Elevation of Christ, Jesus

[barney]

Kelt, the Apostles diddnt suddenly stop seeing each other after Jesus died. Except Paul of course who never knew the others they at least left some txt messages or emails for each other on what to do now, how to hide, where to run to, not to spill any more beans, who was going to hang Judas, that sorta thing.
For all twelve/thirteen to never see each other again ever maks no sense. Having a last few meet-ups in a hurried, hunted way does.

I Agree with your analogy re the car crash.
Some people will say its a blue car, others a blue truck, some will say someone was killed, another will say that there was blood, another that there was nobody hurt, some will say the red bus skidded and the police came straight away. Others that the Fire Brigade came after half an hour.

Jesus, a well known and popular/unpopular figure, a major celebrity, returned from the dead, for forty days (again) and forty Nights (again), did many new miracles and was seen by many.

The Romans forgot to mention any of this. "Yeah, Elvis was electrocuted in the chair, but the following week he put on a full preformance" The Romans were pretty good record keepers.
The Jews who hated him declined to mention that the chap they had procecuted and buried was suddenly up and around again doing the same stuff, FOR OVER A MONTH!
Again, not a sausage of a mention in any contempory notes.
The Followers of Jesus would have been astounded and overjoyed. He actually came back from the dead? Well that means that he's the Son of God! Along with all those other prophets who "rose from the grave and were seen by many" the night he died.

But Like them, a city full of wandering corpses doing astounding things, in the light of a cultured and highly developed civilisation is mentioned by less than a half dozen people. That in itself would be OK. But these half dozen just happened to be the prophets best mates!
Even his old followers declined to make any note of their dead leader wandering about.

 

[Umar001]

I beleive that the gospels are a FAIRLY accurate source of Jesus, in the bible, the 4 gospels in order are Matthew Mark Luke and John, but through close examination, we are able to insinuate that Mark was actually the first source, this is because the works of Jesus and his teachings within Mark are carried out through Matthew and Luke pretty much the same. In theory, Matthew and Luke had a new source which scholars beleive to be the 'lost source' popularly called source 'Q' (I dont know why lol) thats why Mark is the shortest of Gospels, and has more simplistic grammer with the continuous use of 'and' to continue on a story. If you examine Luke and Matthew, they are rich in grammer and have seperate stories as well as different eye witness accounts.

Ok I think we agree so far. Q is called Q because it stands for the German Quelle meaning source.

Sure, there may be a lot of differences and contridictions within the 2 books, and perhaps the book of Mark as well. This is because when Jesus asscended into Heaven, many thought he would appear again, in what they called 'Parousia' meaning second coming. With the mentality that Jesus would re appear once again, many thought that there was no need to write down his life in documents, plus hiring scribes I imagine would have been very expensive. So stories were told through word of mouth. After about 100-200 years after the death of Jesus, people began to document his life because the parousia had not occured as they expected. The books were not written close to each other through time, Mark is estimated to have been written roughly 70-90 years before Matthew and Luke, and Matthew and Luke is beleived to be have written by authors relativley close in time to each other, about 10 years roughly.

I don't think I agree with the dates. They seem very great. But I do understand your possible explanation for why people did not put pen to paper straight away. This is one plausible explanation, as I understand it.

Each author is writing to a different type of audience. Matthew wrote for the messianic Jews. Luke wrote for a Gentile and Non Jewish Christian Audience. Mark is beleived to be aimed at a Judeo-Christian audience.

Mark concentrated more on Jesus' Humanity and Divinity. Matthew concentrated on Jesus' Royalty through a jewish Lineage and Bloodline, tracing his roots back to King David. Luke portrayed Jesus coming for everyone both Jews and Non Jews alike.

We do not know that, we can only assume through reading the text and seeing how it is worded and changes from other areas. We can only assume who the authors of Mark, Matthew or Luke or John were writing to.

Now, The elevation of Jesus Christ through the Bible is evident and can be traced back to the Old Testament. He is prophecised in the prophetic books-

This is an assumption that those passages, in the OT, are speaking about Jesus. They may be not.

etc etc and I beleive he is elevated within the first three gospels in their own approach.

The question is, is Jesus elevated from Gospel to Gospel as time went on? If he was then who was the real Jesus?

Thank you for engaging in this discussion and as you said at the start of the thread, I beleive that the gospels are a FAIRLY accurate source of Jesus the question is, why do you have that belief? What is it based on?

This talk about how Jews regard Jesus reminds me of a conversation I had the other day with a fundamentalist Christian. Fellow hated jews becasue they killed Jesus. He didn't seem to realize that if jews hadn't killed Jesus he'd not have his salvation. Seems to me if anything he should be thanking the Jews for playing their part in bringing him an afterlife off bliss in paradise.

Reminded me of these lines of a poem:

If the Lord was murdered by some people’s act…what sort of god is this?

We wonder! Was He pleased by what they did to Him? If yes, blessed be they..they achieved the pleasure of His

But if He was discontented….this means their power subjugated His!!​

That could be a long post. But i'll sum it up by saying that the stories of the Apostles contradict each other in many many ways.
Just take the story of the open tomb. We have angels inside, outside, not visable, two of them, one of them. The gaurds are gone, asleep outside, Jesus meets mary outside the garden, then she dosnt.

