"Although there is a good deal of evidence (some of which you cited) that a man named Jesus existed, there is by no means a consensus on his teachings. After 2,000 years of translations and innumerable viewpoints it seems highly likely to me that the core message of Jesus to man has been greatly distorted."
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You suggest that the accounts of Jesus' life are inaccurate. You say that "there is by no means a consensus on his teachings." Although this is accurate, it's a bit like saying that everyone believed the world was flat before Columbus sailed to the new world. On the contrary, every educated person believed it to be round, but argued about its circumference--a number which the Greeks had calculated quite accurately hundreds of years before Christ. Uninformed and uneducated people believed the matter to be in dispute, and among them it was. It is very similar with the history of Jesus.
In the late nineteenth century, two strains of naturalism converged within theology to create a new "liberal" school which challenged the authenticity of the texts of scriptures. One strain was based on the rather spurious argument that all things evolved, and therefore religion also evolved; the other strain sprang from the circular notion that the supernatural either did not exist or did not interfere in the natural in any way, and therefore any document which represented otherwise was mistaken. Thus, since the texts of the Bible spoke of miracles but miracles were impossible, the texts must be mistaken; and since they must be mistaken, they must have been written much later than thought, and by persons other than those to whom history credits them; and since they were written so late they must be unreliable; and since they are unreliable, they cannot be cited as support for miracles having occurred. Similarly, since religion evolves as a thought process among man, it must have gone through evolutionary phases; any document which claims that God revealed an ethical monotheistic religion near the beginning of the world is clearly wrong because God does not reveal religion (man thinks it up) and because religion must evolve through stages, of which ethical monotheism is the last. Unfortunately, through the 20th century, the assumptions and conclusions of this line of thought have been falling apart. Archaeologists have discovered that every place and thing which the Bible claimed existed at a particular time did in fact exist at that time, despite scholarly assertions that they could not have existed. Discoveries have also turned up fragments of the disputed documents which are much older than the liberals claimed, old enough to have been contemporary with the claimed authors. The entire notion that the biblical accounts are inaccurate embellishments from a later time, reconstructions by later writers seeking to create a new version of the faith for their own time and attribute it to their ancestors, has been thoroughly discredited. It lingers in part because those not in the field are unaware of the discoveries, and in part because some theologians have a vested interest in maintaining the theories they have taught and defended in the past, and are unwilling to abandon the first premises: that religion is evolved and not revealed (even if it claims otherwise), and that miracles do not happen (and therefore there must be another explanation for any history which reports that they did).
"After 2,000 years of translations and innumerable viewpoints it seems highly likely to me that the core message of Jesus to man has been greatly distorted."
If your premise were correct, your conclusion would be quite logical. Unfortunately, your premise fails, so your conclusion must also. But I may be putting the cart before the horse.
If what you are saying is that it is very likely that those of us reading the words of Jesus, spoken almost two millennia ago, are not completely and accurately understanding everything he intended, the truth of that is apparent from the fact that we who claim the name Christian fall into so many factions with so many nuances in the differences in our interpretations. I would not argue with this. Yet the fact that we are in so many distinct groups demonstrates several things. First, our faith is not based on the traditions of two thousand years, but on the original documents of that tradition. Indeed, we learn from those who have interpreted this faith in the past; but they are not the authority of the meaning of our religion, merely helpers in the process of understanding. What I believe, although influenced by the thoughts Luther and Calvin and Augustine and Thomas Aquinas and Anthanasius and Origen and C. S. Lewis and Bultmann and Barth, and indeed by the thoughts of my good friends David and Jeff whom I've mentioned and many others whom I have not, is ultimately based on how I understand those original texts. Each generation, each individual, returns to the source of the content of our faith, the documents, and strives to fully understand it afresh. Each generation, each individual, makes new errors; yet each also recognizes errors of the past, returning to truths as understood earlier or sometimes understanding things about those words which were perhaps forgotten or possibly not understood before. Every Protestant (and most Catholics) understand this: we are Christian in as far as we believe the Bible, and so we strive to understand the Bible as the true authority of our faith. Our pastors, our denominations, our study books, our teachers, are all here to help us understand, to tell us what they understand or how it was understood by other Christians over the centuries; but in the end, it is the words of the Bible which matter, which define our faith, and not the centuries of exposition on them.
But if you are saying that the texts themselves are unreliable, I have bad news for you: the documents which comprise the Bible are the best attested materials of ancient times. There are more ancient copies, more ancient translations, more extant fragments, more commentaries and quotes, than for any other document in history. The life and words of Jesus (including the miracles) are better attested than those of the Emperors of Rome, the philosophers of Greece, or any other ancient person. Every word of the New Testament, but for three sentences, is quoted in extant writings of authors from before the fifth century, some as early as the beginning of the second century. Document copies of portions of the books which comprise the New Testament have been dated back farther; a fragment of one page of one of the biographies as been dated to the mid-first century. No materials have undergone such extensive study and verification, such intensive scrutiny. I have on my table behind me a printed copy of the New Testament in the original Greek with an accompanying textual commentary giving me all the variations, where they are found, and the process used to determine the original version. That text is accurate to within 99% of the original, and the only uncertainties relate to minor points. I'm afraid that any argument based on doubt of the historical accuracy of the documents fails; one must impugn the motives of the authors themselves--all of them, as they agree on a consistent presentation of the facts in what is actually a collection of works by several authors--in order to doubt the accounts as recorded.
I hope this helps.
To Mark J. Young's Bible Study Materials
Read about the Multiverser role playing game--accused by some critics of being "too Christian".
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