Ok... I'm happy that you're coverign religion. It's about time we have Jamaicans talking more about religious topics... Ok.. I want to start with the creation of the books we call the bibles and where they fit in with each other. The Christian book, the New Testament was claimed to be collected from "early Christians", but I believe this is not true at all. The very first and Christian text, which included Matthew and Luke, were written before 70CE by Josephus Flavia. Those texts were written in Greek, since that was the spoken language of the Romans and the elite people of the region. The main character of those 2 stories was Joseph (funny that this is the name) which was later changed in to Yosua (which is Joeseph is Herbrew as well as Aramaic. Josephus became popular with the Romans, particularly the Flavia family when around 70CE a story written by him was used by the family to plead a "divine connection" to Maxius Flavia, claiming that he was prophesized in religious texts to be one to destroy the 3rd temple in Jerusalem. The thing is, this text was written after the fact and there were no religious following behind any such text. Anyways, Maximus became popular and allowed him to take power as Caesar. Maximus later adopted Josephus into his family, giving him his family name. Josephus used the next few decade of his life enforcing that claimed religion, but also bring into it some of the Hebrew text, written between 400-200BCE based on stories taken from other cultures. Like many writers even today, they changed the story to sort of "make sense of them", adding characters where they felt needed and changing names to more familiar ones. There was no actual religion behind those text either. However, there was a group of people who were Tulmudists, they pass down observations, and opinions of them as "wisdom". At the time, literacy was slightly above 0.1. Mainly rich families (aristrocrates) and priests (who also serves as scribes and also record keepers). On a side note. This divine chosen paradigm is wasn't new and even till today, monarchies still uses it as claims to their thrones. Thousands of years before the time these things were unfolding, there were "god kings", but they couldn't pull that off anymore. The best they could pass off was "chosen by god to rule". Anyways. The Christian text was translated from "Greek" to "Latin" - not one word from Aramaic, the language spoken by all in the region, including Jesus and his 11 disciples - around 300CE commissioned by Constantine. Why from Greek? because that's the language Jossphus wrote in. Why Latin? Becasue it was the other language spoken by Romans. Druing that time, the Roman empire was split in to 2 and had 2 Caesars - on in Rome and the other in Jerusalem. In Rome they spoke mainly Latin, while in Jerusalem thay spoke mainly Greek. Anyways, back to Josephus. If you have not realized as yet that the main character in those stories written by Josephus was himself. Anyways, like Maximus did to gain the throne of Caesar before him, he used the "Christian scipts" to do the same. Becasue of all that Josephus gathered, the new Christian book needed his work to validate itself and in turn gave validity to those texts, including the stories taken from passed down stories from other nations written between 400-200BCE. Those text were compiled as the "Old Testament". Then there is Paul. I believe Paul was a real person. I also believe that Paul was trying to do what Constantine managed to succeed in doing - to use divinity to gain power as a leader in Roman society. It should be interesting to know that to date, there is no archeological evidence found to support any of the events in the Old Testament. Sure, the names of cities and towns, but not events. Genesis was found, but not in the event of it happening. It was found to have been taken from another nation's writing. This includes the story of Noah and the flood. Exodus from Egypt was never found. No evidence of Jericho fall was ever found. In fact, the only archeologal findings to support the existence of "Israel" was dated during the time of Canaan (not after as claimed in the texts). Israel was a small city inside of Canaan. It became a rich city as the trade route from the Mediterranian sea to the Persian empire (Assyria) crossed close by. In fact, what also support this argument is the fact that Hebrew is related to the Assyrian language. It was close enough that travelers would stop there to trade making them an important trade post at the time. There were no evidence of archeological record of any king named David. All of these things was needed by the Christian book to be real and to exist. It's not like the population could look up records to fact-check any of the claims, and as usual, there are always people who chose to believe the claims, or at least parts of the claims that they heard in passing. Put it this way, if someone told you the story of Superman and then your gov't told you Superman is real and wrote a book about him and told you to whorsip him and do as they say or he will comeback and punish you. There will be very little for a naive nation not to accept.
I know it's a lot I've unloaded, but I invite everyone to look into all the things I've said in my post. Below I've included 2 academic courses from Yale that speaks about the creation of the bibles - one course for the Old Testament (the Hebrew Bible) and then other about the New Testament. This will get you started, but if you need help to find anything else, let me know. *Introduction to the Old Testament* ruclips.net/video/mo-YL-lv3RY/видео.html *Introduction to New Testament History & literature* ruclips.net/video/dtQ2TS1CiDY/видео.html
Congratulations 🎉
Ok... I'm happy that you're coverign religion. It's about time we have Jamaicans talking more about religious topics...
