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.
The oldest surviving structure built by a Muslim ruler is the Dome of the Rock, built on the location of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem. It was a real imperial dominating occupier move.
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.