Yep. It’s also kinda curious how many boxes Paul ticks of the comments about a false deceiver in 2 Thess 2.

• Lawless? (1 Cor 9:20 - “though not myself under the law”)
• Used signs and wonders to convert? (2 Cor 12:12 - “I did many signs and wonders among you”)
• Used wickedness? (Romans 3:8 - "And why not say (as some people slander us by saying that we say), “Let us do evil so that good may come”?)
• Proclaimed himself in God’s place? (1 Cor 4:15 - “I am your spiritual father”)
• Set himself up at the center of the church? Well, the fact we’re talking about this is kinda proof in the pudding for his influence.

Sounds like they were projecting a bit with that passage.

Curiously in all those stories in Josephus Rome killed the messianic upstarts immediately without trial and killed the followers they could get their hands on.

Yet the canonical story has multiple trials and doesn’t have any followers being killed.

Also, I’m surprised more people don’t pick up on how strange it is that the canonical stories all have Peter ‘denying’ him three times while also having roughly three trials (Herod, High Priest, Pilate). Peter is even admitted back into the guarded area where a trial is taking place to ‘deny’ him. But oh no, it was totally that Judas guy who betrayed him. It was okay Peter was going into a guarded trial area to deny him because…of a rooster. Yeah, that makes sense.

It’s extremely clear to even a slightly critical eye that the story canonized is not the actual story, even with the magical thinking stuff set aside.

Literally the earliest primary records of the tradition is a guy known for persecuting Jesus’s followers writing to areas he doesn’t have authority to persecute and telling them to ignore any versions of Jesus other than the one he tells them about (and interestingly both times he did this spontaneously suggesting in the same chapter that he swears he doesn’t lie and only tells the truth).

the Eucharist was an act of mockery towards Mystery Cult rituals

More likely the version we ended up with was intentionally obfuscated from what it originally was.

Notice how in John, which lacks any Eucharist ritual, that at the last supper bread is being dipped much as there’s ambiguous dipping in Mark? But it’s characterized as a bad thing because it’s given to Judas? And then Matthew goes even further changing it to a ‘hand’ being dipped?

Does it make sense for the body of an anointed one to not be anointed before being eaten?

Look at how in Ignatius’s letter to the Philadelphians he tells them to “avoid evil herbs” not planted by god and “have only one Eucharist.” Herbs? Hmmm. (A number of those in that anointing oil.)

There’s a parallel statement in Matthew 15 about “every plant” not planted by god being rooted up.

But in gThomas 40 it’s a grapevine that’s not planted and is to be rooted up. Much as in saying 28 it suggests people should be shaking off their wine.

Now, again kind of curious that the Eucharist ritual of wine would have excluded John the Baptist who didn’t drink wine and James the brother of Jesus who was also traditionally considered to have not drunk wine, or honestly any Nazarite who had taken a vow not to drink wine.

I’m sure everyone is familiar with the idea Jesus was born from a virgin. This results from Matthew’s use of the Greek version of Isaiah 7:14 instead of the Hebrew where it’s simply “young woman.” But almost no one considers that line in its original context with the line immediately after:

Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son and shall name him Immanuel. He shall eat curds and honey by the time he knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good.

You know, like the curds and honey ritual referenced by the Naassenes who were following gThomas. (Early on there was also a ritual like this for someone’s first Eucharist or after a baptism even in canonical traditions but it eventually died out.)

Oh and strange that Pope Julius I in 340 CE was banning a Eucharist with milk instead of wine…

Now, the much more interesting question is why there were efforts to change this, but that’s a long comment for another time.

Just plain gross.

I knew a number of camp survivors, and I’m just glad they aren’t still around to see the voices that were so loudly calling to “never forget” having turned into “I’ll ignore your Nazi salute if you ignore my war crimes.”

In Greek theater, when the events on stage looked like they were headed for certain tragedy, there was a trope that could salvage the situation and turn it on its head.

The deus ex machina.

The Doomsday clock is definitely ticking down, but there’s also some curious things taking place beyond the edge of where most people have been following in that vein.

We live in interesting times, but the variables at hand are different from the history that seems to be repeating in very important ways.

“I have a TBI.”

Wait until it starts feeling like revelation deja vu.

Among them are Hymenaeus and Philetus, who have swerved from the truth, saying resurrection has already occurred. They are upsetting the faith of some.

• 2 Tim 2:17-18

I was thinking the same thing!!

It’s like at this point Trump is watching the show to take notes and stage direction.

Gretchen Whitmer

“MAGA tried to kidnap and kill me” is a pretty good campaign narrative.

