 |
CONGRUITIES AND INCONGRUITIES BETWEEN THE BIBLE AND THE QUR'AN |
 |
THE AUTHORS OF THE GOSPELS
| The penning of the Gospels started in the 70s A.D. when the Nazarenes had gone out of favor and the Paulinists had got the upper hand.
Victory of the Paulinists
In the year 65 A.D., about two years after the murder of James (Jacob), Jesus' brother, the Nazarene Christians were compelled to leave Jerusalem in order to escape the persecution of the Jews and the Romans, for Syria and Mesopotamia. Israelites raised arms against the Romans in the year 66 A.D. to be defeated by the Romans in the year 70 A.D. A second uprising saw the devastation of the Temple of Solomon. Although the Nazarenes and the Judeao-Christians and the Paulinist Christians were in conflict, the Nazarenes had the supremacy. Upon the fall of Jerusalem in the year 70 A.D. the situation experienced a reverse of fortune.
As the Nazarenes had lived outside Palestine, they had not come into conflict with the Romans. But along with the Jewish population they also had fallen out of favor in the sight of the Roman Empire. This marked the beginning of the process of severance of the Christians from the Nazarenes. The Roman defeat led to the supremacy of the Paulinist Greek Christianity. The Paulinist Christianity had gained full control after the death of St. Paul. The penning of the texts of the Gospels started about the year 70, at a time when the Nazarene Christianity had fallen out of favor and the Paulinist Christianity had gained the upper hand.
St. Paul's Influence on the Authors of the Gospels
The first basic documents of Christianity were the letters written by St. Paul years before the commitment to paper of the Gospels. The letters written in Greek of St. Paul who had died in 62-64 A.D. were rapidly compiled. The first Gospel to be penned had been the Gospel according to St. Mark while the fourth Gospel had been written 70 years after Jesus Christ's departure from this world. According to researchers, every Gospel author had been deeply influenced by St. Paul's letters, the first basic document; especially the fourth Gospel of St. John bore the typical characteristics of the doctrine. Paul's frequent use of such concepts as 'Father' and 'Son of God' began to occupy larger space in the Gospels. And in the Gospel according to St. John the divine essence of Jesus Christ had assumed an incontestable dogmatic character. This was a sign of the ongoing corruption in time.
Dr. Maurice Bucaille says:« “These 'combat writings', as father Kannengiesser calls them, emerged from the multitude of writings on Jesus. These occurred at the time when Paul's style of Christianity won through definitively, and created its own collection of official texts. These texts constituted the 'Canon' which condemned and excluded as unorthodox any other documents that were not suited to the line adopted by the Church.» (Bucaille, Ýbid. P 33)
The point on which all the researchers agreed upon was the fact that the Gospels had not been written by any person who had been a witness, contemporary with Jesus. The Roman Church that had adopted the doctrine of St. Paul as a basis, had deemed more than seventy gospels to be deleterious, and, had, with the exception those of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John, burnt them all.
Language of the Gospels
The words of Christ, who spoke to his people in the Aramaic language, were translated into Greek. The people that Christ addressed in Aramaic were the Jews, the Palestinians and the nomads. Nevertheless, those who contributed to the penning of the Gospels were the Paulinist Christians brought up in the Greco-Roman culture and the language they used was Greek. This is the reason why the oral and written legacy of Christ was translated into Greek. The language used was described in Paula Frederiksen's book entitled From Jesus to Christ, the Origins of the New Testament and the Images of Christ: “The oral message and the acts of Jesus Christ were interpreted in Greek. These interpretations are far from being reliable. Errors must have occurred during the interpretation. The orally transmitted tradition regarding Christ imparts us with the information on the verbal accounts and incidences that occurred at the time. However, we should take it granted that there must have been alterations during the said transmission.”
The Gospels were anonymous at the beginning
They were given names in the year 180 A.D. by the Church. The authors of the Gospels had not revealed their names; they had not said that they had known Christ in person and that they had shared his experiences. The researchers who criticized this point claimed that had these Apostles known Christ, the authors would have affixed their names to them which would lend greater credibility to them. This shows that it was concluded that the gospels were not the works of the Apostles but of anonymous persons. E.P. Sanders, a biblical scholar, in his book Historical Identity of Jesus Christ says: “The evidences in hand show that the gospels were mentioned in the second half of the second century, always anonymously, however. In 170 suddenly names appeared. There were more than the four gospels we have in hand today. The Christians had to decide which ones of them was the essential one. Towards the middle of the second century Christian scholars had to name those which were accepted genuine versions by the Church, namely those of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
Synoptic Gospels and St. John
Although there are certain divergences between the Gospels, the first three Gospels, namely the Gospels, according respectively to Matthew, Mark and Luke have many things in common; they are called 'synoptic' for this reason. The literal meaning of the word 'synoptic' is 'from a similar point of view'. As for the remaining ones, the Gospel according to St Mark was chronologically the first to be written and it was the shortest. The latter was succeeded by the Gospels according to St. Matthew and St. Luke. Written independently from each other are said to have largely drawn from the Gospel of St. Mark. Now, the fourth one, the Gospel according to St. John differs widely from the synoptic Gospels. The elevation of Christ to the rank of God by the first three is not so marked and may be said debatable, while the Gospel according to St. John lays stress on apotheosis.
According to Christian sources the texts of the Gospels were dictated to their authors by God's revelation; consequently every word of them was inspired by the Almighty. The divergences in them are interpreted by exegetes as chapters that supplement each other as they respectively describe the different aspects of Christ.
Nevertheless, the biblical scholars of today concur on the fact that the contradictions encountered in the Gospels cannot possibly be interpreted as God's revelation. We have in hand, they say, four different texts with four different accounts. Each author had his own version of Christ, and the Gospels were differing expressions of human intellect. Biblical scholars have concluded that the evangelists had largely drawn from the oral tradition of the Judeo-Christian community (Nazarenes), as well as from the original gospel and St. Paul's letters, interspersing them with the data from their respective cultural legacy and creeds.
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW