The Bible is arguably the most important religious text in the western world. From early school age the children of the "Christian" nations are introduced to the stories of the Old and New Testament; we all know the power of stories for capturing the imagination, and the authors of the Bible - as well as Jesus himself in his teaching - were also well aware of this fact. General religious education in schools is woefully inadequate - understandably, it's a vast subject - and most study at pre-college levels deals with the simple cramming-and-recollection of the teachings and tales. For this reason many people - whether drawn to the church or not - leave general education with the impression that the Bible is, in some way, the actual word of God in physical form. Tellingly, the actual word "Bible" has come to have a secular meaning as "definitive work"; books are described as being the "DIY Bible", etc.
Even the most cursory examination of the available historical facts undermines this notion and shows that - like all politically empowered religions - Christianity has shifted its weight from time to time to maintain the best possible footing. Much of the firm and implacable Christian law of today has been the result not of pure instruction from the God figure, but as the result of interpretation led by agenda and the need to attract new believers. When, for example, Christianity was introduced to the British Isles and the indigenous population proved reluctant to give up their pagan festivals, the Church offered an enticement package that promised the prospective faithful not only the glories of the new faith but made allowances for them to continue with variants of almost all of their ceremonies as long they were now performed in honour of the new God. This was something that, with the later rise of the cults of saints, the Church was to regret seriously and become embarrassed by.
These saints themselves are a good example of the agenda-led processes. There are many saints, but there are many, many more would-be saints that were proposed for Canonisation and who either only attained the lower status of Beatification (acknowledged as a "local" saint, but not placed into the Canon of world saints), or who simply rotted away in the files. The problem with saint making was that it was very expensive; you couldn't have just anybody being a saint, their life had to be investigated, their piety evaluated, etc. This cost money, people needed to be paid to carry out this work. With a wealthy sponsor fervently dedicated to making his favoured candidate a saint the investigation, hence expense and therefore income for the church, could take many years, often generations. So, many of the saints we know now are only saints because they had a powerful figure behind their cause, a figure who quite often chose the cause for their own benefit, to show them as a powerful, influential figure. Often sainthood was granted to popular heroes rather than those of purely textbook virtue; Simon de Montfort, a challenger to the English throne who led an army in bloody revolt against the king was sainted thanks to the huge swell of public support for him.
The cult of saints was a sop to the still semi-pagan Christians that backfired horribly - initially the worship of local saints as minor deities (in the eyes of an ignorant peasantry is there any real difference between a pagan god of love and a patron saint of love?) was encouraged, but in the Middle Ages the reports of miraculous cures began to worry the elevated clergy. Whether these cures were miracles or not (reports of starving peasants begging at church doors, receiving a meagre meal or two - their first in days - and feeling miraculously better are rife in the lists of cures, but there are many mysterious occurrences too) they were not something the church encouraged, even if they did create a healthy amount of income. The process of translating and elevating saints became a huge issue within the church, with rival clergy resorting to underhand tactics in order to steal powerful relics (bones, blood, clothing, etc.) from each other; saint's bodies were routinely dismembered and the bones distributed amongst the churchmen for the good of their church and their own personal use. This was all getting a little too pagan for the church hierarchy. It wasn't until the time of the Reformation in Britain that the shrines were at last torn down and the cults of saints dispersed. This very act, which deprived villagers of their local "miracles and magic", led directly to the rise of the "witch" as a substitute source of folk-magic and their subsequent persecution at the hands of the church.
The foundations of modern Christianity were as tentative and as flexible as the example of the policy towards sainthood implies. The early 4th century saw a huge change in the relationship between the Christians and the Roman Empire. From being an officially persecuted cult Christianity became the state religion almost literally overnight. In 312 on the eve of the battle that was to clinch his control of the entire Roman world, Emperor Constantine the Great had a dream in which, as legend has it, he was told that the Christian symbol - the first two letters of Christ's name - would inspire his soldiers to victory during the battle. So he ordered the letters to be painted on every shield and duly won his battle. Overjoyed, Constantine - enthused too by his mother, Helen, who had found what she claimed to be the remains of "the one true cross" in the Holy Land - declared the Christian God an officially approved deity. To better understand the full scope of Christian belief he called in some of the local Christian leaders and asked enlightenment. It was not immediately forthcoming. Having existed for so long as a forbidden cult, Christianity had developed in isolated threads and there was surprisingly little common ground. Was Christ a man created by God, or was he God in human form? Both ideas had fervent support. Each strand of Christianity had its own version of the bible, and each version contained different testimonies.
In 325 Constantine summoned 300 leading Christian theologians to his palace at Nicea in Turkey. It would be the job of this council to decide the "facts" of Christianity - the date of Christmas and Easter (chosen to fall on the same days as festivals celebrating Constantine's favoured pagan sun god, Sol Invicta), the (theoretical) celibacy of priests, the exact nature of Jesus, which books should constitute the "true" bible and so on. Many people assume the "books" of the Bible are the full and only surviving texts. This was not the case at all. Books were chosen to suit the interpretation the assembly favoured.
What we know now as the Bible is a "truth" born of interpretation, led by agenda and based on incomplete testimony written well after the fact. The Bible may be many things, but the final word of God it most surely is not.
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