What being a Christian means, in simple terms -
Part 2
The teachings of Jesus were not kept untouched, but evolving, even
altered
How is it that
we find in the gospels so many teachings that Jesus never said? To answer this
question, we might consider how the change began within the first one hundred
years after his death.
How all this happened
Around 70 CD
the gospel of Mark was written; ten or twenty years later the gospels of
Matthew and Luke were written; and finally, by the end of the first century, or
later, the gospel of John was written.
During this
interim, the Christian community had created what has been called the kerygma, a
set of teachings that the early Church considered the "basic" beliefs
of a disciple of Jesus. The kerygma was not the historical deeds and words
of Jesus, but an interpretation and enlargement of them. The Christian
community had "fantasized" the glorified Jesus, and put on his lips
words he never said.
Historical reality was
"lost..."
The gospels
are the written expression of the kerygma, and hence
not the historical life and teachings of Jesus. The evangelists, starting with
Mark and following up to John, were increasing, progressively, the image of
Jesus, his being, his mission, his deeds, and his teachings. We can not meet in
the gospels the real, historical Jesus, but the pious "fantasy" or
"image" created by the early Church.
In these
writings, Jesus was never a simple man, first a child and later a peasant of
But these are
the gospels: the unhistorical made history, and a Jesus magnified, most in
particular in the gospel of John, which —according to most modern scholars,— is not factual, but a pious devotion and imagination;
some even dare to say that John is
deceiving (E. Kasemann). The gospel of John has
brought a lot of confusion to the real teachings of Jesus.
More in the book
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