While watching 'Discovering the Bible' on the Smithsonian Channel, I learned that the oldest bible in print is the Codex Sinaiticus. It contradicts today's accepted bibles, (the Holy Bible, and the King James Bible) y a great deal. The Codex's version doesn't include 12 verses of Mark's gospel that describes Christ arising from the dead and revealing himself to 500 eye witnesses. A most troubling problem for modern christians to say the least.
The problem for christians today is that nothing substantiates their version of the bible. Today's bibles are copies of bibles that were "created" in the 11th century. These bibles are full of mistakes and political edits. Plus there is no outside source that validates their claims.
Now the Codex lays to rest about the controversy of 500 eye witnesses that saw jesus rise again. It never happened. In the Codex, the Gospel of Mark, christ's tomb was visited by a handful of women that found the tomb empty and disturbed. They were overcome by fear and told noone what they had discovered. There were no firsthand accounts, no eye witnesses, and no accounts outside the bible of the event. Even at that the accounts in the bibles today are much different than the accounts of the oldest known bible.
The Codex was discovered by Constantin von Tischendorf in 1844 at Saint Catherine's just below Mount Sinai. The Codex was written in Greek which also leads to speculation about how accurate they are, even though they are only 300 years removed from the time of christ.
RE: http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-topics/bible-versions-...
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Link to an "on-line" resource for the Codex
http://codexsinaiticus.org/en/manuscript.aspx?book=33&lid=en&side=r&zoom...
Thanks for the link
Great link, thank for sharing it.
yes mark was the first gospel and the Resurrection was not the main focus of the gospel as later Christians would want it to be.
Thus the church sought to change it throughout history with forgeries so that it becomes in accordance with the christian faith.
The gospel of mark is all about the Jewish temple destroyed in 70 AD
(this was a catastrophic event equal to the destruction of the twin towers of today for roman history)
All the stories in it, are directly or indirectly linked to that event.
The most revealing part of mark which I find the most fascinating is how the gospel ends.
The part where the woman were told to spread the news but in fear of ridicule they went home and told no one.
This is in my opinion a direct answer to all the skeptics of the first century that asked this question:
If there was such a prophet that did so many great things, how come none of us never heard about him before the rise of the Flavian emperors(69 AD)?
Mark actually tries to give an answer to that question in an era where the christian religion/propaganda just kick started in the roman empire.
(assuming that Christianity did not exist before 80 ad as the physical evidence suggests)
Mark uses woman as witnesses(that in that period were not even considered), as the reason why no one heard about Jesus.
Mark points out that they told no one about it, yet how does he know about it?
(it is a pun, a joke, the author of mark is pulling the leg of the reader)
Later in history after Christianity was popular enough in the roman empire this answer was no longer needed and was instead a hindrance to the church.
I thought the same thing. If the women told no one how did anyone know of it.....unless of course it was made up.
Yep but it is important to know that the author did this on purpose.
This is literature of the first century and just like a poem, where you put the stories(and their messages) matters.
He let the reader know that he is pulling his leg at the end of the gospel.
You can see, that if you were a roman publishing this work and you just read all the gospel, you would smile when reading the last part.
The author of Mark is like sending the hidden message:
"Now, after reading all that, know that I was pulling your leg."
It is indeed good literature.
So very interesting. However, it will most likely be overlooked by all but those who seek grounded reality. I can already hear the apologists dismissing the obviousness of the forgery at the end of Mark. The fact that any sane, rational, thinking being can honestly believe in this tripe is beyond me.
Btw, been reading a fairly decent book recently. Parallels directly with this subject. I hope I can mention the title and author, without much finger wagging. Kenneth Humphreys, 'Jesus Never Existed: An Introduction To The Ultimate Heresy.' I encourage everyone to read it. Have never thought there was ever such a person, now I know why.
I learned alot from this thread.. Like wow.. But of course if you ask christians they will bring up atheist propaganda or satan haha..
The link that mykcob4 provides offers this statement :
"One other omission in Codex Sinaiticus with theological implications is the reference to Jesus’ ascension in Luke 24:51. Additionally, Mark 1:1 in the original hand omits reference to Jesus as the Son of God."
I think it is very revealing that the writer believes the oldest scriptural record of the New Testament is omitting material. That is an unwarranted assumption. It is very likely that accounts of Christ's ascension were later additions. Speaking to the choir , of course!
