1. Is there a difference between the historical Jesus and the Jesus of Faith designed in part by the early church to meet their needs and fantasies?
2. If there is, can we ever peel away the layers of church editing both oral and written to discover a better portrait of the historical Jesus?
Here are some options:
1. The most popularly held conservative position is that the historical Jesus is exactly the Jesus we get in the gospels. God is concerned with accuracy and therefore the Holy Spirit helped the authors keep and write an accurate account of Jesus' ministry. In this view one of the apostles wrote from memory or one of their friends wrote what they were told by the apostle.
On the plus side - it is simple and it is and has been believed by most conservative Christians from the 3rd Century on.
On the minus side - it does not always address the issue of how the texts met the needs of the early church...the audience to which the gospels were sent. And it assumes that the early church had little or nothing to do with the formation of the gospel episodes, it was only 4 individuals who authored the texts.
2. The opposite of that would be: There is a difference between the Jesus of Faith and the Historical Jesus. The early church added to and subtracted from the real event as they needed.
On the plus side - it fits the templates of social passing down of tradition. Even in Christianity one only needs to look at the stories of Jesus that circulated 300 years after his life to know that the church developed stories of their own that were quite wild and fanciful.
On the minus side - There is little or no connection between the writings and the historical Jesus, and every modern writer can pretty much create or discover billions of possible historical Jesus's. Take your pick!
3. There are other possiblities as well. The Jesus of Faith could be somewhat different than the Historical Jesus in that the early church needed several decades to look at who Jesus was and to discover and rediscover, refine and then develop what we now have as the gospels. They are not the entire account of Jesus ministry (John 21:25), neither are they bare-boned chronological accounts of his biography. They are stories that survived the early church's verbal chatrooms that met the needs of the early church. Among those needs were as follows:
a. Identity - who are we? who do we follow? why do we follow Jesus?
b. Survival - why do we believe what we do? and how can we answer those who refute us? how can we continue and grow?
In this view, even though there may be one writer per gospel, the writer recorded what the early church had developed and what became popular in the early decades of Christianity: The writer did not simply write down his own memories, he shared the memories of the entire church.
It may be that Mark wrote Mark even though the Bible does not tell us that he did, but if he did write the book, he did not write only what Peter shared with him, he wrote down what the early church had developed in its own chatrooms. Peter may have helped guide Mark and let him know the truth of each episode and helped him keep certain stories out that were fabrications, but the Bible does not tell us even this.
On the other hand it may be that all of the apostles and other disciples were directly or indirectly involved in the process of developing the gospels by being an important part of the community developing the stories about Jesus.
Whatever happened and however the gospels came into existence, the Holy Spirit was intimately involved in guiding and helping the early church so that what we do have today is the Word of God.
So let's go back to the questions:
Q. Is there a difference between the historical Jesus and the Jesus of Faith designed in part by the early church to meet their needs and fantasies?
A. Even though I believe the early church kept the stories that served their needs the most, I believe that what they kept remained:
a. true to what God wanted them to keep.
b. true to the Jesus of Faith / Jesus of history.
Q. If there is a difference between the Jesus of Faith and the Jesus of Histroy, can we ever peel away the layers of church editing (both oral and written) to discover a better portrait of the historical Jesus?
A. Even if there were some separation or even a big one, there is no way anybody could possibly peel back the layers of church ideology to discover the original Jesus. We will always only know the Jesus that has been delivered to us by the early church, by those who walked with him and saw him. Any and every search for the historical Jesus is futile.
Scholars who are trying to discover the historical Jesus discover an infinate number of Jesus's.
All we know about Jesus is what is given to us in the Bible, so that is what I will deal with...no more, no less. The only Jesus we will ever know is viewed through the eyes of the early church.
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