Reddit reviews Who Wrote the New Testament?: The Making of the Christian Myth
We found 17 Reddit comments about Who Wrote the New Testament?: The Making of the Christian Myth. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
You wanted to be part of the intelligentsia, but throughout your philosophical journey, you always based your convictions only on authority and tradition instead of on evidence and arguments. Don't you realize that this is the epitome of anti – intellectualism?
It is correct that the New Atheists aren't the pinnacle of atheistic thought and didn't contribute many new ideas to the academic debate of atheism vs. theism or religion. But this was never their goal, and it is also unnecessary, since the academic debate is already over for many decades. If you want to know why the arguments for theism are all complete nonsense and not taken seriously anymore, why Christianity is wrong just about everything and why apologists like Craig are dishonest charlatans who make a living out of fooling people, your reading list shouldn't be New Atheists, but rather something like this:
Colin Howson – Objecting to God
George H. Smith – Atheism: The Case Against God
Graham Oppy – Arguing about Gods
Graham Oppy – The Best Argument Against God
Herman Philipse – God in the Age of Science
J. L. Mackie – The Miracle of Theism
J. L. Schellenberg – The Wisdom to Doubt
Jordan Sobel – Logic and Theism
Nicholas Everitt – The Non-Existence of God
Richard Gale – On the Nature and Existence of God
Robin Le Poidevin – Arguing for Atheism
Stewart Elliott Guthrie – Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion
Theodore Drange – Nonbelief & Evil
[Avigor Shinan – From Gods to God: How the Bible Debunked, Suppressed, or Changed Ancient Myths and Legends] (http://www.amazon.com/dp/0827609086)
Bart Ehrman – The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings
Bart Ehrman – Jesus, Interrupted
Bart Ehrman – Misquoting Jesus
Burton L. Mack – Who Wrote the New Testament?
Helmut Koester – Ancient Christian Gospels
John Barton, John Muddiman – The Oxford Bible Commentary
John Dominic Crossan – Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography
Karen Armstrong – A History of God
Mark Smith – The Early History of God
Randel McCraw Helms – Who Wrote the Gospels?
Richard Elliott Friedman – Who Wrote the Bible?
Robert Bellah – Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age
Robert Walter Funk – The Gospel of Jesus
The two best books for getting a basic understanding of the writing and transmission process of the Bible are:
Richard Friedman's Who Wrote the Bible? for the Hebrew Scriptures
Burton Mack's Who Wrote the New Testament? for the Christian Scriptures
If by 'lacking' you mean 'nonexistent', then yes.
I went to public school but with heavy influence from my folks and church, all of whom seem to be involved in some sort of Fundamentalism competition. I learned exactly as much as I had to in order to pass the test, but I was always convinced it was a lie because scientists are all "out to get" Christianity.
I'm still wrapping my head around just how unhealthy this worldview can be.
I'll echo /u/Cognizant_Psyche - kudos on taking that first step and deciding to get smart on this topic.
I talked to my church pastor, who passed me off to his wife (who has apologetics degrees out the ass). She recommended The Language of God, a tactic which soundly backfired on her. That book was fantastic. It explains evolution from a DNA perspective but then tries to tell me I can still believe in God if I want to. For me, from such a fundamentalist, literalist background, the bible had to be true word-for-word, yet this book flew in the face of the entire Genesis account of creation. If that wasn't real, how could I trust any of the rest?
Once I was 'cleared' to learn about Evolution, I grabbed Dawkins' The God Delusion. I watched the Ham-Nye debate. I grabbed Who Wrote The New Testament, and Misquoting Jesus. That pretty much did it for me.
If you like the bible so much, you should also know who actually wrote it.
I suggest you read this book.
Sure thing. The books are NOT from his disciples. They were written decades after his death. This is mainstream scholarship for non-fundamentalist Christians (i.e., what regular seminaries teach people).
You may want to read: http://www.amazon.com/Who-Wrote-New-Testament-Christian/dp/0060655186
Two gospels mention the virgin birth. Two do not.
Jesus appears to four different sets of people and at different times.
Judas dies in two different ways.
So this thoroughly undermines the credibility of the New Testament (and there are dozens and dozens of such examples).
To take just a few:
http://www.thinkatheist.com/notes/101_Contradictions_in_the_Bible/
No, actually, they did not. Might I recommend "Who Wrote The New Testament?: The Making of the Christian Myth" by Burton L. Mack?
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0060655186
I second /u/ancient_dude's suggestion of John Dominic Crossan. He's probably the "safest" author if you want someone who is a fascinating scholar yet still a confessing Christian.
Who Wrote the New Testament? by Burton Mack is a great read, information-dense but easy to get into.
Also good is Cutting Jesus Down to Size by G.A. Wells.
For a book more focused on Acts and its depiction of early Christianity, try The Mystery of Acts: Unraveling Its Story by Richard Pervo.
Every page of these books will present you with ideas and critical scholarship that probably never occurred to you (or most lay readers of the Bible).
I've not read it myself, but have heard good things about Who Wrote The New Testament
I'd add Who Wrote the Bible? by Richard Elliot Friedman and Who Wrote the New Testament? by Burton L. Mack.
>What if I told you the only group of Christianity that really opposed Evolution is a specific, small subset out of the world-wide population of Christians? It is only really prominent within Conservative Evangelical Christianity (which happens to be, unfortunately, the largest, the most vocal and the most influential religious demographic within the USA, world-wide however is a different story)
I wouldn't call them small considering the influence they wield in government.
