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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[–] [S] 2 points 23 hours ago

I don't think there's a need to invent a conspiracy to explain Christianity. Paulogia's minimal witnesses explanation seems perfectly adequate to me.

I do think the Gospels were written partially to show that Christians were not going to make trouble for Rome.

oh yeah we don't blame Rome for killing the messiah, it was our fault. Pilate had to.

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