Pakeha,
Thank you for the clarificatio; I'm going to highlight this line only to use it as a springboard, but I'll work on a general address and the following quote is not the only comment to which I am responding.
I'd understood you to claim that Christianity offered a powerful and innovative incentive to potential converts, that of personal moral authority, via the personal relation to the Saviour.
The personal relation capacity was a development we can observe being ironed out over time in the subsequent Christian groups.
Not all groups believed Jesus was someone they could keep in touch with, nor was it such that all groups believed that Jesus was a Divinity of some fashion.
The latter was the primary component of the famous battles of Christology, while the former has examples in passing references; such as the Ebionite clusters - who appeared not to believe Jesus to be divine at all, nor appeared to refer to Jesus as a proxy to their god, while another are some of the forms of so-called Gnostics of whom, some factions did not hold Jesus as divine (the matter of Gnostics not all adhering to the same concept of the nature of Jesus is also a good example of why the term is not a very good term for classification purposes).
Further examples of such deviations can be understood by the existence of the terms Psilanthropism and Adoptionism; both for which terminological need only exists by result of applicable groups requiring definition.
It is understood, then, that the moral authority issue that exists on nearly every page of these texts, exists independent of the formation of the various beliefs of divinity.
Indeed, in the texts themselves, these charges of moral authority are driven by the accusative (that is; like saying "you!") casing and never once demand of a person to first and foremost ask Jesus, their god, or anyone anything before making a judgement.
As
Eight Bits pointed out (and yes, those are very similar forms of discussion that I have made in the past on the subject), all comments about the right to have authority of moral judgement (aka, "Kingdom of God"/Kingdom of the Divine/Authority of the Divine) introduce the right by blood or relation (both referring to ancestry and the lineage of the Hebrews - also interpreted as mankind depending on the group); by extrapolation or derivative, it is inherent to humankind, or accessible through divination of sorts.
For example of this use (and why some groups did not agree with the later Orthodox views); take a few examples [here, I will just quote to the English translation that comes the closest to the Greek]:
[NIV]
Matthew 21:43
Therefore I tell you that the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people who will produce its fruit.
Note here that
kingdom of God is the authority of the divine: βασιλεία τοῦ θεοῦ, which rather literally translates to:
dominion (as in, the
right to rule) of (due to genitive casing) the god/divine (note: if "divine" is the selection, it should be noted as singular in the use and not plural here).
The point in this is that the authority, the right, would be taken away (that is how it appears in the Greek; 'lifted from yourself') and bestowed upon a different group of peoples.
This line is not written to assert that one's
access to a physical structure or metaphysical structure of heaven will be removed and given to some other group.
This isn't like "If you can't behave, then the car you
will get will be taken from your and given to your brother".
No, this isn't written in the indefinite or future tenses; it is present tense ownership, and what will be taken is something you
have; not somewhere you get to go.
It is essentially along the same traditions as the judgement of Moses and the running discussions of the difference between Wisdom and Knowledge in the Torah (the two separate applications).
Without getting too far into a tangent, the concept is that Knowledge without Wisdom is death, and that while Knowledge may be retained seemingly endlessly once obtained, Wisdom is portrayed in the stories as a slippery serpent which requires careful handling and a careful watch or it will loose itself from your hands and bite you with its potential poison.
And for that reason, in those tales, it is that a leader is referred to for Wisdom and not the everyday person.
In this line here - just in this line alone - the radical concept is that the axiom is that the regular person apparently already has that right to moral judgement; a right to hold Wisdom themselves.
That is a rather different perspective in philosophy than the Torah's view of the matter.
Here, it is paramount that the individuals take care and control themselves without a leader and entirely by their own merits, each, and if not then to suffer the right to Wisdom as being removed from their hands (which would leave them with 'Foolish Knowledge') and given to those who will bear fruit of it (will be wise with the right).
Now, by the time the Orthodox wars are over, the way something like this is understood in the West is that your
access to Heaven will be denied; a much more mundane rendering philosophically.
Probably the most considerable evidence of this view having existed for a time is found in Mark.
