Why wait 40 years or more to write about Jesus?

[Publisher]

Actually, I didn’t ask the question…I’m not the OP. I was just commenting on someone else’s post.

And I think she was asking more about the gospel writers…why did it take so long to start putting things down on paper, the first one being written about forty years after he died and the fourth one, I think, 20 years later? Or more?

But the bolded words of yours, above, give me pause. Are you saying that Jesus and his disciples didn’t think at the time that his life was relevant enough to write about? (nothing negative intended, I just can’t figure out if you mean Jesus or who when you say “you do not write about your life…” etc)

The second part of your comment still leads back to the OP’s question…why did it take them forty-plus years and well into their seventies or eighties in age, perhaps, to worry about the loss of the stories and start to write? Again, his life and words would have had such a major impact on them, I assume the OP is wondering…what was going through their mind? Why didn’t one of them think, “hey, we better get this down right away…”
That’s what I’d wonder, anyway.

Did none of them know how to write? (still, someone who heard the stories would have been able to, non?) Did they have to spend decades convincing people of the stories first? Were they afraid to write them down? Did it just not occur to them? Was it “expensive” and difficult to get “paper”? Did one person finally say, “hey, we better get this down…”. Were the stories getting mixed up and tampered with, so finally someone realized they better write them down? Did they all just think the end of the world was coming imminently (as he said several times) so they didn’t bother?

I guess we will never know the answers to any of the above for sure, tho…until someone invents a time machine
I, for one, would like to be on that trip back in time…as I’m sure many here would.

One of the reasons the story was not put down on paper immediately was the disciples believed Jesus would be returning very very soon, as evidenced by some of Paul’s letters assuming the “day of the Lord” was very near.

As decades passed and the fledgling Christian movement with it’s various sects began spreading…each sect began writing down what each community had come to believe about Jesus of Nazareth. Within those first decades Christians were still attending synaguoge and using the Jewish scriptures…the gospels were first written to “fill a void” within that setting. The Jewish scriptures were read each sabbath and commented upon…the “liturgy” of the synaguouge was expanded to include readings from the gospels that co-incided with the Jewish liturgical year…as is evidenced by the format of the synoptics.

The “warning” of the disciples being put out of the synagouges was a historical comment on what was happening at the time…those who accepted Jesus as Messiah eventually were chased from the synagouges…especially AFTER the destruction of the Temple when the rabbinical movement began…the struggle of who was the legitimate heir of Judaism…the rabbis or the “Christians”…by the end of the first century Christianity and Judaism made their final “break” with one another and Christianity was seen as a separate religious group as they were predominantly Gentile by that time.

Judaism had a lot of admirers…"God fearers’ but they didn’t want to make the very dangerous step and undergo circumcision to be fully “Jewish”…it was dangerous to one’s health and painful for an adult male to be circumcised…the “Christian” version of Judaism only required a “water bath” to declare one now a “child of the covenant” and for many Gentiles this was welcome news…no dangerous ritual to undergo…Gentile Christianity spread under Paul.

 

[andremiguel]

Actually, I didn’t ask the question…I’m not the OP. I was just commenting on someone else’s post.

And I think she was asking more about the gospel writers…why did it take so long to start putting things down on paper, the first one being written about forty years after he died and the fourth one, I think, 20 years later? Or more?

But the bolded words of yours, above, give me pause. Are you saying that Jesus and his disciples didn’t think at the time that his life was relevant enough to write about? (nothing negative intended, I just can’t figure out if you mean Jesus or who when you say “you do not write about your life…” etc)

The second part of your comment still leads back to the OP’s question…why did it take them forty-plus years and well into their seventies or eighties in age, perhaps, to worry about the loss of the stories and start to write? Again, his life and words would have had such a major impact on them, I assume the OP is wondering…what was going through their mind? Why didn’t one of them think, “hey, we better get this down right away…”
That’s what I’d wonder, anyway.

Did none of them know how to write? (still, someone who heard the stories would have been able to, non?) Did they have to spend decades convincing people of the stories first? Were they afraid to write them down? Did it just not occur to them? Was it “expensive” and difficult to get “paper”? Did one person finally say, “hey, we better get this down…”. Were the stories getting mixed up and tampered with, so finally someone realized they better write them down? Did they all just think the end of the world was coming imminently (as he said several times) so they didn’t bother?

I guess we will never know the answers to any of the above for sure, tho…until someone invents a time machine
I, for one, would like to be on that trip back in time…as I’m sure many here would.

Never. I would not want to be an apostle. Do you realize their lives?
Someone who was a carpenter telling them that He was the Son of God, that He Had a Father and then the Holy Spirit, tell them to eat His Flesh and drink His Blood, resurrecting dead people and then being crucified and then resurrected? God, their lives were not easy.

