Look, I was right, now you're just getting dogmatic and sectarian. You decided to tell everyone a "narrative" without any backing about Jesus and his disciples
No, I was right. You are a person with an agenda and proved it with this message. If you were only looking for truth you would not use harsh language like "you decided to tell...". I haven't "decided" anything, I don't have an agenda. I believe you do and to you if it's not in the canonical gospels is not proof. Well, you're not going to find the secret teachings of Jesus in the canonical gospels. For that you will have to read the manuscripts found at Nag Hammadi, 52 of them. You mentioned to me you will brush up on that. Any progress? There, in 1945 they discovered more than a dozen other gospels which were never included in the Bible. That is where you will find backing for my story. You will also find my story mentioned by early Christian theologians and evangelists like Marcion of Sinope.
Frakes hosted a show
I'm not interested in what Jonathan Frakes has to say, unless you can prove to me he's not connected with Jeffrey Epstein. Many in Hollywood are.
you don't get to write a new past about Jesus rejecting Scripture
Jesus's mission was not to confirm the scriptures. For 2,000 years, we have been told that God is love, that he is the father of light. Yet, open the Old Testament, and you meet a different entity entirely. A being who demands the blood of infants. A being who drowns the world in a fit of rage and requires the smell of burning flesh to be appeased. Why would you think Jesus came to earth to tell us about Yahweh? we already knew, by reading the Old Testament. Was Marcion right? Marcion preached that the benevolent God of the Gospel who sent Jesus into the world, as the saviour, was the true Supreme Being, different and opposed to the malevolent deity, the Demiurge or creator deity, identified with Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible. Could it be that our so-called official New Testament might have actually been deliberately reassembled later to counteract Marcion's version? IMO, that's exactly what happened. The early church leaders were reacting to his influence. They took his challenge so seriously that they constructed a new cannon, four gospels, Acts, and everything else in such a way to police his ideas.
To me sounds like they were building an entirely new narrative just to shut him up. Like I said many times before, use critical thinking, imagine you have a groundbreaking blueprint and then someone comes along and says, "Nope, we need the standard model.". And you re-engineer the whole building. It's counter-programming at its best. And then there's Marcion's theology itself. He claimed the god of the Hebrew scriptures, the Demiurge as he called it, was a legalistic, violent figure, totally separate from the merciful God revealed by Jesus. That's also what my story tells. Scholars like Adolf von Harnack even went on record calling Marcion the first Christian theologian, kind of the original canon creator. It's like he was the architect behind what we might have otherwise considered early Christian theology. Then the Church started attacking him, why? because Marcion was very popular. They literally wrote about how Marcion's followers were everywhere, even in every nation. As Justin Martyr and Tertullian noted, Marcion's church stretched from Italy across Syria, Asia Minor, Egypt, North Africa, and even into Arabia, and Cyprus. It was a phenomenon. Marcionite communities were notably well organized, arguably more so than the proto-orthodox churches, which were somewhat fragmented at the time. So, for at least a 70 years period, his version might have been the most coherent form of Christianity around. That's pretty incredible, but not widely understood.
To me the New Testament canon seems in many ways like a reaction against Marcion's version. For example, Irenaeus writing around 180 AD insisted there must be exactly four gospels. No more, no less. Interesting, because Marcion's had only one gospel. So the inclusion of say Acts and the Old Testament cannon came in as a sort of counterpoint. These became deliberately essential to the new narrative that emerged to contrast with his selective cannon. It's like a built-in rebuttal. But isn't it a little bit of a stretch to say that the entire NT was constructed solely as a response to Marcion? not in my opinion. Furthermore, many modern scholars argue that the NT was published as a collection specifically constructed against Marion's challenge, not just organically inherited. This challenges the comforting narrative that the canonical Bible just dropped fully formed from the heavens. It suggests instead that what we received was a hard-fought outcome of doctrinal battles. So, if Marcion's version was so dominant and coherent, why did it eventually get erased? and his church thrived for over 70 years and persisted in some regions into the fourth and even fifth centuries, why its sudden disappearance? as I said before to you, the history as we know it was written by the eventual winners. It's like the voices of the vanquished were deliberately silenced. So, if history is written by the winners, then perhaps our understanding of early Christianity is missing, has deliberately omitted a whole perspective. I don't believe you are a person who thinks the Bible just fell from the sky fully formed. So, think about what I'm saying, the story of religion isn't a straightforward path but a battleground of ideas, sometimes even forbidden ones.
