Imagine being such a persecuted group in America that you get to blast spam mail to everyone in your community in the name of religion with no repercussions.
Thanks for reaching out with regards to the Bible. One quote I find particularly useful in situations like this which I believe you should take to heart is 1 Timothy 2:12:
"I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men; she is to keep silent."
Fwiw, 1 Timothy is widely recognized by scholars as a later forgery. So it's effective at shutting up literalists but not as much people who recognize the text as an at least partially flawed effort.
But that "shuddup women" stuff in the late first and early second century is pretty interesting.
Like you had Phillip the Evangelist's daughters supposedly prophesying, apocrypha where Jesus is privately teaching female students, with later traditions claiming their original teacher was a woman.
And then Corinth a decade or so after Paul deposed the appointed elders from Rome, and the bishop of Rome writes 1 Clement to them, which is all about how young people should defer to old and how awesome the biblical women who stayed silent were (presumably ignoring the earliest women who were driving tent pegs into the heads of dudes).
Suddenly after this schism and competing materials and tradition owing themselves to female teachers you have a forged letter about how women shouldn't teach.
It's a fun line from the Epistle to throw in their faces, but it obscures one of the more interesting and eyebrow raising episodes to the early church.
More like "the stuff in line with extensive and repeated archeological finds which is present in lower layers of textual analysis below what's clear anachronistic royal propaganda is probably true."
You might be surprised. There's a ton of BS, but the things it tried to cover up are actually pretty revealing.
For example, it talks about how one of the earliest leaders and prophets is a woman named 'bee' and in her song she talks about how the tribe of Dan "stayed on their ships."
Well just in the past ten years there's been a discovery of the only apiary in the region which was requeening their bees from Anatolia for centuries up until the period when Asa is supposedly deposing his grandmother the Queen Mother, when the apiary and only the apiary is burned to the ground.
Inside that apiary there's even a four horned altar to an unknown goddess - a feature that becomes a part of later Israelite shrines.
Just a few weeks ago there were articles about what's thought to be a very early Israelite graveyard where they were burning beeswax with a similar chemical profile to this apiary with the imported Anatolian bees and four horned altars.
Up in Anatolia was a tribe of sea peoples known as the Denyen, who an archeologist in the 50s thought might have been the lost tribe of Dan staying on their ships. And just in the past few years the lead excavator of Tel Dan was remarking that he might have been right given they found Aegean style pottery made with local clay in the early Iron Age layer.
There's quite a lot more to all this, but while none of it is straight up acknowledged in the Bible, there's very valuable evidence of it having been covered up and rewritten in the Bible.
Just because you don't like the current version of royal propaganda doesn't mean there aren't earlier layers beneath what's presented that have value in being learned about and analyzed, particularly for history buffs.
As the science historian John Helibron said, "The myth you slay today may contain a truth you need tomorrow."
There's a difference between the supernatural component of mythologized history and the historical components being false.
Do you also think that 100% of the Iliad and Odyssey are false just because the stuff about Zeus is? That the ruins of Troy in Turkey aren't really Troy? That there was no catalogue of ships of the Mycenaean fleet conquering a foothold in Anatolia? That there was no one day battle with Egypt where Aegean commanders were taken captive?
If not, what about the Bible makes it uniquely 100% false to your discerning eye?
Yes, I very much do believe it is a myth that anyone journey to the Underworld and slayed Titans— however much I wish to believe in Achilles’s and Pericles’s deep, sweaty, manly love. It’s just a legend. It did not happen.
You're right, that the supernatural parts did not happen like a katabasis story.
But you are 100% wrong that 100% didn't happen.
There are serious issues with the work, chief among them being Homer combining the 14th century Mycenaean conquest of Anatolia with the 12th century sea peoples retaking of Wilusa from the Hittites. But many, many of the fragmentary details being combined into a mythological history did in fact occur, including Odysseus's one day battle with Egypt (Merneptah's Libyan/sea peoples war).