>Would you be surprised if I told you that the evidence for Jesus' existence is so overwhelming that no serious Ancient History, Classics, or Christian/New Testament Studies department in any university would deny that he was a real figure?
There are scholars that have put forth the theory he is an amalgam of characters of history and I'm not sure they are wrong. This aside even if a person name Jesus existed in this time frame there is nowhere near the evidence to substantuate the claims of the Bible.
>Would it surprise you if I told you that we know there are contradictions, and that a lot of us don't think they are significant enough to undo our faith?
Nope... I found plenty of Christians willing to cherry pick what they believe, nothing new here.
>We have a lot more complex and nuanced view than simply "everything the Bible says is true" and "the Bible never contradicts itself".
How can you expect us to believe its the word of god if it doesn't demonstrate divine like qualities? For example if the Bible was readable regardless of your language to everyone without translation this would be evidence there is something more here.. Or perhaps if Bibles were impossible to destroy. Two things a divine, all powerful being could do in order to demonstrate there is something special about this book. Instead the Bible appears to be a poorly written book, riddled with contradictions and historical inaccuracies.
>However, scholars generally believe that the NT is basically reliable in giving an account of his life, and along with the external evidence provided, is enough to explain who Jesus was and what he did in his historical context.
Very wrong here. Please go read 'Who wrote the New Testament'
https://www.amazon.com/Who-Wrote-New-Testament-Christian/dp/0060655186
You're constructing two different conceptions of god here. The first, the one involved in the bible, is an intervening, moody deity who punishes and rewards people, and apparently had a short, Arab, Jewish son named Jesus. This first conception is a result of the culling of polytheism as sketched in the video I linked in my prior post. The bible's writing is well-understood and is not divine. This one seemingly stopped interacting with humanity some time in the last couple hundred years, right around the time that globalization and recording technology became widespread phenomena.
The second conception is the god of modern experience. This god does not provide any humans with visions, miracles, or intervention in the style of the other one. This is the god with no consequences, no evidence, and hence no purpose. The first conception above is obviously untenable to anyone who takes even a cursory look at anthropological and philological information about the writing of the bible. This second conception may very well exist, but we have no evidence for it existing and its existence doesn't affect lived experience in any way, shape, or form.
Check out something like Burton Mack's Who Wrote the New Testament?: The Making of the Christian Myth
I'm reading that now, he makes a reasonable argument for the Christ mythology idea, and provides an in depth analysis of the writing of the NT in a historical context.
Who Wrote the New Testament and The New Testament a Historical Introduction are both good places to start. The latter is by Bart Ehrman, who Bikewer mentioned.
The problem is that you said this,
> It's like if the Gospels hadn't been put together into the Bible they'd count as non-Biblical records proving that Jesus existed, but because they are in the Bible that means they don't prove anything.
and you complained about this,
> If you put everything ever written about Jesus into the Bible then there would be no non-Biblical sources for proof, if you don't put everything ever written in then that shows you were picking and choosing your own religion
So now that you have engaged into "backtracking mode", as in,
>All the best historical accounts would be a subset of everything ever written, and so would 'accounts that best fit the goals of the early church'.
So...let's be clear how far we are:
Now, let me address your erroneous statement that the gospels are "the earliest". At best, a portion of one of the gospels may have been written by 70AD (Mark), but could be as late as 100AD. A full 40 years, best case, after the events. The next two (Matthew , Luke )were most likely written based on Mark. Finally, John is most likely even later
This matches very well Egerton Gospel (70AD at earliest) or the Gospel of the Egyptian (80 AD at earliest) and many more whose dating might well be equal to or precede the canonical gospels.
As far as the agenda of the early church, it is well known, and does not worry about historical accuracy, but about setting dogma straight. So, yes, they had an agenda, and that agenda was not to look for historical truth but for orthodoxy. Hardly the standard to create an even close to reliable text.
Ergo, and as a whole, I tell you that this,
> I think it's reasonable to think that the 'selected' canon was selected and held on to because it is the best historical account.
Is not correct. It was selected because it met the orthodoxy of bishops in the 4th century.
You should read this book. It would show you why the bible is not historical record.
Idea of how the Christian Movement began
For details about which parts of the Bible are from which era, you'll need to do some research. Because bible sources before the King James are so thin on the ground (very few of them around) each part is an area of expertise. I would look for the parts relating to prophecies in the OT that are linked to such events in the the NT.
>But I think to say Christianity has absolutely no possibility of being >possible is a really cocky thing to say.
I can't speak for every atheist, but I can speak for myself and people like Sam Harris when I say that we're not closed off to the idea of there being a god, it's just that there is no substantial evidence for such an entity. There's tons of claims that god exists, but so far they've all been dead ends. And all those teachings that are in the gospels are actually a greek philosophy that existed a few hundred years before Jesus. Burton Mack touches on that in Who Wrote the New Testament? I think there probably was a historical Jesus, I just doubt the supernatural claims.
"When censored for keeping bad company, Antisthenes replied, "Well, physicians attend their patients without catching the fever." which parallels Jesus eating with tax collectors and prostitutes.
There are other parallels as well, like living a life free from wealth, rejecting worldly possessions, rejecting fame (like when Jesus told people to not show their good works in Matthew 6:1-4). This shouldn't be too much of a surprise that greek philosophy was inserted considering that the new testament was written in greek.
Unless you don't believe Jesus said that.
http://www.amazon.com/Who-Wrote-New-Testament-Christian/dp/0060655186