Following the fourth gospel is the epistle of Jude, written at the end of the first century. It is certainly not by a brother of Jesus, despite this traditional attribution. Rather, it addresses false teaching in the Christian community of its day. It makes its points with reference to characters in Jewish scriptures and even mentions the apostles (those who had visions of Jesus) but knows nothing about an earthly Jesus. Parts of Jude are lifted wholesale into the later forgery of 2 Peter.
And then… another made up Jesus! This time the avenging angel of Revelation. I’ve written about Revelation recently so won’t repeat it all here. Suffice to say, this revealing is completely within a disturbed cultist’s head. He wants to see those who oppose the cult to suffer at the hands of his the Messiah who sweeps down from heaven determined to wipe out unbelievers and set the chosen few up as rulers of a reformed Earth. This Jesus seems to have forgotten he once told people to love their neighbours, pray for those who persecuted them, humble themselves, give all they had to the poor etc etc. Revelation Jesus has no time for this sorta shit! Of course, he’s no more real than any of the gospel Jesuses. He’s simply another made-up version, ‘revealed’, or so his creator would have us think, from Heaven. Revelation is chockful of symbolism – The Whore of Babylon, the Number of the Beast, the Marriage Supper of the Lamb etc – all of it applicable to the time when it was written. It has no bearing on anything after that time and doesn’t, despite sloppy interpretations, feature ‘the Anti-Christ’.
The letters of John were all probably written by the same person. This is not the John credited with creating the fourth gospel nor Revelation’s nut-job. This John, or whatever he was really called, is concerned with divisions within his community, chiefly those caused by a group who denied that Jesus was the Christ (1 John 2:22). They were literally anti-Christ. This is where the term occurs in the New Testament and it doesn’t refer to a future madman who will crush Christians in his attempt to rule the world. It seems likely that John’s anti-Christs believed Jesus did not visit Earth as a flesh and blood human being. They were perhaps the last remnants of those Christians who, like Paul and most of the preceding New Testament letter writers, held that Jesus was a divine being, active only in Heaven. With these epistles then, written around CE 100, we turn a corner. Belief in the symbolic Jesus depicted in the gospels as a real man, has become the orthodoxy. It took some time to get here.
And chronologically, that’s about it. There are four forged books left, making the properly ordered New Testament end, not with a bang but a whimper. While 1 & 2 Timothy and 2 Peter claim to be written by Paul and Peter respectively their late date rules this out. 1 Timothy provides the infamous line that women should remain silent in church and obey their husbands at all times. 2 Peter has all the nonsense about a day being the same as a thousand years in God’s eyes. Its duplicitous author argues that God is delaying bringing punishment to the world so that more people might be saved. Evidently he lacks any mathematical understanding. You would think at this point the cultists would have realised that the cultists of the previous century, so certain of the Lord’s imminent arrival had got it disastrously wrong. But no. They reinterpreted their ‘revelations’ and prophecies so that instead of his arrival being ‘at hand’ it was now set to happen at any time in the future, even thousands of years ahead.
Christianity was all but dead at this point. It simply refused to admit it.
rejectingjesus, 
Sadly and disappointingly, the True Christians™ care nothing about any of this. They have their versions and along with pulpit preaching, that’s all they need.
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So true. Still, the occasional True Christian wanders off the straight and narrow and ends up here. Have at ’em everyone!
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Do you have any idea how long it has been since Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden? I calculate that this was at the Bolling-Allerod about 14,000 years ago. The promise of a son who would provide a remedy was 12,000 years in coming. Does 2000 years seem so long? Not by God’s time. He is patient.
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Adam and Eve? Seriously?
For future comments you will need to identify yourself in some way. Hiding behind anonymity makes it look like you lack any courage in your convictions.
You do see that what I say is firmly rooted in what the Bible claims, don’t you. Your views alas are what you say they are; what you’ve had to come up with after the NT’s promises of the Kingdom in the first century failed to materialise. In other words; excuses, excuses.
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Anonymous said:
Do you have any idea how long it has been since Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden? I calculate that this was at the Bolling-Allerod about 14,000 years ago.
Okay. Other modern humans go back much further, but homo sapiens (us) go back about 200,000 years. By 100,000 years ago, we’d spread throughout Africa and into Asia. By 70,000 years ago, throughout southern Asia. By 40,000 years ago into Europe. By 25,000 years ago, all of Asia. By 15,000 into North America. And by 12,000 throughout all of North and South America.
So by the time your Adam and Eve show up, homo sapiens has spread to every continent except Antarctica and most of the major islands.
Placing Adam and Eve when you do would place most people alive today outside of their descendants – assuming their descendants survived to today. That means most people today weren’t subject to The Fall™ and therefore are in no need of a Savior.™
Seems your “calculations” failed to factor in actual science. Seems your mention of the Bølling–Allerød Interstadial is just a poor attempt to smuggle science into your favorite myth.
Anonymous said:
The promise of a son who would provide a remedy was 12,000 years in coming.
No. Neither Jesus nor the promise of Jesus appear anywhere in the Hebrew Bible, not even Genesis 3. Also, the Adam & Eve & Fall story only date back to about 500 BCE – nowhere near your “calculated” 12,000 BCE date.
Also, Jesus didn’t fulfill any of the messianic prophesies of a warrior king who would unite dispersed Israel, overthrow their oppressors, conquer the world, and bring all people to follow the Law of Moses™.
Jesus was a failed messiah. So Paul created a spiritual messiah by cherry picking scriptures that Jesus could have fulfilled and stories were written “showing” how he did. Praise Jesus!
Your whole story is a nice little fairy tale but it has no foundation in reality. Reality, A Hell of a Drug™.
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No, Nan. We have two thousand years of consideration and agreement on these issues. Those are not overturned by Neil’s personal thoughts.
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So why did God tell most of the writers of the New Testament that the Saviour’s arrival through the clouds was ‘at hand’ in their own time (Mark 1:15; 1 Peter 4:7 etc)? Why did he inspire them to have Jesus say it would happen while some of his audience was still alive (Matt 16:27,28 etc)? Why did he let Paul think it was going to happen while he was alive (1 Thess 4:15-17)?
They certainly didn’t think it was going to happen thousands of years in the future. Your beliefs about it are not biblically based.
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Like I said, it’s the Christian believers’ version and by their god, it’s all 100% correct! No outside influences, studies, criticisms, discussion allowed.
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