(July 29, 2018 at 5:02 pm)emjay Wrote:(July 29, 2018 at 4:49 pm)Fake Messiah Wrote: Yeah there are actually a lot of legends and some of them are in the books that didn't make it into the Bible, like the life of Mary. She was born of a virgin and lived in a church/ synagogue and prayed her whole life until her dad found her a suitor - Joseph.
There is also a story about Jesus's cross that it was made of wood that was from the Tree of Knowledge whose branch Adam took with him when he left the Garden. Then the wood was used by Moses to put a brass snake on it. Then wood was used in Jerusalem where it was a bridge over the stream and Queen of Sheba knelt over it because she had a vision what it will be used for. etc.
Also there are stories about Jesus' childhood. Like that he played with Judas and they were making birds out of clay which Judas started squashing so Jesus made them alive so they could run away. And this is something I don't get because later on Selma Lagerlof wrote the same story and won a Nobel for it.
Right, well I never knew any of that, but to be fair I haven't read the whole Bible, so it might not necessarily be because it's in one of these extraneous sources.
Well it's not all about the reading. Like the story of the cross is part of one of the most famous paintings in the Renaissance by Piero della Francesca.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