"you decided to tell...". I haven't "decided" anything
Yeah, people who tell have decided to tell, that's just logic.
I don't have an agenda. I believe you do and to you if it's not in the canonical gospels is not proof.
I have one agenda, namely Jesus. Something not in the gospels might well be proof. But if you contradict every fact of history on a subject, in or out of the gospels, that requires extraordinary evidence. Jesus 100% upheld Hebrew Scripture, no historical evidence teaches that he told his disciples secretly that Scripture was wrong, there would be no movement without dedication to Scripture. That's why your narrative on that point is just a narrative. Nothing in Nag Hammadi has your narrative.
my story mentioned by early Christian theologians and evangelists like Marcion of Sinope
Nope. No text mentions such an imaginative retcon as you propose. If you had said you're just Marcionite, it would've made more sense, because he did teach that, but he didn't say that Jesus and the Apostles taught it (as you did): he implied that the Apostles worked for the Demiurge (WP); his Scriptural canon still included details contrary to the Demiurge theory, against his edit attempts otherwise; and his work on antitheses is now lost, and does not even appear in the newly uncovered documents. So what you're doing is imagining something that could've happened if only Marcion was totally right in his view and had a perfect tradition from Jesus's time and every other indication of history is wrong. No historian would view this as a workable theory of what actually happened.
So yeah, when you double down on apparently rejecting facts of history instead of interacting with them, my tone does tend to change.
For 2,000 years, we have been told that God is love, that he is the father of light. Yet, open the Old Testament, and you meet a different entity entirely.
The evidence is that Jesus's teachings made headway among the Jews because they agreed with the God depicted in Hebrew Scripture. All the apostles and evangelists emphatically used Scripture as a final authority, and several times they recognized that each others' works were Scripture too. The fact that Marcion invented a duality narrative, or based it on other gnostics, doesn't mean that narrative existed in primitive Christianity.
Could it be that our so-called official New Testament might have actually been deliberately reassembled later to counteract Marcion's version? IMO, that's exactly what happened.
Marcion admitted that confirmed evangel and confirmed apostolic writings were Scripture. The difference between the NT and Marcion's canon is entirely one of degree. Because Scripture is holistic, you can prove any core tenet of traditional Christianity with reference to Marcionite Scripture alone. If you admit the Marcionite canon, you would have no reason to reject other gospels or epistles that say the same thing (just as I do not reject all the apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, but only hold them to a lower standard of authority).
They took his challenge so seriously that they constructed a new cannon, four gospels, Acts, and everything else in such a way to police his ideas.
The books of the canon were already circulating, nothing was constructed anew, even as your own (liberal) dating would prove. His ideas may have been "policed" (though there was no political power to force anything for another 200 years) but only because all other churches but the Marcionite "church" recognized the internal contradictions of the system early. You say the Marcionite church was regarded as very widespread, so without arguing that either way I'll note it, but if it were "coherent" Christianity it would have survived instead of essentially disappearing in the 3rd century. The orthodox arguments and texts stand, and Marcion's works didn't survive, which is not an indication that Marcion was so much better but an indication that he had nothing to say that wasn't expressed by his canon and the quotations of him that survived. Althist is fun, but must be admitted as such.
Scholars like Adolf von Harnack
Didn't I say 19th-century German unbelievers? Harnack was counted as a Christian but he rejected the Apostles' Creed on Jesus and rejected the Bible.
So the inclusion of say Acts and the Old Testament cannon came in as a sort of counterpoint.
No, the Hebrew canon had been getting closed in the 1st century BC and 1st century AD. All the Hebrew books were recognized as Scripture, and taught to be so by Jesus and the Apostles, with the exception of a couple late disputes persisting for a time over books like Esther. The only reason Marcion could reject the OT utterly was that he was in a Greek milieu where reliance on the Hebrew had begun to wane (but was still extant throughout 2nd century patristics). It wasn't about the OT "coming in", instead the NT shows that it was the NT books that were slowly coming in to join the OT.
