.e., different author, very different date and region) but contains a lot of the same sort of stories about good old Enoch. There's also some stuff about Melchizedek, whom you probably recognize since it seems you're interested in Gnostic stuff. (the Wiki link for this one isn't as strong as the first- please check out more sources for better analysis of the text)


More information on the books of Enoch:

Jewishencyclopedia.com

Detailed analysis by Andri Orlov


If you are looking for more fun Gnostic stuff to peruse, and haven't checked out Apocalyptic/Gnostic scholar Elaine Pagels yet, you're missing out:
Youtube Discussion about the Book of Revelation
I'd definitely check out her books on the Origin of Satan and Revelations

I also started off in a strongly Protestant home but first really started to "own" my faith when I got in with a group of Presbyterians (PCA flavor). I've since come to see the shortcomings in the Reformed faith, but I do love the people in that group, who helped me really grasp the concept of grace and the value of truth and who shepherded me through some tough times.

And like you, the turning point for me was learning my church history. On a whim I picked up Bruce Shelley's Church History in Plain Language and my mind was blown with all the church history I never learned while growing up as a Baptist.

Unfortunately my family has not been accepting of my move toward Catholicism as yours, so make sure to thank your mom and dad.

I'm in RCIA now with my wife, and my kids are in faith formation classes, and I think we'll all be confirmed together in the spring. Around that time I hope to be writing my own post like this. Thanks a lot for sharing.

Everyone wants to lay claim to the church fathers, no doubt. I absolutely love this question, as it was the one that I thought would solve my spiritual questions in college. I'm more qualified to comment on the development of theology, but i can at least get an answer started here.

​

> . Would they have done so in a manner similar to Catholicism or Protestantism? Or were they completely different from either group?

The biggest thing here to realize is that the church fathers didn't deal with the same questions later/modern roman Catholicism did/does, and definitely not with the issues of Protestantism. Most of the time, theology is a reflective practice, done when an issue arises. So if you really want to get a feel for the early fathers, it would be best to dig into their works. The earliest you could get in touch with is the apostolic fathers. Your statement above would lead me to believe you are at least familiar with this material, but you get a good sense of interpretation there. Most people would find the Apostolic fathers to be concerned with Christian living. The question at hand isn't doctrine but rather what makes Christians Christian?

​

The interpretative work of the apostolic fathers is different from even the early fathers. John Chrysostom is probably the most often referred to, as his sermons are written down and widely available on the internet in English even. And yet, it is easy to see how vastly different he is from Arius, Nestorius, Flavian or even Eusebius when you read their commentary. John is highly allegorical in his preaching and interpretation. You see all these mean starting to actually delve into what we would consider dogmatic principles. After all, Arius and Nestorius start to fool around with incarnational theology, and the christian churches finally realize that they need to think about what they actually believe, which affects interpretation of scripture, and lead to Nicaea.

​

In reality, all modern Christian interpretation builds on top of the foundational work of the fathers. It isn't until the counter and radical reformations that the fathers become obscured in mainline orthodoxy. The question of the day at the reformation is exactly how the atonement works in the life of the believer, and that is why it becomes a theological question. Really, before then, it isn't even questioned that baptism and participation are the keys to heaven. The simony prevalent at the time of the reformation is what thrusts the question into the discussion of the church.

​

This way of interpretation and doing theology haven't really changed either, we experience it in the present day, pondering the questions on ecumenism, women's ordination, and the wave of questions out of the gender/identity movement.

​

To sum up what I am driving at: no one interprets like the fathers did, because the questions are different. Many church bodies love to claim the fathers, but the fact of the matter is simply that each body has built on top of their work, in their own way.

​

>you imbecile

I can already tell this is going to be fun.

>Jesus has literally ZERO contemporary historical data.

That's not what you asked for. You asked for peer-reviewed arguments for the historical existence of Jesus, of which I said there are thousands, and to which I said you'd have a much more difficult time finding the opposite--- peer reviewed articles and books arguing that Jesus was entirely a myth.

>I’ll wait for those libraries of sources you have.

Where do you want to start?

Probably the best place for you to start is with Bart Ehrman, a leading scholar of on the development of Christianity, and he's also a popular skeptic speaker and writer. In addition to publishing he's written popular books about how many of the books of the Bible were forgeries, and how the belief that Jesus was divine developed in early Christianity, he also wrote an entire book laying out the widely accepted case that Jesus was likely a real historical person, written directly to skeptical lay people like yourself.

If you want a great introduction to the scholarly debate about the historical Jesus, you could start here or here. I also think Dale Allison's work is great critical look at some of the issues at work in the debate. There are lots of historical reconstructions of Jesus' life. Some of the more popular ones like Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan tend to sell books to liberal Christian audiences, so I've always thought E.P. Sanders treatment was perferable. I'll spare you the links to scholars who identify as orthodox Christians, like Luke Timothy Johnson or N.T. Wright. It sounded like you specifically wanted more scholarly sources and not popular books, so you could just look at the scholarly journal dedicated to the study of the historical Jesus. Or the Jesus Seminar. Or either of the following Introductions to the New Testament textbooks which are used in secular universities throughout the english speaking world:

Introduction to the New Testament by Mark Allen Powell

Introduction to the New Testament by Bart Ehrman

These are the ones I'm personally most familiar with. There are tons more like Geza Vermes and Amy Jill Levine I haven't read and I'm not as familiar with.

But I'm not telling you anything you wouldn't learn in any basic 101 intro to New Testament Class. The academic consensus is that regardless of what you think about him as a religious figure, it is extremely likely that there was a first century Jew named Jesus who started a faith movement that led to him being crucified. Why do scholars think this? Because by the time Paul started writing his letters 20 years later there was a growing, spreading religious movement that worship a crucified Jew named Jesus as their messiah, and given critical analysis of the texts produced by this movement, some of which are now in the New Testament, there really doesn't exist a coherent argument for the development of this movement that doesn't include the existence of a first century Jew named Jesus who was crucified.

He's so readable that I can definitely recommend skipping the books about St. Augustine and just going directly to the source. As others have mentioned, Confessions. Others you may be interested in are City of God and On Grace And Free Will.

Also, as /u/Philip_Schwartzerdt mentioned, John Calvin isn't typically considered one of the Church Fathers given that his time on earth came in the 16th century. In fact, as a Catholic, we would consider him a heretic, but that's neither here nor there. :)

For other early Church Fathers books, you may want to check out this collection of writings from the early church, Against Heresies by St. Iranaeus, countering heresy in the early Church, and The First And Second Apologies by St. Justin Martyr, a convert to the faith at about 130 A.D. and who was martyred (surprise) around 165 A.D.

As you may have guessed, with me being a Catholic in the Roman Rite, that's the perspective to which my study of the early Church Fathers led me, but if you wish to get a primer on St. Irenaeus before the books come, this is a worthwhile read.

I highly encourage the study of the fathers. The whole Christian world disagrees on many parts of of Sacred Scripture, and the testimony of the fathers, especially those who were direct disciples of the Apostles, should be one of our primary sources of discerning Christian truth amid the chaos. Plainly put, there are many interpretations of Scripture which "make sense" or are feasible outside of the tradition of the Apostles, but if said interpretation is true, it should be reflected in the doctrines, beliefs, and practices of those whom the Apostles taught.

I'll pray for you as you jump into this study. Please reach out if I can be of any help!

Peace,

DK

Probably not the answer you're looking for, but I recommend starting by simply just getting a really good annotated study Bible or two. Those are going to give you some great jumping off points as you get to various places, and you can start digging in libraries and online and even start up a discussion from there. Thing is, the Bible isn't merely one book. It's a collection of various works by different authors from different time periods, and you'll find that to this day there's still a lot of disagreement over who wrote what and when as well as which works should be included.

I guess if I had to recommend two other books that could get you started and are easy to understand, I'd go with these two, in order:

https://www.amazon.com/Absolute-Beginners-Guide-Bible-Head/dp/0789734192/

https://www.amazon.com/Misquoting-Jesus-Story-Behind-Changed-ebook/dp/B000SEGJF8/

These are by no means a final authority on just about anything in them, and there are a ton of great books out there, but again... This is just about getting you started.

Probably an unusual choice for a Christian, but I actually like the The Skeptic's Annotated Bible as a kind of companion to my annotated study Bibles. Unfortunately, my physical copy was lost in a move. It's a little condescending at times, in my opinion, but it's useful in giving an outside perspective, and I love that some of the notes give me something else to look into. For anyone who has fundamentalist views, this is of course going to be problematic, but I'm obviously not a fundamentalist.

So, first, and I realize this isn't exactly comforting, but there will be a freak out time no matter what. There will be some time where you feel like the world is ending, and no matter what you do, it will still feel that way. It was that way for me (though we aren't the same, so maybe your experience will differ): every night, up late, praying and sweating and crying. Is there someone in the real world you can talk to? Having a meat body to grab onto for comfort is huge. Also, I wish I'd known about Reddit (not sure if it existed yet) when I went through my biz. This subreddit would have been amazing.

Ironically, part of what pushed me out of Christianity was learning more about it: being really on fire for it. When you learn church history from the church, it's very skewed and specialized, but when you step out of that and examine it from an objective historical point of view, things get crazy. And more calming.

In case you missed it elsewhere in this thread, John Shelby Spong was very comforting for me.

I think A History of God gets mentioned on this sub at least once a day. It's not an easy read, but immensely illuminating as it shows that, essentially, the guy we call god with a capital G is really just a lesser Canaanite deity worshiped by an insane shepherd. But because of Abraham's weird life, all of western history plays out.

It's been awhile since I read Jesus Interrupted, but if I remember correctly, it's about how what the historical Jesus probably said (because we can't possibly know) has been manipulated by history to satisfy different political goals.

Zealot tries to recreate to the best of the author's ability Jesus' world, the philosophies he grew up with, and the philosophies he most likely would have taught. Some parts of this read like an amazing novel, and it has some crazy historical stuff. It really blew my mind.

I read Pagan Christianity right at the start of my dark night. I've mentioned it before, and it confirmed a lot of my suspicions about Christianity actually being fancied up paganism (Zealot discusses that a little as well). It's written from very much a contemporary Christian perspective, so it has some errors that drive me nuts: i.e. Jesus almost certainly wouldn't have ever meant he and god were literally the same, because no half-serious Jewish person of any era would assert that.

It's stupid late where I am (and my toddler already makes sure I'm constantly sleep deprived), so the last thing I'll leave you with:

When I was going through my "dark night of the soul," I still considered myself Christian afterward for quite awhile. It's just that the kind of Christian I felt I had become was so radically different from what I had been that it warranted night sweats and crying. Since then, each progressive deconversion has been less and less painful by magnitudes. But while I was going through it, I kept thinking about a quote in some book I'd read about how, "God made you with the brain you have, the talents you have, the interests you have, and the curiosity you have: pursue that and glorify god." I reasoned (and I feel this is pretty solid) that if god were real, he'd have to be so outside our everyday experience that no one is getting it right; because if he weren't that alien to us, if he was even slightly comprehensible, he couldn't be god. And if god were real, he'd (it?) know how incomprehensible he is, and unless he were insane or evil, he couldn't possibly be just in punishing us for doing whatever we thought was best and in good conscience. The process was still painful, but it definitely made me feel better about ripping off that hairy band-aid.

If you don't already, I'd recommend writing as you go through all this. If you can stomach it, put it some place public, like a blog, so people can bear witness.

Dammit. I said I was going to bed 20 minutes ago.

Sorry-but-not-sorry for the wall of text.

I'm happy to interact with you about the Greek of this verse, as best I can. I am in my third semester of Greek studies for a Masters of Theology in seminary. As with most things, the more you study Greek the more you realize you don't know!

Fundamentally though, be aware that Christian scholarship works a lot like a hospital, in a sense. First, doctors, nurses, and technicians each have a core set of knowledge that they all share. Second, doctors have specialized knowledge that nurses and technicians lack, nurses have specialized knowledge that doctors and technicians lack, and so on and so on. Thirdly, the whole system relies on each person to trust in the specialized knowledge of the other people beside them.

In this way Christian scholarship is made up of many jobs, and for this topic we need a team of Language Experts, Theological Experts, and Exegetical Experts to form any serious conclusions! No one person can be an expert in all three, so we have to trust others to form a conclusion with any confidence.

