The Bible Geek Podcast 23-004

It seems one of the main reasons Christianity was initially attractive was the promise of eternal life. And certainly, going to heaven was always the carrot I saw as a kid a couple thousand years after Christianity began. But isn't that sort of a cheap, crass, or selfish reason to believe in Jesus as savior, to believe in God, to follow the various rules as your church understands them? A reward? Do you think there will be a movement to pronounce biblical proper names closer to the Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic original? If you could have your wish granted for the recovery of one lost text, what would it be? A number of traditional scholars, most notably Bart Ehrman, REALLY dislike mythicism in general, and its presence in the online world of popular biblical studies. Why such hostility? In the 1946 novel Independent People by the Icelandic writer Halldor Laxness, we read of an old woman who invokes "Jesuspeter." Have you ever heard of anything like this? In Genesis 1:28 (KJV) YHWH tells the First Couple to "be fruitful and multiply and replenish the Earth..." Huh? What exactly are they supposed to be replenishing? The planet is just a few days old and it's hardly been "plenished" in the first place!