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Today I sat down and started writing another novel.  I finished my prologue and am nearly done with Chapter One now.
It's called THE GNOSTIC LIBRARY.

This is number five now.

As opposed the the Agnostic Library, which is written in Wingdings.
Good Luck!
-Ed

was the "doubting Thomas" part of the gospel of John a diss to more liberal Christians who followed the Gospel of Thomas? http://news.stanford.edu/news/2004/february4/pagels-24.html (http://news.stanford.edu/news/2004/february4/pagels-24.html)


I listened to the Super Gospel a while ago. it's a compendium of alot of the new Testament apocrypha

http://youtu.be/yUiAViBLg7Q (http://youtu.be/yUiAViBLg7Q)

I tend to use apocrypha and gnostic interchangeably in regards to the NT but I guess technically thats not true

Since John predates the G.o.T. by about sixty years or so, I rather doubt it.
I've read a good bit of the NT apocrypha, though.  While I don't believe the Gnostic Gospels to be as accurate or trustworthy as the canon, I do find them to be interesting reading.  I'll have to re-read all of them to research this book.

Did anyone ever nail down when John was written?

The earliest copy we have is from around 125 AD. (one of the earliest Gospel fragments known).
It was found in southern Egypt, hundreds of miles from the traditional site of the Gospel's composition in Ephesus.
Reasonably speaking, that makes the traditional date of composition (85-95 AD, when John was a very old man and
the last surviving Apostle of Jesus) seem about right.

"Since John predates the G.o.T. by about sixty years or so, "

were you there?


" when John was a very old man and
the last surviving Apostle of Jesus)"

All the gospels were anonymous. most experts agree that John did not write the Gospel of John.

Those experts are guessing 2000 years after the fact.  Virtually EVERY Second and Third century source attributes it to John, and I prefer their testimony, since they were within living memory of folks who knew the author.

Also, the writer of John gives more clues to his identity than ANY of the other Gospel writers.

I actually got to see Ephesus when I went to Turkey in 2012.  That was a highlight of a great trip, seeing the city.

John would have been about a hundred years old in a time when the average life span for a male was 30 years. He was also from a region that was mostly illiterate and that spoke Aramaic. the original language of the gospel is in Greek.


"Virtually EVERY Second and Third century source attributes it to John,"

even back then it was called "the spiritual gospel" meaning it wasn't meant to be taken literally. You can't or you would have to discount the other ones which it contradicts.

There was no such thing as independent Christian theology the early church fathers were devout Christians. the line between belief and fact is blurry.


and of course, none of the apostles claimed to know Jesus when he was a boy so those stories can't possibly be first person accounts.


also from Livy's history of Rome


this describes an incident that takes place in 184 bc


Indiana I totally respect your belief system but this is mine. It's based on my perception of what I think the bible is about. Not trying to be obnoxious or anti Christian.


Last night I was talking with a friend and described the bible as 1000 pages about puppetry then in the last chapter someone invents television. I don't know how that fits in here but ....

I went to some bible study sessions in college sponsored by the seminary attached to the University I was attending.  I remember the seminary student leading the studies said that what had happened was that the followers of Christ thought he was going to be coming back pretty soon so they didn't need to write it down, passing it all down orally.  As the years went on the early Christians and it started to get 60, 70, 80 etc years after the birth of Jesus Christ they started to realize that maybe he wasn't coming back any time soon and they better start writing it down before they got too far away from when Christ was on Earth.

And you're right, by then most of the people with first hand knowledge of Jesus Christ were dead.  John the Apostle was supposed to be the youngest of them, and believed to have outlived all the other apostles.  The rest of them met with rather violent endings.  John was supposed to have died in about 100 AD in Ephesus and was buried in the nearby town of Selçuk.  The early church fathers may have said that the author of the gospel, revelations, and the apostles were all the same John but modern theologians believe there were 2 or more separate individuals.

There are several early accounts - Papias, for one, who knew John when he was a young man - which testify that John lived to an extraordinary old age.  Even in the Gospel, there is a comment in the last chapter where the author has to dispel a rumor that he would live on until the Lord returned, which his longevity had caused to be circulated in the church.

