The real Gospels of Matthew and Mark, my hypothesis

Addition 180204: I regard this theory as improbable – I just need the theory to be formulated

There are a lot of theories of how the synoptic Gospels (Mark, Matthew, and Luke) were written and how they relate to each other. The academics proposing those theories are making a lot of text analyses, comparing Greek language with the language of certain centuries in the Antiquities. I have no competence to contest anything of that, but I can make a simple skip-the-academics-go-to-the-sources operation and propose some theories of my own that nobody else seem to have conjured up. If my theory is good, somebody really has, but I haven't discovered it yet. If my theory is bad, then nobody will ever accept my theory for being crack-pot balderdash.

Nevertheless: the source I'm boldly invoking is Papias of Hierapolis, speaking through the citation of Eusebius the Christian historian:

[John] The Elder used to say: Mark, in his capacity as Peter’s interpreter, wrote down accurately as many things as he recalled from memory—though not in an ordered form—of the things either said or done by the Lord. For he neither heard the Lord nor accompanied him, but later, as I said, Peter, who used to give his teachings in the form of chreiai, but had no intention of providing an ordered arrangement of the logia of the Lord. Consequently Mark did nothing wrong when he wrote down some individual items just as he related them from memory. For he made it his one concern not to omit anything he had heard or to falsify anything.

Naïve interpretation (according to wikipedia on chreia): John Mark wrote a list of logia like the Gospel of Thomas, of the form followers asks, Jesus answers, or Jesus says, without context in either case. Mark wrote the logia in the order that he remembered them, and he wrote them down remembering Simon Kaifas (Peter) speeches. If this text is to be taken for true, then John Mark didn't write the Gospel of Mark, at the very best he wrote fragments that later was extended and reordered to become the "Gospel of Mark".

Furthermore Papias writes:

Therefore Matthew put the logia in an ordered arrangement in the Hebrew language, but each person interpreted them as best he could.

The only clear thing here is that Matthew also wrote something like the Gospel of Thomas, but his logia were 1. written in some order, possibly chronological, or perhaps alphabethical, 2. wrote them in the Hebrew language. Scholars use to assume that Matthew wrote in Greek, but I think this is unwarranted, given that Eusebius's citation of Papias is correct, and that Papias correctly relates to truthful sources that know what they speak about.

My bold addition to this scheme is that Papias himself either collated the "modern" Gospel of Mark or the "modern" Gospel of Matthew, or both. He wrote a (now lost) five book comment on the Gospels according to later sources. He also interviewed a lot of elders, including the daughters of Philip. It is reasonable to believe that he collated the original Gospels of Matthew and Mark with the stories of his interviewed persons, so as to bring the original Gospels in chronological order and make reasonable interpretations of the chreiai and the logia. This constituted what was initially called the "Memoirs of the Apostles", but which later came to develop to the synoptic Gospels.

Why Jesus really did exist, personal opinion

For a very long time after losing my confidence in Christianity, I was bewildered by the lack of proofs that Jesus existed, and the relative strength of some of the Jesus-Myth theories' arguments. I was in a vacuum whether Jesus really did exist or not, since I could find neither the Jesus-existence arguments nor the Jesus-myth arguments convincing, until I saw a serious historian making a Youtube video series validating the arguments from a historians perspective. This series can be found here: Fishers of Evidence.

Fishers of Evidence easily sank my Josephus three-point verification argument for Josephus actually referring to Jesus. My three-point verification argument was formulated as follows:

★ Josephus's Antiquities of the Jews claims that Jesus existed and was the Messiah in a completely unlikely and obviously interpolated glorification from a Jew that was on the losing side in a war against the Romans, and now considers emperor Vespasian being the real Messiah. Someone (whom everybody suspect is the Christian historian Eusebius) messed with the text. ★ On the other hand Origen complains against Josephus that he doesn't regard Jesus as Messiah (Eusebius had no chance to make a scribble on Origen's texts), and ★ we have alternative versions of Josephus in Syriac and Arabic that doesn't praise Jesus but instead regard him as a magician. ERGO – I thought – Josephus must really have written about a real Jesus, Josephus was three-point verified in analogy of verifying a HTTPS web server (Josephus) with a Certificate Authority (Origen).

