Quote:
Originally Posted by MysticPhD
Why does it have to be a conspiracy to perpetrate fraud, Thrill? Why can't it just be a natural evolution of the same theme with a more sophisticated manifestation. If God is guiding the evolution of our understanding . . . it is natural that it would evolve with closer and closer accuracy to what we are supposed to understand within each cultural context and tradition.
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If the early Christian leaders had been working in a vacuum, then yes you'd be right, Mystic. The gospels would have taken one of two courses: either they would have evolved of their own accord as new stories of Jesus came to light OR they would have stayed consistent with the portrait Mark paints of Jesus, which is a very radically different portrait than the one John paints of him.
Now the question has to come up: why is John's Jesus so different from Mark's? I mean Jesus is Jesus. He wasn't schizophrenic. He didn't on some occasions say he was God and then on other say he wasn't, nor would he have told his disciples repeatedly not to give away his identity, and then go around from day one proclaiming himself to be God.
So why do we have these so evident radically different descriptions of Jesus? And how is it that Jesus so conveniently becomes more and more deified as the gospels progress and not the other way around? If Jesus was proclaiming himself to be God from the beginning of his ministry as John insists, then certainly Mark, the first gospel writer, would have been aware of this and incorporated that fact into his gospel, but he does not. Why?
The only reasonable conclusion we can infer from the gospels gradually deifying Jesus as time goes on and the fact that numerous older, more popular religions were making claims that their gods had become men born of virgins who experienced a passion or trial of some sort and then were killed only to rise from the dead, is that Christian leaders came to the stark realization that unless they radically "improved" Jesus' image as this man/god who fit all the criteria of the competing gods they weren't going to win any converts.
The results were predictable: as the Christian leaders slowly deified Jesus over the course of 70 AD to 100 AD they began to win more converts and Christianity began to grow. Had they kept Mark's original portrait of Jesus as this apocalyptic prophet who was able to heal sometimes and not on other times and who did not claim to be God, then likely Christianity would have failed miserably.
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