Greek was the universal trade language of the Mediterranean world.  I would not be unusual for commercial fishermen to be pretty fluent in Koine Greek, especially since there were several Greek communities (the Decapolis referred to in the NT) directly across the Sea of Galilee from Capernaum where James, John, and Peter lived.

I've studied the history of the NT for my entire life.  What it boils down to is that there are three proposed dates for every one of the synoptic Gospels:  The early dates, generally from 55-65 AD, which is held by conservative scholars like myself who believe that the traditionally ascribed authorship of the Gospels is correct.
The intermediate dates, like Lester cites, which place the synoptic Gospels between 70-90 AD and assume that, while they were not necessarily written by the traditional authors, they do preserve oral traditions associated with those individuals, and finally, the extremely late dates, which say that all the Synoptics (that's Matthew, Mark, and Luke, BTW) were written well after 90 AD, that they were not in any way associated with the individuals whose names they bear, and that their content is almost entirely myth, legend, and third or fourth hand testimony and therefore utterly unreliable.  That is the position taken by the more radical atheists who doubt that a historic person named Jesus of Nazareth even existed.
   Having looked over the evidence for all three, I think that the latest dates are altogether unsupportable, and that there is at least as much good evidence for the early dates as there is for the intermediate ones.

Oddly enough, John is the one Gospel that nearly everyone agrees on the date:  conservatives and skeptics alike assign it to the 90's AD, although conservative scholars believe it was written by the Apostle John himself, while others say it was either another follower of Jesus by the same name (a person for whom there is not any real evidence at all) or that it was entirely pseudepigraphic (someone else deliberately writing in John's name).  But again, the earlier sources, who were much closer to the actual events than us and whose motivations were not clouded by a fanatical desire to prove the Gospel's contents false, ALL attribute the Gospel to John himself.

"would not be unusual for commercial fishermen to be pretty fluent in Koine Greek,"

it would be highly unusual for them to be able to write it or even be literate in their native Aramaic though


your paragraph about the dating is wrong. There aren't 3 groups of people and their beliefs don't reflect their faith.

Believing the gospel of Mark was written in 65 rather than 90 ad doesn't mean you believe that it was written by Mark, it just means you think it was written in 65 ad rather than 90. Many historians of all different religiosities believe that date is relatively correct.

Paul of course doesn't reference any of the gospels so it wouldn 't make sense to place any of them in his time frame. at any rate, if they were written later that wouldn't alone be enough to disprove them. everyone agrees they were written long after Jesus death and in a different language.


and again, the John the Baptist story appears as happening to other people in The History of Rome and more to the point the order to kill all the first born males appears in the story of Moses in the same book. they are meant to illustrate the vindictive nature of Herod and prove prophecy respectively.  how would any of Jesus' followers know what happened in a private moment between the King and a woman and her daughter years before it meant anything to them?

incidentally The only date I do wonder about is Revelation which is much more apocalyptic and Jewish than the Gospel of John which it is generally claimed was written around the same time
 

the John the Baptist story appears as happening to other people in The History of Rome and more to the point the order to kill all the first born males appears in the story of Moses in the same book. they are meant to illustrate the vindictive nature of Herod and prove prophecy respectively.  how would any of Jesus' followers know what happened in a private moment between the King and a woman and her daughter years before it meant anything to them?


Just because similar incidents happened - it doesn't mean they were all referring to the SAME incident.  And Herod's execution of John happened at a public party in front of many witnesses, so it would easily have been known and talked about.  The elder Herod's murder of the infants at Bethlehem is certainly in character with the many stories of that bloodthirsty monarch's reign.  However, since Bethlehem was a town of 200 people, the number of children killed may have been less than a dozen - which was probably why the event escaped the notice of Josephus and other historians, but was preserved in the members of Jesus' family.
   One last note - while it is true that illiteracy was widespread in the First Century AD, it was much less so among the Jews.  They were a "People of the Book," after all, whose faith required them to read and learn the Scriptures at an early age.  And the Greek translation of the OT (the Septuagint) had been around for some time at that point, and Jesus often quoted it, so that shows that his audience did have some knowledge of Greek.
   One last thing - every commentary I have read says that there are generally three different ranges of dates given for the Gospels by different groups of scholars, so I stand by that statement. 

