Welcome to the forum.

I haven't the studied the Bible that much, but I'll just write what I think about it.

Miracles such as walking on water, rising from the dead, healing the sick, calming storms, etc. were all conceptualized before Jesus. Almost none of the supernatural events recorded as taking place during Jesus's life were original to Christianity, so this already makes me more skeptical about the validity of anything written about Jesus in the Bible. It's definitely plausible that a religious figure named Jesus lived at the time, but I don't know how much of the Bible is correct on this.     

So, did people make up lies or is it more like 'telephone?' I would guess that it's most likely a combination of both. It's certainly not as hard to start a religion as most people probably think. Think about Elvis worship (telephone) or Scientology (lies). 

In the end, I just rely on the statement that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. It's one thing to say that a man named Jesus existed; it's another thing entirely to claim that he was the son of God. For that, I want to see some really solid evidence, and so far, the amount of evidence that I've seen for any of it is about zero.

Well, I don't really get the whole jesus myth thing. I will grant that nobody ever walked on water but even so, there could be some grains of truth that are buried in the story. For example, there were plenty of itinerant preachers walking around back then (just as there are today). The best stories for several of them may have been packaged together and then the miracle stories were laid on top of that much. Really, we can't say that that never happened either but it is certainly possible.

In any case, getting to the main question of just how the stories got packaged together is of some interest to me. To get to that, it seems to me that we need to know how the NT came to be written.

You did observe that Mark is considered by scholars to have been written somewhere about CE 70 or so. Then Matthew and Luke built on that. Honestly, that is something of an educated guess based on the earliest texts that we have thus far found. Realistically, we do not have even a single scrap of papyrus that could have come from such an early copy. However, the oldest copies that we do have show usage of Greek that are consistent with that approximate date.

There is another dead giveaway, in that none of the epistles seem to mention the gospels, which indicates that the gospels were probably written later even thought they are presented first in the NT. Of course, the epistles all seem to view JC as a fairly legendary character much as the other similar people who were presented as the founders of other religious beliefs were also the stuff of myth.

Past that, the first stories (even going on an historical JC assumption) were probably told word of mouth, so right there, you have your game of telephone going on. Later on, when the stories were written down, books still had to be hand copied and the early scribes doing the work were occasionally sloppy. Mistakes were made from time to time and when those were copied, the mistakes were copied over as well.

If any given mistake was especially bad, someone might change the text to put it back to what it ought to say. Except that this also introduces errors as well. Something like a duplicated line might be very obvious to the right scribe and could be corrected easily enough. However, some things that might seem to be errors might not have been. Rather, the scribe might have felt that some bit of text just came off wrong to his way of thinking and the changed it to conform to what he felt the bible ought to say.

One especially poor bit concerns the genealogy of JC. There are surviving old copies where some scribe clearly had a list that was in two columns but he read across the page as if it were only one column. Humorously enough, not only are the names in the wrong order but we also are given the name of god the father's, well, his father.

Before I get away from that, I would also note that both versions of the genealogy can be read as indicating that Joseph was his father. At least they say that that is what people thought back then. The whole son of god thing apparently comes from somewhere else.

Then too, there are parts of the bible that simply do not appear in the older texts but seem to have been added in because they tell a great story. For example, the whole thing about “let he who is without sin cast the first stone” appears in no text prior to the tenth century CE. Most Xtians consider that to be a rather important part of the text but they don't know that it appears to have been a fairly recent addition.

First, thanks for all of the thoughtful responses.  I appreciate everyone's time and input in the making of them.  (And not to detract from anyone else who might not have a chance to have their say, please, go ahead)

Might anyone be able to recommend me to any works of serious scholarship on these matters? Are there any particularly good books that someone could recommend? Or websites?

I'm also curious as to whether or not it could be that the early founders, writers, copiers, of Christian texts and faith could have basically been aware of the fact that they were in the process of making a myth, that they simply didn't care as to the far distant future consequences.  That's more just an opinion than anything else...one of the difficulties I still have when I think of how the NT must have come to be is I imagine a bunch of snickering tricksters gathering around some scrolls, fully aware of the fact that they're creating a wholly inaccurate document and not caring.  That said if Christianity were an out and out fraud, I'm sure it's not the first.

