Why do you think a Christian identifies with sin? What is the purpose of it? per the Bible?
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The more I learn about Christianity, the less true it seems
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Which parts of the New Testament do you see as an ununified message?
Are you seeking one church in a certain location that everyone converted to Christianity around the world attended? How would you plausibly think an original church would have existed?
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Dave Ellis
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Virtually all of it. Every gospel conflicts with each other, and they conflict again with the epistles.
That's not to mention the dozens of other gospels and other writings that didn't make it in the bible, but were held as sacred by various early Christian sects.
One would presume if Jesus really existed as described that his message should have been pretty clear to all of the early Christians. There would have been one central church at the beginning of it all.
That doesn't necessarily mean that church wouldn't have had schisms over the following centuries, however it would have started as one unified body. That's not what we see from early Christianity though.
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expos4ever
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True but surely you must acknowledge the possibility that the very first Christians had, via word of mouth, absorbed the basic contents of what later turned out to be the four gospels
Indeed, but why does this surprise you. Are you inclined to reject the content of the four gospels simply because other documents were not canonized. I would agree that the presence of these other "gospels" raises interesting questions and perhaps doubts about the canonized four, but this alone does not seem to undermine the possibility that the four canonized ones represent the basic "true picture" of Jesus and His life. Let me be clear: I am not suggesting the four gospels are free of bias - they obviously are not. But to say that a writer has an "agenda" and a bias is not by itself grounds for rejecting their writings. Everyone has an agenda.
I know of one highly respected scholar (yes, he is a Christian but, again, that by itself does not disqualify his views) who argues that from the beginning there was surprising agreement amongst Christians regarding the matter of what happens to the believer after death (i.e. the belief that all believers will be bodily resurrected).
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expos4ever
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I am not sure why you have such an expectation. Perhaps Christians of a more fundamentalist leaning are largely responsible with their arguably overly simplistic thinking. I do not see the fact that it took a while for things to settle down as a particularly strong reason to doubt the basic truthfulness of the "gospel" message. Sure, it raises legitimate questions, but real life is messy and complex.
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expos4ever
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I have only now rejoined this thread. Have you given examples of this "disunity"? If so, can you point me to posts.
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Well, the Word (Logos) is indeed the Creator who existed from eternity, but the man Jesus has only existed from his conception.
Yes, Jesus is the Word, but prior to the Incarnation, the Word was obviously not incarnate as Jesus.
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The first Christians uses Torah, and the most well know teachers of Torah summarizes the Torah as "don't do to others what you don't want others do to you" or something the like. Compare to Jesus' teaching of "Love your neighbor as yourself", see how similar those are? The message is the most central thing of Christianity, it doesn not matter what book is used or when it is written.
List the Gospels that is written in the same period of the 4 Gospels, which one bore very little resemblance and used by other major sects of Christianity? Even the book by Thomas has a lot of resemblance. Please back up your claims.
Again, please back your claims with facts.
Name any major sects that dispute the teaching of Love God and Love your neighbor as yourself, that we are all sinners and can only be saved by God's grace. The message of Christianity is very clear and is indisputable.
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Dave Ellis
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Possibility? Sure. Probability? That's a different question.
I didn't say anything about bias or an agenda.
The point I was raising is that there are a huge number of contradictory claims made, by a multitude of different sects, all with their own beliefs. With all these competing theologies, all with virtually no evidence to back any one of them, how could we justifiably call any one of them the true picture? How do we know any of them are true?
You can find one scholar to back any particular viewpoint. The vast majority of scholars however agree that the early Christian groups had differing, and sometimes wildly differing theologies. Bart Ehrman has a book on the topic called "Lost Christianities", it's a pretty good read, I suggest you check it out.
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Dave Ellis
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Because if there was one teacher (Jesus) teaching a consistent message to his followers, then there should be a pretty consistent take on what his message was. That's not what we see however, right from the start there were major conflicts on basic theological principles that would have been unthinkable if Jesus had actually lived and taught as described.
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Dave Ellis
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I was mainly referring to the many early sects of Christianity that conflicted with each other.
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The first Christians uses Torah, and the most well know teachers of Torah summarizes the Torah as "don't do to others what you don't want others do to you" or something the like. Compare to Jesus' teaching of "Love your neighbor as yourself", see how similar those are? The message is the most central thing of Christianity, it doesn not matter what book is used or when it is written.
List the Gospels that is written in the same period of the 4 Gospels, which one bore very little resemblance and used by other major sects of Christianity? Even the book by Thomas has a lot of resemblance. Please back up your claims.
Again, please back your claims with facts.
Name any major sects that dispute the teaching of Love God and Love your neighbor as yourself, that we are all sinners and can only be saved by God's grace. The message of Christianity is very clear and is indisputable.
