openlyatheist

I've always wanted to see a FAQ done by skeptics regarding the claims of Christianity made as briefly as possible. The problem is; the claims of Christianity often vary from apologist to apologist.

Recently on an atheist blog, a Christian commentor posted a succinct list of his own claims as to the truth of Christianity. Instead of bothering the atheists on the blog to go over the list point by point I thought I would post the claims here and see what reactions people here would have.

I'd like to collect these opinions and build my own FAQ with them. :wave:

Here is the 1st of about 5 claims about the Bible:

"We have the records of multiple eye-witness testimonies..."

patcleaver

This is a common trope in fiction. There are thousands, of fictional books in which the some vanquished hero revives and in which there are lots of witnesses. For example, in King Kong vs Godzilla, Godzilla defeats King Kong who looks dead, but suddenly the fates send an electrical storm and King Kong is revived by lightening strikes. There are television news helicopters recording and broadcasting the entire event.

PS: Be careful on this site not to claim that king kong and Godzilla are immaginary. There are lots of people here who think fictional characters have historical cores.

Toto

We don't have any accounts from eye witnesses. We have accounts that claim that there were eyewitnesses, but that's as far as it gets.

The consensus of modern scholarship is that the gospels do not contain any eyewitness testimony. How much documentation would you need for that?

There are comments in this essay about the idea that the gospels were based on eyewitness testimony.

CS Lewis claimed that the gospels were so unsophisticated and rough that they must have been written by simple fishermen who were too stupid to lie (not his words, but that's the implication.) But the modern consensus is that the gospels are fairly sophisticated literary creations that were originally written in Koine Greek, not the Aramaic that the eyewitnesses would have spoken. The first gospel written appears to be Mark, and Matt and Luke felt free to take the words of Mark and rewrite them - which is not the way eyewitness testimony would have been treated.

There have been books written on this question: Who Wrote the Gospels by Randall Helms or Who Wrote the New Testament (or via: amazon.co.uk) by Burton Mack are two.

aa5874

Well, the first claim is entirely false there are no eyewitness accounts of Jesus son of the God of the Jews external of the NT.

Minimalist

Have you ever served on a jury where a lawyer cross-examined an eye witness?

You learn quite quickly that most people have the observational skills of a loaf of bread.

GakuseiDon

Well, since the witnesses had more than one eye, they were truly multiple eye witnesses.

Luke suggests that the gospels were based on eye-witness accounts, even if he himself wasn't one, for whatever that's worth:

Luk 1:1 For as much as many have taken in hand to set forth in order a declaration of those things which are most surely believed among us,
Luk 1:2 Even as they delivered them unto us, which from the beginning were eyewitnesses, and ministers of the word;

Roger Pearse

Since the ancients who knew the apostles and their successors clearly state who the authors were, and their status or relation to the witnesses, any statements to the contrary can only be based on speculation.

I admit that I have never seen why people get hung up on this. Every great man has his disciples, and most will earn a bob or two by turning out a biography. The idea that somehow this did not happen, and that somehow some people much later faked some, which no-one at the time realised -- even though the apostle John lived to 100 AD, so whose acts and (rather dogmatic) opinions were known personally to people still alive in 150 AD -- seems to me absurd.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

2-J

Well they didn't even get the order in which they wrote rightm for starters. Their knowledge seems to have been based on hearsay and must be considered suspect.

JEST2ASK

Hello Roger I am way over my head in this but are you saying the Mark and LUKE were disciples and that the later church fathers (and other figures) personally knew them? Or is it only John?

Atheos

I disagree. I'd like to suggest that the reason people get so hung up on this is because many of us have had our lives adversely effected by dealing with political, economic, social and familial issues directly related to people who believe these claims. I'm skeptical that there ever was a "Jesus" behind the legend. By extension I'm skeptical that there was a Peter, Andrew, James, John, Phillip, Bartholemew, Thomas, Matthew, James, Thaddeus, Simon or Judas. I'm fairly confident that there was a "Paul", and the evidence suggests that he was a central figure in the formation of christianity. I doubt that Paul wrote all the epistles commonly attributed to him.

That said, I'm not a militant Jesus Myther. I think the evidence favors the idea of a completely mythical "life of christ" (as portrayed in the "gospels"), but if it turns out that there is a nugget of truth underneath all of it (a real itenerant preacher who attracted a few disciples and said some unpopular things that got his ass crucified) I'm perfectly willing to accept that as well.