It was your characterization of the proponents of those dates that I disagree with. Believing in a later or earlier date wouldn't make someone less or more religious. Historically speaking though the earlier text would tend to be more reliable, obviously.



 he would have been completely insane and Jesus would have been the only male in all of Bethlehem who was his age. There's also no reason the family would have gone from Nazareth to Bethlehem for a "census" the goal of which was to collect taxes. either of these decrees would have resulted in total chaos.



Peter, who the church says was the source for the gospel of Mark, was a figure in the early church even writing epistles I think he would have known those stories and recorded them in his gospel.

There were different traditions in early Christianity though. Paul believed strongly in the resurrection and in it's centrality to Christianity, but he admonishes people who did NOT in I can't remember which epistle. that's just to say people calling themselves Christians at the same time had heard something else. The original Mark contains no description of the resurrection. Not to open that whole can of worms just to say the basic message of Jesus' ministry is intact in all the gospels, the facts maybe are subject to human mistakes and biases a little more.

for the record, I do not agree with this at all

(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CRdgWQWXAAAJP2A.jpg)

there is no herbal component in any gospel, gnostic or otherwise

I certainly hope you don't mind that I am kicking this back and forth with you . . .
I'm not offended by any of your responses, this is just a discussion I enjoy.  To cite your last:

"he would have been completely insane and Jesus would have been the only male in all of Bethlehem who was his age. There's also no reason the family would have gone from Nazareth to Bethlehem for a "census" the goal of which was to collect taxes. either of these decrees would have resulted in total chaos."

Herod the Great's paranoid insanity was well documented.  He had five of his own sons and his favorite wife all put to death.  I doubt that Jesus would have been the only male of his age, but there probably would not have been too many boys under 2 in a town that  small.
I can think of one reason why Joseph might have returned to Bethlehem: if he still owned some property there. He was "of the house and lineage of David" so his family definitely came from there, and it was probably his birth place.  Therefore he might have owned, if not a house proper, at least a parcel of land.




"Peter, who the church says was the source for the gospel of Mark, was a figure in the early church even writing epistles I think he would have known those stories and recorded them in his gospel."

Except that Peter didn't bother to record the birth narrative at all; not that he didn't know it, but it wasn't central to his preaching.  According to Papias (around 120 AD or so) Mark simply wrote down the stories of Jesus as he heard Peter tell them.  Matthew, who was writing more specifically to the Jews, recorded the birth narrative from Joseph's point of view.  His source would have most likely  been James, the brother of Jesus, who lived until 62 AD according to Josephus.

"There were different traditions in early Christianity though. Paul believed strongly in the resurrection and in it's centrality to Christianity, but he admonishes people who did NOT in I can't remember which epistle. that's just to say people calling themselves Christians at the same time had heard something else. The original Mark contains no description of the resurrection. Not to open that whole can of worms just to say the basic message of Jesus' ministry is intact in all the gospels, the facts maybe are subject to human mistakes and biases a little more."

I imagine that Paul was referring to those Jewish Christians who came from the Saducees' tradition.  The Saducees did not believe in life after death in any form.  As far as Mark, no one knows what description of the Resurrection the end of his gospel contained, because the original end (after v. 8) has been lost for many years, or else his Gospel was not finished.  However, he still testifies that there WAS a resurrection, because the young men in white at the tomb told the women "He is not here; He has risen."  That verse is in every single manuscript of Mark.

the reason is clearly given in the bible and its not that one


and it's just a coincidence that it's the same story as Moses? Why didn't everyone who had a son flee the town. and how did the 3 Kings of the Orient know Jesus was the chosen one did they have magic powers?  and they weren't Jewish why would they think a prospective messiah was anybody of significance? The reason the brithplace of bethlehem is given was because that was the place that the messiah supposed to be coming from so they found a way to have him be born there even though he did not live there.

as for the birth line, Jesus was not related to David: he was the son of God! He didn't possess David's genes and Joseph wasn't his literal father. plot hole city


so it was a creative choice? To leave out 30 years out of the history of his teacher's life thats something.

also, to paraphrase Bart Ehrman if Jesus made all the divine claims that he did in John why didn't the mark record them too? It's one thing to not feel like telling the story of Jesus' youth, but to ignore him saying that he and God are one and so forth makes no sense. theres no way someone would hear that and not write it down.

