re: #33 SanFranciscoZionist

“Many of them also which used curious arts brought their books together, and burned them before all [men]: and they counted the price of them, and found [it] fifty thousand [pieces] of silver.”

I would say that’s a description of converts burning books (of magic?) to exhibit their new commitment. Still skeeves me out, but a bit different to burning someone else’s holy text as an act of public assholery.

Either way, the mainstream of Christian faith in the modern age does not advocate such an interpretation. You can find justification for damn near anything in Scripture, but the mores of the society that lives by that text also count.

So Jones is not being consistent, just a vindictive schmuck.

ccording to scholar Elaine Pagels, “In AD 367, Athanasius, the zealous bishop of Alexandria… issued an Easter letter in which he demanded that Egyptian monks destroy all such unacceptable writings, except for those he specifically listed as ‘acceptable’ even ‘canonical’ — a list that constitutes the present ‘New Testament’”.[citation needed] Although Pagels cites Athanasius’s Paschal letter (letter 39) for 367 AD, there is no order for monks to destroy heretical works contained in that letter.[1]

en.wikipedia.org

In his 1821 play, Almansor, the German writer Heinrich Heine — referring to the burning of the Muslim holy book, the Qur’an, during the Spanish Inquisition — wrote, “Where they burn books, so too will they in the end burn human beings.” (“Dort, wo man Bcher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen.”)

Some supporters have celebrated book burning cases in art and other media. Such is the bas-relief by Giovanni Battista Maini of The Burning of Heretical Books over a side door on the faade of Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome, which depicts the burning of ‘heretical’ books as a triumph of righteousness.[2]