All in all I think that the legend explanation is more accurate, in that no one person could be said to necessarily be 'lying', but when it gets to the end to be written down, it's all screwed up in a variety of ways. 

Yet another thing that I've pondered is the fact, mentioned above, that Paul (as far as I recall, could be wrong) doesn't even claim to have met Jesus whatsoever.  And (could be wrong here again) these are guessed at being the earliest records, pre-dating the time when followers had collected enough donations from others to afford literate scribes.  Given the little that I know of the larger Roman myths in which infantile Christianity grew up in, it could very well be that at some point, some church father in the spirit of ecumenicism, sought to rectify Pagan myths with those of his new religion.  While I have to state that I have no evidence whatsoever for this claim, it's merely a conjecture, that might explain quite a bit.  The earliest eyewitnesses (assuming for the sake of argument they exist) could have been truthful in believing Jesus to be the fulfillment of the Messianic prophesies, passed along their relatively benign spiritual beliefs through Paul, and then at some later unspecified date religious beliefs began to co-mingle between Christianity and other myths of the time. 

Thanks again for the responses guys, I look forward to participating further in this forum.

I don't study religion a lot, so my sources are not the latest and greatest on middle eastern archeology and scholarship.  But I was able to understand these sources when I read them:

The Mythmaker by Hyam Maccoby - http://www.amazon.com/Mythmaker-Hyam-Maccoby/dp/0760707871/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1271226346&sr=8-1

Bible Unearthed, Israel Frankenstein and Neil Asher Silberman - http://www.amazon.com/Bible-Unearthed-Archaeologys-Vision-Ancient/dp/0756776708/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1271226424&sr=1-1

The Unearthed one is about the old testament, and it's main focus is the archeology.  But it has some good information on how they believe the early parts of the bible were put together and incorporated local myths.

If you are curious about early christian writings, I think this web site has most of them.  http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/

Hi there.

Just wanted to share a few thoughts with you.

I've spent a lot of time reading about this - as a former Christian myself - and think I can shed a good bit of light on your question about how the gospels came about.

It's a question I also had and feel I've answered to a more satisfying degree I ever imagined possible actually.

(Mainly with the help of liberal new testament scholars.)

WHY HISTORIANS BELIEVE JESUS WAS A HISTORIC FIGURE

Unlike some of the comments here, the consensus view is certainly that Jesus was a real historic person and no mere invention based on the myths of other religions.

One of the best arguments for this that has convinced even secular historians is the presence of content in the gospels - for example - that does not reflect what Christians should WANT to say about Jesus.  But would rather appear to reflect something that they HAVE TO acknowledge because everyone already knows its actually what happened.

Examples of this would be Jesus coming from the town of Nazareth rather than Betheleham - where the messiah was expected to be born.  For this reason, you'll notice Matthew and Luke go to a lot of trouble to invent ways for Jesus to be born in Bethleham while still growing up in Nazareth as everyone already probably knew he did.

Also, there is Jesus baptism by John the Baptist.  Why would Jesus be baptized by someone else if he is the greatest and closest to God?  This embarrassing issue Matthew later added to what he took from Mark to try and address - with John the Baptist apologetically baptizing Jesus saying that he should be baptizing him.  The question is of course, why would Christians include this in the first place if they were just inventing every detail of Jesus' life?  It's much more probably it was a well-known detail that they had to deal with to be taken seriously by their audience.

(This "criterian" of the historian is called the criterian of dissimilarity.)

WRITING THE GOSPELS

While there are good reasons to think that some of what we find in the gospels is historically reliable (like the embarrassing details mentioned above), much of it is questionable.

There are two main reasons I'm aware of for this:

1) Contradictions.

The Gospels contradict one another on significant details.  For example Mark and John disagree on when Jesus died.  Was it the day after the Passover meal was eaten or the day before?  Mark says the former and John says the later.

How many animals did Jesus ride into Jerusalem on?

Was it one like Mark says or two like Matthew says?

And there are countless others.

However, these two in particular clue us into a very significant thing occuring in the gospels.

The reason John appears to be having Jesus during the day prior to the Passover meal being eaten - changing what was written in the gospel that was written decades before his and most likely inspired him writing his own similar texted (though taking a difference approach) - is to make a theological point about Jesus.

