No Stupid Questions

The old guys message wasn't working anymore, the age of Pharos and godkings was done. You couldn't just mass execute people anymore, everyone was really woke and PC.

The ruling class needed to revamp the religious arm of the machine that enslaves us all to get with the times or there were going to keep being problems.

You know how corporate media are, it's easier to sell a sequel.

You know what, we're going for a kind of apple vibe, we're literally just going to call this thing "THE BOOK".

Everyone will step into line after we nail a few to boards and stuff

Fiction usually has highs and lows. Unfortunately all the authors wrote under pseudonyms, and multiple editors went through the plagiarized stories, some books were left out, and the consistency is just a mess. Not to mention the terrible translations. Your local Library most certainly has better Fiction books that are very well written and highly entertaining.

I guess they did some market research between the two testaments

Keep in mind that most likely the historical Jesus was just one of many apocalyptic preachers going around telling people that, within the lifetime of some present, God was going to come down and vanquish evil once and for all, so one had better be prepared and be on God's good side when this happened. (Incidentally, the Romans probably could not have cared less about this; it was when they got word that he was claiming to be an earthly king--which may have been how Judas actually betrayed him--that they got seriously pissed and executed him because they had a zero tolerance policy for that kind of thing.)

You can see imminent apocalypse theme in the epistles where John writes that there is no real point making big life changes like getting married since the world is going to end any day; amusingly, when this did not happen, they needed to start coming up with alternative policies, and so other letters start to set down rules which thematically contradict the earlier letters, but it turns out that there are other things about these letters that make them different too so I'm many cases they are considered to be forgeries. (Obviously this is an oversimplification of the academic research!)

(Also, it's also worth noting that John and the apostles had really different notions of what Jesus was all about, and part of the whole point of Acts is to paper over these differences and make it seem like they had all been past of one team all along.)

Finally, it is worth pointing out that there were a lot of texts floating around in the same genre as Revelation, so it was not all that unique and it almost did not make it's way into the Bible, but the Church Fathers thought incorrectly that the John who wrote it was the same as the author of the Gospel of John; if they had known that these were two different Johns, then the Left Behind series would never have been written (amount other consequences).

So in conclusion, be very wary of trying to read a lot of significance into the New Testament as a whole because it was not a unified document written with single purpose.

It's because the Old Testament is actually just the Torah, rearranged and edited to fit the beliefs of what was once a sect of Judaism. That sect branched off when they decided that Jesus Christ was their Messiah, then progressively became more open and split away from the rest of Judaism and became their own religion.

That might be a bit oversimplified, but that's really the gist of it. Jesus made a new covenant with god, which was meant to replace the old one, chronicled in the New Testament; but the old covenant was kept in as background, becoming the Old Testament.

The old testament is essentially Judaism which is an ethnic religion. There is no marketing needed because it is a religion for a specific group of people from a theoretical single lineage. There is no need for God to be accepting or patient since the goal appears to be unify and keep people under control during times of great strife.

Christianity is a universal religion ie. it tries to create new followers. If you're a religion that is trying to grow your following, you need to have a message of openness and acceptance.

The Old Testament is a bunch of books, letters, poems, historical and legal documents. That when read tell the story of the Jews and their relationship with God and the world over a couple of thousand years. They reflect the culture in which they were written. Many of the documents were written during wars where the writer is convinced God is on their side. There are many prophesies especially in Isaiah which point to Jesus. So when Jesus arrives and fulfills the prophesies some of the Jews follow Jesus but many powerful leaders are awaiting a different, more normal king figure and they are comfortable as they are so choose not to follow. The New Testament is written in a time of relative stability during the longtime invasion by the romans. The writers of those letters and books, some of whom are eyewitnesses to the life of Jesus. (Almost unique in historical documents) take a different stance to who God is. But they don’t all agree. Basically Bible means library.

This is one of the reasons Gnosticism exists. In the gnostic interpretation the God of the old testament was the demiurge, while the snake is identified with God or Jesus.

Maybe because JC was a great guy and a lot of people believed in what he had to say. So, in order to benefit from his fame and gain the trust of his past and potential future followers, there was a gathering a hundred or so years after his death where they chose suitable accounts of his life to include in the book called the new testament. Accounts like the ones later found in the Nag Hammadhi texts and "gnostic gospels" were excluded because they undermined the authoritiy of the church and the power of priests to be the only ones to interpret the will of God.

God a bitch

In the gnostic belief it is just two different gods.

Not a particularly informed comment, but I always figured because people started getting scared of the Christian god, so they started turning towards other religions. As a consequence, the Christian church needed to figure out how to make Christianity a bit more approachable, so the new testament and forgiveness were created.

It depends where you read. There is fire and brimstone in the new testament. Revelation is a book that doesn't hold back and we see a wrothful God of judgment. But then there stories of Josiph and his brothers, or the book of Daniel, shows that there is forgivness in the old testament as well.