to this video as soon as I'm finished doing my taxes!

Thanks, Uncle Joe!

is the only one that makes sense to me. Otherwise you have a vindictive God setting people up to fail. Billions of people would be condemned simply because of circumstances of their birth.

But a message of love, compassion, and awakening? I am so down with that.

I favor the approach of Malcolm X, who recommended taking Jesus off of the stained-glass window, and placing him fully within the context of humanity. We know from the Dead Sea scrolls and Nag Hammadi books that there were a number of writings about the historic Jesus, some of which tell a story in a manner not unlike the four gospels -- especially gospel of John, which shows both gnostic and Greek influence. In John, one finds the various levels of understanding highlighted with phrases such as when Jesus was "lifted up" on the cross.

If you read the Old Testament you'll quickly learn that there were A LOT of "sins" that required you be killed if you committed them.

My theory is the local government called in the church elders and told them, "no more religious killings or we'll ban your church."

And so, they came up with the whole Jesus thing: a sinless man, the Son of God, who died brutally to absorb all the sin of the world, so that all those who believe in Him will be forgiven and go on to eternal life.

Christian beliefs varied widely across the hemisphere. They held several councils, such as the Council of Nicaea and the Council of Constantinople that resolved several issues, but there was still a lot of upheaval until at least the seventh century.

Christians from the time of Christ and up to about the time of the council of nicaea probably would look at todays bibles and christianity and wonder what the hell happened to it, because it most likely it would be totally alien to them. Just think of all the versions of the bibles since guttenburg published his version in the 1450s. There was the Wycliffe bible, the first english translation published in what is now the U.K., in about 1380-85 c.e. As each new protestant religion came about, they published their own translations. Even the bible used by catholics have undergone changes, especially since the 1960s. With each version, things got dropped, added or changed, depending on who was doing that particular version. So doesn't surprise me that there are versions out there that may not be known about in our era.

It's been translated dozens of times from languages that haven't been spoken in thousands of years.
I compare it to the classroom exercise where the teacher whispers something into a student's ear. That student turns to the kid next to him and whispers what he thought he heard. The process is repeated. By the time it gets to the last kid, the original statement has been lost.

We used to play it at birthday parties.

Mother was well known for being sweet and judicious with her word choices.

❤️

... that somebody a long time ago has put letters together in interesting ways, and that others then preserved these papers. Hallelujah!

Says pretty much the same thing.
It was known in the early church.

much easier to scroll through the torturous build-up.

If you hadn't posted the transcript, I would have missed the beauty of it.

Besides, videos are not (really) randomly accessible, copy and paste-able for lookups of words, and a big barrel of roadblocks to extracting meaning (or even proving whether it's AI-assisted or not)

It's a little tedious even though I have a computer workflow, so I reserve it for things that I want to skim but not sit in front of a screen for a half hour or whatever.

And a tiny bit of guilt about unfinished chores (Hint: they're NEVER done).

Guess religion is a protected space?

The power of AI compels it

Evidence. Zero. Nada.

Mel Gibson is pushing this pretty hard. Check YouTube.....you can find this exact same story coming from Mad Max himself......our true messiah.

You want to get out of here? You talk to me.

And that Emperor Haile Selassie was a living god. Personally, as an atheist, I don't follow any religion, but I find many interesting.

of the Book of Enoch, alone, something that signifies its importance. The contents signify why it was suppressed by an empire looking to exert maximum control At least they called that one "apocryphal," meaning the muckey-mucks in the churcjh still got took at it even if tje faithful were deprived.

In any case, there's a big debate coming among Christians of all flavors about power and the limitation of both knowledge and faith and that debate is long overdue.

The Ethiopian Bible is in agreement with Orthodox Christianity that Jesus did in fact die for the sins of the world. The key difference in the Ethiopian Bible vs. Western Christianity is that it gives Mary Magdalene a much higher position in the hierarchy of Jesus' disciples.