How did early Christian texts just go missing?

[iskander]

Romans 9:5
The patriarchs are theirs, and from them by natural descent -- kata sarka, sexual intercourse-- came the Messiah. May God, supreme above all , be blessed forever! Amen.

Kata sarka means according to the flesh. In the patristic teaching, Jesus is from the patriarchs by the flesh through Mary.

Yes I know . according to the flesh, by birth, natural descent all are nice ways of saying -- by sexual intercourse as those of the flesh reproduce.
For Paul Jesus is a man, a very special one : the second Adam that repairs the damage done by the first Adam

How could the action of generating the son of God through the Spirit be transformed as through the flesh of Mary?
God told several women that He will open their womb , as in Sarai

[Michael BG]

Many things in the gospels and early Church history are the kind of thing that someone living in the 1st or early 2nd c. could find out, but someone living 400 years later would not.

It is often suggested than Christians were more likely to be slaves or poor people, therefore someone of these categories living in Rome, Greece or Asia Minor would find it difficult to go to Galilee or Jerusalem to talk to the neighbours of those involved in the Christian stories. After 66 CE it would be hard even for rich people to find these neighbours. How many women who knew Mary when she had her first child would be alive more than 74 years after his birth (c 70 CE).

It seems to me that it would be difficult for the average Christian to fact-check anything they were told my Christians after 70 CE. It might even have been difficult for Christians in Greece to fact-check anything Paul told them.

How could such major documents have ended up being so fragmentary? Did someone intentionally suppress them because they had heretical information? That seems to have been the case with Gospel of the Hebrews, according to one story about Pat. Cyril Jerusalemite.

Once Christianity become the major faith of the Roman Empire Christians became obsessed with wiping out alternative views.

I do think that Paul knew the story of the Virgin birth, as he writes in Galatians 4:4:
"But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law."
There does not seem to me to be much point in Paul writing those underlined words unless he is referring to birth from a mother in particular, otherwise, why not say "born of a human father and mother"?

All children are born of a woman. Why would someone write born of a man, when men can’t give birth?

I would add by the way, that due to the Chiastic structure and parallel between Mary Magdalene (finding an empty tomb due to a miraculous resurrection) and Mary of Nazareth (having Jesus in a cave due to a miraculous birth), that Mark and for that matter the other gospels at least allude to the virgin birth concept.

Please can you tell me where Mark, Matthew, Luke and John write that Jesus was born in a cave? My RSV Bible doesn’t seem to have this.

Still, there is something curious. Paul complains in 1 Timothy 1

Are you aware that most New Testament scholars do not think Paul wrote 1 Timothy?

It's reasonable to imagine that Mary or Joseph were descended from David and as such were living in Bethlehem and then fled to Nazareth because Herod was maniacal and had a practice of killing potential rivals ...

I don’t think it is probable. Luke has Mary and Joseph living in Nazareth (remember no room at the inn Lk 2:7) he has no king Herod. No one else apart from Matthew tells us about Herod killing children like the Pharaoh.

It is just as reasonable to think Mary had sex with a Roman soldier called Pantera who was the real father of Jesus as written in the Talmud.

If you check Matthew 13 though, it says:
“Is this not the carpenter’s son? Isn’t His mother’s name Mary, and aren’t His brothers James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas?"

Are you not aware that it is likely that Matthew is editing Mk 6:3 here?
“Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?”
This is used as evidence that Joseph was not Jesus’s father, because only an illegitimate son would be called “son of Mary”.

[Steven Avery]

I do think that Paul knew the story of the Virgin birth, as he writes in Galatians 4:4:
"But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law."
There does not seem to me to be much point in Paul writing those underlined words unless he is referring to birth from a mother in particular, otherwise, why not say "born of a human father and mother"?

Because "born of (a) woman" was a common expression in antiquity. It had nothing to do with absent fathers or virgin births:.

None of those are "made of a woman".

"born of a woman" is a minority corruption (which is not even in the apparatus). There are a number of interesting and apparently solid Greekies who discuss this difference, as well as the learned historic Christian commentators like John Gill. Ironically, Reddit has a good discussion.

I will point out that many of the modern versions get this wrong, and mistranslate the accepted Greek text (TR and CT) to "born of a woman".

Steven

[rakovsky]

Another time in the gospels, actually the only time it narrates Jesus' childhood, Jesus leaves Mary and Joseph behind and stays in the Temple listening to the Jewish teachers. He explains to Mary and Joseph that this is because the Temple is "his" "father's" house. According to the narrative of the gospels, this father-son relationship wasn't something Jesus just entered into at the time of the Baptism when the skies opened up and the voice said "This is My Son". It was apparently something that Jesus just "knew" even as a child.

