Reddit mentions of The Other Bible

There is a collection out there called The Other Bible that has texts from the Dead Sea Scrolls, as well as other stuff that was deliberately excluded from the Bible during the Nicean council.

Once you read it, you kind of understand why. In modern English, stripped of all the usual picking aparts that exist in modern annotated Bibles, a lot of it reads like fanfiction.

This can keep you busy.

https://www.amazon.com/Other-Bible-Willis-Barnstone/dp/0060815981/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1501553677&sr=8-1&keywords=the+other+bible

I bought this 4 months ago and I highly recommend it.

As in the religion or as philosophic thought?

Either way, Stephan Hoeller is a good place to start for modern day Gnostics. Also see The Other Bible by Willis Barnstone for a good collection of historical Gnostic texts.

I started with this but as I started to read more, I found better articles to put up.

> and the period prior to the failed Jewish revolt to gain political and religious independence from Rome that lasted from A.D. 66 to 70

>Qumran, the guides say, was home to a community of Jewish ascetics called the Essenes, who devoted their lives to writing and preserving sacred texts. They were hard at work by the time Jesus began preaching; ultimately they stored the scrolls in 11 caves before Romans destroyed their settlement in A.D. 68

Map

I'm honestly interested in the Greek writings myself, apparently the area prior to the Maccabees revolt was under a Greek king.

~ 150 BC Macabean Revolt as a possible cause to the Qumran community leaving to protect their work from the new Priest Class (religious oligarch imo). I found this interesting book, 1 Macabees, some sort of written record talking about the historical context of the kingship that came down over the Jewish sect. Qumran timeline

I should say there is a lot of conjecture over these claims, even in this article it goes back and forth...

Hmm... seems the Jewish Temple was destroyed in ~ 70 AD by Romans. It could very well be that Jewish sects hid these scrolls from Roman onslaught.

I've heard that the greatest influences on Western culture are Judeo, Roman, and Greek ideas around this time in history. Specifically Egypt was not mentioned. I have a quote by an author Jorge Luis Borges who worked on compiling the Dead Sea Scrolls, he put in his foreward to his book, The Other Bible which include commentary work on the Dead Sea Scrolls. I wonder if he is alluding to the burning of the Library of Alexandria?

> Had Alexandria triumphed and not Rome, the extravagant and muddled stories that I have summarized here would be coherent, majestic, and perfectly ordinary.

It seems to fit in line with the narrative that these texts were hidden from Roman occupation?

> John the Baptizer, Jesus’ teacher, probably learned from the Qumran Essenes—though he was no Essene,” says James Charlesworth, a scrolls scholar at Princeton Theological Seminary. Charlesworth adds that the scrolls “disclose the context of Jesus’ life and message.” Moreover, the beliefs and practices of the Qumran Essenes as described in the scrolls—vows of poverty, baptismal rituals and communal meals—mirror those of early Christians. As such, some see Qumran as the first Christian monastery, the cradle of an emerging faith.

On Golb
> If that’s the case, then Qumran was likely a secular—not a spiritual—site, and the scrolls reflect not just the views of a single dissident group of proto-Christians, but a wider tapestry of Jewish thought

Schiffman

> The notion that the scrolls are “a balanced collection of general Jewish texts” must be rejected, he writes in Biblical Archaeologist. “There is now too much evidence that the community that collected those scrolls emerged out of sectarian conflict and that [this] conflict sustained it throughout its existence.” Ultimately, however, the question of who wrote the scrolls is more likely to be resolved by archaeologists scrutinizing Qumran’s every physical remnant than by scholars poring over the texts.

Michael Hunt - agapebiblestudy

> However, the intellectual influence of Pythagoras in the fields of mathematics, music, and mysticism was strong throughout the classical age. He founded a philosophical community known as "the Pythagorean Order" which became the prototype of many such institutions (11). It was as much an intellectual and religious community as it was a center of scientific study. Some of the "community rules" resembled not only Christian monastic communities founded in the Middle Ages but the mysterious 1st century BC-AD religious community at Qumran where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered: the members own property in common, lived under community rules which were both ascetic and ceremonial, and observed a rule of silence within the community.

I'm totally in disagreeance with Michael's summary [not quoted here], but the insight was worth noting; I've come to a similar conclusion. A secretive cult like society that preserves knowledge in some way. Here comes an invading army that want to enslave and steal all your good stuff and possibly burn everything... what is the obvious course of action? Hide it in the hills.

The Other Bible - The Other Bible gathers in one comprehensive volume ancient, esoteric holy texts from Judeo–Christian tradition that were excluded from the official canon of the Old and New Testaments, including the Gnostic Gospels, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Kabbalah, and several more.

Awesome! I did not know this existed. Thank you!

I think so but I find religion fascinating. I would highly recommend that after you read the bible you read some of the other versions, it's important to stop thinking of the bible as a singular book, different sects of christianity use different versions and I think this is the source of many of the differences. The gnostic bible or the alternative gospels like the gospel of mary or judas are good places to start. Also highly recommend this book blew my freaking mind.

Since you went to seminary, I'd say Bart Ehrman's books would very likely strike a chord with you. I'd recommend reading Misquoting Jesus, Jesus Interrupted, and Forged, in that order. The Other Bible (not Ehrman's work) makes a great companion to these; you get to delve into exciting non-canonical works like the Gospel of Nicodemus, and see what other (non-canonical) churches and ideas were around at the time the surviving gospels were written. Far from there being one truth which later splintered into many, you'll find there were many truths from the very beginning, only one of which became "official" by being in bed with the state.

Nominally, the full KJV contains the Apocrypha too. It was one of the first bibles edited to also include a set of apocryphal writings. However, no surprises here, there is a lot more 'apocrypha' than that included in the KJV (and often, it is categorized under a different title). I recommend, for its breadth rather than its depth, http://www.amazon.com/The-Other-Bible-Willis-Barnstone/dp/0060815981 to those interested.

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.