It’s always fascinating to go back and re-read the Bible without the blinders of dogma on. For instance, Paul was held out as a divinely-appointed guide to the early church, but if you don’t take his conversion story at face value it’s quite clear that he’s a conservative trying to take control of a nascent religion and steer it away from the more radical ideas that some of the other early followers took away from the teachings of Jesus. That fun children’s story about Joshua and the walls of Jericho (remember the French Peas from VeggieTales)? That was the opening act of a years-long campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing that God commanded the Israelites undertake to claim the Promised Land!
My favorite, though, is Song of Solomon. It’s straight-up erotic poetry, right in the middle of a book handed out to children! I know they claim it’s metaphorical, but come the fuck on… the author spends whole chapters describing his lover’s naked body, that ain’t a metaphor for anything other than “I want to bone you.”
I’m not going to go as far as to say it’s good erotic poetry, though. I’ve tried “your breasts are like fawns, twins of a gazelle” on my wife and was immediately ejected from the bedroom. YMMV, though.
to take control of a nascent religion and steer it away from the more radical ideas that some of the other early followers took away from the teachings of Jesus.
tbh authentic Paul was in many ways more radical that Jesus… Jesus told people to give to the poor because the end was near, and so did Paul. Jesus chose all male disciples, Paul refers to Phoebe, Prisca, Euodia and Syntyche (all women) as his “fellow workers” or “ministers”. Jesus affirmed “for this reason a man will leave his parents and be united with his wife”. From Paul we have “there is neither male nor female in Christ Jesus”. Jesus followed synagogue traditions (male only), Paul allowed women to pray and prophesy in his churches. Jesus taught the Jews to follow a loving version of the Torah, Paul pushed the utterly radical idea that Jews were freed from the Torah and united with gentiles in “one body”.
(The conservative line taken in later letters attributed to Paul are believed by academic scholars to be from his later school of disciples, not from him himself.)
There are some aspects of Paul which tick the conservative box in that he comes across as a sex negative asexual who uses part of his soapbox to preach his own distain by insisting that pleasure in sex is bad and linking the idea of anything but purely reproductive sex with a spiritual uncleanliness and immorality. It fuels a lot of bad shit from purity doctrine to anti-same sex relationship rhetoric.
Not that sexual control over women and reproduction particularly hasn’t been a worldwide phenomenon but instilling pleasure and sex directly to sin really linked in to all the conservative bullshit that Paul’s hijacked letters contained so I feel like there’s a bit of a “depends on your definition of conservative” thing.
It’s always fascinating to go back and re-read the Bible without the blinders of dogma on. For instance, Paul was held out as a divinely-appointed guide to the early church, but if you don’t take his conversion story at face value it’s quite clear that he’s a conservative trying to take control of a nascent religion and steer it away from the more radical ideas that some of the other early followers took away from the teachings of Jesus. That fun children’s story about Joshua and the walls of Jericho (remember the French Peas from VeggieTales)? That was the opening act of a years-long campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing that God commanded the Israelites undertake to claim the Promised Land!
My favorite, though, is Song of Solomon. It’s straight-up erotic poetry, right in the middle of a book handed out to children! I know they claim it’s metaphorical, but come the fuck on… the author spends whole chapters describing his lover’s naked body, that ain’t a metaphor for anything other than “I want to bone you.”
I’m not going to go as far as to say it’s good erotic poetry, though. I’ve tried “your breasts are like fawns, twins of a gazelle” on my wife and was immediately ejected from the bedroom. YMMV, though.
tbh authentic Paul was in many ways more radical that Jesus… Jesus told people to give to the poor because the end was near, and so did Paul. Jesus chose all male disciples, Paul refers to Phoebe, Prisca, Euodia and Syntyche (all women) as his “fellow workers” or “ministers”. Jesus affirmed “for this reason a man will leave his parents and be united with his wife”. From Paul we have “there is neither male nor female in Christ Jesus”. Jesus followed synagogue traditions (male only), Paul allowed women to pray and prophesy in his churches. Jesus taught the Jews to follow a loving version of the Torah, Paul pushed the utterly radical idea that Jews were freed from the Torah and united with gentiles in “one body”.
(The conservative line taken in later letters attributed to Paul are believed by academic scholars to be from his later school of disciples, not from him himself.)
There are some aspects of Paul which tick the conservative box in that he comes across as a sex negative asexual who uses part of his soapbox to preach his own distain by insisting that pleasure in sex is bad and linking the idea of anything but purely reproductive sex with a spiritual uncleanliness and immorality. It fuels a lot of bad shit from purity doctrine to anti-same sex relationship rhetoric.
Not that sexual control over women and reproduction particularly hasn’t been a worldwide phenomenon but instilling pleasure and sex directly to sin really linked in to all the conservative bullshit that Paul’s hijacked letters contained so I feel like there’s a bit of a “depends on your definition of conservative” thing.
To be fair, the monk robe and tonsure haircut might not have helped…