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    8 months ago

    Fun fact - in both apocrypha and multiple gospels, Jesus is all like “don’t carry a purse with you when ministering and just accept food and shelter when offered.”

    You can see attitudes against this prosperity BS in some of the earliest Christian documents, where in 1 Cor 9 Paul is arguing against preexisting attitudes in the Christian community in Corinth about whether he has a right to collect money for his ministering.

    You even see in Paul’s letters that he gets personally gifted a fragrant offering, which must’ve caused a bit of controversy as decades later in the gospels there’s a part where Jesus gets personally gifted a fragrant offering and gets pissed at people saying he should sell it and give the money to the poor.

    That part about “carry no purse and no money” gets explicitly reversed at the Last Supper in Luke. But curiously, it’s not present in Marcion’s version which was probably the earliest version of the text.

    It’s pretty wild that you had Paul - who called himself lawless, performed signs and wonders, was constantly swearing he wasn’t lying, was a false prophet of apocalypse, and inserted himself into the center of the church - straight up representing positions exactly opposite widely alleged positions of Jesus’s, and yet so many don’t even blink an eye at their blind faith in the guy while frantically looking everywhere around them for “the antichrist” that’s supposedly going to lead them astray.

    That said, I have little doubt that Paul would be extremely pleased with the conmen that followed in his footsteps and the profits they raked in under his name.

    And why not say (as some people slander us by saying that we say), “Let us do evil so that good may come”?

    • Romans 3:8