John actually has Jesus crucified at precisely the time that the Passover lamb was slain prior to the meal.  This would reflect - in a symbolic way - the Christian belief that Jesus was the new Passover lamb.  A view the Apostle Paul himself had expressed in his letter to the Corinthians 30-50 years earlier.  In other words, a view that had been around in Christian circles for sometime before John decided to symbolically express it in this way - by changing a detail from the earlier gospel narratives.

Matthew also appears to have a theological intent in mind when he alters Mark's story of Jesus riding into Jerusalem on one animal to two.  (Matthew by the way uses 90% of the content in Mark - changing a good deal of it in theologically significant ways.)

Matthew quotes a messianic scripture directly - about the messiah riding into Jerusalem on an animal.  If you read the text without an understanding of a particular idiosycricity of Jewish writing - you would think it is talking about the messiah riding into Jerusalem on two animals.  But historians tell us that this is a mistake and that thereby Mark's version of the story actually better reflects what the scripture actually says.

The key point here being in both cases - that we see the gospel authors getting their details for their portrayals of Jesus life FROM THEOLOGY rather than HISTORY.

There are historically problematic and theologically examples in all four gospels.  And even more theologically explainable content that given what we see in these examples also comes into question.

(There's also content in the gospels that comes into question because it shows contradictions between the gospels in how they portray Jesus taking a stance on a particular issue - with different gospel authors having him take a different side.)

I'm currently writing a book that surveys a lot of this in detail.

If you're interested, I can send you a copy when I'm done.

But now to tackle you're question about the miracles of Jesus - also something I look at in the book.

THE MIRACLES OF JESUS

In light of how the record reflects the gospel authors using theological ideas and scriptural sources for content in their narratives - again there's much more to this than the sparse examples here reflect - we might ask - do the miracles of Jesus in the gospels have theological explainations that would also put them into the category of content int he gospels that this pattern of the authors cast into historic doubt?

And the answer is a clear and firm YES.

What the examples we can look at show is that the gospel authors not only get details for Jesus life based on expectations for the messiah (like Matthews using the scripture about the triumphant entry into Jerusalem - although misread - for his tale of Jesus riding 2 animals into the city) but also based on the stories about other Jewish prophets found in the Old Testament.

The miracles of Jesus appear to have both of these interest of the gospel authors as there best explanation.

If you're aware of the story of John the Baptist asking one of Jesus disciples if he is the real messiah they've been waiting for or if they should look for someone else and what Jesus says in response, you know the first reason why.

This story has Jesus tell his disciple to tell John the Baptist that Jesus has done several different kinds of miracles - all which are found as messianic expecations in the prophet of Isaiah's writings (though scholars believe the book had multiple authors.)

This shows that the gospel authors - beginning with Mark who first presents the story - are concerned with Jesus fulfilling messianic expectations in terms of mircles.

You can then see how stories of miracles of Jesus they present correlate with the messianic expectations that they have Jesus quote from Isaiah.

Since we've seen that the gospel authors are willing to present non-historic content for theological reasons - and we see here a theological interest - we can not trust the miracle stories they present as historically reliable.

Further, several of the miracle stories they present - fit their pattern of presenting details of Jesus life based on theology and scripture; including the miracles of prophets in the Old Testament.

This includes miracles like Jesus feeding the 5,000 by multiplying food or raising the widows son from the dead.

Both of these have ready parallels in the life of the prophet Elijah; a prophet who Mark himself has the disciples say some people thoguth Jesus was - showing it was a theological theme he was aware of... and perhaps used in writing his gospel.  These stories subsequent gospels authors borrow and expand on or alterate.

There's a lot more to the story, but I hope that addresses you're question at least a basic level.

(My book will have all scripture verses for both Old and New Testament listed... just didn't do here for time sake.)

Regards,

DJ Wilkins

This was a pretty A+ post. Definitely sell me a book once it's written!

Can you tell us more about your indirect sources (i.e. teh biblical scholars?). Are they contacts of yours, or you been doing a load of library work. Any good reads to recommend?

LOL, which leaves us to a question that has been asked on here before. Why doesn't the all knowing, all powerful, all loving, god just BEAM the knowledge down into everyone's head to understand it ? Or at least give us a newer version that is a whole lot more clear on the issues ?