Jon wrote:
What historical aspect of the Jesus situation could explain why he was deified into one with God? With so many prophets in the day, what about Jesus and his followers brought about the following cult? There's been a lot of people since then who have been highly-regarded; why didn't they get a super-mega religion named after them?
For this post, I'd just like to say that I want to focus on the historical aspects behind this matter, and not the supernatural ones”so no posts saying 'Jesus really was God, that's why'.
My guess is that the biggest factor is simple: like the lottery, somebody’s gotta win. In other words, if any of the others had happened to be made into a deity and set up as the official Roman religion, you could be here asking the same question about them. I think that on top of that, there may be some real reasons. For instance, the connection to Judaism provides some advantages, such as the extreme intolerance of other religions (useful in squashing competitors), and a poster boy who really did say some nice things (like be good to the poor, etc.).
Much of the discussion has reflected on the Gospel of John (or the 4th Gospel, since it doesn’t claim to be by John, and the John idea is a later Catholic tradition). Mentioning P52 isn’t terribly relevant, since P52 (which dates to between 110 and 150) only contains parts of just 5 verses (about 0.06% of the new testament) - so it only shows that John existed then, but not that it wasn’t changed or tampered with later (which Jar wasn’t saying anyway). Similarly, saying that three prominent Catholics revered Catholic scripture in the second century is hardly surprising.
Most importantly, the 4th gospel has so much magic and so many fabrications that is does not appear to be written by someone who was there or even someone familiar with the Palestinian world and the life of Jesus described in the synoptics. This is probably the biggest point against any kind of eyewitness. Whoever wrote the 4th gospel, it wasn’t any who was around Jesus and the disciples. In the 4th Gospel, Jesus never casts out a single demon, talks incessantly about himself, never does anything special with the bread and wine at supper, openly does miracles to prove that he’s the messiah and never even tells a freakin’ parable! The exact opposite is seen in the other gospels. If the other gospels have accurate information about a real Jesus, then it is clear that whoever wrote the 4th gospel can’t be anyone who was around Jesus. The author of the 4th gospel also speaks in Greek, and apparently doesn’t know Aramaic (see Greek word pun in John chap 3 - ask me if interested). How could a disciple not know Aramaic??
The bottom line for me is that we don’t have much of a clue as to who wrote the 4th gospel - but that it appears to be a well-educated, upper class person, far removed from Jesus' life and direct followers by both distance and time, so getting information about the historical Jesus is better done with the synoptics, especially the earliest, Mark.
Plus, it’s clear that whoever wrote the 4th gospel changed quite a bit to fit the religion that he wanted people to believe. In addition to the many differences I mentioned above, he changed little details too, such as moving the temple tantrum to the beginning of the ministry instead of the end, changing the day that Jesus died on (so as to make him into the lamb of god), etc. Thus studying the 4th Gospel does give you good information about what the author of the 4th gospel believed, and about his group of Christians around 100 CE, but not much information about the historical Jesus.
Have a fun day-
Equinox
Edited by Equinox, : removed obsolete subtitle
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