More like “the stuff in line with extensive and repeated archeological finds which is present in lower layers of textual analysis below what’s clear anachronistic royal propaganda is probably true.”

You might be surprised. There’s a ton of BS, but the things it tried to cover up are actually pretty revealing.

For example, it talks about how one of the earliest leaders and prophets is a woman named ‘bee’ and in her song she talks about how the tribe of Dan “stayed on their ships.”

Well just in the past ten years there’s been a discovery of the only apiary in the region which was requeening their bees from Anatolia for centuries up until the period when Asa is supposedly deposing his grandmother the Queen Mother, when the apiary and only the apiary is burned to the ground.

Inside that apiary there’s even a four horned altar to an unknown goddess - a feature that becomes a part of later Israelite shrines.

Just a few weeks ago there were articles about what’s thought to be a very early Israelite graveyard where they were burning beeswax with a similar chemical profile to this apiary with the imported Anatolian bees and four horned altars.

Up in Anatolia was a tribe of sea peoples known as the Denyen, who an archeologist in the 50s thought might have been the lost tribe of Dan staying on their ships. And just in the past few years the lead excavator of Tel Dan was remarking that he might have been right given they found Aegean style pottery made with local clay in the early Iron Age layer.

There’s quite a lot more to all this, but while none of it is straight up acknowledged in the Bible, there’s very valuable evidence of it having been covered up and rewritten in the Bible.

Just because you don’t like the current version of royal propaganda doesn’t mean there aren’t earlier layers beneath what’s presented that have value in being learned about and analyzed, particularly for history buffs.

As the science historian John Helibron said, “The myth you slay today may contain a truth you need tomorrow.”

Not exactly. The last saying is widely recognized as a later addition, and you can recognize that it is because it used Matthew’s “Kingdom of heaven” phrasing instead of the more common Thomasine “kingdom of the Father” or just ‘kingdom.’

But you have earlier sayings like 21 where Jesus is shit taking the male disciples to Mary or saying 61 where Salome is declared as a disciple. And saying 22 has a very different perspective on gender from that last saying: “…when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female… then you will enter [the kingdom].” The latter phrasing is also echoed in Galatians 4 and the lost Gospel of the Egyptians.

Also, the only recorded group following the text (the Naassenes), who were also following the lost Gospel of the Egyptians, claimed their tradition originated with a woman named Mary.

The problem is the only surviving version of that text we have in full was one buried in a jar in the 3rd century CE, and the extant version is so late that it’s even combining its own sayings, such as 110 combining the adjacent but very different sayings of 80 and 81. The addition at the end was probably from a point in time where the prominent role of women in the tradition had to be explained away in an era of increased Christian misogyny (likely from the very efforts I was just talking about). Much like how the association with ‘Thomas’ was probably a second century addition to the text after the core philosophy of a dualist reality was anthropomorphized as an apostle to doubt the physical resurrection in John just as the proto-Thomasine sect in Corinth was doing in 1 Cor 15 (with significant details in common with the much later Naassenes, such as the first and last Adam).

Also, FYI, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas is probably a satire. How many kids in a Jewish town in Galilee do you think were supposedly falling off roofs to be lifted back up who were also named after the Greek philosopher known for his paradoxes of motion?

You basically had a very philosophical text with the core of the Gospel of Thomas using Platonism as a response to Epicureanism, and then around the second century when the canonical gospels are including miraculous infancy narratives the group that denied the physical resurrection as preposterous writes a text with a tyrannical magic child smiting and resurrecting people left and right, credited to “Thomas the philosopher” that’s including a philosophy joke about Zeno? It’s making fun of the infancy narratives. Which is what makes it so much funnier that the actual Gospel of Thomas doesn’t survive the church’s filter except for said jar, but the Infancy narrative actually totally does survive and has monks copying and preserving it because they take it at face value as claiming he was resurrecting people and not as something that needed to be banned.

Here’s a chart of a poll of scholars on the letters: https://www.reddit.com/r/AcademicBiblical/comments/uq26n8/which_nt_epistles_did_paul_actually_write/

And yes, often people who pursue scholarship tend to have a deconversion moment, especially if they were coming from more conservative or orthodox backgrounds. I’ve also seen people go the other direction, which is a bit odd to me, but whatever floats their boat. The texts are a mess of revisionism and edits that fly in the face of any kind of literalism.

But those revisions and edits reveal a lot in what they sloppily cover up, or the motivations behind the changes, etc. It’s actually a really fun field of study.

For example, I disagree with the consensus linked for 2 Timothy, as if you look at the letters given a recent finding that covert narcissists talk about themselves more in their writing, Paul talks about himself vs others at a similar relative rate as the undisputed Epistles, which isn’t the case for any other disputed Epistle, and is much more than all the other Epistles. (Some other reasons too, but that’s the main data point I think is interesting.) Paul definitely appears to have been that type of narcissist, and it may reveal what he did or didn’t write.