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What is your favorite story arc?
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Logicians have but ill defined
As rational the human kind.
Logic, they say, belongs to man,
But let them prove it if they can.
-- Oliver Goldsmith
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday January 17 2017, @10:26PM
Well that's complicated because technically by your definition something like Plutarch or Xenophon qualifies. There's a lot of paganism out there that never made the biblical cut.
Usually "Apocrypha" is defined as stuff that was in and then they yanked it out, or stuff that a substantial subset of the population really liked but the majority didn't dig it (like the Mormon literature)
A couple decades before the internet I obtained a copy of the Christian Apocrypha that claimed to have all the stuff that was biblical-ish but got the axe, and every chapter began with the story of how the Catholic church gave this particular book the axe in such and such year by such and such pope or bishop having a cow over the topic. I read thru it thinking it would be all magical and enlightening and stuff and it ... wasn't. I would imagine all that stuff is freely available online today.
Honestly you're probably better off reading some Plutarch.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Phoenix666 on Thursday January 19 2017, @09:05PM
The Gnostic Gospels are pretty interesting because it gives a different view on the events of Jesus's ministry. There's a lot more eastern mysticism reflected in them. To me it's an interesting window into the philosophical foment before the canon was developed.
In the West our view of Christianity is much more monolithic than it really was. There was the Catholic Church, then the Reformation, and that's pretty much it. Maybe some people are aware of the schism between Rome and Eastern Orthodox churches. A handful know that even centuries later in southern France there was a major splinter movement called Catharism that persisted for a very long time before Rome managed to hang all of them as heretics.
But if you go to Turkey (where the early church took root) and the Middle East and visit holy sites it's quite clear how much disagreement there was on the exact message and form of Christian worship. In Cappadocia you can walk from one cave church with its iconography to another 50 yards away and see a completely different set.
For me, somehow, seeing things through that rawer, more unrefined, less codified form was much more spiritual than walking through St. Peter's.
Washington DC delenda est.