These became deliberately essential to the new narrative
No, they were not regarded as essential until late 4th century. They were regarded as inspired, useful, beneficial, and sufficient, but there was no argument of essentiality. Look, if the church has Luke-Acts for 100 years, and then suddenly Marcion says only most of Luke is good and none of Acts, it's clear to everyone that he is innovating on received tradition, and it's clear from history that they continued to preserve the whole Luke-Acts because Marcion's version didn't have a slate of dedicated copyists throughout the known world like the established tradition did. There is no althist available where Marcion's Luke existed as Scripture, and Acts, which was written by the same man around the same time to the same audience, was accorded universally as useless until somebody got it to be thought of as inspired as if it counteracted Marcion. It's Luke, it's the same author! Did you know that Papias, quoted by Eusebius, mentioned and named the four gospels around the 120s, long before Marcion or Irenaeus step up?
many modern scholars argue that the NT was published as a collection specifically constructed against Marion's challenge
Nope, nobody published the "NT" until Constantine, much later. Nor was his canon "constructed" but it consisted of all Greek Scriptures that rose to the level of inspiration and acceptance that other works (including some verses added by Marcion) didn't.
the comforting narrative that the canonical Bible just dropped fully formed from the heavens
I agree with you in rejecting that narrative. All mature Biblical Christians recognize and admit the same.
So, if history is written by the winners, then perhaps our understanding of early Christianity is missing, has deliberately omitted a whole perspective.
I'm very empathetic to Romanism omitting perspectives and have consistently appealed here for primitive Christianity. Gnosticism isn't primitive Christianity and never had approval from Jesus's apostles or their appointed successors at large. When gnosticism is tested as a theological system (as it was), it fails logic, history, and inspiration.
Now, in all our conversations I've been attempting to find out how you know what is true. I don't see that answer. I see you sticking to a storyline, even imagining what Jesus might have said that totally contradicts what history shows he did say. If you had quoted Gospel of Thomas, I wouldn't object because Jesus may have said everything in there in context, and there may be an echo of apostolic tradition in it. But you're coming in with Marcion whose only tradition, if any, comes from either part of the holistic Bible (which was accepted along with the rest), or Valentinus or Simon or Menander before him, who were never accepted. It was apostate (standing aside from Christianity), never something that acted as if part of the same Christianity as everyone else kept. So you don't seem to be committed to seek the truth wherever it leads and to accept the facts of history. You're free to show me otherwise.
You said this before. What exactly is your Jesus agenda? The Church’s goal is to convert people to Jesus, is this what you mean? is this your agenda?
Christianity it would have survived instead of essentially disappearing in the 3rd century. The orthodox arguments and texts stand, and Marcion's works didn't survive, which is not an indication that Marcion was so much better but an indication that he had nothing to say
My guess is you have no idea how power works. Don't take this the wrong way, most people have no idea how power works. So, let me summarize the concept of power. So, you've been brainwashed into thinking certain ideas about who we are. They're not true. The first myth is we humans are driven by material desires. So, why do we want what we want? We want to pass on our genes. We want to marry a lot of beautiful women who are young and so they can give us a lot of babies because we want to pass on our genes. And we want to maintain our status. All we care about is power. Fundamentally we humans are nothing but imagination. And we care about three things. The first is we want to express our religion through art, music and rituals. We want to know where we came from, why we're here, where we're going. That's who we really are. That's the first thing. Second thing is we are diverse and want to differentiate ourselves. We want to stand out. We want to be different. We want to be creative. The third thing is we are curious and want to explore. And that's what explains why we go everywhere. This has been true throughout human history.
Let me give you a concrete example, Islam. So, what is the power of Islam? And I want you to remember this. Islam's power comes from how Islam is able to unite two major intellectual traditions in the world. The first is paganism. Remember the Vikings? The Vikings told stories. They acted out rituals. And therefore, there was an intimacy, concreteness, an interconnectedness to paganism that made us feel happy and good. It made us understand the world. It made us feel as though we could influence the world. That's the power of paganism.
But Islam is doing the same thing by making God concrete. You can feel God. God is everywhere. He knows everything. But what Islam is also doing is it's seeing the simplicity, clarity, and absoluteness of monotheism. Monotheism is nice because with monotheism, everything becomes clear to you. There's one God. Therefore, I just have to follow him. I just have to believe in him. There's like a million gods in paganism. So, it's unclear what you should do or how you should relate to these million gods. But here in monotheism, the relationship between God and you, it's very clear. So, in other words, Islam is a major intellectual revolution in human history. And we have forgotten this because Islam the idea has embedded itself into modernity itself. We forget that Islam really built the basis for modernity. Fulfillment of the law and the prophets is completing the story in the Bible. It's bringing God to the people. You can now touch God. You can now know God. That's the beginning of the idea of Protestantism and create heaven on earth.
So you don't seem to be committed to seek the truth wherever it leads and to accept the facts of history.