A more reasonable answer is that John  reflects 90 ad era Christian concerns and likewise for Mark and the earlier time frame, not Peter and Johns different ministerial focus.  


I sort of accidentally implied that the author of Mark did not believe in the resurrection. That's not true as you point out. Its just to say that Jesus does not appear in the story itself after he is crucified.

"I imagine that Paul was referring to those Jewish Christians who came from the Saducees' tradition. "

He doesn't say that. Corinth was an international/ mixed Roman city and Paul of course is famous for preaching to gentiles. At any rate

Actually, a census tax can require people to return to their hometown if they still have to pay a tax on anything they own there.

 "it's just a coincidence that it's the same story as Moses? Why didn't everyone who had a son flee the town. and how did the 3 Kings of the Orient know Jesus was the chosen one did they have magic powers?  and they weren't Jewish why would they think a prospective messiah was anybody of significance? The reason the brithplace of bethlehem is given was because that was the place that the messiah supposed to be coming from so they found a way to have him be born there even though he did not live there.

as for the birth line, Jesus was not related to David: he was the son of God! He didn't possess David's genes and Joseph wasn't his literal father. plot hole city"

It's only slightly similar to the story of Moses; one involved a deliberate genocide against a race of captives, the other was an attempt to take out one individual.  As for why they didn't flee - they didn't know it was coming!  Joseph and Mary were warned, the others weren't.
As for the Magi, they studied the stars for a living, and were familiar with the Scriptures of the Hebrews, since so many Jews had lived in Babylon for hundreds of years.  Watch the documentary "The Star of Bethlehem" to get an idea of what it was that they saw that brought them from the East to greet this newborn King. 

Now, as for Jesus' ancestry - legally, he was the son of Joseph, but not biologically.  But look at Luke! He gives a completely different genealogy than Matthew - tracing Jesus' lineage from a different son of David than Matthew does.  The most obvious explanation for that is that he is providing Mary's genealogy, and she was also a descendant of David.  Jesus DEFINITELY had her DNA.

As for why John is so different - again, I am giving the ancient sources the benefit of the doubt and assuming that John wrote this because I have yet to see a single convincing piece of evidence that he did not - John was writing 30 years after the other three.  I am sure he was familiar with what they said.  He was also aware of the rising heresy of Gnosticism which denied many of the teachings of Christ that the Apostles, at that point, had been passing down for 50 years or more.  So, as the last survivor of their generation, he set out to write a Gospel, based on his memories of Jesus, but also emphasizing that Jesus was not only a divine spirit being, as the Gnostic insisted, but also a fully human being who ate, slept, wept, and grieved.  At that time Cerinthus, one of the proto-Gnostics of the Docetic persuasion, was teaching his followers that Jesus never actually had a flesh and blood body - which of course completely undermines the whole idea of an atoning blood sacrifice for the sins of mankind.  John wrote what I personally consider the most beautiful book in the world as an enduring testimony to the Jesus he knew, but also to the Jesus he had seen in his revelation from heaven - the risen King.

I will say this: the author of John had to have lived in Jerusalem before its destruction by the Romans. He was intimately familiar with the city's geography, and also with the customs and traditions of the Jewish temple service.

Each of the four Gospels adapts its message to a different audience: Mark's fast-paced, bare-bones account, with its sprinkling of Latin terms, was aimed at Roman readers.  Luke's polished Greek and attention to historic, geographic, and political details shows that he was writing for a more upper class, Greek-speaking audience, which might have been the upper crust of Roman society, or the philosophers of Athens.  Matthew, with more OT references than any of the others and his attention to the laws and customs of the Jews, was writing for his own people.  And finally, John wrote a Gospel for Christians who were being swayed by some of the early offshoots of Christianity.  Each included some things the others didn't, but John's is the most original of the bunch because he was writing in a different set of circumstances, long after the other three books had passed into general circulation among the early church.

