Word: gospels
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...view of numerous academicians, the anonymous authors of the four Gospels (later conventionally labeled Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) were working from second- and thirdhand materials, passed along by word of mouth for some decades before being written down. Consequently, the Gospels cannot be taken as gospel; that is, they cannot in every instance be considered as describing actual events. "The New Testament is the testimony of believing people," says the liberal Catholic Theologian Edward Schillebeeckx of the Netherlands. "What they are saying is not history but expressions of their belief in Jesus as Christ...
...Jesus did not claim to be the Messiah. Such assertions represent the church's later belief, which Gospel writers inserted into the life of Christ...
...Some portions of the Gospel of Thomas, a text that church authorities have always considered spurious, are earlier and more authentic than the four New Testament Gospels...
...Scriptures must be subjected to the same rigorous scientific scrutiny as the laws of nature; nothing could be taken on faith. One such self- confident rationalist was Thomas Jefferson. After leaving the White House, he wrote a biography of Jesus that kept many of the teachings but discarded numerous Gospel passages that, in his judgment, could not have been authentic. The true words, he said, were "imbedded as diamonds in dunghills...
...fact, the translating process has led the Jerusalem team to the unusual conclusion that the Gospel of Luke is the oldest and closest to Jesus' original words, whereas most conventional scholarship gives that distinction to Mark. Unlike most experts, they also believe that Jesus' sayings and actions were first recorded -- in a now lost Hebrew document -- within a few years of his death on the Cross, not put down by his followers decades later...