this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2023
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Wasn't New Testament (Jesus) the one that changed view to that God is all loving?
Yup. My fan theory is that old testament god is the new testament devil.
Fuck that is so good and totally theologically unsound.
Look into Gnosticism. That was part of thier creation myth.
Thanks, I will
Gnostics believed the old testament god is a malformed mistake, and it's evil, blind, and jealous
Gnostics were Christians from ~100 to 400 CE
Yeah, through it flipped the paradigm from the proto-Gnostic thought, which instead had God brought forth by a spontaneously existing original man.
In parallel with the resurgence of Platonism, it flipped from "physical first, spiritual second" (as Paul mentioned in 1 Cor 15) to "spiritual first, physical second" and the eventual demiurge went from an agent of salvation escaping the Epicurean doom of a soul which depends on a naturally occurring physical body to an agent of corruption imprisoning the Platonic intelligently designed forms to corrupted and imperfect physical embodiment.
The earlier stuff is much more interesting than the later nonsense.
Not necessarily.
For example, look at the story of Solomon's wise ruling.
It's an anecdote about how to tell between a true parent and a false parent.
In that story, the false parent is the one who only cares about being recognized as the parent and is willing to see the child suffer and die to achieve that result.
Whereas the true parent is the one who cares the most about the child living as their complete unadulterated self even if that means being entirely unknown to them at all.
The tradition of God as a divine parent in Judaism goes back well before Jesus, and the Solomon story sounds a bit absurd as an actual ruling.
But it's important to keep in mind that Solomon was a figure back in the polytheistic Israelite days which the version of the Old Testament we have today was actively rewriting the history of. So what was a poignant anecdote about the concept of the love of a true vs false parent dating from a period when Yahweh was married to the fertility mother goddess Asherah ends up just sort of randomly in there, surrounded by a bunch of claims about how Yahweh is a divine parent and if you don't acknowledge him as that he's going to smite you.
So it may have simply been changing it back to an earlier perspective. Potentially even informed by the above.
In fact, if you look extra-canonically, you can see Jesus saying:
(Solomon's story above related to the child of a prostitute.)