WHAT'S THAT??!! Wednesday

This is a new thing I'm starting for myself but would be thrilled if anyone wanted to join. I know there are a lot of memes out there for Wednesdays but I've never really found one I felt compelled to participate in. WHAT'S THAT??!! Wednesday is going to be fairly loose in terms of "rules," unlike my Friday 56. Basically the rules are:

1. Discuss something shocking you found in a book recently.

Yep, that's it. One "rule" and it's not even that very structured. Hopefully by next week I'll have come up with a logo for it.

I've always been interested in the religions of the world, and since I live among mostly Christians (being in Texas), I find Christianity particularly fascinating. What I find most fascinating is the early Christian Church and how it was formulated over the first couple centuries. I've decided recently to read more on the history of the church and picked up two books from objective authors. I think this is very important. I feel reading anything with a strictly Christian or strictly atheist agenda would color the book. I found Richard Dawkins interesting but will probably never read anymore of his books. I get it, he hates Christianity. Don't need to read anymore. But I also don't want to read something that slants the history in a pro-Christian way either. The first book I picked up is A History of Christianity by Paul Johnson. Even though he is a Christian, he states clearly in his introduction that he his writing a strictly historical account. He says, "A Christian historian who draws the line limiting the field of enquiry at any point whatsoever, is admitting the limits of his faith."

The other book I picked up is Misquoting Jesus: The story behind who changed the Bible and why by Bart D. Ehrman. It was in this book that I found my shocking quote for the day:

In some of his letters, such as Romans and Galatians,Paul had taught that a right standing before God came only by faith in Christ, not by doing any of the works prescribed by the Jewish law. Marcion took this differentiation between the law of the Jews and faith in Christ to what he saw as its logical conclusion, that there was an absolute distinction between the law on the one hand and the gospel on the other. So distinct were the law and the gospel in fact, that both could not possibly have come from the same God. Marcion concluded that the God of Jesus (and Paul) was not, therefore, the God of the Old Testament.