"Silly boy, it's all about trust."

[Ninurta]

I have a fairly firm grounding in the history of the Bible, and can find no basis for the claims which continually crop up that books were "removed"

Correct me if i am wrong but the bible we use today is based on template which was created under Constantine of the Roman Emperor. It is at this point  heavy censorship occurred. For example the book of Enoch was not incuded (it mentions a previous civilization) and many other sciptures where denied access. To think these books have not been altered by the elite to control the narrative of mankind baffles my mind.

Our history has been cleansed and sanitised for the masses.

If you are in any doubt that the bible has been altered. Go back and look at the oldest bible (Ethiopian) and see how many scriptures are now missing.

Happy days :-)

We're obliged to correct that because it isn't true. There is no evidence for any such template. Printed books are a better source of information than the internet, and they will tell you that the growth of the Biblical "canon" was organic, a collective consensus building up in the centuries before Constantine. The alleged "omitted" books were not omitted, because they had never been included in the first place. The early church had a "nonsense filter" of inherited tradition, which managed to keep them out. The trouble with the modern internet is that the internet has no nonsense filter, so any speculative or fictitious rubbish is given the same standing as genuine knowledge, especially if it chimes in with what people want to believe. Part of the trouble is that an obsessively anti-authoritarian mindset has left many people hopelessly gullible, ready to believe any old crap as long as it doesn't come from established authority.

The only thing I can add to that is that the Ethiopian Bible was not "the first Bible". The Bible was not written in Ethiopia. Furthermore, Ethiopia was a hotbed of Gnosticism, so there is no telling which spurious "Biblical" books may be found there. many of those were the very sources that Mohammed based his concept of "Christianity" on which he built Islam up from.

The book of Enoch, which I have read, has theological problems that kept it out of the cannon over and above any mention of ancient civilizations. It was not that mention that kept it out, it was faulty theology, which is also the case with the exclusion of most of the Gnostic texts.

Being initially excluded from incorporation into a body of literature in the first place is not the same thing as having been removed from that body. For instance, the musical "Cats" was not removed from the works of Shakespeare through any malicious motivation, because it was never included in the first place.


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