Avatar wrote:Or was deliberately excised, in the manner of many books, because it failed to fit in with current church doctrine or dogma?
--A
That's a silly allegation, since the doctrines were
based on those books. If the Gospels said something different about Jesus, the doctrines would also have been different.
To put it in terms related to the subject matter of Kevin's Watch, it would be like saying that Thomas Covenant (and not Kevin) enacted the Ritual of Desecration, but that SRD's readers suppressed that information to make it look like he was a hero. In fact, the documents say what they say, and if they said TC was a Desecrator, we would not have any motivation to regard him as a hero, let alone to falsify the text. Besides, we can prove by simple textual evidence that the TC books existed years before any of us made any commentary upon them.
Likewise, the Christological doctrines of the Church were formulated generations after the latest possible date for the composition of the Gospels. The earliest manuscript fragments of the Gospels date from circa 130 AD, whereas the official doctrines concerning the Person and Nature of Christ did not begin to be formally promulgated until the Council of Nicaea in 325, and were not generally accepted until the Council of Chalcedon in 451. There are numerous Greek manuscripts of the Gospels dating back to that period, which agree down to very small details, both with each other and with the presently accepted text: the documents have been faithfully transmitted. And there are manuscripts in other languages, such as Gothic and Armenian, which were prepared and preserved by national churches outside the Roman Empire which did not accept the decisions of the Council of Chalcedon. These, too, agree with the Greek text as closely as any translation can be expected to do. Quite clearly the doctrines were derived from the Gospels and not the other way round.
As for the anointing: it would be very surprising news to me if 1st-century Jewish brides anointed
dead grooms, or if wives anointed their husbands
after they had been married for some time. If you want evidence that Mary of Magdala was Jesus' wife, you must look for evidence in Jewish funeral customs, not wedding customs. Such evidence is wanting. Even if it were normal for the wife of a married man to anoint his body in preparation for burial, obviously the anointing of an unmarried man would have to be done by someone who was not his wife.
Kinslaughterer wrote:Other than Jesus's savior status in the New Testament, what proof is there that he isn't just a mostly normal ambitious Hebrew?
Other than Jesus' saviour status in the New Testament, what proof is there that Jesus even existed? Virtually none. You can't cherry-pick. Either you accept those documents as substantially truthful, or you reject them as substantially false; and if you reject them, you have no reason to say anything about Jesus at all. There is no external body of evidence against which to judge them chapter by chapter and verse by verse. And the evidence of the New Testament portrays Jesus as anything but ambitious. He consistently advised his followers to obey the Roman authorities, and refused to be cast as a political leader or revolutionary despite the obvious desire of many Jews that he should play such a role.
By the way, don't come the 'Gnostic Gospels' with me. Textual critics, both now and at the time, have found solid grounds for rejecting those documents, both from the date of composition and because their depiction of Jesus is radically incompatible with that of the Synoptic Gospels and the writings of the early Church Fathers. One would think, to read these conspiracy theories, that the science of textual criticism had never been invented, and that the content and meaning of old documents was strictly a matter of opinion and guesswork. That is very far from the truth.
Without the Quest, our lives will be wasted.