On the contrary I would say I'm committed to seek the truth wherever it may lead. That's why I'm studying Kabbalah and Islam, both at the same time. Why? because God wants us to make the world better. Let me ask you three questions. First question is why did Islam enter its golden age and Christian Europe enter its dark ages? Second question is why did the Islamic golden age end? And third question is how did Christian Europe overtake the Muslim world? IMO, to answer these three questions, all we have to do is compare and contrast these three major religions together. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. There are both strength and weaknesses to all religions.
For instance Judaism, you could say it's very hard to pick out a definite message from the Bible. And that's why the oral tradition is actually much more important. And so Jews have to go to the synagogue all the time where the rabbi will explain to them the meaning of the Bible because if you read it by yourself, it's almost impossible to understand. Second problem is their God Yahweh is very problematic. He doesn't seem to know what he's doing and he's very, violent. He often commands the Israelites to go kill all their enemies. The third major problem in the tradition is faith versus history. If you believe that you are the chosen people, if you believe that Yahweh is the only true God, then why are you being persecuted all the time? Why were the Romans able to kick you out of Jerusalem and burn down your temple, which is the house of God? Why do you lack a homeland? And this has been going on for thousands of years.
So the Christian faith was created in many ways to try to resolve a lot of the issues within the Jewish tradition. The first major advantage of the Christian faith is it's the purification and perfection of divinity. Remember how we said that Yahweh is problematic? Well, now we have Jesus who we can understand and Jesus made the ultimate sacrifice. Therefore, we know him to be the ultimate good. Second advantage is now that there's a person, we can have him deliver a consistent message of being kind, being merciful, being loving. The third advantage is the idea of progress, of history ending. History is leading to the return of Jesus the second coming. So you may suffer now but don't worry because Jesus is returning and that will end history for us. So these are the advantages of Christianity. But when you do that when you have Jesus personify God you create a lot of issues. The first issue is it's a really confusing story. Why would God come down to earth, manifest himself as a human, and then sacrifice himself? That's really, really confusing. Like, I know there's a lot of really good explanations as to why this is the case. Still, if you're just a normal person, you can't understand the story. It makes no sense to you. Second a lot of the ideas in Christianity, it's just counterintuitive. The Holy Trinity must be the strangest idea in religion where God, the Holy Spirit, and Jesus are separate but equal. It makes no intuitive sense to anyone. The third is distant divinity. God is out there somewhere. You don't know where. You can't talk to him. You can't see him. You have absolutely no idea where he is. It's a very distant divinity. And so these are the disadvantages of Christianity.
And so Islam now makes sense because it's trying to remedy and rectify these failings of Christianity. The first is that it takes the Jewish tradition and the Christian tradition and makes it part of itself. So it is really the continuation and the perfection of the Jewish Christian tradition. Second is the absoluteness of God. This is now true monotheism where God is everywhere and you can see him. But if God is everywhere then what's amazing is that you can now that God can come inside you through your faith, through your devotion and through your practice. And so what this means is you now know how to behave in the world. There's a clarity of purpose and action. You know that as long as you do those five things, those five pillars of Islam, your life will be good. God is in you and that gives you strength and purpose and power.
What exactly is your Jesus agenda? The Church’s goal is to convert people to Jesus, is this what you mean? is this your agenda?
If there's an agenda, Jesus the person is it. When I interact with people, I have one goal, Jesus's goal. The word "convert" should simply mean "turn", and people being turned to God the Father is a good thing, although if you think it means turning to something else it would be a bad thing. When you say "On the contrary I would say I'm committed to seek the truth wherever it may lead", you're turned to God the Father.
If your pursuit of truth leads you to Islam, your keen grasp of issues will reveal to you the issues with Islam too, just as their are issues in the practice of (rabbinical) Judaism and Christianity. However, the original covenant, which came to be called both (messianic) Judaism and Christianity, is one, and the people are one, and this includes people outside the known covenant if they still accept its terms in their own culture (e.g. Muslims having visions of Jesus). So, just for accuracy, I'll briefly note there are answers to the issues you see in the covenant.
"Hard to pick out a definite message from the Bible": Not the experience of people who read it in pursuit of truth. The message of the Hebrew Bible is the identity of God, whose name is Lovingkindness. "Yahweh is very problematic": This objection never arose from within the covenant but only in 19th-century Germany; the text explains the core but leaves a few details to be discerned by seekers. "Why are you being persecuted all the time": This is well explained in the later Hebrew Scriptures about the first diaspora and there is no confusion about it in Judaism.
