The New Testament as literature.

I'm going to read the New Testament as literature. It's so important to understand references to the bible in literature, so really there is no escaping it. I live in the USA, and while the people who say they are Christians, their actions say otherwise. That's an ethnic Christian. Someone who is raised up in the tradition but hasn't really committed to the spiritual life. They can go to church and give money to the church, they can even be a priest. But if you're not trying to live the spiritual life, then you're only just an ethnic Christian, you were raised in the tradition and you follow along enough to seem to be spiritual but underneath you're just a regular person without spirituality. And that's OK. I'm coming to see the spiritual life as a rare option. 

I like the God of love, though it's speculated that that was a later insert, and there is a quote where Jesus rebukes the person who rebukes the woman for giving him expensive oil, saying he would only be here for a little while, so it was OK to squander money on rich presents for him instead of giving to the poor.

As I've said I don't see the Bible as the word of god, because god is a either remote and uninvolved in the world, or there is evil and she's complicit with the evil. The free will boondoggle doesn't work, outside free will god could act and she doesn't.

I say she because I want to subvert the patriarchy. Men and women are equal but in Christianity, that is not true. I have a friend who went to the church to complain about her husband abusing her and they basically said he has the right to, just take it. Sorry, that's patriarchy, and that's why god is he to them. I'm going to use the pronoun she because the feminine in divinity must be better. I'm sure there's a downside to matriarchy abuse of power but I haven't seen it. Nobody is perfect men or women, when they are in charge.  

I understand that through the history of humanity, whatever we can't understand gets slotted into miracles and whatnot, but I don't think anything breaks regular conditionality. And if god is the transcendental, what is beyond conditions, it's that remote god that doesn't do anything and isn't anything you can speak about with words. Mysticism maybe can talk about it, and I like mysticism. But it's groping in the dark. Howling into the void. God is dead, but culturally she lives on. Thus I study a root text to help me to understand literature.  

My first go through will be the King James, to be close to the language of Shakespeare. Shakespeare read other bibles, but King James was of his time.

I'm going to give a readers response of Matthew below:

Matthew: Lots of begetting, which is also known as sex. 14+14+14=42 generations from Abraham to the birth of Christ. For Joseph to find that Mary was with child before they consummate the marriage must have been a shock. She had conceived by the holy ghost. Thinking it's a blessed child is a pretty cool way to cope with cuckoldry. Herod was king, and the wise men came with gold and incense. Herod was going to kill the child so they fled to Egypt. I looked it up on Google Maps, it's 430 miles at least. Even so Herod killed all the children "to the coasts. There's the Mediterranean to the left and the Dead Sea to the right. That's a lot of ground and probably an exaggeration. And not just newborns, those 2 and under. Ramah is way up north and if the lamentations went that north, that's quite some territory. But Herod eventually died, and Joseph brought his family back. He went up north near to the sea of Galilee, Nazareth is to the left of the sea, almost in the center between the two seas. (I know the biblical cities are probably different than the current modern cities, but I haven't found the Google Biblical Maps yet.) John The Baptist makes an entrance in clothes of camel hair and "leather girdle about his loins". It's hard to imagine Judaea a wilderness, but that is what John The Baptist came from. We get the first mention of heaven. "The Kingdom of heaven is at hand." Does he mean in the here and now or the afterlife? He ate locus with honey. People got baptized and confessed their sins all around the region. They trace their spiritual tradition back to Abraham. 3:10 seems to say if the fruit of baptism doesn't appear then cast people into the fire? Perhaps they live in the burning world, the water doesn't dowse their fire? John says someone will come along and baptise with the Holy Ghost and fire. Anyone baptized with fire? Hard to imagine. But they will burn the chaff, the waste of wheat that is thrown away. I didn't know what it meant that John had "suffered him" meaning Jesus, but the NIV (New International Version) says he consented to be baptized by Jesus. Here we get god descending like a dove. Jesus is the son of god. 

I decided to read the NIV version from here along with the KJ version. I need to find a better version, though I'm only reading free versions.

4. Jesus goes into the wilderness and fasts for 40 days. That's pretty intense. The Buddha fasted so that you could see his spine, probably an exaggeration, and I'm not sure how long. And he would eat one grain of rice a day, so it wasn't a complete fast. 

This seems to be a common activity for spiritual people. I've been working on fasting. I haven't gotten past a day, which is more like 32 hours. When I look on Reddit, the longest fast I found was 26 days.

It says he was tempted by the devil. I can't help but think of Mara, the Buddhist version of the devil, the temptation being to give into urges, the hunger. Learning to not be reactive, to be creative is the goal of Buddhism. There are similarities and differences between the two spiritual tradition. The devil tells him to throw himself off a building and Jesus says not to test god, that way. The devil took him to a high place and said he would give it all to him, but Jesus declined and the devil left and he was attended by angels. 

When I hear of angels I think of my grandmother who imagined she would be in heaven with wings. I hope she is right, she was a lovely woman, very kind to me. It was a barrier to me and my grandparents that I didn't embrace Baptist Christianity. Ditto for my other grandparents. I've always felt a kind of nostalgia for my grandparents and it's intertwined with Christianity. I met a lovely woman in the park once who was a preacher's wife, and she invited me to her church. I'm not connected to a Buddhist sangha at the moment, beyond some individual friendships. That is a huge hole in spiritual life, I'm not going for refuge to the sangha enough.

John gets put in prison, so Jesus went to Capernaum, which is on the north side of the Sea of Galilee, and taught 2 of the 12 tribes of Israel (Look at the Wikipedia page, it has a good map). He told them to, "repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near." Simon, Peter and Andrew were fishing and Jesus asked them to follow him, and they quit fishing. Then he added James and John who were former fishermen too. From there he preached in synagogues, "healed every disease and sickness." News started to spread, people came and he healed them.

I bet letting the sick approach him filled them with positive energy. Charismatic people can cast a kind of spell on you, make you feel good, positive. I bet getting attention while sick is a positive thing. 

You can see where the faith healing tradition come from here. I can't help but see the Steve Martin version. 

5. This has the sermon on the mount about the beatitudes. Wikipedia: "the Beatitudes present a new set of ideals that focus on love and humility rather than force and exaction."