How Jesus evolved
And how the order of the Bible stories hides this
Bart Ehrman and other scholars have shown me how the order of the Bible stories creates a false sense of continuity. This flow hides how stories about an apocalyptic human Jewish preacher developed into competing stories about a divine being who existed before creation.
Imagine you are reading the New Testament for the first time. The order of the events seems natural.
The four Gospels tell the story of Jesus, then the Book of Acts tells how the early church developed. Various letters by Paul and others explain the beliefs and practices of the new movement. Finally, the Book of Revelation tells how the world will end.
Reading them in this order, you see a continuous narrative, with each book seeming to build on the previous one to create a grand story.
You also form a false impression of how and why these books were written. And you miss the sequence in which different writers gradually recorded the various elements of the Jesus story during fifty or more years.
Now imagine reading these stories in the chronological order in which they written.
You would start with the apocalyptic apparitions of Paul, then move on to the eloquent quotations of Q and the raging ruler of Revelation. The Gospels would tell you about the misunderstood messiah of Mark, the Moses-like messiah of Matthew, the all-inclusive leader of Luke, and the Jehovah-like Jesus of John.
The writers of those contradictory stories did not foresee that their texts would become part of a book centuries later. Indeed, many of them believed that the present earthly age would end within their own lifetimes.
Here’s how they were written in a different sequence to the published version, written as standalone books, written among rival Christian stories, and show how the Jesus character we know today evolved.
Written in a Different Sequence
Firstly, these books were written in a very different sequence. Their precise dates are disputed, but the following approximate dates are widely accepted.
Paul wrote his letters first, about 48-62 CE, and he wrote almost nothing about the earthly life of Jesus. He believed Jesus’s resurrection was the key moment in his divine status. However, some passages suggest he may have believed Jesus existed in some form before becoming human.
Perhaps between the 40s and 60s CE, someone may have compiled sayings attributed to Jesus into a hypothetical source that scholars call Q. Matthew and Luke may have used it independently. Alternatively, Luke may have drawn directly on Matthew.
The Book of Revelation, with its violent avenging Jesus, is commonly dated to about 90–95 CE, although it may include earlier material and some scholars argue for a date around 68–70 CE.
We don’t know who wrote the Gospels, and the church assigned four names to them in the second century. The Gospel called Mark was written about 65-70 CE. It has no birth narrative and, in its earliest surviving form, ends without the risen Jesus appearing to anybody.
The Gospel stories about the birth of Jesus, and his appearance after death, first appear in Matthew and Luke. These were written about 80-85 CE, and the author of Luke wrote the Book of Acts around the same time.
The Gospel called John was written about 90-95 CE. This Gospel goes further than the earlier Gospels. It is the first Gospel to present Jesus as the divine Word who existed before creation and became human.
Written as Standalone Books
Secondly, these books were not written as part of a grand meta-story. They were never intended to be read as continuous chapters of the same book.
Their writers wrote them as standalone books, at different places and times, to convey different political and theological beliefs, for different audiences and reasons. This is one reason for the many differences and contradictions in the New Testament.
As one example of these contradictions, the physical resurrection of Jesus is the central tenet of Christianity.
In the earliest written Biblical reference, Paul says the risen Jesus appeared to more than five hundred people at one time. Yet in the earliest written Gospel, called Mark, the risen Jesus does not appear to anybody. A different writer later added the familiar longer ending to Mark, with the risen Jesus saying that people who believed in him could safely drink poison.
The Gospels called Matthew and Luke, written a decade or more later, were the first to include the risen Jesus physically appearing to people. But they disagree about who first encountered him, where and when, and what Jesus said and did. None includes Paul’s claim that Jesus appeared to more than five hundred people at once.
Also, in Matthew, not only did Jesus rise from the dead, but many dead holy people also rose from their tombs, entered Jerusalem and appeared to many people. None of the other Gospels mention this extraordinary incident. If it happened, it would hardly have gone unnoticed by anyone writing the story of Jesus.
Written Amid Rival Christianities
Thirdly, these books were selected from a wider range of early Christian writings. As Christianity developed into the second century, rival movements promoted different understandings of Jesus.
Some Jewish-Christian groups, later labelled Ebionites, believed Jesus was fully human, but chosen by the Jewish God. They continued to observe Jewish law.