I was checking the timeline of the Gospel of Mark from the Codex to the apparent forgery or addition. I wonder if the addition was made in a reaction to the growing Islamic religion. Mohammed ascended to heaven, so the christians needed a deity that would also ascend to heaven dramatically.
Luke 24:50–51
The Ascension
"50 Then he led them out as far as Bethany, and lifting up his hands he blessed them. 51 While he blessed them, he parted from them and was carried up into heaven."
Definitely nothing to do with Islam since Luck has already the ascension 600 years prior Islam.
Actually it is Islam that copied Christianity and not the other way, a special excommunicated sect of Christianity.
Most likely the ones that believed Jesus did not even die.
The ascension is most likely a mirror ascension of the old testament prophet Elijah where he ascended to heaven after being a miraculous true prophet.
" taking the prophet up to heaven "by a whirlwind"" = ascension
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elijah
Basically the author is taking the life of Elijah and retelling it in the life of Jesus in the same sequence of events.
This is a genre known as typology which is not well known/used today but it was very popular in the first century Judea.
The Jews used this method to validate a "true" prophet in their literature.
Basically the life of "true" prophets will foresee the life of subsequent ones.
Thus the newly invented prophets must have the same attributes and actions of the old ones to be considered true prophets for the Jews.
(This is the way god is linked to the true prophets)
Elijah was such a prophet, and now Jesus mirrors the actions of Elijah too as he mirrors the actions of Moses, Titus and other gods/prophets.
The author of Mathew basically spills the beans:
"Matthew 16:13-15
"13 When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say the Son of Man is?”
14 They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”"
15 “But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?”"
The author is admitting to the reader that the Jesus character is similar to all of them.
A character made up from all of them.
The Romans just copy paste the idea from the Jews and went a little overboard.
This was the best and truly original roman attribute; COPY PASTE.
Actually there were many resurrection myths prior to the jesus myth.
http://fringe.davesource.com/Fringe/Religion/The-Jesus-Myth.html
I was just considering the fact that in 621 AD Muhammad ascended to heaven. That is the time of the addition to the gospel of Mark. That seems rather coincidental. Could there have been a political reason that the christian church made this addition that was based on the growth of Islam?
Of course I am speculating. It seems though, that with every event in history the bible is modified, rewritten....moving the goal post so to speak.
The christian faith is solely based on the four gospels. Modern christians ignore the old testament and focus primarily on the gospels. It doesn't matter that the gospels actually contradict each other. It doesn't matter to them that most of the gospels are proven to be stolen stories of other myths. It doesn't even matter that the gospels have been edited, reedited, added to over the years for pure political reasons.
Yep Jesus attributes is a collection of myths but he is focused mostly on prophets and the military campaign that happened in Judea around 70 AD.
"Of course I am speculating. It seems though, that with every event in history the bible is modified, rewritten....moving the goal post so to speak."
yes the church did not always have the same goal either.
Even more deeper then that, before the church was kinda formed, the gospels where spread all over the roman empire and no one bothered with consistency because the gospels were never intended to be united together.
Basically each gospel had one purpose, to convert and be liked by the people of a particular province.
So for example, if in a province you had mostly Gnostic pagans, you would send a Gnostic gospel there like the gospel of Thomas or Philip.
In Rome of course the gospel of Luke was very popular which brings a more miraculous and historical Jesus since the people in Rome loved heroic greatness. In Luke Jesus not only is a god/man but is better than most gods/men.
It was never the intention of the authors and publishers(elite Romans) to make a coherent story of Jesus because they assumed that illiterate peasants and slaves won't be travelling throughout the empire to hear the other versions and they were right.
They never imagined that the Jesus story would outlive the roman empire.
For them this was just counter propaganda against the Jewish extremist propaganda that was inciting the peasants and the slaves to revolt against Rome.(3 Roman-Jewish wars in this period).
They never imagined that it would become a religion, even worse a successful one.
They did not care what the slaves believed as long as they follow roman law.
The church in fact had a huge problem to square this circle later on in history lol.
4 of the gospels could somehow agree with each other but the other 40+ gospels had to be banned and declared heretical.
