3 Jul 2023 6:45 am
Bruce » 03 Jul 2023, 6:04 am » wrote: ↑ The four gospels hold the best story 99% of Christians really haven’t ever actually read.
No Hollywood movie, no Broadway play, no novel ever written compares with the story of a young virgin Jewish girl Mary, engaged to a man named Joseph, finding her self pregnant.
She walks the narrow streets of Nazareth, in Roman era Judea, to her fiancé’s carpenter shop, and tells him of her condition, and that the father is the Lord God.
Imagine Joseph, who at first is hesitant but still wants to hide and protect Mary from the Council, who will have her stoned to death for fornication and her heresy of claiming God is the father.
It is not recorded, who, helped the young couple to flee to Joseph’s native town of Bethlehem, but Joseph’s mother is most likely.
They had to travel 90 miles to the city of Joseph's ancestors: south along the flatlands of the Jordan River, then west over the hills surrounding Jerusalem, and on into Bethlehem.
In her condition it might have taken two or three weeks for the journey, with every town presenting a risk the Sanhedrin would discover they were not married, and Mary killed along with her unborn child and Joseph as well, for his complicity.
But we know they did, make it to Bethlehem and there in a stable, the most famous unwed mother in the history of the world gave birth to Jesus Christ.
The couple was likely married in Bethlehem by a friendly rabbi, who either did not know or kept their secret, and then they returned to Nazareth, where Joesph and Mary had other children, and Joseph raised Christ as though he was, His true father.
A Christian must understand, that the Sanhedrin without any doubt, have killed a pregnant, unwed Mary if she’d claimed to be the future mother of the Messiah, for heresy.
The Sanhedrin would murder the child, 33 years later, but spare Mary and others, that relayed to us the most beautiful story ever told.
About one per cent at most, of Christians orally learn the entire story from the beginning in Nazareth until the end when Mary Magadeline finds two angels in the empty tomb, and Christ appears to her unknown, as a Gardener.
The Baptists call us Campbellites.
We call ourselves, Christians only.
We are the most conservative Christians, because we keep the story intact.
And we love to tell it
https://youtu.be/HqddWm48DnY
How was that 1% measured?