Entirely too many people give a shit about a shitass collection of bronze age bullshit in the first place.
I don’t know who you are, where you live, or what you do for work, but if you talk crap about the quality copper ingots of Ea-nāṣir, I’m gonna whip your ass. That stuff is dope!
Or is there something else to say about that time?
Iron Age*
Get your ages straight
I think they’re talking about Abrahamic belief as a whole
Yahweh is an Iron Age god. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahwism
And the God of Abraham was El. There is historical evidence of the conquests of Canaan which placed them around 1400 BCE.
In the Bronze Age.
There’s also a later period with another round of conquests and sackings in ~1250 BC that oh-so-coincidentally coincides with the infamous Sea Peoples.
There’s obviously a lot that isn’t true in the Biblical accounts but the general time period is confirmed archaeologically for when the hillbilly Israelites conquered at least some of the coastal Canaanites.
(Their cities didn’t have walls, which is interesting)
(Also it wasn’t a purge, the “Canaanites” for a certain value of the term were doing fine in Alexander’s time)
The first person of color to be killed by the police.
I mean I know it’s a joke but it’s not even biblically accurate bud.
Plus everyone knows old testament god was an ex cop with tendencies towards beating his kids.
Dad nailing his son ? That’s Eww on so many levels…
Absolute fire my man
I like my sky wizards to be of authentic skin color thank you very much.
If The Christ was, in fact, directly descended from David, then this guy would have been one of his Niblings/ Cousins, many many generations removed. The Christ probably would have looked very similar to the man in this photo.
I’m not really up on the Bible, but wasn’t it Joseph who was allegedly descended from David? Joseph, who definitely wasn’t the father of Jesus?
It’s kind of like being European and being descended from Charlemagne, or having almost any Middle Eastern, Russian, Tibetian, or Siberian ancestry, and claiming to be descended from Chingis Khan. Yes, it’s probably technically true for the majority of the people in those immediate geographic areas.
If David was one historical figure, and not an amalgamation of people, kinda like Shakespeare might have been, at the time that The New Testaments would have been written, then, David would have been dead for a few thousand years. We know from DNA that a single figure, namely Chingis Khan, fathered so many children that something like 20% of all people alive are descended from him. He existed less than 1000 years ago.
Charlemagne existed about 1000 years ago and fathered about 20% of Europeans that exist today, again according to DNA.
Even in the time of the Christ, David would have been a few thousand years old, and was similarly prolific with his wives as Khan and Charlemagne. It’s entirely probable that Mary was also descended from David since most of The Tribe of Israel would have intermarried a lot more frequently than we would today.
Also… A lot of The Torah especially doesn’t hold up with archeological evidence, but even with The New Testament, there definitely seems to be some historical fuckery going on. Did The Christ even exist? Probably, seems to be the answer there. Did the historical person do everything they are credited with doing? Unlikely seems to be the answer to that question. Doesn’t seem to be the authors’ faults though. In both cases they were writing from perspectives that seemed reasonable at the time.
David was not a historical figure tough.
I don’t care if he was purple, his message was be kind to each other and we’ve failed to grasp even that simple philosophy.
Too
Considering the makeup of the population of the region back when Jesus lived, he could have had white skin due to the Roman, Greek and Anatolian (modern Turkey) presences, though light hair would be super unlikely. Of course, the most likely appearance would’ve been that of a common Egyptian, almond-ish skin,
#D5915A, and black hairThis guy is directly descended from David, and therefore would have been from the same family as The Christ, just many many generations removed. The Christ probably looked very similar to the guy in this photo.
People also think that Jesus was all love and light and goodness because they ignore or don’t know about the other parts about Jesus.
Like when he says, just two verses after the famous John 3:16 verse, that you worship him or go to hell:
18 Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son
Then there’s him being super racist:
21 Leaving that place, Jesus withdrew to the region of Tyre and Sidon. 22 A Canaanite woman from that vicinity came to him, crying out, “Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me! My daughter is demon-possessed and suffering terribly.”
23 Jesus did not answer a word. So his disciples came to him and urged him, “Send her away, for she keeps crying out after us.”
24 He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.”
25 The woman came and knelt before him. “Lord, help me!” she said.
26 He replied, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.”
Mark 15:21-28
Or when he says in Matthew 19 that you can only divorce a woman (and, of course, a woman can’t divorce a man) if she’s cheating on you, essentially condoning domestic violence:
8 Jesus replied, “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning. 9 I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery.”
There’s more where that came from.
I’m sure some Christian would be happy to come in here and hand wave it all away with being out of context or misinterpreted or whatever. And yet quoting the Bible out of context happens every time they go to their church and they have no issues.
People most often praise Jesus for the Golden Rule. He didn’t invent it.
