RE: What were Jesus and early Christians like?
March 3, 2015 at 10:57 am
(This post was last modified: March 3, 2015 at 11:06 am by Mudhammam.)
(March 3, 2015 at 10:08 am)watchamadoodle Wrote: Sometimes I wonder if Christianity started as an esoteric, gnostic Jewish religion, but gradually more and more people took the stories literally instead of symbolically. The people that misunderstood the gospels to be literal became the proto-orthodox, and they declared the original esoteric understanding of Christianity to be a heresy.I feel the same way. The earliest Christian works seem to paint a celestial Christ who in recent history appeared as the Logos incarnate and triumphed over bodily death, though with only a few scattered references to an earthly existence and a great deal of emphasis on past and future apocalyptic events in the heavenly realms. Then comes the biographical narrative adapting a list of earlier composed wisdom sayings and oral teachings that some have suggested were only branded by Christians in Jesus' name. Then comes Matthew and Luke-Acts, written probably 15-25 years later, putting Jesus' life story in the contexts of Judaism and Rome, respectively, with many more mythological additions. Near the end of the century we have the Johannine community responsible for John's Gospel, his namesake's epistles, and Revelation, all clearly influenced by Gnosticism, though expanding on the concepts that both the earlier epistles and biographies elucidated separately.
This idea goes well with the mythicist claim that Jesus was entirely fiction. Unfortunately, there seems to be a good argument for a historical Jesus.
So I don't know.
Where's James and Jude generally placed on the timeline? Pseudo-Paul, 1 Peter? I think 2 Peter and the Pastorals are late first century, early second century.
We also have to consider that there were thousands and thousands of books in the ancient world that we don't have anymore.
He who loves God cannot endeavour that God should love him in return - Baruch Spinoza