Part of that means humbly admitting where we are unequipped and untrained to offer a dissenting opinion. You are very open with your lack of education in the Koine Greek, which is admirable! Please accept my loving challenge to rectify this situation over the next year of your life. You can buy Mounce's Basics of Biblical Greek textbook and workbook for fairly cheap, and if you commit yourself to a chapter a week than you can acquire a surprisingly adequate understanding of the language in just 8 or 9 months! You obviously have a passion for the knowledge and the ability to pursue truth, so level-up your skills!

Back to Matthew 23:23...

>However, it appears that ἐκεῖνος is not exclusively reserved for what is far, the more distant object. All the examples I gave in my article (Matthew 15:18, Mark 12:4, John 7:29, Acts 5:37, 2 Timothy 2:12) use κἀκεῖνος (not ταῦτα) but they are clearly referring to what was near. I wonder why they did not use ταῦτα instead.

Let's look at each one of those examples, and I suspect we will see ways that English and Greek are similar, and also ways they differ. I'll be using ESV for english. But first!! Let's get some good lexicon information on εκεινος and τουτο. From BDAG

ἐκεῖνος, η, ο demonstr. pron. (Hom.+) pert. to an entity mentioned or understood and viewed as relatively remote in the discourse setting, that person, that thing, that (‘that over there’; opp. οὗτος ‘this’)

οὗτος, αὕτη, τοῦτο (Hom.+) demonstrative pron., used as adj. and subst. As subst., the person or thing comparatively near at hand in the discourse material, this, this one (contrast ἐκεῖνος referring to someth. comparatively farther away; cp. Lk 18:14; Js 4:15; Hm 3:5)

>Matt. 15:18 But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this [κακεινος] defiles a person.

κακεινος is actually a bit troublesome for me to research. Most lexicons have it thrown in with και which is a multi-function conjunction, so finding good information there is like finding a needle in a hay stack. The most helpful thing I've found is

>κἀκεῖνος (kakeinos), and. A compound of ἐκεῖ and καί. From The Lexham Analytical Lexicon to the Greek New Testament (Logos Bible Software, 2011).

εκει is of course the shortened form of εκεινος, which gets us back to BDAG's lexical help which I already pasted.

So why does Matt 15:18 have κακεινος translated as "and this" instead of "and that?" BDAG tells us that εκεινος has a secondary usage, "referring back to and resuming a word immediately preceding. Often weakened to he/she/it" English actually works this way too, and you can see this by looking at Matt 15:18 and swapping out "this" for "that." It makes zero impact on the meaning of the verse because

>and this defiles a person

and

>and that defiles a person

mean the exact same thing, so using εκεινος vs τουτο is just a stylistic variance. You might be thinking, "aha, that's the same usage I was talking about in Matthew 23:23!" but remember that Mt. 23:23 has a clear "this ... that ..." structure, leaving no ambiguity as to the meaning of εκεινος in that context. In all these examples where it takes the secondary use, it is meaning "that one" like you might point to a donut in a donut shop and say, "give me that one." Greek uses this as a transition between clauses way more than English does. Back to the donut store analogy, they might often say, "I would like a chocolate donut, that one with the sprinkles." You see that it is still being demonstrative, but is not primarily communicating a distance.

>Mark 12:4 Again he sent to them another servant, and they struck him [εκεινος] on the head and treated him shamefully.

This is another case where εκεινος is taking the secondary usage, and is also being weakened to a pronoun. The full literal translation would be:

>And again he sent to them another servant, and that one they beat over the head and dishonored.

This is awkward phrasing for English so the "and that one" gets weakened into "and ... him."

>John 7:29 I know him, for I come from him, and he [κακεινος] sent me.

This is similar to Mark 12:4 where the literal translation would end up "and that one sent me," which is awkward English phrasing, so it gets translated/weakened to "and he" because it makes more sense to the English reader.

>Acts 5:37 After him Judas the Galilean rose up in the days of the census and drew away some of the people after him. He too [κακεινος] perished, and all who followed him were scattered.

This is, again, the same usage :) The literal translation for that would be, "and he withdrew people after himself; and that one was destroyed." Again, referring to someone as a "that one" is awkward in English, so it becomes "he" instead. I'm not sure where the "too" comes from, it might be from the context of the narrative, or it might be an implication of the εκεινος.

>2 Tim 2:12 if we endure, we will also reign with him; if we deny him, he [κακεινος] also will deny us;

This whole verse is obscure when translated literally and carries a lot of implied subjects. It goes

>If we endure, then we will reign with; If we deny (future tense!), and that one will deny us.

Translators add in the implied "him" when it is needed, and turn the [κακεινος] into a pronoun once again, this time completely dropping the "and" that would naturally come out of the και in κακεινος.

So that's all of them! The demonstrative εκεινος can mean "that one" like "that one right there" or "that one we I just mentioned," and when it is used weakly it can even be interchangeable with τουτο (pointing and saying "I would like this donut" instead of "I would like that donut", means the same thing!).

I'll go ahead and submit this and reply to it in order to continue the Greek topic.

The problem is that if you deconstruct a lot of church you will find many pagan influences. Do you get rid of them all? Wedding rings? Pews? the sermon? If you haven't check out Pagan Christianity, it shows most of our traditional modern worship forms have some influence from paganism.

Am I saying this to mock you, no. Or to make you doubt Christian origins? No.

But I do think that ancient symbols can be repurposed. Remember the cross was once a symbol of a death sentence from a pagan empire, but now its our greatest hope.

And you say that you are happy to celebrate Jesus birth in other ways, well perhaps its not all about you - maybe Christmas is that one time a year when someone might come to church for some fellowship or comfort, or a chance to rediscover God.. why not take advantage of the spiritual nature of the season and open the doors to the church?

Just hoping to make you think.

Firstly, I wanted to thank you for your interest and hope that you find the answers to your questions. If not, there's plenty of people on this sub that would be happy to help.

In terms of shedding light, there are a number of non-canonical accounts of Jesus, even early ones that were not included into the canon. Many give vastly different accounts of Jesus' nature and teachings, which ultimately is one of the reasons they became rejected, along with dating of when they were written, who by, integrity of the teachings, etc. I think the Didache is a little misrepresented though, many of our early Church fathers were not only aware of it, but clearly reference it.

Ultimately, though our early accounts of Jesus do offer a divine incarnation from the get go, our earliest Gospel, Mark includes many such references as do our earliest writings, the epistles of Paul, hence why the notion of Jesus as merely a human is widely rejected (though there some who self-identify as Christian and might accept a human-only Jesus, this wouldn't be considered orthodox though).

If looking into the historical evidence and various accounts of Jesus as human as well as further reading material you might be better poking your head into /r/AcademicBiblical. You could also look into the companion books How Jesus became God and How God became Jesus to get a good grasp for arguments on both sides.

Peace be upon you!

> 1) Biblical. The Holy Bible speaks of the powers and dignities of Mary though in a muted and mystical manner

Nope. I've read em. Just refers to her as blessed.

>>2) Patristic. The Catholic Church Fathers speak of devotion to the Mary.

None speak of her as sinless, virgin born herself, perpetually a virgin, and building idols/praying to her. Even if there was, it wouldn't negate my belief that Roman paganism was influencing Catholic doctrinal development. Here's a great book about how Roman idolatry influenced the church Pagan Christianity

>>3) Archeological.

1 scroll from Egypt? I think there's also a broken piece of pottery from the 3rd century, too.

>Source and further reading

I read the blog and it's going to take more than 1 scroll from Egypt to convince me that Mary is the cause of salvation for herself and the whole human race.

>The Bible says wide is the path to hell, narrow is the path to heaven.

If that's your criteria, then 1 billion Catholics is a pretty wide gate.

I sense that this conversation is departing from a friendly tone, probably more my fault than yours. I have to get to work and since I am the guest in this sub, I will let you have the last word. Blessings from one truth-seeker to another.

Edit: Also, on the blog about the scroll in Egypt, it isn't surprising considering this text from the wiki article on Isis as the "Queen of Heaven" ["Isis was venerated first in Egypt. As per the Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BCE, Isis was the only goddess worshiped by all Egyptians alike,[1] and whose influence was so widespread by that point, that she had become completely syncretic with the Greek goddess Demeter.[2] It is after the conquest of Egypt by Alexander the Great, and the Hellenization of the Egyptian culture initiated by Ptolemy I Soter, that she eventually became known as 'Queen of Heaven'](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_of_heaven_(antiquity)

If Bart Ehrman is a Christian apologist, then I might as well be Jesus! Ehrman is an agnostic atheist, and about as far from being an apologist as you can get (you can tell because some Christians write books trying to refute him). He is a highly respected New Testament scholar and has written standard university textbooks in biblical studies. You can find a complete list of his books here. The formation of the biblical canon is a massive topic, but for the New Testament Ehrman has written something of a three-part series: Misquoting Jesus, Jesus, Interrupted, and Forged (which I'm reading right now and highly recommend). These are all books aimed at a general audience and are easier to grok than his academic texts.

This will probably start a flamewar, but I should also point out that Richard Carrier's views are pretty far off the beaten path. There's nothing wrong with that, but crucially, they seem to be motivated by his personal ideology as an atheist more than objective scholarship. (Yes, Jesus did exist, and no, you can't use Bayes' Theorem to prove he didn't).

As a side note, Yale has free online courses about the [Old Testament](http://oyc.yale.edu/religious-studies/rlst-145
) and [New Testament](http://oyc.yale.edu/religious-studies/rlst-152
), along with books to go with them. These lectures really are incredible in framing the history of the Bible within its ancient context. I finished watching them a few weeks ago, and they have completely changed my perspective on the Bible, Judaism, and Christianity. You can find content of a similar nature in r/AcademicBiblical, which is a sub devoted to biblical scholarship. Cheers!

Sorry for the late reply, you caught me between class and teaching last night.

> I did not know that about Luther. Did he say why he removed those books?

His reasoning for removing those 7 books were that they weren't recognized by the Jews as canon (who themselves only "formalized' their Scripture sometime between the 3rd and 6th centuries. There's no scholarly consensus on when it was exactly finalized or by whom). Part of his reasoning was that they weren't (debatably in some cases) written in Hebrew but instead in Greek, thus they weren't inspired texts like the rest of the Hebrew OT. The Council of Trent, a Catholic Ecumenical Council, defined the Catholic Bible as 73 books including the 7 removed by Luther and the Reformers as deuterocanon (or "secondary canon" though still full parts of Scripture).

> Also, was there ever some sort of original historical team that established a set of books that was later refined? Do we have a timeline where that occurred, and how the Canon shaped over time and research?

Wiki does a good job summarizing the major movements in the development. And as I said above, Trent was when the finalized Catholic bible was authoritatively declared, though it was basically a formal acknowledgement of what was already standard practice in the Church for about a thousand years.

>Is this what the "Magisterium's Team" is?

The Magisterium is the teaching body of the Catholic Church and they settle matters of doctrine, including what is contained in Holy Scripture. The Magisterium is what made up the various councils throughout the ages including Trent.

>Finally, is there any specific source you recommend where I can go to find out more about the history of the Canon of the Bible?

Like I said, wiki does quite a good job giving a summary level. If you want a more academic and in depth reading I recommend Metzger's The Canon of the New Testament as was already suggested (though it tends to be on the apologetic side, it is still quite reliable) or F F Bruce's The Canon of Scripture. Niel R Lightfoot's How We Got The Bible is also quite good.

Elaine Pagels mentions Milton's Paradise Lost in her book The Origin of Satan:

>As Satan became an increasingly important and personified figure, stories about his origin proliferated. One group tells how one of the angels, himself high in the heavenly hierarchy, proved insubordinate to his commander in chief and so was thrown out of heaven, demoted, and disgraced, an echo of Isaiah's account of the fall of a great prince:
>
>How are you fallen from heaven, day star, son of the dawn! How are you fallen to earth, conqueror of the nations! You said in your heart, "I will ascend to heaven, above the stars of God; I will set my throne on high...I will ascend upon the high cluds...." But you are brought down to darkness [or the underworld, sheol], to the depths of the pit (Isa. 14:12-15).
>
>Nearly two and a half thousand years after Isaiah wrote, this luminous falling star, his name translated into Latin as Lucifer ("light-bearer") was transformed by Milton into the protagonist of Paradise Lost.
>
>Far more influential in the first-century Jewish and Christian circles, however, was a second group of apocryphal and pseudepigraphic stores, which tell how lust drew the angelic "sons of God" down to earth. These stores derive from a cryptic account in Genesis 6, which says:
>
>When men began to multiply on the earth, and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw the daughters of men, that they were fair
>
>Some of these angels, transgressing the boundaries that the Lord had established between heaven and earth, mated with human women, and produced offspring who were half angel, half human. According to Genesis, these hybrids became "giants in the earth...the mighty men of renown" (Gen 6:4). Other storytellers probably writing later, as we shall see, say that these monstrous offspring became demons, who took over the earth and polluted it.

