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Early Christian Writings
- mortoc 8mo agoWhy is this being presented to the HN community?
- gespadas 8mo agoWhy not? It's a wonderful summary of writings. I'm so glad I found this resource on HN.
- nephihaha 8mo agoAs I said there, I've used this particular website many times. It's a great historical resource in some ways.
- nephihaha 8mo agoWhy not? I have been on this particular website quite a few times, but there have been other pages linked on here which I haven't been to so much. It's good to have a variety of interests. I am getting a broader range of websites and articles off here than mainstream media.
- SilverElfin 8mo agoAre there other such archives for other religions or cultures?
- irishcoffee 8mo agoAre you looking for a yes/no answer, or for someone else to do the legwork for you? I'll save you some time, the answer to you question is unequivocally: no. There are no other such archives for other religions or cultures. Just this one website. See how silly that sounds?
- nephihaha 8mo agoMileage may vary! The basic problem for an English speaker is that some languages are more translated than others. There are far more people translating from Greek, Hebrew and Latin works, than from Tibetan or Ge'ez (an Ethiopian language). I've heard about the Taoist canon recently, which is seemingly vast, and despite Chinese being a major language, and a substantial number of people knowing both Chinese and English... Only a fraction of the Taoist canon is available in English.
- irishcoffee 8mo agoI saw no claims the website needed to be written in English!
- SanjayMehta 8mo agoDharmapedia https://en.dharmapedia.net https://en.dharmapedia.net There's the sacred texts archive. https://sacred-texts.com/index.htm https://sacred-texts.com/index.htm
- nephihaha 8mo agoSacred Texts is excellent. I use that one too. There is a basic problem with some eastern texts, i.e. that many have not been translated into English. I was watching a video on Taoism recently, and a huge number of their scriptures are unavailable in English.
- qarl 8mo agoWhy not? They're nice stories. People like stories, even if they're entirely made up. I guess maybe it does feel a bit like gross proselytizing. Hm.
- DennisP 8mo agoThe link includes all sorts of stuff that modern Christians generally consider heretical, so I don't think it's proselytizing. Most people underestimate the diversity of beliefs in early Christianity. A lot of that was violently suppressed by Constantine, to the point that some of it was only dug up in the last century.
- qarl 8mo ago[flagged]
- kokanator 8mo agoOr perhaps those who are saying otherwise are trying to spread their own mind virus. It is interesting how derisive your comment is compared to those who are in support of interesting and diverging content. I am, however a bit confused by your comment as I have read several posts this week that had absolutely nothing to do with software/technology and most interestingly only two having to do anything with a compiler. Are you saying we should only post about compilers. I am waiting to be enlightened by your list of acceptable topics and content.
- qarl 8mo agoWell, actually, my culture doesn't program me to "bear witness", so no. I mean, you guys don't even try to hide it.
- kokanator 8mo ago@qarl but you ARE bearing witness. The beliefs you have accepted or you believe you have chosen has compelled you to bear witness here.
- misiti3780 8mo agoI, also frequent this sight to avoid religious dogma.
- BigTTYGothGF 8mo agoConsidering how often, say, lesswrong.com gets posted that may have been unwise.
- DiggyJohnson 8mo agoThat’s not a reason to visit this site. One of the current top 100 posts relates to western religion. It’s easy to avoid if uninterested. I enjoy that every now and then we have an ancient history, archeology, theology, literature, futurism or etc. post make the front page.
- trash88 8mo agoThis is not an online bible, it's an archive of the surviving material from a movement that has had unimaginable reach and impact on the world we live. You can see first hand how diverse their thelogy was prior to canon and orthodox enclosure.
- tptacek 8mo agoBecause it's interesting as hell. I'm Catholic, and clicking around in here there's practically nothing religious in it to me at all. No part of my own faith engages with Celsus Description of the Ophite Diagrams. But it sounds like something out of a Clive Barker book --- and, behold, it is like something out of a Clive Barker book: He is the Demiurge of this world, the God of Moses described in his creation narrative. Of the Seven archontic demons, the first is lion-shaped; the second is a bull; the third is amphibious and hisses horribly; the fourth is in the form of an eagle ; the fifth has the appearance of a bear, the sixth, that of a dog ; and the seventh, that of an ass named Thaphabaoth or Onoel. This is like a weird parallel of Greek mythology. But it's got a little extra charge because it ostensibly plugs into a modern religion. Super fascinating.
