Erhman provides a fascinating answer:
"THOSE OF US WHO are deeply invested in the early Christian traditions would give a great deal to discover a Gospel written by one of the first followers of Jesus a year or so after his resurrection. Unfortunately, we almost certainly never will. Jesus’s disciples were lower-class, illiterate peasants from remote rural areas of Galilee, where very few people could read, let alone write, and let alone create full-scale compositions. We don’t know of a single author from that time and place, Jewish or Christian, who was capable of producing a Gospel even had she or he thought of doing so. The first followers of Jesus probably never thought of doing so. They, like Jesus, anticipated that the end of the age was imminent, that the Son of Man—now thought to be Jesus himself—was soon to come from heaven in judgment on the earth and to usher in God’s good kingdom. These people had no thought of recording the events of Jesus’s life for posterity because in a very real sense, there was not going to be a posterity.
But even if the original apostles had been forward-looking and concerned about the needs of posterity (or at least the longings of twenty-first-century historians), they would not have been able to write a Gospel. The only way they could pass on the story of Jesus was by word of mouth. And so they told the stories to one another, to their converts, and to their converts’ converts. This happened year after year, until some decades later, in different parts of the world, highly educated Greek-speaking Christians wrote down the traditions they had heard, thereby producing the Gospels we still have.
Even so, historians can at least dream, and even if it is an idle dream, it is worth considering what a Gospel written in the year 31 CE by one of the surviving disciples might have looked like. If the views I have presented in this chapter are anywhere near correct, this imagined Gospel would look very different from the ones we have now inherited—and its view of Jesus would not at all be the view that came to be dominant among later theologians when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman world.
This nonexistent Gospel would be filled with the teachings of Jesus as he went from village to town proclaiming that the kingdom of God was soon to arrive with the coming of the Son of Man. The day of judgment was imminent, and people needed to prepare for it. My guess is that this Gospel would not be filled with the miraculous things that Jesus had done. He would not spend his days healing the sick, calming the storm, feeding the multitudes, casting out demons, and raising the dead. Those stories were to come later, as Jesus’s followers described his early life in light of his later exaltation. Instead, this Gospel would tell in detail, probably from eyewitness reports, what happened during the last week of Jesus’s life, when he made a pilgrimage with some of his followers to Jerusalem and enraged the local authorities with his outburst in the temple and his incendiary preaching of the imminent coming of judgment—a cataclysmic destruction that would be directed not only against the Roman oppressors, but also against the ruling authorities among the Jews, the elite priests and their followers.
The great highlight of the Gospel, though, would come at the end. Jesus had been rejected by the scribes and elders of the people and handed over to Pontius Pilate, who found him guilty for insurrection against the state. To put a decisive end to his troublemaking, rabble-rousing nonsense, Pilate had ordered him crucified.
But even though Jesus had been unceremoniously executed by the power of Rome, his story was not yet
over. For he had appeared to his disciples, alive again. How could he still be alive? It was not because he survived crucifixion. No, God had raised him, bodily, from the dead.
And why is he still not among us? Because God not only brought him back to life, he exalted him up to heaven as his own Son, to sit on a throne at God’s right hand, to rule as the messiah of Israel and the Lord of all, until he comes back as the cosmic judge of the earth, very soon.
In this Gospel Jesus would not have become the Son of God for his entire ministry, starting with his baptism, as in the Gospel of Mark and in a tradition retained in the Gospel of Luke. And he would not have been the Son of God for the whole of his life, beginning with his conception by a virgin who was overshadowed by the Holy Spirit so that her son would be God’s own offspring, as in Luke and in traditions preserved by Matthew. Nor would he be a divine being who preexisted his coming into the world, as attested by such authors as Paul and John. No, he became the Son of God when God worked his greatest miracle on him, raising him from the dead and adopting him as his Son by exalting him to his right hand and bestowing upon him his very own power, prestige, and status." [Bart D. Ehrman. HOW JESUS BECAME GOD: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee, Kindle Edition (San Francisco, CA: HarperCollins, 2014.) pp. 208-209]
Notes:
- Erhman thinks the Injeel was not even conceived of by Jesus or his disciples
- If it was conceived of there would be no way for them to write it or preserve it due to their own intellectual incapacity
- However if such a gospel did exist it would primarily focus on Jesus last week not his teachings or miracles (sorry Quran and Muslims!)
- It would come from eye witnesses reports (not Allah)
- It would report Jesus crucifixion under Pilot (bye Q 4:157)
- It would report the disciples believed Jesus rose from the dead, rather than surviving crucifixion (so long Islamic swoon theory and apparent death theory, bye Deedat and Ally)
- It would testify Jesus became the Son of God at his Resurrection (umm Allah has no divinely adopted Son)
- Because Jesus became the Son of God at his Resurrection it would show how he is highly exalted and worshiped as the divine Son of Man, a divine judge and ruler, the King-Messiah and Sovereign Lord over God's creation. (Sounds like Issa, not)
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