The golden rule is so stupid too, I want to be left alone, should I leave people alone? My friend likes people coming to his place unannounced, should he come to places unanounced?
It’s like everyone takes the rule and twists it so it benefits/excuses how they live and do.
Those seem like misinterpretations to me. Underlying your desire to be left alone is the desire to be treated how you want to be treated. So you can quite easily extend that reasoning, how do others want to be approached? The golden rule then suggests we should have the conscientiousness to inquire and respect the relative boundaries that each of us have.
This gets into letter of the law, vs spirit of the law. If you care about the latter, then the golden rule is quite good. But if you take advantage of the former, then you can subvert and break down any rule.
But for this to work, everyone has to understand every other person. I don’t feel the golden rule is about that. Also, a rule which is abused if you use it straight out of the box without enough thinking is IMO not a very good rule, especially if it’s supposed to be some sort of catch-all good rule.
As far as catch-all rule of life rules go, do you have any greater alternatives?
But again, your problems aren’t really problems with the idea itself. You’re just trying to make a general life guideline do more heavy lifting than it was meant to, and all your issues are again solved with a little bit of common sense and conscientiousness.
As a quick sidenote, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” is not Yeshua’s (Jesus’s) principle law. His highest commandment was, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.'”
“Be nice to eachother” is good.
The idea itself is, IMO, wrong. That’s why the rule is just bad. I won’t do onto you what I want you to do onto me. Obviously if you think about it. There is no magic hidden idea inside it, it just sounds good if you don’t think about it.
I couldn’t care less who invented it but yes I know it wasn’t jesus or santa claus lol.
Oof. Where do I begin? You actually incorrectly cited the source of the verse you are quoting, so we’re off to a great start.
First off, you’ve incorrectly cited the verse to Mark 15:21-28 which is about Jesus’ crucifixion instead of Matthew 15:21-28 which you also sneakily removed the last two verse (27, 28) which are necessary to understand the context.
27 “Yes it is, Lord,” she said. “Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.”
28 Then Jesus said to her, “Woman, you have great faith! Your request is granted.” And her daughter was healed at that moment.
Also, Jesus alludes to his Parable of The Lost Sheep (Matthew 18:10-14, Luke 15:3-7) when he said, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel”. In this context, the Canaanite woman in Matthew 15 is just one of many lost sheep.
In regards to marital divorce in Matthew 19; yea, this one is pretty easy if we take into consideration that social customs have been continuously evolving. The first verse in Matthew 18 begins with Pharisees attempting to catch Jesus in an ideological “gotcha”.
“Some Pharisees came to him to test him. They asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?”
Jesus responds by saying, “…they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”
Keep in mind, when the Israelites were autonomous from foreign rule, they imposed the death penalty to those who committed adultery. It wasn’t until Moses that the concept of a divorce certificate was created, eliminating death to adulterers, which was a socially progressive move for that ancient time period. After all, you can’t create the act of divorce without first creating the act of marriage. I’ll continue with Matthew 19:7:
“Why then,” the Pharisees asked, “did Moses command that a man give his wife a certificate of divorce and send her away?” Jesus replied, “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning.”
The hearts of the people during Moses’ time had become hardened, cold, unsympathetic to those who committed adultery and sentenced them to death. The certificate of divorce that Moses proposed allowed for the hearts of people to soften instead of, you know, killing in the name of law.
So, when the Pharisees present this question to Jesus, he doesn’t actually say anything about whether women can or cannot divorce their husband, as you seem to imply. Jesus simply explains the history of the Pharisees’ own religious law back to them. They wanted him to take a definitive side so they could have him arrested for heresy and he didn’t take that bait.
So Jesus called gentiles dogs and only healed the daughter after her mother crawled in the dust? Not very loving, which is what OP pointed out. The two added verses don’t change that.
Also, he admits here that he is there for the lost Sheep of Israel.
I always find it funny how Christians rally around a guy who called them dogs and made it clear he doesn’t care about them, just because a random dude (Paul) had “visions” of Jesus 30 years after his death and from there on pretended that gentiles were part of the ingoup. While contradicting Jesus as well if the church of Jesus actual fucking brother on this very issue.
It’s just wild.
Hey, I called it.
Well, you did incorrectly cite your source and disingenuously remove the last two verses of the passage you were trying to attack.
Adding a tag at the end of your comment that “some Christian is going to tell me I’m quoting out of context or misinterpreting the text” doesn’t dispel you of literally doing those things. Also, I didn’t “handwave” away your argument. I systematically approached each of your points and rebutted them with the correct sources.
In todays standard Jesus would be a communist.
Really more of a communal theocracy. It says right in the New Testament that you are expected to give all of your wealth to the church, with the implicit trust that the church is meant to distribute those resources fairly, starting with those most in need.
