a) Accuracy of the 4 Gospels: You have to consider that Luke never met Jesus, that Matthew and Luke based all their accounts of the Nativity and boyhood of Jesus on hearsay... unless you accept the idea that the whole thing was divinely inspired, that God was telling each one what to write down.
Actually, the authentic Pauline letters were written before the first Gospel (Mark) was written. So, the most accurate information is in Paul. Who never met Jesus except in a vision.
Many scholars believe that the differing narratives of Jesus' "life" were based on Paul's theology, as folk tales to bring Jesus more down to earth. Paul is notoriously wacky and hard to understand. But then again, he was so beloved, there sprang up a "School of Paul," who used his name to write the later fake epistles.
WHY would God need 4 versions of the same story? (If this is God's word, shouldn't we believe it based on ONE telling?) And why would there be discrepancies between the 4 versions?
Because God didn't need tales of Jesus. People did, and made them up, and embellished them, occasionally writing them down so that the one person in the village who could read, was able to tell the tale to others. (The huge majority of people back then were illiterate.) Each Gospel was circulated in its own place in the region. It took hundreds of years for a collection to be made and canonized. (It took until the 15th century for the book of Revelation/Apocalypse/Unveiling of John to be added, because it is the craziest book of all of them. But there were other apocalypses written in that time period. They were rejected from the canon because they claimed authorship by Moses and others long dead. No one knows who this John was, so they figured he was a contemporary man telling the truth, lol.)
The fact is that there are MORE than 4 Gospels, but that the council of Nicea (325 A.D.) decided which were God's Word - and therefore to be included in the New Testament - and which were spurious falsities - and therefore heresies. So now we're asked to believe that God Almighty was an active member of the council of Nicea.
Yes, and many people do believe these bishops were inspired by God. Others have historical information... Constantine bribed the bishops to just get their act together and agree on a doctrine so he could use it to rule his Empire.
b) Something else to think about: Sift through the New Testament and you may discover that Jesus NEVER gave himself the title "The Son of God". No, Jesus regularly called himself "The Son of Man". It was only AFTER he was dead that people started using the term "The Son of God".
Yes.
The last time that we come across "The Son of Man" as referring to Jesus is when Stephen was being stoned to death. He raised his eyes to the skies and claimed to see God and - sitting at his right hand - "The Son of Man". And who was the cloakroom attendant on that gory occasion? A certain Saul... later known as "Saint Paul"!
Well. Calm down. The story of Paul holding the cloaks of the men who stoned St Stephen was in the book of the Acts of the Apostles (which is nothing but a folk tale). It was not Paul's authentic autobiographical words. However, Paul did seem to work (perhaps for the Jerusalem Temple police) to root out people (like Jesus' followers) who were commandeering the Jewish religion and warping it by claiming the Messiah had come. The official script in Judaism was, and is, that the Messiah is still hoped for. If the Messiah had come, the Temple (House of Yahweh) would be restored and all Jews would return to Jerusalem and live in peace. This has not happened. So, there was nothing inherently WRONG with a Jewish Paul persecuting the early Christians. He was protecting Judaism, the religion of his fathers, from Gentiles who were warping Jewish doctrines. However, yes, he did then convert himself, and was the major proponent of this new doctrine, which is heresy to the Jews.
which brings us to this nasty character, who - in his letters - commanded the early Church to reject out of hand any doctrine originating from anybody who wasn't Jesus... with one exception: "If I tell you something, you may believe it as if it had come directly from Jesus" [my paraphrasing]. Who introduced misogyny, gay-bashing, and the virtues of self-loathing into an originally healthy belief system.
I agree, Paul was self hating. He had issues, for sure. A vaguely referred to "thorn in the flesh." But he wasn't a misogynist. In fact, he and his male followers also traveled with "sister wives," (non-sexual close friends and believers) who preached and even baptised new converts. It was the later fakes, the pseudo-Paulines, which commanded women should not speak in the eccleisia. As I referred to above.
HOWEVER... this slimeball somehow came up with the shortest, most accurate summing up of the whole ball of wax. Just 3 words were all it took. If I could be said to have a religion, it was defined by Paul (who apparently never put it into practice) and not by Jesus (who did). You can complicate it with theological treatises, debate, and honeyed words as much as you want, but all you really need are these 3 words.
"God is Love."
Oh. My favorite phrase from Paul is also three words: "Christ in you." And the context seems to imply Christ's body, his flesh, is the church, the human members themselves, not an actual person named Jesus who lived and walked and taught.
1Colossians:
...This is the gospel that you heard and that has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven, and of which I, Paul, have become a servant.
Now I rejoice in what I am suffering for you, and I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions, for the sake of his body, which is the church. I have become its servant by the commission God gave me to present to you the word of God in its fullness— the mystery that has been kept hidden for ages and generations, but is now disclosed to the Lord’s people. To them God has chosen to make known among the Gentiles the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.
Gospel is an English word meaning god's word (from old German, Gott's spiel). The Greek word is euangelion. Good message. Eu, and ev, are the same prefix, meaning good. Angel means messenger. This is where we get the word evangelist from. Good news messenger.
"This is the good news... Christ in you."
The Gentiles are the heirs of this mystery! God's son, the Jewish god, Yahweh's son, is the idea that Christ (messiah) is in everyone, as love and as a hope of glory. That is pretty clear. Jesus never existed as a man. He was an idea Paul, the Jew, had, that the Messiah is nothing more than an idea, a belief available to everyone's heart, a working towards love and glory.