Reading holy books for fun

TVP45

To follow up on your point, I read through a number of translations while watching George Stephanopoulos do his spin show this a.m. I had never really seen this through your perspective before.

Essentially, the gospel of Matthew was aimed at a Jewish audience and presents the couple as married and mentions sex. The gospel of Luke was aimed at Gentiles and has the couple engaged and doesn't mention sex. Both gospels are believed by many to be derivatives of Mark's gospel, yet Mark makes no mention of this at all.

I suspect there was a lot of spin in these gospels as well??

mheslep

I'm aware that Augustine wrote actively against the Donatists and eventually asked Rome to cut off their funds. I don't know that he went further than that. Do you have a source?
Edit: I'll go further and say the attachment of Augustine to the later purges of the Catholic church is somewhat backwards. Its more credible that the lingering contributions of the Donatists were responsible for that. The Donatists had a very exclusive view of the church: only a select group should be allowed in; the church should expel those who didn't meet a standard; and only 'undefiled' clergymen could run the show (i.e. Matthew the tax collector need not apply).

CaptainQuasar

“Why, therefore, should not the Church use force in compelling her lost sons to return, if the lost sons compelled others to their destruction?”

“Is it not a part of the care of the shepherd, when any sheep have left the flock, even though not violently forced away, but led astray by tender words and coaxing blandishments, to bring them back to the fold of his master when he has found them, by the fear or even the pain of the whip, if they show symptoms of resistance;”

⁓ The Correction of the Donatists

(emphasis mine) Augustine was the Bishop of Hippo at the point when Roman Catholicism was the official state religion of the Empire, at a time when Church officials had temporal power as well as spiritual. I'll leave it up to the reader whether he would have had any part in handing out the fear and pain of the whip. And whether it was his authoring of doctrine like this that led the actions of the later Church.

mheslep, I'll further ask: are you making your judgments based upon descriptions of the Donatists written by Catholics or Donatists? I have been unaware of any writings by the other party or even a neutral party.

mheslep

Thanks, google books is a treasure.
I'm referencing Brown's 'Augustine of Hippo'.
For example: Pg 188
There's also this web note based on Brown:
CQ: I take your point regards possible bias from the large reach of the Roman backed Catholic Church.

Another eye opener that I came across in Brown's book - Mommsen's 'The Provinces of the Roman Empire' on Christianity:

CaptainQuasar

So it is, so it is indeed.

You should talk to my friend Nestorius. The Roman Church was very much into pruning the vine too, sometimes for lofty reasons, sometimes for petty reasons.

My guess is that the Donatists / non-Donatists division in North Africa was originally your usual internal political division you'd find in any group. There was probably nefariousness and capitulation to pagan Romans on both sides. The Donatist probably didn't expect to find the entire Roman Empire backing their political foes all of a sudden. Oops.

And the victors wrote the history, literally all the history, for the next thousand-plus years…

Interesting side note that I only learned recently: in Roman times the Sahara was much smaller and the North African coast was much more verdant than it is today. I always wondered how it was the breadbasket of the Roman Empire when it's all desert, especially after the Punic Wars when they salted the fields of Carthage.

mgb_phys

It's also on the coast - even with good roman roads it's easier to move cargo 1000 miles by sea than 50 miles by road.

mheslep

Yes that explains a lot. Ive always wondered, after glancing at the modern map, how Carthage managed to rise as a world power out of that little bit of green. BTW, sure would be nice if google maps had an ancient worlds version. Hippo was supposedly located in modern day Algeria; its an irritation to try an mentally transpose some old ancient map onto google satellite views.

CaptainQuasar

Well, yeah, but if all of that had been desert back then it would have been the coasts of Gaul, Iberia, and the Euxine Sea that were the breadbaskets of the Empire.

mheslep

My favorite history on the shenanigans of the medieval Catholic church is W. Manchester's 'A World Lit only by Fire'
, perhaps you've read it. Nothing quite like it for bringing the period to life by interesting detail:

CaptainQuasar

I haven't read it, it looks interesting. Have you ever read the medieval morality play Everyman? It's actually well written, albeit with cartoonish symbolism and church-mandated themes, but it's very humanizing in that it portrays to you from one angle how medieval peasants must have lived and thought.

mheslep

Thanks. I started skimming into Everyman. I bit thick w/ all of the medieval english, 'thus endeth' an so on.

