Ancient_texts

When a superior man hears of the Tao, he immediately begins to embody it. When an average man hears of the Tao, he half believes it, half doubts it. When a foolish man hears of the Tao, he laughs out loud. If he didn’t laugh it wouldn’t be the Tao. -41 Summary For my first read through (assuming there might be more) without much research I picked up Stephen Mitchell’s version. Two things of note, one Stephen Mitchell was also the one who authored my version of Gilgamesh which was fantastic. Second, he makes clear that this is an English “version” and not straight translation of the Tao Te Ching. This book came with his own commentary at the end, as well as a transcript of an interview about the process of translation. I read once all the way through, and then re-read referencing his notes. The Tao Te Ching itself is similar to the Old Testament in that its actual authors are lost to history. It appears to have been put together from various text around 250BC. The assumed author Laozi or Lao Tzu is a person we know next to nothing about, in fact he may not even exist. His name adds to this mystery by being translated as “old teacher”. That being said there are now over 250 translations of the text and its 81 short chapters. ...

This book was pretty interesting. Especially since probably the last couple years I noticed that the idea of heaven and hell don’t seem to show up in the Old Testament very much at all. Which makes for some very interesting questions. Written by an historian of early Christian religion, this book makes some startling claims. The goal of the book was to walk through recorded history (in the western world) and take note of what was said about the afterlife that indicates what beliefs were popular at the time. The cornerstone thesis of this book is that the historical Jesus did not believe in a heaven and hell in the now traditional sense, but a different conception that is based on a tradition of Jewish apocalyptical ideas. Ehrman starts with what is probably the oldest fiction we have the “Epic of Gilgamesh” and works his way up to the Greek authors Virgil, Homer and eventually Socrates examining how the idea of the afterlife was expressed at each stage. He then turns his attention to the Bible and works his way chronologically through the Bible stating pretty categorically that the main idea of the afterlife presented in the Old Testament was that there wasn’t one. After looking at the OT he spends some time in a couple apocryphal books written in between the OT and NT which shed some light on how the idea of afterlife was evolving. He then comes to the clickbait part of the book where he explains that he believes the historical Jesus believed that God was going to come back and set things right in the world and rebuild Jerusalem and have a physical Kingdom on this earth that believers would be part of. He also believed that Jesus thought this was happening soon (Matt 16:28). As for non-believers they would be annihilated into nonexistence. From there he continues through history into the early 300AD time period up through the conception of purgatory and ends the book with the idea of universalism that is the idea that all eventually make it into heaven. This was surprisingly a view of one of the early church theologians, Origen who lived around 200AD. This book was well written and pretty easy to follow. It is another book that at the end of the day you read it and realize, that you just have to go back to the bible because everyone has always agreed about what it had to say about things.