But in the face of such massive deception, self deception, holy wars, persecutions and families torn apart because of religious differences, there is at least some merit in investigating the available evidence and attempting to ascertain what (if anything) really did happen.

What we can know about the gospels just from internal evidence is the following:

• None of them are signed by an author. This is the single most signifigant point to address when claiming "eyewitness testimony". The four canonical gospels are anonymous. It is a deception to refer to anonymous testimony as eyewitness testimony.
• All of the gospels are written entirely in 3rd person. The intention of the author was to convey that he (or she) was not actually a participant in any event that was described therein.
• Not once, anywhere does any writer of any canonical gospel suggest that he spoke to an eyewitness of any of these things.
• The gospels are internally contradictory with each other about key elements of the story they tell. This is consistent with oral traditions developing independently in different regions, not with the telling of events that actually happened. As but one example, GMark says that Jesus went into the wilderness for 40 days to fast and be tempted by the devil "immediately" after he was baptised. GJohn says that three days after he was baptised he was attending a wedding in Cana of Galilee, where he turned water into wine.

As far as external evidence is concerned, the arguments against traditional authorship (and eyewitness accounts) is very compelling in my opinion.

Without getting into a derail about priority it's pretty generally accepted that GMark was written first, that GMatt and GLuke depended heavily on GMark, and that GJohn was written last.

GMark's geographical mistakes, as well as its inaccurate portrayal of Jewish laws and customs give objective readers cause to doubt it was written by anyone personally familiar with the area and culture in question. Language scholars agree that it appears to have originated in Koine Greek and was not translated from Aramaic into Greek. This is signifigant when one considers that the traditional view was that Peter (who would have spoken in Aramaic) dictated his memoirs to Mark, who wrote them down.

The earliest record of the traditional view about the authorship of Mark comes from Papias, about 130 CE. And he doesn't claim direct knowledge of that information, he simply states that he heard it from "John the Presbyter" (which was not the same as John the disciple).

Papias was also the source of the traditional view about the authorship of Matthew. His claim is that "Matthew composed the sayings [of Jesus] in the Hebrew language, and each one interpreted them as best he could." Since (once again) GMatt was originally written in Greek and it's not a "sayings" gospel it's unlikely that the document today that bears the name of Matthew is the document that Papias was referencing.

Around 180 CE Irenaeus began claiming that Luke, who was a traveling companion of Paul wrote the gospel traditionally ascribed to him as well as "Acts". He gives no substantiation of this claim. Instead the claim appears to be based on the "we" passages in Acts, along with the mention of "Lucas" in the books of Collossians, Philemon and some of the other (probably non Pauline) epistles bearing his name. That's it. Nearly 100 years after the book was written an apologist wants to place a name on two anonymous books that appear to have been written by the same individual. He picks one of the names associated with Paul since there are "we" passages in one of the books implying that he was a travelling companion of Paul. "Mark" was already taken, "Demas" became a backslider, "Barnabas" wasn't hanging around with Paul when the "we" passages were written, etc. Luke was a physician which meant he was educated and probably literate. Good choice, bad scholarship. And regardless, neither Paul nor Luke were ever claimed to be eyewitnesses of any of the events recorded in GLuke. Even if it could be proven to a level of scientific acceptance that "Luke the Physician" wrote those two books, the book of GLuke was still not written by an eyewitness nor did the writer give evidence that he had access to any eyewitness.

Irenaeus (again, circa 180 CE) is the earliest claim for the traditional view that "John the beloved disciple" wrote GJohn. Once again this claim is not substantiated in any way. Internally the book does not appear to be written by an illiterate Galilean fisherman. Nor does it claim to have been written by the disciple in question. It contains impossibly long and detailed conversations supposedly had by Jesus with Nicodemus and other characters in the storyline. Such detailed conversations are inconsistent with the fact that these conversations were often held when the alleged "eyewitness" wasn't present. But the fact that nearly 80 years had elapsed between when the time the conversation took place and it was written down strains the limits of credibility to the extreme.

So in short, the four canonical gospels are anonymous documents containing substantive internal contradictions with each other. As anonymous documents they would (and should) be considered less authoritative. There is good reason why apologists would want to attach names to the documents to make them appear more authoritative. There is absolutely no reason why an individual who would have been in a position to speak with authority about these things would have failed to put his name on the document to testify that these were his words. There are many reasons why names would have been added later.