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Dave Ellis
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However, that principle did not originate within Judaism, or Christianity. It appears in much older writings, both theological and secular. For example, Hindu religious texts like the Rigveda that predate the Abrahamic religions have that principle in it.
Likewise, not all early Christian sects used the Torah. Some sects completely disregarded the old testament.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Gospels#Apocrypha_and_pseudepigrapha
All of those gospels had a group that followed that particular gospel. Some of those gospels are probably not all that different, whereas others are very different than what we see in the modern gospels.
And that's a list of the gospels we know about. There are plenty of others which have been lost to history.
There are a number of relatively early bibles that we still have, either in complete or nearly complete form. However, those date from the 4th or 5th centuries. Still, we can see some dramatic differences from those early bibles and the bibles of today.
For example, in the Codex Sinaiaticus, one of the two earliest complete or near complete versions of the bible (along with Codex Vaticanus), there is no resurrection story for Jesus. He's never described as the son of god, there's nothing about Mary, a virgin birth, Joseph of Arimathea, the star of Bethlehem, or anything of that sort. A lot of the tales which tie him to old testament prophecies also do not appear, likewise the story about Jesus and the woman taken in adultery "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone" also does not appear in this copy of the bible.
There is also no resurrection story in virtually all of the other early surviving bibles, the Codex Vaticanus, Codex Alexandrinus, Codex Bezae, etc. Some of these bibles include additional works which are non-canonical today, such as 1 and 2 Clement.
I could keep going, but I'm sure you get the idea.
The Gnostic Christians, which were a major collection of early sects believed nothing like that.
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Luke17:37
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Jesus is the Word, who always existed, but took on flesh for good about two thousand years ago. When you say the man Jesus has only existed from His conception, it seems like you're trying to divide His divinity from His humanity. Besides, He appeared in the flesh other times before--for example, to Adam (walking with him in the garden), Abraham, Sarah, and Jacob.
2 “But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah,
Though you are little among the thousands of Judah,
Yet out of you shall come forth to Me
The One to be Ruler in Israel,
Whose goings forth are from of old,
From everlasting."
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No, I'm not, I'm just saying that before the Incarnation the Logos only had a divine nature.
After the Incarnation Jesus had a divine and a human nature. As the Athanasian Creed says:
"... we believe and confess
that our Lord Jesus Christ, God's Son,
is both God and human, equally.
He is God from the essence of the Father,
begotten before time;
and he is human from the essence of his mother,
born in time;
completely God, completely human,
with a rational soul and human flesh;
equal to the Father as regards divinity,
less than the Father as regards humanity.
Although he is God and human,
yet Christ is not two, but one.
He is one, however,
not by his divinity being turned into flesh,
but by God's taking humanity to himself..."
I don't think we're actually in disagreement here; I think we're saying the same thing with different words.
In the likeness of a person perhaps, but not in the flesh, or you wind up denying the Incarnation (John 1:14) as a unique event.
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Thanks to modern technology, this sort of thing is easily checkable, and you are completely wrong. The Codex Sinaticus, online at codexsinaiticus.org, says exactly what modern translations of the New Testament do:
John 1: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him came into being not one thing that is in being... And the Word became flesh, and tabernacled among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the Only Begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth." -- see http://codexsinaiticus.org/en/manuscript.aspx?book=36
Luke 1: "And in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee, named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man, whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the name of the virgin was Mary... And behold, thou shalt conceive in the womb and bear a son, and thou shalt call his name Jesus. He shall be great, and Son of the Highest shall he be called; and the Lord God shall give him the throne of David his father, and he shall reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there shall be no end. But Mary said to the angel: How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?" -- see http://codexsinaiticus.org/en/manuscript.aspx?book=35&chapter=1&verse=26
For the star of Bethlehem, see http://codexsinaiticus.org/en/manuscript.aspx?book=33&chapter=2
Joseph of Arimathea: http://codexsinaiticus.org/en/manuscript.aspx?book=34&chapter=15&verse=43
Resurrection: http://codexsinaiticus.org/en/manuscript.aspx?book=33&chapter=28
Also false.
The Gnostics were not Christians. They were a different, hybrid, religion. Their so-called "gospels" were written later than the Christian gospels.
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Dave Ellis
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My apologies, it was late when I wrote that post and I was tired and got sloppy.... Bed was calling
You are correct, that part of the post as written is wrong. I meant to specify the earliest writings contained in these bibles, for example the Gospel of Mark in Sinaiaticus. This was the first gospel written, and the one all of the others were based upon (Matthew and Luke in particular).
