goldenroad

Have you ever considered the fact that it would be rather unlikely for the apostles to have fabricate the gospels. I mean, the apostles are going to try to make themselves look good if they are going to fabricate it but do they??? no
ex:
John runs naked when the Roman guards take Jesus
Peter denies Jesus three times.
Peter loses faith and sinks in the water.
Women discover the empty tomb (At this time women were considered less and the testimony of a woman was a peice of crap, it was disgraceful)

If the apostles had fabricated their accounts why would they have included all this?

One last thing:
consider the criteria that you personally would use in determining if a document (not just the gospels) is accurate and reliable. Now use that criteria and research the gospels (with an open mind) to see if they stand up to those guidelines.

Thomas II

John runs naked?
Wasn't it Mark?

So let me ask you "How reliable are the Gospels?"
Are there other Gospels that would be MORE reliable?

Toto

Hi goldenroad:

You are new here, and evidently trying to be a Christian witness. Right now the only thing that you are "witnessing" for is that you are not up to speed on the state of the discussion.

The disciples did not fabricate the gospels - later Christians wrote fanciful stories with theological and not historical meaning.

I can assure you that most people here have read the gospels and applied neutral criteria as to their historical value. Their historical value is virtually null. They are anonymous, they cannot be dated reliably, they are based around supernatural events. they contain mythic themes and themes from the Hebrew Scriptures. In short, they lack any indicia of historic reliability.

If you have been reading the usual Christian propaganda, I suggest that you start by reading the complete refutation of Josh McDowell's work, The Jury is In. You will see there that many of your arguments have already been addressed and refuted.

EssEff

Here are the criteria I would use:

1) Validation from other sources
2) Reliable dating of the earliest copies, indicating they were written within a few years of the events
3) Uniqueness of the story -- i.e., could it be plagiarized?
4) Textual criticism: comparing early sources
5) Agenda of the compiler(s)
6) Agenda of the writer(s)
7) Errors (intentional & otherwise) of translators

Most Christians I know haven't considered any of these criteria in deciding whether they believe the Christian mythology. They get it from their pastors & priests and often haven't even read the entire Bible cover-to-cover, nor have they studied Greek or Latin sources.

hatsoff

Welcome to the forums, Goldenroad!

As Toto pointed out, your approaches as seen in this thread have been considered and rejected, already. Let's take a look at them, briefly, though, so you can understand why they don't hold water.

Most non-Christians do not believe the Gospels were written by Apostles, based on various internal and external evidence. However, for the sake of argument, let's say that Matthew did write GMatt and John did write GJohn: Nowhere in GMatt is Matthew portrayed in poor light, nor John anywhere in GJohn.

But again, for the sake of argument, let's say that Mark just wrote down what Peter told him to. Why then is Peter so flawed in Mark's Gospel? The best explanation may be that Peter was simply not too proud to add an element of humanity and realism into his account by conceding certain mistakes. But it is important to remember that no identifiable motive is required. Sometimes people don't have good reasons for doing the things they do.

I did that long ago. So do most specialists in this area of history. The Gospel accounts, whether canonical or apocryphal, are mythic tales of a man who may not have existed in the first place (though most including myself believe he did). Their historical value is based primarily on what they meant to future generations, not what they alleged about the past.

spin

History is quite a complex pursuit these days. To use a text as a historical document, you need to identify when the text was written. How do you do that with the gospels? The first exemplars we have are from the second century. The first writer who shows clear knowledge of gospel content was Justin, writing circa 150 CE. That's 120 years to late to function as a primary historical source, 150 years if you consider the birth accounts.

Without being able to date a text to the period it claims to deal with. You can only hope at best to have a secondary source which can supply material to a historical narrative already built on primary sources: for Tacitus we have coins, epitaphs and monumental inscriptions as primary sources for the period he was writing about. However, we have no primary sources which provide a base on which to use the gospels as a secondary source.

You need to think about why someone should treat the gospels as historical and it's not good enough for the gospels to say that they are true or to be considered plausible. If you were a lawyer, would you accept the truth of a witness, merely because they proclaim that they are telling the truth? Plausibility is often the way to convince the jury to make the wrong decision.


spin

rlogan

Quite so. Since none of the "apostles" existed in the first place.

Lola

Welcome to IIDB, and Merry Christmas.

You may not realize this but many of the posters in this forum are actual scholars of the Bible who have read it in its original languages.

Goldenroad, with a truly open mind and with a desire to find something reliable, many of us certainly did research the gospels (as well as the entire Bible) and, if one is absolutely honest with him/herself, they do not stand up to reasonable guidelines. Can you say the same for yourself or do you selectively look for anything to only support your own conclusion that the gospels are reliable and that Jesus (if he existed) was the Son of God, no matter what--even if there are many documents and publications claiming otherwise. Our decision to dismiss your Bible as a trusted source was not as flippant as your particular cult leaders would have you believe.

You can read all the over simplified books from Strobel, McDowell, etc. as you'd like, but you must submit that is ONLY faith and not fact nor logic for the reasons you choose to believe in your particular myth. That's fine by me--I support religious freedoms as long as no one is hurt by them.

David B

I wonder if the OP has considered the likelihood of deliberate falsification of other documents that are taken on faith by many people (though generally not the same people) to be the truth, and who build their lives on those alleged truths.

Like, for example, the Book of Mormon, the Qu'ran, the works of Nostradamus, the works of L Ron Hubbard, the alleged prophesies of Edgar Cayce, the alleged accounts of alien abductees.....

I wonder if the OP would be kind enough to explain to me why the gospels should be more reliable than any or all of the above.

David B

Roger Pearse

I hate having to do this. But in the interests of balance, I feel it only right to say that all of these statements seem to me to be merely opinions, and indeed opinions that seem to me to be entirely specious and many anti-historical. Whether Christianity is true or not, little of this can be true.

All the best,

Roger Pearse