I read the Bible last year and tried to imagine how it would be perceived if it were any work of fiction. Looking at it just as a fictional book, it’s very poorly written. For one thing, explanations of Jesus sacrifice only come after the fact. A good book would have set it up and explained the necessity of the sacrifice beforehand. Another problem is parts of it are very boring, like the parts that describe the temple in detail. However, I recommend Genesis and Samuel because they are very eventful, a lot happens in them
I was kind of musing in a corner of my mind that Jesus acting as a sacrifice to god…really only makes sense in a cultural context where basically everyone around you is already sacrificing goats and chickens and bulls and whatever to their gods.
When that cultural context is removed (as in our culture where generally nobody slaughters animals as a sacrifice to any god) the whole crucifixion thing comes off as…weirdly pagan.
Like, HAVING to have a human/god sacrificed to god to…remove sin I guess…it only really makes sense if you have the cultural expectation that sacrificing things to some god is…just what you DO to get rid of sin or stuff that’s harmful like curses or whatever?
I’m not a bible scholar, and I know there’s tons of theology that’s already argued about Jesus “dying for our sins” into infinity.
I’m more vaguely looking at this from a layperson secular standpoint, where I’m thinking about the cultural context of “sacrifice” as it pertains to 2000 years ago, and how it pertains to now in our current culture. Like…wow, the culture and how we see things has totally shifted and the Jesus died thing is a really weird boondogle/relic of those ancient mindsets, isn’t it?
Yeah, a lot of things in the Bible probably made more sense for the culture it was written for. Of course the books of the Bible were written over hundreds of years and so culture shifted in that time, explaining some of the contradictions. The reason it doesn’t work very well as a book is there is a lot of background information the writers expected the readers to know that now most people don’t
I read the Bible last year and tried to imagine how it would be perceived if it were any work of fiction. Looking at it just as a fictional book, it’s very poorly written. For one thing, explanations of Jesus sacrifice only come after the fact. A good book would have set it up and explained the necessity of the sacrifice beforehand. Another problem is parts of it are very boring, like the parts that describe the temple in detail. However, I recommend Genesis and Samuel because they are very eventful, a lot happens in them
I was kind of musing in a corner of my mind that Jesus acting as a sacrifice to god…really only makes sense in a cultural context where basically everyone around you is already sacrificing goats and chickens and bulls and whatever to their gods.
When that cultural context is removed (as in our culture where generally nobody slaughters animals as a sacrifice to any god) the whole crucifixion thing comes off as…weirdly pagan.
Like, HAVING to have a human/god sacrificed to god to…remove sin I guess…it only really makes sense if you have the cultural expectation that sacrificing things to some god is…just what you DO to get rid of sin or stuff that’s harmful like curses or whatever?
I’m not a bible scholar, and I know there’s tons of theology that’s already argued about Jesus “dying for our sins” into infinity.
I’m more vaguely looking at this from a layperson secular standpoint, where I’m thinking about the cultural context of “sacrifice” as it pertains to 2000 years ago, and how it pertains to now in our current culture. Like…wow, the culture and how we see things has totally shifted and the Jesus died thing is a really weird boondogle/relic of those ancient mindsets, isn’t it?
Yeah, a lot of things in the Bible probably made more sense for the culture it was written for. Of course the books of the Bible were written over hundreds of years and so culture shifted in that time, explaining some of the contradictions. The reason it doesn’t work very well as a book is there is a lot of background information the writers expected the readers to know that now most people don’t