Bring Your Legos To Heaven

I love the Bible because it's such a human book, more of history of the first Christians, if you ask me, than an account of actual events. I love how every. single. word. is deliberate and rich with meaning, and has evolved along with the Christians who were writing it. As Bart D. Ehrman points out in Misquoting Jesus, it has been edited, falsely copied, reconstructed, deleted and re-written, mistranslated, lost, found, etcetera, which makes the entire Bible one huge mystery that tells us more about the authors than the subjects of the stories. We can't accept it as the literal Word of God.

That's why I got a huge kick out of the Brick Testament. Brendan Powell Smith has spent years creating Bible Stories with Legos. To me, this is just another step in the evolution of the Bible. For thousands of years, people have picked it up and and read it, spoken it, listened to it, acted it out, drew it, sculpted it, and interpreted it in many ways. I hope that process never, ever ends.

Ehrman's book was pretty good. Even if you agree that the Bible was written by humans (which is a surprisingly low percengate of people), you will be surprised to read about the actual history of how these words became published, and how it is impossible to argue that they are the inerrant words of God. Ehrman breaks down the history of the Gospels and letters of the New Testament so we see (and this is why I love the New Testament so much-->) that the New Testament is a primary source history of the first Christians. We're learning much more about them than Jesus Christ.

You'd like to think that putting the Bible together was a simple process -- that it came together quite neatly in a short amount of time. But it took hundreds of years of unorganized "editing," by often illiterate monks and scribes with agendas. I used to joke that when recording John's Gospel some stupid intern dropped the manuscript on the floor and picked it back up and shuffled it back together out of order because it seems so awkward and obviously non-sensical at times. But honestly, this might have actually happened. And a whole bunch of other weird stuff, too.

Every single word in the Bible is heavy and was selected for a very specific reason, to support a theory, to blame the Jews for killing God, or fulfill Old Testament prophecy. Oh, that last one. The book hardly touched upon this, and that is one of my favorite aspects of the New Testament stories. That's why I love Jesus' birth narratives so much -- they have Joseph carting his ass all over the Middle East at warped speed just so he can be in the right places at the right time, even though it makes no sense logistically. It's hilarious. I'm shocked Ehrman didn't talk about this very much -- almost all Jesus anecdotes reflect predictions about the Messiah in the Old Testament. But still, there was a lot that I did NOT know. (Like, the fact that four Gospels was chosen was not because there were only four legitimate Gospels -- shit... there were far more than that -- but because there were "four corners of the earth." Did you know that?

Also, this book is pretty basic, so even if you don't know shit about the Bible, you can get through this book and enjoy every page.