The Missing Gospel?

          Why didn't Jesus write a book?

                       

Allow me to advocate for the devilish questions surfacing now and again in minds ruled by logic.  Only my opinion, encouraging dialogue:

If I were the Son of God Himself come to earth with an important message, would I leave it to chance that my friends and contemporaries would get it right?  Why wouldn't I scribe my messages down for the ages of people I was trying to reach, thereby insuring its accuracy?  Why, I ask, didn't the historical Jesus, the Christ, put His very advanced new notions to paper, like any genius or prophet of that time?

Think of it - God, the Creator of All in the Christian ethic, decides it's time to visit His most beloved creations with the "good news" that the God of the Jews is actually a living God, a loving Father, a forgiving deity waiting only for the acceptance of His children - quite contrary to the vengeful, judging, cold dry God of what we now call the Old Testament.  So, as we've come to know it, He appears on earth in the guise of His only Son, and grew as any child would, at the feet of his parents and little friends, a good and obedient Jewish boy, yet somehow knowing He was set apart.  For wouldn't God, in human form, be influenced by that form?  Wouldn't He be ruled by human emotion and foibles?  I'm not sure.  I've come to think He was 100% human, 100% divine, and aware of both living within Him.  Very difficult to grasp. 

Surely God the young earth-child named Jesus would feel joy and sorrow, cry when He skinned His knee, laugh at something funny or feel hurt by the usual boyhood bullying.  Being raised a good, devout Jew, Our Lord would be held to the restrictions of that faith by His parents, and expected to obey them.  I've no doubt He did, most of the time.  But all through His childhood and young adulthood He surely would've felt the tug of that divine mission He started out on, planned and put into action.  How would that have affected His earthly life?  Was He a hard man to get to know, at say, 20?  Why did He never talk of His early life to His friends, His disciples?  Was He not entrusting them to relate His views accurately?  Did He not believe people in ages to come would be interested in how He lead His life before becoming a self-proclaimed preacher, then prophet?  And how did He keep the secret of His true identity for so long? 

With such an awesome message to bring so many, why did Jesus leave it to others to remember His teachings, and pass them on intact, accurately?  The New Testament seems our only record of this Man, yet nowhere in those pages does He speak.  His ideas, thoughts, sermons, everything He did or said - all left to heresay by others.  Not once does Our Lord speak in the Bible.  Every word He may've uttered comes to us through another.  People with motives perhaps different from their peers.  Jesus seemed to be very confident of the great faith His words and deeds would instill low these 2,000 years later.  Why?  Was it His divinity that inured it so strongly in His mind?  A human mind!  For in human guise he possessed all our frailties, weaknesses, emotions and needs, yet doing battle with the most base of these would have been His much-challenged divinity - being the Son of God.  Jesus held this secret, according to Biblical record, for all His life, almost to the end of it.  When He did reveal His true identity, He started the beginning of the end - or as many see it, the fulfillment of the prophecy that a Messiah would come to save the Jews from bondage by the self-sacrafice He would make.  Imagine what it was like when He made this proclamation!  

I sometimes wonder why it was that particular historical period God decided it was time to walk amonst us, and chosing His guise I think make alot of sense.  Surely He couldn't appear as Himself - but as a man like any other, who speaks of new ideas, new and better, kinder ways to look at one another, I can see how people were drawn to Him.  Then, in absolute silence and with no public explanation, He offered up His life and it was taken in the cruel manner and custom of the day.  Many who believed in His new ways turned against Him.  

The message of Jesus I believe was a very basic one, that His Father is connected to us all, that He loves and cares for us, that we can come to Him in need and be heard, always be welcomed, always forgiven, always loved.  Yet at that time in history such ideas were very radical to the Jews, and of course traitorous to the Romans, in political power.  It's a message of great import - surely it must be if God Himself would bring it to us as His own Son.  

So why didn't Jesus write it down Himself? 

Was Christ Jesus aware of future events the way He would've been as God, Creator of All?  Would coming into human form subtract any part of your divinity from you, if you were a true god?  How did the two co-exist in one man? 

From Biblical record we know Jesus was many times confused and hurt.  He considered Himself a lone voice.  Alone and apart.  Heavy-laden with His mission.  Given to temptations yet able to fight them more ably than most.  Such import to be left to others to record is given to the winds of chance!  And the gospel writers themselves, all contradicting each other, then the Ages of Man in the Church taking out and re-arranging this Testament, then all the mis-translations ... but Jesus felt confident to leave His great message to the vagaries of human-kind, no matter how contradictory.  Why? 

These questions take nothing from one's love of the Lord, for whatever reason and in whatever fashion.  It's just something I wondered ...

 

 

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