From Fiction to "True Story"

[DeistPaladin]

Really good post DeistPaladin! I agree with everything you said. What do you think of the 'phase' before the exaggeration of Mark into being literal history? Basically, why do you think Mark was spawned? Was it also rumours that happened to get written down?

A very good question. My answer would (disclaimer) involve speculation but nonetheless a compelling scenario, one at least more believable that the Christian folklore which doesn't fit the evidence at all.

We do know the ancient Jews at the time were chaffing under Roman occupation. There was one major rebellion during the first century and another early in the second. Previous to Roman occupation, the Judea traded hands between different foreign empires.

We also know from scripture that Yahweh made a promise to David that his empire would reign forever and that his seed would always sit upon the throne. I forget chapter and verse but I can look that up later. If the OT is any indication, the ancient Jews really did think of themselves as the chosen people of Yahweh.

The two above facts should inevitably (here's where my speculation comes in) create a theological conflict. We're Yahweh's chosen and yet living under foreign occupation? What the hell happened to our contract with Yahweh?

Some of the early forms of Christianity, according to what I've read from Ehrman, preached that the higher spiritual realm was good, closer to God, and the physical material realm was corrupted. Something had gone horribly wrong in the material world. In fact, one of the early brands of Christianity, Doceticism, rejected the idea of a physical flesh-and-blood Jesus because they couldn't imagine a holy god having anything to do with an unholy world. Echoes of the struggle of proto-orthodox Christianity against Doceticism are found in the Bible itself in 1John 4:1-3 and 2John 1:7 where the reader is admonished to reject Doceticism on the basis of faith (not on recent history???).

Even today, echoes of this belief about the material world are reflected in how we tend to hear spiritualism/materialism as having positive/negative connotations respectively.

OK, so we've got the theological connundrum, a restless population looking for deliverance and a belief that the material world had gone to pot. My speculation is that some of these ancient Jews began to look for their promised kingdom in a "higher world". This fits with the perception of the messiah reflected in Revelation as being a man born in Heaven who descends upon the earth riding a white horse.

Judea stands at the cross-roads of three continents. It was occupied by various pagans for centuries prior to the birth of Christianity. Many of the core beliefs of Christianity are foreign or even blasphemous to ancient Jewish beliefs found in the OT (the intercessor like Jesus, the concept of an afterlife, Heaven and Hell, etc.). While I'm skeptical of any claim that the early Christians copied a specific alternate religion like Mithraism, I have no doubt that these other faiths did influence early Christians, or else where did these non-Jewish ideas come from?

And so we have a compelling scenario where a sect of Judaism, influenced heavily by pagan ideas, gave up on this world seeing both their promised kingdom and messiah existing in a higher place. Jesus might have gotten his start as a vision of prophets like Paul and was later "brought down to earth" in what might have been intended as parables, parables later taken to be "true stories" and elaborated upon, from Mark to Matt to John.

And the rest is history.