Did Jesus Claim to Be God?

Did Jesus Claim To Be God?

How the tale evolved

In a previous article, I covered the various discrepancies in the four gospels, but this particular topic deserved an article of its own.

First, we should lay down some groundwork. We’re going to look at the various gospels chronologically; this is important because the oldest gospel is most likely closer to the truth since it had less time to evolve from being retold and rewritten by various members of the Christian community.

Now you can find various claims on the exact writing dates, but generally most agree that Mark is likely the oldest, written somewhere around 60 AD, followed by Matthew although some will claim Luke was next, with each of these written somewhere between 60–80 AD. Both of these seem to borrow from Mark, so it’s thought that particular gospel was already circulating around the church at this point. That brings us to the final installment John, which is thought to have been written somewhere around 80–95 AD, making it the youngest gospel of the four.

This is an important point to remember moving forward because this means that all of the gospels were written at least around thirty years after Jesus’ crucifixion and in the case of John around 50+ years after.

That gives the church quite a bit of time to evolve the story of what happened and could explain why that particular gospel has so many differences contained in it, which we’ll dive into more shortly.