Yeah, in some kind of merger of state, church, and corporate power.
What’s the name for that again?
If I learned anything from all of the Sunday school my parents forced me to go to it’s that Jesus was a white dude with amazing abs.
Korean Jesus?
We have an American commercial illustrator named Warner Sallman to blame for the canonical Jesus’ melanin deficit.
Yeah, I think Italian Renaissance painters may have pre-dated that somewhat.
That’s a ridiculous claim.
Here’s a picture of Jesus’ baptism from Normandy, painted in 1185.
Plenty of others here: https://smarthistory.org/standard-scenes-from-the-life-of-christ-in-art/
Europeans tended to paint Jesus as white because they didn’t understand there were no photos or movies or TV around, so someone in Norman France didn’t know there was an alternative possibility.
i think it goes back a little further than some dude from the US…
There used to be more diversity in the middle east. But there’s been a bunch of genocides since then.
Isn’t there a physical description of Jesus in the Bible that says his skin is the color of bronze and his hair was wooly like a sheep? 🤔
That was Revelations, which was written far after anyone who ever saw Jesus would have died, and describes Jesus’ divine form. The only gospel that describes anything about him was about a transformation. “His face shown like the sun,” but that is in Luke, so between 50 and 80 years after his purported death, and continued to be edited throughout the second century. So essentially it’s all made up and none of it matters.
I remember when I learned all the gospels were written decades after the “fact.”
I can’t remember what I ate for lunch yesterday, and we are supposed to believe people played a game of telephone for a few decades and got everything correct when writing it down?
Sure, Jan.
Surely it must be. Nothing really important except for the biblical events was going on back then! /s
The gospels were, while written decades after the fact, written by people who were alive at the time. It’s not really a game of telephone.
It turns out that when a guy dies in his early 30s, most of his buddies are still alive 30-50yrs later.
None of the Gospels were written by the apostles. They didn’t even have names until much, much later. I’m talking centuries.
Life expectancy was also much shorter
Mathew and Luke are both just re-writes of Mark. Mark is the oldest out of them all, and the oldest surviving versions we have are not designated a name.
It was a marketing ploy much later to give each gospel a name of one of his apostles to give them more credibility.
Some parts of Mathew and Luke are even word for word copies from Mark, which suggests that they are revisions from a different party who decided to edit in their own ideas.
Hell, the original version of Mark actually has a different ending than the one we got in the modern Bible.
John comes much, much later which is why it’s so different than the other three. It’s Spaceballs.
None of the Gospels were written by anyone who personally knew him.
Levantine people don’t have very dark skin, they definitely aren’t as white as Western Europeans though
Modern Levant and Levant people three thousand years ago are both different in appearance. You can thank the Romans and Crusaders from Europe for changing this.
Ancient Romans weren’t even really white. More olive toned.
There aren’t any white people in the Bible.
All Europeans are white… You mean to tell me Italy is not in Europe or that the amount of melanin in their skin is inconsequential?
no white people in the Bible
What about the Greeks?
I could give two shits about the Bible, but what you are saying is dumb as fuck.
Italians and Irish weren’t considered white just 100 years ago. Haven’t you seen the photos of signs posted on US shops that read “Help Wanted, Irish and Italians need not apply!” ?
Like I said, more Olive toned. Sorry it offends you but ancient Europeans, especially people in the Italian peninsula and Greece didn’t exactly look like the Europeans of today, being as most of them came from a different part of the world
They weren’t white people who left the middle east, they were middle eastern people who eventually turned white due to the different climate conditions of the area.
Not dumb as fuck, nuanced. History is neat like that
Good info. Looks like I’m the one here who is dumb as fuck.
You’re not dumb as fuck.
It’s a common misconception. Wasn’t even really until around the time of Queen Isabella (Might have the wrong queen as it’s pretty late here) that fair skin was considered preferable and a sign of religious purity.
Humans are a weird species.
Even relatively recently, Italians weren’t really considered “white”, especially by Americans. The KKK considered them “coloured” people with their olive skin and dangerous Catholicism. There was a big wave of “italiapobia” in the late 19th/early 20th century.
The governer of Louisiana in 1911 described Italians as “just a little worse than the Negro, being if anything filthier in their habits, lawless, and treacherous”.
People can be pretty terrible when it comes to race and ethnicity.
Sicilians weren’t seen as Italians by other Italians because Arabs had held Sicily for centuries. This is also why some did not see the Spanish as white.
My grandmother’s mortgage paper from 1955 had a clause to check to see if the Italian quota had been hit before offering the home for sale to Italians. Of course you couldn’t sell to black or Jewish people. This was in Northern NJ.
