Historical background of the New Testament that the Temple would not be rebuilt in their lifetimes, Christianity reflected the acknowledgment of early Christians that the Second Coming of Christ and the establishment of God's kingdom on earth was not to happen in their lifetimes. The critical analysis of the Gospels involves, at least in part, a consideration of how these concerns affected the Gospels' accounts of Jesus. According to historian Paula Fredriksen (1988: 5), critical scholars rely on four basic criteria for extrapolating an "authentic" historical account of Jesus out of the New Testament sources: As Fredriksen observes, these criteria do not guarantee an accurate historical
New Testament apocrypha the Gospel of Thomas is heavily gnostic and likely not written by orthodox Christians. In any case, both of these documents offer insight into what the theoretical Q document might have looked like. A number of gospels are concerned specifically with the "Passion" (from Greek "pathos" (suffering) i.e.: the arrest, execution and resurrection) of Jesus: Although three texts take Bartholomew's name, it may be that one of the "Questions of Bartholomew" or the "Resurrection of Jesus Christ" is in fact the unknown "Gospel of Bartholomew". A number of texts aim to provide a single harmonization of the canonical gospels, that