Quote Originally Posted by F L E S H
Actually, I have read in some books that it was not Jesus himself who said that the Second Coming would take place in the first or second centruy AD, but rather the new Christians. Remeber, Jesus didn't write the Gospels, and no one was following him taking notes in order to write books. The Gospels were written between 50 and 100 years after Jesus died, so there's obviously going to be mistakes and intentional changes by the authors. The evangelists simply wrote down the Gospels as they thought it should be, and that's what we're left with.
Yes, I do realize that the Gospels were probably based on exaggerated oral history, so we can't really attribute anything said in the Bible directly to Jesus, but when Christians want me to trust in Jesus they want me to base that trust on the material contained in the Bible (since we have virtually no other sources for information about him). Since Biblejesus predicts the Second Coming within the lifetimes of the people alive at the time, I can't trust Biblejesus, and since I have no way of knowing what Realjesus actually said (assuming he existed), I can't trust Realjesus either.

By the way, what was the evidence that Jesus didn't really preach such a quick return? It seems to me like it would be downright impossible to prove what somebody said or didn't say 2000 years ago whose life was never documented until decades after his death.