Classic example of someone reading a few passages about something that has been studied and poured over for centuries and is like, "No! It works like this..."
Delusions of Grandeur & Narcissism at its peak.
Sorry bro, but the reason it works like this is that for centuries, people have taken the word of the canon writers that these are the gospel. Revelation itself made sure that canon is strongly enforced by this passage.
For I testify together to everyone who hears the Words of the prophecy of this Book: If anyone adds to these things, God will add on him the plagues that have been written in this Book. And if anyone takes away from the Words of the Book of this prophecy, God will take away his part out of the Book of Life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which have been written in this Book.
I am not arrogant enough to say "I know the right way to interpret the Bible and everyone else is wrong."
I am a skeptic, not a narcissist. I instead say, "But... what if you're wrong? What if some of these writings were
frauds?"
I know the typical path of Bible writing. We study the Greek and Hebrew translation, which has resulted in yet another copy among hundreds, maybe thousands. We decide whether to translate literally, paraphrase, or a mix. But we never question whether there is text that in fact
shouldn't be there. But I wondered about that. After all, the Jews have been conquered and enslaved many times, and in fact there was ample opportunity for their enemies to try to destroy them in combat. But suppose this failed, and the Jews remained Jewish, a united people. How do we keep them in check?
Hey, I know! We
distort their writings.
1. Now they have a history that tells them that Jews that don't share their history and have a different Bible are not REAL Jews. Voila, suddenly Jews are not allies with the Samaritans. Nor Christians.
2. We get them to adopt some Babylonian or Egyptian ideas. In particular, we get them to worship temples (not God, who is spirit) and laws (not God, who is about freedom from captivity). Not God himself, manmade objects.
3. We give them prophecies that distort their connection with the One True God, who wants us to understand that this world is created on behalf of all humanity. This one in particular is really bad, because it means that the Jews completely lose touch with the idea that God can become human and care for humans. It also means that the Christians and Jews are divided. The Christians blame the Jews for killing Jesus (even though he explicitly said his kingdom is not an earthly kingdom), and the Jews think the Christians are polytheistic heretics.
4. We also give the Christians false writings so that they doubt the very teachings of Jesus, and are unable to effectively lead any kind of meaningful change in the world (despite this, Christianity still did an immense amount of good, but for years it suffered under the Catholic near-monopoly on dogma, which even managed to convince the Orthodox church to accept these writings as canon).
5. Lastly, insert false writings into older text, so it isn't even clear what was trying to be said, blending it into existing ideas.
I employed my skills as an amateur historiographer and theological analyst (okay, I'm amateur at both of these things), and looked through quite a portion of this text. I learned the following things:
1. Revelation is clearly a distorted plagiarism of Ezekiel, not New Testament knowledge. Aside from name-dropping Jesus, it has literally nothing to do with the gospel. In fact, it is very clearly intended to distort what Ezekiel actually said as a sort of wet dream about (mostly Jewish) Christians fighting the secular world and purging the world of evil. At this point, I need to reference something quick. Remember John 3:16, the most commonly quoted passage from the Bible? I need to introduce you to the very next verse.
3:17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.
Another red flag is the stern warning not to remove this book (or any part of it), nor add anything to it. It is basically like saying "This is not some crappily-written hallucinations of a person who may not even be John, these are super-sacred prophecies." But Jesus directly warned against people that would come after him claiming to speak for him.
(Yes, I am aware of the irony here, but it's a necessary evil to warn against really crap writings)
2. I do not trust Zechariah either. Just as Jeremiah shows a false prophet telling the king what he wants to hear, here Zechariah is telling the Jewish people what they want to hear, "Never you worry, we Jews will have our Messiah, and he will destroy our enemies. And God wants us to be bloodthirsty savages who not only kill lambs and doves by the truckload but also tries to assassinate state authorities." A false prophet tells people what they want to hear. A real prophet tells the truth, even if it costs them their friends. Even if it costs their life.
3. Daniel 6 actually ends with this passage:
6:28 So Daniel prospered during the reign of Darius and the reign of Cyrus the Persian.
This is very clearly a "he lived happily ever after" segment. Instead, afterward, we have a shift from third person historical to prophetic, gradually switching to first person by about chapter 8. Textual changes are a read flag that it isn't the same person writing the text (as I discovered doing my own edits). It is clearly tampered with, and the fact that later passages, like Revelation say "an angel told me all of this" should give us pause.
Let God’s curse fall on anyone, including us or even an angel from heaven, who preaches a different kind of good news than the one we preached to you.
Rather than being a prophecy of Jesus, the one who comes to redeem us, it is a series of dark prophecies of end times. Daniel 2's prophecy seems perfectly fine, while these after Daniel 6 tell of specific timelines (possibly in order to discredit) and even claim the one who is Jesus will set up an abomination of desolation, and finally that there will be some great false prophet. I scrubbed those passages in my bible from the NT too, as they don't belong, so Jesus's prophecy of the Temple now reads as mentioned in the attachment below.
Prophecy of the TempleThe prophecy is not about the abomination of desolation (though technically, the Temple falling for centuries could be called that). It is about Jesus's death and resurrection, linked to the new creation of the kingdom of God. This is then paired with a coupled fulfillment of the prophecy, complete with the truth about what has happened with most of the Bible since then. That is has essentially been covered up, so that regular people and especially Jews, would have no hope of salvation (but salvation is unconditional, so the only thing this affects is that alot of people are suffering from the side-effects of ignorance).
4. Also, God is male and female in the Bible, but certain books, like Proverbs, are heavily tampered with to scrub this fact to prop up a patriarchal culture. As such, I removed a massive amount of text from the book, and renamed Proverbs to reflect what it was originally intended to be about, before hamfisted sayings from father to son were added. I then renumbered everything. The actual passage reads as a lady who even says she existed since the founding of the world (mirroring what John tells us of the Word of God), a coherent reference to Jesus, and a reference to a wise lady of the household. All of these work together to make a much shorter but more important book, which pairs beautifully with the Song of Songs.
Lady Wisdom(Unfortunately, it turns out that I cannot attach files directly, so I have Discord download links if you wanna see this stuff)