"Why would God come down to earth, manifest himself as a human, and then sacrifice himself?" You allude to the "normal person" but you mean the normal American who is thoroughly separated from the culture in which these things were understood. Close reading of the Torah reveals the culture sufficiently to answer. "God, the Holy Spirit, and Jesus are separate but equal": I understand your confusion seeing as the church doctrine is that they are not separate. Again, recognizing the original culture, all kinds of things are known to be diverse unities, to be one and to be diverse at the same time and in different senses. If we are too Greek in our logic, we make assumptions from propositions without synthesizing our views with other propositions of equal value. "God is out there somewhere": You know this is not the teaching of Christianity (though it comes closer to Islam). Jesus taught the kingdom of God is within us, and the immanence of God was well-known.
If you want to pursue the works of the five pillars of Islam, you will find that as soon as you fail you are left without access to the God who comes inside "through your practice". The covenant teaches a God who provides access, by love and mercy, to those who have failed in their practice.
No, I was right. You are a person with an agenda and proved it with this message. If you were only looking for truth you would not use harsh language like "you decided to tell...". I haven't "decided" anything, I don't have an agenda. I believe you do and to you if it's not in the canonical gospels is not proof. Well, you're not going to find the secret teachings of Jesus in the canonical gospels. For that you will have to read the manuscripts found at Nag Hammadi, 52 of them. You mentioned to me you will brush up on that. Any progress? There, in 1945 they discovered more than a dozen other gospels which were never included in the Bible. That is where you will find backing for my story. You will also find my story mentioned by early Christian theologians and evangelists like Marcion of Sinope.
I'm not interested in what Jonathan Frakes has to say, unless you can prove to me he's not connected with Jeffrey Epstein. Many in Hollywood are.
Jesus's mission was not to confirm the scriptures. For 2,000 years, we have been told that God is love, that he is the father of light. Yet, open the Old Testament, and you meet a different entity entirely. A being who demands the blood of infants. A being who drowns the world in a fit of rage and requires the smell of burning flesh to be appeased. Why would you think Jesus came to earth to tell us about Yahweh? we already knew, by reading the Old Testament. Was Marcion right? Marcion preached that the benevolent God of the Gospel who sent Jesus into the world, as the saviour, was the true Supreme Being, different and opposed to the malevolent deity, the Demiurge or creator deity, identified with Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible. Could it be that our so-called official New Testament might have actually been deliberately reassembled later to counteract Marcion's version? IMO, that's exactly what happened. The early church leaders were reacting to his influence. They took his challenge so seriously that they constructed a new cannon, four gospels, Acts, and everything else in such a way to police his ideas.
To me sounds like they were building an entirely new narrative just to shut him up. Like I said many times before, use critical thinking, imagine you have a groundbreaking blueprint and then someone comes along and says, "Nope, we need the standard model.". And you re-engineer the whole building. It's counter-programming at its best. And then there's Marcion's theology itself. He claimed the god of the Hebrew scriptures, the Demiurge as he called it, was a legalistic, violent figure, totally separate from the merciful God revealed by Jesus. That's also what my story tells. Scholars like Adolf von Harnack even went on record calling Marcion the first Christian theologian, kind of the original canon creator. It's like he was the architect behind what we might have otherwise considered early Christian theology. Then the Church started attacking him, why? because Marcion was very popular. They literally wrote about how Marcion's followers were everywhere, even in every nation. As Justin Martyr and Tertullian noted, Marcion's church stretched from Italy across Syria, Asia Minor, Egypt, North Africa, and even into Arabia, and Cyprus. It was a phenomenon. Marcionite communities were notably well organized, arguably more so than the proto-orthodox churches, which were somewhat fragmented at the time. So, for at least a 70 years period, his version might have been the most coherent form of Christianity around. That's pretty incredible, but not widely understood.
To me the New Testament canon seems in many ways like a reaction against Marcion's version. For example, Irenaeus writing around 180 AD insisted there must be exactly four gospels. No more, no less. Interesting, because Marcion's had only one gospel. So the inclusion of say Acts and the Old Testament cannon came in as a sort of counterpoint. These became deliberately essential to the new narrative that emerged to contrast with his selective cannon. It's like a built-in rebuttal. But isn't it a little bit of a stretch to say that the entire NT was constructed solely as a response to Marcion? not in my opinion. Furthermore, many modern scholars argue that the NT was published as a collection specifically constructed against Marion's challenge, not just organically inherited. This challenges the comforting narrative that the canonical Bible just dropped fully formed from the heavens. It suggests instead that what we received was a hard-fought outcome of doctrinal battles. So, if Marcion's version was so dominant and coherent, why did it eventually get erased? and his church thrived for over 70 years and persisted in some regions into the fourth and even fifth centuries, why its sudden disappearance? as I said before to you, the history as we know it was written by the eventual winners. It's like the voices of the vanquished were deliberately silenced. So, if history is written by the winners, then perhaps our understanding of early Christianity is missing, has deliberately omitted a whole perspective. I don't believe you are a person who thinks the Bible just fell from the sky fully formed. So, think about what I'm saying, the story of religion isn't a straightforward path but a battleground of ideas, sometimes even forbidden ones.
