Bible Lesson: The Death of Jesus an Evolving Myth

[Jenny A]

<snip> And having read the gospels a few times myself, I doubt that the gospels would lead you to the church's (Catholic, liberal or conservative Christian) current or first millennium view of Jesus if you were to read them without a theological overlay. <snip>

God spent centuries building a theology before Christ came. The gospel wasn't intended to be heard in a vacuum. A "theological overlay" is not necessarily a bad thing. Consider the Bereans: Act 17:11 Now these Jews were more noble than those in Thessalonica; they received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so.

You misunderstand me. I don't mean an OT theological overlay, or even a Theological overlay of Paul in the form of the Epistles, I mean theology developed outside the Bible, i.e. church tradition and later theology. Without knowledge of theology outside the Bible, modern Christians would not practice the religion they do. As is there is a remarkable variety in Christian belief simply because of the ambiguity in the OT.

It's a side note here because I began with Jesus and the Gospels, but the OT is not a particularly clear set of documents either, and just as there are several sects of Jews now, there where many sects in the couple centuries before and after 1 CE. The Pharisees and Sadducee mentioned in the synoptic Gospels were just two such sects.

I am interested in the development of that theology, but I don't think that god developed it. God is the fictional subject of theology, not the creator of it. Obviously you will disagree with that

Paul won. But not necessarily because he was right--

As noted, the apostles and a gospel writer endorsed Paul's message, which indicates that Paul was in accord with Jesus.

So you say, but where do the Gospels endorse Paul? What do you find in them that accords with Paul and not the other Christian sects existent at the time the were written?

It is true that the author of Luke and Acts sort of endorses Paul in Acts. Certainly he describes Paul's life and death in Acts. But he describes a rather different Paul than the one in Paul's own letters. And while the Gospels are written after Paul, and they do describe people other than the disciples seeing Jesus after the resurrection, they do not describe Paul's vision of Jesus. With out Acts, the Gospels have no connection to Paul at all.