New Testament

“it comes from. I was raised Jewish, but when you read the New Testament, it's beautiful. And the ideas in it are beautiful. So I went back and I reread the book of Matthew.”

“Did Jesus make a difference? Well, if you read the New Testament, talks about names, six other Messiahs. Jesus was not the only Messiah. There were lots of people then who said, I'm the Messiah.”

“Right. There were other people at the right place in the right time. There were those six other prophets mentioned in the New Testament, and they were the Essenes of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Why was a world religion founded by Jesus and not by the leader of the Essenes?”

“It's like, well, you got your guy, we got ours. Our guy did it better. And this is a lot of what's going on with the representation of Jesus in the New Testament. Because there are certain turns of phrase, there are certain things that Jesus does in the New Testament that reflect what the Greco-Roman world expected from their emperors and their god-men.”

“down or by writing any of the texts in the Hebrew Bible or in the New Testament. And the best way to figure that out is to try to situate the composition within, you know, whatever historical period makes the most sense, whatever we can make the best case for, and figure out how it would have worked in that period, which is why there are some texts that we think were intended as propaganda.”

“It's right next to her. Yeah. Yeah. So you were talking about Jesus and the New Testament and that some of it seems to have been the way it was done to appease the people that lived in the same era?”

“Jesus. In the New Testament, Jesus is the word. But it's never used to refer to a specific textual manifestation of the message. And so there's not really a case to make that any author of any text that's in the Bible used that phrase to refer to the scriptures or the Bible.”

“You have in one sense. You would think that would be kind of important. Yeah, you would think. Nobody talks about it until we get to the New Testament. There's a reference to Adam at the very beginning of a big genealogy in Chronicles. And in Ezekiel 28, there's a reference to the mountain of Eden, which you would imagine would be the same thing, but”

“But so throughout the Hebrew Bible and even in Greco-Roman period Judaism and down into some parts of the New Testament, it's not Adam's and Eve's fault that evil exists. That's not the main story that they use to understand why evil exists.”

“the angels taught humanity. And so I think that, up until the New Testament was written, that was probably the dominant tradition about where evil came from. And then in the New Testament, we kind of see both of them.”

“And the First Enoch tradition was probably the dominant one. And then because of Paul and the New Testament, we can kind of see traces of both of them in there. But I think Christianity later decided to just go with the one that was in their canon, which was the Genesis one.”

“I think is kind of funny. Most modern translations of the New Testament have taken out more than a dozen verses that are in the King James Version. Why? Because since the King James Version was translated, we have discovered hundreds more manuscripts, and we have been able to do”

“They were not written by the author. And so now, when we publish these translations of the New Testament, we just omit the verse. And because versification is kind of complex to just redo, we just leave the verse out entirely.”

“out. There are about 16 passages in the New Testament that have been taken out. Is there any debate about whether or not they should have been taken out? Among scholars, not really. So for instance, the passage in Matthew 17, 21, we have some very, very old manuscripts that don't have it at all.”

“And then later on, it gets worked right into the body of the text. So most modern translations of the New Testament, there are about 16 verses that are commonly just omitted. And they're included in footnotes. But also the ending of Mark, the whole story of Jesus' post-resurrection appearance at the end of Mark, scholars agree that's not original.”

“important text. And particularly because we have in the letter of Jude in the New Testament this direct quotation introduced by saying, Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied, saying.”

“The stories get told over and over in slightly different ways. And then also, it contradicts a lot of the stuff that Christians are finding in the New Testament and in their Hebrew Bible. And so it was becoming unpopular in the second and into the third century.”

“And they develop as we get into the New Testament. And so I think it's trying to accomplish a lot of those bigger questions. What is the meaning of all this? Why do good people suffer? Why are wicked people so successful?”

“lot of good work. And there's not really much that's going to be much different. But also we have that idea that repeated a few times in the New Testament where they're referring to Gehenna as the place where the fire doesn't die and the worm doesn't, or the fire never goes out and the worm doesn't die.”

“a new sixth narrative that harmonizes it all, that makes it all fit. And that's what we did with the New Testament. Once we got it all together, we decided this is all inspired. It all has to mean the same thing. More or less. They weren't as strict about it as we are today about it.”

“So when we get to hell in the New Testament, scholars suggest there are three different ideas about post-mortem divine punishment that seem to be represented there. One is annihilation, that the wicked just cease to exist.”

“So I think the gap closed over time. I think in the New Testament you have inconsistent ideas about what post-mortem divine punishment is going to be like. And I think it becomes formalized and systematized by the Christian church in the centuries after the completion of the New Testament.”

“And I think that's a post-biblical thing. Certainly folks who wrote the New Testament, I'm sure that if they were asked that, they would have been like, yeah, I would agree with that. But it's not something that's ever stated anywhere in the New Testament, at least not in those words.”

“I just don't talk about that. And in no small part because I do believe that it is, as Jesus in the New Testament says, when you pray, go into your closet and pray in secret, and your Father will reward you openly.”

“Bible that's kind of picked up again in the New Testament. And while there are definitely problems with the authors who are responsible for spreading this, because they are somewhat hypocritical themselves, I think the message is an interesting one.”

“It must say some version of two. I don't think so. Let's ask perplexity. Yes. And perplexity ask in specifically the New Testament in the New Testament. Does it ever say you can't have sex? Well, that's why the Old Testament, the Old Testament, you don't fuck. Well, the Old Testament tells you you can.”

“God killed him. Yeah. God killed him because he pulled out. Mm hmm. New Testament does not contain a single sentence phrased exactly do not have sex before marriage. But the mainstream Christian reading is that it teaches sexual intercourse belongs within marriage and treat sex outside the covenant as sexual immorality.”

“but there were other conditions. There were other candidates besides Christ. The New Testament talks about six messiahs who variously got killed by the Romans. Of the six candidates, Christ was the most successful. But Christ also, to found a religion, you have to be charismatic, number one.”

“that, these are the, in the New Testament of the Bible, these are the demons that possess people. This is the origin of demons, by the way, in Hebrew cosmology. So there's this pervasive idea, again, especially in the ancient Near East, that dead giants can be communicated with, and, and can possess living human beings, their spirits.”

“He didn't force his way into their lives. And it seems to me that the one example in the New Testament of a person who did not live a good life and neglected the poor around him and ended in that place, there is no evidence that he wanted out of it.”