Thread by @abdullahadam

"The New Testament contains 27 books, written in Greek, by 15 or 16 different authors, who were addressing other Christian individuals or communities between the years 50 and 120 C.E. It is difficult to know whether any of these books was written by Jesus' own disciples."

"The followers of Jesus were uneducated lower-class Aramaic-speaking Jews. The Gospels are not written by people like that. Their authors were highly educated, Greek-speaking Christians of a later generation. They probably wrote after Jesus’s disciples had all, or almost all died

"Jesus died sometime around 30 CE. Mark was around 65–70 CE; Matthew and Luke 15-20 years after that, and John around 90–95 CE. What is significant here is the time gap involved. The very first surviving account of Jesus’s life was written 35-40 years after his death. "

Quotes from "How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee" by @BartEhrman, slightly edited for twitter

The gospels are all anonymous. They were not named and attributed thus until Irenaeus of Lyons named them around 185 CE. For Irenaeus, there were four and only four Gospels that were authoritative. He names them as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. ehrmanblog.org/the-gospels-ar…

Thus, the Bible is an arbitrary collection of books. It contains some books letters and speeches that were decided upon by the church to be considered 'authoritative', and others that were not included in the canon.

"The recognition of these writings as authoritative was formalized in the Second Council of Trullan of 692. The Catholic Church made dogmatic definition upon its Biblical canon in 382 at the Council of Rome"
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developme…

If this entire process was guided by God, it does not seem to be. Why do we find so much contradictions about basic facts regarding the most important events of all history?

Even something as important as When Jesus became God, the Gospels all indicate different ideas about when he became divine:

1) Paul indicates Jesus became God when he was resurrected: "Who was descended from David according to the flesh and designated Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead."

2) Luke indicates in Acts 13:33 that he became God at the baptism 'You are my son; today I have become your father.' For Luke, the virgin birth is when Jesus becomes god.
3) Matthew as well.

4) John's Gospel indicates he preexisted Abraham, he was always with god, he was god.. His is the highest Christology.

"Looked at from a historical perspective, Jesus being equal to god simply cannot be ascribed to the historical Jesus. They don’t pass any of our criteria. They are not multiply attested in our sources; they appear only in John, our latest and most theologically oriented Gospel."

"The traditional Christian doctrine takes the view of Matthew, Luke, and smashes it with John, and creates a view found in NONE of the Gospels, namely, that Jesus Christ was a pre-existent human being “who became incarnate through the Virgin Mary” (as the Nicene Creed states)."

Thus Christians today all assume that all four gospels are preaching the same thing, whereas they all have very different Christologies. A mishmash of all of these is what is official Church doctrine today.

Should we really believe that the reality of God is reflected by what Church fathers agreed is an accurate understanding or reflection of God, which is a mix of the views of these four anonymous authors written years after supposedly witnessing miracles of this man?

Credit to Bart Ehrman's blog for the above summary on Christologies: ehrmanblog.org/the-virgin-bir…

Correction: Luke considers him God from the virgin birth. It's quite confusing because Luke has inconsistent Christology