I’m not sure if this is a good format for this, but I’m going to try to put this book project here, under the ‘reframing’ tag, and use this post as a kind of way station between the parts as they develop. If it becomes too much of an encumbrance, I’ll try something else, but I have some expectation of success.
The motivation to start a project focused on yet another analysis of the Gospels is to test a novel framing for their creation. Most interpretation today is based on a relatively consistent “Early Church” myth, based on the stories from the Gospels, Acts, the various Epistles, and stories from early Christian writers. There is much left unstated in the Gospels, and by filling in details from the Early Church myth, new meanings emerge from out of the Biblical text. However, there are also many passages that simply make no sense within this context and are largely ignored.
If instead, a different context was assumed, it is likely that different meanings would emerge. What is being tested is the degree to which nonsense verses must be ignored in order to make this framework match the Biblical text?
I cannot provide history — I can only provide another myth. I can rationalize my myth all day long but in the end, while it may be based on more historical history than the Early Church myth, it is still required that some elements are accepted on faith. While it’s the product of a lot of research and reading and discussions, and truly represents the best of my understading in this epic, complex story, there is no historical record that covers every voice, and every motivation. We have only our guesses, and I’m hoping to find some guesses that match the evidence better than the ones we have now.
In my framework, I attempt to name names and show a chain of causal connections that resulted in Trinitarian Christianity. I’m very interested in the motivations of the people behind the development of what we know as the Roman Catholic Church. To this end, I’ve tried to learn as much as I can about pre-Christian religion in Europe, about Judaism and the Hebrew culture, and about the Roman Empire and its impacts on the world today. As a result, I can say with complete confidence that the traditional Early Church story is complete fabrication with little to no connection to history or reality.
When reading the Gospels through the lens of this framework, a completely different picture emerges. What I have found so far has answered questions I’ve had about the Gospels my entire life. So I offer this to you: Read the framework, and then look at the Gospels yourself in this new context and see if they don’t make so much more sense to you than they did before. I’ll be putting my notes up here as I go through the Gospels, and I’ll be very curious to read what other people may have discovered in their readings.
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