Amaleq13

Wrong. The logical placement of the burden in on the "traditions of the Faith" and there simply is insufficient reliable evidence to support the claims.

False. The 2nd century is not the earliest evidence. The earliest evidence, from the late 1st century, lacks any identification of the authors nor any suggestion that the texts originated with anyone directly involved in the events depicted.

Jack the Bodiless

It has already been pointed out to you that Matthew (an eyewitness, according to you) plagiarized Mark (who was not). You didn't respond to that. Nor have you mentioned the early references to a (singular) gospel.
...Except that he probably never set foot in Palestine. He was quite unfamiliar with the geography of the region. Among several geographical errors, he has people travelling from Tyre (in modern Lebanon) through Sidon (to the north of Tyre) to reach Galilee. It's like leaving Washington DC and passing through Boston on the way to the Everglades.
So, Luke is reliable, according to... Luke.
The connection between Paul's "Luke" and the gospel author is tenuous at best, especially as Paul had been dead for about 30 years when "Luke" was written.

And then, of course, there are the irreconcilable contradictions between the two nativity stories (like having two dates at least a decade apart, for starters). Neither author claimed to have been an eyewitness to those events, but if both are supposedly reliable, which one gets everything so badly wrong, and why?

Richbee

O.K., thanks, and please see my EDIT ADD.

TomboyMom

1. Skepticism is a good thing.
2. It's not skeptics, it's the leading authorities in the field.
3. Why not? You're the one making the assertion, so it's on you to provide evidence for it.

People-who-know-this-stuff: Why do most scholars think Mark was first and written after 70 C.E.? Is it because of the destruction of the Temple? And how do we know who plagiarized whom? Thanks.

Yuri Kuchinsky

Because most scholars don't think. They just repeat the same faith-based nonsense over and over again.

Cheers,

Yuri.

michael wellenberg

You should take into consideration that in 1st century neither were there any maps availible nor were people habituated to make a journey through the country. Mark may not even have been to Galilee himself.

Michael

Diogenes the Cynic

That's exactly the point. Mark was unfamiliar with the geography of Palestine, but his alleged source (according to dubious 2nd century tradition) should have been very familiar with it, especially with Galilee. The Tyre-Sidon mistake is not the only one in Mark. An even more significant mistake is Mark's story of the Gerasene demoniac. The story in which he drives demons into a herd of pigs which run into the Sea of Galilee. The problem is that Gerasa was not only 30 miles away from the Sea of Galilee but there were three rivers in between them. If Mark got this story from Peter then why did Peter think Gerasa was next to the lake?

michael wellenberg

So this would leave two main alternatives.
Either Mark is not concerned in geography and aims at different (theological ? narrative ?) goals. Or his source is not Peter. But also a combination of these alternatives is possible.

Michael

Doug Shaver

Let's see . . . the parts we can check have mistakes, but we can ignore them because they concerned matters about which the author didn't care enough to verify his facts.

But we can trust him when we gets to the parts he really cared about?

How do we know that what he really cared about had anything to do with any factual history?

robto

1. Early traditions (Papias, Irenaeus) say Mark wrote his gospel after Peter's death, which is placed in the 60s (for what reasons? I dunno.) And we all know how reliable Papias is ...
2. Mark wasn't from Galilee, as already noted, so we have to allow time for Xty to spread around.
3. The general tenor of Mk seems to imply that bad stuff was going down. This could refer to the Roman-Jewish war that culminated in the destruction of the Temple in 70. (Tho why would this be relevant for Mark if he was Gentile and living outside of Palestine? hmmm....)
4. Mark was written before Mt and Lk, which were written around 80-100 AD.

The Temple references in Mk are considered proof of a post-70 date by some scholars, but not by all. In the context of the impending war, a prediction of the Temple's destruction wouldn't have required supernatural intelligence. Josephus, in fact, tells of a another Jesus who, in 62 AD, went around saying:

A voice from the east,
a voice from the west,
a voice from the four winds,
a voice against Jerusalem and the Holy House....

In other words, there are no really good reasons to date Mk to any particular period. The general feeling, tho, is that 60-75AD is a good guess.
This is difficult, and somewhat controversial as you will see if you look around on other threads here. For one, it's hard to see why, if Mark were copying one of the others, he would leave out stuff like the resurection appearances of Jesus. A more compelling argument, IMO, appeals to Mark's "literary DNA" found in Lk and Mt. For instance, Mark likes "sandwich stories", where he begins a story (A), leaves it to tell another story(B), then returns to finish the first story(A'). One instance is Mark 11:12-22. (A) Jesus curses the fig tree, (B) Jesus overturns tables in the Temple, (A') Disciples see that the fig tree has withered. Mark has (at least) six such stories, so it seems to be a stylistic quirk of his. Mt has 3, Lk 2, in the same places where Mk has them, and none elsewhere. This makes sense if Mk was copied by Mt and Lk, who didn't care for the sandwiches and either combined A and A' into a single story, or left out one of the pieces to get rid of the sandwich. It's hard to understand on any other hypothesis.