The gist of it as I understand it, is that there is in Jesus no longer any penalty to sin, so don’t let the law (religious or otherwise) get in the way of loving each other or living your life the way that you were made (aka the way God made you). So n restrictions on that. and My Father will protect you so you can and you will be rewarded for that as living in Love is advancing the Kingdom of God.
I don’t disbelieve this, but I have a hard time squaring it with Matthew 3:18
That passage among others is what led to dual-covenant theology. It’s the belief that the Mosaic Law is still in effect, but no longer necessary. Jews therefore are on a valid path to God (if they follow Mosaic law anyway.) but it’s a path that Christ’s crucifixion made obsolete, but not actually void. The basic idea behind it is that you can still take a covered wagon to go from Missouri to California, but a car is way better. You’ll get there either way though.
The Gospel of Matthew was originally written for the Jews. At some later point a different Gospel of Matthew was released by someone, which seems to have been similar but not quite the same as the original, largely changing the beginning section. If the original text was, also, quite similar to the Orthodox Matthew then I’d wonder about the prominence of Peter in the text. If that’s still there, then I would assume the Gentiles are the originators.
This secondary Matthew is the one in the Bible (i.e. the Orthodox Matthew). The original is now called the Gospel of the Hebrews and possibly is the same text as the Gospel of the Nazarenes and the Gospel of the Ebionites.
I would suspect that the Orthodox Matthew was created by editing and adding to the Original Matthew, in order to jibe with Paulian/Gentile Christianity. For the most part, that didn’t change it too much since it’s really more a “history” than a doctrinal work. But it does make it the most Jewish of the Gospels (and probably the closest to Jesus’ actual teachings). The later Gospels toned this down by taking the Orthodox Matthew (or maybe the original) and further Paulianizing it.
Granted, it is possible that it went the other direction and the Gentiles created Matthew first and then the Jewish-Christians modified that to match their beliefs. But that wouldn’t explain why Matthew is the most Jewish of the Orthodox Gospels, so I don’t believe that to be the case. Though it does seem a bit more likely that the Gentiles would have had access to a scribe earlier and been more liable to use text to transmit their teachings than the Jewish churches, so I’m not hardcore on that.
If the OP is fascinated by this stuff, I would recommend *Zealot *by Reza Aslan. He tries to parse exactly what is real and what is embellishments in the history of Jesus, and who the historical Jesus was.
Among the things I take from this -
Jesus was a religious preacher who was determined that the Jews would be freed from Roman oppression; exactly how isn’t clear, but possibly unlike other Messiahs of the time, rather than armed rebellion he seemed to have expected popular uprising and heaveny lightning bolts.
His grand entry into Jerusalem seems to have frightened the temple authorities because of his adoring crowds, so they persuaded the Romans that he was a threat to peace and order, and the Romans crucified him as a rebel.
The apostles let by Jesus’ brother James generally hung out in the Temple after the crucifixion, trying to convince Jews that Jesus was the Messiah. They also spread the message to Jewish communities in the eastern Mediterranean.
Paul was part of a group that found this sect heretical and tried to stamp it out - until he had a seizure on the road to Damascus, and decided that God was telling him to “spread the word”.
However, much of what Paul preached was his own concoction; he called himself an apostle, claimed he was talking to Jesus (whom he never met in life) and made up a mystical religion which he pedalled to Gentiles as well.
There was strong friction between Paul and the real apostles, but eventually they agreed that he could preach whatever pablum he wanted to non-Jews as long as he did not try to convert actual Jews/Christians to his nonsense. After all, in their eyes, Jesus came to save the Jews so gentiles were irrelevant. Similarly, his converts did not need to become Jews and follow Jewish law, either.
When the Jews rebelled in 70AD Paul had the last laugh, because much of the Temple group and their converts were massacred, the Temple was levelled. Paul’s version of the religion spread across the Roman empire and became the orthodox Christianity. Gospels and such were embellished and redacted in order to validate the orthodox view.
So to get back to the OP - the critical bit was probably the eventual grudging agreement between Paul and the apostles that his followers did not need to follow Jewish customs as laid out in the Old testament.
I am not Reza Aslan and I have never read his work (though, I have seen the Wikipedia summary once).
Having read a healthy quantity of the 1st and 2nd Century sources, I would concur with his reconstruction (at least at this level). Though, I will note that the early church did persist outside of Jerusalem and continued for a few centuries.
There’s the case of Tatian, for example, he was an early scholar in the Roman church for the Orthodox church - writing commentary on the documents, creating a harmony of the Gospels, etc. - then he went to Syria and dropped the Orthodox beliefs in a hurry. The heretical traditions there persisted until being supplanted by the Orthodox church, having all of their materials and traditions suppressed, a few centuries later. Similarly, there seems to be decent evidence that St. Thomas made his way to India and started a church there, with some unknown heretical beliefs. Again, eventually the Orthodox church gained sufficient might that they were able to convince the Indians that they’d been sold a load of rubbish, and got them to throw away everything that they’d been doing in exchange for the Orthodox traditions.
Ebion lead a group of people out of Jerusalem just before or soon after the destruction of Jerusalem, and there are some traces of them and some related groups (who may have been other Jewish Christian believers or John the Baptist’s followers) that go for a few centuries among Islamic sources. It’s unknown what happened to them. Displaced and suppressed seems to be the case, except the Mandaeans.
There is a “new” take on the Historical Jesus every few years, however, and have been of the last century or so at the least. These reflect little more than the pre-occupation of the writer. The inferences may be better or worse reasoned, but the reasoning is always rather motivated.
