this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2024
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The varying competing sects and later official churches did exactly that, cherry picking various texts as official canon, in either proposals or meetings of high church officials, for hundreds of years after the death of Jesus.
The first known to propose a list of canon texts was Marcion... who was ironically deemed to be a heretic as he rejected the Old Testament God and the Old Testament itself.
Then you had all kinds of local and regional and imperial Symposiums and Councils to decide what worked and what didn't...
And surprise surprise, this didn't even achieve a unanimous consensus!
Even today, major world and regional Christian denominations include books other consider apocryohal, omit books others consider canon, and divide or combine books differently, and a whole lot of that goes back to all of this squabbling in the 3rd century CE basically going unresolved and creating or laying the groundwork for major schisms.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_canon
Check out the Canons of various Christian traditions sections.
It gets especially strange when you end up with a canon book that explicitly quotes and refers to a book that ... isn't canon, in that particular tradition.
dang that is fascinating! Amazing to see someone with vast knowledge on what seems to be a deeply confusing topic, thank you!
also, goodness, no offence if you're religious but i have no idea how Christianity is treated any different from Greek mythology and the sort - the sources of faith for both are all over the place. Sure Christianity has just one god, but there is an awful lot of different versions of him
and sure you could justify it with various logic like - Satan spreads misinformation, and it's up to the chosen of God to pick out the truth, but if the God's alleged chosen disagree what then? How is one supposed to follow this religion and learn from its teachings if every sect/denomination claims they're the only correct one?
Its maybe less confusing than it is just not talked about. Churches dont like to bring up how mortal people have been sculpting the documents that they say came from god. Its a hard contradiction to swallow, to the point where I think most religious people would change how they worship if they realized the books in their hand are entirely the word of men, written with all of the biases any human has.
Even if we accept it originated from some holy place, the firsthand accounts of those that were with Jesus, we have to accept that that has been translated and copied so many times, by hand, that the words there are no closer to god than Harry Potter.
Are Mormons Christian? They say they are, many other Christians say they are not.
One of many reasons: They don't do the whole Trinity thing.
According to the LDS Church, God and Jesus are separate, distinct. Father and Son yes, but in a literal sense, not as distinct manifestations of the same thing. Holy Ghost is a totally distinct entity as well.
My memories are dim but I think Jehovah's Witnesses take this stance as well.
Mormons are Christians, but not Protestant Christians.
The short answer is: centralized power (orthodox patriarchy, roman catholic church) and active persecution of heretics