Aside from the "secret" knowledge of the Apostles regarding the authority of moral judgement (for which all others [including the reader, apparently] require parables to grasp, according to 'Mark'), we are given the definition of how this authority works in the following manner:
[NSRV]
26 He also said, “The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, 27 and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. 28 The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. 29 But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come.”
It is a growth that is planted, and regardless if it is ignored or not, eventually it comes to a day of employing it.
We are left off at that point; the success of that "harvest" is left to the imagination and implied dependent on how well someone kept their field.
In this, it is then charged that all have the authority of moral judgement in them and that it grows and one day comes to need use; to bear its fruit.
If we look at Jesus and the Kingdom of God in a more Gatekeeper and Camelot view, then a parable such as this really stretches the metaphor to more complex ideas that hardly make sense even in the most abstract nature, aside from Surrealist Philosophy (which is even debatable) - we would then have to say that Camelot is built by a sort of crowd-sourcing to the serfs and that once it is ready, then the serfs go to use Camelot.
Which would be to say that Heaven is built by everyone and that once it is ready, then everyone goes to Heaven.
But then we have to throw in the Orthodox view of "through Jesus alone" literal translation of John 14:6 (which, really...we shouldn't mix-match the theologies in these texts anyway, John doesn't prove an idea of Mark, Mark doesn't prove an idea of Luke, etc... this logic was a later creation [and a different subject]), and in so doing after everyone helps construct Heaven, then they have to gain the access through Jesus to enter Heaven...or...
Everyone has to "build" Heaven metaphorically (build the community of Heaven) through Jesus and only through Jesus and once that community has been "built", then God will begin the Apocalypse (harvest) and cut out the souls and take them to the dinner table of Heaven for eternity.
Either way, it gets far more strange and odd as we move further into the age of Orthodox and from the earlier separated groupings.
Mark 12 also shows this view of the access to this authority not having anything to do with tunneling through Jesus like a black hole to traverse metatimespace.
[NRSV]
32 Then the scribe said to him, “You are right, Teacher; you have truly said that ‘he is one, and besides him there is no other’; 33 and ‘to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength,’ and ‘to love one’s neighbor as oneself,’—this is much more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.” 34 When Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” After that no one dared to ask him any question.
Again, here, Kingdom of God is the same wording referring to the right of the divine; which, again, is the right of moral judgement.
Notice here, this individual is being told that they are close to the divine way of judging and praised for it.
Notice also that this individual accomplished this without tunneling through Jesus, and notice that the Jesus figure does not then follow up with "but you have one more step to take; pray to me alone after I die so that I can forgive your sins and you may go to heaven...otherwise you're screwed".
Nothing like that follows here.
The bottom line of the theological philosophy in Mark is that it is difficult to discern moral wrongs from moral rights; that there is a divine logic of discerning; that the divine logic must be figured out; that it is within the individual regardless; that one will eventually make a moral judgement; that one practices to discern how to discern divine moral right from divine moral wrong.
This is a bit different than Matthew's philosophies, where in Matthew the outline is basically (summarizing) "You're Hebrew, you have the right to morally judge bestowed upon you through contract with God as a people! Get on it!"
Meaning: the arguments in Matthew are ancestry and authority by direct ancestry (something other groups just kind of either gloss over, or translate and focus on the "Adam" component as much as possible, or say that this is what gave the Israelites their specialty, but they lost it when...etc...etc... and therefore Jesus...etc...etc...now the world is all of God's children..etc...etc... [never-minding that "Israelite" is not the same as "Hebrew", and the context is far more complicated than this common Evangelical view...but whatever, let's not get our theology bogged down with anthropology).
Luke straddles the two concepts and begins to blur the idea of right to moral judgement with the idea of a geographical location.
Luke, in a way, is Platonic in its approach (which seems to have entirely confused the writers/compilers of John).
In Luke, the location of the right of moral judgement is also an access subject to one's ideological and moral position.
It is as if Luke writes of this like an aether layered atop the world of the
actual so that as one moves by one's actions, one is equally
ideally moving by distance within the aetheral plane.
In Luke, we see the Mustard seed trimmed down and the physical structure of it focused upon more directly and clearly by adding at the end that a bird comes to land on the branches of the Mustard Tree.
