Amaleq13

Irenaeus also favored the four because, in his view, they portrayed Jesus in all four of his roles:

Matthew = God's appointed king

Luke = priest

Mark = God's prophet

John = as God

Paraphrased from Elaine Pagels' Beyond Belief, pg 152

Added later:

The main thesis of the book, relevant to the previous post, is the notion that GJohn was written to specifically contradict the beliefs of the Thomas crowd if not the GTh.

Ebonmuse

:notworthy

Ebonmuse

Thanks! Even Christians have pointed out that the canonical gospels skip over huge chunks of Jesus' life - we get an account of his birth, a brief incident from his life at the age of twelve, and then nothing more until he's thirty. Why aren't they more upset by this, I wonder? Don't they want to know what he did all those years? (Then again, it might be for a reason. I read one of the non-canonicals, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, and frankly it reads like that Twilight Zone episode where the kid with the spooky powers controls the entire town. But I digress.) The Gospel of John itself says that a lot of things from Jesus' life had to be omitted (21:25). It seems to me that throwing out all this redundant material and including more of those episodes might have led more people to salvation - or at least Christians should see it that way.

Amos

Why don't they come to the realization that the infancy is missing because Jesus was the reborn Joseph? The infancy of Jesus now is explained where Jesus was in the temple talking to the chief priests and what not and "Mary took this to heart."

lpetrich

Irenaeus's argument reminds me of Francesco Sizzi's argument against the existence of Jupiter's four large moons, which Galileo had discovered:

Just as in the microcosm there are seven 'windows' in the head (two nostrils, two eyes, two ears, and a mouth), so in the macrocosm God has placed two beneficent stars (Jupiter, Venus), two maleficent stars (Mars, Saturn), two luminaries (sun and moon), and one indifferent star (Mercury). The seven days of the week follow from these. Finally, since ancient times the alchemists had made each of the seven metals correspond to one of the planets; gold to the sun, silver to the moon, copper to Venus, quicksilver to Mercury, iron to Mars, tin to Jupiter, lead to Saturn.

From these and many other similar phenomena of nature such as the seven metals, etc., which it were tedious to enumerate, we gather that the number of planets is necessarily seven... Besides, the Jews and other ancient nations as well as modern Europeans, have adopted the division of the week into seven days, and have named them from the seven planets; now if we increase the number of planets, this whole system falls to the ground... Moreover, the satellites are invisible to the naked eye and therefore can have no influence on the earth, and therefore would be useless, and therefore do not exist.

JoeWallack

MiddleMan:
"This may seem like a silly question at first, but why are there four gospels?"

JW:
Or put another way:

How many Gospels does it take to screw up A "Light's" Buble?


Joseph

From Rodney Dangerfield's Back To Theology School:

Thornton:
"The answer is...four?"

Philip:
"Riiight."

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Errors...yguid=68161660

http://members.aol.com/_ht_a/abdulreis/myhomepage/