THE VARIANCE OF THE GOSPELS AND THE REALITY OF JESUS
The Christian
Scriptures have a particular nature.
We call ‘Christian’
Scriptures to the writings of the followers of Jesus of Nazareth, a historical character
that lived around two thousand years ago. But his life and what has become of
his personality these days is shrouded in mystery as there are gaps of silence
in the development of what has come to be the biggest religion in the world,
Christianity, which has literally shaped the world into the culture it has
today. Even though we live in secular times, Christendom has been and still is,
the dominant force behind modern ethics and social science on the planet.
From the short public
life of this Jewish religious leader, different doctrines developed, some held
him as a prophet of God, others as God incarnated. Some took his crucifixion as
an execution, most as a propitiatory offering in expiation of sins for all who
repent in his name. But all who follow him, accept him as the promised Jewish
Messiah of the Hebrews, the apex of God’s revelation, who opened the way to salvation
for all humanity.
Christianity divided
from the very beginning, that is a historical fact.
Besides the
claims of exclusiveness of each corner of Christendom, the truth is that the
diversity proper of the human race affected this group as well, as it affects
any other social group. The earliest testimony of Christianity tells us in narrative
of the divisions of her early days, and warns of more to come in the future.
In conclusion,
Christianity has never been one from the first century (1Corinthians 1:10-13),
but however diverse it is, still holds, like any other social group, a fixed
set of common characteristics, underplayed by their own believers, but crucial
to distinguish them as a single social group.
These are:
They all hold
Jesus as the Messiah.
They all hold the
authority of his twelve closest disciples.
They all believe
in salvation through his merciful intercession before God on our behalf.
They all hold
the New Testament as the written apostolic heritage.
But apart from
these, all other aspects of this religion, vary from this point onwards.
HOWEVER, even
though these points started in oral form, the belief of Jesus as the Messiah,
the authority and teachings of the twelve apostles, and the need of forgiveness
for salvation; soon were put into writing in the first century, with the
intention of preserving the teachings in an unchangeable manner. They are all
based in the four gospels of the NT.
These four
gospels are the ones who tells us of the life of a man called Jesus of Nazareth
who proclaimed himself as the Jewish Messiah.
These gospels
tell us of the existence and roles of those twelve exclusive disciples of Jesus
who later were commissioned with the building of a believing community.
These gospels
are the ones which settled the bases of Christianity as a religious system.
Even what we call the ‘letters’ of the apostles included in the canon of the
NT, derive from the authority and acceptance of these first four gospels.
Without these four books, Christianity would be a loose legend without much
acceptance in the world.
But the fact is
that these four books, selected from among many others due to the level of
acceptance they enjoyed among the Christian communities around the globe from
early times, are not a homogenous work, but four narratives independent one
from another, with variations in their narrative of similar events.
They all have a
vast number of common situations, like the baptism of Jesus by John ben Zachariah.
(Matthew 3:13-17;
Mark 1:9-11; Luke 3:21; John 1:29-34)
At least one
cleansing of the Temple.
(Matthew
21:12-17; Mark 11:15-19; Luke 19:45-48; John 2:13-17)
Or the Judgement,
crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus.
(Last chapters
of each gospel.)
But even more
are the variant details among the narrative of same events, or even whole
events omitted by some and mentioned by others or only one of the other gospels.
(See the Canaan
wedding, the day of the Passover meal; or the washing of the feet).
Many discredit
Christianity because this apparent inconsistency, coming to the conclusion that
it is not a divine work, due to these variants.
But it is in
this detail that the opposite is actually found.
COMPARED with
the writings of the other Abrahamic religions, like Judaism and Islam, Christianity
gives the impression of being inconsistent, since the Torah and the Koran, the
books of Judaism and Islam respectively, possess one consistent narrative.
Christianity is based on four different narratives independent from each other.
Even though the
first three gospels are called synoptics because they share more common narrative
than with the one from John (Note that these are attributed authors, in reality
the documents don’t mention the name of their authors), nevertheless they are
independent from each other.
The idea that two
of them were based on Mark, is only a hypothesis, impossible to prove. The
truth is that the gospels are four different narratives about the same person,
Jesus of Nazareth.
BUT EVEN THOUGH,
the similitude among them is usually quoted as proof of the super natural unity
of revelation; the opposite is also determinant of that.
If the gospels
were written by anonymous authors, and differ in many details to different
degrees, however, as four independent documents from each other, they maintain
a high degree on similitude to one another. Even though the narrative of specific
events varies in each book to a degree, the names remain the same always, the places
and the circumstances as well.
They tell the
same events, in different words, but to the reader it is evident that they
narrate the same story. And specially, when an isolated event is mentioned only
in one of the gospels, it never contradicts or interferes with the narrative of
the other books, times or circumstances.
In conclusion,
the whole biography of Jesus of Nazareth can clearly be seen from the four documents,
and leave clear, in whatever wording used, that Jesus is divine, conceived
virginally from Mary of Judah by the power of God. They all evidence that Jesus
was a holy man according to Jewish and gentile standards, and that he performed
many miracles, including resurrections. It is clear that he defeated Satan in
the desert, and that he was arrested, crucified and resurrected on Sunday
morning; among many more lesser details.
It is astonishing
the coherence of the four biographies over the same man, impossible to attain
in four independent documents written without printing or electronic communication,
or any other of the facilities we have today.
Whatever other supernatural
or mystic meaning believers may want to give this, paleographically, it is a
unique phenomenon.
The variations
in the four biographies of Jesus of Nazareth, and how they have maintained a
cohesion through times and places, to the point of becoming a single witness of
Jesus’s message; it is an invaluable testimony of the particularity of the
Christian religion, which also witnesses of the purity of their sources, which have
not been manipulated and depurated through history, as the Koran, that only became
a single version four generations after Muhammad, or the Torah, which being
also a unique set of documents, have no modern witness earlier than the post Babylonic
period.
Omar Flores.
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