"This leaves the question of when these works were created. Scholars in the first half of the 20th century came to the conclusion that the Yahwist was produced in the monarchic period, specifically at the court of Solomon, 10th century BCE, and the Priestly work in the middle of the 5th century BCE (the author was even identified as Ezra), but more recent thinking is that the Yahwist was written either just before or during the Babylonian exile of the 6th century BCE, and the Priestly final edition was made late in the Exilic period or soon after." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Genesis#Origins
The Yahwist had extensive knowledge of the area that's now Syria and Iraq but knew little to nothing about Egypt except that it existed and was run by a bad person. Most of the events are set in the area between Israel and Persia, such as the Flood, the tower of Babel, etc. The author didn't seem to know that the walk from the Nile delta or Red Sea to Israel takes about three days, or that Egypt didn't use slave labor, that it had pyramids, or that it wasn't ruled by someone named "Pharaoh" (The ruler of Egypt was called "king ____" and he lived in a pharaoh "big palace"). Harold Bloom is convinced that the Yahwist was a woman. I have to agree. Most of the interesting, well-developed characters are women, and it's full of tells like Joseph getting sold into slavery because his brothers were jealous of his coat of many colors. Women writers often connect clothes to power and jealously but male authors never do (see "The Hunger Games"). Then we have Samson whose superpowers come from his long, flowing, luxurious hair. No man would ever write that. A third clue is that an actual, believing, deeply religious person can't write a sacred text that shows true character development on the part of their revered god, whose essential nature and form must remain fixed in the worshipper's mind. Yet the Yahwist's God has a huge character arc, starting the story as someone who walked around and talked to people, showing up at their house for dinner, and ended the story as a distant and remote force. So the author was probably not a believer, raised in the religion, but an outsider. So my guess is that the Yahwist author was a woman from what is present day Persia, Iraq, or Syria who married a Jew during the exile and then got tasked with writing a "prequel" to the king's list and other old Jewish texts to explain why it's all important.
There is some stuff in Luke - "blessed art thous amongst women" and so forth. But they were appropriating the goddess archetype from other belief systems, to more easily attract converts. Christians did this repeatedly. For this reason and others you see nothing in the New Testament to support quite a lot of Christian dogma, both Catholic and Protestant.
In fairness, this is not such a big problem for Catholics, since they don't believe that the Bible is the one central source of their religion; the tradition and teaching of their church, stretching back to Peter, is. Fun fact: I started out saying 'we' in the above sentence. It's hard to shake.
Don't they depend on the New Testament account of Jesus saying "Upon this rock I will build my church" when addressing Peter to justify the belief that Peter was the first pope?
No, they agree with it, but it would still be true in their mind even if the Bible didn't mention it. As my priest used to say: Australia and gravity aren't mentioned in the Bible. It doesn't become real by being written down, nor by a Protestant accepting it as his salvation. It's just what's true.
In strict dogma, the latter, referring to Mary's non-virgin but immaculate birth, was kind of a prerequisite for the former, referring to Jesus' birth. 'Immaculate' doesn't mean 'non-sexual'. There is a prudish misinterpretation of the term coming around in the 19th century, and I'm unsure whether it came from prudish Catholics or people assuming Catholics were prudish. But while lots of sex is sinful in a Catholic's eyes, not all sin boils down to having sex.
Why is considering church teaching to be authoritative any more ridiculous than considering the Bible to be so?
Well to me, "church teaching" must be based on something. That said, I think it is ridiculous to expect the Bible to have a vast amount of material in it not related to the plan of salvation which it me is the whole point of the Bible and Christianity.
Especially considering that the church, when teaching, actually intends to teach religion, whereas three quarters of the texts in the Bible have clear other intentions.
Tradition and theology. The question here is whether a written text in genres and languages nobody really quite understands anymore is a better manner of tradition than a living sequence of generations. Most detailed Protestant theories of the Bible as the vessel of religion assume some kind of grace involved in translation and interpretation; why not apply that same concept to the church itself? After all, Jesus created and blessed it, and not the gospels.
Well, Protestant dogma is not uniform, and people read all sorts of things into the texts. But... The trinity. Realised eschatology. Christmas. Total depravity. Hell. Atonement. Even biblical inerrancy itself.
See, I would translate "this rock" to mean "this rock", a slab of stone that he was probably pointing to. I'm thinking that if he was referring to a person he would have said something like "this person".
I'm on my phone but Trinity: what happened at Christ's baptism. Don't know Realized Eschatology Christmas: first couple chapters of Luke. Total depravity: righteousness as filthy rags. Hell: AKA Lake this HTML class. Value is All Scripture is God fire. Atonement: The whole purpose of Christ coming and death on the cross. Inerrancy and source of Christianity: "make a lamp upon my feet" and 2 Timothy 3:16: All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and teaching in Righteousness.
Actually the Rock He was referring to was Himself. He was the solid rock upon which the church would be built.
That Jesus died for our sins. It took Christians over a thousand years to discover that interpretation. For the previous thousand years the idea was that the whole thing was an elaborate con played on Satan. You see, due to the original sin all human souls, upon death, went to hell. Satan claimed them all. So when Jesus died Satan claimed his soul like all the others and took it down to hell. Perhaps being executed on a cross like a murderer or traitor was just bait, because if any soul goes to hell it would surely be someone strung up like that. But Satan had no legal claim over Jesus's soul because Jesus was the direct son of God, not a pure descendant of Adam and Eve. So Satan had unknowingly overreached, and then some crazy shit must have happened down in hell, and Satan's human soul contract was voided, perhaps like Neo blowing up the Matrix because he was the one. Ever since then people's souls have been able to get into Heaven. Then about a thousand years ago some Christians look at that plot line and said "You know, that's kind of convoluted and stupid. There's got to be a better way to look at it." And thus we arrived at "Christ died for our sins."
You can read it in, I suppose, but it's not stated. That's the view that the apocalyptic teachings of Jesus did come to pass, but in a spiritual sense rather than a literal one. It's one of several ways to explain those teachings, none of which have any foundation in the texts. There's no instruction to celebrate it, nor any instruction as to what time of the year it happened at. That's not from the New Testament. I'm guessing this is a typo. You may think so but it's not stated. Which scripture is that referring to? The New Testament was not collected until some time after it was written.
No, because then he would have just said "myself". Being omniscient, he would also have avoided any possible confusion that he was referring to Dwayne "the Rock" Johnson.
He was referring to Peter, in the sense that whoever wrote that verse in Matthew wanted to justify the authority of Peter and thus had Jesus say it. It is a stretch to consider it as something that actually happened.
Jesus's dad apparently ran a major temple construction firm. (His dad was possibly Israel's Donald Trump). So when Jesus points to a rock and says "Upon this rock I will build my church" he's talking business: Carpentry, masonry, architecture, contracting, union disputes. His apostles or later followers were obviously off in religious la-la land.
That's my guess as well, but I really, really hope I'm wrong. I definitely want to see the interpretation in which the New Testament predicts html. Note that for a proper prediction, the gospel has to correctly distinguish markup languages and their derivations from markup language sets.