Then we have the chiasm between Joseph of Arimathea being a surrogate father figure at the Burial and Joseph being a surrogate father.

In the gospels, there is a "spiritual" resurrection of repentance and restoration, but there is a "physical" resurrection that Jesus actually underwent. Same thing with the virgin birth. Jesus says that the faithful are God's children, anypne who does God's will is his brother. But it's not left on a purely metaphorical/"spiritual"/allegorical case with Jesus. With Jesus, God is actually is father, he is the "only begotten" son (John 3:16). Same thing with the other miracles, transfiguration, walking on water, healing sick people, raising comatose and dead people, etc. The extreme miracles were not just spiritual or metaphorical in the gospel's eyes, they were full, real, direct, objective.

If the gospel narrative was the original, apostolic one, why wouldn't Jesus just say in the Sermon on the Mount to the crowd, "Greetings, ye gathered here. I have great news for you. I, Jesus, created the world and am the only begotten son of Adonai, and Mary never had sex and Joseph is not my biological father. Also, I am G-d and the Messiah Son of David."
He would not have made it as far as he did if he talked that way based on the portrayal of him in the gospel as a person with human limits and mortality (whether you believe those big supernatural claims are reality or not). Mark's gospel tones things down a bit, John's gospel is intense. I think also that if the gospels were written in a fully and thoroughly blatant way, they might have less appeal. 2000 years later, even major detractors and skeptics argue among themselves and find interest in the gospels with alternative (non-supernatural) theories about what really happened.

[rakovsky]

If you check Matthew 13 though, it says:
“Is this not the carpenter’s son? Isn’t His mother’s name Mary, and aren’t His brothers James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas?"

Are you not aware that it is likely that Matthew is editing Mk 6:3 here?
“Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?”
This is used as evidence that Joseph was not Jesus’s father, because only an illegitimate son would be called “son of Mary”.

Such a phrase would also thereby apply to someone from a virgin birth.
It looks to me like this is another sign that Mark knows of the virgin birth teaching.
Meanwhile, Paul says Jesus was born under the Law. It was not a birth outside the law. So that leaves us with the virgin birth option.

If I told you: "God is your father and ______ (your Mom's first name) is your mother", you would think that I had just told you something weird in a way that "God is your father" would not sound as weird, but rather something a mainstream Christian might say. "Why are you cutting my Dad out of the picture?", you might ask me.
The underlined statements carry certain implications in their juxtaposition of the two.

[spin]

None of those are "made of a woman".

Nor is that literal. You should try "made from/out of a woman", if you want to be literal. "From" and "out of" are the most transparent and frequent uses of εκ, which denotes a point of origin, be it ablative (departure from location) or sourced from an action. The woman in the expression is the locative source of the subject.

"born of a woman" is a minority corruption (which is not even in the apparatus).

No Geek manuscript uses "born". The use of "born" seems to be an attempt to convey to the reader the sense of the Greek expression which is not transparent in literal translation of the parts.

Perhaps you should state what content you think γενομενον εκ γυναικος conveys and why you think so based on linguistic grounds that differs from the sense translation provided as "born of a woman".

I will point out that many of the modern versions get this wrong, and mistranslate the accepted Greek text (TR and CT) to "born of a woman".

This seems like a taxi driver saying definitively that a climate scientist is wrong because the latter uses models to explain climate changes.

[rakovsky]

Many things in the gospels and early Church history are the kind of thing that someone living in the 1st or early 2nd c. could find out, but someone living 400 years later would not.

It is often suggested than Christians were more likely to be slaves or poor people, therefore someone of these categories living in Rome, Greece or Asia Minor would find it difficult to go to Galilee or Jerusalem to talk to the neighbours of those involved in the Christian stories. After 66 CE it would be hard even for rich people to find these neighbours. How many women who knew Mary when she had her first child would be alive more than 74 years after his birth (c 70 CE).

It seems to me that it would be difficult for the average Christian to fact-check anything they were told my Christians after 70 CE. It might even have been difficult for Christians in Greece to fact-check anything Paul told them.

I can tell you that if I were living in the 1st c. AD and I was as interested in this stuff as I am now, I would have gone to Galilee and Jerusalem and wherever else I needed to in order to check up on it so long as my research was legal. I wish I could do so today.

If Mary was 15 y.o. at the birth, her friends who knew her while Jesus was growing up (up to 15 years old) and could know her backstory through the rumor mill, whether she was Davidic or lived in Bethlehem, how long before Jesus was born was she married, etc could be about Mary's age. In 70 AD they would be 85 years old. Women can live a long time, and they can pass information to their kids.

