Masters of Religions Studies thesis

Idea 1:

My thesis, at this moment, will be based on the following assumptions (meaning I won’t argue them but accept them to be true):

• ·         The Christian dating system (BC/AD) did not exist before 525 AD.   What we call today 1^st century Israel was contemporarily dated via Rome’s AUC.
• ·         The Roman prefect-procurator Pontius Pilate served in Judaea from  311 to 321 AUC.   The best historical guess of the year of the crucifixion, was based on Pontius Pilate’s service dates by those who have devoted the most study to this issue, is 317 AUC.  Midway thru Pontius Pilate’s tenure in Judaea.
• ·         Paul set the stage for Christianity when he wrote between the years of 336 AUC to 349 (51/64 CE).
• ·         Mark, the 1^st-Gospel was written ~42 years later in 359 AUC.   This is 2.8 generations after the crucifixion assuming a 15 year generation gab at this time.
• ·         Matthew, the 2^nd-Gospel was written in 369 AUC.
• ·         The Scholarship on the writing of Luke, the 3^rd-Gospel, is anywhere from 365 to 425 AUC.  This thesis will place the writing of Luke at 373 AUC.
• ·         John, the 4^th-Gospel was written no sooner than 385 AUC but before 425 AUC.  Between 5 and 6 generations after the crucifixion.

One may argue any the points above, but this is the best scholarship we have at the moment.   These are not my arguments; I am however using the above positions as a baseline in my research.   Here is a current outline, which I’ll turn into a abstract before February.

I will provide evidence in my research either for or against the following main ideas.   I don’t know whether it will be for or against yet because I suspect it will take two years of research to complete.

• ·         Mark was written during the time that one sect of Jews had an audacious political goal to add Jesus as a disciple/prophet in the Jewish tradition.   They were bold and pushed a Gentile-friendly argument.  This political force was approximately 18 years before the Jewish Orthodox excommunicated the “Followers of the way.”   The Roman destruction of the Second Temple happened the same year as Mark was authored (what we now refer to as 70 CE).  The destruction of the Temple rendered the “Followers of the Way” to be willing to take on this dauntless charge of change.
• ·         Matthew rewrote Mark ten years later not only to fix and improve on it but also to reverse its too-Gentile-friendly argument.  Unlike Mark, which favors a brand of Christianity developed by Paul (in which Torah observance was an option), the author of Matthew comes from a community of Torah-observant Christians.   The change in tone from Mark to Mathew is a result of the changing environment.  It was realized that the push of Mark to canonize Jesus in the Jewish tradition would not happen without the support of Torah observation.
• ·         The political change in Matthew was not enough to stop the excommunication.  When diplomacy broke down, and it was realized the split (between the “Followers of the Way” and the Jewish Orthodox) was inevitable; Luke was written.  Neither Mark or Mathew contained history in the writings, there no sense or focus on incorporating current secular invents into the books which would allow historical dating or past interactions.
• ·         Luke, in a response to a newly found Christian independence, was the first Gospel to represent itself as history overtly.   Luke writes like a historian, adding superficial historical details as local color to bring legitimacy to the newly formed cult.  (the word cult is used to describe a relatively small group of people outside the Orthodox.  It is not utilized for a negative connotation as it is sometimes used today.)   Luke creates a resurrection narrative that is engineered to answer skeptics of Matthew’s account.  In 2016 history is still void of material of the crucifixion and resurrection from the contemporary time of the events.  Luke, written approximately four generations after the resurrection would not have had access to original material either, nor did anyone else at the time.  Thus, Luke was free to create a narrative to fit his currently found political arena.
• ·         John, written four to five generations after the crucifixion and at least two generations after the split; is a free redaction of the previous Gospels.  John, written by multiple authors, leveraged Mark, Mathew, and Luke to aim a rebut to a theme common to them all:  that ‘no sign shall be given’ that Jesus is the Messiah.   Mark was written before miracles had been imagined for Jesus.  The ideas suggesting that Jesus was pre-existent, that he was of one substance with God, are introduced by John in the late tenth decade; politically driven by the new idea contained in John, that Jesus is the new Moses. 
• ·         The political stage for the next millennium was set; Christians were no longer attempting to reconcile with Judaism; rather they were directly competing with it and with that Christian antisemitism was born.
• ·         Christianity was a developing story from the year 336 AUC (51CE) to the competition of the 4^th-Gospel of John ~90 years later.  During this century-long journey, Christianity had many a sojourn driven by multiple political realities in which the faith was required to adjust with to survive.  Not only did Christianity survive these political struggles, but within two hundred yeas Rome had outlawed all other forms of Religions (some exceptions were made for  Jewish tradition).  Christianity within two centuries was vaulted to the largest, most dominant religion, and force of the common era.

