More and more, I think of Medium as the place where bad blogging hot takes filled with clickbait stupidity go for a new life. Medium's multiple business model fails reflect this.
Now, for the unfamiliar, although some atheist types use the mash-up word "fundagelical," not all evangelicals are literalists or even full-on biblical conservatives. That said, I reject the idea of truly liberal evangelicalism, as I take it a a sine qua non of evangelicalism that not only is salvation through Jesus universal, so is the need for it.
OK, back to the current round of stupidity I ran into on my email algorithmic feed yesterday. And, given that I take time not only to read, but to argue with, these nutters means its my fault for Medium shoving more of this at me.
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On the first piece, a Medium "brand" having the name Koinonia kind of gives the game up right there.
Second, no, Kyle Chastain, contra your claim, Jesus wasn't "dangerous" in the way you claim, though that's a common evangelical trope, along with the claim that Jesus says "you don't need to change anything, just everything."
Reality is that Chastain ignores the broad variety of Judaism and instead has Jesus rebelling against some sort of "system." I think he's stereotyping temple Judaism as being all Judaism, or maybe also using the stereotyped caricature of Pharisaic Judaism as a "system," but he's not clear.
He IS, though, wrong. As I said, Judaism was indeed broad, and there was no "system" against which Jesus revolted.
AND, to the degree he challenged certain types of Judaism, he was far from alone. John the Baptizer was an even more ferocious challenger. Rome executed yet other Jews, or their client kings did.
Chaistain has other modern evangelical errors, like claiming that in ancient Palestine, church and state were one, when in Roman, or Maccabean, ears, such framing was simply nonsensical.
The biggest error is the logical conflict in trying to claim Jesus was such a system-breaker while at the same time trying to proof-text the Tanakh for "all about Jesus."
The second-biggest error, once one throws out circular arguments from claims of Jesus' divinity, is not asking if he's really got the BEST answer for "living outside systems."
Finally, since modern critical scholarship claims that many things allegedly said (or done) by Jesus actually weren't, what system he was rebelling against, and what system he was NOT rebelling againts, are still up in the air.
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Second is Jonathan Poletti, whose nuttery I've run into before. He claims there are 10 things Christians don't know about Jesus. First, it sounds like we're in strawmanning territory right away. Second, he must not have originally been inspired, because the URL says "7 things."
Some are things that a fair amount of Xns surely DO know, but that's not where I'm headed.
Rather, Point 9 is surely wrong and Point 10 almost surely so
On the first, Jesus was very likely NOT LGBQTIA, "tia"? bah "firendly." The claim that the Roman centurian was gaybagging the slave he had Jesus heal is as laughable as the claims Abe Lincoln was gay because during his frontier court hustings he occasionally shared a bed with a man while on the road. Poletti, in responding to a comment there, didn't understand the analogy or parallelism, so I spelled it out in more detail, and said it was an argument from silence.
In addition, Jesus as a good observant Jew come to "fulfill the Torah" would have almost certainly looked askance at gay sex. Paul did, and don't @ me that he didn't, atheists. I've covered this in EXTREME detail, with updates, and looking at that, am now reminded that Poletti is not the first to make this stupid claim that the centurion and the servant were gay lovers, and I clearly refudiated it before.
Also, Jesus not being omniscient, even if there WERE a gay relationship, as only the centurion visited him, and surely didn't say, "I love him, Jesus, as in I LOVE him," Jesus wouldn't have known they were gay lovers.
Fourth, beyond the Torah, as a backwoods Jewish peasant, he likely would have been repulsed by such things.
On the second, no, Jesus almost certainly was NOT raped as part of crucifixion humiliation. There's reasons that critical scholarship has largely killed with silence David Tombs' 1999 paper, and that's because Tombs himself is arguing from silence almost totally, about crucifixions in general. (Update: Poletti claimed it wasn't an argument from silence. In my reply, I said "yes it was," told him he wasn't the first to make this idiotic claim, and pasted the link above.) The tombs paper isn't "famous," at least not outside evangelical circles. And, when I did a search on "were Roman crucifixion victims raped," one gets fundagelicals plus Mel Gibson Catholics.
Poletti himself is more clickbaiter than fundagelical, with pieces such as the one claiming Codex Bezae is a different New Testament, for example. (Update: In reply, I then told him I actually knew more about the bible than he did and that he WAS a clickbaiter IMO.)
And, wrong elsewhere.
First, Christians did NOT come up with the vocalization of Yahweh. He ignores his own piece stating that the Tetragrammaton wasn't included in post-150 CE Septuagints, and also ignores the Masoretic Text, its development of Hebrew vowel pointing and related matters.
Yes, contra Poletti, the bible IS anti-gay. See my link above.
No, an earlier bible was NOT discovered in 1883. (I've actually read a book about this.)
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