I was recently fortunate enough to be given this link which discusses how Christianity is just a cut-and-paste job.
Moreover, the Sermon on the Mount – supposedly the original monologue straight out of the mouth of the Son of God Himself – can be shown to be a series of Old Testament scriptures strung together, along with, apparently, such texts from Qumran. No “historical” founder was necessary at all to speak these words, as they are a rehash of extant sayings. (Even in this patent literary device the gospels cannot agree, as Luke 6:17-49 depicts the Sermon as having taken place on a plain.)
It is easy to see why the Catholic Church would blanche upon the discovery of these scrolls, as it could be – and has been – argued that these texts erode the very foundation of Christianity. It appears that this news, however, when released slowly has little affect on the mind-numbing programming that accompanies Christian faith.
The bottom line is that the existence of the Old Testament and the intertestamental literature such as the Dead Sea Scrolls shows how Christianity is a cut-and-paste job – a fact I also reveal in The Christ Conspiracy, in a chapter called “The Making of a Myth,” which contains a discussion of some of the texts obviously used in the creation of the new faith. These influential texts evidently included some of the original Dead Sea Scrolls, serving not as “prophecy,” “prefiguring” or “presaging” but as blueprints of pre-existing, older concepts cobbled together in the New Testament.
I guess Christians can at least take solace in the fact the Islam is just another step further in this sort of holy writ mimesis.
Filed under: Religions | Tagged: Acharya S, Dead Sea Scrolls, FreeThought Nation |
For the Sake of Science 
Interestingly, this is a blog post of a blog post which quote mines an original article which comes to a significantly different conclusion – from the original article:
“When people say there’s nothing Christian about the scrolls, I beg to differ,” said Rappé. “They’re not what we’d call explicitly Christian. But they come from that matrix of Jewish beliefs and thoughts about God and our relationship to God . . . that was breathed by the original followers of Jesus, and by Jesus himself.” Even where they are not directly quoted, the scrolls enliven New Testament scripture, said James C. VanderKam, a professor of Hebrew scriptures at the University of Notre Dame and one of the principal editors of the official scrolls translation team. He points to the story of Jesus healing someone on the Sabbath and the ensuing debate over whether that’s acceptable under Jewish law. “We see evidence of just that kind of thing being debated in the scrolls,” VanderKam said. “For me it makes that story from the Gospels a much more lively one.”
This hardly supports the conclusion that Christianity is a ‘cut-and-paste’ job. Indeed, no one ever claimed Christianity sprang out of nowhere, but rather that it is the culmination of a plan that had been implemented millennia before, and alluded to throughout that time – in short; we would expect Christian ideas to be related to what came previously. The notion that this weakens Christian ideas is nonsense.
That’s the exact same evidence, but with an illogical interpretation. It makes more sense that the Gospels sprang more directly from ancient writings and stories than from anything Jesus ever said or did.
Well, again, a significant number of teachings in the gospels sprang directly from the OT and Jewish traditions. In fact a lot of them are quoted verbatim. Jesus was after all eminently Jewish, so for it to be otherwise would be quite odd.
There is however no evidence that the apostles died the deaths they did because they just read about Jesus death and resurrection in the Dead Sea scrolls.