Christian Nation

[Angrboda]

This should come as no surprise, really. As it turns out, there is New Testament evidence about Peter’s education level. According to Acts 4:13, both Peter and his companion John, also a fisherman, were agrammatoi, a Greek word that literally means “unlettered,” that is, “illiterate.”

And so, is it possible that Peter wrote 1 and 2 Peter? We have seen good reasons for believing he did not write 2 Peter, and some reason for thinking he didn’t write 1 Peter. But it is highly probable that in fact he could not write at all. I should point out that the book of 1 Peter is written by a highly literate, highly educated, Greek-speaking Christian who is intimately familiar with the Jewish Scriptures in their Greek translation, the Septuagint. This is not Peter.

It is theoretically possible, of course, that Peter decided to go to school after Jesus’s resurrection. In this imaginative (not to say imaginary) scenario, he learned his alphabet, learned how to sound out syllables and then words, learned to read, and learned to write. Then he took Greek classes, mastered Greek as a foreign language, and started memorizing large chunks of the Septuagint, after which he took Greek composition classes and learned how to compose complicated and rhetorically effective sentences; then, toward the end of his life, he wrote 1 Peter.

— Forged: Writing In The Name Of God, Bart Ehrman


Question: Why does it matter whether we were or are a Cristian nation when Christianity herself is an obvious bunch of lies, idiocy and absurdity? I'm reminded of the scene in Monty Python's Holy Grail in which the father built his castle in a swamp (several times), remarking at one point that it, "burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp." This is not prime ground for building. If this was once a Christian nation, and is no longer, apparently being Christian didn't serve sufficiently well to prevent her from becoming an Un-Christian nation. Sisyphus would be proud. The very history of Christianity shows that this is not a suitable foundation upon which to build a nation. So even if there were support for the notion that this nation was at one time "a Christian nation," I would fight to the death any attempt to return her to those roots.

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Regarding the fire in Rome in 64 AD, Seneca states that the fire burned for six days, destroying 132 palaces and 4,000 apartment buildings.

In the riots following the acquittal of the police officers in the beating of Rodney King, over 6,000 buildings were destroyed.

Worth considering.