patcleaver

Freethinkers do not believe anything based simply on whether or not Bauer thought it was true or not. We try to base our beliefs on evidence, and not on what our mama told us when we were children, or some insane quack Christian leader, or wishful thinking, or visions in our dreams, or just pretend.

It is evil to believe that anything is true, when you know that you do not have sufficient evidence that its true. If you want us to believe that 1, 2 Corinthians, Romans, and Galatians are not fiction, then present evidence that they are not fiction, otherwise its not true and we have a moral obligation to not believe that its true.

Kapyong

Gday,

I think the earliest MSS that show a title would be the MSS from c.200 :

P66 (John) :
earlham.edu/~seidti/iam/tc_pap66.html

P75 (Luke and John)
earlham.edu/~seidti/iam/tc_pap75.html

(Prepend triple w dot to links above.)

AFAIK the titles of G.Mark and G.Luke are not found before the famous "B" and "Aleph" in the 4th century (P4, P52, P90, P45 don't cover the titles or endings.)

However, the period of anonymous Gospels, (and the time when names of the Gospels were attached), occured before all these MSS, so we don't actually have any MSS showing a full Gospel with NO author's name.

But,
we can see several references and citations to the Gospel(s) as written yet un-named works in the 2nd century - there is a post here somewhere from Iasion about that.


Kapyong

aa5874

And further, accepting an epistle as authentic is just a case of futilty since the acceptance proves nothing without external corroboration.

Of what use is it in accepting letters as authentic and still not know or are not sure if they really are, or if the contents of the letters are fundamentally true.

There are multiple possibilities with letters as presented with respect to the authors, chronology and veracity. Just believing some has no real significance without external confirmation.

Doug Shaver

Hmmm.

If forgeries are signed, it follows that unsigned documents must be authentic.

Yeah, right.

Ben C Smith

This evidence is often misread. The epistles of Cyprian were written in the first half of century III (at the earliest), long postdating the naming of all four gospels (whenever that may have occurred, whether early or late). Yet, IIRC, Cyprian rarely (if ever) calls them by name; he prefers to quote from them as from the gospel.

I have not read every single epistle of Augustus, but he seems to show the same preference (though he does occasionally name the evangelists in the letters, and in other, nonepistolary writings he certainly knows their names).

Ben.

Atheos

Rather than debate the remainder of the post I'd like to address this statement.

The ongoing claim made by fundamentalists is that the four gospels are "eyewitness accounts". This is the subject of this thread as well.

My post was given with the sincere intention of shedding some light on the subject. The facts remain that none of the four gospels are signed by anyone, none of them imply that they were written by anyone who was an eyewitness to the events described therein, and none of them actually claim that they talked to any eyewitness of any of the events described.

I would think that I demonstrated why it's a blatant deception to claim that these are "eyewitness accounts". Anonymous accounts are not the same as eyewitness accounts. Why is this so hard for people to understand?

Add to that the fact that even if each one of the gospels could be proven beyond any reasonable doubt to have been written by the authors traditionally ascribed, they still (for the most part) would not be eyewitness accounts. Most of the stuff they contain was not witnessed by the writer. Even according to the storyline, none of the alleged writers witnessed the birth of Jesus, the baptism of Jesus, the 40 day fast in the wilderness, the temptations, etc. None of the writers witnessed the "transfiguration" (except John, who didn't write about it). None of them witnessed the trial. None of them witnessed the private meeting between Judas and the Jewish leaders, the conferences had by the Jewish leaders deciding how to deal with Jesus, the guards being bribed with hush money or dozens of other private conversations recorded in the gospels.

You're not being an eyewitness by relating something told to you by another person even if Jesus is the one who told you what to say.

I guess I'm just missing something. On the surface this seems to be one of the most ridiculous arguments imaginable. Since some forgers signed their documents with the name of someone it stands to reason that any documents that nobody signed must be authentic. What am I missing here?

My intention was to demonstrate the reality of just how specious the traditions are about who wrote the four canonical gospels. We don't know who wrote them. We just don't, and there's good reason to be skeptical. Taking the unsubstantiated word of an obviously biased Papias or Irenaeus is fine if that's what you want to believe in your heart.

But that is not the same as having four robust eyewitness accounts.