Originally Posted by ApostateAbe

The Gospel of Abe

To the thinkers of the 21st century world. I have written an account of Jesus and the beginning of Christianity using the best ideas of New Testament scholarship and the information contained in the earliest Christian writings. The Christian gospels were revised for the sake of the Christian religion, so you may revise this text as you please for the sake of the most probable truth.

Originally Posted by eccles

You should now go further and tell how this new "Church" was hijacked by pagan Emperor Constantine I who founded the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church for politican advantages and the Roman Catholics have not woken up to that yet.

Originally Posted by DNAReplicator

Abe…

You have listed 36 referenced best guesses about the origins of Christianity. While it’s a fun read, my inner statistician got thinking….

Personally, I’m somewhat sceptical of the provenance and reliability of early Christian texts and histories. However your best guesses appear reasonable and mainstream. So for the sake of argument, I will be generous and assume that there 50% chance of each referenced best guess being correct. If so, then there would be a little over one chance in 100 billion that the whole gospel was true.

OK – fair enough you might think – but I don’t need all of my guesses to be correct to have a 'reasonably accurate narrative'…..

If we take (for the sake of argument) a benchmark that three quarters, or 27 of your guesses need to be correct for the narrative to be considered reasonably accurate. The chance of this, if each guess has a 50% chance of being correct is about one in five hundred.

So basically, I think there is less than a one in five hundred chance that it is even a 'reasonably accurate narrative'. Sorry.

Originally Posted by eccles

Very Good St. Abe. At least you, as the author have a name. The real authors of the Gospels are unknown and there are no extant authored manuscripts to verify what we have now.

You should now go further and tell how this new "Church" was hijacked by pagan Emperor Constantine I who founded the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church for politican advantages and the Roman Catholics have not woken up to that yet. And you should refer to Mary Magdalene as the wife of Jeshua Bar Joseph (aka. Jesus the Nazarene).

I would love that to be posted on the "Catholic Answers" Forum. I can't. I have been banned after a couple of weeks there for telling the real truth about the Roman Catholicism thus making me the first Martyr to the cause of Atheism.

Originally Posted by ApostateAbe

there doesn't seem to be any hints in our earliest sources that Mary Magdalene had romantic involvement with Jesus, though it is certainly possible.

Originally Posted by ApostateAbe

I am not sure that Constantine hijacked Christianity more than Christianity hijacked the Roman Empire

Originally Posted by mountainman

I'll give you 90 out of 100 for boldness alone.

In any eventuality, compliments of the seasons AA.

Originally Posted by ApostateAbe

The Gospel of Abe

To the thinkers of the 21st century world. I have written an account of Jesus and the beginning of Christianity using the best ideas of New Testament scholarship and the information contained in the earliest Christian writings. The Christian gospels were revised for the sake of the Christian religion, so you may revise this text as you please for the sake of the most probable truth.

Around the turn of the first millennium, Jesus was born in the small rural town of Nazareth in Galilee, to his parents Joseph and Mary. He was brother to James, Joses, Judas and Simon (Mark 6:3). His father Joseph produced crude wooden farming equipment and building material for a living (Mark 6:3). The sons helped with the shop labor, and they worked on the farms around the village. They were poor uneducated Jews, and there was nothing unusual about them.

As a teenager, Jesus became a devoted follower of a charismatic apocalyptic preacher called John the Baptist (Mark 1:9). John attempted to stay out of the way of Herod and the ruling Roman prefect, so he preferred the countryside, baptizing people in the Jordan River to cleanse and purify them from unclean sin of the bodies and souls of his followers, who believed that God would soon bring justice on their oppressive authorities (Josephus AJ 18.5). John saw the charm, devotion and talent of the young Jesus and took him under his wing, and John became a mentor and teacher of Jesus, teaching him about Jewish laws, history, prophecies, and the apocalyptic future. When John’s popularity grew, Herod sensed a threat, and he had John beheaded (Josephus AJ 18.5).

As a grown man with his new religious knowledge and leadership talent, Jesus struck out on his own, taking with him a few of the former followers of John who respected Jesus, and they traveled the countryside preaching radical new ideas. Jesus had tremendous talent in oratory, and he spoke what the people wanted to hear, including the evils of the rich and powerful (Matthew 19:24), the virtue of the poor (Mark 12:43), the supremacy of God and scripture (Matthew 5:18), and the hypocrisy and stupidity of the Pharisees and Sadducees (Matthew 3:7). He delivered his sermons with emotion and made them highly entertaining and interesting through parables (Matthew 13:34). He made a living by collecting donations from his sympathizing audience (Mark 12:43) and staying in their homes as guests (Matthew 10:14).

Legends were spread that Jesus was a miracle worker, and Jesus relished in them, because it meant greater popularity. He did everything he could to encourage the belief, including trickery. When his opponents challenged him to perform miracles, he only accused his challengers of having evil intent (Matthew 12:39). He did not stay in any single location for long, because skepticism, complacency and religious opposition would soon emerge (Matthew 11:20). He kept the fire alive by traveling quickly from one place to the next in the region of Palestine.

