JustinFoldsFive

Hello out there. Recently I have been spending a good bit of time at Worthy Boards debating Christianity/the Bible/Jesus, and it seems like their arguments ALWAYS return to the Bible. No matter the issue, the answer is always in the Bible. Though convincing them that the Bible is not the word of God is essentially an exercise in futility (these ARE hardcore/extreme fundies we are talking about), there may, just MAY be a chance to convince some of the more liberal Christians that the authors of the Bible did not actually see/meet/witness/interact with Jesus. Taking away the "first-hand account" aspect of the Bible would likely raise a few red flags to the non-fundamentalists out there. So, I have a few questions;

1) How can we definatively know that the authors of the Bible were not contemporaries of Jesus?

2) What method is used to date the gospels? How full-proof and reliable is this method?

If anyone has anything else to add that would refute the notion that the gospels are first-person accounts, please share.

(P.S. I am mainly looking for concise explanations as to why the gospels are not, and can not be first-person accounts. Various pieces of evidence that can easily be shared, not 10-page essays.)

Amaleq13

Have you checked the Some basic questions sticky thread? I think both questions are covered.

james-2-24

1) Even the church don't claim Mark or Luke were eyewitnesses, and Luke expressly says he relies on other sources, ie, he is not an eyewitness.
2) Matthew has been shown to rely heavily on MArk, copying much of it verbatim. Why would a supposed eyewitness do that?

Roland

And, if Matthew were an eyewitness, why is his account so different from John's who is also supposed to have been an eyewitness? Why would Matthew's gospel only match with Peter's account (through Mark) and not John's?

JustinFoldsFive

Thanks for the link Amaleq, that's exactly what I was looking for!

Doug Shaver

I don't know what you think think makes someone a liberal Christian, but the term is rarely applied to anyone who thinks the gospels are eyewitness accounts or that their authors relied on eyewitness sources. Any believer who takes that hypothesis seriously is unlikely to to be receptive to any rational argument against it.

hatsoff

Right away, there's a problem with what you're aiming to do, here. It seems like you've already made up your mind that the Bible was not written even in part by eyewitnesses, yet you don't even know any good reasons to think so! Might I suggest that you look for the truth rather than arguments to back up your pre-existing bias?

No. In fact, it is quite likely that many if not most NT authors lived during Jesus' lifetime. This is not to say they met Jesus, however. The strongest argument for an eyewitness author seems to be 1 Peter, which, although much disputed, it is quite plausible that it was written by Simon Peter, a disciple of Jesus. The Gospel of John also may have been written by an eyewitness, although that too is doubtful. The author of Mark, though not an eyewitness, may have been only once removed, a disciple of Peter. As for the remaining works (apart from Luke-Acts and the Pauline corpus), though pretty darn unlikely, it is somewhat plausible they were written by the eyewitness authors to whom they have traditionally been ascribed.

In other words, it is not very likely that any NT book was written by an eyewitness, but it cannot be proven with the current scope of evidence and scholarship.

There is no single method, but lots and lots of clues to which scholars give varying weight. For example, Acts provides a framework to which we can date the Pauline epistles, c. 48-60 AD. 2 Peter defends the imminent second coming of Christ, which was in doubt at the turn of the first to second centuries. Revelation refers to intense persecution, most likely under Domitian, c. 90-96 AD. Mark's "little apocalypse" is suggestive of the Jewish revolt, c. 65-70 AD. And those are just a few of the countless hints scholars use to date NT works.

Obviously, these methods are not particularly reliable. Some books can be dated more firmly than others. You really have to look at each one individually.

There are no short answers. Probably the most concise reasoning I've read comes from An Introduction To The New Testament (or via: amazon.co.uk) (Carson/Moo). If your library doesn't have it, your local book store should.

Toto

An informed Amazon reviewer calls this book "the standard evangelical NT introduction." Another says "As others have noted, this NT Introduction is a standard introductory text from an evangelical perspective. . . . As can be expected, the analysis and conclusions in this Introduction are decidedly conservative on questions of authorship, canonicity, original situation of the writings, and historical reliability of the documents."

It appears that this source will give you a fairly biased viewpoint, perhaps helpful in understanding the mindset of a conservative evangelical Christian.

Diogenes the Cynic

First off, except for what is accepted as the authentic Pauline corpus, all of the books of the New Testament were written by unknown authors. The authorship traditions all derive from the 2nd century. So, in a vaccuum, the burden of proof rests with the person who would asign a particular person as an author, not on anyone else to disprove that author.

Beyond that, there is a lot of internal evidence within the texts themselves which mitigate against the plausibility that they were written by witnesses.

In the case of the Gospels, none of the authors even claim to be eyewitnesses so we now have the additional burden for traditionalists to prove a claim which is not made by the evangelists themselves.

Only two of the Gospels (Matthew and John) are alleged by tradition to have been authored by witnesses but there are serious problems with both claims. The tradition that Matthew was written by an apostle stems from a claim made by Papias (as quoted by Eusebius) that the Apostle had compiled a logia (a collection of sayings attributed to Jesus) in Hebrew. If such a book ever existed, though, the description does not fit Canonical Matthew which was written in Greek, not Hebrew and which is not a sayings gospel. Moreover, it is heavily dependant on Mark (who is not alleged to have been a witness) and most scholars also believed he shared another common written source with Luke (called the Quelle or "Q" source [quelle is German for "source"]) although there is also some argument that the non-Markan commonalities in Matthew and Luke might be explained in other ways. Regardless, Matthew uses at least one secondary source and we should not expect a witness to rely on a non-witness in compiling a memoir.

John is a very late 1st century work, contains multiple identifiable phases of redaction, contains the most developed and Hellenistic theology, presents a much different characterization of Jesus than the synoptics, has Jesus give long speeches which are not found in the synoptics and do not fit the form or style of orally transmitted pericopes (it is simply not plausible that an illiterate Galilean fisherman [and nobody else] would remember long and complex discourses given originally in Aramaic and then be able to translate them into literary Greek 70 years later). GJohn also believes that the followers of Jesus were not permitted to enter synagogues during the life of Jesus. The expulsion of Jewish Christians from synagogues did not occur until c. 85 CE. This is an anachronism that would not be expected from a witness.

Mark and Luke are not written by eyewitnesses even by tradition and the traditions that do exist for them are both highly suspect and are widely regarded as spurious by NT scholars.

JustinFoldsFive

I have a quick question. At Worthy Boards, I asked for extra-biblical evidence of the resurrection of Jesus. Instead of being offered any extra-biblical evidence, I just was given an explanation as to why the Bible is a credible, first-hand source of the resurrection. The basis of EricH's argument is that Paul was a witness to the resurrection (he cites Corinthians 15:1). However, from what I read in the link that Amaleq provided, Paul does not even claim to ever see/meet Jesus. What gives?

The following is EricH's response;