Yeah, people who tell have decided to tell, that's just logic.
I have one agenda, namely Jesus. Something not in the gospels might well be proof. But if you contradict every fact of history on a subject, in or out of the gospels, that requires extraordinary evidence. Jesus 100% upheld Hebrew Scripture, no historical evidence teaches that he told his disciples secretly that Scripture was wrong, there would be no movement without dedication to Scripture. That's why your narrative on that point is just a narrative. Nothing in Nag Hammadi has your narrative.
Nope. No text mentions such an imaginative retcon as you propose. If you had said you're just Marcionite, it would've made more sense, because he did teach that, but he didn't say that Jesus and the Apostles taught it (as you did): he implied that the Apostles worked for the Demiurge (WP); his Scriptural canon still included details contrary to the Demiurge theory, against his edit attempts otherwise; and his work on antitheses is now lost, and does not even appear in the newly uncovered documents. So what you're doing is imagining something that could've happened if only Marcion was totally right in his view and had a perfect tradition from Jesus's time and every other indication of history is wrong. No historian would view this as a workable theory of what actually happened.
So yeah, when you double down on apparently rejecting facts of history instead of interacting with them, my tone does tend to change.
The evidence is that Jesus's teachings made headway among the Jews because they agreed with the God depicted in Hebrew Scripture. All the apostles and evangelists emphatically used Scripture as a final authority, and several times they recognized that each others' works were Scripture too. The fact that Marcion invented a duality narrative, or based it on other gnostics, doesn't mean that narrative existed in primitive Christianity.
Marcion admitted that confirmed evangel and confirmed apostolic writings were Scripture. The difference between the NT and Marcion's canon is entirely one of degree. Because Scripture is holistic, you can prove any core tenet of traditional Christianity with reference to Marcionite Scripture alone. If you admit the Marcionite canon, you would have no reason to reject other gospels or epistles that say the same thing (just as I do not reject all the apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, but only hold them to a lower standard of authority).
The books of the canon were already circulating, nothing was constructed anew, even as your own (liberal) dating would prove. His ideas may have been "policed" (though there was no political power to force anything for another 200 years) but only because all other churches but the Marcionite "church" recognized the internal contradictions of the system early. You say the Marcionite church was regarded as very widespread, so without arguing that either way I'll note it, but if it were "coherent" Christianity it would have survived instead of essentially disappearing in the 3rd century. The orthodox arguments and texts stand, and Marcion's works didn't survive, which is not an indication that Marcion was so much better but an indication that he had nothing to say that wasn't expressed by his canon and the quotations of him that survived. Althist is fun, but must be admitted as such.
Didn't I say 19th-century German unbelievers? Harnack was counted as a Christian but he rejected the Apostles' Creed on Jesus and rejected the Bible.
No, the Hebrew canon had been getting closed in the 1st century BC and 1st century AD. All the Hebrew books were recognized as Scripture, and taught to be so by Jesus and the Apostles, with the exception of a couple late disputes persisting for a time over books like Esther. The only reason Marcion could reject the OT utterly was that he was in a Greek milieu where reliance on the Hebrew had begun to wane (but was still extant throughout 2nd century patristics). It wasn't about the OT "coming in", instead the NT shows that it was the NT books that were slowly coming in to join the OT.
No, they were not regarded as essential until late 4th century. They were regarded as inspired, useful, beneficial, and sufficient, but there was no argument of essentiality. Look, if the church has Luke-Acts for 100 years, and then suddenly Marcion says only most of Luke is good and none of Acts, it's clear to everyone that he is innovating on received tradition, and it's clear from history that they continued to preserve the whole Luke-Acts because Marcion's version didn't have a slate of dedicated copyists throughout the known world like the established tradition did. There is no althist available where Marcion's Luke existed as Scripture, and Acts, which was written by the same man around the same time to the same audience, was accorded universally as useless until somebody got it to be thought of as inspired as if it counteracted Marcion. It's Luke, it's the same author! Did you know that Papias, quoted by Eusebius, mentioned and named the four gospels around the 120s, long before Marcion or Irenaeus step up?
