If Jesus wanted to be taken all that seriously surely his disciples should have written an account in their native tongue, rather than the lingua franca of Greek or even Latin. The only explanation I can think of for why they didn’t is these texts were not transcribed or even destroyed by later faithful who had some sort of agenda. Such texts are clearly rare though, I imagine the sheer contreversy of the faith and the lack of accurate dating meant that some texts were never taken seriously, despite often being written prior to the cannon. The question is why is cannon cannon and not say the Gospel of Madgellen or Thomas? ~In my experience the apologists often claim they are just plain wrong and don’t gel with other sources, but what do they have to base this on, popularity? It’s a pretty mirky early religion of which little or nothing is known about with anything more than faith and or politics.
People did write of Jesus in Hebrew.
And for all we know, his disciples did and we haven’t a copy of the texts because we simply lack a copy of nearly anything from the first century CE…I don’t mean, religious…I mean there is very little text of any kind from the first century that has survived.
I’m pretty assured he did intend to be taken seriously.
To what end? That is where I’ll get into disagreements with others.
But yes, it is a murky landscape, absolutely, during the late 2nd through 4th century.
The texts we find from that era (pretty much all of them) are something of a faith in their own right of just accepting any text as original, or as a copy.
Dogma is the death of reason. I’m sure we’d both agree that religion is subject to the same scorn as historical accounts always are. Bias and power plays sadly always play a part in what is believed to be true, but were any of these power mongers all that successful in analysing what they said and did and eliminating doubt. Clearly not hence Christianity and its multi accounts of all. I’m perfectly willing to accept the Gospel is true but according to who? And why should we believe them if they were written sometimes a great deal of time after the fact? Or there were systematic efforts to control belief, as nebulous as it was. I Think there has to be consensus but sadly there is none, who has the ultimate say though God, he’s been pretty silent since we offed his nipper.