Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are a bunch of practical joker...	Jared Baumeister	02/24/26
Do you realize how great the second and third centuries afte...	Jared Baumeister	02/24/26
We should be friends	Noah Tannenbaum	02/24/26

Date: February 24th, 2026 7:43 PM Author: Jared Baumeister Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are a bunch of practical jokers who meet somewhere and decide to have a contest. They invent a character, agree on a few basic facts, and then each one’s free to take it and run with it. At the end, they’ll see who’s done the best job. The four stories are picked up by some friends who act as critics: Matthew is fairly realistic, but insists on that Messiah business too much; Mark isn’t bad, just a little sloppy; Luke is elegant, no denying that; and John takes the philosophy a little too far. Actually, though, the books have an appeal, they circulate, and when the four realize what’s happening, it’s too late. Paul has already met Jesus on the road to Damascus, Pliny begins his investigation ordered by the worried emperor, and a legion of apocryphal writers pretends also to know plenty...It all goes to Peter’s head; he takes himself seriously. John threatens to tell the truth, Peter and Paul have him chained up on the island of Patmos. Soon the poor man is seeing things: Help, there are locusts all over my bed, make those trumpets stop, where’s all this blood coming from? The others say he’s drunk. Who knows, maybe it really happened that way. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5838082&forum_id=2.#49692714)

Date: February 24th, 2026 9:05 PM Author: Jared Baumeister Do you realize how great the second and third centuries after Christ were? Not because of the pomp of the empire in its sunset, but because of what was burgeoning in the Mediterranean basin then. In Rome, the Praetorians were slaughtering their emperors, but in the Mediterranean area, there flourished the epoch of Apuleius, the mysteries of Isis, and that great return to spirituality: Neoplatonism, gnosis. Blissful times, before the Christians seized power and began to put heretics to death. A splendid epoch, in which dwelled the nous, a time dazzled by ecstasies and peopled with presences, emanations, demons, and angelic hosts. The knowledge I am talking about is diffuse and disjointed; it is as ancient as the world itself, reaching back beyond Pythagoras, to the Brahmans of India, the Hebrews, the mages, the gymnosophists, and even the barbarians of the far north, the Druids of Gaul and the British Isles. The Greeks called the barbarians by that name because to overeducated Greek ears, their languages sounded like barking, and the Greeks therefore assumed that they were unable to express themselves. In fact, the barbarians knew much more than the Hellenes at the time, precisely because their language was impenetrable. (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5838082&forum_id=2.#49692927)

Date: February 24th, 2026 9:08 PM Author: Noah Tannenbaum We should be friends (http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5838082&forum_id=2.#49692931)