Monday, March 23, 2015

Why were these gospels not written in the life of Jesus?

Why were these gospels not written in the life of Jesus?

Jesus is "the First and the Last, the One who was dead and came to life"
-- (Revelation 2:8).  Jesus is not Dead!  After he died on the cross, he rose again and kept right on ministering!

Jesus rose again and spoke to many people (1 Cor 15, Luke 24: 13)
The Book of Revelation was partly dictated to John, and partly revealed to John in a vision.

Why were they not written in Aramaic the language he and the people spoke and in which he preached?
How do you know what language Jesus spoke in? The LXX, which was the Bible that was used in his day was in Greek, and all the people in Jesus' day knew that language.  If the scriptures were read in Greek, then it is more likely that religious conversations would be in Greek.

In the Book of Revelation, mentioned above, Jesus describes himself like this:
"I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end."
--Revelation 1:8.
The words Alpha and Omega are Greek distinctly words.
Why there are so many different gospels, every denomination has its own?
The word Gospel can refer to either the teaching about how Jesus paid the price for our sin, or it can refer to the four (books) biographies that were written about the life of Jesus.
All Christian denominations use the same four biographies of Jesus.
Why the gospel needs to be written and rewritten?
Every local church wanted to have copies of these gospels, so they copied them and gave them to each other.  Sometimes they translated them into their own language, like Latin or Syriac.  There are about 5,800 manuscripts in the Greek language that we have today, and with the translations we have around 24,000 manuscripts (these are the numbers that Josh McDowell commonly cites).  The Bible of today comes from careful study of these manuscripts.
Why the newer editions are written by human beings who use their bias in it. Why you don't see the way Christianity is today was not taught by Jesus.
We are able to  know around what year each of these manuscripts was written because every time period had subtle changes in script style.  If any human were to have put changes into any of their copies of their gospels, they would not have been able to make their changes appear in all the manuscripts everywhere.  Special scholars, called "textual critics", do nothing but study the small changes that exist between manuscripts in order to reconstruct the original text.
At no time were all Bible manuscripts in the hands of one person or group.  Nobody would ever have been able to change the Bible.

How much adjustment to the text of the Bible comes from textual critic scholars?  The 1611 King James version (translation) was produced from about 12 manuscripts.  400+ years and 5788 manuscripts later, the King James version translation is still used by many people.

In Christianity we call a translation that was done by a committee a "version".  If one person does it, it is called a "translation".

ALSO: note that it is not true that Jesus did not bring his own book.  In fact, he did bring the book of Revelation to John his disciple.  John signed his name in it (it is not anonymous).
It is the only book in the New Testament that contains a blessing for the reader:

"Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear, and who keep what is written in it."
--Revelation 1:3

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