For example, the resurrection story is not present, it ends at Mark 16 verse 8, as does all other early bibles that I'm aware of. The resurrection story was added to the gospel later on.
The other missing pieces are present in some bibles, and not present in others. Which basically points to the fact that the gospels had undergone numerous edits, which is the commonly accepted view of biblical scholars. Things by this point hadn't quite settled into a fully agreed upon storyline, but it was getting close.
As for something that might give you a bit of a laugh, Arimathea is actually a joke name. The "Ari" part describes "best" or "good", we see this in other common words like Aristocracy. The middle section "math" from Mathetes is the Greek word for disciple, and "ea" describes a land or place, for example Judea is the land of the Jews. So, the literal translation of Arimathea is "Best Disciple Town". That's a rather convenient birthplace for a supposedly non-fictional character
In reality there was no place we know of that was called Arimathea, it appears to be a joke name written by the gospel authors. The joke only works in Greek though.Correct this as well to the Gospel of Mark.
That's not really true, the Gnostics when they were still a force referred to themselves as Christians, and regarded the proto-orthodox Christians as heretics, while the proto-orthodox also called them heretical. However, that is about as meaningful as modern day Baptists calling Lutherans heretical and vice versa. No question the Gnostic and Proto-Orthodox takes on Christianity were far more different than Baptists and Lutherans, but writing one group off as heretical is simply an accident of history.
If the Gnostics had won the struggle for power and things had otherwise worked out the same, you'd be on this forum calling gnostic Christianity the real Christianity, and the proto-orthodox Christians were just some heretical splinter group.
The important point is that is not how they were regarded in their day. When Gnostic Chrsitianity was still around, it was regarded as a collection of Christian sects, just like the dozens of other groups, like the Ebionites, Marcionites, and others that had a wide range of views, some of which were nothing like modern christiainty.
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Matthew and Luke seem to rely partly on Mark, John not at all.
Well, as I said, the Resurrection appears elsewhere in the gospels as well, including in the "short ending" of Mark (see http://codexsinaiticus.org/en/manuscript.aspx?book=34&chapter=16&verse=6). So your statement is false again.
Also, the so-called "long ending" of Mark coexisted with the "short ending" from early on. Second-century Christian writers quote it as Scripture. Some manuscripts have the "long ending," many don't. It's far from clear which ending came first.
Nonsense. There's not really much variation between manuscripts at all. There is no manuscript support for an "editing over time" theory.
Yes, that ludicrous theory does make me laugh. Where do you get all this nonsense?
"Arimathea" is more likely a Hellenization of a Hebrew definite article + name, such as Ha-Ramathaim.
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Dave Ellis
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Matthew and Luke seem to rely partly on Mark, John not at all.
The problem is that vast sections of Mark that appear in Matthew and Luke aren't only just reporting the same thing, they are word for word copies of Mark, then added on to with additional narrative. That suggests that Luke and Matthew are plagiarized and then expanded upon subsequently. This is known as the synoptic problem, and is well known to biblical scholars.
Likewise, it can be demonstrated that the author of Luke lifted parts of Matthew, and other secular writings, like the historical writings of Flavius Josephus, who was a prominent Roman Historian.
As for John, you are correct in that it is much more independent, however it's not completely independent as you suggest. Some of Mark and the other gospels to a lesser extent also appear in John. Interestingly enough, the Gospel of John was deemed heretical by some prominent early church fathers, however it wound up garnering enough support to make it into the canon.
Which short ending though? There are a number of different endings that we know of in different works. There's actually an expanded long ending as well in another manuscript. The resurrection narrative however (Mark 9-20) is universally regarded as a later addition
That's complete nonsense. The above described ending to Mark is one such example. We also have writings of the very early church fathers like Papias who quoted the gospels of Mark and Luke, however his quotations do not appear in the gospel of Mark or Luke as we know them.
There are a multitude of interpolations, edits, additions and deletions to the biblical manuscripts.
Ari in Greek
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ari_(name)#Greek
Mathetes in Greek
https://bible.org/seriespage/2-understanding-meaning-term-disciple
and "ea" is a common ending of biblical towns or lands, for example Judea means "Land of the Jews".
Not to mention that the location of Arimathea is intentionally left vague in the bible, only being described as a small Jewish town. As all four gospels were originally written in Greek, this is the Greek translation of the phrase.
It's not totally unexpected though, there are other characters in the bible with fairly dubious names that were almost certainly added later. For example, "Lazarus" means "God has helped him".
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The point is that it conflicts but you have no specific verses? Umm... Ok, moving on. Just your opinion and you've probably never read it.
Why don't you explain what books made it into the Bible cannon and which ones did not and why? Surely you know the specifics if you are posting about it.
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