Reddit mentions of A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

>How do you perceive what is true and what is not from the bible? By that I mean events actually happening or not...

If you mean the historical validity of certain stories, then I have to concede that realm to scholarship. Scholarship and common senses has discerned that many stories in the Bible didn't literally happen as they were told, but that doesn't make them "false," it just means that you have to read them as a story through the lens of human literary creativity (and, if you are a believer, a creativity guided by God.) A great book on the history Christianity (written by a gay church historian) sums up this perspective eloquently:

>Is Shakespeare's Hamlet 'true'? It never happened, but it seems to me to be much more 'true', full of meaning and significance for human beings, than the reality of the breakfast I ate this morning, which was certainly 'true' in a banal sense.

Again I will claim that by rigidly equating "truth" with "empirically historical events" you are reading the Bible through the lens of the fundamentalism you dislike, because fundamentalists think that the truth of Bible stories depends on their literal historicity, not on God's ability to speak through the loudspeaker of human creativity and human experience. As the same historian says:

>There is no surer basis for fanaticism than bad history, which is invariably history oversimplified.

The Bible is "history" not in the sense that everything literally happened, but in the deeper, better sense of history, by which I mean the human response to events and experiences (involving a mixture of empirical recording and non-empirical storytelling) in an attempt to distill their meaning.

Additionally, I think that your exegesis is stained by fundamentalism because you seem to be using "spiritual truth" as a shorthand for some sort of self-help advice. Fundamentalists, in claiming that scripture can be plainly understood in a vacuum from any exegetical aid, often just end up strip-mining scripture for "life verses" and directly applicable advice on everything from whether gay people caused that hurricane to whether Christians should listen to the Rolling Stones.

But the Bible is not self-help. Dr. Phil gives better advice than the Bible. It's not a cookbook; that is too easy, too clean, too reductionist. The Bible is soil: dirty, but fertile. Reading the Bible requires the believer to become a farmer and do the work of planting their seeds to yield a harvest of thirty, sixty, even one-hundred fold.

In any event, I believe that Jesus was crucified and that he was the Son of God historically as a man and eternally as a member of the Trinity. So I hope that puts my "cards" on the table.

Sorry for the long reply. I'm passionate about this and believe that someone of your sensitivity and intelligence deserves to read the Bible in deeper ways than what you have inherited.

Also, I want to thank you for your thread and your willingness to reach out to this online community.