Biblical misconceptions

[GoodQueenAlysanne]

Not a Bible or religion bashing thread!

I saw a post on fb about someone who'd actually read their bible, and realised there were more than x2 of some animals loaded onto the ark, and their mind being blown by that.

I've been googling and there seem to be loads, it makes me want to actually whip out a Bible and start reading it properly.

Some of the top of my head, I already knew about are

Hell.

The true nature of angels, and what they really look like.

Who wrote the Torah, the Gospels and various other books.

That the Lords prayer was supposed to be copied, and not just read as an example.

Mary Magdalene being a prostitute.

How Esther became a Queen.

David and Jonathan being "friends"

There are bound to be tons more.

Jonah wasn't swallowed by a whale, but a fish. It must have been a big fish!

I just found this, looks interesting, Christine Hayes, professor of Religious Studies at Yale.

The title didn't come up, it's "common myths about the Bible" and it's 15 minutes long.

Thanks for that, looks interesting

Great thread OP. Fun fact, the word homosexual didn't appear in a translation of the Bible until 1946. The mistranslated word is arsenokoitai and has otherwise been translated as boy or young men molesters, in the ancient world having relations with children was common, this is what the Bible is condemning. Although I'm sure lots of Christians would disagree with me.

I think every bible should come with a free eerdmans commentary for explanations from biblical scholars.

@PurBal, I've read that as well - condemning paedophilia, not homosexuality. The Greek men with young boys.

well, one of the most interesting things about the Bible is how the translation is so often through the eyes and world view of the translator.

This is particularly around women.

So, in one of the letters it refers to apostles. This term meaning leaders of the church, and it mentions Junia. (I may have the spellings wrong here, as it is a long time since I did it, but the principle is sound) Now, in Greek, words change their ending according to where they are in the sentence, so Junia could be the very common female name Junia, or it could be a male name Junio (that's not right, but can;t remember the actual name), with an ending on it due to grammar. But the name Junio does not appear as a male name ANYWHERE in the whole ancient world, or in any Roman document at all. So the most likely explanation is that it is Junia.

ie, the Bible has a femal high level leader in the early church.
But every single translator until recently translates it as the male name Junio.

Again, the Bible talks about Deacons (lower level church leaders)
There is a word which could e translated as Female Deacons, or as Deacons wives. It was always assumed to be Deacons wives by our mysongonist translators. But there is no reason for it.

again, the original doesn't have male pronouns because in greek you don't use htem in the same way.

So many sentences in the Bible insert 'he' in English to make it make sense, but it also makes it sound as if that passage is talking about men only.

But in the original, it is neutral, neither male nor female.

And yes Akire, raunchy is the wrong word. Lewd maybe?

@Sheleg

The plagues were actually the eruption of Mount Thera. The locusts, frogs, cattle etc swarmed to escape the ash. In Egypt, the firstborn sons slept downstairs, so when the fumes of the volcano passed through, they would have been killed but the people upstairs spared.

How did the Nile turn to blood?

This is off topic, but in line with what steppemum said.

William G. Dever, talks at Emory University, about the godess Asherah. "Did God have a wife?"

"Asherah is identified as the queen consort of the Sumerian god Anu, and Ugaritic ʾEl, the oldest deities of their respective pantheons, as well as Yahweh, the god of Israel and Judah."

He talks about how two similar religions and Gods merged, around the time the books attributed to Moses were written, and the pantheon of "God" as we know him, was reduced to just him in his various aspects, and later his son Jesus.

*Goddess.

And I forgot to say, the first 16 minutes or so are introductions, the video is 1 hour 8 minutes total.

@Whenwillow

Have been trying to read the whole Bible but it often doesn't make sense to me.

I can recommend "God's Big Picture" by Vaughan Roberts, a 'how to' study of the bible. Interesting & really helpful

Thank you fascinating thread.

There is evidence i think in some of the early churches of iconography of female priests/bishops.

I think one version is that of something like ash blocks the sun for weeks then some sort of algae can grow. I’m sure one is red and looks like blood. Something on the history channel

This link is about 8 minutes, and debunks the idea that the "Lucifer" referred to once in the bible, in Isaiah, is the devil. I'm looking for more info on "the devil", "satan" etc in the bible now.

I'm more interested in who decided what to put in the Bible in the first place. It didn't appear out of nowhere - people had to choose what to put in and what to leave out. How many other gospels were left out, and what do they say?

This is such a fascinating area. The Council of Rome in 382 was the first to officially decree what was canonical and what was not, and the Synod of Hippo and others followed it up. But still today there isn’t one version of the bible that everyone agrees is canon. The CoR included the Deuterocanonicals/Apocrypha as canon. (They were not considered canon by Jews at the time, I think.)

