The Templar Revelation by Clive Prince & Clive Prince

Author:Clive Prince & Clive Prince [Picknett, Lynn & Prince, Clive]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473512252
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 2020-05-14T00:00:00+00:00

The earliest surviving complete manuscripts are from the fourth century, but they are clearly copies of older texts. So scholars have had to try to establish their provenance by analysing the language of the surviving Gospel fragments. Although the question has not been conclusively resolved, the current consensus is that Mark’s Gospel is the earliest, having been written perhaps as early as 70 CE. It is also agreed that Matthew and Luke were based largely on Mark and therefore must have been composed later, although they do incorporate material from other sources. John’s Gospel is thought to be the last to have been written – somewhere between 90 and 120 CE.20

The fourth Gospel – John’s – has always been something of an enigma. Matthew, Mark and Luke, known collectively as the Synoptic Gospels, tell more or less the same story, putting the events in much the same sequence and depicting Jesus in a similar way – although there are still many discrepancies and inconsistencies in individual episodes. A good example of this is the different number and names of the women who attended Jesus’ tomb according to the three authors. John’s Gospel, however, tells Jesus’ story in a very different order and also includes events that the others do not mention.

Two examples are the wedding at Cana, in which Jesus performs his first miracle – turning the water into wine – and the raising of Lazarus that becomes, in John, one of the pivotal events. That the other chroniclers should have been unaware of such important episodes has always puzzled biblical historians.

However, John’s Gospel also differs in the image that it presents of Jesus. While the Synoptic Gospels tell the story of a religious teacher and miracle-worker that largely fits within a Jewish framework, John’s Gospel is much more mystical and more Gnostic in attitude, placing far more emphasis on Jesus’ divinity. It also seeks to explain the meaning behind the story as it unfolds.21

The standard view today is that Jesus was a Jewish religious leader who was mostly rejected by his own people. Many modern commentators do not even think that he intended to found a new religion, and that Christianity almost happened by accident, because Jesus’ teachings took hold in the rest of the Roman Empire. This explains, they say, ideas such as Jesus’ deification: he had to become known as the Son of God – literally God incarnate – to appeal to the romanized world, which was used to the idea that its rulers and heroes became gods. Because John’s Gospel dwells on such themes, it has been assumed that it was written at a later stage in the development of Christianity, when the fledgling religion was finding its feet within the wider context of the Roman Empire.

The problem is that John’s is the only Gospel that actually claims to be based on the eyewitness testimony of someone who had been present at the major events of Jesus’ life: ‘the beloved disciple’, who is traditionally taken to be the young John, hence the attribution of the Gospel.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.