[squirt]

however, is that what really happened? there's a competing and contradictory scenario that has been promoted by some critics, they have said that early Christians were convinced Jesus was going to return during their lifetime to consummate history, so they didn't think it was necessary to preserve any historical records about His life or teachings, after all, why bother if He's going to come and end the world at any moment? so years later when it became obvious that Jesus wasn't coming back right away, they found that they didn't have any accurate historical material to draw on in writing the gospels, nothing had been captured for historical purposes, isn't that what really happened? there are certainly sects and groups, including religious ones throughout history, for which that argument works, but not with early Christianity, why not? what's so different about Christianity? the truth is that the majority of Jesus' teachings presuppose a significant span of time before the end of the world, even if some of Jesus' followers did think He might come back fairly quickly, remember that Christianity was born out of Judaism, for eight centuries the Jews lived with the tension between the repeated pronouncements of prophets that the Day of the Lord was at hand and the continuing history of Israel, and still the followers of these prophets were recorded, valued, and preserved the words of the prophets, given that Jesus' followers looked upon Him as being even greater than a prophet, it seems very reasonable that they would have done the same thing, they say that early Christians frequently believed that the physically departed Jesus was speaking through them with messages or "prophecies" for their church, since these prophecies were considered as authoritative as Jesus' own words, when He was alive on earth, the early Christians didn't distinguish them between these newer sayings and the original words of the historical Jesus, as a result, the gospels blend these two types of material, so we don't really know what goes back to the historical Jesus and what doesn't ... the strongest argument is what we never find in the gospels, after Jesus' ascension, there were a number of controversies that threatened the early church, should believers be circumcised, how should speaking in tongues be regulated, how to keep Jew and Gentile united, what are the appropriate roles for women in ministry, whether believers could divorce non-Christian spouses, these issues could have been conveniently resolved if the early Christians had simply read back into the gospels what Jesus had told them from the world beyond, but this never happened, the continuance of these controversies demonstrates that Christians were interested in distinguishing between what happened during Jesus' lifetime and what was debated later in churches