" almost all scholars agree that people would not be required to travel in order to register for tax purposes (it would be the taxation officials who would travel, as they had to link property to its owners), and Joseph, as a resident of Galilee rather than Judaea, would not have been affected by the census in any case"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Census_of_Quirinius (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Census_of_Quirinius)






again, how could Luke, Mathew and Mark not have thought that Jesus saying that he and God were one not merit a mention?


the point of the geneology was to prove the prophecy stated in the OT. Jesus wasn't born into royalty no one would have traced his lineage or known anything about it. as if that would even matter to someone who was leading a religion that would be seperate from Judaism entirely. If Jesus is God it certainly wouldn't be dependent on criteria from a faith that doesn't see him as such


 the stars don't tell people things. Jesus wasn't revealed in stars thats astrology




well this goes back to my original comment that the Gospel of John in particular the doubting thomas part was political motivated to try and marginalize other schools of Christian thought. These existed thruoghout early Christianity though as we see in Paul exhorting the Corinthians to unite under one basic set of beliefs. Whoever wrote Paul  (edit: John, not Paul) had an axe to grind and put words Jesus didn't say into his mouth


it shows that the writer/ compiler himself who was not Luke was of that social position and location

John is specifially said to be illiterate in the Book of Acts https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts%204:13 (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts%204:13) which I would tend to believe as he was a poor peasant from Gallilee and not one of the very few and well of who could afford to be educated.

Commenting from bottom to top this time -

Acts never says John was illiterate.  You're the one making suppositions.  It says he  and Peter were "unlearned" meaning they hadn't had rabbinical training.  And, since John wrote his Gospel 50 years later, you're saying it's impossible for a grown man to learn anything, even something as basic as how to write?  That seems harsh!

Why on earth would you say the writer is not Luke?  Luke was, according to Scripture, an educated Greek physician - the perfect candidate to write the kind of Gospel that is attributed to him!  His numerous "we" passages in the Book of Acts make it clear that he was a traveling companion of Paul and was involved in Paul's ministry - at the exact points where Paul's letters mention that Luke was with him.  The case for the authorship of Luke is perhaps the strongest of ANY of the Gospels, except maybe for John's.

Paul put words in Jesus' mouth he didn't say?  PURE SUPPOSITION!! Unless you personally know every word Jesus ever said!

Actually, the ancients believed that the stars could tell them many things, and the Gospel says that God celebrated the birth of his Son with a unique stellar phenomenon.  Since the writer was 2000 years closer to the event than you are, I'll take his word for it!

Actually, according to Josephus, the genealogical records for all of Israel were kept at the Temple in Jerusalem. Young Jews learned their family tree at an early age and could cite it from memory.  It was very important to the cultural identity of the Jews to trace their lineage back to one of the Twelve Tribes.  It's not surprising that both Joseph and Mary's lineage was known.

If you read the Synoptics carefully, Jesus consistently spoke of Himself as having a unique relation to God.  John calls Him the Son of God in the very FIRST VERSE of his Gospel.  They just presented the message in different ways.

My whole point on the tax is that Joseph probably lived most of his life in Bethlehem before moving to Galilee to marry, and therefore would have been listed as a resident of Bethlehem at the time the decree was issued, so back to Bethlehem he went.


I guess my beef with a lot of modern scholars is that their motivation is to prove the Gospels wrong as often as they can.  They don't believe any of the deeds attributed to Jesus are physically possible so they ignore the fact that ALL the early evidence says, in fact, that Jesus did do these things.  For example, every reference in the NT says that Jesus was buried in a rock tomb near Jerusalem.  Many modern scholars dispute that!  Why?  Because a sealed rock tomb lends credence to the idea that Jesus might actually have risen as the Gospels say.  They dismiss the resurrection, therefore they dismiss the tomb, even though every ancient source mentions it.  That's not scholarship - that's an agenda masquerading as scholarship!

he busted out what you call the most beautiful book ever coming out of a region where almost no one could read and he himself is described as ordinary and unschooled. and he was so proud of his work he didn't even attribute it to himself



because it was written long after Pqauls ministry and again the author is not named



It was bart ehrman I think who said, perhaps in jest,  theres a strong case for  Mark because who would name a gospel after Mark, who everyone knows was not even a witness or an apostle to the events he describes. You know they found a copy of it from like 90 ad http://www.livescience.com/49489-oldest-known-gospel-mummy-mask.html (http://www.livescience.com/49489-oldest-known-gospel-mummy-mask.html)

and Luke and Mathew are dependent on it in places

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9f/Relationship_between_synoptic_gospels.png/350px-Relationship_between_synoptic_gospels.png)



that was John not Paul and he managed to hear Christ call himself Divine and one with God many many times when none of the other gospel writers did. and it just happened to serve the purposes of the church. almost like they wrote it



because theology in the time of John had evolved to a certain point. Jesus wouldn't have known that in 30 AD and tailored his remarks to clarify such an issue.



my point is there was no decree and the story exists to put Jesus back in Behtlehem to support the Old testament prophecy which no Christian wold even care about once it eventually became  a seperate faith.