Bless you, /u/luckysushi22! It is good and healthy to realise that emotional experiences (whether euphoric or calm) are not the sign of God's presence. "Good fruit" in our lives is (and these may come with or without pleasant emotions).

I wonder if you would find Dom John Main helpful? (The website is not trying to sell you anything, and has some nice short talks on Christian meditation.)

If you PM me your mailing address (and live somewhere I can ship to cheaply) I would happily buy you a used copy of The Desert Fathers. (Many bits and pieces are also findable free online.) It is a collection of sayings from ancient Christian men and women who retreated into the Egyptian desert in order to devote themselves to full-time contemplative prayer. Not all of the sayings are directly about prayer, but many are; others are about temptation, voluntary poverty, love of God and neighbour, etc. Some of it is pretty kooky, but some of it is really edifying (and some of it is kooky and edifying).

Atheist Delusions by David Bentley Hart is really awesome. It doesn't spend much time on much of the New Atheist arguments, because honestly they don't take very long to refute. But he does spend a lot of time talking about the historical impact of Christianity, and dispelling historical myths about Christianity and the sciences/thought in general. It's also a hilarious read, Hart is a great polemicist. Only read if you can stomach stuff like, "The rather petulant subtitle that Christopher Hitchens has given his (rather petulantly titled) god is Not Great is How Religion Poisons Everything. Naturally one would not expect him to have squandered any greater labor of thought on the dust jacket of his book than on the disturbingly bewildered text that careens so drunkenly across its pages - reeling up against a missed logical connection here, steading itself against a historical error there, stumbling everywhere all over those damned conceptual confusions littering the carpet - but one does still have to wonder how he expects any reflective reader to interpret such a phrase. Does he really mean precisely everything?"

Terry Eagleton's Reason, Faith, and Revolution is also really good. It's a cheat for me to mention him, since he's not a Christian but a marxist; he does a terrific job of showing how Dawkins and Hitchens (what he calls, Ditchkins) make their argument on the cheap, however. In the end, he concludes that the problem Ditchkins has is that Christianity is far too radical for them. And that the Church has strayed from its radical roots. So it happens to be a good pro and anti-Christian work. Since I gave you an excerpt of Atheist Delusions, I may as well give you one from Reason, Faith, and Revolution: "With dreary predictability, Daniel C. Dennett defines religions at the beginning of his Breaking the Spell as “social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought,” which as far as Christianity goes is rather like beginning a history of the potato by defining it as a rare species of rattlesnake. Predictably, Dennett’s image of God is a Satanic one. He also commits the Ditchkins-like blunder of believing that religion is a botched attempt to explain the world, which is like seeing ballet as a botched attempt to run for a bus."

Bowman wrote: This one God is the single divine being known in the OT as Jehovah or Yahweh (“the LORD”).

Put simply: Bowman was just saying how Yahweh was translated. I was wondering how long you were going to chase your tail on this one!!!

>If you would like to give an example of something Ehrman giot wrong feel free. Be specific.

I gave you specific verses on how where the Bible reveals that Jesus shares the honors due to God, Jesus shares the attributes of God, Jesus shares the names of God, Jesus shares in the deeds that God does, Jesus shares the seat of God's throne. All of those you just ignore.

As well as the one where the Holy Spirit is called God. The one where you say it is "figurative" but never, even when explicitly asked, say why one should come to that conclusion. Which you continue to ignore

So sure I'll show what Ehrman got wrong, just so you can ignore it as well

For case in point, let’s consider Ehrman’s use of the “criterion of dissimilarity,” which on his account dictates that a given unit in the Gospels is historically authentic if “it is dissimilar to what the early Christians would have wanted to say about him.” This criterion is well-known and has received a devastating barrage of criticism to the point that I am, to be frank, at a loss as to why Ehrman continues to use it. In extreme cases some scholars looked for a double dissimilarity, whereby a tradition is authentic when it is dissimilar to both Judaism and to the early church. Ehrman wisely uses it in its less extreme form and only applies it to dissimilarity from the early church.

But even then it verges on the ludicrous. Think about it. A story about Jesus or as a saying attributed to Jesus is only historical if it does not sound anything like what the church was saying about Jesus. What historian would say that the historical Plato is different from what the platonic school said about Plato? Who would say that reliable information about the Teacher of Righteousness who founded a community by shores of the Dead Sea can only to be found when material attributed to him in the Dead Sea Scrolls sound nothing like the Dead Sea Scrolls? Who thinks that the real John Wesley can only be retrieved by searching for un -Wesleyan things that Wesleyans said about John Wesley?

The criterion of dissimilarity posits a huge rupture between a movement founder and his or her subsequent movement that is simply absurd. You end up with a Jesus who said, thought, and did nothing that his earliest followers believed that he said, thought, and did. Jesus becomes a free-floating iconoclast artificially insulated from the movement that took its name from him, claimed to follow his teachings, and memorialized his deeds and actions.

No wonder, then, that the criterion of dissimilarity has been near universally abandoned and replaced with something far more credible , like a criterion of historical plausibility. We can regard a unit in the Gospels as claiming a high degree of historical authenticity when a saying or event attributed to Jesus makes sense within Judaism (i.e., plausible context) and also represents a starting point for the early church (i.e., a plausible consequence). Rather than try to drain the theological dross from the historical silver in the Gospels through several fallible criteria, more recently scholars have been interested in the application of social memory research to the study of the historical Jesus.

In other words, how did the things Jesus said and did create a memory in his followers, a memory that was faithfully transmitted, yet also refracted according to the theological framework that the early church was developing. In which case, we cannot hope to penetrate the impregnable bedrock of the church’s interpretation and proclamation of Jesus found in the Gospels and discover a deeper layer of historically accurate data laid beneath.

At the end of the day the best way to read the Gospels responsibly and historically is to narrate the story of Jesus in a way that has realism and explanatory power — a story that makes Jesus fit plausibly into his Jewish context, that brings all of the sources together, that explains the shape and direction of the early church, and that accounts for why and how the Gospels are what they are. Allison again puts it well: As historians of the Jesus tradition we are storytellers. We can do no more than aspire to fashion a narrative that is more persuasive than competing narratives, one that satisfies our aesthetic and historical sensibilities because of its apparent ability to clarify more data in a more satisfactory fashion than its rivals. Ehrman’s entire approach to historical Jesus studies does not commend itself as a good way of doing history*. source

So go ahead and ignore this as well, it is your best tactic.

Sure. The first thing I did was read the primary sources and pretty much in chronological order. I began with the Apostolic Fathers (Michael Holmes has this edition with Greek and English). I then read some 2nd century stuff, especially Irenaeus. Cyprian, Tertullian, etc, were all important. The fourth century took me forever to read through. I probably stayed in the 4th century for a year.

For secondary literature, I'd recommend, in no particular order:

Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, Vol. 1: The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition

J.N.D. Kelley, Early Christian Doctrines

Henry Chadwick, The Early Church (Chadwick is my doctoral grandfather, so to speak)

Adrian Fortescue, The Early Papacy: To the Synod of Chalcedon

Benedicta Ward's translation of The Sayings of the Desert Fathers

Less to do with Church history, but filling in some intellectual gaps:

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Called to Communion

Henri de Lubac, Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man (This may shock people that I recommend it, but I do like the nouvelle théologie every now and again)

I also welcome /u/koine_lingua to offer some of his own recommendations to give some balance if he'd like.

I use the BDAG as my lexicon. It's pretty pricey, but is the definitive lexicon when it comes to scholarship.

I use the Theological Lexicons of the Old and New Testament (TLOT and TLNT) a lot as well. Those don't have every word, but most of the ones that are theologically significant.

The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology is also a good resource. I assume the Old Testament one is, as well, but I don't have that one.

As far as Hebrew lexicons, I like A Concise Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament. It's pretty basic, but relatively reliable.

Sorry to be late to the party OP, but I was actually sort of in her shoes (attended a conservative Christian school before I attended college).

At university, a peer I respected recommended reading Pagan Christianity by Viola & Barna. Essentially it is an incredibly well-researched explanation of why modern churches are arranged/presented the way they are, and how that presentation has no real biblical justification. For instance, the podium-before-audience setup of a typical sanctuary is found nowhere in the Christian bible, but it's so prevalent that the term "pulpit" has entered the secular lexicon.

Pagan Christianity is actually the first of two volumes, the first of which explains why church practices are what they are, and the second ("Reimagining Church") recommending how to change them to better align with scripture as Viola and Barna read it. I deconverted after reading the first book, which is exactly what the authors recommend you don't do, since it might make you reimagine your faith, instead of just reimagining church.

Edit: The copy I read was the 2008 printing, not the updated 2012 printing. I suspect more material from "Reimagining Church" has been added to the more recent printing to prevent Christians rethinking too much, or at least more encouragement that they buy the second book as well.

Of course the top "reformed book" is Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion.

A great and useful book is the Heidelberg Catechism (or the Baptist version).

And, something put together this century is Valley of Vision, a great book of prayers to help learn to pray better.

Judging by your list, I'd say you should check this out.

Forgive the Title, Publishers love a provocative title, but this book is outstanding as it won the Ramsey Prize in 2011

Athiest Delusions by David Bentley Hart

If you are really interested, and you should be because it's very interesting, you should read The Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans, and Heretics by Elaine Pagels.

>. . . ground-breaking . . . Many times in the course of reading her explications I found myself saying, "Of course, why hasn't someone said this before?" By showing how the sectarian demonization of the "intimate enemies"--Jews and heretics--shaped early Christianity, the book helps us to understand the power of irrational forces that still need to be confronted in contemporary society. -- S. David Sperling, professor of Bible, Hebrew Union College

Bonus: you'll get a great look at the politics of the early church and a much better understanding of how things came to be than almost anyone - even most theologians aren't aware of the shit she lays out.

