In mid life I urgently needed to know without doubt what was indeed the truth about my religion. I was married, had four children and had become a regular church worker and officer. Now I needed to know for certain, what was indeed true and trustworthy.

The journey to find a solid conviction for myself had begun, I could not turn back. I have always regarded love, compassion, honesty and goodwill as natural human virtues and still do. After years of reading and searching I did succeed in building a satisfying and honest philosophy for myself. In this essay I have come back to the Bible itself. What was the message of Jesus to the people and does it still apply? Is the philosophy valid or is it all superstition? What was the influence of the Apostle Paul upon the teaching of Jesus? We will seek to answer these questions in this unusual study of the life, the people and the surrounding history of Jesus.

I knew that scholars regarded the Gospel of Mark as the first Gospel to have been written. So I listed the stories of Mark and compared them with Matthew and Luke, and discovered that both Matthew and Luke often followed the same sequence as presented by Mark in reporting the stories and teaching of Jesus. Did they copy and change Mark's story? I wanted to know why.

There is a rather full record of the life of the Apostle Paul and thirteen or possibly fourteen epistles written by him to the various churches. These make up a large proportion of the New Testament. But there is not even a hint in the New Testament of a sacred text being read in the churches. Surely if there had been a written story of the life and sayings of Jesus before the end of Paul's life it would have been mentioned somewhere in the New Testament. This alone gives us the approximate date of the writing of Mark as 70 A.D. or later. It also means that the stories of Jesus were carried orally from one person to another for thirty or more years before Mark put pen to paper. No wonder there is poor agreement between the Gospels.

I wrote out the heading of each of the incidents recorded in the three Gospels. Sometimes Mark's stories were reduced and sometimes they were enlarged with additional ideas by Matthew and Luke.

Our study will raise many questions which need to be answered. The writings of the Apocrypha, which are ancient Christian religious texts, are not included in the Bible. Some scholars think they were written as late as the second century A.D, Therefore they will not be included in this study. The Bible itself is my chief witness and authority.

The influence of the first apostles appointed by Jesus, disappeared with the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. The Romans expelled the Jews from the city about that time. Paul's epistles remained the only Christian texts for instruction. Paul's epistles now had the field all to themselves until the Gospel of Mark appeared followed by Matthew and Luke. The philological scholars tell us that the Gospel of. John was the last to be written about 110 - 130