- bossyTeacher 8mo agoCan I ask why do you identify as "Catholic" and not as "Christian"? I have seen that a few times and it does seem like attempt from you to essentially state that you are making your own religion. How much splintering off can you do and still call yourself Christian? I am asking this in a purely curious way, btw!
- tptacek 8mo agoThat's weird to me because most Catholic people I know (Chicago is a very Catholic city) would identify themselves as "Catholic", not as "Christian". If you ask us "are you Christian", we'll say "yes", but it's not the word we use. Maybe that's totally different for evangelicals or some other mainline denomination. I wouldn't know.
- zozbot234 8mo ago"Catholic" is just a Greek word that means "general, universal", derived from "kata holou" ("in accordance with the whole"). It's the opposite of a splintering off, though there is a viable argument that they splintered off of Orthodox Christianity (due originally to the filioque controversy, and arguably with broader differences relating e.g. to the worship of graven images, and the like).
- johnjames87 8mo ago[dead]
- altruios 8mo agoHow is this technology related?
- sklargh 8mo agoReligion is basically assembly for civilization?
- trash88 8mo agoDocetism is an early version of the Holographic Universe theory.
- mellosouls 8mo agoIt doesn't have to be. From the guidelines (link at the bottom): On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity
- kokanator 8mo agoThe actual way you reason today has in large part to do with your religious cultural heritage. This is true regardless of whether you accept it or not. To say that Christianity has not impacted western culture including thinking and reasoning would be naive at best. Understanding this will help you to understand why you view the world and morality the way you do and in turn how you answer hard questions like technology's place in culture, life, workplace, etc.
- unclad5968 8mo agoReading the early Christian church leaders was enlightening, as a member of an evangelical church. My church didn't really have any answers when I asked why our practices/beliefs diverged so intensely, which was somewhat disappointing. The writings of the early Christian leaders are filled with Greek philosophy, genuine debates about theology, and a ton of wisdom for both believers and unbelievers.
- SilverElfin 8mo agoGiven the borrowing of ideas, why then do modern Christians, including evangelicals, dismiss other cultures so aggressively? For example Greek and Roman beliefs in god are described as “pagan”, which is a negative term. And obviously evangelicals are very hostile to other faiths even today, whether it’s Buddhism or Islam or Hinduism or whatever.
- Guestmodinfo 8mo agoBecause all ideas and all thought and all knowledge stem from Jesus and eventually will be used to worship HIM only but other gods are just made up distractions. This is the profound underlying theology
- tempaccountabcd 8mo ago[dead]
- api 8mo agoI’ve always seen American evangelism as a political movement first and a religious one second. This impression has strengthened quite a bit in recent years as it’s become clear that political movements and politicians that are diametrically opposed to the teachings of Jesus are perfectly okay if they align on other more immediate secular political issues. There’s always been a claim that the US is an outlier compared to other developed nations in terms of religiosity. I don’t really believe this anymore. I think we have a lot of politics with heavy religious veneer, but if you look only at sincere belief in the tenets of a faith I don’t think the US is much more religious than the UK for example.
- bobanrocky 8mo agoPersonally, i like occasional non-tech links like this ..
- permenant 8mo agoAnyone, Christian or atheist, who has any interest in the Science Vs Religion debate as it has existed since Darwin should look at "Against Celsus" by Origen. It provides a fascinating example of a well educated Roman philosopher and a well educated Christian Platonist philosopher arguing with each other.
