@Greatest I am cv,
Immortality is a myth. The end of the world is a Biblical story. The Bible must be read with the understanding that it is the rumminations of authors who had no connection with the subjects they were writing about. Allow me to explain.
Sometime around the year 30 C.E., Jesus, a Nazarene peasant and charismatic religious leader, was executed in Jerusalem as a political agitator by the roman prefect Pontius Pilate. Despite his death, however, his followers did not disband. They grouped together, preserving some of Jesus’ teachings and some stories about him, which became part of the substance of their preaching as they continued his mission to prepare Israel for the coming Kingdom of God. At the same time or shortly thereafter, these oral teachings began to circulate in Greek as well as Aramaic.
Eventually, some of Jesus’ sayings, now in Greek, were collected and written down in a document, now lost, which scholars designate Q (Quelle means Source). Meanwhile, other oral traditions- miracle stories, parables, legends, and so on – grew, circulated, and were collected in different forms by various Christian communities. In the period around the destruction of the second Temple (70 C.E.), an anonymous Gentile Christian wrote some of these down. This person was not an author, he did not compose de novo. Nor was he a historian – he did not deal directly and critically with his evidence. The writer was an evangelist, a sort of creative editor. He organized these stories into a sequence and shaped his inherited material into something resembling a historical narrative. The result was the Gospel of Mark.
This Gospel eventually circulated beyond its community of origin to others, acquainted with different traditions about Jesus. From surviving literary evidence we know of at least two other anonymous Christians who, independently but at roughly the same time (90-100 C.E.), combined Mark with other materials, both written and oral – the Greek sayings source, Q; extensive references to the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, The Septuagint; and other, perhaps local, traditions. The results were the gospels of Matthew and Luke.
So Fundamentally the gospels are theological proclamation, not historical biography; and to the degree that they do present us with an image of Jesus, it is first of all the “Jesus” who founded the particular community behind each gospel. By that I mean to say that traditions from and about Jesus spanning this temporal, cultural, and linguistic gap circulated orally; and the reliability of oral traditions, in the absence of independent or convergent lines of evidence, is nearly impossible to assess. As psychological and anthropological studies of oral traditions show, even reports going back to eyewitnesses are far from historically secure. Interpretation distortion occurs at every link because the observer is human. Communication between different people over time, before it achieves written form ( like the gospels), would undergo revision at every retelling. The degree of distortion between what actually occurred and what is written in the gospels is incalculable.
