Brokeback Mothman

"it's simple. we smoke out the batman."

- the toker

this post would've changed the world in 2009

to the toker today is just a regular day

“The best revenge is living well.” Wrong - it’s leaving a toxic work environment where they also rely on you for things and are now screwed with your departure because they get overwhelmed easily and didn’t bother to get involved or understand the things they left to you and will now struggle and suffer the actions of their own hypocrisy and incompetence.

Extremely important things my boyfriend has said to me this week:

Will update this post as he says more wild shit like this

Happy Valentine's Day! This blog's favorite thembo just almost set fire to their apartment (everyone is fine)

(in response to hearing someone made fun of me on the bus for having visible OCD behaviors)

Them: *showing me a picture timeline of a guy who, in the first picture, is small, has a feminine face and a weird haircut, and is covering his chest; but in the second picture is larger, has a shaved head, and is confidently shirtless*

Me: nice. Is that a trans guy?

Them: no... It's... Rey Mysterio...

Obsessed with @cedobols's dog Jay & @llewhn's cat Matt

everyone say in the tags what their current custom discord status is

really recommend getting a partner with a different religion than you and very little knowledge of your religion because the opportunities for explaining things to each other are just exquisite

yesterday she told me some story about the Buddha's wife and child and I was like. Wait. He fucked? And she was like yeah of course he fucked, why wouldn't he, he was the most attractive and loveable and and wise and etc. person who ever lived. why would he not fuck.

this morning she looked perplexed in the kitchen at me and said "did Jesus not fuck?"

I mean, he did. But it was monogamous and his wife was a literal sex worker before their marriage, but people like to ignore that fact.

If you ask the Roman Catholic Church, they will swear that the woman wasn’t his wife and he was a bachelor and virgin.

Guess it's time to debunk some conspiracy theories about Jesus.

(My credentials: I have a Masters of Divinity, which is a combination of Biblical analysis, Christian history, and some other odds and ends. I am not Catholic, and have never attended a Catholic school; my school taught using the standard academic texts about the Bible, not doctrinal assertions from any denomination or Christian group. Although my professors were all Christian, the Biblical and Christian history was taught the same way it would have been if an atheist were teaching it.)

There is absolutely ZERO evidence that Mary Magdalene was a sex worker. The belief that she was is based on a combination of Medieval misogyny (on several levels) and sex negativity. As for Jesus, the only evidence that Jesus was married comes from one fragment of a papyrus with shaky provenance that was probably written at least 200 years after Jesus' death (and probably later than that).

"But that's because the Catholic church suppressed everything!" Well, if you knew anything about the early church, you would realize that's nonsense on several levels. The Catholic church as we know it didn't exist yet. Until Christianity became intrinsically linked to the power structures of the Roman Empire in the 4th Century AD, authority was decentralized. Local areas governed themselves. They had bishops, but there was no central authority appointing them, it was "whichever priest or monk the locals think is especially holy and/or wise". There was no central set of scriptures that everyone agreed to, the central set of doctrines was still under hot debate, as were organizational structures and worship patterns and pretty much everything else. The Catholic church has historically done a lot of censorship and suppression of things it didn't like, but that begins in the Medieval era, when it had the power to enforce things, which it did NOT in the early centuries of Christianity.

Early Christians decided things like "which books should be in the Bible" with a series of ecumenical councils between 325AD and 787AD where hundreds of representatives from all around the Mediterranean and beyond came together and decided on things they could all agree on. When texts were not included in the New Testament, it was because only a handful of churches actually used that text. Not because a central authority told them to, because there wasn't a central authority. But because they didn't like it, or they knew that (despite it claiming to be from the first apostles) it was actually written much later.

