(July 29, 2021 at 11:07 am)Vicki Q Wrote: OK, so there's no actual evidence that the community described in the NT believed in anything other than God is One. So we can Hitchens that suggestion.
And yet Paul himself complains about the diversity among early believers. Paul also repeatedly rails against his many rival apostles, who “preach another Jesus.” He often rages and fumes that his rivals are evil deceivers, with false Christs and false gospels so different from his own true Christ and true Gospel, that he accuses them of being agents of Satan and even lays curses and threats upon them.
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"