I knew a priest that had a Phd in theology. His discipline was historical literature. He professed that there were over 2,000 gospels. He explained that the church (meaning catholic, he was anglican), had lost most of the gospels, had edited out gospel that they deemed not directed by god and just struck out many to reduce the number, especially if the gospel didn't add anything to the stories told in major gospels.
Yea he was right, I don't know about the 2000 gospels though, i think that is too much, the larger number i have heard for the gospels was 116 in total and that included unfinished forgeries.
We actually have unfinished gospels that show us how they created them.
Find links to on-line resource covering some of the "extra" Gospels....
(plus some really funky other stuff...)
http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/index.html
The gospels provide a demonstration of a rule that manuscript scholars use: Later versions invariably add to or improve upon earlier versions. Mark has nothing to say about Jesus' nativity or childhood, and (other than fraudulently inserted material) there are no post-resurrection witnesses. By the time we get to Matthew and Luke (who copied wholesale from Mark) the nativity scene and post-resurrection witnesses have been added.
Without Mark to copy from--there being no nativity stuff in that gospel--Matthew and Luke are forced to search the Old Testament (i.e., the Jewish literature) to come up with their material. Apparently, they did not feel right about totally making something up out of thin air. Unfortunately, they seem to have used different passages (liberally interpreted by them) that led to totally contradictory stories of how Jesus came to be born in Bethlehem! (Jesus being born in Bethlehem was apparently a doctrinal necessity for Matthew and Luke.) Needless to say, neither Matthew nor Luke was doing eyewitness reports.
Whereas in the Gospel of Mark we have no reason to think that Jesus viewed himself as God, by the time we get to the Gospel of John (on a different plane altogether--not one of the "synoptic" gospels) Jesus takes on a cosmic presence with no beginning and no end. After the biblical gospels were written there came others, notably the Gospel of Peter which names players not previously named. The Gospel of Peter also supplies a witness to Jesus' resurrection! The lack of such a witness must have really bugged that author (or authors) and the "oversight" was fixed. Gospels of this latter time also filled in Jesus' childhood, but these stories got a little wild and never made the cut.
Another story worth following in the 4 Gospels is the account of Jesus' baptism by John the Baptist. Note how each of the authors handles it.
Can anyone here direct me to information (hopefully condensed in one place) on when and how Christianity actually began? It seems there is no evidence of the existence of Jesus of Nazareth (a place which didn't exist at the time cited), or Peter or any of the disciples. My theories were that it began with Paul's belief in some proto-Attis like cult which caught on in the first century. It was handily passed off on one of the multiple wandering teachers of the Palestine area during the first century. Apparently more than one was even named Jesus. I assumed the gospels were written later to flesh out the character of the "savior". Now I find that there is no historical evidence that Paul ever existed and that most of Paul's letters may have been creations of Marcion who produced them in the second century. However, some form of Christianity was in evidence before Marcion came on the scene. The church never seemed to get its stuff together until the 100s AD and just fabricated everything up to that point. But it would be nice to know what can actually be discovered about how this crap got started.
I don't know what you hope to accomplish by necro posting. If you want to ask these questions, create a new topic.
mykcob4,
A nice resource to have is a decent Bible commentary, one that looks reasonably thick and will be fun to read. You can learn a whole bunch of things that never get passed on to the public at large. But check the entry on "Daniel" before you buy. If it depicts Daniel as living in the time of Nebuchadnezzar instead of being a co-opted name for a writer working around 160 AD, then it's a fundie production and you will have to keep looking. Oddly enough, some good resources can be had at most Christian bookstores which serve a variety of customers. Another good resource for the ambitious debater is Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible which allows you to locate verses in the King James Bible that contain a particular world. It also allows some limited insight into the Hebrew and Greek. No doubt, concordances for a variety of translations can be accessed from the Internet. If you are lucky enough to live near a major university or major city library you can also check out the Anchor Bible (more than 70 volumes) to get the very best scholarly (but readable) interpretation and related details for every single verse in the Bible! If you have plenty of time to spare, there's no end to what you can learn from that massive resource!
While the Codex Sinaiticus offers valuable insights into the early textual history of the Bible, it is just one among many ancient manuscripts that scholars consider when studying the Bible's origins and variations. Ultimately, the interpretation and significance of biblical texts continue to be subject to theological, historical, and scholarly discussions. https://tunnel-rush.co/