We know a great deal about what texts the various early churches used because we've spent a LOT of archaeological time and effort over the last century excavating 1st and 2nd century Christian areas looking for texts. And then scholars worldwide spend years analyzing them to death. (Many of them are not Christian.) (Any translation of the New Testament made in the 20th Century is based on those archaeological manuscripts, not the ones sitting in the Vatican, btw.) We also have a bunch of letters from early church leaders where they discuss all of this. We know with a fair degree of certainty which texts (and which versions of texts) were earlier and which were later. In order for all of that to be wrong, somebody centuries later would have had to come in, dig up all of the archaeology, destroy some of what was there, and put it back so neatly that modern archaeologists can't tell things have been changed.

"But what if those early Christians were sex-negative misogynists who didn't want to record Jesus' marriage?" Christianity's hatred of sex didn't get codified until the writings of St. Augustine in the 3rd-4th Centuries; the early Christians would have had no reason to suppress that Jesus was married, and we have a lot of copies of the New Testament texts that date to the first and second centuries. Besides the Gospels itself, Paul spends a decent amount of time talking about marriage and families in his letters, and he never once even implies that Jesus might have been married.

Also the Catholic church is European. The great Christian power in the Levant, Turkey, Greece, and other areas that had large concentrations of Christians in the first few centuries of Christianity was the Orthodox church. So if there was anybody creating a conspiracy and altering things it would have been the Patriarch of Constantinople doing it, not the Pope in Rome.

In Christian communities, sharing stories, myths, and legends about Jesus was a cottage industry. Everybody was making up and sharing stories. Most of them don't seem to be designed to be taken as factual. The Gospels that made it into the Bible were the earliest ones, the ones that everybody knew dated back to the first generation of Jesus' followers. Those, they were careful about keeping accurate and copying precisely and upholding their authority. The other stories that got passed around were held to different standards--and that's why they weren't included in the Bible. Most of them seem to be designed assert what Jesus would have said or done in such-and-such situation, or in response to a particular topical issue, or just make Jesus seem like The Most Awesome Dude Ever. (It was sort of like fanfic. "wouldn't it be cool if Blorbo From My Religion had said/done X?" and it continued to be a major thing up through the late medieval period.)

So, with that background, where does the idea that Jesus was married come from? Mostly, it comes from The DaVinci Code. I mean, periodically people have thought "wow, wouldn't it be cool if Jesus were married?" but with no evidence or source beyond "wouldn't it be cool." Which also is the sum total of Dan Brown's evidence. People who believe it point to a single fragment of papyrus, written in Coptic. And that fragment is not believed to be a forgery but it doesn't have any provenance and there's a lot of mystery surrounding where it was found. And only a small handful of scholars have been allowed to inspect it. So like. It's shaky, at best. (Also, it wasn't publicized until 2012, and so cannot be the source of earlier stories.) We don't start seeing Christian texts in Coptic (an Egyptian dialect) until the beginning of the third century AD. So the very earliest this papyrus fragment could come from is about 170 years after Jesus' death, in a text written in a language Jesus didn't speak, in an area he never lived in. In a time where people were passing around all sorts of legends. Assuming that it is a genuine ancient text, it's still not very good evidence that it's relating historical sayings of the actual Jesus. The Bible mentions Jesus' parents and siblings, why doesn't it mention a wife anywhere?

Dan Brown made a shitton of stuff up for The DaVinci Code and its sequels. It is a great work of fiction, but it is fiction. The thing he's really good at is coming up with puzzles that tie into things people want to believe, and into various historical conspiracy theories. Please take everything he says with a boulder of salt.

So now let's turn to the question of "was Mary Magdalen a sex worker!" And the answer is no, she was not. You have to understand that there are a lot of women named Mary in the Bible, and lots of people conflate them. For our purposes, the other Mary you need to know is Mary of Bethany (sister of Martha and Lazarus).

In the Gospel of John, Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead. In the next chapter, Mary of Bethany (Lazarus' sister) anoints Jesus feet with oil, presumably in gratitude for her brother's resurrection.