CaptainQuasar

Oops. Yes, it is. Sorry, I forgot about that.

Greg Bernhardt

Well honestly I need to take a major break. I've read about 100 pages of the Koran and my mind needs a rest. I picked up a nice fiction book for the meantime lol

Moridin

Might I suggest reading the Klingon version of Tao Te Ching? Or perhaps Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health by L. Ron Hubbard?

Is it just me, or do many religious texts seem like the result of someone who just got stoned and started writing gibberish?

---
The End of Biblical Studies by Hector Avalos

_Mayday_

If you are also reading the Torah you can start writing your own scroll. I have always wondered how many people have mispelled something on the last word, as it is very important that you write it perfectly.

CaptainQuasar

I'm an atheist but I really do not think they're anything like that. You have to take on the perspective that for a devout person of that particular religion who grew up with it, the premises and mindset and cosmological viewpoint / mythology of the religion permeate their mindset and their every thought. You can't attempt to see the writing from your own viewpoint and cosmological beliefs (not if you're really trying to understand what it's saying, at least.) I think studying a religious text in isolation from the religion itself is going to make it seem especially wacky and far-fetched.

In particular, even besides the lack of context to the pious reader's mindset, many of these texts are written in utterly ancient languages. The Tao Te Ching is almost unintelligible to a modern Chinese reader, much less if you try to read it in Klingon. For another example, the portions of the Zend Avesta we have are only very distantly related to modern Farsi. Or Ancient Hebrew in the Old Testament / Talmud, which lacks vowels¹ and particles and things; even modern-Hebrew-speaking scholars fiercely debate exactly what a particular word or phrase or sentence means and applying these different meanings can lead to a radically different meaning for a passage - particularly interesting when that passage is cited as the foundation for some extra-scriptural doctrine.

To give a specific example - in the Christian New Testament there are four different words that are commonly translated as “Hell”: the Hebrew Sheol and Gehenna and the Hellenic Greek (or Middle Greek, or whatever it's called that was the Roman-era version of Greek) Tarterus and Hades. Now if you know what “Hades” was in Greek mythology (the New Testament appears to have originally been written in Greek) - not a place where bad people go, but where everyone may end up, including heroes like Achilles or Herakles/Hercules - that kind of puts an interesting twist on Biblical passages that have the word “Hell” in them and extra-scriptural doctrines that incorporate Hell. But many translations do not give the slightest hint of what word they're translating as “Hell”. I'm always greatly amused by Evangelical Christians who say something about Hell that's obviously a completely interpreted doctrine and then insist that their sect or they personally read the Bible strictly literally.

An interesting side note to the above is that the word “Hell” actually appears to come from Norse Mythology - “Hel” or “Hela”, Loki's daughter and Queen of Helheim, one of several Hades-like underworlds in Norse Mythology (although I think in this case usually only people who did not die in battle would end up in Helheim.)

(I've tossed out lots of facts above but I believe they're all conventional scholarship and can be easily Googled if sources are desired. In particular, the presence of Hercules in Hades is straight out of The Odyssey.)

¹It's not that there weren't any vowels in spoken Ancient Hebrew, it's that they were not present in the written form of it which sometimes adds some ambiguity to figuring out which modern word, or which syntactic form of one, a written word is equivalent to.

CaptainQuasar

One other thing about reading the Tao Te Ching. Even modern written Chinese can be difficult to interpret because it's made of pictographs - one symbol means an entire word rather than a single sound like in English or a single syllable like in Sumerian. I only read and speak a little Mandarin, but if you show a sentence to someone who's fluent they'll often say something like, “Well depending on the context that combination of characters could mean this or it could mean this or it could mean this.”

It's possible for a Chinese comedian or humorist to tell a literate audience a joke that is a double entendre - says one thing literally but has a 2^nd meaning because of a pun or a verbal homonym - that actually contains a 3^rd joke based on the multiple meanings of the written characters for the sentence. I personally cannot imagine being able to think quickly or abstractly enough to even understand a joke like that, imagine what it must be like to actually successfully deliver one. Imagine saying something like that and conveying sarcasm at the same time, my head would explode.