What Do You Do With a Chocolate Jesus? Read Online Free PDF

offshoot of Judaism, the Hebrew Bible (with all the stories of Eden, Noah, Abraham, and Moses) is part of that tradition. Because Jesus was supposed to be the fulfillment of Hebrew prophecy, and God’s way of cutting a new deal (or new covenant) with humanity, the official stories about him came to be known as the New Testament. This meant that the Jewish prophecies he allegedly fulfilled, which were first compiled in a single book around 430 B.C., got stuck with being called the Old Testament.
    At the core of the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible is The Law, which is found in the Pentateuch —the first five books. They were supposedly written around 1200 B.C. by Moses. The fact that they describe Moses’ death is just one of the many reasons why most scholars don’t buy this. Actually, they are collections of stories produced by two rival priesthoods from two rival Hebrew kingdoms—Israel and Judah—beginning around 900 B.C.
    Those from the northern kingdom of Israel worshipped a more sophisticated deity, El, the high god of Canaan. He was a calm, aristocratic god who said blissful things like, “Let there be light.”
    By contrast, the southern Hebrew kingdom of Judah had a more rugged, desert culture, and they worshipped Yahweh, the more primitive god of storms and fertility. He’s the one that made man from a lump of clay, breathed up Adam’s nose to give him life (yuck) and then cloned a woman from his rib. Yahweh worked with his hands, was big on vengeance, and had problems with anger management.
    When the northern kingdom was invaded by Assyria in 722 B.C., the priests fled south to Judah. Now two competing priesthoods vied for supremacy in the one kingdom, and both rewrote the old stories to justify their own authority. Eventually, around 430 B.C., these two sets of stories were sandwiched together into a single book, written in Hebrew. More books about King David and Solomon and a dozen or so prophets were later added to the mix.
    Then, a landmark Greek translation of it all was produced by 70 scholars in Alexandria, Egypt around 250 B.C. It’s called the Septuagint —the popular Greek edition of the Hebrew Bible. This was the version of the Old Testament used as a reference by the writers of the New Testament.
    The New Improved Testament
     
    The New Testament tells us all about Jesus, or at least about the first and last years of his life—not much in between. It’s a collection of 27 books written between roughly A.D. 50 and A.D. 120. The Bible presents them in the order set by the Catholic Church, not in the order they were written. This was done to make it read like a chronological history of the religion. Many other writings about Jesus, some of them genuinely strange, never made it into the Scripture, though some churches include a few of them among their “apocryphal” books. It took about four centuries before the Church canonized the list of books we know today. Apparently, there was no hurry.
    The New Testament has two parts: the Gospels and the epistles. The first part is comprised of the Fab Four of Faith—the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, plus Acts of the Apostles , by the writer of Luke. The Gospels are allegedly biographical accounts of Jesus’ life, written at least two or three generations after his time.
    But the authors of these Gospels were not guys named Matthew, Mark, Luke or John. They were written anonymously, in Greek, and it wasn’t until the fourth century that the Church attributed them to four of Christ’s followers. It was a nice gesture, but it gave people a really false impression. Nobody knows who actually wrote them or even where the authors lived. None of them are eyewitness reports, none of the authors ever claimed to have met Jesus, and the author of Luke specifically says he got his information second-hand. Tell me if any of this is reassuring.
    The Gospel of Mark is the oldest of the four, written around the year A.D. 70. Matthew came along about a decade