[Sethomas]

The Old Testament, given the times, is pretty damn conservative in terms of ancient religion. It's mostly just fanciful histories with moral overtones. A few quaint stories to teach human virtues (Job, Ruth), some nice anthologies of religious introspections (The Book of Psalms, Proverbs), more histories, yadda yadda. It's unique in that it shows a singular God with the full spectrum of human emotion: anger, love, mercy, ruthlessness, jealousy. By comparison, the polytheistic mythologies of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Greece/Rome show a multitude of characters that together form a nice corpus of colorful stories but are individually flat and undeveloped. The mythologies themselves are pretty void of any moralistic meaning, though individual philosophies rose to fulfill this end. In a lot of pre-Socratic philosophical texts, there are innumerable citations of Homer's epics in much the same way that Christian literature will quote Scripture as often as possible.

The New Testament is "weird" in that a Judean ascetic borrowed ideas from works of Plato to which he almost certainly had no literary access, and was something of a socialist 1500 years before Utopia was written. Telling his own culture that they were no longer the only people God cared about was pretty weird. Telling the Jewish people to "turn the other cheek" and "love those that hate you" while they were seething for revolution against the Empire was, well, weird. Predicating the doctrine of transubstantiation? Yeah, I'd call that weird.