I'll give you that one because again, it doesn't even matter. Jesus doesn't need to meet the criteria of prophecies from another faith




the reason critics doubt it is because people who were crucified were usully left on the cross to rot or buried quickly by the soldiers. Roman soldiers didn't care about Old Testament ways of burying people. and yet somehow Jesus is buried in a brand new grave by a rather imporbable person who is both on the council of people condemning him and a follower. This after many of his followers abandon him and even God abandons him on the cross, at least in Mark.



was the Easter Bunny there too? The stars don't tell anyone anything



so is so called conservative scholarship much of which I like and respect btw. I've heard fascinating lectures that begin with prayers. some are not so fascinating but that goes for both sides

Actually, I think there is a VERY strong case to be made that both Luke and Acts were written while Paul was still alive.
It's not that far a stretch, really - Paul was martyred around 68 by Nero, and  most scholars want to date Luke around 70 or so.
But why does Acts end with Paul under house arrest in Rome?  Why not record his heroic martyrdom, and that of Peter, the other main player in the book, if they had already happened while Luke (or whoever, although I think Lucan authorship is an absolute no-brainer!) was writing his books?

As for the whole "Synoptic Problem,"  (i.e., Matthew and Luke's alleged dependency on Mark), there are two ways to look at it, neither of which erases their reliability: One, that Mark wrote first, summarizing and organizing Peter's stories about Jesus into a short, punchy narrative.  Then Matthew took Mark's notes and added his own memories in, and created his longer and more detailed account, while Luke in the meantime interviewed all of the disciples and family members of Jesus still living during his travels with Paul and produced his Gospel and the Book of Acts during Paul's imprisonment in Caesarea and later on in Rome itself.  Or, quite possibly, Luke and Matthew didn't use Mark's written gospel at all, but did use Peter's recollections, which form the core of Mark's narrative, as one of their primary sources.

Your constant derision of Judea as a "region where almost no one could read" is derisive and contemptuous of a culture that, in fact, treasured the written word.  Of course, John wrote in his old age at Ephesus, which was a major trade center and crossroads for many religions and cultures.  John ended his life as the bishop of Ephesus, according to numerous ancient sources.

Again, you're just assuming Matthew and Peter never heard the remarks that John records.  They simply chose to record other sayings, many of which are equally powerful.  John knew what was in their Gospels and set out to record other things that Jesus had said and done, which they didn't mention.  Even he attested that if all the things Jesus said and did were written down, the world itself wouldn't be able to contain all the books that were written.

This is the thing that always gets me:  No other work of antiquity has its authorship challenged and derided the way the Gospels do.  No one disputes that Caesar did, in fact, write the Gallic Wars, nor that Cicero wrote the letters attributed to him, or that Plutarch wrote his "Lives of the Noble Romans."  Yet none of those, with the possible exception of Caesar, have their authorship attested as often or as early as our Gospels do.  We have copies of them dating within less than a century after their composition, yet scholars all over the world join shoulders in ridiculing the very idea that any of them were authored by men who knew Jesus.  The oldest copy of Caesar's Gallic Wars dates almost nine hundred years after the original was written, but nobody picks it apart line by line, saying what Caesar did and did not actually write!

One other thing - all the Gospel writers agreed that Jesus came to be the Messiah of the Jews, so he wasn't exactly "fulfilling the prophecies of another religion."

Last of all:  there were over a dozen Gospels written in the second century AD, and twice that many in the next 200 years.  The church rejected them all, even though many of them had the names of one of the Apostles attached to them in an attempt to lend them credibility.  They were denounced as "spurious" and "forgeries" by the leaders of the Church.  Yet not one of the Biblical gospels was rejected or questioned until modern times.  In fact, Origen, writing less than a century after the four canonical Gospels were written, not only considered the authoritative and apostolic in origin, he said that they were as certain as the four corners of the earth!*


*Not an indication he thought the earth was square, just a reference to the four points of the compass.

