Accuracy of the Various Gospels: Why Mark Uber Alles?

[Caliga]

Anyways, Spellus, you need a girlfriend. Or a boyfriend. Of any species.

Spellus reminds me of that kid in every college class who keeps asking bizarre questions and makes the class run over.  Everyone else wants to leave so they can go to the bar, and this kid won't shut up about whatever.  It's like "Ok douche, your A+ is fucking locked down, so can you shut the hell up now and/or maybe visit the professor during his office hours!?"

[alfred russel]

Not a scholar, but if you read the four gospels, Mark is the shortest and most basic. Supposedly it was written before the other synoptic gospels: Matthew and Luke.

John is off on its own in terms of content, and somewhere I've picked up the understanding that a major reason for its inclusion as the fourth major gospel is because if you read the synoptics the divinity of jesus isn't entirely obvious.

The gospels aren't very long and don't have a ton of detail. If a christian starts discounting the gospels besides Mark as unreliable, it is like basing a religion on a memo.

[Josephus]

This strikes me as highly suspect.  While I don't doubt that there was certainly that element in the teachings of Jesus and his early disciplines, it strikes me that the opposite case is almost as likely true; that Mark was meant for and written by Jews accustomed to the traditional Messiah claimant narrative of the period, and substantially altered the original text (including, of course, oral narratives) to fit this.  While I don't doubt that the Jesus of the other thee gospels is to varying degrees more Gentile friendly, I think something in the initial sermons must have been as well, as we find Christians in Rome just a lifetime after Jesus' death, perhaps within living memory.  I don't think Jesus' gospel was such a *fantastic* leap either; the Old Testament talks of charity and brotherhood for fellow Jews, why couldn't the initial Christians (including, most obviously, the big J himself) make this universal? 

I'm not 100 per cent what you're asking. But I think your first point is correct. There is evidence that Mark was written by a "Peter disciple" which explains why Mark is the most "Jew-centric" of the gospels. Peter was not at all interested in converting heathens.

I disagree though if you are trying to say that Jesus probably went around teaching to gentiles, or was especially "gentile friendly." It was mostly Paul who went around, as you said, teaching brotherly love as a universal, not Jew-centric, concept. I think that the original Jesus message was meant for and included only Jews in its salvation theology.

[Valmy]

I'm not 100 per cent what you're asking. But I think your first point is correct. There is evidence that Mark was written by a "Peter disciple" which explains why Mark is the most "Jew-centric" of the gospels. Peter was not at all interested in converting heathens.

I disagree though if you are trying to say that Jesus probably went around teaching to gentiles, or was especially "gentile friendly." It was mostly Paul who went around, as you said, teaching brotherly love as a universal, not Jew-centric, concept. I think that the original Jesus message was meant for and included only Jews in its salvation theology.

Christianity did not fully break with Judaism until 88, so John was the only one written after that divergence had been established.  This explains the rather bitter Jew-hatred in John that did not exist earlier on.  And the non-Jew-centric salvation ideas in Judaism had been around since Isaiah (or earlier if you believe the B'nei Noah stuff), Paul hardly invented them.

[Caliga]

I don't think anyone has ever suggested that Jesus went out of his way to preach to non-Jews.  Indeed if he thought of himself as the Messiah (and IIRC there's no evidence that he did, but it seems likely to me) why would he think his preaching would appeal to anyone outside of the Jewish faith, since only the Jews were waiting for the Messiah?

[The Minsky Moment]

Before addressing that question, the first question that has to be answered is whether any of them are remotely accurate to begin with.

[Valmy]

Before addressing that question, the first question that has to be answered is whether any of them are remotely accurate to begin with.

The Legend of Jesus had clearly grown and evolved by the time John was written, so the presumption is that going back to the earliest stuff we have (the letters of Paul) and comparing them to what was said in the earliest gospels will be closer to the original story.

Of course that that original story is any more based in fact than the later ones is, of course, an assumption.

I think my favorite aspect of the New Testament is how they clearly went back and read Isaiah and then tried to make sure everything he prophesied happened to Jesus...and then had to do backflips to explain why Jesus did not actually make any of things the Messiah was supposed to make happen happen.  "Dude he will like come again and like correct all that stuff."