: Hello Van8lan,: You asked,
: Can you give me the breakdown of the first group of documents and the later gospels that you believe to be added to? And maybe the Quelle that you mentioned.
: Yes. We know quite well what we believe to be Yeshua's words apart from what the church added. We know it from the oldest documents (Mark, Paul, and Quelle) and from what we have learned were Yeshua's sentiments and those of the church. To get to Yeshua's words, you need to go to Mark and Quelle. Paul has little of Yeshua's words because he was concerned with converting people, not helping people understand Yeshua's teachings on spiritual maturity.
: Read The Lost Gospel Q: The Original Sayings of Jesus y Borg, Powelson, and Riegert. You will find the portrayal of Yeshua in it squares with Mark. The Mithras characteristics haven't been added yet. In other words, the church hadn't begun to shape Yeshua into Christ, an icon with pagan and Messianic characteristics.
: Read the Jesus Seminar's (1) The Five Gospels: What Did Jesus Really Say? The Search for the AUTHENTIC Words of Jesus, (2) The Gospel of Jesus: According to the Jesus Seminar, and (3) The Acts of Jesus: What Did Jesus Really Do. The Jesus Seminar worked at identifying the Yeshua buried in the matrix of what the church added.
: You will quickly realize who Yeshua was and what the church added. You'll soon find yourself being able to read the canonical gospels and pick out what is Yeshua and what is the church just from your knowledge of his teachings. He was a good Jewish Rabbi and didn't intend to found a church, certainly not a church for the gentiles. What's profound about him is that what he understood from the universe and Higher Power that he wanted to bring to the Jews are truths all humankind needs to hear. When we listen to the real Yeshua, we can hear remarkable wisdom unaccountable for from a first-century Jewish spiritual teacher without the guidance of those on the other side and Higher Power. He becomes an even more inspiriting man than the church could ever have realized.
: You wrote,
: I do believe that the spoken language of his time would have been Hebrew. There is much evidence to support this, and even the documents in circulation at his time would have been in Hebrew...when did that all change? Was it upon the destruction of the temple?
: Yes, Yeshua, a carpenter from the Galilee, spoke Aramaic, a form of Hebrew. He didn't speak Greek. He wrote no text that was showed up in later gospels. Some of what is attributed to him could not have been written by a witness because there were no witnesses (his prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, for example, when he was to have been alone while the disciples slept).
: We know that the Mithras and Christos additions came from dedicated, inspired people who wanted to have others believe that Yeshua was the waited Messiah for the Jews, but beyond that, a Messiah for humanity. They were well-intentioned people who felt the end (conversion to believe Yeshua was the Messiah) justified the means (changing Yeshua's life and words to make them both more compelling and appealing). We must not denigrate them, but we must look at Yeshua as a historical figure, not the Messianic icon created by his followers in the first three centuries after his death.
: That's our challenge, but when we meet the real Yeshua, we are brought to tears, in awe, inspiration, and admiration. Truly, this man was the Servant of God.
: Love and peace, Craig