Nope, nobody published the "NT" until Constantine, much later. Nor was his canon "constructed" but it consisted of all Greek Scriptures that rose to the level of inspiration and acceptance that other works (including some verses added by Marcion) didn't.
I agree with you in rejecting that narrative. All mature Biblical Christians recognize and admit the same.
I'm very empathetic to Romanism omitting perspectives and have consistently appealed here for primitive Christianity. Gnosticism isn't primitive Christianity and never had approval from Jesus's apostles or their appointed successors at large. When gnosticism is tested as a theological system (as it was), it fails logic, history, and inspiration.
Now, in all our conversations I've been attempting to find out how you know what is true. I don't see that answer. I see you sticking to a storyline, even imagining what Jesus might have said that totally contradicts what history shows he did say. If you had quoted Gospel of Thomas, I wouldn't object because Jesus may have said everything in there in context, and there may be an echo of apostolic tradition in it. But you're coming in with Marcion whose only tradition, if any, comes from either part of the holistic Bible (which was accepted along with the rest), or Valentinus or Simon or Menander before him, who were never accepted. It was apostate (standing aside from Christianity), never something that acted as if part of the same Christianity as everyone else kept. So you don't seem to be committed to seek the truth wherever it leads and to accept the facts of history. You're free to show me otherwise.
You said this before. What exactly is your Jesus agenda? The Church’s goal is to convert people to Jesus, is this what you mean? is this your agenda?
My guess is you have no idea how power works. Don't take this the wrong way, most people have no idea how power works. So, let me summarize the concept of power. So, you've been brainwashed into thinking certain ideas about who we are. They're not true. The first myth is we humans are driven by material desires. So, why do we want what we want? We want to pass on our genes. We want to marry a lot of beautiful women who are young and so they can give us a lot of babies because we want to pass on our genes. And we want to maintain our status. All we care about is power. Fundamentally we humans are nothing but imagination. And we care about three things. The first is we want to express our religion through art, music and rituals. We want to know where we came from, why we're here, where we're going. That's who we really are. That's the first thing. Second thing is we are diverse and want to differentiate ourselves. We want to stand out. We want to be different. We want to be creative. The third thing is we are curious and want to explore. And that's what explains why we go everywhere. This has been true throughout human history.
Let me give you a concrete example, Islam. So, what is the power of Islam? And I want you to remember this. Islam's power comes from how Islam is able to unite two major intellectual traditions in the world. The first is paganism. Remember the Vikings? The Vikings told stories. They acted out rituals. And therefore, there was an intimacy, concreteness, an interconnectedness to paganism that made us feel happy and good. It made us understand the world. It made us feel as though we could influence the world. That's the power of paganism.
But Islam is doing the same thing by making God concrete. You can feel God. God is everywhere. He knows everything. But what Islam is also doing is it's seeing the simplicity, clarity, and absoluteness of monotheism. Monotheism is nice because with monotheism, everything becomes clear to you. There's one God. Therefore, I just have to follow him. I just have to believe in him. There's like a million gods in paganism. So, it's unclear what you should do or how you should relate to these million gods. But here in monotheism, the relationship between God and you, it's very clear. So, in other words, Islam is a major intellectual revolution in human history. And we have forgotten this because Islam the idea has embedded itself into modernity itself. We forget that Islam really built the basis for modernity. Fulfillment of the law and the prophets is completing the story in the Bible. It's bringing God to the people. You can now touch God. You can now know God. That's the beginning of the idea of Protestantism and create heaven on earth.
On the contrary I would say I'm committed to seek the truth wherever it may lead. That's why I'm studying Kabbalah and Islam, both at the same time. Why? because God wants us to make the world better. Let me ask you three questions. First question is why did Islam enter its golden age and Christian Europe enter its dark ages? Second question is why did the Islamic golden age end? And third question is how did Christian Europe overtake the Muslim world? IMO, to answer these three questions, all we have to do is compare and contrast these three major religions together. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. There are both strength and weaknesses to all religions.
For instance Judaism, you could say it's very hard to pick out a definite message from the Bible. And that's why the oral tradition is actually much more important. And so Jews have to go to the synagogue all the time where the rabbi will explain to them the meaning of the Bible because if you read it by yourself, it's almost impossible to understand. Second problem is their God Yahweh is very problematic. He doesn't seem to know what he's doing and he's very, violent. He often commands the Israelites to go kill all their enemies. The third major problem in the tradition is faith versus history. If you believe that you are the chosen people, if you believe that Yahweh is the only true God, then why are you being persecuted all the time? Why were the Romans able to kick you out of Jerusalem and burn down your temple, which is the house of God? Why do you lack a homeland? And this has been going on for thousands of years.
