baixueagain:lloerwyn:cervinesatyr:darkravn:maggie-stiefvater:destielhiseyesopened:umiko-hitara:poiso
baixueagain:lloerwyn:cervinesatyr:darkravn:maggie-stiefvater:destielhiseyesopened:umiko-hitara:poisonpawz:zftw:voyagebysexualdiscovery:Uh ohwouldn’t that be awkwardCan I get some credible sources?Here’s oneand anotherand one more for the roadTheology nerd side of Tumblr, reporting for duty!There are roughly five and a half fucktillion extracanonical gospels out there. For the first couple centuries after Jesus bit it, his followers wrote a ridiculous amount of fanfic. There were a gajillion different headcanons floating around about exactly who and what he even was (God pretending to be human? human who got possessed by God at his baptism? human who got promoted to demigod after his death? simultaneously God and human all along??) and lots of early Christian communities ~conveniently~ discovered a Totally 100% Authentic Eyewitness Account that supported their pet theory (and also, proved that their fave disciple was clearly the best).Big Name Fans argued about all the major disagreements, periodically throwing conventions specifically to bicker until they reached some sort of consensus (more or less – sometimes the hold-outs ended up saying “screw you guys, we’re gonna go form our own church!”) Toward the end of the second century, a guy named Irenaeus wrote a meta arguing that there were four fics worth reading – no more, no less – and they were ones that folks somewhere along the line started to claim were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. This idea caught on as a popular bit of fanon, and over the next couple of centuries it gained so much support that it was declared canon.So, what’s the point of this Jesus fandom history lesson? Basically, that the discovery of yet another extracanonical text isn’t particularly earth-shattering. Headlines like “Ancient Bible changes everything! Pope freaking out!” are bullshit, but that’s how it’s always framed cause more accurate headlines like “Old manuscript discovered – Historians say ‘Ooh, nifty!’” aren’t very good click-bait.The actual history and politics of the various gospel texts are really fascinating though (if you’re a huge fucking nerd, like me). In the Gospel of Judas, he’s the only disciple who really understands Jesus, who told Judas to “betray” him. Also, God’s a Glow Cloud. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas has kid!Jesus smite other kids for being little shits. The Gospel of Peter is hella anti-Jewish, but has one cool bit with a character that’s literally a walking, talking cross. There’s a whole book called “Q” which has never even been found, but scholars are pretty sure exists cause Matthew and Luke copied a lot from it.Seriously, leaning about this stuff made me go “woah, this is freaking awesome – why the hell did my parents’ church make the Bible seem so damn boring??” Well, probably cause all those white upper middle class folks didn’t want us kiddies to dig too deep and find out what a radical, anti-establishment bamf Jesus really was, but that’s another rant for another time…Reblogging because this is what I live for. As a medieval history major, I got taught first and foremost that we’d be spending four years reading lies and biased half-truths and mythologies. Our job was to find the places they agreed and work the rest out from there. “Do the edge pieces first, Maggie.” I took an entire seminar on forgeries, because so many of the sources historians use to piece together the past are known fakes, but the best they can do is read between the lines or have no lines at all. There’s a reason why medieval historians read farm reports featuring travel descriptions and saints’ lives involving demons-living-in-buckets with the same attention to detail. Every dry history text you’ve read in your life comes from a pile of sources like this, bits of maybe-truth cobbled together with toothpaste and narwhal horn dust.The moral of the story is be curious, and look for the lies in truth and the truth in lies. It’s pretty great: hello, history, riddle me this.@businesspumpkin imagine not knowing about the council of nicaea lol It would honestly take an absolute whopper of an extracanonical text to shock a historian or a theologian. One saying Jesus wasn’t crucified wouldn’t make the Vatican bat an eyelid let alone send Christianity as a whole crumbling into the sea. every time some clickbait article like this comes out about “omg you’ll NEVER BELIEVE what the Vatican has been hiding!!!”, theologians and people who actually know church history are likeand like on top of what others have already said above, do y’all know how archival libraries work, especially really fucking old ones? have y’all ever even been in one?their items aren’t perfectly catalogued like in a regular public library, with authors, titles, dates, subjects, and summary blurbs. in many archives, you’re more likely to get dozens and dozens of entries like “book, Latin, 5th century????” or “personal papers of Fuckface McWeasel” and it’s literally just a massive pile of random documents in a box that you have to sort through one by one. i worked as an archivist for a while and one job i had was sorting through two boxes of papers that were only about 20 years old and entirely in modern, printed English. it took me literal weeks to sort through and properly catalogue the papers in just two boxes, on top of all my other duties. do you think most archivists in most of these really oldass archival libraries are spending time going through each and every document, especially when their library has about 10,000 similar boxes in multiple ancient languages and in alphabetic scripts that go back millennia? hell no. especially not when most of them are overworked, understaffed, and underpaid. they take one glance at it, write down the most barebones possible description, and move on.so yeah when you see headlines about “omg look what this library was keeping secret for all these years because it was too SCANDALOUS!!” know that no, bitch, they weren’t hiding jack shit, it’s just that nobody fucking knew it was there until some random visiting researcher practically tripped over it (and probably while searching fruitlessly for something completely different). -- source link