Got any further readings for this? Thank you for sharing that knowledge. Yeah racists are going to racist
If he actually lived it might even matter.
There are historical records of somebody named Jesus that lived at the time. The Bible story is just horse shit. He was an apocalyptic preacher just like today, and probably had undiagnosed schizophrenia, thought he could talk to God, and was the son of God. Plenty of people think that today, and we put them in Institutions instead of create a whole ass religion out of their life.
He never claimed to be the literal son of God, this is something that was addded into the dogma 2 to 3 centuries after his death during the Council of Nicaea (check Arianism).
I will say this, I can’t think of a thing Jesus says in the Bible that isn’t pretty based. He prioritized pragmatism over rules and protocol, compassion and understanding over judgment, generosity over greed, forgiveness over scorn, acts over words. Everyone following his death like Paul seem to be the ones that start to miss the point.
Umm there’s a few
When he spoke of division instead of peace (Matthew 10:34-36, Luke 12:51-53)
“Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.”
Acting like a gate keeper of Salvation (John 14:6)
“I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
Slavery and servanthood (Luke 12:47-48)
“The servant who knows the master’s will and does not get ready or does not do what the master wants will be beaten with many blows.”
Gentiles as ‘Dogs’ (Matthew 15:21-28)
When a Canaanite woman asks for help, Jesus initially replies: “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.”
There’s a few more, but I’m too lazy to keep going. The problem with the bible is it tried to be too many things at once. Especially trying to sell the concept of fear and love in one, which isn’t possible.
I grew up Christian and no longer believe but with the exception of Matthew 15:21-28, which you only quote a piece of, you are taking these out of context.
Matthew 10 is Jesus sending his apostles to preach his word. The bit about not bringing peace but a sword is a reference to the changes he promised and the suffering he tells the apostles they will face for preaching his word. This is also where Jesus tells them to separate from family that turns their back on Jesus’ word.
It’s not an endorsement of violence.
John 14:6 is properly read in context. You cannot follow a path different than the one Christ set and get to heaven. The guy who constantly steals, cheats, abuses people, and only pursues wealth or the praise of others isn’t a “good guy” in most religions. This isn’t as controversial as you make it out to be.
Luke 12:47-48 is part of a parable which discusses how since you cannot know when Jesus would return you always need to be ready.
This isn’t an endorsement of slavery nor is it a refutation of it, rather, it is part of a metaphor and wasn’t taken literally. If you got this one off a website or infographic rather than your own knowledge of the texts it’s a trash tier source. If this came from your own knowledge WTF this is one of the most famous passages in the whole book you shouldn’t be fucking this one up if you know the NT.
The last part is the only thing actually taken correctly in context. Jesus wasn’t there for the gentiles. The idea he was here for all comes from all the Paul related writings aka the gentile who never met Jesus IRL.
When you see something that looks as off as these quotes do you should look at the larger passage because they rarely mean what the atheists think they do.
I agree he said a lot of cool stuff for sure but ultimately he was an apocalyptic preacher. I think it’s immoral to tell people they need to accept your God or you’ll go to hell, personally, so that’s one not cool thing.
“Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved; whoever does not believe will be condemned.”
Pretty messed up given that belief is not something you can even really choose.
There’s no such thing as hell in the Bible. Jesus said sinners would cease to exist.
37 He answered, “The one who sowed the good seed is the Son of Man. 38 The field is the world, and the good seed stands for the people of the kingdom. The weeds are the people of the evil one, 39 and the enemy who sows them is the devil. The harvest is the end of the age, and the harvesters are angels.
40 “As the weeds are pulled up and burned in the fire, so it will be at the end of the age. 41 The Son of Man will send out his angels, and they will weed out of his kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do evil. 42 They will throw them into the blazing furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
Very truly I tell you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be judged but has crossed over from death to life.
For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God’s wrath remains on them.
If you’re pious, you live forever in heaven. If you’re sinful, you die. No eternal torment, no hanging out with demons. Dead.
While forgiveness is good, I’m not sure forgiving all sin just for following Jesus is so great.
It’s literally thoughts are more important than acts. I’m not convinced.
I’m not a biblical scholar but my understanding was there was biblical basis for it. Especially mentioned by Jesus as he was an apocalyptic preacher. Something like this sounds like it fits the bill pretty well:
The Son of Man will send out his angels, and they will weed out of his kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do evil. They will throw them into the blazing furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
Like I said though I’m not a biblical scholar. Although I’m not sure simply being denied an infinite reward is that much better really. It’s still effectively an infinite punishment for something you have no control over.
The closest thing to hell in the Bible is shoal. And that’s just the word for the ground people are buried in.
Hell came long after either Bible was canonized.
What’s the whole weeping and gnashing of teeth thing, is that something different to hell?