In the mid 1930's, about 55 years after Stalin was born, a group of Soviet researchers and writers went to the Caucasus to learn about their Great Leader's childhood to write a story of his youth. Stalin had the mission called off, claiming that you can't write about the sun before it arose. The truth is though, you really can find out a lot about someone's childhood even 60 years later. There were things in his pre-Revolutionary days that Stalin didn't want people finding out about. Over 100 years after Stalin's birth, the Soviet Union collapsed and different stories came out for researchers about what people who knew Stalin's family thought. These kinds of stories included things passed down through generations.

Celsus probably heard the Ben Pandera story from somewhere.

How could such major documents have ended up being so fragmentary? Did someone intentionally suppress them because they had heretical information? That seems to have been the case with Gospel of the Hebrews, according to one story about Pat. Cyril Jerusalemite.

Once Christianity become the major faith of the Roman Empire Christians became obsessed with wiping out alternative views.

That plays a role. But some of the noncanonical lost documents like Gospel of the Hebrews and Ascension of Isaiah (non-Ethiopic version) were still available to church theologians in about the 11th c. and 17th c., respectively.

I do think that Paul knew the story of the Virgin birth, as he writes in Galatians 4:4:
"But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law."
There does not seem to me to be much point in Paul writing those underlined words unless he is referring to birth from a mother in particular, otherwise, why not say "born of a human father and mother"?

All children are born of a woman. Why would someone write born of a man, when men can’t give birth?

They would write about the man's role in order to avoid the juxtaposition:
God is the father and Mary is the mother, which raises the question of what happened to the earthly father in that paradigm. Joseph the carpenter plays almost no role in the gospels after the time when Jesus as a youth stayed in the Temple. There is kind of a gap that begs the question what happened. Meanwhile, Mary continues to get major attention. There seems to be a paradigm there.

I would add by the way, that due to the Chiastic structure and parallel between Mary Magdalene (finding an empty tomb due to a miraculous resurrection) and Mary of Nazareth (having Jesus in a cave due to a miraculous birth), that Mark and for that matter the other gospels at least allude to the virgin birth concept.

Please can you tell me where Mark, Matthew, Luke and John write that Jesus was born in a cave? My RSV Bible doesn’t seem to have this.

Still, there is something curious. Paul complains in 1 Timothy 1

Are you aware that most New Testament scholars do not think Paul wrote 1 Timothy?

I heard that there was a common idea among scholars that he didn't.

If you check Matthew 13 though, it says:
“Is this not the carpenter’s son? Isn’t His mother’s name Mary, and aren’t His brothers James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas?"

Are you not aware that it is likely that Matthew is editing Mk 6:3 here?
“Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?”

I am not sure whether Matthew preceded Mark or the other way around. Scholars have different theories on this too, although they usually think Mark came first. I think Mark could be a scaled down edited version based on Matthew.

[Michael BG]

If you check Matthew 13 though, it says:
“Is this not the carpenter’s son? Isn’t His mother’s name Mary, and aren’t His brothers James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas?"

Are you not aware that it is likely that Matthew is editing Mk 6:3 here?
“Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?”
This is used as evidence that Joseph was not Jesus’s father, because only an illegitimate son would be called “son of Mary”.

Such a phrase would also thereby apply to someone from a virgin birth.

I think it is more reasonable that a first century Jew would understand “son of Mary” as evidence of an illegitimate birth than think God had replaced a human as father of the child.

I not think that any first century Jew would think that “son of God” means that God has replaced the need for a human father.

[rakovsky]

I think it is more reasonable that a first century Jew would understand “son of Mary” as evidence of an illegitimate birth than think God had replaced a human as father of the child.

I not think that any first century Jew would think that “son of God” means that God has replaced the need for a human father.

Well, how many first century Jews would think that Jesus was the "only begotten son of God" (John 3) or preexisted his own birth and created the world (Paul)?

I think that when mark wrote "son of Mary" he was not announcing that Jesus' Mom had sex out of marriage. He was, I think, alluding to this teaching about God actually being his father, just like the empty tomb story in Mark alludes to an actual resurrection, not just a purely spiritual afterlife.

Yet Mark never directly narrates the birth or the bodily resurrection. Interesting, huh?
He only alludes to these events and wants the reader to follow the inferences.

[Garon]

"Virgin" birth is what it says. He was the first born out of her vigina..Hence Virgin Birth.

You people keep thinking about a Non Sexual Birth.

Think People.