Man, my reading list gets longer and longer. I'll hide DB at the very bottom of it... maybe someday when I am unable to move and have no other book to hand... But Chariots of the Gods sound interesting (though I have NOT googled it. I just like the title. It sounds like stuff I am reading for Actual Work at the moment!)
I first read Da Vinci Code on a holiday which took in London, Paris, Rennes le Chateau and back home to not far from Rosalyn Chapel. I almost felt I should be looking over my shoulder! For my sins I had to read it again when I was asked to write an article for FT about it. One of my favourite covers that issue!
Awesome, thanks! I will certainly do that. I admire Le Roy Ladurie, too. The Annales School were pretty cool dudes, and he was one of the coolest.
Pierre de Plantard and yes to taken in.
That brings a thougjt to my mind, i wonder how widespread, amongst believers, is the knowledge that the bible, in the form we know it, was put together by a commitee of church hierarchy hundreds of years after the death of Jesus, and that many books and gospels, that didnt fit their narrative, wete omitted from the final version? i personally would have questioned the fact that there were 12 apostles, yet only 4 gospels, but i never was a Christian.
) who don't know the practical history of the book.
In my second year with the OU, there was a middle aged woman on my course who was a committed Christian, and she was shattered to discover how much was omitted from the Bible, and how much of the Old Testament in particular was shared with other non-Christian faiths. My impression is that there are very few Christians who have an appreciation of the history of their faith, specially older people.
I can just imagine.
I do like the Cathars version of Christianity, where earth is hell so things cant be any worse in the afterlife (paraphrasing for all im worth)
From what i was taught, during my religious ed classes at school, the 4 gospels are the stories of each disciples experiences of his time with Jesus, his teachings and the miracles he performed, i would have thought that the more examples and experiences of the life of Jesus included in the New Testaments, which are pretty much, the books of Jesus, the better, as a Christian (in general) would you not want to know as much about the son of god as you possibly could?
Further to this i would add, what was in the other gospels that the church didnt want published and why?
Various things that didn’t fit the narrative of what the Fourth Century Church considered to be the life of the son of God. Temper tantrums, and the killing (and resurrection) of another child when Jesus was young. Physical closeness with others, including women. Political stuff. Nothing truly shocking, but all stuff that detracted from the view of Jesus as divine that they wanted to project. Interestingly, the four gospels of the New Testament are wildly different on many details. If you’re interested, any books by Bart Ehrman are a good place to start exploring.
There are discussions here, for example. Put a request in to Threadfinder General? https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/threadfinder-general-lost-threads-located.21261/
Well you were lucky. Our RE teacher called ‘Spike’ dilligently redacted all references to circumcision in our textbooks with a thick black pen, engaged in a constant fumigation war against flies covering us with fly spray and then he would finish the lesson with some sort of discordant, possibly Russian, experimental piano mangling that was all hell on the ears.
I for one believe that it was the Comte de Sainte-Germaine, and that he's still at it!
I can imagine that so vividly. It would have been great to read it for the first time at that kind of age. Even if it all came tumbling down like a house of cards under greater scrutiny, it captures the imagination like few "proper" history books can.
I don't think very widespread at all. The NT is a product of the fourth century, not the first.