The Apostles clearly got together after Jesus was killed and decided on a basic story. They diddnt have time to thrash out the details. They stuck in miracles, angels and events as they thought of them, whilst still trying to adhere to the basic story of rising from the dead.

Some speeches and events are clearly based on real events. The entering of jerusalem. There must have been a fair crowd come to see the celebrity. I fear for the palm tree population of Jerusalem if all 30000 each threw down a leaf.
Some not so much:
As Jesus died, hundreds of old dead prophets rose from the graves and wandered about the fully populated city.......for days........And this is mentioned in one place. The Bible, by one person.:?

It's impossible to know what is real and whats not about the life of Jesus. Since so much is clearly falsified by the apostles, I start at 0% and work my way up. Evry apostle says that Jesus preached loving your brother, so thats a safe bet that he said something similar.

Really needs to be made into a "science"!

The underlining assumption you have is that the Apostoles (eyewitnesses) were behind the Gospels. What if the Gospels were written by authors who had recieved information through oral or written sources? Who then shaped the Gospels according to their communities' needs, this should explain some of the contradictions and theological writings which may not be historical.

The question then would be how much has Jesus changed.

Thank you all for keeping this thread civil.

 

[barney]

The underlining assumption you have is that the Apostoles (eyewitnesses) were behind the Gospels. What if the Gospels were written by authors who had recieved information through oral or written sources? Who then shaped the Gospels according to their communities' needs, this should explain some of the contradictions and theological writings which may not be historical.

The question then would be how much has Jesus changed.

.

Yeah, thats the big question, and impossible to answer! There were many factions up to the 300AD mark who beleived that Christ was mortal, Nicia straightened that out so that everyone was singing more or less from the same hymnbook.

I would look at duplication as a grounding point.
Some messages, Love your neighbour, do good to others as you would want done to yourself and I am the way and the truth and the light, are repeated again and again.
I often find that a core message in any scripture is repeated over and over so that it becomes a mantra, this obviously aids rememberance but can also point to the words being actually said at some point, or similar words.
If we look at Hadiths, we will find substansively different narrators convaying the same message with minor changes, all due to the memory of the listener.
This is part of how Hadiths are assigned their authenticity?

I would also look at external sources, unfortunatly no contempary of Jesus other than the apsostles,(if indeed it was them) ever recorded a word about him, so we have to draw a blank here.

 

[Umar001]

Yeah, thats the big question, and impossible to answer! There were many factions up to the 300AD mark who beleived that Christ was mortal, Nicia straightened that out so that everyone was singing more or less from the same hymnbook.

I would look at duplication as a grounding point.
Some messages, Love your neighbour, do good to others as you would want done to yourself and I am the way and the truth and the light, are repeated again and again.
I often find that a core message in any scripture is repeated over and over so that it becomes a mantra, this obviously aids rememberance but can also point to the words being actually said at some point, or similar words.
If we look at Hadiths, we will find substansively different narrators convaying the same message with minor changes, all due to the memory of the listener.
This is part of how Hadiths are assigned their authenticity?

I would also look at external sources, unfortunatly no contempary of Jesus other than the apsostles,(if indeed it was them) ever recorded a word about him, so we have to draw a blank here.

But you see, if a statement is repeated this could indicate that it is genuine, but that depends, on whether the different sources are indipendent of each other. Example, a teacher is teaching a class, you look at the student's notes a week after and find that alot of the students note that 1+1=3, now, due to the number of people who wrote that you may conclude, well that is what the teacher said, but if you knew or if it was possible that the students copied notes from one student, or a group of students who were working together on the same table/group then this means that it is not the number of people that counts.

You get what I mean? The fact that all the Gospels have a saying common to them does not neccesarily mean that the saying came from Jesus, it could be that those Gospel writers had the same source (i.e. other than Jesus) And so this is what happens with people look at manuscripts.

It is not neccesarily the quantity of one reading that shows whether it is true or not, rather it is the quality of where it is found.

If that doesn't make sense I'll explain further.

The study of hadith works different, in that the individuals who study this start with a basis of knowing who said what to some extent. This eliminates various things which can keep one in darkness.

 

[barney]

But you see, if a statement is repeated this could indicate that it is genuine, but that depends, on whether the different sources are indipendent of each other. Example, a teacher is teaching a class, you look at the student's notes a week after and find that alot of the students note that 1+1=3, now, due to the number of people who wrote that you may conclude, well that is what the teacher said, but if you knew or if it was possible that the students copied notes from one student, or a group of students who were working together on the same table/group then this means that it is not the number of people that counts.

You get what I mean? The fact that all the Gospels have a saying common to them does not neccesarily mean that the saying came from Jesus, it could be that those Gospel writers had the same source (i.e. other than Jesus) And so this is what happens with people look at manuscripts.

It is not neccesarily the quantity of one reading that shows whether it is true or not, rather it is the quality of where it is found.

If that doesn't make sense I'll explain further.

The study of hadith works different, in that the individuals who study this start with a basis of knowing who said what to some extent. This eliminates various things which can keep one in darkness.

No thats ok, it makes sense :thumbs_up.
Thats why i'm very open to the option that they just gathered together in a meeting shortly after his death and thrashed out the details breifly.