This is a very good question, Rosanna. So allow me to answer it from the text of my book:
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What the Church does is get in the way of that conversation [between ourselves and GOD] and muddies it all up with its man-made traditions, its Pagan Bible, and its Pagan dogma.
Yes, you read that right, I said “Pagan Bible”.
“Keith! You cannot call the Bible ‘Pagan’!”
Yes, I can, because that is exactly what it is. The terms “Pagan” and “Bible” are inescapably related, inextricably linked, and as you keep reading this book you will understand how and why.
Keep in mind that “Pagan” and “Gentile” are just two ways of saying the same thing; they imply and define the exact same thing: a person of a culture that is not Jewish. In the New Testament, the Greek term hellēn is typically rendered as “Gentile”, but what it really means is someone who is Greek, or in the larger sense of the term, anyone who isn’t Jewish; this includes Romans as well. You may have heard the term “Hellenized Jew”, this is someone who is Jewish but was raised in the Greek culture. They might be of “Jewish” blood, but they are “Pagan”, meaning culturally Greek, not really “Jewish” in culture.
Another Greek term that gets rendered as “Gentile” is ethnikos, meaning someone of an ethnic background who is also not Jewish.
Thayer’s Greek Lexicon renders the term ethnikos with the following explanation,
“ἐθνικός, -ή, -όν, (ἔθνος);
1. adapted to the genius or customs of a people, peculiar to a people, national …
2. suited to the manners or language of foreigners, strange, foreign; so in the grammarians [cf. our ‘gentile’].
3. in the N. T. savoring of the nature of pagans, alien to the worship of the true God, heathenish; substantively, ὁ ἐθνικός, the pagan, the Gentile …” [1]
Within the Old Testament Hebrew, the term that often gets rendered as “Gentile” is gôy, meaning “heathen” or people who are not of the nation of Israel, or non-Hebrew.
I just wanted you to know that I was not just making something up. “Pagan” and “Gentile” mean the exact same thing within a Biblical context — anyone who is not Hebrew or Jewish.
So, when I assert that that the Church is “Pagan” or that the Bible is “Pagan”, I do so for clarity and not just because I want to call the Church nasty names. The Church is not what the Church thinks it has made itself into.
Huh?
Let me say it another way.
The Church is NOT Jewish — not by a long shot and for very explainable reasons that we will cover as we dig deeper into the history and formation of the Christian Church as it was coming to power in Rome.
[1] “Thayer’s Greek–English Lexicon is a revised and translated edition of C.G. Wilke’s Clavis Novi Testamenti — first published in 1841. After numerous revisions by both Wilke and his successor, C.L. Wilibald Grimm, Thayer took over the project. Thayer devoted nearly thirty years to the translation that first appeared in 1885, and updated edition in 1889.” — Wikipedia, Joseph Henry Thayer
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I hope this is helpful. And you’re right, Pagan in the Biblical context is simply one who is not Jewish.
— Keith
