[Disclaimer] - I am not an American and I consider myself atheist, I am Caucasian and born in a pre-dominantly Christian country.
Based on my limited knowledge of Christianity, it is all about social justice, compassion and peace.
And I was always wondering how come Republicans are perceiving themselves as devout Christians while the political party they support is openly opposing those virtues and if this doesn’t make them hypocrites?
For them the mortal enemy are the lefties who are all about social justice, helping the vulnerable and the not so fortunate and peace.
Christianity sounds to me a lot more like socialist utopia.
The historicity of Jesus is that there was a Christian movement that was suppressed by Rome. But I’m not sure we can verify, even, it was led by an apocalyptic prophet. There were no texts before Mark, as the movement was entirely word of mouth, and as per all games of telephone, evolved with each retelling.
What scholarly consensus does assert is the scripture is not univocal, inspired or inerrant, and the narrative bends with every era to affirm the morality of the time. This is to say, it’s not a source for right or wrong, but a tool used to give authority to external beliefs. Whether that is to justify charity and compassion or to justify genocide against gays and Palestinians is up to the individual.
I completely agree - Paul is certainly apocalyptic, but something like the Gospel of Thomas has very different ideas, such as:
You see a similar notion opposed in the Epistles:
(It’s worth noting that while 2 Timothy is classically considered to be forged, it is the only disputed letter to have the same relative amount of personal reference as Paul’s undisputed letters - he happened to talk about himself a lot like a covert narcissist is prone to, and that may offer another perspective on authenticity that’s been missed by scholarship to date.)
That’s a spurious claim based on an argument from silence and at odds with Papias’s description of a sayings work we don’t have, as well as a number of scholars estimating the date of a early core for the Gospel of Thomas, which Paul even seems to quote from as among the collection of resources in Corinth, potentially even as a written document.
Even an earlier form of Mark probably predated the version of Mark we have today. And the Pauline Epistles are documentary evidence that predate Mark (and likely even informed it).
While the first part is true, the second is a gross oversimplification. The morals of some people at the time. For example, there was a massive women’s speech movement going on in the first century that the church was opposing, including regarding women’s speech in early Christian circles. So the scriptures that are misogynistic in the NT don’t necessarily reflect the broader morals of the time so much as the reactionary morals of a select few controlling that version of the narrative.
Same with how Jesus was suddenly talking about marriage being between a man and a woman in a gospel whose extant version is dated after 70 CE, relevant to gay marriage having become an institution in Rome after Nero married two men in the 60s CE, but much less relevant in the 30s CE when he was allegedly saying it.
So keep in mind scripture only reflects morals of a select few of the time (and at the time of various edits).