(July 27, 2021 at 12:56 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote:(July 27, 2021 at 9:15 am)Vicki Q Wrote: What evidence is there that the NT community disagreed on the oneness of God?
We know they disagreed viscerally about the ongoing application of Torah, but I'm not aware of any evidence which challenges the oneness of God- in fact the absence of evidence is highly significant. As is the lack of challenge to the divine nature of Jesus.
Communities, plural, there was no single community of nt authorship. It seems to me that the murder of heretics and the destruction of their work qualifies. Are these things simply absent in whatever history of the Christian movement you draw from?
Challenges to the alleged god mans divinity were dealt with similarly.
Indeed. For instance, Bart Ehrman notes in his book "Lost Christianities" how early Christians disagreed how many gods are there, like:
Quote:The wide diversity of early Christianity may be seen above all in the theological beliefs embraced by people who understood themselves to be followers of Jesus. In the second and third centuries there were, of course, Christians who believed in one God. But there were others who insisted that there were two. Some said there were thirty. Others claimed there were 365.
https://books.google.com/books?id=URdACx...&q&f=false
Or on theology of Marcion who GN mentioned earlier:
Quote:How could the same God be responsible for both? Or put in other terms: How could the wrathful, vengeful God of the Jews be the loving, merciful God of Jesus? Marcion maintained that these attributes could not belong to one God, as they stand at odds with one another: hatred and love, vengeance and mercy, judgment and grace. He concluded that there must in fact be two Gods: the God of the Jews, as found in the Old Testament, and the God of Jesus, as found in the writings of Paul.
Once Marcion arrived at this understanding, everything else naturally fell into place. The God of the Old Testament was the God who created this world and everything in it, as described in Genesis. The God of Jesus, therefore, had never been involved with this world but came into it only when Jesus himself appeared from heaven. The God of the Old Testament was the God who called the Jews to be his people and gave them his Law. The God of Jesus did not consider the Jews to be his people (for him; they were the chosen of the other God), and he was not a God who gave laws.
And so on and on and on and on.
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"