- cratermoon 8mo agoI'm a fan of "Thunder, Perfect Mind" I am the knowledge of my inquiry, and the finding of those who seek after me, and the command of those who ask of me, and the power of the powers in my knowledge of the angels, who have been sent at my word, and of gods in their seasons by my counsel, and of spirits of every man who exists with me, and of women who dwell within me. I am the one who is honored, and who is praised, and who is despised scornfully. I am peace, and war has come because of me. And I am an alien and a citizen.
- ryan42 8mo agothe full thing is a long read, but its very good and interesting!
- Erem 8mo agoIs this a decent translation? http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/thunder.html http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/thunder.html
- cratermoon 8mo agoIt's the same translation provided at the collection mentioned in the post. https://earlychristianwritings.com/text/thunder.html https://earlychristianwritings.com/text/thunder.html Here's a more recent rendition https://diotima-doctafemina.org/translations/coptic/the-thunder-perfect-mind/ https://diotima-doctafemina.org/translations/coptic/the-thun...
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- canjobear 8mo agoI wonder about the accuracy of critical text methods like the ones that have been used to putatively reconstruct the Q document and to argue about authorship and dates. Have these methods ever been validated against a ground truth that the arguers didn't know about beforehand? Like, have we ever philologically reconstructed a text from other texts, and then found exactly that text buried somewhere? Or even something close to it? In the case of Q, you could argue that the Gospel of Thomas validates that there were texts of that kind (sayings gospels) floating around, but Thomas doesn't match the content of Q. Outside biblical scholarship, another area where people have tried to reconstruct what is going on in ancient texts is the Chinese classics, especially the really cryptic ones like the Yijing. But whenever some actual ancient manuscript gets dug out of an old grave or a bog, it seems like it just brings up more questions and complications, instead of validating anyone's theories. Compare to the philology methods that people use to reconstruct ancient languages. These have been validated pretty well. For example in the 19th century linguists were able to deduce that the Proto-Indo-European language must have had guttural consonants not found in any extant language, and then later when the Hittite language was decoded, the guttural consonants were right there. The theory was validated on held-out data. Has this ever happened for critical methods for discerning authorship and sources and missing texts?
- eucyclos 8mo agoWell, I usually reconstruct what TFA is about in Hacker News from what readers are saying about it and I can report that it works almost as well for a lot less effort! I jest, but on a serious note, a leading theological text would probably have the same ambiguity as to its meaning even if everyone had access to the original text. Knowing what everyone thinks something means isn't better than knowing what it means... but scientifically, they're indistinguishable!
- zeckalpha 8mo agoThose groups have more overlap than you'd think. Also, diff algorithms are derived from these methods...
- gdwatson 8mo ago
- rietta 8mo agoThis has been a source I’ve referred to on and off for years. It’s really interesting to read some things that don’t show up in our everyday Bible. Including things that were considered not canon by the early church. I enjoyed reading the translation of the Shepherds of Hermas. It was not the easiest to follow, but in a sense it was a very popular allegory like Pilgrim’s Progress was centuries later!
- nephihaha 8mo agoInteresting to hear someone discuss Hermas. I have never taken to it personally, but have attempted to get into it a few times. Hermas was very popular at one stage, and I've even heard some people argue that it should have been in the canon and the Book of Revelation taken out. (Although both books tend towards metaphorical imagery which is not always clear.)
- rietta 8mo agoIt was certainly popular enough to be included in the 4th-century Codex Sinaiticus, which is the oldest extant "complete" Bible (Genesis through Revelation) in a single bound volume. Interestingly, in that manuscript, The Shepherd of Hermas and the Epistle of Barnabas actually appear right after the New Testament. The library has published scanned copies online at https://www.codexsinaiticus.org/en/ https://www.codexsinaiticus.org/en/. It is an epic resource for anyone studying this history or textual criticism.
