What are some christological questions which the New Testament books inspire but do not explicitly answer?

Answer 1

A:

Christology is the field of study within Christian theology which is primarily concerned with the nature and person of Jesus Christ as recorded in the canonical Gospels and the epistles of the New Testament. Ideally, the New Testament provides all the answers, if only we look hard enough, with no unanswered questions. However, unanswered questions are raised whenever the texts are incomplete, ambiguous or contradictory. This does happen. Questions are also raised when a passage is only found in manuscripts after a passage of some centuries from the time of Christ, since they are insertions, or interpolations, that certainly raise questions but, because of their late provenance, do not answer them.

The Gospel of John clearly defines Jesus as both divine and pre-existing, referring to him as the 'Word' (Greek: Logos). Scholars say that Mark's Gospel says that Jesus was fully human and adopted by God as his beloved son, at the baptism. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke say that Jesus was divine from conception. Christianity now universally accepts John's message, but the first question raised is whether this was really true, or whether the synoptic gospels were right. The second question is why the author of John chose to compare Jesus to the Logos of the ancient Greek philosophers.

Mark's Gospel, the first gospel to be written, originally ended at verse 16:8 with the young man telling the women that Jesus was risen and they fled in terror, telling no one. In this account, Jesus did not appear in the flesh after he rose from the dead, although the other gospels and the 'Long Ending' eventually written for Mark (verses 16:9-20) give varying accounts of the risen Jesus. Paul's epistles suggest that the resurrection and the ascension to heaven were one and the same event. Somewhat like Mark, Paul seems to have believed that the appearances of the risen Jesus to the disciples were purely spiritual, like the appearance to himself (1 Cor 15:3-8). Here the question is whether Paul and the author of Mark were right, or whether the other three evangelists were correct. Was the resurrection of Jesus merely spiritual or did he return physically?