Update 190717: This three-point verification is now doubly falsified because the "alternate versions" of Testimonium Flavianum has been proven[?] to be spurious.

Except the Fishers of Evidence just asked where from Josephus got his information. Plausibly from some Christian, which in the phase of history when Josephus wrote books, was more likely to believe that Jesus was a real person. The three-point verification system just verified that Josephus wrote something.

Now, a much heavier argument why Jesus existed is the Onomastic argument, which is an unlikely application of statistics. It claims that the Gospels are referring to (mostly) real persons, that probably existed, based on their names. The names in the Gospels distribute fairly similar to the names found on archeological tombstones in the region of Judea and Galilee. In fiction names are chosen as to not collide with each other so that confusion does not occur. For the Gospels to have been written as fiction, the author must either unlikely take the names of a clearly delimited group of people, keeping the names of all of them, and then fantasize a completely fictional story around them, or, impossibly: guess that readers of the Gospels in the future will doubt the content, and therefore contrive a random distribution of persons, that counterparts the statistics of real persons in the geographical vicinity. Statistics was invented in the 17th century Europe. ERGO: not necessarily Jesus, but most of the persons in the Gospels must have existed. It is less likely then that the main character Jesus is mythical than say one of the Jameses.

Henceforth I will write this blog as if Jesus the man really existed. The Jesus-mythicists sometimes have good arguments, but their main case is weak.

Sylvia Browne and Novus Spiritus

Sylvia Browne (1936–2013) was a well-known author and TV artist that made a lot of money on claiming to be a medium with psychic abilities, abilities that was hardly criticised for being worse than random guesses regarding known cases of disappearances, such as Amanda Berry (the Ariel Castro case) who was "predicted" to be dead, despite being alive. One could (unnecessarily generously) maintain that Browne had learnt cold reading and believed herself to be a medium, but that she "boldly expanded" her sphere of application of the techniques to where it shouldn't work according to socio-psychological common sense.

Sylvia Browne founded a church called Novus Spiritus (new spirit) in 1986, that describe itself as "Gnostic". The adherents are called "Browneites" among the Hoellerite Gnostics, and the earlier are reputed for their arrogance against everybody not accepting their own dogmatics, indicating a slightly cultic culture. From the traits I write about below, it is reasonable to believe that such a cultic tendency will soon disappear. The church in question maintains some standing points:

• Novus Spiritus describe God in a way that can be interpreted as a modern way to say "ineffable"[1];
• they claim that there are at least two gods, the Father Om and the Mother Azna, which could certainly fit in a polytheistic Gnostic system; this Azna is partaking in the world in a similar way that a Providence saves people from trouble at prayer – Azna is vaguely similar to Sophia Achamot but not just the guiding angel of the Gnostic community, but to anyone praying to God; the existence of this Om and this Azna was revealed by Brownes's spirit guide Francine[2];
• they assert that Christ lived on earth as non-unique Son of God, meaning that the son/daughter-hood is universal, but that his uniqueness rested in his teachings which are the only way to come to God; however our son/daughter-hood doesn't imply that we are gods[3];
• on the other hand, they deny the Godhood of Christ[3];
• they believe in the Neo-Theosophical (non-Gnostic) concept of all religions being equal and valuable and their own beliefs being more equal than anyone else [3];
• they regard knowledge more important than faith, which certainly is a Gnostic attitude[4];
• there is no Satan, but this planet is a Hell, which we leave for an eternal life in Heaven[5];
• every soul reincarnates until perfection is reached, after which we can enter Heaven [6];

The main deviations from Gnosticism are the lack of Aeons and a lack of a theory of the freedom in intellect versus imprisonment in passions. Formerly I regarded Novus Spiritus as not Gnostic, but rather Marcionite in design, but from their current material, one can actually maintain that they are Gnostics with their own (deceased) prophet.

Their website novus.org also refers to lots of external material, some of it really fringy, such as The Tomb of God (Andrews & Schellenberger) and Holy Blood, Holy Grail (Baigent), and on the other hand serious works as The Gnostic Gospels (Pagels) and The Nag Hammadi Library (ed. Robinson). This means that Novus Spiritus is open to the outside, and not a cult proper.