Sure. If you want scholarly resources on the resurrection, then I would suggest The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach by Licona. You can get it on Amazon for about $35 and it's a long read at 700+ pages.

https://www.amazon.com/Resurrection-Jesus-New-Historiographical-Approach/dp/0830827196/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3UCOAX5QZYQUY&keywords=the+resurrection+of+jesus+mike+licona&qid=1570211397&sprefix=the+resurrection+of+Jesus%2Caps%2C157&sr=8-1

Another good scholarly resource is The Case For the Resurrection of Jesus by Habermas and Licona. You can get it for about $13 dollars on Amazon.

https://www.amazon.com/Case-Resurrection-Jesus-Gary-Habermas/dp/0825427886/ref=pd_sbs_14_1/140-8576167-7556334?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0825427886&pd_rd_r=decfba9d-109a-4324-99c9-ba4523d42796&pd_rd_w=TIA6v&pd_rd_wg=EeKYx&pf_rd_p=d66372fe-68a6-48a3-90ec-41d7f64212be&pf_rd_r=WW1HBRRY8K7JV6EPDW3P&psc=1&refRID=WW1HBRRY8K7JV6EPDW3P

I would also suggest getting a general overview of the New Testament. Bart Ehrman is probably the world's leading skeptical scholar of the New Testament. His book on the New Testament, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the New Testament Writings, is a great resource and can be bought on Amazon for around $6.

https://www.amazon.com/New-Testament-Historical-Introduction-Christian/dp/0195126394/ref=sr_1_6?keywords=introduction+to+new+testament+ehrman&qid=1570211027&sr=8-6

Other books that I would strongly recommend would be:

Early Christian Writings. A short read at 200 pages. A catalog of some of the earliest Christian writings outside the New Testament. You can get it for $3 on Amazon.

https://www.amazon.com/Early-Christian-Writings-Apostolic-Fathers/dp/0140444750/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=early+christian+writings&qid=1570212985&s=books&sr=1-1

The New Testament: Its Background, Growth and Content Bruce Metzger was one of the leading New Testament scholars of the 20th century. You can get it for $20.

https://www.amazon.com/New-Testament-Background-Growth-Content/dp/1426772491/ref=pd_sbs_14_5/140-8576167-7556334?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1426772491&pd_rd_r=d83ca7e7-e9be-4da7-b3e8-3e5b6e143a27&pd_rd_w=AUNpT&pd_rd_wg=VLsLw&pf_rd_p=d66372fe-68a6-48a3-90ec-41d7f64212be&pf_rd_r=RESQKSAY5XYMKZ939JS7&psc=1&refRID=RESQKSAY5XYMKZ939JS7

The Fate of the Apostles, by McDowell. An in-depth study of how reliable the martyrdom accounts of the apostles are. A little bit pricey at $35-40.

https://www.amazon.com/Fate-Apostles-Sean-McDowell/dp/1138549134/ref=sr_1_1?crid=JBDB9MJMOVL8&keywords=the+fate+of+the+apostles&qid=1570212064&s=books&sprefix=the+fate+of+the+ap%2Cstripbooks%2C167&sr=1-1

Ecclesiastical History, by Eusebius, a 3rd century historian. Eusebius documents the history of Christianity from Jesus to about the 3rd century. You can get it for $10.

https://www.amazon.com/New-Testament-Background-Growth-Content/dp/1426772491/ref=pd_sbs_14_5/140-8576167-7556334?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1426772491&pd_rd_r=d83ca7e7-e9be-4da7-b3e8-3e5b6e143a27&pd_rd_w=AUNpT&pd_rd_wg=VLsLw&pf_rd_p=d66372fe-68a6-48a3-90ec-41d7f64212be&pf_rd_r=RESQKSAY5XYMKZ939JS7&psc=1&refRID=RESQKSAY5XYMKZ939JS7

studying Gnosticism reintroduced me to Jung and lead me to start reading his works. He was deeply interested in the Gnostics and was able to make an in-depth study of them WITHOUT the dead sea scrolls or the nag hamadi index! unbelievable. One of the enduring lessons I've kept from The Gnostic Gospels, however, is the idea that religions initially developed their rules because they were essential to the basic operation of society due to the fact that the people were relatively unevolved and thus needed to be told what was good for them by a higher being. One of her examples is a law in the Torah that requires you to sweep out your food storage shed twice a year. Seems kind of a weird law to the modern observer but then we notice that the jewish community was the only one to avoid the plague, and then we see that sweeping out your food storage prevents rats and rats are the main carrier of plague. Now modern man doesn't need to be told to clean his home because God told him to but rather he understands its in his own well being to do so. This idea leads into an idea I conceive of as moral power. I use this often in arguments where my opponent is decrying the proliferation of technology or the internet or porn; and the basic idea is that when you basically have access to anything you want at any point in the day in this modern age than it DOES require moral power to not sit around getting drunk all day or doing drugs all day or looking at porn all day or becoming ADDICTED to any of a hundred things that it would be IMPOSSIBLE to become addicted to in the time of jesus. We continue to Evolve! So to try to bring it around WHILE Jung appreciated the Gnostics it seems through his writings that it was because of what they were able to accomplish during THEIR time, just like he was impressed with the alchemists but he WOULD NOT recommend a modern person emulate them...we have moved past them although the study of them is infinitly fulfilling.

Just curious, did you grow up in a religious household? Growing up in a Catholic household, I was constantly exposed to the religion but never asked questions. I went down this path of curiosity on Christianity a few years ago and read a few books and watched a few documentaries. The fact is, there is very little data on the historical Jesus, so you'll have to come to your own conclusions. A few things that helped me come to my conclusion:

An interesting free Yale open course that deals with the historical context of the New Testament -

http://oyc.yale.edu/religious-studies/rlst-152

An introduction to the "banned" books of the bible. One could suggest that these were influenced by other religions of the east, and did not fit the narrative of the current version of the Bible -

http://www.amazon.com/The-Gnostic-Gospels-Elaine-Pagels/dp/0679724532

One authors interpretation of what Jesus probably was given the historical context and the political strife of that time -

http://www.amazon.com/Zealot-Life-Times-Jesus-Nazareth/dp/0812981480/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1449711190&sr=1-1&keywords=zealot

Good luck!

If you want something related, but not JW specific, these might interest you:

"The Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans, and Heretics"
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0679731180/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_WJCDDbMAJFDPK

And

"Forged: Writing in the Name of God--Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are"
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0062012622/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_KMCDDbAAJ0GGN

I found them interesting and they do tie indoctrination, particularly since JW are big on the Satan Concept and Paul's teachings, most of Paul's books of the bible were not written by Paul. I might be biased in my enjoyment of these books. I do not believe in Satan, I think it is just a boogeyman concept to instill fear. I also think Paul/Simon was a sack of shit, but it seems as though most of the books attributed to him were written in his name well after his death. None of this is groundbreaking, it is pretty well established and accepted biblical history, but it is well written and easy to follow.

Satan being God's #1 angel is actually based on later tradition, rather than from the Bible. A lot of "facts" about Satan that we pretty much take for granted nowadays are actually tacked on over time from various other sources. It's actually a pretty interesting topic, and you can read up a little about it here, and there's a pretty good book about the subject here.

I read the bible with the aid of a commentary (The New Jerome Biblical Commentary), and a Bible Dictionary (HarperCollins Bible Dictionary). It slowed the pace a bit, but I got a lot out of it. I also had some good intros to the New Testament (An Introduction to the New Testament by Raymond Brown and The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings by Bart Ehrman).

Some other interesting study aids:

• Who Wrote the Bible? by Richard Friedman - for an overview on the Documentary Hypothesis of the Pentateuch.
  
  
• Misquoting Jesus by Bart Ehrman - goes over the difficulty of rebuilding the original words of the authors of the bible.
  
  Good Luck.

First of all, can I just say how much I love giving and receiving book recommendations? I was a religious studies major in college (and was even a T.A. in the World Religions class) so, this is right up my alley. So, I'm just going to take a seat in front of my book cases...

General:

1. A History of God by Karen Armstrong
   
   
2. The Great Transformation by Karen Armstrong
   
   
3. Myths: gods, heroes, and saviors by Leonard Biallas (highly recommended)
   
   
4. Natural History of Religion by David Hume
   
   
5. Beyond Tolerance by Gustav Niebuhr
   
   
6. Acts of Faith by Eboo Patel (very highly recommended, completely shaped my view on pluralism and interfaith dialogue)
   
   
7. The Evolution of God by Robert Wright
   
   Christianity:
   
   
8. Tales of the End by David L. Barr
   
   
9. The Historical Jesus by John Dominic Crossan
   
   
10. Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography by John Dominic Crossan
    
    
11. The Birth of Christianity by John Dominic Crossan
    
    
12. Who Wrote the New Testament? by Burton Mack
    
    
13. Jesus in America by Richard Wightman Fox
    
    
14. The Five Gospels by Robert Funk, Roy W. Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar (highly recommended)
    
    
15. Remedial Christianity by Paul Alan Laughlin
    
    Judaism:
    
    
16. The Jewish Mystical Tradition by Ben Zion Bokser
    
    
17. Who Wrote the Bible? by Richard Elliot Friedman
    
    Islam:
    
    
18. Muhammad by Karen Armstrong
    
    
19. No God but God by Reza Aslan
    
    
20. Approaching the Qur'an: The Early Revelations by Michael Sells
    
    Buddhism:
    
    
21. Buddha by Karen Armstrong
    
    
22. Entering the Stream ed. Samuel Bercholz & Sherab Chodzin Kohn
    
    
23. The Life of Milarepa translated by Lobsang P. Lhalungpa
    
    
24. Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism by John Powers
    
    
25. Zen Flesh, Zen Bones compiled by Paul Reps (a classic in Western approached to Buddhism)
    
    
26. Buddhist Thought by Paul Williams (if you're at all interested in Buddhist doctrine and philosophy, you would be doing yourself a disservice by not reading this book)
    
    Taoism:
    
    
27. The Essential Chuang Tzu trans. by Sam Hamill & J.P. Seaton
    
    Atheism:
    
    
28. Atheism by Julian Baggini
    
    
29. The Future of an Illusion by Sigmund Freud
    
    
30. Doubt: A History by Jennifer Michael Hecht
    
    
31. When Atheism Becomes Religion by Chris Hedges
    
    
32. Atheism: The Case Against God by George H. Smith

For your husband's dad, what about some interesting spices or condiments he can cook with? I know Penzey's has some good gift sets, or you could do something like flavored olive oils paired with a new spatula/other cooking tool.

If your dad likes religious history, I've heard good things about Zealot (haven't read it myself though).

take some gold for being in a similar situation as myself at around the same time in life. in return, i hope you will look into purchasing one, a few, or all of these used/new books on amazon (or anywhere) for your contemplations.. you have my sacred word you will not regret it even if you just set them aside for a year or two. The knowledge gained from opening one's mind to these potential patterns of thought is incomparable to anything else I can think of as an addendum to the Holy Bible & other worldly religious books of faith.

1. Sefir Yetzirah (Book of Formation) - Aryeh Kaplan's version (a great explanatory edition)
   
   
2. The Hermetica - Timothy Freke & Peter Gandy compilation
   
   
3. The Gnostic Bible - Edited by Willis Barnstone & Marvin Meyer
   
   
4. Isis Unveiled - vol 1 and vol 2 - Madame Helena Blavatsky
   
   
5. The Magician's Companion: A Practical & Encyclopedic Guide to Magical & Religious Symbolism - Bill Whitcomb
   
   

> Feel free to present some.

Again, fair point! There's a couple of books that are a good introduction to the topic.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0062204602

http://www.amazon.com/Zealot-Life-Times-Jesus-Nazareth/dp/0812981480

These are meant for non-specialists, but they do a decent job of summarizing the last 30 years or so. If you're interested in a more in-depth study, both books contain a large number of excellent references.

I don't see any need to 'prove' anything. My position is that God is not susceptible to proof and that religion actually teaches this.

Atheists might deny God but asking for proof is intellectually dishonest. It's like if I play Baseball and you play Football and I keep asking you to prove Football exists by showing me a Footballer getting a Home Run.

In essence they are trying to force their rules on to you rather than trying to disprove your position by your own rules - which is what they should do if they are rational. No-one would ever construct a scientific model that tried to prove something by rules that don't apply to it.

Anyway, I digress. I never read atheist books any more as I find them insulting to my intelligence but I do read a lot of theology. Actually, most problems about God have been far better addressed by theologians than atheists.

David Bentley Hart is good on Atheist 'thought'. This is a good one:

Bart Erhman is good on alternate readings of Christian scripture.

This is good too - a discussion on how atheists see the world as material 'things' and assume God does not exist because He is not material. That's the whole point though... God is NO THING

If you want a logical proof though The Kalam Cosmological Argument is probably the nearest to it and I think no atheist really wants to discuss this.

It's an early Islamic 'proof' of God which has been take up by theologian William Lane Craig. He actually has repeatedly asked Dawkins for a public debate on this but Dawkins continually refuses.

The argument is simple

• Whatever begins to exist has a cause;
  
• The universe began to exist;
  
• therefore: the universe has a cause
  
  To falsify it the atheist would need to point to one example of an existent thing that has no cause (which actually would be God)
  
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalam_cosmological_argument
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

I didn't find exactly what I said in the previous comment, but here's the definitions of δικαιόω which I did find:

> 1. To take up a legal cause, show justice, do justice, take up a cause
2. To render a favorable verdict, vindicate
3. to cause someone to be released from personal or institutional claims that are no longer to be considered pretinent or valid, make free/pure
4. to demonstrate to be morally right, prove to be right

I think 3 and 4 are closest to what I was saying, but neither say exactly that.

Source, p249

Possibly. One of the best books on the subject (although I'm sure strict Christians will call me a "heathen" or whatever...especially his other "major" book preached a lot about Islam, but he's still a great religious scholar) is Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth by Reza Aslan. The book focuses a bit too much on "trivial" details of the region but the pertinent details of "Jesus of Nazareth" are really interesting.