So the Christian faith was created in many ways to try to resolve a lot of the issues within the Jewish tradition. The first major advantage of the Christian faith is it's the purification and perfection of divinity. Remember how we said that Yahweh is problematic? Well, now we have Jesus who we can understand and Jesus made the ultimate sacrifice. Therefore, we know him to be the ultimate good. Second advantage is now that there's a person, we can have him deliver a consistent message of being kind, being merciful, being loving. The third advantage is the idea of progress, of history ending. History is leading to the return of Jesus the second coming. So you may suffer now but don't worry because Jesus is returning and that will end history for us. So these are the advantages of Christianity. But when you do that when you have Jesus personify God you create a lot of issues. The first issue is it's a really confusing story. Why would God come down to earth, manifest himself as a human, and then sacrifice himself? That's really, really confusing. Like, I know there's a lot of really good explanations as to why this is the case. Still, if you're just a normal person, you can't understand the story. It makes no sense to you. Second a lot of the ideas in Christianity, it's just counterintuitive. The Holy Trinity must be the strangest idea in religion where God, the Holy Spirit, and Jesus are separate but equal. It makes no intuitive sense to anyone. The third is distant divinity. God is out there somewhere. You don't know where. You can't talk to him. You can't see him. You have absolutely no idea where he is. It's a very distant divinity. And so these are the disadvantages of Christianity.
And so Islam now makes sense because it's trying to remedy and rectify these failings of Christianity. The first is that it takes the Jewish tradition and the Christian tradition and makes it part of itself. So it is really the continuation and the perfection of the Jewish Christian tradition. Second is the absoluteness of God. This is now true monotheism where God is everywhere and you can see him. But if God is everywhere then what's amazing is that you can now that God can come inside you through your faith, through your devotion and through your practice. And so what this means is you now know how to behave in the world. There's a clarity of purpose and action. You know that as long as you do those five things, those five pillars of Islam, your life will be good. God is in you and that gives you strength and purpose and power.
If there's an agenda, Jesus the person is it. When I interact with people, I have one goal, Jesus's goal. The word "convert" should simply mean "turn", and people being turned to God the Father is a good thing, although if you think it means turning to something else it would be a bad thing. When you say "On the contrary I would say I'm committed to seek the truth wherever it may lead", you're turned to God the Father.
If your pursuit of truth leads you to Islam, your keen grasp of issues will reveal to you the issues with Islam too, just as their are issues in the practice of (rabbinical) Judaism and Christianity. However, the original covenant, which came to be called both (messianic) Judaism and Christianity, is one, and the people are one, and this includes people outside the known covenant if they still accept its terms in their own culture (e.g. Muslims having visions of Jesus). So, just for accuracy, I'll briefly note there are answers to the issues you see in the covenant.
"Hard to pick out a definite message from the Bible": Not the experience of people who read it in pursuit of truth. The message of the Hebrew Bible is the identity of God, whose name is Lovingkindness. "Yahweh is very problematic": This objection never arose from within the covenant but only in 19th-century Germany; the text explains the core but leaves a few details to be discerned by seekers. "Why are you being persecuted all the time": This is well explained in the later Hebrew Scriptures about the first diaspora and there is no confusion about it in Judaism.
"Why would God come down to earth, manifest himself as a human, and then sacrifice himself?" You allude to the "normal person" but you mean the normal American who is thoroughly separated from the culture in which these things were understood. Close reading of the Torah reveals the culture sufficiently to answer. "God, the Holy Spirit, and Jesus are separate but equal": I understand your confusion seeing as the church doctrine is that they are not separate. Again, recognizing the original culture, all kinds of things are known to be diverse unities, to be one and to be diverse at the same time and in different senses. If we are too Greek in our logic, we make assumptions from propositions without synthesizing our views with other propositions of equal value. "God is out there somewhere": You know this is not the teaching of Christianity (though it comes closer to Islam). Jesus taught the kingdom of God is within us, and the immanence of God was well-known.
If you want to pursue the works of the five pillars of Islam, you will find that as soon as you fail you are left without access to the God who comes inside "through your practice". The covenant teaches a God who provides access, by love and mercy, to those who have failed in their practice.