Trivia / The Four Gospels

• Fountain of Expies: This Very Wiki gives us the Crystal Dragon Jesus and Messianic Archetype tropes; if the authors have encountered Christianity, they can be assumed to be Expies of Jesus Christ himself. Some of the most well-known, though, include Luke Skywalker and his father, Aslan, Superman and Nagisa Kaworu. In Real Life, many individuals have claimed to be His reincarnation.
• God Never Said That: God gave a number of general rules, but by Jesus' time, these had been analyzed and quantified into strict rules by the Pharisees. When the Pharisees tried to call Jesus on his "rule-breaking," He often explained that they had over-analyzed the letter of the law and missed the spirit completely. For example, the Pharisees said He violated the Sabbath's ban on work by healing someone; He explained that while the Sabbath is a day of rest, it's never against God's law to help a person or show mercy on them (see Matthew 12).
• Missing Episode:
  • The non-canonical gospels.
  • Luke begins with an introduction saying that many other people had written down accounts of Jesus, and Luke considered them as he did his own research.
  • John ends with him saying Jesus did a whole bunch of other stuff that he didn't have time to write down.
  • There are almost 200 quotes from Jesus that appear in Matthew and Luke, but not Mark. A popular theory among New Testament scholars is that the authors of Matthew and Luke both had access to a now-lost document, which has been named "Q" (short for "Quelle", the German word for "source", since German scholars formulated the theory), made up of only of the sayings of Jesus. The discovery of the previously lost Gospel of Thomas, which is also made up of only Jesus quotations, has bolstered the idea that such documents existed among early Christians.
• Short-Lived, Big Impact: Probably the Ur-Example. Jesus preached actively for only three years and died in his thirties, and here we are over 2,000 years later still talking about Him. Not to mention the religion He started currently having over two billion followers worldwide, more than any other. (Of course if one takes the Christian view, this is rather Zig-Zagged, as He is believed to be God in Human Form and thus exists eternally, but either way He wasn't around on earth for very many years.)
• Shrug of God: It's debatable whether Mark 16:9-20 and John 7:53-8:11 were ever actually part of the Gospel accounts as originally written by their authors. For that matter, the following verses are also debatable as far as their origin:
  • Matthew 17:21, 18:11, and 23:14
  • Mark 7:16, 9:44, 9:46, 11:26, and 15:28
  • Luke 17:36
  • John 5:4
• Word of Dante:
  • The Scripture doesn't say that there were three Wise Men exactly; that's a later tradition that probably came from them bringing three gifts. They're also often depicted in Nativity scenes, even though the Bible records them arriving at "the house", not a stable, suggesting they arrived well after Jesus was born.
  • Mary Magdalene is sometimes portrayed as a reformed prostitute although it is not explicitly stated anywhere in scripture. Instead, it's an ancient tradition found in the Catholic Church.
  • Mary's age is never specified in the Bible, nor is there even remotely a hint of it. If you've ever heard someone say Mary was 12 or 14 or anything like that, they're probably quoting the 1912 Catholic Encyclopedia, which mentions that some apocryphal sources describe her age. The "apocryphal sources" in question is probably the Protoevangelum of James, which was written in the mid-to-late 2nd century and never accepted as scripture by the church.

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