If you just started, skip the "Tripartite Tractate". It's hard to understand even for someone who has read a lot of other Gnostic books. Some good places to start reading and realize just how different a picture is painted on the Apostles and Jesus, I recommend reading the Gospel of Thomas first.

Elane Pagel's "The Gnostic Gospels" is a wonderful primer to the NHL (and Gnostic Bible) and Gnostic thought altogether. Really easy to read, really well written. Here are some links:

https://www.amazon.com/Gnostic-Gospels-Elaine-Pagels/dp/0679724532

https://www.amazon.com/Gnostic-Bible-Revised-Expanded/dp/1590306317

Well, the birth narratives and trial dialogues are narrative devices and aren't historical (Is 7:14 also isn't about a virgin. You didn't say that, but in case you don't know).

I'm pretty sure the Samaritan woman thing is from John, and again, John preserves less historical information about Jesus than other gospels. It was also written a lot later than Mark or Matthew.

For more information, you can read this book by Bart Ehrman, or this book by John Dominic Crossan. Crossan's book is brilliant, but it is pretty dense. I think he says that Jesus being the Messiah is the post-Easter Jesus.

You could also ask /r/AcademicBiblical for more resources. Even if some people there might not personally hold to the view, they can probably direct you to scholars that do (and those that don't).

What are you referring to as the Gnostic Bible?

Edit: never mind, I found this. If you're more familiar with Western religious/philosophical traditions, it will be easier to understand. Also, I'd recommend reading some secondary works first, like Elaine Pagels' books, or listening to the relevant episodes of The Secret History of Western Esotericism. earlychristianwritings.com/ is also a great source for free primary texts and commentaries on Gnostic strains of Christianity.

This noir anthology kept me entertained while I was bedbound with a broken leg.

Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace. Very fun to read, funny, insightful. He was pretty great.

This book is creeeepy but fascinating.

Also, try r/books. It's what they're about over there, after all.

The Canon of Scripture by F.F. Bruce. Can't go wrong with anything by F.F. Bruce imo hahah.

Metzger has a book on the subject that I haven't read yet but what to. He's one of the best scholars of the last 50 years.

Kruger is a prof at RTS so this is one that probably has a reformed bent to it. Haven't read this one yet either, but it is suppose to be good.

There have been various responses to 'How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher From Galilee' by Bart Ehrman including two books published the same day! -

• How God Became Jesus: The Real Origins of Belief in Jesus' Divine Nature---A Response to Bart D. Ehrman, various authors
  
• Even before Ehrman’s book was issued ... Texas minister Mike Robinson rushed out his own, unauthorized counterattack: “How Jesus Became God in the Flesh: The Proper Exaltation of a Jewish Prophet from Nazareth; Bart Ehrman Refuted.” https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/25/bart-ehrman-jesus-god_n_5029457.html
  
• WHY JESUS IS GOD: A Response to Bart Erhman by Bishop Robert Barron

http://www.amazon.com/When-God-Talks-Back-Understanding/dp/0307277275

The Bellah book is by a sociologist and it goes through more of a history of religion. The book by Luhrmann is by an anthropologist who actually immerses herself in these religions and finds herself having these magical experiences. She puts forward an idea of why religious people have religious experiences, but she does it in a pretty gentle way - she experienced them herself. Here's a quote:

"In effect, people train the mind in such a way that they experience part of their mind as the presence of God. They learn to reinterpret the familiar experiences of their own minds and bodies as not being their own at all - but God's. They learn to identify some thoughts as God's voice, some images as God's suggestions, some sensations as God's touch or the response of his nearness."

As a former protestant (and current catechumen) the podcast series "Search the Scriptures" really helped me. I know it's not a book, but coming from a Sola Scriptura background, it really helped me form a proper view of what Scripture actually is, how it formed, and the best way to interpret it: http://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/searchthescriptures

re: a good book, I read this: http://smile.amazon.com/Early-Christian-Writings-Apostolic-Fathers/dp/0140444750/
These were some of the earliest writings after Scripture itself. As far as I can remember, these authors were taught by the Apostles.

This is an excellent study of Satan in the history of the Christian religion, and those that preceded it. I love this authors work, she has a way with history. Fun Fact, she is Hans Pagels wife. Jeff Goldblooms part in Jurassic Park was based on him. And I'm not religious, just enjoy the history of it all.

https://www.amazon.com/Origin-Satan-Christians-Demonized-Heretics/dp/0679731180

Robert Louis Wilken's The Spirit of Early Christian Thought isn't exactly a reading list, but it provides an excellent orientation to the Patristic theological world.

A dated but classic reference text is J.N.D. Kelly's Early Christian Doctrines

EDIT: Forgot the most obvious and helpful link. There's a goldmine at http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/

> You have literally no clue what your saying. Listen to your self.

Curious words coming from someone that does not use academic references.

> I gave you a reference on the origins of the Bible, and it says there it was written by fake prophets.

You gave websites. And, as I said, only a portion of the OT was written by prophets -- the Gospels were not, nor the Epistles, or the Sapiential writings...

> FF Bruce was a Christian, so obviously his works are heavily biased in favor of the Christian belief. It would be as if I gave you and article from the Friendly Atheist.

What matters is not who wrote, but the content. But, if you want another reference about canon development, I can point you to Metzger's [The Canon of the New Testament] (https://www.amazon.com.br/Canon-New-Testament-Development-Significance/dp/0198269544), but this one is much deeper.

> If you read such biased works, then yeah you are very clearly indoctrinated. Go pick up a science book and maybe you might actually learn something for once in your life

I am reading and quoting academic works... very funny that you rambles so much about science but can't quote academia.

So a few things first. Aslan's Zealot is not, in any way historical scholarship. It's pop history that is mostly dismissed among actual historians. Similarly, O'reilly's book is likewise almost useless since he is a journalist, not a historian. While both provide some interesting facts (mostly taken out of context) neither actually present an understanding of the historical Jesus as understood by historians.

Several I'd recommend are:

Ehrman, Bart's Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium
This book is written by one of the world's most well-respected historians on Early Christianity. This is also the very first book I had to read in graduate school on the historical Jesus and it's engaging and easy to read for non-historians. It also presents the view that the historical Jesus was an Apocalyptic prophet in the proper context -- which also happens to be what the vast majority of historians believe about the historical Jesus. Ehrman is also agnostic (like myself) but he doesn't attack religion.

Crossan, John Dominic: The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant
This is another excellent book. This book like, Ehrman's attempts to pain a proper contextual understanding of the historical Jesus, but does it in a different light -- he focuses on who the man was rather than what his primary preaching message was.
Sanders, E.P.: The Historical Figure of Jesus
I'd only recommend this one if the other two have been finished. It focuses on Judaism and Christianity and the dynamics of the historical Jesus after he died and the effects he had on his early followers.

Please let me know if you have any other questions or if I can help in any other way.

The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power

"Behind the scenes at every National Prayer Breakfast since 1953 has been the Family, an elite network dedicated to a religion of power for the powerful. Their goal is "Jesus plus nothing." Their method is backroom diplomacy. The Family is the startling story of how their faith—part free-market fundamentalism, part imperial ambition—has come to be interwoven with the affairs of nations around the world."

PingTiao: ^^original ^^reddit ^^link

The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power

"Behind the scenes at every National Prayer Breakfast since 1953 has been the Family, an elite network dedicated to a religion of power for the powerful. Their goal is "Jesus plus nothing." Their method is backroom diplomacy. The Family is the startling story of how their faith—part free-market fundamentalism, part imperial ambition—has come to be interwoven with the affairs of nations around the world."

Yes, and also a good writer. Erudite and entertaining. He's probably best known for a book he did several years ago called Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies, which is a response to some of the NuAtheists, particularly correcting their many historical errors.

He did another book called The Doors of the Sea: Where was God in the Tsunami, which is an expanded version of this article on the problem of evil.

And he recently published a book called The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss, which I haven't finished reading yet, but is basically an attempt to give an account of what it is that monotheists (and some Hindus) are actually talking about when they talk about 'capital G' God. So far, it's really good.

This was a huge point of discussion and contention in the early church. The Gnostic Gospels is a great book detailing some of the thoughts of groups who saw the two as pretty different, and their conflicts with those who saw the two as identical. It is well worth a read.

I have a book called Church History in Plain Language (Bruce L. Shelley) that is pretty good. Link

>If you haven't read the book, how do you know you've seen his arguments elsewhere?

As I said, I've seen parts of his book referenced, and read the title. I've heard others claim that Jesus did not believe Himself to be God, but I've seen just as many claims to the contrary.

>here may be some disagreement, but the basis of his argument is considered fact by scholars

Did or did not Jesus believe Himself to be divine? I would think if there was a wide a consensus on that question as you state, Wikipedia probably wouldn't say this. Here is one article that goes into depth debating one of the basis of Erhman's claims. There is an entire book devoted to rebutting Ehrman's claims. So, if one wants to claim Jesus did not believe Himself to be divine, you would not find a scholarly consensus.

>As for my argument, it was more than simply one sentence. I pointed out the reasoning for my argument, which is a historical argument. As I argue, Jesus is first seen as a religious leader, and eventually is said to be God. So Jesus eventually becomes God.

There are good reasons to believe this, but many other good reasons to not. You can not claim this definitively.

Today, I have a very special guest who is an expert on evangelical religion, psychotic pathology, and how it all relates to tulpas and plurality.

Tl;dr takeaways:

-Hearing voices isn’t always a problem.

-Tulpamancy may have profound benefits for one’s mental health and social life.

-Tulpamancy-like practices may be especially therapeutic for individuals with Schizophrenia.

-The stigma against plurality and hearing voices is unbased and should be removed.

Check out Professor T.M. Luhrmann and all of her research: http://luhrmann.net/

Check out my video on Luhrmann’s research and why we need to destigmatize plurality: https://youtu.be/lEPgaFaP6X0

Check out my video overviewing the research by myself and others on tulpamancy: https://youtu.be/cw0vCPNL5lU

Check out my video on why tulpamancy isn’t mental illness: https://youtu.be/Qp1an8XSkZc

---

Studies mentioned:

Schizophrenic voices are made worse by a stigma attached to hearing voices: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26349837

Tulpamancy-like practices help schizophrenia: https://theamericanscholar.org/living-with-voices/#

Tulpamancy has a positive impact on mental health: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/310460591_Tulpamancy_Transcending_the_Assumption_of_Singularity_in_the_Human_Mind?ev=prf_pub

Imaginary friends are beneficial and enhance empathy: http://www.psy.cmu.edu/~siegler/423-taylor07.pdf

Luhrmann’s research on Evangelical religion: https://www.amazon.com/When-God-Talks-Back-Understanding/dp/0307277275

I've been meaning to read this book since Rachel Maddow first started talking about it. The whole thing just seems so weird to me. It just sounds like it must be a conspiracy theory, but the whole thing is just so ridiculously well documented, it's obviously the truth.

I'm really can't wrap my head around how something like this can exist.

Has anyone read this book and would you recommend it?

If God is God, and he is supposed to have a relationship with you... wouldn't he offer some guidance? Wouldn't he talk back?

I recommend this book: http://www.amazon.com/When-God-Talks-Back-Understanding/dp/0307277275
"When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God"

It's incredibly thick and academic, but I would recommend giving this book a stab. Very in-depth analysis, broken down between various extant texts showing how scriptures have been altered and the Christ myth has changed over time (e.g. the Eucharist was a later addition.) Love it love it.

You've got a lot going on here, but here's my tuppence...

Orthodoxy has spread through the use of the local language, and documents get translated into local languages. So, you don't need to learn another language to read Orthodox writings. If you don't already know the mother tongue of the tradition your church is in (I have no idea where you are), check that one out.

That said, OCA clergy learn Koine Greek in seminary (I have this by word of those who went to St. Vladimir and to St. Tikhon). ROCOR learn Church Slavonic and Russian. It's all kind of what you want to learn there.

The majority of things were written in Koine Greek. The Septuagint is Greek, and much of the New Testament (if not all of it... my coffee hasn't kicked in enough to remember) was originally in Greek. The book The Apostolic Fathers (I have an earlier edition), which has 2nd century Christian writings and letters is in Greek and English.

