My Sordid Sins

[drfuzzy]

What Jesus is "reported" (by later followers, two decades or more after-the-fact) may be very little like what he actually said. There's some inference that can be drawn by agreement from the older sources about stuff like the Sermon on the Mount, but most of it seems to have formed (and grown vastly) in the decades after his death. By the time you get to the Gospel of John, almost 70 years later, the story is MUCH more miracle-filled, and the claims made so much more strident for the whole Jesus-as-God thing, that people call the first three the "synoptic gospels" (meaning "with one eye-view") and place John outside of it.

If you don't believe me, Google a list of the "miracles" they claim Jesus did in each of the books, in the order they were published: Mark, Matthew, Luke, then John, and keep track of the increasing claims of miracles and other wonderous signs performed.

The legend grew, and the signs are as plain as day, the moment you stop thinking of the Bible as emerging all-at-once in intact, modern form. The books we know as the New Testament weren't assembled until 300 years after Jesus' death... literally longer than the United States has been a country, by a fair margin.

Not only that, but this morning I was wondering (again) about the origins of the gospels, as I listened to the Beatitudes being read.  

In Roman-ruled Judea, there were very few literate individuals.  We know that the Jews (and Romans?) had "scribes" - and that it was a well-paying job.  We know that the people had a very strong oral tradition.   I read somewhere that even the schools, which taught Jewish law to wealthy young men, were almost never "reading from scrolls", they were memorizing what was told to them.   Most people assert that Jesus was illiterate, although in Luke 4:16 it states that he stood up in the synagogue to read from a passage in Isaiah.   IF Jesus could read, he somehow got training that most young men of his time and place did not have.
    BUT, he apparently did not take the time to write down his teachings.  His (mostly fisherman) followers did not.  But either someone did, and it became the "Q" document, or the gospel writers just collected good stories from . . . what the early church told them?   The problem with a completely oral tradition is:  I heard a short sermon only a two hours ago.  My memory is decent.  And I can barely tell you what the main points were.
    And yet, someone, 2-3 decades after the death of Jesus, writes down a sermon Jesus gave as a word-for-word accounting.
 
    Have none of the people who believe the Bible was literally written by God ever played the game of "telephone"?  A whole bunch of stuff just doesn't make sense here.