Why is the New Testament considered scripture?

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Scripture is any literature that’s held to be the foundation of a religion. “Bonus” points if that’s all it’s being used for. Star Wars might be scripture for a somewhat hypothetical Jedi religion, as everything we know about the Jedi comes from Star Wars.

Scripture attempts to articulate truth. But more than truth, it wants to codify culture and tradition. There’s lots of scripture for lots of religions. The Book of Mormon is scripture for the Mormon religion.

There is surprisingly little that unifies scripture. Today I learned that the Old Testament contains legit satire of itself. The book of Jonah tells the tongue-in-cheek story of the prophet Jonah, who, having received the word of God to go and prophesize to a particular city, decides instead to go fuck off at sea, going everywhere but where God told him to go.

The crew of the ship he absconded with wound up being more godlike and repentant than he was. They repented while throwing Jonah overboard, and he promptly gets eaten by a whale. Jonah finally decides he needed God after all, and utters a half-hearted prayer for deliverance. The whale vomits Jonah back on the shores of the country whose city he was supposed to prophesize to.

Jonah makes his way over to Nineveh, and utters a five word prophecy, Nineveh will be overturned soon. His work done, he fucks off. Well, Nineveh’s king and, hilariously, her cows, are unbelievably repentant and stop their wayward ways overnight. Nineveh was truly overturned by Jonah’s prophecy.

Disgusted by God, Jonah disgruntingly makes his way outside the city so that he can watch it from afar. He sits under a tree and just keeps and eye on the city. God causes moss and leaves to grow from the tree to shade Jonah while he inspects God’s work. Then he sends worms to eat Jonah’s shade, this is literally the only punishment God levels on Jonah for his impertinence.

Jonah gets royally pissed at this judgment, and demands God strike him down. Surely Jonah deserves to get erased from this silly, ridiculous world, he did nothing but disobey God, and got more and more pissed with God as God granted Jonah’s endeavors success and showed mercy to people who didn’t deserve it.

God essentially asks Jonah for his permission and guidance and, well, that’s how the story ends. The whole thing can only be understood as an utter satire on Biblical literary themes.

I submit that anyone who thinks they really understand scripture really hasn’t read it yet. And if they read it, they haven’t understood it. Any body of work that people believe in enough to create a religion around is going to be a truly interesting body of work.