There are a lot of writings in Slavonic and Russian, though, as well, since the Slavs have had Christianity for over a millennium. Coptic, Ge'ez, or Amharic wouldn't be bad to learn, but most of the writings you'll find there are Oriental Orthodox (Coptic, Ethiopian, Eritrean). If you're looking for a challenge, there's Georgian (EO) or Armenian (OO).

Ranking language by importance is probably not a useful exercise, since different languages will be important to different people. Romanian is more important to Romanians than to the Arabs or Greeks, as a wild example.

>how I could learn more about church tradition. About the patristic era and everything that was taught. I feel like if I learn about it, I'll be able to judge it for myself.

There are many excellent introductions to this era:

• Classical Christian Doctrine by Ronald Heine
  
  
• Learning Theology with the Church Fathers by Christopher Hall
  
  
• Life in the Trinity by Donald Fairbairn
  
  
• The Spirit of Early Christian Thought by Robert Louis Wilken
  
  
• Beginning to Read the Fathers by Boniface Ramsey
  
  
• The Christian Fathers by Maurice Wiles
  
  I don't mean to overwhelm you with sources, but the point is that if you want to learn more there is a lot available to you!
  
  Maybe you could ask your clergy to dialogue with you and study as well.

This is a great book to start with. It covers the subapostolic era/authors, meaning the generation directly after the apostles, those who studied under them. It's amazing to see how Catholic we were from the very beginning, especially in the letters of St. Ignatius. https://www.amazon.com/Early-Christian-Writings-Apostolic-Fathers/dp/0140444750

Unfortunately, it is difficult for people with a Western Post-Enlightenment worldview to simply interpret what Pre-Modern Hellenistic Jews were writing, especially if unaware of the context.

I was supplying interpretations from biblical scholars and showing that there are multiple ways that people understand Jesus' divinity. I wasn't making any value statements that they are better or even exclusive of one another. These are just the ways that people read the text.

Edit: If you want to read some biblical scholars and their interpretations of what Jesus meant by claiming divinity.

[N.T. Wright- Jesus and the Victory of God] (http://www.amazon.com/Victory-Christian-Origins-Question-Volume/dp/0800626826)

[Marcus Borg- Jesus: A New Vision] (http://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Vision-Spirit-Culture-Discipleship/dp/0060608145)

[Richard Bauckham- Jesus and the God of Israel] (http://www.amazon.com/Jesus-God-Israel-Testaments-Christology/dp/0802845592)

[John Dominic Crossan- Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography] (http://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Revolutionary-John-Dominic-Crossan/dp/006180035X)

[Reza Aslan- Zealot] (http://www.amazon.com/Zealot-Life-Times-Jesus-Nazareth/dp/0812981480) Edit 2: Apparently his credentials are in some dispute and this particular book is pretty "pop theology" but I found this [post] (http://www.patheos.com/blogs/peterenns/2013/08/two-scholars-respond-to-the-actual-content-of-reza-aslans-take-on-jesus/) by a theologian I respect that gives some insight into the whole thing.

[Thomas J.J. Altizer- Contemporary Jesus] (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1876258.Contemporary_Jesus)

This is generally considered the best NT lexicon: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.amazon.com/Greek-English-Lexicon-Testament-Christian-Literature/dp/0226039331&ved=2ahUKEwjg-rnhk5TkAhUQIKwKHWL4BioQFjAAegQIARAB&usg=AOvVaw2x1bV7P6oLho-Lu3Dn94Uv

It's pretty extensive. There is a shorter edition too if you're mostly wanting glosses, but if you're wanting to really dig in BDAG is the way to go.

I have seen people using the Brill dictionary lately too, but it's not specifically NT.

The grammar from what I can tell is really close but tends to be simpler in Koine so you probably wouldn't need a specifically NT grammar. Wallace's grammar would help with specific passages and constructions if you want one and his book is relatively inexpensive.

The best book on the subject of Catholics and Christianity in general is "Pagan Christianity" by Frank Viola and George Barna, exposing the Roman Paganism that infiltrated the Church through the years.

It's a little hard to read, so I wouldn't recommend it to people new to the faith.

https://www.amazon.com/Pagan-Christianity-Exploring-Church-Practices/dp/1414364555

(It was written by Christians, not a Fedora tippers)

There's a follow up book called Reimagining Church that is also good.

There are two different books that share a chapter title that speaks to this issue. Both are books I'd happily recommend, even if they have somewhat divergent emphases. The chapters are called 'Edifice Complex' and can be found in Rick Warren's seminal Purpose Driven Church and the second is Pagan Christianity although the latter seems to have changed the title of Chapter 2 to 'The Church Building'.

Read Bart Erhman. My library has all his e-books, hopefully you have access to one.

This way we remove all the accretions stuck to Jesus' story, and the real truth of how loving and progressive and radically equality-oriented earliest Christianity was will make you love them more.

https://www.amazon.com/Misquoting-Jesus-Story-Behind-Changed-ebook/dp/B000SEGJF8/ref=la_B001I9RR7G_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1498111603&sr=1-3

I have Issues that mean I can't read fiction without angst, so I read almost exclusively nonfiction. BUT I dogeared and underlined nearly every page of TM Luhrmann's When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God, which looks from a critical yet compassionate anthropological point of view at what exactly is happening with people in the charismatic Vineyard church who claim to literally hear God's voice. Takeaway: they are consciously engaging in practices that systematically rewire their brains, perceptions and meaning-making mechanisms.

• F.F. Bruce's The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable?
  
  
• Richard Bauckman's Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony
  
  
• Bruce Metzger's The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance
  
  
• Bruce Metzger's The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration
  
  
• D.A. Carson and Douglass Moo's An Introduction to the New Testament
  
  
  
  (Note, these will probably go against or "provide a nice contrast with" captainhaddock's view --the current most popular post in the thread).

John Dominic Crossan wrote a book on the historical Jesus, which was published in a scholarly edition and a shorter edition for a more general audience. I know a few recent PhDs and advanced PhD students in Biblical Studies that tell me he is respected in the field.

Just in case you're interested in a more reliable source.

EDIT: here's the shorter version on amazon

Great book about the Christian origins of Satan, and how different he is from the Jewish Satan:

https://www.amazon.com/Origin-Satan-Christians-Demonized-Heretics/dp/0679731180

Interesting talk by the same author, 9 minutes: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/666/the-theme-that-shall-not-be-named/act-two-4

> Hey, there's more than one person who fits that description (i.e. it's not just me), glad to hear it LOL.

It's increasingly common. Especially among the more sincere (and arguably "true") believers.

NOTE: Below are not "endorsements" -- just more noting that this is a larger (and growing) "phenom" that's sort of happening "under the radar" -- arguably it's been going on all along.

Cf http://unchurching.com

• Unchurching: Christianity Without Churchianity
  
  And you might also find a similar book:
  
  
• Pagan Christianity?: Exploring the Roots of Our Church Practices to be of interest.
  
  --
  Likewise, though coming at the issue -- people leaving "church" but NOT losing their faith -- from an entirely different (anecdote) side; if you can get your hands on a copy, a book from a couple decades ago (circa 1993), might be helpful to you as well.
  
  
• Exit Interviews: Revealing Stories of Why People are Leaving the Church
  
  --
  Chief point being, you are FAR from alone.

>They are calling them the family even though I have been deep in this shit for years and never heard that stupid name

Thats funny, because it has been known about for years. Jeff Sharlet even wrote a couple of books about them C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy was published in 2010, and The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power was published in 2009. He wrote a famous piece in Salon about this issue in 2009 as well.

https://www.salon.com/2009/07/21/c_street/

The nexus of right wing Christianity and fascism in American politics has been a running theme for decades.

A great book, very highly recommended: http://www.amazon.com/Origin-Satan-Christians-Demonized-Heretics/dp/0679731180/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1463457841&sr=1-1&keywords=the+origin+of+satan

The blessings of the Lord.

This would be a good choice for the Apostolic Fathers.

OP (and everyone else here), you check out this book a former worship leader of mine got us reading called Pagan Christianity?: Exploring the Roots of Our Church Practices. It traces back many common church practices and traditions to their original, non-scriptural origins. Touches on everything from the sermon to holy relics and even the music ministry. It's a real eye opener and it will absolutely challenge the way you look at your Sunday worship.

> suspend disbelief

I shouldn't have to do this in order to believe in something that is real. It's like asking you to suspend your disbelief that water turns to wood.

>It is only because you come at the Bible with the circular reasoning that flawed humans came up with it that you therefore assume the information conveyed is primitive and not timeless truth.

Some of the information is somewhat true. The reason that some of it still applies today is that human psychology has changed little in the past 2,000 years. Things that were wrong 2,000 years ago are still wrong today, stealing, indescrimate killing, etc.

As for the Bible, perhaps there is a version one that will settle all debate, but as it stands right now through the scholarly scrutiny of it, we've found that the Bible has been changed, edited, things have been left out or put into it. Some of these changes were innocent scribe mistakes, but others weren't. I suggest reading Misquoting Jesus by Bart Ehrman for a layman's look at contexual critism of the Bible.

>Such as the earth is the center of the universe... I don't think the Bible states that.

No, but as with any religious text it's open to interpretation and there are verses that talk about the circle of the Earth and how it shall not be moved and how it has corners that could be taken and misconstrued to mean just that.

Reading Joshua 10:13 (And the sun STOOD STILL, and the moon stayed...So the sun STOOD STILL in the midst of heaven, and HASTED NOT TO GO DOWN about a whole day. ), those back in that day might have come to the conclusion that the Sun moved around the Earth otherwise how could the Sun just stay in the sky and not move. This is where our human intuition breaks down. There are many things that appear to be true and feel psychologically true, but aren't. This is how it looked to the ancient people of that time. It was what they were comfortable knowing. It made them feel special. God's creation at the center where it should be. Later, though we found this to be wrong.

So, why not from the beginning state these things? Why not say that the Earth revolves around the Sun and is a spherical ellipse? Why not explain that insects have six legs and not four (Leviticus 11:20)?

These things show a primitive understanding of the world and cosmology not an awe-inspiring truth. But then perhaps this wasn't what God had in mind? Maybe he didn't care for us to know that the Earth is round and not the center of the solar system or that insects have six and not four legs?

Suns out, guns out!

1.

and 2.

Edit: also finished my own Summer reading list if anyone cares.

"Becoming a Supple Leopard", "Pagan Christianity", "Anatomy Without a Scalpel", and "The Official Truth: The Inside Story of Pantera"

Get yourself a New Revised Standard Edition of the Bible, and a copy of The Other Bible, and a copy of the Gnostic Bible, and then start going to Temple on Shabbat so the rabbi can get a decent look at you every now and then, and eventually start asking about the Talmud.

Thing is, the Old Testament is kind of only half the point. You're only ever gonna see half the picture until you're one of God's Chosen People. Just make sure you know when God calls, and answer respectfully.

Or, y'know, just work for that other guy.

I think you're being too hard on yourself. If you can scrape up £3.99, check out the chapter on "Progress in Perfection" in this book.

I have this version and it is a really easy to read translation. The only complaint I have is the typeface. Other than that, it's great. Look for it used or on Kindle if $90 is a bit steep. I bought mine under a pastoral stipend back in the day.

If it helps, "feeling God", "hearing the Holy Spirit", and similar claims that you hear a lot — particularly in Neo-pentecostal churches (but others as well) — are really dependent on factors like personality type. They rely on treating a portion of one's own thoughts and emotions as though they were the thoughts of another entity, and it takes both practice and innate aptitude. There's an interesting book on this by an anthropologist who studied these phenomena for several years at several Vineyard churches, called When God Talks Back. It includes a lot of stories from Christians who claim to constantly "hear God speak" as well as those who have found it difficult or impossible.

You're in a tough spot, because if you explain it to other people at your church, they'll probably assume it's due to some sort of spiritual flaw or sin on your part. Maybe nose around a bit and find someone who's in the same boat.

It seems we're of an identical view on this after all.

In many ways, the church has become the problem with the faith. I highly recommend a book called Pagan Christianity by Frank Viola. It covers this topic extensively. He also has a couple other books that go with it called Reimagining Church and Finding Organic Church. The general theme with these books is the effort to get involved in non-institutional churches. Ones where there is not this hierarchical structure other than the simple one the Bible set out, which is to elect elders from among the people who act more or less as guidance due to their wisdom. The very idea of a senior pastor isn't even found in scripture anywhere. When we stop and actually take stock of how far the church has strayed from God's word, we get a sense of disillusionment and don't feel quite so awkward looking for something else.