- SirensOfTitan 8mo agoI started exploring Christianity from an archetypal or psychological lens last year, and have found it really rewarding. I've put in thousands of hours of westernized Buddhist oriented meditation (I think "Pragmatic Dharma" is the term), and ultimately found it and the communities attached to it cultures of avoidance that loses something in its detachment of meditation technology from its larger context. I also grew up vaguely Presbyterian and hated it, so this was a great moment for me to reclaim my heritage on my own terms. I started with various books of the Nag Hammadi collection, reading the excellent Meyer translations, and started noticing some metaphors that felt like "hidden signposts" in the text (and had some relevance to some ideas in Buddhism). Gospel of Thomas and especially Gospel of Philip felt like they map quite well to non-dual ideas in Buddhism. I decided after some explorations of gnostic text to jump back into the gospels, wondering if I noticed the same kinds of hidden signposts there. I started this exploration during a trip to London with my wife, where I went and hunted down a copy of Bruce Rogers's amazing Oxford Lectern Bible at the Church of England reading room. What a beautiful bible -- it's so forward thinking that it feels like it was typeset last year, but while it is a beautiful piece, the King James translation of the bible is pretty incomprehensible. This little journey led me to the Sarah Ruden translations of the gospels, and as soon as I read them I felt the same kind of resonance. This all eventually led me to Cynthia Bourgeault's amazing "The Heart of Centering Prayer," which explores the non-dual kind of ideas in esoteric Christianity and lays out the practice of centering prayer as a basis of Christian spirituality. And I would remiss if I didn't mention Jacob Needleman: Esoteric Christianity was good, but his "Money and the Meaning of Life," really helped me put my own relationship with money in perspective. This is all a long winded way of saying: Christianity has a rich set of amazing spiritual resources, but they need to be consumed in a sort of non-literal way, where you're meeting the authors in the same mind as they were when they wrote the text. I'd also note that this kind of reading is not scholarly, the point isn't to find the right answer but to impute a larger meeting by meeting the author with your own struggles. We live in a time that is committed to a materialist reductionist mindset, but I believe that humans are naturally mystical beings, and that we leave a lot of real meaning on the table when we reduce the world down into solely material order. Rob Burbea explored these ideas (largely inspired by James Hillman's concept of "soulmaking") in his soulmaking dharma (https://hermesamara.org/ https://hermesamara.org/), the idea being an extension of emptiness: if all is fabrication, why wouldn't we make meaning that is beautiful? I'm sure I'm coming off quite a bit rambly, but it's very exciting to see such a resource on the HN front page. If you read my comment and feel any similar excitement, please check my profile and feel free to email me!
- gdwatson 8mo agoIt’s interesting that they’re organized by date. On an intuitive level, that makes sense. But so many of the dates are hotly debated, and reorganizing the list would produce such a different impression, that it’s a surprising choice. I am not a scholar of such things, but a quick glance at the documents I am familiar with suggests that the date ranges represent uncertainty within the compiler’s point of view. That’s reasonable, but when it’s linked out of context it’s not immediately obvious that it doesn’t reflect the range of debate in the broader secular scholarship, let alone secular and conservative religious scholarship taken together. So caveat lector. That said, the breadth of documents linked here is really impressive.
- spacebanana7 8mo agoHistorical documents should really have four dates: 1) Oldest full manuscript to be carbon dated (or similarly rigorous scientific dating) 2) Oldest fragments to be carbon dated 3) Oldest citations 4) Estimated date from internal factors within the text The initial methods would serve as an objective upper bound for age, and the later would give a more accurate subjective view.
- Salgat 8mo agoMost people don't realize this but Paul is the earliest known Christian writer and the earliest surviving source for the Gospel. His letters also independently corroborate not only Jesus' existence as a real person (in addition to secular sources), but also that Jesus' close followers genuinely believed they met Jesus' resurrected form. Since Paul's witness is dated to within 3-5 years of Jesus' death, this also shows that the Gospel didn't develop as a myth/legend, but as something people genuinely believed who had personally met Jesus. It's a fascinating story of a Jewish religious scholar who hallucinates on the road to Damascus, has a sudden complete change of heart, and ends up transforming Christianity from a local Jewish cult into a worldwide religion. Another fascinating topic in biblical study is the criterion of embarrassment, where the early Christian writings left in bizarre and unflattering events that members of a cult would generally leave out. The most obvious example is the crucifixion itself (considered by Jews to be extremely shameful and cursed), the repeated unflattering presentation of the disciples (portrayed as regularly confused, lacking in faith, petty about status, falling asleep at critical moments, even rejecting Jesus at the end), even Jesus' own despair when he was publicly humiliated and executed, crying out asking God why he was forsaken. This is in contrast to Islam, which has Jesus rescued and replaced at the moment of execution.