The Marcionites believed Jesus was fully divine, and had descended from heaven without an ordinary human birth. He came from a higher God, whom Marcion distinguished from the Jewish creator God.
Various groups now known as Gnostics believed Jesus brought special knowledge to save human souls from the material world.
The tradition that eventually became Christian orthodoxy argued that Jesus was both fully human and fully divine. This enabled the New Testament to include differing stories of Jesus.
How Jesus Evolved
To help understand the New Testament stories better, you should read them in the sequence in which they were written, instead of the sequence in which they appear in the Bible. Doing this may change your beliefs about not only the Jesus of history, but also the Jesus of theology.
You will see one broad pattern when you read the Gospels in their probable chronological order. In the earliest Gospel, Mark, Jesus’s special status is publicly declared at his baptism as an adult. In Matthew and Luke, it reaches back to his conception and birth. In John, it reaches back before creation itself. The human preacher has evolved into being part of God.
Paul, writing before all four Gospels, complicates this neat sequence. He believed Jesus’s resurrection was the key moment in his divine status. However, some passages suggest he may have believed Jesus existed in some form before becoming human.
The development of early Christian belief was therefore not a simple straight line. But the Gospel sequence shows Jesus’s divine identity being projected further and further back, from his baptism as an adult, to his conception, to before the creation of the universe.
For a comprehensive analysis of these and similar themes, read the work of Bart Ehrman and other academic textual critics of the New Testament.
Your piece contains a lot of sense, but perhaps errs in just accepting the "mainstream" account of how Christianity originated.
> "This flow hides how stories about an apocalyptic human Jewish preacher developed into competing stories about a divine being who existed before creation"
Except that, as you yourself then say, the earlist writings (Paul's letters) contain almost nothing about a "human" Jesus. Paul seems to have no conception of Jesus as a recently-lived human. Instead, Paul seems to regard Jesus as a divine being who is known from scripture and from visions. So, the development of the stories could be the reverse of your statement.
Just as one example, what does Paul do after becoming a Christian on the Road to Damascus? Surely he would have gone immediately to talk to all the Christians who had lived alongside Jesus, and asked them everything they could tell him about Jesus?
But no, what he actually does is, not talk to any Christian, but instead wander around Arabia for three years (which only makes sense if, in Paul's mind, the only source of information is scripture and visions).
Then when he does go to meet other Christians he explicitly tells us that he got none of his teachings from any person (only direct from Jesus in visions, plus scripture). So, Paul was totally unaware of "Q" or any similar oral accounts.
> " then move on to the eloquent quotations of Q ..."
Except there's no evidence at all for Q. The hypothesis of Q comes purely from scholars refusing to even counternance the possibility of gospel writers simply making stuff up, so they must have got it from somewhere, so let's hypothesize Q.
But if Paul seems utterly unaware of Q, or anything along those lines, then doesn't that suggest that there was no Q, nor anything similar?
> "The Gospel called Mark was written about 65-70 CE."
How do you know that? It was almost certainly written post AD71, after the destruction of the Jewish temple. That's because the work seems to be a theological allegory, linking stories of the death of Jesus to the destruction of the temple (several passages explicitly do this).
There's actually little evidence for the existence of the gospels prior to Marcion in about AD 130s. Maybe Marcionism was the original Christianity (later superseded by the now orthodox Christians, who denounced earlier versions as heresy); Marcion was, after all, the first person with a version of the New Testament.
Thus, dating of "Mark" is perhaps somewhere AD71 to AD140. (Ditto for the other gospels.)
> " These were written about 80-85 CE, and the author of Luke wrote the Book of Acts around the same time."
The Acts Seminar dated Acts to about 110 to 120 AD (for a whole set of reasons that are hard to summarise). That would then put "Luke" in a similar timeframe.
So, there's a whole alternative scenario along the lines:
1) Early Christians (Paul) thought of Jesus as divine (not as a recently lived human).
2) Post the AD-70s revolt, "Mark" wrote a theological allegory that storified Jesus and turned the destruction of the temple into the death of the messiah.
3) Somewhere AD 100 to AD 130, "Matthew", "Luke" and others embellished and added to the story, putting their own theological spin on it. The crucial bit being that all of these gospel stories were largely made up for theological reasons.
4) Different conceptions of Jesus competed for dominance (check out the large number of 2nd-century Christian writers whose works are called "against heresy" or similar). What is now the mainstream won out, over the Marcionites and others.