Malachi151

I think that once you realize how the early Christian thing worked, you can start making a lot more sense of it, i.e. once you realize that the early fathers didn't really have any information, but that instead the rationalized everything to arrive at their views, just as Christians do today, their claims start to make more sense.

Given this, what about the claims made of where the gospels came from?

Papias before him said basically the same thing, but only about Matthew and Mark.

Here, I believe, is the basis for this claim:

Matthew was the biggest gospel with the most details, including the virgin birth story, and the most supernatural events.

To the early Christians this made Matthew "the best". They probably also knew that Matthew was one of the older gospels, i.e. older than Luke and John.

So, from this they claim that Matthew was an eye witness account, written first, and in the language of Jesus originally (though no one really saw this Aramaic tome, but there were accounts of so-and-so's second cousin's uncle, having seen it and touched it).

Mark, then was not an eye witness account and was not written "in the order of the original events", because.... the order of events in Mark is different from Matthew. So, this whole business about Mark being second hand and out of order is just a justification for why it differs from Matthew. Why did they say that he got his info from Peter? Not sure, but possibly because it was seen as a Roman gospel, and Peter supposedly was the main man in Rome.

Luke is also claimed to be second hand, because it also doesn't agree with Matthew, the proclaimed king of gospels. Why was Luke supposedly based on the word of Paul? Because Luke says "we" and implies someone that could be Paul in his writings.

(Note: This certainly leads me to believe that these people had not read the "letters of Paul")

Now, John, why was John claimed to a first hand account? Well, it was well written, also well esteemed since it was of better quality, and John is was attributed to, was confused with the John "the beloved disciple". This was made easier by the fact that John didn't have much detail about the life of Jesus, so there wasn't a whole lot there to contradict Matthew since it was a more philosophical work.

I think that this somewhat gets at the typical issues with Christians. They made tons of claims, but they were all based on coming up with explanations to fit the desired outcome, which is endemic in the religion.

They seem to have no problem with rationalizing and simply doing without evidence, and yet acting like their claims are evidence in and of them self, which of course is not a new observation at all.

Tigers!

I've always been a radical and accepted the traditional view as to the Gospels composition.
(Yes I know it makes me a radical but someone has to do it)

Doug Shaver

Where do you think they got the views that they rationalized everything to arrive at?

In other words, if they were trying to justify a dogma, where did the dogma come from?

Gamera

Given the early date of Paul's writings and his vast influence, this seems like a poor conclusion.

Note that Crossan and Wilson both assume the opposite, that Paul basically set the stage for the writing of the gospels and thus "invented" Christianity out of the ramblings of an itinerant Jewish preacher.

I disagree with them as to their conclusion, but agree that Paul was first in time as to expounding the gospel narrative.