For a long time, I went to what could be described as a large home church which didn't meet in a home. It grew out of a home church and kept the decentralized non-institutional structure. Most of the focus was on family relationships and taking the Bible's teachings seriously. There were no tithes and no liturgy. It was not pre-planned week to week. Just a gathering of the saints for the purpose of expressing their faith and fellowship. Pretty much just like was done back in Acts 2.

But you're absolutely right in that the mistakes of the church are harming the public impression of the faith. When I see atheists explain what they don't like about Christianity, it's almost always reasons which are flaws in the church, not the faith itself.

The short answer is not much. What we know comes from critical analysis of the synoptic gospels, anthropological and archeological facts about the region that we can use to interpret those texts, and Roman writings from the time period, most importantly those of Jewish-Roman historian Josephus. There's a whole field of scholarship on the historical Jesus, and you should check out the work of the Jesus Seminar(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_Seminar).
I can recommend a couple books on the subject as well:
If you want the full monty, big ol' weighty tome, you need John Dominic Crossan's The Historical Jesus: The life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant. -http://www.amazon.com/The-Historical-Jesus-Mediterranean-Peasant/dp/0060616296

For the shorter, more digestible version, see his book Jesus: A revolutionary Biography http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/006180035X/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_dp_ss_1?pf_rd_p=1535523722&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=0060616296&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=1QHBK1Y6G36CNGSTPAZ7

For a counterpoint to many of Crossan's arguments, see Dale Allison, Jesus of Nazareth http://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Nazareth-Millenarian-Dale-Allison/dp/0800631447

New Testament Scholarship is a really interesting field and if you really want to answer the question you've asked here you should check out the work these historians/religious studies scholars have been doing in the last 20-30 years.

>We do not stand alone. We have the shared and consistent apostolic confession as passed down through the generations.

- exactly what our Lutheran friend said. So look at the early church fathers and read what they said from their own mouths. Just follow it from the ground up through the 21st century.


I would start here: Early Church Writings - 2nd Century Church

Go mid-way here: Church Fathers 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th Century,

6th century to 16th century here: Later Centuries / Renaissance + Not What Luther Thought of the Gospel

End here: Final Centuries - The Church's Designated Sr. Pastor Sums it Up for You

Just follow the Church's confessions, including its confessions through the Protestant heresies, and just make it to the end. Very simple. It's crisp when others don't throw in heresies in the middle to confuse you.

I'm reading:

Church History in Plain Language

A General introduction To the Bible

Systematic Theology by Wayne Grudem

And I really learned a lot from William Lane Craig's Defenders Podcast. Over several years he covered the major topics of Christian doctrine in depth. The best part is the Q&A time at the end of the class.

I think it depends on the discipline (Thayer's NT specific, so less so in mine). Older LSJs have also hit public domain, hence Perseus having them. I'm sure one of our seminarians could do better on this, but it looks like a recent NT Lexicon is Bauer's. Looks pricey though, for non-professional use.

I would recommend Pagan Christianity? by Frank Viola. He covers the origins of current Christian traditions, along with why they may or may not be Biblical. I haven't finished it yet, but so far it's been very interesting.

You may also be interested in seeking out the gnostic gospels. One claims to be from Mary and provides a direct female succession. I'm not a catholic myself, but I gained that nugget of info recently while reading The Origin of Satan by Elaine Pagels. She's written a couple books on the gnostic gospels that I intend to pick up next.

Also, as a side-note I've also read The Historical Jesus which concludes that Jesus was thrown in a ditch like all other peasants.

And How Jesus Became God by atheist Bart Ehrman who sees the resurrection witness as nothing more that a public delusion comparable to some modern examples that he gives.

I highly recommend these as well. Though I disagree with them at some important points.

Bruce Metzger's The Canon of the New Testament is a good summary and exhaustive description of the Apostolic Fathers and early development of the NT canon and bias free to boot.

There's a bunch of other gospels, including a Gospel of Jesus. This book explains them pretty well.

Gnosticism has a lot of really fascinating, thought-provoking and little-known mythology. The Gnostic Bible gives a good overview of multiple Gnostic traditions with differing and often contradictory mythology.

I always loved Sr Benedicta Ward's "Sayings of the Desert Fathers" https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0140447318?tag=amz-mkt-fox-uk-21&ascsubtag=1ba00-01000-org00-mac00-dsk00-nomod-uk000-pcomp-feature-scomp-wm-5&ref=aa_scomp

Christianity wasn't legalized until 313 C.E. and it didn't become the State Religion until 380 C.E. we can reasonably declare 380 C.E. as the beginning of the Catholic church. Before 313 Christians were persecuted throughout the empire. Also, did you even read the second link?

>
>
>Preface
>
>The Short answer is no: Tacitus is not the only or main reason why modern historians (whether Atheist, Agnostic, or Christian) believe the historical Jesus existed. I am going to copy and paste my answer from a previous post and also suggest that if you want in depth answers into what evidence we have for the Historical Jesus to read one of these two books:
>
>Ehrman, Bart: Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth
>
>Crossan, John Dominic: The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant Ehrman is a very vocal Agnostic (borderline Atheist) and Crossan is a Christian, just to give you both sides of the coin. I recommend Ehrman because he's one of the most engaging historians on this topic, period.
>
>Why do historians overwhelmingly agree that Jesus was historically a real person?
>
>First, we need to address one key issue that most people don't understand, so people on both sides of this argument like to take certain things out of context. It needs to be known that we have practically no primary sources for many secondary (non-monarchs or major political figures) characters in antiquity. This is what the historical Jesus was (a secondary character in his day). If we simply say "we have no archeological evidence, so he doesn't exist" then we need to say that Aristotle and Socrates did not exist because, like Jesus' story, we are left with written accounts that have been repeatedly copied through various generations.
>
>Now when it comes to the historical Jesus (and what we know of him) well it's simple in a few ways. The first, is that although the gospels and other New Testament books were all written decades after Jesus died (however Paul started writing between 45-49 CE), they are independently attested. Yes, from a historical perspective (and personally for myself since I am agnostic) the miracles and resurrection are considered embellishments to help encourage early people convert to this new Jewish sect.
>
>What does this mean
>
>Now although much of this information cannot be relied upon for historical purposes, some of it can pass the test of historical plausibility. What do I mean by that? Well, every historian, when examining evidence, has a set of criteria they must use when comparing written accounts of any event. Part of doing this, is taking these four accounts, and cross examining with each other and seeing if any of the minor details (things that lack religious implications that would be less likely for people to make up) correspond to most or all of the documents. What you'll find is that many of these minor details correspond consistently in ways that you wouldn't expect-- this is something you almost never see with mythical figures.
>
>You'll also see that the early Gospel writers likely had to create explanations for certain things about Jesus because his name was likely somewhat known around the time of his death. I'll give a brief example:
>
>Two of the gospels deal with the birth of Jesus. Without going into too much detail, it's easy to make the argument that both Matthew and Luke did not get their information for this narrative from the same source. They are constantly at odds with each other over many specific areas of this story (example: in Matthew, Mary and Joseph already lived in bethlehem and then had to move to Egypt and then, years later, move to Nazareth. In Luke, Mary and Joseph lived in Nazareth, traveled to Bethlehem for a theoretical tax registration, waited there for 32 days after Jesus was born, and then returned immediately to Nazareth).
>
>Most historians believe it is likely that both of them made up nearly all (if not all) of the parts to their stories because they were trying to fulfill the prophecies from the Old Testament. See, in the book of Micah, it was predicted that a savior would be born in the city of David (Bethlehem), so these writers wanted to make sure that Jesus fulfilled this prophecy. But wait, they had a real issue to deal with. It was probably well-known that Jesus was from some small town called Nazareth, thus he didn't fulfill that part of the prophecy. So, to deal with this, early gospel writers created these narratives to explain how this person from Nazareth could have still been from the city of David.
>
>If Jesus was a mythological figure that sprung up out of thin air, there would be no reason to say he was from Nazareth, they would have said he was from Bethlehem and just left it at that. This is what we typically see for made up figures. Keep in mind that this is one of dozens of examples where the writers did this to meet personal agendas of their time.
>
>What historians also find is that it is nearly impossible for a sect or cult to immediately spring up without a founding figure. After Jesus' death, the remaining followers were probably a group of people of about 20-30 people, and it expanded rather quickly -- probably hitting the hundreds within the decade after his death and by 50 CE, they had spread throughout the Roman Empire. Most scholars believe that the book of Mark, written between 65-70 CE, was actually written in the city of Rome for a local church there. This type of growth and expansion is, by historical standards, incredibly fast. The rapid rate of growth suggests, for historians, that a real figure of Jesus existed, had a few followers who immediately disbanded after his death. Yet, for those whom remained, they started preaching about his life and resurrection, which was likely very enticing for their day.
>
>I hope this gave you a glimpse into the answer for this. If you'd like more examples I can provide them.
>
>Addendum I wanted to add one more thing that I forgot to mention in my original post, and it's something that I find to be extremely important but is often overlooked. Tacitus is often identified as the first Roman to discuss or mention the historical Jesus or his followers which is actually not correct. The first mention of Christians actually comes several years earlier, around the year 112 CE (although I've read one scholar claim it was maybe even during the decade before that) by a Roman governor. Here's an excerpt from another Ehrman book on the topic:
>
>"The author, Pliny the Younger, was a governor of a Roman province. In a letter that he wrote to his emperor, Trajan, he indicates that there was a group of people called Christians who were meeting illegally; he wants to know how to handle the situation. These people, he tells the emperor, “worship Christ as a God.” That’s all he says about Jesus. It’s not much to go on if you want to know anything about the historical Jesus." -- Ehrman, Bart D Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don't Know About Them) HarperCollins. (2009-02-20) pp. 149
>
>As Ehrman points out, it's not much to go off of, but it is important that we have multiply attested sources talking about the rapidly growing Christian base at this time.

The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power

The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (Amazon)

The Fellowship (Wikipedia)

The Family’s Ugandan Project (Harper's)

My Logos Bible software gives καίπερ in the NT in 5 instances, namely Philippians 3:4, Hebrews 5:8, 7:5 and 12:17, and 2 Peter 1:12. All of the instances of καίπερ are translated with though or although. Especially 12:17 seems to indicate that you cannot translate it with "because":

> "17 For you know that afterward, when he desired to inherit the blessing, he was rejected, for he found no chance to repent, though he sought it with tears. "
>
>The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016), Heb 12:17.

It cannot be that he was rejected "because" he sought it with tears. Jesus offered up prayers and supplications with tears in 5:7, and he is not rejected because of it. Rather, his reverence gets noticed.

BDAG ( https://www.amazon.com/Greek-English-Lexicon-Testament-Christian-Literature/dp/0226039331/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=bdag&qid=1571748897&sr=8-1 ) only lists "although" as a translation, and has many verses to back it up

>καίπερ conj. (since Od. 7, 224; SIG 709, 18; 1108, 8; PGiss 47, 22; PSI 298, 17; LXX, TestJos, Joseph., Just.) although w. ptc. (so usu., also Diod S 8, 9, 2; 10, 19, 2; 17, 114, 1; Wsd 11:9; Jos., Ant. 1, 319; 3, 280; TestJos 10:5; w. finite verb Just., A I, 4, 4) Phil 3:4; Hb 5:8; 7:5; 12:17; 2 Pt 1:12. Also 1 Cl 7:7; 16:2; ISm 3:3; MPol 17:1; Hv 3, 2, 9; Hs 8, 6, 4; 8, 11, 1 (B-D-F §425, 1; Rob. 1129; FScheidweiler, καίπερ nebst e. Exkurs zum Hb: Her 83, ’55, 220–30).—M-M.

William Arndt, Frederick W. Danker, and Walter Bauer, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 497.

What may help in the interpretation is if you look at "son" as a spiritual being rather than as a literal child. I don't know if you're aware of Michael Heiser's work on spiritual beings (https://youtu.be/pKPid4i4SmI)(his book The Unseen Realm, his podcast or his videos) but according to him, sons (of God) are a type of spiritual being like angels, demons, God's heavenly host, etc.

