is the faith of illiterate superstitious peasant Christians around the time of Jesus different to christians of today?
A little presumptuous and arrogant there, aren't we? People of the time were not stupid idiots, witness the Roman empire, Commerce existed across nations. Jews studied the scripture. Jesus as a child discussed the sacred Jewish texts.
And yes, if you're not locked into sola scriptura the traditions of people of the time of Jesus are acknowledged (so far as they compliment the bible). They were there and heard Him and the apostles. It would be naive to think everything got written down in the bible.
The key elements in human thinking are not numbers but labels of fuzzy sets. -- L. Zadeh