I’m not denying that some religious myth-books do, in fact, contain references to historical events, what I’m saying is that they’re not to be relied upon as they’re often inaccurate to the point of being apocryphal.
But that “shuddup women” stuff in the late first and early second century is pretty interesting.
The apocryphal Gospel of Thomas (not to be confused with the also apocryphal Infancy Gospel of Thomas) which is dated to the second century is so anti-women that it ends with Jesus basically saying that women who worship him will be turned into men so they can enjoy the afterlife.
Not exactly. The last saying is widely recognized as a later addition, and you can recognize that it is because it used Matthew's "Kingdom of heaven" phrasing instead of the more common Thomasine "kingdom of the Father" or just 'kingdom.'
But you have earlier sayings like 21 where Jesus is shit taking the male disciples to Mary or saying 61 where Salome is declared as a disciple. And saying 22 has a very different perspective on gender from that last saying: "...when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female... then you will enter [the kingdom]." The latter phrasing is also echoed in Galatians 4 and the lost Gospel of the Egyptians.
Also, the only recorded group following the text (the Naassenes), who were also following the lost Gospel of the Egyptians, claimed their tradition originated with a woman named Mary.
The problem is the only surviving version of that text we have in full was one buried in a jar in the 3rd century CE, and the extant version is so late that it's even combining its own sayings, such as 110 combining the adjacent but very different sayings of 80 and 81. The addition at the end was probably from a point in time where the prominent role of women in the tradition had to be explained away in an era of increased Christian misogyny (likely from the very efforts I was just talking about). Much like how the association with 'Thomas' was probably a second century addition to the text after the core philosophy of a dualist reality was anthropomorphized as an apostle to doubt the physical resurrection in John just as the proto-Thomasine sect in Corinth was doing in 1 Cor 15 (with significant details in common with the much later Naassenes, such as the first and last Adam).
Also, FYI, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas is probably a satire. How many kids in a Jewish town in Galilee do you think were supposedly falling off roofs to be lifted back up who were also named after the Greek philosopher known for his paradoxes of motion?
You basically had a very philosophical text with the core of the Gospel of Thomas using Platonism as a response to Epicureanism, and then around the second century when the canonical gospels are including miraculous infancy narratives the group that denied the physical resurrection as preposterous writes a text with a tyrannical magic child smiting and resurrecting people left and right, credited to "Thomas the philosopher" that's including a philosophy joke about Zeno? It's making fun of the infancy narratives. Which is what makes it so much funnier that the actual Gospel of Thomas doesn't survive the church's filter except for said jar, but the Infancy narrative actually totally does survive and has monks copying and preserving it because they take it at face value as claiming he was resurrecting people and not as something that needed to be banned.
Even if that's true--and I don't know if it is or not, because I'm not a true biblical scholar--the fact is that 1 Timothy is recognized as canon throughout the Christian world. Even if it's a forgery, it's been accepted as gospel for the last 1800 years or so.
...And that's completely ignoring the fact that most people that get really deep into scholarly historical bible studies very quickly end up as agnostics and atheists, because you can't square the historical record with any religion currently practiced.
And yes, often people who pursue scholarship tend to have a deconversion moment, especially if they were coming from more conservative or orthodox backgrounds. I've also seen people go the other direction, which is a bit odd to me, but whatever floats their boat. The texts are a mess of revisionism and edits that fly in the face of any kind of literalism.
But those revisions and edits reveal a lot in what they sloppily cover up, or the motivations behind the changes, etc. It's actually a really fun field of study.
For example, I disagree with the consensus linked for 2 Timothy, as if you look at the letters given a recent finding that covert narcissists talk about themselves more in their writing, Paul talks about himself vs others at a similar relative rate as the undisputed Epistles, which isn't the case for any other disputed Epistle, and is much more than all the other Epistles. (Some other reasons too, but that's the main data point I think is interesting.) Paul definitely appears to have been that type of narcissist, and it may reveal what he did or didn't write.