Jesus kept with him a small group of traveling companions. They left their families, their possessions and their careers, mostly as fishermen (Matthew 4:18-22), to serve Jesus in his missions. With them, Jesus divulged the deeper meanings of his sermons, prophecies and moral opinions, information that the outsiders, the members of his oratorical audience, may have found disagreeable (Matthew 13:11). He told them about the kingdom of God and hell, and he said that only the true believers and followers of righteousness would be welcomed into the kingdom (Mark 1:15), and everyone else would suffer torment in the fires of hell, a punishment for sinners that Jesus adapted from the Greek myth of Tartarus (2 Peter 2:4). He used the word, “Gehenna,” the name for the fiery dump outside of Jerusalem (Matthew 5:22).

Jesus taught his companions that the end of the existing world order would very soon come to a violent end within their own lifetimes (Mark 9:1), and the Son of Man would send forth his angels to punish the unrighteous and the unbelievers in an otherwise indiscriminant mass killing (Mark 13). Jesus did not make clear who the Son of Man was, but his companions believed the Son of Man to be Jesus himself (Matthew 17:9), as well as the Messiah and the Son of God (Matthew 26:63). Jesus did nothing to discourage these beliefs.

Around 30 AD, Jesus went on his most daring mission. He entered the temple of Jerusalem, the heart of the Jewish religion, and he went into a violent rage against the profiteers inside the House of God (Mark 11:15-19). He also delivered his abusive oratory against his religious rivals (Mark 11:27-33). As planned, word quickly spread inside Jerusalem, and Jesus became a hero of the people. The Pharisees, Sadducees and religious authorities were very angry and felt threatened by the popularity of Jesus, but they could do nothing.

Then, shortly after the Passover meal, the companion Judas Iscariot came to the chief priests and elders (Mark 14:10) and told them about Jesus’ secret apocalyptic teachings. The chief priests took Judas to the prefect Pontius Pilate, and Judas repeated the testimony. The intent of Judas was to provoke the authorities against Jesus in order to hasten the apocalypse. Instead, on order of Pilate, Jesus was quickly crucified and killed without a trial.

When the other companions heard about the betrayal by Judas, they became enraged, hunted down Judas, and killed him. They explained their act by claiming that Judas brought his death upon himself (Matthew 27:5).

The corpse of Jesus hung on the wooden stake where scavenging birds picked it apart, his remains fell to the ground in pieces, and wild dogs took them away (poet Pseudo-Manetho). Roman guards stood by to ensure the humiliation and spiritual defeat.

Three days after his death, two female companions, Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Joses (Mark 15:47), went to the site where Jesus was slain, but they could not find the body of Jesus. They knew nothing about crucifixion, so they went into a joyous delirium that Jesus had defeated death, and they told the other companions. Thomas strongly rebuked them for their stupidity (John 20:24-29), and so did Peter at first (Matthew 26:72), but then he saw an opportunity. He encouraged the women, and he spread the word among those who mourned Jesus that he had risen from the grave and ascended to heaven.

As the story of the resurrection became popular, Peter became the new leader of the cult, joined by James the brother of Jesus and John the son of Zebedee (Galatians 2:9). The other former companions of Jesus, knowing the truth, abandoned the cult in despair. Peter told stories to crowds of people about how Jesus was born in Bethlehem to a virgin, how Jesus was transfigured, how he could walk on water and command the weather, how he fulfilled messianic prophecies, which made him the messiah and the son of God. The religion of Christianity was born.

Years later, a well-educated Pharisee named Saul had ridiculed Christians (Acts 8:3), but he was impressed at the power of the Christian message, and he also saw an opportunity. He converted to Christianity, changed his name to Paul, and became a missionary, using his religious knowledge and writing talent to become a powerful new leader. He opposed Peter at the Council of Jerusalem for his refusal to bend Jewish laws and allow non-Jews into the religion (Galatians 2:11). Paul saw great potential for the religion to expand to the Greeks, because they were most receptive to the message. The Jews knew that Jesus was not the Messiah, but the Greeks could be much more easily swayed (1 Corinthians 1:22).

Indeed, the religion became especially popular among the Greeks. Around 60 AD, the myths spoken among the Greeks were transformed into written texts: the gospels of Mark, Q, L and Signs, which were then used to write the gospels of Matthew, Luke and John. These gospels, the letters of Paul, other letters and the apocalyptic book of Revelation were collected into the New Testament. The apocalypse did not happen as scheduled by Jesus, but Christians either denied the prophecy (John 21:21-23) or extended the deadline (2 Peter 3:3-8). The failure hardly slowed the growth of the religion, for it became the most popular in the world, and Christians today still await the return of the Lord.

These are the best guesses about the historical lives of Jesus and the early Christians. Amen.