The toughest book you have read or tried to read

Edit = *
*(Updates: Dec. 10, 2019)

*To you say that the sin of Sodom refers to homosexuality is just as bad as an oversimplification as it is being in the wrong for being a crappy host. The city was destroyed for its inhospitality, cruelty and violence, and the overall collapse of social morality, leading to an end of the culture and its people instability and strife.

Thanks for being patient, ksp; it's a joy sharing these insights and exchanges. Please note that I approach this in a general, pragmatic way.

SHORT VERSION:

The basic tenets of any faith are always changing, whether we want them to or not. It can happen gradually, so we don't notice much in our lifetimes, or it can happen suddenly - but religions do inevitably change.

Adherents of every faith argue over the meaning of their chosen religious text, because language exists in such a way as to mean it can be misunderstood. Hence why Christians can claim Romans 1 (in which God gets angry at people painting birds and mind-controls them into becoming orgiastic mass murderers) and the story of Sodom and Gomorrah (which is about not being a sucky host) justify their prejudice towards all gay people, despite the fact that just reading them can provide you with a completely different understanding of what they mean (like I did).

LONG VERSION: (2 minute read)

What many Christians regard as canonical scripture was cobbled together over centuries by committee and as Church Fathers (including men like Bishop Eusebius) debated the set of beliefs that would eventually become part of the orthodox confession of faith, (see "Nicene Creed").

Early Christian communities drafted statements of faith for themselves and affixed the names of various saints and figures from the earliest days of the Nazarene faith (what Jewish authorities called the early Christians) in a call to authority "My apostle can beat up your apostle!" These were copied and circulated around the Christian world. It was humans who knit together the various threads and practices into a coherent body of belief.

I find it difficult to treat the Bible as the literal word of God. It was followers of Christ and their descendants two to three hundred years later who promulgated the canonical literature.

Literal reading of the Bible is actually pretty modern - Christians did not originally read it that way, they read it all as being about Christ (typological) which can thus hardly be literal. For almost two thousand years, most Christians then used a fourfold approach (the Quadriga), of which literal meanings were present but needed to be considered alongside other ways of understanding a passage such as allegorical and typological readings.
It was pretty much inevitable that this would be the case as it grew out of an oral tradition not a written (literary) one. To be very literal you need to be very literate - to think like someone one from a strongly literary culture and see the written work as something that is 'fixed' and can be read as it is - that's only really something that developed with mass literacy. Late 19th early 20th century.
Most people who were not literate would relate to the Bible orally which was more fluid and allowed for questions and interactions with a speaker (most of which is now pretty much lost to us) and through pictures that were deeply symbolic, not actual representations of things.

Mark 12:29 says the same: "The Lord our God is one".
The word Trinity does not appear once in the Bible. And the concept of the Holy Trinity was only developed in the fourth and fifth centuries. Orthodox Christians still do not believe it.

The councils did not so much "create" the canon as they did "recognize" the canon. Many of the apocryphal gospels are clearly part of the Gnostic tradition (Thomas, for instance) and the early Church was trying to separate itself from the dualistic nature of most Gnostic writings. After all, Christians believe that the whole point of Christ's life was that God should bridge the gap between spiritual and physical to bring salvation and not treat the physical world as corrupt and irredeemable, likely created by a "lesser" god.

Revelations very nearly didn't make it into the Christian cannon at Nicaea as the events which it 'foretold' should have happened 200 years earlier. It was argued to be an allegory of the individual sinner's journey to Salvation. It was never to be taken literally.

As scripture, it remains something of an embarrassment. Greek scholars will tell you that, unlike the Gospel of John, the demotic Greek of Revelations is the product of an unlettered author. 1,200 years after Nicaea, Luther very nearly excluded it from his translation, saying "Christ is not here."

Here are some relevant scholarly facts that are worth your time:

* below is an understanding of many of the Conservative Christian viewpoint point.

https://www.michaeljkruger.com/the-complete-series-the-10-commandments-of-progressive-christianity/

~~/o/