- spacebanana7 8mo agoI feel we should be hesitant about claims like this. It might well be true that Paul was the earliest writer. But it also seems strange that Matthew, a presumably literate tax collector, wrote nothing at all before Paul despite being a disciple during the time Jesus was around.
- Salgat 8mo agoMind you I am only saying the earliest known writer, it's likely that most Christian writings are lost to history. And technically we don't even know who wrote the Gospels with any certainty. Only Paul's 7 undisputed letters are universally accepted by secular scholarship as being genuinely authored by Paul, the authorship of the rest of the New Testament is disputed.
- bossyTeacher 8mo agoOne of the most curious things about Christianity, is how most of the sauce in the plate doesn't even come from the figure their very religion is meant to be based on. The idea that followers of a religion about a figure, are spending most of their time talking, reading and doing stuff unrelated to the figure they meant to follow is such a human thing to do. After 2k years of divergence, what is there in common with that figure. Can't read or speak his language, experience his culture or the geopolitics of his world. Everything is seen through 2k years of subjective lenses that people with various goals give to you. At what point, do you call it a day or focus on the Gospels exclusively? Because that's arguably as close as you can get to him. Everything else seems secondary accounts of secondary accounts and people claiming to have authority to speak on behalf of someone who can't refuse that anymore.
- ipnon 8mo ago“Another parable put he forth unto them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and sowed in his field: Which indeed is the least of all seeds: but when it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs, and becometh a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in the branches thereof.”
- card_zero 8mo agoWriting some 70 or 80 years down the line, of course they would say that. Or say that Jesus said that.
- ipnon 8mo agoYes, these are the central mysteries of Christianity. We have to reckon with imperfect people writing about a perfect person. And there is never any absolute proof or disproof. We make the justification by faith alone.
- ArchieScrivener 8mo agoWho cares? It. Is. Not. Real. Time to stop coddling religion. All religion is politics and all politics require force to power. Stop caring about nonsense.
- WarOnPrivacy 8mo ago> Who cares? It. Is. Not. Real. Early Christian writings are real. > All religion is politics and all politics require force to power. Politics in religion - this is how we know those adherents have lost their way.
- rexpop 8mo agoReligion has always been political. The very language of religion is rooted in political and economic struggle. Concepts such as "guilt," "sin," and "redemption" originally emerged from ancient debates regarding debt, law, and social obligation. During the "Axial Age," major world religions like Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam developed specifically to address the social dislocations caused by the rise of markets, coinage, and professional armies. For example, the biblical "Law of Jubilee"—which mandated the cancellation of debts and freedom for bondservants—was a direct political intervention into the economic sphere. Similarly, the Christian concept of "redemption" was originally a financial term referring to buying back something (or someone) held as security for a loan.
- WarOnPrivacy 8mo agoI offer that intersection isn't definition. To run across politics and then need to navigate it doesn't transform an entity into a political one. Folks who have transformed their faith into a political entity tended to utilize methods and beliefs that fall outside of the scope of the faith's founding principles (ex: Republican Jesus).
- krapp 8mo agoJesus was very political. The archetype of the Messiah was understood to be explicitly political in the context of liberation from Roman occupation. Overturning the tables of the moneychangers was political. "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and Render unto God what is God's" is political. "It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God", "If anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, let him have your coat also.", "If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also.", "Let the dead bury their own dead." All political. "Supply side Jesus" obviously has nothing to do with Jesus' actual teachings but the faith's founding principles are inextricable from politics because those principles are inextricable from the followers' relationship with the world and its power structures.
- tuna74 8mo agoJust a reminder. The point of religion and beliefs is that it can't be proven. If gods existence could be proven we wouldn't believe anymore. We don't believe in gravity for example.