Ok.. I want to start with the creation of the books we call the bibles and where they fit in with each other. The Christian book, the New Testament was claimed to be collected from "early Christians", but I believe this is not true at all. The very first and Christian text, which included Matthew and Luke, were written before 70CE by Josephus Flavia. Those texts were written in Greek, since that was the spoken language of the Romans and the elite people of the region. The main character of those 2 stories was Joseph (funny that this is the name) which was later changed in to Yosua (which is Joeseph is Herbrew as well as Aramaic. Josephus became popular with the Romans, particularly the Flavia family when around 70CE a story written by him was used by the family to plead a "divine connection" to Maxius Flavia, claiming that he was prophesized in religious texts to be one to destroy the 3rd temple in Jerusalem. The thing is, this text was written after the fact and there were no religious following behind any such text. Anyways, Maximus became popular and allowed him to take power as Caesar. Maximus later adopted Josephus into his family, giving him his family name. Josephus used the next few decade of his life enforcing that claimed religion, but also bring into it some of the Hebrew text, written between 400-200BCE based on stories taken from other cultures. Like many writers even today, they changed the story to sort of "make sense of them", adding characters where they felt needed and changing names to more familiar ones. There was no actual religion behind those text either. However, there was a group of people who were Tulmudists, they pass down observations, and opinions of them as "wisdom". At the time, literacy was slightly above 0.1. Mainly rich families (aristrocrates) and priests (who also serves as scribes and also record keepers).
On a side note. This divine chosen paradigm is wasn't new and even till today, monarchies still uses it as claims to their thrones. Thousands of years before the time these things were unfolding, there were "god kings", but they couldn't pull that off anymore. The best they could pass off was "chosen by god to rule".
Anyways. The Christian text was translated from "Greek" to "Latin" - not one word from Aramaic, the language spoken by all in the region, including Jesus and his 11 disciples - around 300CE commissioned by Constantine. Why from Greek? because that's the language Jossphus wrote in. Why Latin? Becasue it was the other language spoken by Romans. Druing that time, the Roman empire was split in to 2 and had 2 Caesars - on in Rome and the other in Jerusalem. In Rome they spoke mainly Latin, while in Jerusalem thay spoke mainly Greek. Anyways, back to Josephus. If you have not realized as yet that the main character in those stories written by Josephus was himself. Anyways, like Maximus did to gain the throne of Caesar before him, he used the "Christian scipts" to do the same. Becasue of all that Josephus gathered, the new Christian book needed his work to validate itself and in turn gave validity to those texts, including the stories taken from passed down stories from other nations written between 400-200BCE. Those text were compiled as the "Old Testament". Then there is Paul. I believe Paul was a real person. I also believe that Paul was trying to do what Constantine managed to succeed in doing - to use divinity to gain power as a leader in Roman society.
It should be interesting to know that to date, there is no archeological evidence found to support any of the events in the Old Testament. Sure, the names of cities and towns, but not events. Genesis was found, but not in the event of it happening. It was found to have been taken from another nation's writing. This includes the story of Noah and the flood. Exodus from Egypt was never found. No evidence of Jericho fall was ever found. In fact, the only archeologal findings to support the existence of "Israel" was dated during the time of Canaan (not after as claimed in the texts). Israel was a small city inside of Canaan. It became a rich city as the trade route from the Mediterranian sea to the Persian empire (Assyria) crossed close by. In fact, what also support this argument is the fact that Hebrew is related to the Assyrian language. It was close enough that travelers would stop there to trade making them an important trade post at the time. There were no evidence of archeological record of any king named David. All of these things was needed by the Christian book to be real and to exist. It's not like the population could look up records to fact-check any of the claims, and as usual, there are always people who chose to believe the claims, or at least parts of the claims that they heard in passing. Put it this way, if someone told you the story of Superman and then your gov't told you Superman is real and wrote a book about him and told you to whorsip him and do as they say or he will comeback and punish you. There will be very little for a naive nation not to accept.
I know it's a lot I've unloaded, but I invite everyone to look into all the things I've said in my post. Below I've included 2 academic courses from Yale that speaks about the creation of the bibles - one course for the Old Testament (the Hebrew Bible) and then other about the New Testament. This will get you started, but if you need help to find anything else, let me know.
*Introduction to the Old Testament*
ruclips.net/video/mo-YL-lv3RY/видео.html
*Introduction to New Testament History & literature*
ruclips.net/video/dtQ2TS1CiDY/видео.html
Congrats. Grab you diploma. You’re not atlas don’t take the world on your shoulders. You know those people are bias to their religious beliefs.