If the New Testament included only the Gospels.....

Spectrum

.... what would christianity be like today had the rest of the NT been rejected or turned into apocrypha?

Was Christ's teaching enough to give momentum to this religion beyond the first Christians? Or did Christ's teaching need augmenting with Pauline doctrines? And if so who is the real daddy?
Any ideas.

El Kabong

I've often thought the same thing. I do think Christianity would be very different than it is today if it was just the Gospels.

There would be no (just to name a few) Disfellowshipping (shunning), faith healing, speaking in tounges, celebate priests, women treated as second class citizens in the church, and the list goes on and on...

I do believe there would be more genuine love and forgiveness than there is in todays churches.

Narkissos

The problem with this question, imo, is that the Gospels presuppose and reflect the ideas, beliefs and teachings of many if not most segments of early Christianity, including Paul.

Opposing the Gospels to the rest of the NT is about like opposing the teaching of the main character of Thus Spake Zarathustra to the rest of Nietzsche's work. There are obvious stylistic and literary differences but it is clearly the word and thought of the same author.

The Gospels are probably the best literary production of early Christianity -- but they belong to the early Christian corpus just as the epistles, Acts or Revelation.

zen nudist

Paul wrote first, you should ask would anything be different if the gospels had never been written

and like you will see that christianity is really the work of paul who hallucinted a risen christ and

preached this far and wide and the gospels only filled in the blanks he had left.

Spectrum

Zen,

That is very interesting. So you are saying it all started with Paul's halucination rather than Mary's halucination of the Angel Gabriel?

I don't know if this theory would hold up to literary scrutiny.

Something very significant made Paul change from a die-hard jew to a die-hard follower of Jesus unless this is also just another moral story of how anyone can change for the better by accepting christ.

Spectrum

Narkissos,

"Opposing the Gospels to the rest of the NT is about like opposing the teaching of the main character of Thus Spake Zarathustra to the rest of Nietzsche's work. There are obvious stylistic and literary differences but it is clearly the word and thought of the same author."

Are you saying that the NT was written with one voice or everybody piled in their 2 cents worth then normalised chelation to be coherent.

Narkissos

So you are saying it all started with Paul's halucination rather than Mary's halucination of the Angel Gabriel?

Leaving hallucinations aside, I would certainly not take the Nativity stories (in that case Luke's) as a starting point since in all likeliness the earliest Gospel (Mark) had none.

But I agree that Paul's "conversion" (whatever its real motivation) is hardly a starting point either because Hellenistic Christian churches predate him.

Narkissos

Are you saying that the NT was written with one voice

Definitely not.

or everybody piled in their 2 cents worth then normalised chelation to be coherent.

I'm not sure what you exactly mean here.

The NT echoes many early Christian "voices" which can be traced back to different groups or schools. Those separate voices, btw, do not exactly correspond to the different NT "books". Some of the latter are pretty homogeneous internally (e.g. Romans, the Pastorals, Hebrews, James) while others result from a blending of originally distinct traditions (e.g. the Gospels of Matthew or Luke, or Acts), and still others, although originally homogeneous, went through a complex process of more or less "orthodox" editions (e.g. the Gospels of Mark and John) before they made their way into the NT canon. In all the redaction and canonisation process doctrinal consistency was only one factor; an antagonistic force was the authority which particular books had gathered within important segments of the church. There was no central authority ("GB"?) who could modify the texts at its whim. The result of about 3 centuries of informal but effective power struggle and negotiation is the NT as it is -- a library with a rather low but obviously tolerable level of consistency.

XJW4EVR

Zen Nudist wrote:

Paul wrote first, you should ask would anything be different if the gospels had never been written
and like you will see that christianity is really the work of paul who hallucinted a risen christ and
preached this far and wide and the gospels only filled in the blanks he had left.

I may be mistaken, but from everything I have read hallucinations generally occur to people in highly excitable states of anticipation, e.g. a mother who's son always came home at a certain time, say 5:00PM, but who was killed in a war. That same mother now sits in a chair in the front room of her home, reminiscing about the times her son would come home. Eventually, she hallucinates the son's arrival, and even converses with the son. At which point she would have lost touch with reality. My question to you, would be, how does Paul fit this criteria, based on the fact that he was A) a non-believer, and B) was violently hostile towards any that professed Jesus of Nazareth as Messiah?

Secondly, when has the last time a person suffereing from hallucinations ever became a moral leader?

Spectrum

"I'm not sure what you exactly mean here."

Well, your response gave me the answer to my cryptic question!

I always remembered the phrase "the scriptures are inspired of God" and took that at face value but literary study shows that it is very man made.

If the New Testament included only the Gospels.....

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