Most Protestant sects have 66 books, Catholics and Eastern/GreekOrthodox 73 and the Ethiopian Orthodox has over 80 I think. And the Catholic bible also has bits of eg Esther and Daniel that aren’t in the Protestant version.

Well worth reading about how the bible was formed, particularly the OT texts and how different early theologians put different weight on what was canonical in Judaism and what wasn’t, and how the bible evolved.

But I guess that is probably the biggest misconception about the bible - that there is one agreed version.

Indeed, Jassy, various Church councils deciding what to include, what to cut out eg leaving out the Book of Enoch for example.

@PurBal

Great thread OP. Fun fact, the word homosexual didn't appear in a translation of the Bible until 1946. The mistranslated word is arsenokoitai and has otherwise been translated as boy or young men molesters, in the ancient world having relations with children was common, this is what the Bible is condemning. Although I'm sure lots of Christians would disagree with me.

I've heard that argued, but in most translations it doesn't even use the word homosexuality does it.

KJV and most of the english translations say something like this:

Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.

If the original just says "arsenokoitai is bad" then someone did a lot more than just mistranslate one word didn't they. As it stands it's impossible to think it meant anything else.

I read years ago that the correct translation for 'Red sea' was the Reed Sea and its position ties in with the earthquake that sunk the middle of Santorini and caused a tidal event.

The subsequent tidal wave sucked up the water (like the tsunami in Thailand but on a much smaller scale), this is the incredible timing that occurred as Moses parted the Reed Sea.

I read about this decades ago and it's always fascinated me.

The immaculate conception refers to the conception of Mary not Jesus. To be mother of Christ she had to be free of original sin.

That's not actually in the Bible itself, though - it's separate Catholic tradition/teaching, but it doesn't say in the text itself that Mary was sinless. How far would you have to go back? Would Mary's mother have to be sinless too, and her mother, and her mother....?

In Isaiah 11 & 65, it says the WOLF shall dwell with/feed with the lamb, which makes most sense, if you think about it, as they are traditional 'enemies'; but almost everybody things it juxtaposes the lion with the lamb. Lions are later mentioned in both verses, but they are clearly not directly contrasted with lambs.

"There is evidence i think in some of the early churches of iconography of female priests/bishops."

And from further back, possible evidence of folk worship of female deities, alongside and associated with the worship of the traditional Abrahamic God, who was still known by the name El, and was still known by epithets like El Shaddai. Before the Midianite (and other) influences, and the revelation of the tetragrammaton to Moses (or so the story goes..?).

Early priests were allowed to marry, have normal, healthy, sexual relationships with women, and families, until 1123. It doesn't say in the bible they shouldn't though? The bible is mostly pro marriage?

This was around the same time that Henry I named his daughter Matilda, as his heir (and was uncertain if his court would accept a female heir or not).

When the Normans invaded in the 11th century they established primogeniture, but it took a while to become the norm.

They also replaced the Saxon bishops, and changed Ecclesiastical law.

Odd to think there can still be so much debate, over more or less the same set of books, 1000's of years after the were first written down, with different denominations and cultures, having such different interpretations.

If the original just says "arsenokoitai is bad" then someone did a lot more than just mistranslate one word didn't they. As it stands it's impossible to think it meant anything else.

Romans 1:26 clearly condemns 'males lying with males' and 'forsaking the natural use/function of a woman'.

As with a lot of things, there is also context that may (or may not) have been understood at the time as the implicit meaning of something that is different/disputed nowadays.

Just taking a rubbish example from the top of my head, we might nowadays describe a dodgy, shifty, dishonest, Del-Boy-type character by saying 'he's a right one' - but anybody translating that from a neutral linguistic context in a different time could quite reasonably render that as 'the one who is right' - and therefore understand it as somebody fair, just, upright, honest, true and the complete opposite of what 'a right one' clearly suggests to us in our time. They could even quite logically see the root parallels of 'right' and 'righteous' and thus extrapolate that 'the one who is righteous' must be a clear reference to God/Jesus!

The word malakoi was translated as effeminate, but was it universally understood to mean that, or might it also have meant gentle, soft, kind etc.? There have also been some who have interpreted it to mean that (sorry for the blunt language) only the 'receiving' man is sinning but the 'giving' partner is not.

The Hebrew in leviticus actually says man must not lie with male. It uses two different words.
This is equivalent to a Greek practice of men lying with boys, referred to as males. Or something like that. Google it and it will come up.