In the other three Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), there is also a story about a woman anointing Jesus' feet, but she is unnamed and pretty clearly not Mary of Bethany. She is a sinner who washes Jesus' feet in gratitude for having been forgiven. The context of the story--and the way Jesus talks about it--are completely different. But historically, people would go "eh, all women are the same, right? so this unnamed woman has to be Mary of Bethany" despite all the differences in the text and context.

So then we come to Mary Magdalen. Mary, we are told, had seven demons cast out from her and after that became one of several wealthy women who paid for his and the disciples' bills (this is a patronage relationship, and doesn't imply anything sexual--wealthy people in those days would regularly subsidize teachers they liked. Lydia, for example, supported Paul in his ministry, as did several other women he names in his letters.)

But the medieval Catholic church looked at this and went, "well, all women are basically the same woman, right? Mary Magdalen and Mary of Bethany and all the other Marys (except Jesus' mom) are all the same woman, pretty much. So therefore, Mary Magdalen anointed Jesus' feet, and therefore she was publicly known as a sinner. (Despite the fact that a) Mary Magdalen didn't anoint Jesus' feet, and b) Mary of Bethany, who did, wasn't publicly labelled a "sinner") And also, look at those seven demons that were cast out from her, that's GOT to be a reference to the Seven Deadly Sins, right? (which were a medieval fabrication, not found in the Bible.) And the sin of women is lust, so therefore Mary Magdalen was controlled by lust and therefore she was a prostitute!

And in addition to the fact that there is zero evidence of this whatsoever, there's the fact that the vast majority of sex workers in the ancient world were desperately poor. She would not have had the money to sponsor Jesus and his disciples if she was a former sex worker.

As someone who believes that sex work is work and should be legalized (and that sex workers should be unionized and have legal protections), I'm not saying this because I think her being a sex worker would be a shameful thing. I really like all the modern theology about "Jesus hanging out with sex workers." I wish it were true! But it almost certainly isn't.

tl;dr: Jesus almost certainly wasn't married, Mary Magdalen was never a sex worker, and Dan Brown is a fiction writer not a historian.

Hey sorry. Your boyfriend knows exactly what he wants and who he wants to be. He knows exactly why he walks and talks like a machine. He's now becoming his own self-fulfilled prophecy. Yeah sorry.

If you guys were on here at 11 years old what would you be posting about

Twin Peaks | 2.11 | Masked Ball

who give a fuck. fall out boy forever

The tumblr experience is having politics that make the most left leaning progressive you know irl blush and then logging on here and getting called a bootlicker fascist because you said that you dont think we should make the reign of terror happen again

Me irl: the problem isnt taxes, youre thinking too small. The problem is that the federal government isnt taxing the right people the right amount. Theyre taking all our extra cash in our measly little wealth bracket and letting the billionaires hang on to more money than they can ever spend in a lifetime. The only way anybody gets a single billion is either through exploitation or inheriting it from someone else who did the exploitation, nobody who has that kind of money earned it legitimately. Not only do we need to strip that back into social safety nets for those of us theyre bleeding dry instead, but they need to establish hard laws and regulations to prevent that kind of exploitation from happening in the first place!

My coworkers: man, youre a real red-card commie, aren't you? You gonna start telling us to vote NDP and that healtcare isnt a scam too? Jesus christ go give someone else your goddamn revolution pamphlets, lenin.

Me on tumblr: while i appreciate the animosity towards billionaires, i dont think literally dragging a guillotine into the streets and beheading people as a public spectacle is going to actually solve the problems inherent in the system considering the french already tried that and it didnt work out well for them. Also i dont think anybody has the right to decide who lives and who dies, im pretty anti death penalt-

Tumblr users: how does that boot taste, fascist?

Extremely important things my boyfriend has said to me this week:

Will update this post as he says more wild shit like this

Happy Valentine's Day! This blog's favorite thembo just almost set fire to their apartment (everyone is fine)

(in response to hearing someone made fun of me on the bus for having visible OCD behaviors)

making a collection

you want me to get high? the thing that killed icarus?