Annotated 26-24
Jesus didn’t do any writing himself; his teachings were entirely oral. It was only some time after his death that the oral tradition cohered into the writings of the New Testament.
Having seen way too many ancient texts taken out of context to try to justify modern unkindness, I quite like Rachel’s thought about updatable Gospels. There are certainly a lot of thorny questions surrounding that idea, starting with who’s doing the updating, but it beats hell out of having your sexuality governed by survival tips for desert nomads.
Phil wanted to be sure we didn’t get E-Merl and Rachel “back together” here, just yet. Scipio’s talk was meant to shame her into facing her issues with herself, but shaming someone who’s said “no” to a relationship into a “yes” is not a good look. Also, E-Merl has been a much better comrade (fighting courageously, protecting her from Hestia’s immolation) than would-be boyfriend (avoidance, stalking) to her lately. And yet, the primary obstacle to their relationship has been removed. So she drops this little hint, he hesitantly picks up on it, and we leave that fire gently stoked.
Is it me or is E-Merl looking a bit scornful at panel 2?
Perhaps he’s a bit jealous of Scipio.
Perhaps, justifiably so?
I think he’s probably just in a bad mood because his _arm really hurts_.
Having a friend who is annoyingly right all the time and who’s willing to call you on your shit, can be rough.
Well the Christians re-write their gospels all the time. The Catholics hold a conference every couple centuries and go over any changes they want to make to the bible. What books and parables are put in, taken out, or “re-written to reflect current ideologies”. AFAIK, the last one was before women’s suffrage, so it’s definitely written from a white CIS male POV. Those who didn’t like the way Christianity was written, taught, or worshiped? They went out and started their own sects. Protestants, Russian Orthodox, Episcopaleans, Lutherans, heck, the Mormons even have their own book of writings that nobody else has.
No, they don’t. You can lay the King James Bible next to a modern translation and you’ll see it’s actually the same text. Councils are discussions on orthodoxy. Interpretations of Scripture may differ, but the underlying text remains the same. That the First Council of Nicaea decided which books to exclude from the Bible is a spurious anecdote by Voltaire, repeated and popularized by Dan Brown. However, it’s true that the Bible has not always been the same collection of books.
Yeah, ty for that.
Not to turn this into a religion thread, but the only thing I would add is that small tweaks are made over time as they compare the oldest texts they can find and work out what errors were introduced as people copied and re-copied.
Most scholars don’t rely on the King James these days because it contains a bunch of those errors. They didn’t really have so many different ancient texts that they could work from at that point in history.
But yeah, the goal for scholars isn’t to corrupt the texts into something more palatable, but to find the most original text they can. Then everyone else figures out what to do with the text.
They don’t tend to change the texts all that often aside from translation updates. But 90% of the religion is the tradition about how the texts are to be interpreted. And that has changed in both small and large ways many times over the centuries.
Huh. I can’t help but compare this banter-y speculation (with E-merl sans hat, no less) to E-merl’s eventual fate.
I think the problem isn’t so much that gospels need to be updated wholesale, but that people don’t look into the context of when and how the gospels were written and how they should affect us today.
The foreshadowing! Its too much!
Go Rachel! You git it girl, yeah!
…Oh wait, you’re saying that was supposed to be a “little hint”? If you say so. To me she seems to be in full-on flirt mode, at least by Rachel’s standards.