ben11 said:
Though much of the gospel was written 30 to 70 years after Christ died, that was still plenty of time for stories about his life to evolve pretty far away from reality. Just think about all the books that have come out that revisit the founders of this country. Ben Franking could be an ass and was a womanizer. Jefferson had a black slave for a mistress, Lincoln may have suffered from severe depression, and George really didn't chop down a cherry tree.
ben11,
I see your point. As we began to developed our young nation's legends about our founding fathers (Cherry trees, cannot tell a lie, etc), we whitewashed them into some kind of quasi demigods of virtue and ignored their flaws. Now that enough time has passed, we are writing more realistic historical accounts of them and finding them to be very human and not so demigodly at all.
I think your point is that the authors of the New Testament, some 50 years after Jesus' death may have been doing the same kind of demigod making. You could also argue that it is too late to dig up much dirt on the guy (short of a few manuscripts we discover from time to time), so he will go on being the demigod of Biblical legend.
Here is the rub, though. If you were going to embellish the account of a man whom you claimed was the son of the creator of the universe, and further that he was also the creator himself, you would have written a very different story. Wouldn't you have been tempted to put in a few miracles that were more than simple parlor tricks (compared to creating the universe, anyway). Don't forget that at the time, the people of Jerusalem had been conquered by anyone with a horse and chariot in the hundreds of years before Christ, they were under Roman domination and were expecting a really kick-ass savior to come along and bring some good ol' Old Testament Godlike wrath and judgement on their enemies and make things right.
(In fact, in regard to solong's point about studying the Bible without anyone else's help, chances are you will only invent the God you want, and he will probably be a kick-ass God.)
But no, what they got was a helpless baby who grew up to walk around like a homeless guy telling everyone to just give away their money, be meek and childlike, and then allow himself to be carried away and nailed to a tree to die a miserable death. In the runup to that event, he is full of doubt and seems to be somewhat afraid of what is going to happen.
My point is that if you were in the first century church's marketing department and asked to put a really good spin on this Jesus guy, you would be fired for telling this particular story.
In fact, in the Koran, they did rewrite the story, because they considered it absurd that Jesus would just allow himself to be nailed to a board. (and it IS absurd, which is my point) So in their version, he comes down off the cross and kicks some butt. Now thats a demigod!
Anyway, thanks for bringing that up. I have been thinking about this recently, so you caught me with a lot of words about it.
JustAsking