The Different Beginnings of Jesus in the Gospels: Mark’s Version

The modern New Testament canon contains four Gospels. When they are placed in chronological order (the order in which they were written) they are: Mark, Luke, Matthew & John. They were written as separate scrolls and circulated that way at first. Each Gospel was “the” Gospel of different congregations in the early years of Christianity. Then copies were made and shared by communities until the first New Testament canons appeared. There are many other gospels in existence, but only the four above ultimately were chosen by Athanasius to be in the New Testament he created in the 4th century.

 This is the Christmas season and the “Christmas story” is told often, but the story we hear and see in school plays and church services is not found in that form in any of the Gospels. It was created by taking stories from multiple Gospels and putting them all together. But that destroys the ancient accounts of Jesus’s beginnings that were known in the different early congregations. This is the first of four blogs in which each of the four accounts are presented as stand-alone accounts. You will soon see that they are indeed very different and they present different stories about the beginnings of Jesus. I will present the Gospels in chronological order beginning with Mark, which was written about 72 CE.

Read this blog at -- http://fromonejesus.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-different-beginnings-of-jesus-in.html