Idea 2:

The Gospels of Mark, and Matthew, were written (at least started) by Jewish authors in the synagogue during the eight and ninth decades, before the excommunication of the Jewish sect called “Followers of the Way” in the year 841 AUC (what we now call 88 CE). These books go back and forth on the idea of what a Gentile is. Luke may have been written in 841 AUC creating a catalyst for the excommunication, or more likely as an attempt to repair the new divide, but that is a fluid idea either way. The fourth Gospel, John, was started in the late tenth decade; it was the only one of these four books without scholarly disagreement clearly originating after the excommunication. The post-excommunication fourth Gospel is where the ideas of Jesus as pre-existent, one with God, the Trinity, etc. began to evolve; along with it antisemitic ideas also began to take hold. The beginning of the 2nd-century was a time of political struggle as the new cult (the word cult is used to describe a relatively small group of people outside the orthodox religion), now separated from the synagogue grappling to remain relevant. The fourth Gospel reflects the struggle in the changing of the Jesus narrative as the next Moses. John is a political statement to the orthodox that "I am" part of the Jewish tradition. But the attempts to rejoin the orthodox failed. Christian antisemitism is a direct result of the excommunication; it has nothing to do with the crucifixion story, as this took place in time about 52 years before the split. This gap represented three and 1/2 generations in 1st century Israel. Thus, the concept of Christianity, and therefore Christian antisemitism did not exist until more than three generations after the crucifixion story as dated by the recall of Pontius Pilate to Rome in 789 AUC. Christian antisemitism took hold with the writing of John in the 2nd-century but was unable to progress beyond a small group until Constantine raised Christianity to the status of “legal” in the fourth century. Later that century Constantius II outlawed other religions and race discrimination exploded in Europe from this moment forward. Antisemitism continued to flourish in western society for more than a millennium but took a major blow in 1791 with the writing of the First Amendment of the United States, which declared adoption of a state religion as illegal; challenging 1400 years of Christian governmental rule. Antisemitism wasn’t crushed by any means and still grew in Europe until reaching a zenith during the Holocaust. Galileo remained convicted of heresy until 1992, but the Church did not expel a single leader of the Third Reich. Therefore, no matter how sickening the majority of modern people now viewed race prejudice, the measure was still active in the church during the 20th-century. A pursuit that started within the 2nd-century writing of the book of John, driven by the excommunication of the sect, and empowered by the Romans has been with us since. As Christian America continues to lose members, the surviving population is growing more fundamental as the number of churchgoers continues to decline; 40% of American millennials now consider themselves as non-religious. In 1970 90% of Americans identified as Christian, this number is expected to drop below 50% by the end of the 2020s. Percentages of Christians in the west will slump to a level not known since before the fall of Rome. Will this second excommunication, a fall from mainstream relevance, create a social structure for a return of an antisemitic dominance within the church by 2030?

Idea 3:

How do we promote 1st century Christian scholarship? Our best scholarship places Paul’s writings between the years 51 CE and 64 CE. In so Paul would have written I Thessalonians, Galatians, I and II Corinthians, Romans, Philemon and Philippians. Epistles such as Hebrews were not attributed to Paul until the King James translation in 1611, such stories are political, that’s all – they are not historical - , if you could connect your story with Paul, you had political power! . . . . Miracles dint’ show up until the 8th decade with Mark. And all the “Drink my blood/Eat my Flesh” ideas didn’t come into play up until the tenth decade in the 4th Gospel after the Messianic Jews were excommunicated. People were writing these stories, but we only talk about the stories written. Behind the writings, from the 5th to the 14th decade, there are stories - stories of people, people writing of their God (people waiting on their God).