Some say the Pope doesn’t know the Bible because the Bible supports the death penalty. But, the Bible has all sorts of dos and do nots that almost all Christians ignore. The Pope is going deeper than hypocritically and inconsistently following something just because it is in the Bible. He is using reason and theological principles combined with the Bible to determine what is right and wrong.
For those who think the Bible started the seeds of human dignity that later led to the abolition of slavery even though God is clearly cool with slavery in the Bible, then you don’t have a consistent argument saying that because God commanded, or was cool with, the death penalty in Biblical times, we must be for the death penalty now.
The Pope is using the same Christian argument for overriding the Bible’s pro-slavery passages to override its pro-death penalty passages.
Two reasons the four gospels were chosen were 1) they were older so they had more time to spread and become more well-known. 2) when the canon was being put together, these four could be better used to argue what the Orthodox believed compared to adding others or removing some of these.
A more accurate translation of the Old Testament is not that ‘in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth’, but that ‘when he began to create the heavens and the earth’…meaning, this is just when he began to create them, and…it is not the beginning of time.
Texas’s selections of readings that students must read are specific selections of verses and interpretations biased toward a particular view of theology and morality. It chooses mistranslations. Texas is requiring historically misleading passages and interpretations to preach to students–an outrageous rejection of the founders’ belief in church and state separation.
These passages and interpretations don’t help one understand history or literacy, but mislead in favor of a particular historically false theological interpretation that doesn’t aid in understanding the Bible’s historical or literature value.
The writer of the Book of Revelations was advocating for things that went starkly against what Jesus himself is purported to have said.
One of the reasons Revelations was included in the Bible was because it could be used to argue for the Trinity.
Revelations was written to specific Christians who felt that they were being persecuted by the Roman Empire, and it was promising that the good Christians would triumph and God would punish the persecutors.