Thomas_More
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Yes. The fact that everyone was rushing to buy the cheapest pocket Bibles and reading tracts produced by both sides in the English Civil War shows they could either read themselves or knew someone who could read.
Private reading is a recent phenomenon. Reading was a social activity in the medieval and Early Modern periods.I think we know things now about the history that Engels didn’t have to hand. There are many interesting books written by modern materialists and experts on religious history. We don’t have to rely on just 19th century sources any more.
Even Kautsky’s is much more detailed and researched than Engels, and I think his Foundations of Christianity still holds true.
Marx and Engels would have been thrilled with discoveries made since, including in the realm of religious history.
The Hebrew of Genesis opens with “In the beginning the Gods made the Heavens and the Earth.”
Elohim is plural of El, the king of the gods.
Because we use the Anglo-Saxon Goden (Wodin) i.e. “God” in the Germanic languages, we lack the plurality of the Hebrew. Similarly, so do the Latin tongues, which use the Celtic name Teu (Deus, Dieu, Dios).
The Gods are also physical, material beings. As Kautsky says, this was true in Jewish Christianity too: Heaven is to be made on Earth, it is not a “spiritual” kingdom in the sky. The religious idea today of “spirit” is inherited from Plato and the Greek idealists; it was unknown to the Hebrews and the Jewish Christians. When Christians today tell us God is “not a white-bearded man” that is in fact precisely what he was to the Jews and Judaeo-Christians: a material being who looks like us.
A vestige of this original physicality of Heaven and its inhabitants remains in Eastern Orthodoxy, in which the dead are asleep in their graves waiting to physically rise and ascend, as bodies, upon Christ’s command.
If we want to see socialism, then a nuclear war must never happen. The present suicidal madness of the EU, with not even any evidence that I can see of capitalist interest therein, pushing a US line that the US has itself abandoned, could end us all.
Stavrakopoulou shows that the whole Old Testament “history” up until Ezra is a fabrication. There was no Moses, no David and no Solomon, and no evidence of a first Temple. The Jews were polytheists. El was the creator God, later usurped by Yahweh, who also stole El’s wife Asherah.
As for Moses crossing the Red Sea to escape from Egypt, Egypt ruled all the lands up to the borders of modern Turkey, so they would only have been running from Egypt to Egypt.
If the far right are against the EU’s obsession with war with Russia, are they not then preferable, as Orban was in Hungary?
Thanks.
Kautsky says there were many “Jesuses” but none of them would have exhorted peacefulness. The Mount of Olives was the place where rebels against the Jewish establishment would meet to conspire. In the Gospels Jesus tells his apostles to bring swords.
As far as I can see yet, Christopher Hill, in his book The English Bible, seems to overlook completely the English Catholic Douai-Rheims Bible, which preceded the Authorized Version. The New Testament appeared in 1582 and the Old Testament in 1609.