The interpretation then becomes: "Even though Jesus was in a high position, maybe undeserving or generally unaffected by suffering because of him being a son of God, he learned obedience through what he suffered." Hebrews 1:2 tells us that God created the world through His Son, so it may be a little strange that this very son with God learns obedience by suffering.

This may fit because in the previous verse, 5:7, Hebrews talks about "in the days of his flesh". This is then contrasted with his spiritual status as son in verse 8 if you accept my speculation.

​

I think "because" is not a fitting translation. I understand why you're puzzled by the formulation and I find it a bit difficult to explain my ideas around Christ's sonship without me sounding a little wacky.

i read this ( http://www.amazon.com/Origin-Satan-Christians-Demonized-Heretics/dp/0679731180/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1302899963&sr=8-3 ) in an afternoon while working in a used book store one summer. i was already an atheist, but it definitely cleared up a lot of questions about satan and hell for me. you might find it useful - even comforting.

Which should be read in tandem with How God Became Jesus :)

I would class that as painfully detailed knowledge.

You could have a pretty good broad knowledge of Christianity and have read entire books and not know either of those 2 things

For example, off the top of my head, I was raised Christian and went to Bible study classes (catechism) and I've read all these (below) and more and I did not know either of the things you just quoted

• History of Christianity
  
  
• Misquoting Jesus
  
  
• The First Crusade

Read the book. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060560053/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0

It's much easier to believe. The author stumbled on this connection as a reporter in the late 80s and the experience changed his entire worldview.

Here's another book he wrote at the time. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316091065/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i2

You can probably find these in your local library. They are absolutely worth reading.

I highly recommend that you read Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth by Resa Aslan. I read the entire thing (except for the author's notes) last year.

The author claims that according to Roman records, there definitely was a Jewish rebel named Jesus of Nazareth who staged a small tussle in the Jewish temple and was crucified by Rome. Jesus Christ as described in the New Testament is mostly a myth.

So to answer your question, Jesus of Nazareth was a real person who was crucified by Rome. The gospel accounts are written by believers for various reasons.

The Spirit of Early Christian Thought by Robert Louis Wilken

> In this eloquent introduction to early Christian thought, eminent religious historian Robert Louis Wilken examines the tradition that such figures as St. Augustine, Gregory of Nyssa, and others set in place. These early thinkers constructed a new intellectual and spiritual world, Wilken shows, and they can still be heard as living voices in the modern world.

EDIT: this will go beyond the 1st and 2nd centuries, but might still be worth something to you.

Depending on which level you prefer, I would suggest two books.

Church History in Plain Language by Bruce Shelley provides a very basic, simple, broad stroke approach to church history. The elitists here won't care much for it, but this is a good place to start for someone who is not at all familiar with the history of the church.

If you want a little more detail, History of Christianity is one of my favorites.

I'd encourage them to look up the history of the pentacle, and where else it can be found outside of Wicca/Witchcraft. For example, the shape is a representation of Venus' orbit as viewed from Earth. I reckon it gets its cultural and religious significance originally from astronomy and study of geometry.

Also, you can explain that when Christians sought to take over Pagan cultures, they demonised a lot of their traditions and branded them as demonic. Is the devil horned because Christians decided that anyone worshipping the Pagan Horned God was worshipping the devil? This book might be a good resource.

Oh man, never read up on Biblical history and its evolution over the course of time then! Every generation of believers has added, changed, and/or removed interpretation of "revealed doctrine" over time that largely reflect the current time they live in.

If you do want to read up on it, I'd suggest Pagan Christianity as a starting point. It's written at a pretty high level and from a more historian/anthropological view and less of a subjective/religious view.

Gregory of Nyssa's On Virginity is somewhat of a classic on asceticism. As are Cassian's Conferences and the Sayings of the Desert Fathers. Peter Brown's Body and Society is an excellent secondary source on early Christian ascetic movements.

I find the books written by Bart D. Ehrman to be both informative and interesting. I have read three of them: Forged: Writing in the Name of God - Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are

Misquoting Jesus

Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don't Know About Them)
All three of them are solid reads.

Online Bible Links:
http://www.blueletterbible.org/
http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/
https://www.biblegateway.com/ (over 100 versions and 50 translations of the bible, including audio.)
The Holy Bible, English Standard Version (with Cross-References) [Kindle Edition] [free]

(edit:formatting to make it easier to read)

This isn't unique to Bannon btw. Of course it extends to the aids he's elevated from Stephen Miller to Sara Hahn.

But it's much bigger than Bannon. Pence, Sessions, Conway, Betsy Devos, and others have all evinced key elements of this ethnonationalist, Christian Dominionist, Clash of Civs ideology.

One center of this group in politics is organized by the CNP, which has included Conway and Bannon in the past. However, it's extremely secretive.

>The CNP is not controversial so much for the conservatives who dominate it — activists of the religious right and the so-called “culture wars,” along with a smattering of wealthy financiers, Congressional operatives, right-wing consultants and Tea Party operatives — as for the many real extremists who are included.

>They include people like Michael Peroutka, a neo-Confederate who for years was on the board of the white supremacist League of the South; Jerome Corsi, a strident Obama “birther” and the propagandist hit man responsible for the “Swift boating” of John Kerry; Joseph Farah, who runs the wildly conspiracist “news” operation known as WorldNetDaily; Mat Staver, the Liberty Counsel leader who has worked to re-criminalize gay sex; Philip Zodhaites, another anti-gay activist who is charged with helping a self-described former lesbian who kidnapped her daughter from her former partner and fled the country; and a large number of other similar characters.

>As the SPLC noted when it published the 2014 directory in May of this year, the CNP has every right to keep its membership secret. But, as the SPLC wrote then, “it also provides an important venue in which relatively mainstream conservatives meet and very possibly are influenced by real extremists, people who regularly defame LGBT people with utter falsehoods, describe Latino immigrants as a dangerous group of rapists and disease-carriers, engage in the kind of wild-eyed conspiracy theorizing for which the John Birch Society is famous, and even suggest that certain people should be stoned to death in line with Old Testament law.”

If you're interested in reading more about this strain of politics in the US gov, you can also check out The Family by Jeff Sharlet.

> A High View of Scripture?: The Authority of the Bible and the Formation of the New Testament Canon is very much an apologetic work written for the evangelical community.

I agree with /u/Gadarn here and, to some extent (eliminating all bias is impossible), the alert about "bias-free position".

As far as NT canon, another suggestion would be The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance by Bruce M. Metzger.

Sure: The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, Getting to Know the Church Fathers, Nicaea and Its Legacy Anything by John Zizioulas.

Church history in Plain Language

There are also multiple college-level courses available free online (search iTunes). Here is one: http://www.biblicaltraining.org/church-history-1/gerald-bray

This book might be of interest to you.

Caesar and Christ by Will Durant covers both Roman civilization and Christianity up until 325 AD. This is Vol. 3 in his acclaimed Story of Civilization series.

In terms of what people during the time period wrote about Christianity, I suggest reading the Apostolic Fathers, i.e. the influential church leaders between the apostles and the First Council of Nicea. Additionally, The History of the Church by Eusebius was written around 325 AD

This book is good too.

http://www.amazon.com/Desert-Fathers-Sayings-Christian-Classics/dp/0140447318/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1450443958&sr=8-2&keywords=desert+fathers

So...is the book worth getting? I'm really tempted, but I'm currently unemployed. The paperback version is on sale at Amazon for less than $8.79. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060560053/ref=s9_simz_gw_s0_p14_t1?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=1RFGX9K3G52PQWNZEWQG&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=470938631&pf_rd_i=507846

It's a massive load of bantha poodoo, and only goes to illustrate the person's ignorance of history.

You might take a look at a book called Atheist Delusions: the Christian revolution and its fashionable enemies by David Bentley Hart. He addresses basically this exactly line of reasoning and dismantles it.

Another fun book is The Fall of the Roman Empire by Peter Heather. That's a more secular work, focused on the history, not on Christianity, though you simply cannot discuss the end days of the Western Roman Empire without addressing Christianity in some sense. It will give you a bit more context as to 1) why, exactly, the Empire fell, and 2) what led to the so-called Dark Ages.

Here's a hint, though: The reason most any knowledge at all was preserved during the "Dark Ages" was due to its being preserved both in Christian monasteries in the West and in the Christian Byzantine Empire in the East (the Renaissance being partly kicked off by the flight of Byzantine humanists to the West as the Turkish invaders were approaching Constantinople).

In fact, the Medieval Period was very much not a time of stagnation; there were advances in metallurgy and agriculture, for example, the latter, combined with a period of warmth, led to a population boom which, ultimately, led to the devastation of the Black Death, which caused a massive upheaval in European society helping to pave the way to the modern world. Also cannons!

I know about it. He does not have any academic credibility. If you argue otherwise, please link me a paper of him from a peer-reviewed journal.

Meanwhile, you can read Reza Aslan's Zealot if you wonder who truly Jesus were. Unlike Holland, Aslan is an actual academic scholar.

Well there's the Wikipedia of course. It uses several different (though some conflicting) sources.

But the one that I get the definition and the particular count from is actually Bauer's Lexicon that had its 3rd edition published in 2001. It's considered one of the bigger of the big boys when it comes to understanding the old terms.

Oh! The word I reference is "porneia" in Greek.

Edit: You can also use an Interlinear translation to count off the number of uses. Though that would take a lot of reading.

When God Talks Back has been linked here a bazillion times, many of them by us, but this is the strongest the parallel's ever been, other than maybe that atheist former preacher who said he could still talk to God today (Dan Barker?).

Must be a hell of a blow to the ego to come down from literally being God, though.

-Serk

I have not read the book, but a response was made particularly to this very book from Ehrman by some Christian scholars.

How God Became Jesus

You should have hit Joe Rogan with some knowledge from Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies. I was cheering for you there, but it is a tough topic if you aren't fully ready for battle.

Have you since decided to keep religion a bit closer to home? It's best not to cast pearls before swine after all.

If you're looking for historical view, I personally like Elaine Pagels The Origin of Satan.

I recommend this book. We used it in (christian) high school and found it very readable.

http://www.amazon.com/Church-History-In-Plain-Language/dp/0849938619

Well I just got and am reading Joy to the World and Apostolic Fathers

I believe Elaine Pagels was directly involved
with the study of these texts. She is an exceptional
and engaging writer.

https://www.amazon.com/Gnostic-Gospels-Elaine-Pagels/dp/0679724532

Elaine Pagels makes a good argument in her book "The Origin of Satan" for the idea that Christians (at least the earlier ones shortly after the death of Jesus) had a very different if non-existent notion of Satan, and that they never really believed in an ultimate evil incarnate, and that if you look closely, Satan doesn't even really appear in either the old or new testaments in the way that we think of nowadays. Instead, Satan is a derivation on Shaitan, or a force of opposition (someone or something that blocks). Shaitan was an angel sent to do God's bidding in preventing someone from accomplishing what they were originally intending. Supposedly, this was to prevent humans from accomplishing goals that would ultimately lead to greater misfortune. For example, the spirit of Shaitan would be send into a donkey that would prevent that donkey from climbing the hill, where a landslide would happen. Since God knows it would happen, he sends the Shaitan to keep that human safe. Over time, this developed into "Satan", and took on a more malevolent tone. An interesting read, if you want to look into this more.

If you're genuinely interested, I recommend either The Origin of Satan by Elaine Pagels. Or if you want something a little less dry and academic, then check out A History of the Devil by Gerald Messadie.

But briefly, I would say that the "Christian cults got the notion that he's the 'enemy of God'" through the New Testament. 2 Corinthians 11 and Mark 3:25 are two quick examples of this.

Elaine Pagel's "The Gnostic Gospels" would be a good place to start. Far from a complete analysis, doesn't really get into the "conspiracy" angle of things, BUT---if you're really interested in going down this path to learn, there is no better primer to understanding the content and background of the 1947 Dead Sea Scrolls discovery.

https://www.amazon.com/Gnostic-Gospels-Elaine-Pagels/dp/0679724532

Suggestion for further reading: the chapter on humility from The Desert Fathers: Sayings of the Early Christian Monks (Penguin Classics). You will find the other themes addressed there as well.