I used to prefer books, too. Until my eyes started getting cranky. Now I find that the lighting on my tablet is much superior to lighting from lamps and the ability to adjust the font size is a major upgrade.
Just one more observation on the point I think you were making.
The story - and I mean "story" - that the church tells would have us believe that ole jesus gets whacked somewhere between 29-36 and then 'paul' comes along at some time thereafter - a really shaky story and anything based on Acts of the Apostles is almost certainly total horseshit.
He runs around starting churches in the 50's AD and within a hundred years there are all these 'heresies' breaking out which later proto-orthodox writers have to denounce. With me so far?
Carrier's point is that the earliest xtian sects were mystery cults. They had no written canon until Marcion came along and again, Marcion was 'paul's' champion and there would not have been anything in there that Marcion did not want there. Did Marcion write 'paul?' We'll never know.
But the other xtian sects were indistinguishable from the other mystery cults which were rampant at the time: Mithraism, Isis, Cybele, Dionysius, Eleusinian, etc. Knowledge was communicated orally, from
Master to initiate. As the initiates learned they moved up the scale.
Now, what is more likely: That there was some monolithic church which fragmented within a century into all of these differing..and generally regional...heresies? Or, that there was a widespread Hellenistic cult - perhaps centered in the lower classes - devoted to someone who bore the title of Christos...or Chrestus. Later, one of these groups attained a measure of political power and moved to suppress all the others in the interests of goose-stepping to a common goal?
Just one more observation on the point I think you were making.
The story - and I mean "story" - that the church tells would have us believe that ole jesus gets whacked somewhere between 29-36 and then 'paul' comes along at some time thereafter - a really shaky story and anything based on Acts of the Apostles is almost certainly total horseshit.
He runs around starting churches in the 50's AD and within a hundred years there are all these 'heresies' breaking out which later proto-orthodox writers have to denounce. With me so far?
Carrier's point is that the earliest xtian sects were mystery cults. They had no written canon until Marcion came along and again, Marcion was 'paul's' champion and there would not have been anything in there that Marcion did not want there. Did Marcion write 'paul?' We'll never know.
But the other xtian sects were indistinguishable from the other mystery cults which were rampant at the time: Mithraism, Isis, Cybele, Dionysius, Eleusinian, etc. Knowledge was communicated orally, from
Master to initiate. As the initiates learned they moved up the scale.
Now, what is more likely: That there was some monolithic church which fragmented within a century into all of these differing..and generally regional...heresies? Or, that there was a widespread Hellenistic cult - perhaps centered in the lower classes - devoted to someone who bore the title of Christos...or Chrestus. Later, one of these groups attained a measure of political power and moved to suppress all the others in the interests of goose-stepping to a common goal?
