Sheshbazzar

You must be forgetting that the religion being discussed is Christianity.

The religion that has spouted 41,000 different sects, each with a different take on the reading and understanding of their texts.
From its very beginnings it has been divided by splits among what its adherents believed, both about the Scriptures, and what they were supposed to observe and keep, and what they were supposed to overlook and to discontinue.

These old questions and disputes have never been satisfactorily answered.
If the Almighty God of Israel and the Prophets, who supposedly does not change, says that something is an 'abomination' to Him, does it cease to be an 'abomination' to Him because someone gets dunked?
Or because an unknown preacher allegedly said something, related third hand, that can be twisted to nullify the very commandments of God?

If both The Law and the Prophets say that a particular institution is to be observed forever, in all generations, and clearly states that it will continue to be observed in the world to come by all of mankind, does it cease to be of any effect or value because one gets dunked?

Does self-proclaimed 'Apostle' Paul's' private 'vision' and 'Paul's gospel' really possess an authority that exceeds that of the Torah itself, and of the direct words of Yahweh El Shaddi (Lord God Almighty) and of His Prophets?

Many early Christian's certainly did not think so.

They continued to observe the Seventh Day Sabbath and to abstain from Scripturally unclean meats clear into the fourth century, until the Catholic form of religion finally imposed the death penalty as a means of exterminating those who would not conform to the Roman Catholic dictates regarding holy days, and forced men at the point of the sword to violate both The Laws of God and their conscience or be tortured to death.

Appears to me that anyone who would follow that 'gospel which according to Paul' would be the one to be accursed.
By the one man becomes accursed of 'Paul' and that notoriously murderous church of his invention.
By the other a man becomes accursed by the Holy One of Israel.
Many Christians chose rather to undergo torture and die, than to live lives in subjugation to the will of, and to serve that Pauline abomination called Catholicism.

sotto voce

John noted, 'He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.' So we can see that respectable, upright Jews, whose love of Romans was not quite the stuff of romantic legend, preferred even that appalling mega-cur Caesar to their own, long predicted monarch. They found Jesus a disappointment, a bit of an anti-climax, shall we say. So no wonder that those infamous organisers of orgies in the recognised capital of decadence found the rule of Jesus just a trifle incommodious. But of course, canny Tertullian was proved right, and the Mighty Empire eventually had to grovel. Jesus just had too much street cred. Jesus ruled.

Or rather, the empire had to appear to grovel. Because, as we know, the old brainwashing of the plebeians carried on, as it had from the foundation of Rome, and as it had from the foundation of every 'civilisation' known to archaeologists. It was plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, already. Sacrifices were made in temples by cipher priests, just as they always had been, and as they are today in a papist temple near you.

Yes, the 'majesty' of Jesus was transferred to a ridiculous succession of ridiculous 'Vicars of Christ', imperial puppets, whose current status and residence was granted by Benito Mussolini, a dictator who proudly modelled his regime on that of Bullhead. Rather appropriately, one might observe.

So ruling Pharisees, Roman patricians, aristocratic Greeks and no doubt many others, whose interests were carnal only, who found the gospel 'foolish', all had an interest in claiming the majesty of Jesus as their own, in order to fool the poor into doing what the real Jesus did not want them to do. So they created a figment, to fool. And some still people want to be fooled, do they not.

So, Bible; or Renaissance.

Duvduv

The reason I referred to "minimum consistency" is because although a plethora of sects developed, the bare minimum has been the basic canon. So when it was all created why did they not seek to eliminate at least the most glaring contradictions among the texts that served as the fundamental charter of their new faith. That's all.

Chili

More than anything Paul was a good salesman to get the Emperor sold on his salvation recipe, and so Paul is not to be blamed for any murder at all, nor is the Catholic Church.

Lucky for us we now have freedom of religion again with 40.000 going in everywhich way.

sotto voce

No, no. What is being discussed is the hypocritical effulgence of killers, the avaricious, tricksters, thugs, cowards, adulterers, buggers and paederasts. Who didn't like the Bible much, as they get mentioned in it, in unflattering terms.

So why it's here in BC&H is anyone's guess.

Chili

Because in the proper reading they compliment each other that way.

Duvduv

<Sigh> How do they complement each other when there were apostles before Paul and people "in Christ before me" when it was he who revealed the gospel of the risen Christ?!
How do they complement each to explain how the epistles were collected, when and where, and who decided that these 4 gospels were the ones for the canon?
How does the GC complement the exclusive revelation of Paul?
How is "salvation is from the Jews" when the Christ of GJohn was not?
How does the fate of pagans in Galatians gets reconciled with that of the pagans according to Romans?
And on and on it goes.........but a basic minimum consistency at least.

Toto

Duvduv - compare it to the Republican Party Platform. The platform has to have something for the atheist libertarians and also the Bible thumping southern theocrats. Who needs consistency? That's missing the point of the purpose of the document.

Chili

They do compliment each other and the longer your list just shows the further wrong that you are.

All you have to do first is park your historical idea and call it the description of metamorphosis that is the same for all, and always will be the same.

To this I will add that "many are called but few are chosen" and only those are the few who will understand, and so then, why would anybody try to make you understand if you tell me that you are not one of the chosen.

As for me? I just rant my thoughts as I see them and you do not have to believe a word that I write, nor would I ever ask you to do.

Diogenes the Cynic

Essentially the answer to the OP is that these texts were originally produced independently of each other, and were produced at a time when there really was no "church" or controlling authority, or even an orthodoxy. There were a multiplicity of "Christianities" long before there was a Catholic orthodoxy (The Acts of the Apostles is largely an attempt to harmonize the Pauline/Petrine division - which was basically a fight between Hellenizers and Judaizers). When the orthodoxy finally emerged around the 3rd and 4th Centuries, it basically inherited these texts after they were already too established and popular to be able to do any wholesale changes to them.

It was also the case that most people could not read anyway. Readings and interpretations were doled out by the Church, and most people simply did not have the ability or the occasion to read the Bible themselves without pastoral filters, so the contradictions would not have been well-known to them. It's not a coincidence that the Reformation followed soon after the invention of the printing press, which allowed the masses much greater direct access to the text.