I guess they did some market research between the two testaments

Because god was pregnant with jesus so she was all crazy lol

It’s because the Old Testament is actually just the Torah, rearranged and edited to fit the beliefs of what was once a sect of Judaism. That sect branched off when they decided that Jesus Christ was their Messiah, then progressively became more open and split away from the rest of Judaism and became their own religion.

That might be a bit oversimplified, but that’s really the gist of it. Jesus made a new covenant with god, which was meant to replace the old one, chronicled in the New Testament; but the old covenant was kept in as background, becoming the Old Testament.

Because they’re completely different gods. The old testament is only a part of christianity because in order to gain some legitimacy for their early church, they decided that their new god must be the same dude as the the god of the people that they were living among.

But in reality, they are very different books, written in very different times, by two very different religious cultures.

Because the people who wrote the old testament wanted to scare people into subservience

And those who wrote the new testament thought positive reinforcement was better

The old guys message wasn’t working anymore, the age of Pharos and godkings was done. You couldn’t just mass execute people anymore, everyone was really woke and PC.

The ruling class needed to revamp the religious arm of the machine that enslaves us all to get with the times or there were going to keep being problems.

You know how corporate media are, it’s easier to sell a sequel.

You know what, we’re going for a kind of apple vibe, we’re literally just going to call this thing “THE BOOK”.

Everyone will step into line after we nail a few to boards and stuff

Going well beyond my competencies to answer, but I think a lot of it comes down to monotheism changing the nature of god.

Judaism thinks of itself as starting monotheism; and that is largely true. However, the old testament is still littered with vestiges of it’s polytheistic origins.

If there are multiple God’s, then those God’s will come into conflict. That is simply the nature of human storytelling.

Looking at the old Testament, probably the most violent God has been was during exodus. In addition to freeing the Jews, he smite the Egyptians with 10 plagues, among which was the death of all firstborn sons.

For I will pass through the land of Egypt this night, and will smite all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast; and against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgment: I am the LORD. (Exodus 12:12)

Note the polytheistic origins of this story. God is not merely intervening in the Earthly affairs of us lowly humans. The Jewish God is fighting with the Egyptian gods. He does not have the luxury of being nice and good. Even if he wins this fight without resorting to such drastic measures; he still needs to do so to act as a deterrent against other gods acting against him. That is not so much a specific tactical calculation in this case, but the way humans tend to imagine polytheistic gods working (reflective, of course, of the way human conflict tends to work).

It probably doesn’t help that Yahweh was the god of War before becoming the only God.

By the time we get to the new testament, the situation is different. Beyond merely declaring that their god is the only God, the early Christians believed it, and had believed it for generations of storytelling. Their view of God had shed the vestiges of polytheism and morphed into what is truly possible under monotheism. God can be good because he lacks a peer rival. There is no narrative reason for God to be mean, because he can simply win any direct confrontation he faces.

We see similar dynamics play out in modern story telling. When we have vastly overpowered characters, the nature of the conflicts they get in us not fights. Perhaps they are trying to mediate between lesser parties. Perhaps they want to get something while respecting the rights and interests in weaker parties. A story where a vastly superior force wants something and just takes it is boring; so we don’t tell it.

It’s all fiction. Different fiction from different people at different points in history. It was even re-written at certain points in history, to conform with (then current) ideas and morality.

Why doesn’t it all make sense put together? It’s fiction written by many, very different types of people with completely different ideas.

The old testament is essentially Judaism which is an ethnic religion. There is no marketing needed because it is a religion for a specific group of people from a theoretical single lineage. There is no need for God to be accepting or patient since the goal appears to be unify and keep people under control during times of great strife.

Christianity is a universal religion ie. it tries to create new followers. If you’re a religion that is trying to grow your following, you need to have a message of openness and acceptance.

I feel like y’all are forgetting about all the heinous shit God does in the new testament. Just because he’s not all up front fire and brimstone about it doesn’t mean he isn’t still an evil bastard in the new book

If I had to guess, it’s because they were written by different people at different times.

Different guy

Keep in mind that most likely the historical Jesus was just one of many apocalyptic preachers going around telling people that, within the lifetime of some present, God was going to come down and vanquish evil once and for all, so one had better be prepared and be on God’s good side when this happened. (Incidentally, the Romans probably could not have cared less about this; it was when they got word that he was claiming to be an earthly king–which may have been how Judas actually betrayed him–that they got seriously pissed and executed him because they had a zero tolerance policy for that kind of thing.)

You can see imminent apocalypse theme in the epistles where John Paul writes that there is no real point making big life changes like getting married since the world is going to end any day; amusingly, when this did not happen, they needed to start coming up with alternative policies, and so other letters start to set down rules which thematically contradict the earlier letters, but it turns out that there are other things about these letters that make them different too so I’m many cases they are considered to be forgeries. (Obviously this is an oversimplification of the academic research!)

(Also, it’s also worth noting that John Paul and the apostles had really different notions of what Jesus was all about, and part of the whole point of Acts is to paper over these differences and make it seem like they had all been past of one team all along.)

Finally, it is worth pointing out that there were a lot of texts floating around in the same genre as Revelation, so it was not all that unique and it almost did not make it’s way into the Bible, but the Church Fathers thought incorrectly that the John who wrote it was the same as the author of the Gospel of John; if they had known that these were two different Johns, then the Left Behind series would never have been written (amount other consequences).

So in conclusion, be very wary of trying to read a lot of significance into the New Testament as a whole because it was not a unified document written with single purpose.

Edit: Gah! I wrote John above when I meant Paul. How embarrassing!

PR mandated rebranding

Maybe because JC was a great guy and a lot of people believed in what he had to say. So, in order to benefit from his fame and gain the trust of his past and potential future followers, there was a gathering a hundred or so years after his death where they chose suitable accounts of his life to include in the book called the new testament. Accounts like the ones later found in the Nag Hammadhi texts and “gnostic gospels” were excluded because they undermined the authoritiy of the church and the power of priests to be the only ones to interpret the will of God.