all it is is proof people have been coming up with conspiracy theories for centuries. it’s fucking bollocks.
gold lettering, black leather-bound book, unsigned? well doesn’t that sound dramatic and mysterious? to me, it sounds more like the Book of Mormon hoax – a secret, controversial text that’s written weirdly (gold letters on black paper = gold plates buried in the woods), only a few have access to and the Church don’t want you to see.
it’s a centuries-old con. it’s fucking clickbait.
let’s break this down. in the first article, the implication that it has been kept secret by the Vatican is false – “many followers of Islam believe the original gospel work was repressed by the Vatican Library” – the Vatican actually want access to it; it’s been repressed by the Turkish authorities (implying that the Church are repressing it is just typical anti-Catholic propaganda).
and who do the Turkish authorities have a grudge against? Sunni Muslims – the people who this ‘gospel’ benefits (heavy air-quotes on the use of the word gospel). the article never actually says how they arrived at this figure of 1500 years, but it fits with the historical fad for rewriting scripture – most notoriously, the Torah/Pentateuch by Mohammed – to fit local beliefs, to create controversy, and to pass off a forgery as real. it dovetails so well with Muslim theology because they’re both influenced by the same event – the gradual formalisation of Christianity by deciding between canonical, apocryphal, and non-canonical texts.
here’s the thing though. this book isn’t 1500 years old. it isn’t even a gospel. it’s 500 years old. and it’s a fake. the inscription reads “In the name of the Lord, this book is written by monks of the high monastery in Nineveh in the 1500th year of our Lord.” when copying apocryphal works, monks would still call it a holy book.
more generally, the gospel of Barnabas itself is of far-more dubious origin than any of the canonical gospels. if it’s really written by Barnabas, why the actual fuck does he call Paul – his mentor, his colleague, his closest companion – an ‘impostor’. if it’s not, then it’s kinda pointless to claim it has any legitimacy. yeah, maybe someone who’s not Barnabas wrote it and used his name to boost the profile of the work, but that still doesn’t answer the question of how something first recorded in c. 500 is considered more authentic than the actual canonical gospels.
the pseudo-epigraphical gospel of Barnabas is 500 years old. the canonical gospel of Mark is 1950 years old. the synoptics’ authenticity doesn’t come from their age though. it comes from the fact they were written whilst the apostles were still alive.
also, why the fuck would something allegedly from c. 500 in Turkey be written in Aramaic? that’s because it’s not: it’s written in Syriac, a dialect, as the third link shows. the original post says “Aramaic” because it’s popular knowledge that was the spoken language for the Jewish civilians in the Gospels (ie. Jesus). again, it’s fucking clickbait! anything of a serious scriptural bent would have be written in Latin, or possibly Greek if you really want to pull the wool over people’s eyes. it’s written in Syriac because it was the closest thing people had to Aramaic, the language a forgery would choose to say “HEY! THIS IS REAL! IT’S WRITTEN IN THE RIGHT LANGUAGE!”
it’s a conspiracy theory. just because it’s vaguely old, that doesn’t make it valid. if i produced a document from 1964 saying that JFK had been kidnapped by aliens and it was LBJ who was shot in Dallas instead, would you believe it just because it’s old?
no. use your noggins.
tl;dr – conspiracy theories aren’t anything new
PS. the second link is just plain dead.
PPS. the first article cites the third article – so there aren’t three separate sources, there’s one – and also cites a highly unbiased Muslim website called Answering Christianity.
So like, did no one bother to even Google that the Gospel of Barnabas is a known fake text that was made specifically to get Christians to convert to Islam by claiming Christ wasn’t Divine? You guys are aware Barnabas the Apostle died in the 1st century AD, so how could he have written something in the 500s?
These are not retoricle mind you
The Catholic Church: *has been dunking on apocryphal forgeries for 2,000 years*
Some Dumbass Reporter: “the Vatican is SHOCKED!!!!1!! Utterly DISMAYED!!!”
I never see anyone talking about how kids can abuse adults though.
Growing up I saw a lot of adult teachers get bullied by students and it sucked. They would purposely push them to their breaking point until they exploded, yelled, cursed, threw desks, and the ones who didn’t have that kind of reaction would just quit or end up fired because the kids would start rumors. One was because our new math teacher was effeminate so the guys thought “obviously this guy is gay and he’s after our dicks” and if he was ever nice to a male student (which… he was nice and friendly with EVERYONE and was the best teacher we’d had that year) they would start whispering behind me, “yo, look at that, did you see that? He’s flirting with his male students, that’s nasty” and so they made trouble for him.
My mother worked at a Discovery Zone type place when I was little and she would come home and break down crying because groups of little boys would call her names, call her stupid her whole shift.
I had friends in childhood who absolutely abused their parents. They were relentless and mean and hacked them into submission and it made for a lot of awkward moments when I would hang with them, because I couldn’t do anything since… they were my abuser too.
Just because you’re a minor doesn’t mean knives you throw are not sharp and won’t hit someone. The fact that so many kids on this site use their age as a weapon, as a way to say “but nothing I do has any impact because I have no social power” is SCARY and we need to try to make people aware of this kind of stuff from a young age because most people who are like that don’t really realize it and they need guidance and rehabilitation so the cycle can stop. Because those people grow up and have kids and do it to their kids and they don’t learn that it’s not normal or okay, that they cannot deny reality by controlling the people around them.
