The best General History of Religion books: Reddit reviews

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Read The Bible Unearthed. There isn't even any archaeological evidence for the genocide of Canaan or the Exodus. So now ya get to have Christians not only argue that the genocide happened because the Bible said so, but that it was morally justified. Fun!

well for one, christian persecution at the beginning is something of a myth - there were some persecutions, but they were isolated events.

there's this idea that the romans just hungrily wanted all the christians dead because they were christians. however, christians at the time WANTED to be martyred - it was preached by bishops as a noble thing, it was played up in christian literature, and whenever christians were arrested they did everything they could to not co-operate so they'd be executed. (for more info, read Candida Moss' "The Myth Of Persecution", and Catherine Nixey's "The Darkening Age")

if the romans were so giddy to execute, and the christians happy to be nixed, there would be no christianity today. there woulda been no christianity by the time of constantine, to be sure.

if you want to talk about a religion that's been persecuted and survived, try judaism. compared to that culture, christianity is a wimpy crybaby.

Turns out nothing has changed.

Almost all Christian martyrdom stories from early Christianity are false. Read all about it in this book book by Candida Moss.

> Is this a good book for a lay person for an introduction to the origins of yahweh / the major monotheistic religions?

No.

> By “good” I mean is it held in good/ high regard among scholars?

I'm fairly certain that it is not.

You'd be better off reading The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel & Michael Heiser's work on the Divine Council.

EDIT: grammar

The ancient Semitic pantheon (which included 70 sons of El, including Baal) was widely believed in across the region. What made Judaism unique was its eventual push toward monotheism, although traces of the old pantheon are still in the Hebrew Bible.

Mark Smith has put out some good scholarship on the topic:

https://www.amazon.com/Early-History-God-Biblical-Resource/dp/080283972X

Asherah was originally a wife of the father God El, although later Yahweh was brought in (possibly from contact with Edom) and El and Yahweh were eventually merged.

This interesting convergence tends to be brought up in apologetic literature but I haven't seen it from church leaders. The Deuteronomic Reforms removed "pagan" altars and gods from Hebrew worship, including the worship of Asherah. Is it the LDS position that those reforms were correct? Incorrect? Somewhere in between? There isn't an official position as far as I know, but if Asherah is to be associated with Heavenly Mother it might be necessary to take one.

It's an interesting area of LDS theology that hasn't really been explored much.

>Any books you can recommend covering this?

a history of god

>Old Testament actually referred to other Gods actually being thought to exist. Do they not read it?

i've been apollogetizied on those already, they are either not real gods but metaphors for worldly things or it was taken out of context /s

The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities of Ancient Israel by Mark S. Smith is a fantastic book with (too many?) references that really paints the picture of Judeo-Christian God as just another iron age mythology, no different than any other.

Edit: link

You should read The Immortality Key

It details the ancient church’s relationship with drugs - mostly psychedelics and opioid type drugs. Happy reading!

Why should I believe a random Quora answer instead of a Yale Professor, or an actual textual critic?

Well, according to the textual analysis, they did a lot of both: copies of the books which now make up the Christian Bible differ across what was the Roman empire (eg the copies in Alexandria, Egypt are quite different from those we find in Rome which are different again from those we find around Judea).

On top of that, once Constantine converted he convened a council and many books were decreed “heresy” and excluded from what is now the Christian Bible: plenty of people in churches across the empire suddenly found Scripture that had been passed down for hundreds of years was considered heresy now because a recent convert who happened to be emperor and/or his advisors didn’t like it.

Bart Ehrman’s MISQUOTING JESUS is an excellent scholastic resource if you’re interested in the details of this sort of thing:

Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why https://www.amazon.com/dp/0060859512/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glc_fabc_7JACJP33W5J4QRM26WXW

An accessible work written about this subject is Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth.

More about this subject can be found at the wiki/FAQ pages here: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskBibleScholars/wiki/faq

Specifically, numbers 12, 32, and 34.

According to secular historians?

Yeah...not a chance.

The consensus is that pre-Exile, the Bible is entirely unreliable. Post-Exile it has a lot of fact, but it's heavily propagandized.

Here's a great book to read on the matter: https://www.amazon.com/Bible-Unearthed-Archaeologys-Vision-Ancient/dp/0684869136

Along with everything listed here, your friends may be inclined to listen to Bart Ehrman. He's an atheist New Testament scholar who has written and spoken quite a bit against Jesus mythicism. Be aware that as an atheist he has many claims about both the historicity of certain parts of the bible and the figure of Christ himself that I find problematic, but he does a good job refuting the idea that Jesus never existed period. If you or your friends enjoy reading, his book Did Jesus Exist? is a good presentation a secular case for the historical figure of Jesus. He has also been on the radio show/podcast Unbelievable?
If you like podcasts, then Unbelievable? has a ton of great episodes debating this issue if you search through the archives. (And, might I add, if you're doing any kind of apologetics it's a great resource to listen to Christians having fantastic apologetics discourse with people from all kinds of belief systems.)

Since everyone is saying everyone else is wrong, both you and /u/TheBlackBear are wrong (well, sort of). They (the party, not necessarily Republican voters) only care about two core things:

1. Making the rich richer.
2. Pushing white evangelical Christian nationalism.

Not everyone in the party cares equally about these two things, but those are the two core drivers that the modern Republican party are built upon. Everything else-- including all the things that /u/TheBlackBear refers to, as well as the racism, homophobia, and misogyny-- follow from those core ideals.

I'm just reading the book Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation and it really does a good job of tracing both the history of white evangelical Christian nationalism and shows the effect that they have had and are having on our national policies. Their ultimate goal is to make the US a Christian theocracy. Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States is another good book on the subject.

