There are more than four Gospels, historically speaking. Many more 1 . "Gospel" literally translates to "good news", and there were lots of them floating around in the early centuries of Christianity. The ones that made it into the New Testament are considered canon by the major branches of Christianity, but "canon" really only means that they were accepted by the Synod of Hippo in the year 393. Before that, a few of the Apostolic Fathers in the early church had proposed accepted lists of canon works but I'm unaware of any being very influential outside of certain circles. And even after that, the canonical books changed multiple times and today can vary across Christian groups. There is this idea that the Bible as it exists today fell from the heavens in its current form and never changed. That's simply not true. Catholics, for example, hold the deuterocanonical books to be authentic scripture. Protestants do not. Some books are considered canon...

Genesis 3 is probably one of the most famous parts of the Old Testament. It's where the devil convinced Eve to eat an apple from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Except not. The Hebrew is pretty clear. The נָחָשׁ mentioned in the first verse is just the Hebrew word for "serpent". It has nothing to do with the figure who would later become identified as the Christian Satan. And it wasn't an apple.          Again, the Hebrew text is reasonably clear. The word used is פְּרִי which literally just means "fruit". Like in English, this can be an actual fruit or metaphorical for the "fruit of ___". Hebrew has a separate word for "apple" תַּפּוּחַ which does not show up (as far as I'm aware) in Genesis. So how did we get the whole "Apple" thing? Because languages are fun! The "apple" translation comes from people working with and getting confused by the Latin translation of the Old Testament. In Latin, the word...

Let's talk about the book of Revelation, because I'm sick of it. It has been used as a fear-mongering tool for televangelists and shady preachers for generations and people think that it's some grand prophecy of the end times. The reality is interesting though much more banal. Revelation is an apocalypse, but that word doesn't mean what you probably think it means. Apocalypse is Greek in origin (ἀποκάλυψις), and just means "revealing". Specifically the revealing of some truth by a higher power to humans. It has nothing to do with prophecy or eschatology, per se . While Revelation does talk about the end of the world, and does so with language and imagery that sounds like a drug-trip, it's less literal and more of a coded rebuke against Rome. Here's why: An apocalypse typically comes from a people in some sort of peril. Revelation is commonly dated to 81 AD/CE, which is the period immediately following the first Jewish-Roman War, where the Romans capt...

Let’s talk about Satan, because why not? The entity that became the Satan of the New Testament and Christianity as a whole has its basis in the Old Testament. Note: basis. But it didn’t exist there in anything resembling the form that it took in later centuries. In the Old Testament, Satan is not a name like it tends to be used today. It’s just a word meaning “adversary”. In Hebrew, this is שָׂטָן and does not refer to this entity specifically. It is used multiple times thoughout the Old Testament to refer to multiple things. At one point, an angel of the lord was explicity referred to as שָׂטָן (Numbers 22:22). It seems like a general word for anything in the way. So, it is not necessarily clear what the entity is, though it is implied that it has some relation to the בְּנֵי הָאֱלֹהִים, the sons of God (Job 1:6). The text does not specify exactly what it is, but makes it sound like a sort of cosmic pest in a celestial court, something under complete control of the Elohim. Everything i...