In Luke, then, the reader is the Bird, and not the farmer.
The Farmer is now Jesus (it would appear; though it is not entirely clear) and the seed is the spreading of the knowledge of the right way to God, and the Tree is the fruition of God's followers adhering to the prescription and therefore growing the Kingdom's might (ignore the quandary of there needing to be some growth in power like this for the moment...keeping in mind that in Athenian culture, gods didn't do everything alone, but through humankind) and thereby the bird, the individual, can fly right and true to the wealth of the Mustard seed.
It's a pretty image and very Grecian; not at all like Mark's version.
Equally at the same time, Luke writes things like Luke 11:20, which if we only take the physical location idea from Luke's version of the 'Kingdom of God', as it in this version of the Mustard Seed, and do not couple it with some aetheral comprehension of ideal/actual in the Platonic sense, then this comment tends to be rather senseless and queer:
[NSRV]
20 But if it is by the finger of God that I cast out the demons, then the kingdom of God has come to you.
I hate this "demons" translation because that's the English Western cultural ideological
transliteration of the Greek and not an actual translation at all.
It would rather be:
But if it is by the finger of God that I send out the spirits, then the kingdom of God has come to you.
Which...this is actually far more interesting when you add the previous verse (often terribly rendered into English)
Again, I will revert to Greek over English transliteration here.
Now if I send out the spirits by Beelzebul into these sons of yours, send out by himself, your judgement.
The gist of these two lines is essentially:
"Look if I instill evil into your children, then you can judge them as evil by their actions. On the other hand, if I am instilling good into them by the divine, then the 'right way of being' has come to you."
Why did I state "right way of being"?
Because Luke's way of thinking of "right to moral authority" is always one with a preconceived ideal version of the "correct" choice; thinking that one with the "right to moral authority" inherently would make the "correct" choice.
So in this sense, Luke's application of the "Kingdom of God" in this section is basically to outline that the right way to be is already with them so be happy and stop the whining; they are clearly not bad because of me otherwise you would see it in them.
This is why I said Luke is Platonic.
Because on one hand we have this rather non-structure application of the Kingdom of God, while on the other hand we see that as one nears to right thinking, one is ascribed to moving close to the Kingdom of God in a rather physical application.
It only really makes sense from the Platonic ontological views.
Think of Luke like the Matrix in a way...as far as the dichotomy of Ideal and Actual, and how moving close in IDEA to something is one with moving "physically" close to it.
Now, John...John is crazy, but fascinatingly, doesn't really touch on this phrase and only uses it (if I recall correctly) twice - both referring to a physical place, or at the least a state of salvation with a very clear idea of a location for an eventual destination in mind.
Aside from that John doesn't really talk about much of the same concepts as the others in regards to these ideas of moral judgement of the individual's imperative.
In John, we have the closest thing to what came to be the Orthodox means of understanding things, as well as the current popular means of Christian salvation outline.
John is really easy, and takes no real effort to outline.
Jesus = supermangod.
Get Jesus or get death.
Why? Because that's how the realm of the divine flippin works, obviously!
There's a sacrifice, that makes it possible to save you, and that spirit is your access point to Mazda...err, Heaven. Start praying because otherwise, let me tell you, this world is going to suuuuck and you do NOT want to be on the wrong side of ArmyJesus when he comes back man! REPENT NOW!!!!! OMG TOTESREPENT!!!
There's really no examination in John of the same subject material.
So yes, there were considerable changes in 3 of the 4 texts (with one going cotton-candy-epic-theater-for-Family-fun with the story [in 3D!]) in regards to the idea of wisdom and reaching for moral authority to right judgement.
That is almost the entire focus of Matthew, Mark and Luke (as well as Thomas, and and the Gospel of the Hebrews [at least, from the citations that survived]).
These concepts are pretty much absent from John and Revelation, Paulinism goes an entirely different route to applying these concepts and they become more of a social bonding imperative than an individual moral authority imperative - whereby Jesus is the superglue of their holy spirit as a collective.
They take some concept as universal (such as the African Kindship system) and then see if it is universal. Such concepts explain why there are pyramid like structures in both Egypt and South America without delving in such ad hoc theories as Atlantis or some unknown contact.