by saying this, Jesus declared all foods 'clean' since food comes from outside of the body. And by clean he does not mean physical, but spiritually.
Again. This is just interpretation. Since in that very story, all Jesus is referring to is the practice of ritual hand-washing, and not the food itself, I say you have no evidence that Jesus ever ate pork or shellfish. None. Zip. I know it sounds like he may be declaring all foods to be clean, and I know that is what Mark goes on to say. But I say there is insufficient evidence. The very last meal Jesus ever ate was a Kosher Passover dinner, complete with unleavened bread. And his parable of the Prodigal Son is complete with the detail that the son sank so low, that he was staying in a foreign farmstead and tending to pigs. See, pigs being the unclean animal. Since this was not a true story, but a parable only, I say the pig detail is significant. Jesus was very much Jewish, no matter what Mark and Paul and so on wanted him to be.
Anyway, you missed the second half of my question, about why Jesus would come along and change the diet. I say the early Christians made this crap up and put it into the Gospel in order to sell the story to the Romans. I say the God that asked Abraham to kill his own son, and who promised him that his were the Chosen People, would not abandon his people to a group of Hellenite upstarts with book-learning.
You have to be kidding here. We live in a world of electronic record, and look what thirty years did to the myth of Kennedy, from the assassination in 1963 to the Oliver Stone film of 1993. That is not some fever-dream; Stone quoted only popular and widely-accepted myths about the shooting. Look at the Waco story, a modern day Masada. Hell, look at the current myth of Al-Qaida and Osama Bin Laden. Thirty years is plenty for a non-scientific word-of-mouth people.
Yes, thousands of people saw this man. Thousands who likely would never have read the material written about him, given that they spoke Aramaic and the Gospels were written in Greek. Mark wrote the first gospel, some thirty years after the death, when many of those thousands would have died. The others were much later; the much-quoted Gospel of John, the bourne of most of Christianity, came about after the turn of the century. And I hold that the stories were embellished by writers wanting the man to seem more than he was, and that thirty years is enough for this. Five Thousand people fed with a few loaves of bread and some fish. Sure, why not. Plus, he rose from the dead!
To say that the true eyewitnesses would have been able to wrest the myth from the hands of its makers is to say that there have never been any false cults since the beginning of religious history, that noone ever believed Jim Bakker or Oral Roberts, and that Jerry Falwell was right when he said that the attacks of 9-11 were retribution on a nation of homosexuals. Yes, he said that, and he still has followers. Any shit is true, if enough people believe it.
The fact is, Christianity exists because people were told about it by a handful of people either who claimed to have been there or who claimed to have had visions or visitations. You are a Christian because someone told you about it, and because you read about it. You have not seen a man rise from the dead or ever witnessed water turning into wine. Why this is enough for you, I do not know. I give you John 20:25 (I hope I have that right).
You might have missed my point here. My point is that the Bible is not a Christian book. It is a collection of Jewish books and then some Christian ones, re-interpreted by Christians as telling only one story. I say no way. If it is all the story of Jesus, then what is that bit about Rebecca hiding stolen loot by sitting on it? She refuses to get up because she is having her period. It is a great story, one of my favourites, but I see no direct line to the Jesus story.
No prophecies = no validification; well I see that, but the majority of the Old Testament is not prophecy at all, and a good many of the so-called prophecies are bogus, or lines out of context. The Old Testament, as Christians call it, is a set of the histories and myths of the Jewish people. It is not a book about how Jesus is going to come along one day. This business about God sending Jesus to heal Mankind of the sin of Adam, it just makes no sense. Did he not already send his people a Flood, and Pillars of Fire, and the confusion of Babel, and numerous periods of captivity, and hardship, and all that, as punishment for various periods of hard sinning? Was he running out of ideas, or am I supposed to believe that all along, through the Floods and the Visitations and the Captivities, he was working up to this Jesus thing? Do you have any idea how tacked-on and crazy that sounds?