It doesn’t matter if you’re racist, sexist, or homophobic, it doesn’t matter if you commit crimes, perpetrate injustice, blaspheme, or maliciously harm others, as long as you believe in Trump, he forgives you. It’s intoxicating to some people. He’s like the opposite of Jesus.

I hate to burst your bubble, but that literally is the canonical conceptualization of Jesus.

“As long as you accept him into your heart as your lord and savior, all is forgiven” is basically the lifeblood of modern Christianity. It’s why you have people proselytizing to death row inmates to “save them” before execution.

There’s a lot of other aspects that are antithetical to canonical Jesus, who I don’t recall having golden toilets or being tried for fraud in paying off a porn star to keep quiet about an extramarital affair - but “he forgives everything” is pretty on brand.

Whether Jesus actually said what’s in the Bible isn’t important, we know people thought he said that stuff and that it resonated strongly with many. We can infer things about people at the time based on what they ascribed to Jesus.

Eh, the above mentioned sect of Christianity claimed he was talking about indivisible properties of matter and naturalism as a greater wonder over intelligent design, with the sower parable (the only one with a 'secret ’ explanation in the first canonical gospel) as actually being about the naturalist origins of all life and the universe while inadvertently using the language of Lucretius’s “seeds of things” from 80 years earlier to do so (who even described failed biological reproduction as “seed falling by the wayside of a path”).

I think we too readily cede the authority over what a historical Jesus might have been trying to say to the revisionist version that snowballed into a beast torturing and executing people for even possessing competing versions of Christianity and directly accepting money in exchange for promises of salvation and propping up tyrants over the masses.

For example, here’s another saying from the above tradition:

Jesus said, “Let one who has become wealthy reign, and let one who has power renounce .”

Weird that the council of Nicaea at the prompting of an empire largely governed by those who were born into power and held it until death didn’t decide to canonize that tradition, no? But could you imagine the Roman empire maybe motivated to be executing a guy that was saying it?

Also weird that Paul seems vaguely familiar with this connection between gaining wealth and ruling in 1 Corinthians 4:8 as pre-existing his first letter to Corinth where he later accused them of accepting a different gospel from superapostles and where they later depose the presbyters appointed by Rome:

Already you have all you want! Already you have become rich! You have begun to reign—and that without us! How I wish that you really had begun to reign so that we also might reign with you!

the teachings Jesus actually preached

Except that we really don’t know what those would have been, and there’s a pretty decent likelihood that many of the most popular sayings like “blessed are the poor” and “easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle then a rich man to get into heaven” were additions after Paul and what later becomes the canonical church shift their splinter of the tradition to start collecting money from people.

“Want salvation? Too bad you have all that money - maybe we can help you out with that.”

For example, in apocrypha that has a decent chance of also dating to the first century, it depicts a Jesus ridiculing the very idea of prayer, fasting, and charity as necessary for salvation, instead characterizing it as a birthright for all people and those who give money to the church as being like people who take off even their clothes to give to someone else in order to be given what is already theirs.

This is arguably an even more transgressive tradition and version of Jesus than the one Paul offered up, and was more in keeping with the pre-Pauline attitudes about “everything is permissible for me” and the resistance to his rights to profit as an apostle discussed in 1 Corinthians.

There’s a significant survivorship bias in modern Christianity - for example, a tradition that changed the prohibition on carrying a purse and collecting money from people when ministering (Luke 22:35-36 - absent in Marcion’s version which was likely the earliest copy) was more likely to survive and thrive than ones that had limited fundraising capabilities as originally directed.

So while yes, he may have been all about helping the poor and downtrodden, it’s also entirely possible that a lot of it is a load of BS meant to separate fools from their money by an organization claiming to do those things on people’s behalf (you’ll notice in the Epistles vs gospels that Paul, who is supposedly collecting money for the poor back in Jerusalem, mentions a gift of a nice aromatic in Philippians 4:18, and then in the gospels written later on there’s a scene where Jesus is given an expensive aromatic and chastises those who criticize him for accepting it rather than selling it and giving the money to the poor).

Personally, I prefer the nuance in something like saying 95 attributed to Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas: “If you have money, don’t lend it at interest. Rather, give [it] to someone from whom you won’t get it back.” There’s a bit more nuance in that this addresses not an obligation for everyone including those struggling with money to give to the poor via the church but rather the inherent wisdom of recognizing the diminishing returns on personal wealth for the rich and the value in directly enriching one’s environment rather than hoarding a resource you can’t take with you (the point of the parable in saying 63 in the same work).

So while I’m inclined to think that a historical Jesus probably was against hoarding wealth stupidly given the overlap between unique extra-cannonical and canonical sentiments, I’m quite wary that the extreme degree of bleeding heart asceticism we see promoted canonically is much more than a sales effort by a parasitic organization that went on to build the Vatican off its back.