All Christians (yes, ALL, without exception) take the parts of the Bible that they like, and disregard the other parts. It’s impossible to reconcile the Bible to itself. The only difference is which parts they like or don’t like.
I’m curious what you mean by “take” and “disregard”.
“Take seriously, and actually believe” vs “ignore or minimize, and not believe”.
You can take something seriously, but not believe it as a literal fact. For instance, the story of the boy who cried wolf.
You are understanding the Bible like a fundamentalist. It is not one, uniform book with one consistent style.
It is a compilation of 73 different books which were written by dozens of different authors in multiple languages and across the span of many centuries. These books comprise different genres and are meant to be read in a different light.
Would you read a sci-fi fantasy novel the same way you read a biography on George Washington?
To say that ALL Christians express the dichotomy you related betrays your own ignorance as to what the purpose of the Bible is.
And yet the rampant inconsistencies still force you to take some parts of it more seriously than other parts, whether or not it’s literal fact.
If your copy of the boy who called wolf one time called the wolf a snapping turtle, then you would have no choice but to either downplay/ignore that error, spend brainpower spinning a tortured explanation for the error, or build an entire theology around the error at the expense of paying attention to the lying boy. You don’t really have a choice - you have to deal with/not deal with the error somehow.
I assume you’re alluding to the Bible when you speak of “rampant inconsistencies”.
With that assumption, I would respond by saying that it’s an issue of the author’s intent. It’s a question of “why” the different authors wrote what they did.
Your example of there being two contradicting copies of a work (the boy who cried wolf vs. The boy who cried snapping turtle) doesn’t hold since there is only one Bible which was definitively and authoritatively compiled by a deliberating body. There are not two competing Bibles in the Catholic Church.
Jesus was a practicing Jew and at no point did he weaken OT laws.
One version I’ve heard (but would need you more scholarly people to verify) is that Matthew started out as just a collection of Jesus’s sayings, and nothing more. People just wrote down his sermons and maybe some situations around the sermons, but not really any history.
You’re talking about the Q source hypothesis. It’s probably the most widely accepted hypothesis on the origin of the Gospels. Basically, it posits that there existed a hypothetical ‘Q’ gospel that was primarily an orally transmitted collection of sayings. In this hypothesis, Mark was an original Gospel that functioned as a history and ‘Q’ functioned more as a theology. Matthew and Luke then used Q to further flesh out their biographies. While this is the popular theory behind it, it runs into issues that no one ever mentioned such a thing existing and there were quite a few people writing about source documents in the 2nd century.
The Farrar hypothesis is a bit closer to what you’re saying in that it posits that Matthew is Q. Basically, Matthew is the source of the quotes and there is no need to come up with a hypothetical Q. Where Matthew got them is a mystery (the author seems to be Jewish, so possibly from Jewish-Christian oral tradition.) Of course, this runs into problems because Luke was written at essentially the same time as Matthew (or was it? dating the Gospels is another arena largely of guesswork. It generally goes Mark didn’t mention the temple being destroyed, so it must be pre-70, but it does mention Christ prophesying persecution and conflict, so it must be during the Neroan persecutions-I think you can see that this line of reasoning though widely accepted is certainly capable of being flawed. Matthew has Jesus prophesying the temple’s destruction, so this obviously must be post-70-unless of course Jesus actually did prophesy its destruction, in which case, who knows?) so unless the authors were talking to each other why would Luke have a copy of Matthew to copy from?
The real answer is that we just don’t know. Until the 1700s, everyone just thought they were written in the order in which they appear. Matthew first which fed Mark and Luke. That’s what the ancients seemed to believe (which is why they are in that order in the first place.) It wasn’t until the introduction of literary criticism that people started to wonder if that was actually the case and the truth is that we’ll probably never know. They are 2000 year old books whose authors are lost. Q-source is as good a theory as any.
The historical record is not great. I certainly can’t vouch for the existence of a life of Jesus gospel by Matthew. But the record by Origen and others is that the Jewish Gospel of Matthew was a life story, which he describes some of the differences of, and we have a copy of the Orthodox Gospel of Matthew, from sometime between 370 and 500, with margin notes that describe different wording in the Jewish Matthew.
Most of the records of Jesus from the non-Paulian churches are sayings gospels, documenting specific conversations between one apostle and Jesus. Somewhere it’s written that after Jesus’ death, the apostles got together and tried to write down as much as they could remember about his teachings, and that is what we see. Matthew is really the only outlier.
And while the margin notes imply that there’s not a large difference between the two versions of Matthew, it’s possible that there was a Jewish translation of Orthodox Matthew used by some groups or that Original Matthew was modified to integrate more information from everyone, including Peter, so they might have taken some content from Mark, and then the Orthodox Church brought Matthew back.
It’s fully possible that both groups were feeding off each other for a century or two, back and forth, with multiple revisions. And, for a time during Paul’s birthday life, the two churches were unified and could have worked on the Gospel together. It’s hard to know what the original state was. But most indications are that there was overlap between Jewish Matthew and Orthodox Matthew by 200ish.
And yes, M was (probably) not the only source. There is also Q, probably something similar to the Gospel of Thomas, if not in fact the Gospel of Thomas.
I agree the dates are a bit arbitrary, but Mark 13 does have Jesus predicting the temple being destroyed. Many scholars realize the temple was already destroyed and put in as a prophecy later, while some wouldn’t rule out it could have possible been written before its destruction when events were unfolding that would make it easy to predict that.