(November 25, 2021 at 10:53 pm)Ferrocyanide Wrote: This means that Jesus is a jew, his parents are jews, his grandparents, sisters, brothers, cousins, uncles, aunts and plenty more are most likely jews.
He grew up in a jewish culture, which automatically means that he is going to know the version of hebrew of the time and he is going to get a religious education at some point.
Therefore, it is no surprise that he is going to build on that foundation as he starts up his own religion.
It's more important that Paul was a Jew who was not taking part in a traditional Jewish religion, but he was a Hellenistic Jew who participated in both Jewish and non-Jewish culture, practices, and ideas. And by the 1st century there were an abundance of religions in the Greco-Roman world known as "mystery religions". In these different mystery religions, which were like cults, people worshiped specific heroes or gods, such as Adonis, Dionysus, Mithras, and Osiris. Many of these gods were savior type gods, who were said to take on various problems of individuals or the world, and people were initiated into these religions often through secret ceremonies that included various rituals, such as sacrifices, special meals, anointing, washings, etc.
So Paul's preaching and ideas reflect a merger of the Jewish apocalyptic and messianic traditions with the Greek mystery religions.
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"
