I've been listening to Dan McClellan, CJ Cornthwaite, and Bart Ehrman a lot recently. I put two and two together the other day.

The Gospel of Mark shows a Jesus that was highly influenced by the book of Daniel. (We can see this in things like "Son of man", "kingdom of god"). This makes sense because it was composed partially in Aramaic, the language Jesus was probably most familiar with, and would have been circulating a lot at the time (as shown by the dead sea scrolls at Qumran). N.T. Wright says:

The Book of Daniel was central to how Jesus taught and who he understood himself to be.

Biblical scholars widely agree that the book of Daniel was written well after the timeframe it purports to be from. The book retrojects prophecy (by that I mean it pretends to predict the future but is actually "predicting" the past) to forge authority, for apocalyptic prophecies that it goes on to make.

The gospel of mark portrays a Jesus fooled by this forgery. Is it possible for a thinking person to reconcile these observations, with a belief in a Jesus with divine knowledge/wisdom?

Fundamentalists will reject the scholarly consensus about the date of Daniel's composition, but what about moderate Christians?

Am I wrong? Could I explain things more clearly? I've never seen this idea articulated clearly before, but it seems very obvious now, I'm not sure it's of any interest.

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[–] 1 point 14 hours ago (2 children)

We all know it's a bunch of borrowed and blended and rebranded mythology, and Yehoshu'a ben Yosef probably wasa a legendary blend of multiple people. That said, humans were still barely out of the caves by then and the gospels written 100-300 years after the time the events supposedly occurred; and it was still revolutionary thinking for it's time. If anything, we're devolving back into barbarism (as predicted about 150 years ago). Beyond that, thetales furthered an empire trying to take over the world, so there's that.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 14 hours ago (1 child)

    Yehoshu'a ben Yosef probably was a legendary blend of multiple people

    I suspect that some traditions about Jesus of Nazareth were possibly (probably?) previously about John the baptizer. And sure yeah some things ascribed to Jesus may be from others, but the Daniel thing just seems like a really clear example of something that undermines the Christian narrative of Jesus being a wise teacher. And having never seen it spelled out before I thought I'd ask for reactions.

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