It's not being contemptuous to point out it was rigidly class based system, which is a big reason why Jesus came along. The upper classes were the ones who could afford an education while the Religious leaders read services much like in the Middle Ages and so forth. It was not a economically integrated culture like we have today it was a brutal ancient culture

more to the point no one doubts the importance of oral tradition in early Christianity and its what many feel are the source for the gospels. Paul learned Christianity from these people there was no gospel for him to read and he didn't just bump into the apostles immediately.

this is a pro Christian site talking about literacy levels in Jesus time and place

http://evidenceforchristianity.org/were-people-literate-in-the-time-of-jesus-r/ (http://evidenceforchristianity.org/were-people-literate-in-the-time-of-jesus-r/)

"Thus, it is no exaggeration to say that the
total literacy rate in the Land of Israel at that time (of Jews only, of
course), was probably less than 3%. "

and those were mostly in urbanized and heavily urbanized areas. there is even in the first paragraph there descriptions of how to do services if a town only has one person who can read.




that's just beyond belief, no pun intended. We'll just have to agree to disagree that the Apostle Peter simply didnt feel it was relevent to mention the fact that Jesus referred to himself as equal to God. In all likelihood he did NOT say it, nor did Thomas likely stick his fingers in the risen Jesus' wounds. These were interpolations of the original story that had changed as issues surrounding Christianity changed.

If you look at the gospels simply as the work of writers of their time in another part of the world they make more sense and John being less accurate than the others and more geared to the issues of its day does too



I'm not challenging anything the gospels don't claim to be written by the people whose names are attached to them. I take them at their word that they're anonymous. and they say throughout that such and such proved the prophecy that stated yadda yadda yadda. That he would come into town on a donkey or if you believe Mathew on two donkeys


http://www.patheos.com/blogs/carlgregg/2012/03/jesus-subversive-donkey-ride-a-progressive-christian-lectionary-commentary-for-palm-sunday/ (http://www.patheos.com/blogs/carlgregg/2012/03/jesus-subversive-donkey-ride-a-progressive-christian-lectionary-commentary-for-palm-sunday/)

in fact it was a misreading by Mathew of the Hebrew which repeated the word donkey for effect



he was the messiah of all of mankind including the Jews. If Hindus said the messiah had to be wearing a pink hat that would mean as much. trying to match events to prophecy is another one of the spurious rituals Jesus undid.



because the other gospels appeared after many had become Christians while the early ones appeared before



He was a devout Christian and as you note he lived nearly a hundred years after they were written. Those were canonical inasmuch as they could be and he probably would have been called a heretic if he criticized them

You obviously enjoy reading on this subject.  I highly recommend Donald Guthrie's NEW TESTAMENT INTRODUCTION for a strong and very scholarly defense of the apostolic origins of the Gospels.  Also, much shorter but covering some of the same ground, F.F. Bruce wrote THE NEW TESTAMENT DOCUMENTS: ARE THEY RELIABLE?  There are some other excellent defenses of the accuracy of the Gospels out there, but those are two of the best.

I'd go back and forth a bit more, but it's late and I have a movie review to post before I go to bed . . . IF I can sleep.

After the film I just watched, I'm not sure!

sounds interesting. and if you haven't checked it out I'd recommend the epistle to Diognetus

http://youtu.be/2nWIRo4mzPs (http://youtu.be/2nWIRo4mzPs)

it's the one epistle I know of that wasn't sent to members of the church. instead, it's a sales pitch of sorts one that lays out what Christianity was about IN PRACTICE, rather than as series of beliefs regarding arcane philosophical and historical issues.

The fact that they don't make animal sacrifices because God made animals and doesn't need them given back to him
that they don't worship things they made out of elements that God created
and the general way that Christians relate to the society around them being in it but not of it.

the references to Jesus are brief and in line with the mainstream Roman church but they aren't labored and extensive.

That's the aspect of Christianity I'm interested in, how it changed peoples relationships with each other and society. The story has too many questions for me. so much of early Christianity was about expecting Jesus to return and then he didn't so what are you left with? the lifestyle and so forth

Congratulations on your latest literary undertaking, indy!!