While nothing these two books cover started with Trump (Jesus and John Wayne traces it's roots back to the Eisenhower administration), it's hard to truly understand the Trump presidency without understanding these forces. It's really far more terrifying then it even appears on the surface.

>According to Plato, "the ultimate design of the Mysteries ... was to lead us back to the principles from which we descended, ... a perfect enjoyment of intellectual [spiritual] good

>Upon reaching Eleusis, there was an all-night vigil (pannychis) according to Mylonas and Kerenyi. Perhaps commemorating Demeter's search for Persephone. At some point, initiates had a special drink (kykeon), of barley and pennyroyal, which has led to speculation about its chemicals perhaps having psychotropic effects from the Ergot fungi.

>Discovery of fragments of ergot (fungi containing LSD like psychedelic alkaloids) in a temple dedicated to the two Eleusinian Goddesses excavated at the Mas Castellar site (Girona, Spain) provided legitimacy for this theory. Ergot fragments were found inside a vase and within the dental calculus of a 25-year-old man, providing evidence of Ergot being consumed (Juan-Stresserras, 2002). This finding seems to support the hypothesis of ergot as an ingredient of the Eleusinian kykeon.

>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleusinian_Mysteries#Participants

More

I recommend Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide by Edward Feser. I found it very informative while at the same time being easy to understand.

I would tie the origins of the War on Drugs in the US to the Christian crackdown on use of plants and sacred ceremonies all around the world for centuries. Peyote was the first drug made illegal here in the US. Mushrooms in Mexico. The witch hunts in Europe and America. I would recommend Brian Muraresku’s book The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name for more on this. Basically, drugs have been associated with anyone who is different. And people who think differently scare us.

The overwhelming academic consensus is that there was a historical Jesus, the mythicist hypothesis (which is the main competitor) is really fringe (not that there aren't biblical scholars and peer-reviewed papers that support it, but they're treated kind of like climatologists who deny anthropogenic global warming).

Bart Ehrman (an extremely respected NT scholar who generally identifies as an agnostic) wrote a book for non-scholars on the topic, Did Jesus Exist?, but while I recommend Ehrman's work generally, I haven't read that particular book.

You don’t seem very versed in theology.

I recommend starting here. https://www.amazon.ca/History-God-000-Year-Judaism-Christianity/dp/0345384563/ref=nodl_

Either way, he was talking about God/Allah/Jehova being the same to bring people together claiming he was doing it to ignite religious “wars” and divide is false.

This is a fascinating book to read: The Early History of God: : Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel by Mark S. Smith. Excellent scholarly work showing YHWH's pre-Jewish roots as a Canaanite deity.

In it we also learn how little we know about the role of Asherah. While there is a snippet of info about Asherah as YHWH's consort, and we know that something called an Asherah Pole existed, there is almost no knowledge of her role in the ancient Israelite religion. She doesn't appear to have been worshipped, and I don't believe we know much about what she represented.

Worth a read - I recommend it for all.

> They belong to a cult that is brainwashing them from birth.

I hate to be that guy, but that IS Christianity as a whole. I'm Agnostic with a Bachelors in History here. You would be amazed about how much a regular Christian is clueless about how the bible was built, by whom, and why it's been changed over the centuries. Here's a good book from amazon if you are interested in learning more..

I recently read Jesus and John Wayne and it brought all kinds of flashbacks from growing up in Baptist churches.

1) the historical consensus is that Jesus did, in fact, exist. Bart Ehrman, the world's leading atheistic Bible scholar, even wrote a book dedicated to explaining to other atheists that Jesus did in fact exist: https://www.amazon.com/Did-Jesus-Exist-Historical-Argument/dp/0062206443

2) So what if every religion thinks they're right and the others are wrong. the same is true of political ideologies. That's just how a debate works.

If you're interested in HOW the bible was put together, by who, and when, the The Bible Unearthed is a great resource. It uses known history, archaeology, etc. not religious views. It's well sourced, and interesting.

Thanks, I'm glad I'm not in that mess any longer, either.

You might also find this book interesting:

https://www.amazon.com/Early-History-God-Biblical-Resource/dp/080283972X

I use the Amazon links because you usually get a free preview on those links.

> But the Bible itself is a good secondary source

Not really. There are so many issues with the Bible for the time frame. As an example - there was never a census like the Bible describes, crucifixion was not performed in the manner described in Bible, the Romans never forgave prisoners for Passover, etc.

If you throw in that none of the existing texts of the New Testament date even close to the actual events. A very good book on how the New Testament was written is 'Misquoting Jesus' by Bart Ehrman

Samt de arkeokjemiske bevisene som blir lagt frem i Brian Muraresku sin "The Immortality Key" som mer eller mindre beviser at Allegro hadde rett.

Så ikke lenger en teori, vi vet de tidlige kristne brukte ett ergotamin basert hallusinogen, dvs det slekter på LSD/LSA.

Here is a brief overview.

If you wanna go for a deep dive, this book provides a historian’s look at the history the religious right. I’m still reeling from it, though I don’t know if it would be as interesting to those who didn’t grow up in that world.

the historical and scholarly consensus is that Jesus did, in fact, exist.

Bart ehrman, the world's leading atheistic Bible scholar, wrote a book dedicated to explaining this to other atheists. https://www.amazon.com/Did-Jesus-Exist-Historical-Argument/dp/0062206443

@WorriedBoysenBerry

I think you should read The Immortality Key. It presents an interesting case that Jesus of Nazareth was trying to bring psychedelics to the masses as a way of enlightenment.

There are some fascinsting connections to Ancient Greece and the transition to Roman Catholicism and how religious dogma over the centuries has completely missed the orginal intent of the sacrament.

https://www.amazon.com/Immortality-Key-Uncovering-History-Religion/dp/1250207142