Novus Spiritus otherwise share many traits with New-Ageish Spiritualism, and makes some profit from dubious practices such as hypnosis and "past life" examination, and also less dubious practices such as dream analysis and meditation.

Demiurges, archons and the meaning of life

A religion is essentially a "cosmology" that describes the individual's role in the universe, and thereby describing what is a meaningful life in regard to society and nature.

Gnosticism is an Abrahamite religion, who are characterized by an initial creation, a linear history where a God is (or gods are) acting in the history for or against his own chosen people, depending on their well-behavior according to his rules. Since the antiquity, all Abrahamite religions believe that all humans are judged individually after their death, to live eternally in a Heaven, or if so judged, suffer eternally in a Hell. Judaism per se doesn't have a Hell, this Hell is probably a borrowing of the Greek Tartaros, superimposed upon a Sheol (some kind of Purgatory) a temporary grave-place where newly deceased awaited elevation to Heaven.

Abrahamite religions are among others Judaism, Samaritanism, Bahá'í, Islam, Ahmadiyya and so on. The most dominant and in parallel some of the most deviant Abrahamitism is Christianity, and it has a far sibling the Gnosticism originating in heretic Judaism, with clear signs of an earlier embedded polytheism.

In the Christian cosmology the Cosmos was created by God in 6 days, and the original man Adam and his wife Eve, were created as managers for Gods personal garden of Eden. There were two trees in this garden the Tree of Life that gave eternal life by eating from it, and the Tree of Knowledge that gave divine knowledge of good and evil when eating from it. God had a monopoly of divine knowledge, so he placed a snake ("serpent") in the Tree of Knowledge for protection, but this snake was illoyal, and manipulated Eve and Adam to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. Then God had to expel Adam and Eve from Eden, and make them live short lifes of hardships before dying. The cause of all hardships in this world was this Original Sin, and Jesus, the son of God, came down to the Earth to prepare an easier way to return to Heaven after death.

As far as Gnosticism goes, this Adam-and-Eve story is a false late addition to the Bible in order to surpress the Divine knowledge that Gnostic movements provided, presuming that the Tree of Knowledge and Tree of Life were originally identical, and probably originated from the Asherah-poles thrown out of the Bible where Asherah the Wisdom (Sophia, Barbelo, Pira, etc..) was the Heavenly Mother of all angels and all divine knowledge. Therefore the Sethian Gnostic scriptures provide alternative stories regarding this Adam-and-Eve stuff, while the Valentinian Gnostic Scriptures mainly builds the creation story on the Gospel of John Chapter 1.

The Christian moral is here that everybody is originally sinful, not by own acts, but by being born, and the only means of salvation is submission under the regime of Jesus, the Son of God God — which is either the Church (Catholic or Orthodox), or the consensus of the Christian collective (Protestantism). What Jesus did was, among others, reconquer the Cosmos that had been kidnapped by evil spirits, and sacrifice his own Life as a scapegoat for all sins of the humankind. Christianity is submission under this external regime of moral.

Gnosticism instead regard the Cosmos to be created by "evil" forces, the paths of everyday sinfulness and depraved behavior were followed to their origin: our biological material bodies, which when used without knowledge and understanding, creates sin and depravation. The low drives and the limited life length of our biological body was put in contrast with the clarity and objectivity of a knowledgeable enlightened mind, which was seen as an eternal divine spark originating from God. Our natural inborn sense of moral was seen as a "memory" of our divine heritage. The main original Gnostic moral is to not let strong passions ("archons", the rulers of this world) rule us, but to always act after consideration and understanding directed towards charitable acts and altruism.

The Demiurge is the creator of this material world and a symbol for transient worldly success, that makes us insensitive for other humans' needs and isolate us from each other, it is also a symbol for narcissism and power based on cynism and exploitation. Those following the way of the Demiurge, follow a path of sensations and success in vanity, while those following the way of the true Lord and his messengers (such as John the Baptist, Jesus and the prophets) disregard such worldly success and dedicate their life on understanding and acting for social charity and welfare. In modern Gnosticism, it is assumed that such social acts must come from within, and to be adapted to personal traits, in order to be valid.