Now, Jesus could have written the Gospels, He knew how to write. He could make a miracle and make one book ( not four with discrepancies) appear out of the blue.

But the first guilty one was Jesus Christ who did not write.

Thanks for your post, which is nice.

 

[patrick457]

And I think she was asking more about the gospel writers…why did it take so long to start putting things down on paper, the first one being written about forty years after he died and the fourth one, I think, 20 years later? Or more?

Actually, a gap of forty years or so is a very short period of time when compared to other examples. I mean, look at Alexander the Great: Arrian and Plutarch wrote biographies of him more than four hundred years after he died, yet both of these are generally considered more or less reliable. And the Buddha’s teachings were only put into writing after being passed down orally through the centuries during the Fourth Buddhist Council in Sri Lanka in 29 BC, approximately four hundred and fifty four years after the death of Siddhatta Gotama. Finally, the Vedas themselves were, and still are to some extent, mainly transmitted orally. (Because complete accuracy was perceived to be highly important, various complex methods of memorizing the texts were devised. It was due to this that the Vedas were preserved with unparalleled fidelity for more than a millennium by oral tradition alone, and even when these were finally put into writing - around the final centuries before Christ - the written texts were still considered to be secondary to the spoken word.)

Did none of them know how to write? (still, someone who heard the stories would have been able to, non?) Did they have to spend decades convincing people of the stories first? Were they afraid to write them down? Did it just not occur to them?

Nowadays we learn reading and writing as a set, but in reality they are separate skills. In the ancient world, being able to read was not an automatic 100% guarantee that you could write. And even if you could, it was not always certain that your handwriting would be ‘fair’ enough to be legible or beautiful. In those days, when you wanted to write something, you were not the one who did it: even if you had writing skills you almost always made use of a scribe (an amanuensis) who would write things down for you. St. Paul for example made use of a scribe named Tertius when he ‘wrote’ the letter to the Romans; and even in his other epistles the implication seems to be that he was not the one doing the actual writing itself.

BTW, not exactly related, but here are a few articles by Ben Witherington:

Reading and Writing in Herodian Israel– Was Jesus an Illiterate Peasant? Part One

Reading and Writing in Jesus’ World— Was he an Illiterate Peasant? Part Two

Was Jesus Illiterate? Part Three

Books and Scrolls in the World of Jesus

Was it “expensive” and difficult to get “paper”?

Yes. Papyrus was quite costly (a standard roll of papyrus in mid-1st century Egypt cost four drachmae, about 4-8 days pay of an ordinary workman) to the point that it was often recycled and reused, as the papyri discovered in Oxyrhynchus shows us. Greeks mostly wrote only on one side of a sheet of papyrus, while Egyptians (again cf. the Oxyrhynchus papyri) were apparently less hesitant to do so. In addition, scribes also devised ways to conserve space.

There was a good reason for wanting to write only on one side of a papyrus scroll: first, writing on the ‘back’ side (the side where the strips ran vertically, as opposed to the ‘front’ side where the strips ran horizontally) went against the grain of the papyrus fibers, and second, the scroll will almost certainly want to roll up the wrong way. It was also fragile: damp destroys it, which explains why papyrus manuscripts survive only in Egypt and a few other very dry locations. And while exposure to dry conditions is not as quickly destructive, the papyrus still turns brittle in these conditions.

There was another alternative: parchment, which was in many ways more high-quality than papyrus. For one, it was smoother, more durable, quite light in color (which makes for good contrast between ink and background), and was reusable (the very smoothness and sturdiness which make parchment such a fine writing material also make it possible to erase new ink). But the downside was that it was also highly expensive, much more than papyrus was. This kind of explains why virtually most, if not all, of the earliest NT manuscripts or for that matter, early Christian literature in general were (probably) written on papyrus. It was only when the Church grew stronger and richer that parchment became the prevalent writing material of choice (though Christian use of papyrus held out for a little longer; as late as the mid-11th century, papal bulls were still being written on papyrus!)

 

[zgraf]

Why wait 40 years or more to write about Jesus.

New evidence indicates the gospels were written much earlier. In particular, St. Matthew’s Gospel was written in approximately 41 AD – less than 10 years after Jesus.

For more info, please check out the PDF article (that discusses the authorship and dating of the gospels) here:

authorshipdatingsynopticgospels.com/

Blessings,
-john

 

[horazy]

From the beginning of Pentecost they had the written Scripture. It was the Old Testament. Christ was the fulfillment of the OT. See chapters 53 of Isaiah and 22 of Psalms as examples. The first preached to were Jews, who knew the Scriptures. Also many proselytes to Judaism were converted. They also knew the Scriptures. The Breans searched the Scripture (OT) to make sure what Paul said was the truth. They believed.

Know one needed a New Testament gospel written to be converted because they had OT gospel. When it became necessary for the NT in a written form the Holy Spirit provided.