What were Jesus and early Christians like?

[TimOneill]

Critically examining the story of all four Gospels, I can't see why anyone thinks they're all written accounts of the same story.

I’m not sure what “written accounts of the same story” means here. It’s pretty obvious to anyone other than a fundie that these are not works of documentary journalism and are theological elaborations on various stories floating around about Jesus. But there is enough overlap in them and a number of other indications that they were telling stories about the same guy and in some places obviously telling versions of story about the same events in his life.

1. Mark came first, whether or not Mark had some sort of basis in a Historical Jesus.

There are several clear indications in gMark that its author was working from an earlier source and one that was written in Aramaic. We can tell this from several places where the gospel writer has clearly misunderstood his source and mistaken one Aramaic word for another. Given that gMark is most likely the earliest gospel, this makes his Aramaic source or sources earlier still. Given that all of the gospels set Jesus’ life in the time of Antipas, Caiaphus and Pilate, this pushes these early Aramaic accounts back much closer to the 30s AD – i.e. when the stories are set. Which makes gMark much closer to the action, especially by the standards of ancient textual sources.

2. Then Luke and Matt were fanfiction elaborations on Mark, adding a birth story and so on, but working separately so as to create contradictory narratives with one another, often going in opposite directions.

That’s true for the infancy narratives but much less true for the rest of their accounts. They also share the Q material, which seems to have been based on at least one common source, possibly more. So we now have gMark’s early source/s, and the Q source/s as well as any “fanfic” material the authors of gMatt and gLuke made up. And that’s assuming that the material unique to them – the “L” and “M”material –actually was made up by them and not gleaned from oral traditions or any further lost sources.
So it’s not quite as simple as “Mark wrote a story and then Luke and Matthew came along and elaborated on it, but it all goes back to Mark”. There are number of sources in the mix, and at least one of them predates gMark. The source/s behind the Q material could do so as well, since there are some parallels between it and some of the Pauline material.

3. Then John comes along much later and offers a complete rewrite.

A substantial rewrite, but not a complete one. gJohn is clearly much later and has a completely different theological agenda – pretty much all the earlier apocalyptic stuff has gone, for example. And it’s not a “rewrite” anyway, since there is no evidence at all that the writer or writers of gJohn had any knowledge of any of the synoptics, let alone used them as sources. Yet gJohn tells some of the same stories and deals with several of the same issues (eg. Why was Jesus being baptised by his supposed subordinate John?)

So with gJohn we are dealing with a new strand of tradition where the author must be getting his information from somewhere, but we can tell that it wasn’t from any of the synoptics. This means there was yet another source or sources out there, though judging from the differences between gJohn and the earlier gospels, they are unlikely to have been early ones (though this is not impossible).
Does all this mean these gospels are “all written accounts of the same story”? Not really. But it does mean they are all accounts about the same person drawing on earlier sources that are now lost. And some of those – especially the Aramaic source/s of gMark and proabably the source/s of the Q material – seem to be quite early and fairly close to the time of the events described. And that means that at least some of what they say is quite likely to have a historical core under the theological spin.

So, putting it together, if Jesus was crucified in let's say as late as 33 CE, that would mean JtB was put into prison earlier than that, which means he would have mouthed off about the divorce/remarriage of Antipas earlier than that, which means the divorce happened earlier than that. Let's say 31 CE, which gives Jesus' ministry its minimum year between the arrest of JtB and Jesus' crucifixion. That would mean Aratas' daughter fled in 31 CE, Aratas twiddles his thumbs in 32 CE, he twiddles his thumbs in 33 CE, he twiddles his thumbs in 34 CE, he twiddles his thumbs in 35 CE and finally in 36 CE he gets outraged and says "ATTACK!" ...or the whole drama with the arrest of John the Baptist occurred closer to 36 CE.

It doesn’t matter to me much whether he was crucified in 33, 36 or 37 AD. But there are some possible reasons Aretas could have chosen to wait until 36 AD to have his revenge on Antipas. Antipas was a loyal vassal of Rome and an Arabian king would hesitate in attacking him if it meant an intervention by the Roman governor of Syria on the behalf of Rome’s Jewish client. But in 36 AD Rome was at war with the Parthian shah Artabanus III and the Syrian governor Vitellius and his legions were marching to the Euphrates. Which made it a good time to get revenge on Antipas both for the divorce ofAretas’ daughter and for the ongoing border disputes that were most likely the real cause of the war. If this was the reason he launched the war in 36 AD, the strategy almost didn’t work. The Parthian war concluded pretty quickly and Tiberius then ordered Vitellius to punish Aretas. The Arabian king was only saved by Tiberius’ death, upon which Vitellius returned to base in Antioch.