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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There’s a noted lack of good evidence for Jesus being a historical figure at all. The earliest historical references to him, that are often pointed at to say “look, this proves he existed” are from 70 to 100 years later (Tacitus, Josephus and maybe the Talmud), and are from people who knew him only by his developing reputation amongst early Christians. Tacitus claims “He was crucified by Pilot,” but that was the story told by early Christians as well. There’s some record that “James, the brother of Jesus, he who was called Christ, died” but that’s pretty thin to me. You can go read about this dude here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James,_brother_of_Jesus
What there’s not are Roman records of “masses of people following a man around” or “a great leader of the people being crucified.” We have records of how much grain people grew in Roman territories in the middle east and of crime and punishment from the region, but nothing about this, which would have been a disruption and concern to the Roman authorities?
An unproven hypothesis I really like is that Jesus was a Roman psy-op aimed at pacifying the Jewish people, by using their own prophesies against them, trying to get them to believe that their Messiah had indeed come and wanted them to stop rebelling (which they were constantly doing), be peaceful, love thy neighbor and “render unto Cesar what is Cesar’s.” If you think about it, the New Testament is so full of things that are about “being a good citizen”, the way the Romans of the time would have wanted.
There’s a book about this idea: https://www.atheistsforliberty.org/opinion/jesus-was-a-psy-op-a-book-review-of-creating-christ/
You know 100% who would have been tricked by the Book of Daniel? Roman operatives trying to create a fake new religion. It also explains the prevalence of Mediterranean and middle eastern sun god themes in the Christ story. They were working with what they knew.
It even explains the need to evangelize. Of course you want adherents to this to go tell all the other Jews “the Good News.”
But the early Christians were persecuted and the Romans hated them. I mean yeah, but clearly whoever launched such a campaign didn’t tell anyone else about their secret plans and 50 years later the whole thing was forgotten. I think about how much has happened and been forgotten in my own lifetime and I’m not even 50 yet… and our earliest writings to support the veracity of Christ come from almost twice as long as 50 years out? When this was supposedly this big important guy being followed by a multitude working miracles and healing everybody? Color me VERY skeptical.
