Because it's all fake. Everyone who actually reads it finds way too many inconsistencies.

That's because it underwent some serious transformations across the millennia. Yahweh started as a storm god (basically Thor of Canaanite religion). Back then each nation in the religion had their own patron god and guess which god did the Israelites happen to have? Good old storm god Yahweh.

Over centuries the religion evolved and among Israelites Yahweh slowly took on attributes of other gods, mostly El (the all-father and creator of the universe) and Baal. First the other gods were degraded and monotheism was required, even though other gods were known to exist (you might remember the whole "jealous of other gods shtick" even though the rest of the Bible says there's only one god).

Then the other gods were slowly edited out of the Bible, though some remains persevere (the aforementioned jealousy of other gods, some gods are even mentioned by name). If the gods couldn't be removed because the story wouldn't make sense, they were mostly changed into angels or other mythical beings.

It's pretty funny rereading the Bible with this knowledge, you can clearly recognise which parts were the original Yahweh-the-storm-god and which used to be El-the-actual-creator by how he behaves in the story. When he's all jealous, rageful and angry, it's mostly based on the original Yahweh.

Anyway, that's basically what Old Testament is - a bunch of edits of much older religions. IIRC Yahweh precedes even the Canaanite religion, so it's a really old and grumpy storm god.

Now, New Testament is something else entirely, that was basically just slapped onto Judaism to have some legitimate and widely recognised vessel. Unlike the other edits, it didn't evolve naturally over time, it was just violently slapped onto the Old Testament.

Fun fact: try finding Satan anywhere in the old testament. You won't. Satan has been retrofit on multiple characters, but neither is mentioned directly as Satan, devil or really anything. The most famous one, the snake in the garden? Just a snake (which checks out with older religions where animals had a lot of influence). Then some morons come and say "actually, that snake was the grand adversary." The concept of a grand adversary wasn't really common in older religions, there usually wasn't a Satan-like figure. Compare for example with Greek, Roman or Norse gods.

So, in conclusion, the Bible is a horrible mess of edits that were made so the religion would serve the needs of the time they were introduced in. IIRC the Israelites were having some trouble with their neighbours back when Yahweh got the promotion, so having a strong sense of nationality would really help in keeping the nation together. New Testament is even more obvious because it didn't even really try to fit with the rest. They just tried to retrofit a few things and called it a day.

Well, this got longer than I planned, but I really like the topic and I don't think you can do it justice in two paragraphs. If anyone's interested, do some research, it's honestly fascinating! For example, what's the connection between Dionysus and Yahweh? That would be a homework for ya!

its almost like the whole thing is an amalgam of thousands of texts edited and repurposed across thousands of years by human beings with various motivations.

They switched writers.

My take is that it's a reflection of the Israelite people. It's easy to be all fire and brimstone when you can back it up with military force. Suspiciously that all went away after they got conquered...

I have studied this topic academically, a little bit. My answer:

1. The people who wrote the old testament lived in a world that was almost unfathomably dangerous and difficult compared to today's first world. Death, disease, starvation, natural disasters, the collapse of whole towns and settlements, unexplained daily suffering for which there is not even an explanation let alone a cure, were constantly present. If you're in that place, and you believe there's a God who's in charge of it all, there is absolutely no conclusion to come to other than he's a real son of a bitch.
2. I definitely believe that Jesus had some kind of genuine religious inspiration, that a lot of what he was teaching was for-real insight about life. The stuff about forgiving your enemies, living for good works through action and how it really doesn't matter what you say or what team you're on, trying to build a better life by caring about people around you, taking care of the sick and injured, even if they are beggars or prostitutes or foreigners or otherwise "bad" people in your mind simply because of their circumstances, seems pretty spot on to me. It was 100% at odds with the religion of the day, pretty much as much as it is with modern religion. What Jesus actually said does obviously have "spiritual" and supernatural elements also, but it is also focused to a huge extent on what you as an individual can do, and a sort of alignment towards the greater good and a calling for humanity, as opposed to this wild half-Pagan mythology about a capricious and bad-tempered God who might kill you at any instant.

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 new testament is just as vile and filled with hate as the old one.

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!

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

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.

Why Hulk can defeat Wolverine in one comic but in the next one gets obliterated by someone weaker?

Fiction usually has highs and lows. Unfortunately all the authors wrote under pseudonyms, and multiple editors went through the plagiarized stories, some books were left out, and the consistency is just a mess. Not to mention the terrible translations. Your local Library most certainly has better Fiction books that are very well written and highly entertaining.

This is one of the reasons Gnosticism exists. In the gnostic interpretation the God of the old testament was the demiurge, while the snake is identified with God or Jesus.

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 it's all fake and the authors changed.

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

He's very much not.

I mean, using Jesus to recontextualize the Old Testament God definitely misses the mark. Jesus was here on a mission of mercy to cross the boundary between the sinful ape and the rising angel, and to bring as many people along with him as he could.

But once you're grafted into the tree of Judaism through Christianity, you still have to abide by the rules of Judaism (with the exception that foods are no longer verboten or whatever).

Jesus was an incredibly stern man who was very rigid and inflexible on his views because he had the eternal viewpoint.

He refused to perform an exorcism for a Samaritan woman's daughter who was half Jewish because she wasn't full Jewish even though she was perfectly faithful until she made such a hue and cry that she publically shamed him into it.

He would snap at his own friends if they said the wrong thing or failed to understand something because he didn't effectively communicate it to them so that they would understand at the same level he did.

And I don't hold any of these actions against him, he was on what should be the most important mission in all of human history, right?

But the modern Christianity teachings of Christ where he's like buddy Jesus and he's just a happy-go-lucky, I love everyone peace, love, and harmony dude is absolutely not the way he's actually represented in the Bible by his closest followers.

It was not out of the realm of normalcy for him to do things like beating the fuck out of a temple full of salespeople.

But once again, the sheer stress of his every moment, the fact that if he told a lie, if he felt lust, envy, greed, selfishness, anything that even approximated a sin, it would destroy all of humanity, and himself in the process, must have been so stressful, that in a way, I believe it was a mercy that he died so young.

If Jesus had had to stick it out into his 80s, I don't know.

Maybe he would have fallen along the way.

There are more than a few disrespectful answers here, but if any of these ppl talked to someone who honestly believed, they'd be more inclined to tell you to investigate the new covenant

Full disclosure Im an atheist. The answer ive been given before is something along the lines of 'after jesus died and did his whole thing, part of the deal with jesus dying is now mankind and god enter into a "new testament" and now the new one supersedes the old one', but thats a very rough paraphrasing.

How any of this makes any sense is beyond me. God killed himself for himself to have himself stop hating us...?