But sometimes it isn’t always that way, some of those parents were so nice and kind and I considered like family, and they just had absolute evil villains for kids.
Check in with yourselves, guys. Especially right now. There’s a lot of upsetting stuff being shoved in our faces all the time and it makes it hard not to get tunnel vision when our emotions get out of control, especially with the pressure to perform by a lot of social circles on tumblr. And if you’re young and a lot of this is new, pace yourself, you’re learning, and you need to be open to the idea of learning more and know that us being adults doesn’t mean we’re just out of touch boring old farts who don’t know anything. We’ve lived things and we have experience and when we say to you that it’s not okay to tell people who like things you do not like to kill themselves, we’re not “apologists”… we’re the survivors too.
yo this is really important
my piano/choir teacher in 6th grade was only around 20-23 whenever she came to our school, and she only stayed for 2 years because all the kids were so awful. one time she told me that me and a few other of my friends were the only ones who hadn’t said a bad word about her the whole time.
in 4th grade, we got an awesome music teacher. he was in his late 20’s at the time, really chill and easygoing (we were in elementary school). some of the kids would just slowly drive him off the edge until one day he ended up throwing pens across the room out of frustration and anger. everybody was either scared of him or laughed at him, and it kinda made it worse. he left 2 years later and teaches a civilized and nice group of kids now.
kids really can abuse adults. I’ve seen it happen a lot and it’s sad and heartbreaking and overall awful to see because so many people brush it off as “kids being kids.”
In 7th grade or so I had the most delightful Maths/Science teacher (the two were taught by the same guy) and he was always super nice. Like he adored teaching, he brought us snacks sometimes and like really wanted us to do well.
By 8th grade he was a changed man. We had young neo-nazis starting shit. We had kids screaming and throwing shit at him. We had knife fights and I’m 90% certain I remember him straight up being forced into a position where he had to wrestle one of my more violent classmates to the floor. My class had actually driven this calm, cool, great guy (he couldn’t’ve been more than 27 at the time) to actually break down crying in class. As far as I heard he was gone by the time I entered grade 9.
I remember lots of my classmates mocking my math teacher because of her accent, when I was a freshman. She was from Syria, in a mexican school. Little pieces of shit were always imitating her accent and mocking her from getting certain words wrong.
I saw her about four years later and she looked so tired of everything, less cheerful and with a tougher attitude from the beginning. Fortunately she still talks to me calmly and smiling, but it’s awful to know she’s always anxious around thw kids she teaches.
In seventh grade I had a teacher named Ms. Burns. It was only her third year of teaching, and it was her first year of teaching middle school. And the class I had her for?
My fellow classmates were fucking awful to Ms. Burns. They talked over her when she was trying to teach, they made fun of her appearance (said she looked like man and called her a ‘tranny’, or “It Burns” instead of Ms. Burns), and when a few months into the school year, she broke down and screamed at the top of her lungs at the class before sitting down at her desk and crying, they considered it a triumph and laughed about it for weeks.
Being a kid doesn’t exempt you from being a piece of shit, and just because, on the whole, adults have more power than minors doesn’t mean that minors get a free pass on being purposefully cruel to adults. Some of you on this website really need to learn this.
Not related to teaching (though that’s an excellent example of an environment in which abuse against both adults and minors occurs), but over the course of various therapy programs both online and offline, I have met adults – who shall remain anonymous, unless they ever want to come forward themselves – who have been violently sexually abused by minors, who have been otherwise physically assaulted by minors, and who have been (this one is especially common) emotionally/verbally abused by minors.
And these ones have been targeted because they are adults, and that made abusing them convenient, in many communities, to abuse. This was often because, when the adult spoke out, the minor in question could easily fall back on “I can’t abuse you, you’re an adult, and you suggesting that I could be abusive is abusive toward me.”
I feel like the main issue (and definitely the issue on this and other social media sites) is that people are conflating individual abuse with systemic injustice. You can be in a more socially privileged position than someone else and still be abused by them on a personal level. Kids and teens don’t systemically oppress adults, but that doesn’t mean they can’t abuse them in their daily, individual interactions with each other.
In other words, your abuser may often be less privileged than you are in various ways, but that still doesn’t negate that they’re an abuser.
remember when you were 11 and you would watch asdfmovie with your friends and you would quote it with every single friend you knew? that was basically just the early version of quoting vines
and now I’m wondering how in the hell Lilo came to the conclusion that there’s a peanut butter loving fish god who demands tribute or else he’ll murder your family.
When massive trauma hits, some people try to find any way to make sense of what seems senseless. Find any semblance of control, of responsibility.
Lilo may be blaming herself (unfairly) for her parents’ death. This was the only connection she could make, the only thing she could have had any control over, so to her it must have been her fault. If only she was a good girl. If only she did the right thing. Then maybe…
It’s very very hard to lose a mindset like that even when it’s the most irrational thing, even when it hurts you, because then you’re left with nothing.
And when you’re six your pattern recognition skills are a work in progress. Lilo sees that type of fish one day and as it swims away it starts to rain; connection made.
Solfege Navigator 