“Neither Jesus nor his 12 disciples, nor their original followers quit being Jews. When Jesus was born it didn’t usher in a whole new religion (Paul and the Greeks did that). What Jesus professed is completely different from what Paul and the Greeks taught.”
Paul was Jewish thru and thru. The charge that he introduced Hellenism into Christianity was in vogue for some time. But more recent scholarship has put rubbish to that. See e.g. N.T. Wright, “What Paul Really Said.”
I agree that Greek notions did weasel their way into Church doctrines later. But not from Paul. Paul was a very well educated second temple Jewish Pharisee thoroughly acquainted with the scriptures. Most of his work was spent working through the implications of the Resurrection in light of the Jewish scriptures (as I’m sure you know, second temple Jews—excluding the Saducees—interpreted the scriptures as saying the Messiah and the resurrection of everyone would happen all at once. As Paul noted, only Jesus got resurrected. So the existing interpretation of scripture was clearly wrong and Paul worked thru the new interpretation to accomodate the fact of the Resurrection.)
“The man-altered scriptural translations and interpolations and politics of 2000 years have made christianity something that Jesus nor his 12 disciples would recognize or claim.”
The case that our current Bible is the result of alterations, interpolations, and bad translations of the new testament is really a bad case. Few serious new testament scholars will make it with a straight face (whether Christian or non-Christian scholars). The “Catholics altered the bible” argument is really nothing more than a pop-culture meme at this point. Here is why:
1. We have more than 26,000 existing copies of the new testament in at least ten different languages that survive from the ancient world. The various copies can each be traced to a chain of copies made from the originals. There are many chains with many branches. Mistakes or alterations in one chain are not made in other chains. So we can assemble the original words in the new testament with very high accuracy— greater than 99.9%. The 0.01% of the words that are not clear make no difference in doctrine.
2. In fact, the Bodmer and Beatty Papyri both date to before 200 A.D. and the vast bulk of the new testament is in them and accurately reproduced in today’s Bible. So all the sneaky alterations would have had to have been made by no more than 163 years after the Resurrection—not the imagined 2000 year conspiracy.
3. Finally, the early church fathers quoted from what is now the new testament extensively in their writings (much of which survives). Those were written from 90 A.D. to 200 A.D. We could reconstruct almost the entire new testament from just the writings of the early church fathers even if all the ancient copies were lost.
4. These are all documents that are reliably dated to pre-200 A.D. Thus, we know that the words in today’s Bible are the same words written by the original authors. So even if the Catholic Church had wanted to change things around, it couldn’t have because all those tens of thousands of copies were already out there.
If you are interested in learning about this, I would be happy to provide more references.
Thanks. The da vince code theory is a lie. http://peacebyjesus.witnesstoday.org/thedavincicode.html
And if the Catholic Church had wanted to change things and had the power, then it would not have been hard to add a text about praying to departed saints and other things which are now extrapolated out of texts.