Diogenes the Cynic

What early Christians would those be?
There is not a single eyewitness account for anything in Jesus' life or death. Not a single extant Christian writing was written by anyone whoever met Jesus.
Luke says no such thing. You know Luke-Acts wasn't written until at least the late 90's don't you? What witnesses were left?
Which means he read Mark and Q.
Where did you get the idea that Luke was a great historian. :rolling:

His nativity alone is full of historical inaccuracies.

aChristian

This is just ignorant. Read I Corinthians

Read their arguements, they are sound.

It just make sense. Why would they not be identical copies everywhere if they were just copies. It is more reasonable to assume they are telling the same story that they both knew and that they are not identical because each adds different details. There is also no one who lived back then and knew about it that said that they copied one another. The people who were in a position to know seem to agree with my view.

Read the conservative Christian historians. You just call the historical documents biased because you don't like what the history says. You want to re-write history.

The proof has been written in plenty of conservative books. I think that you need some proof to back up your re-writing of history. I can read the historical documents in the Bible. The hyper-critical 'history' I've read from liberal Biblical scholars appears to have no facts to back it up, just wishful thinking about how they want history to be.

aChristian

Nope. Sounds like National Enquirer to me. Sounded that way to the early church fathers who accepted the Bible, not the pseudepigrapha.

aChristian

Matthew, Mark, those who Luke talked to, John, etc.

No, Luke was probably written in 58 AD and Acts in 63 AD. Read a good conservative scholar to get your dates.

Never read any book called Q. He may have read Mark and Mark may have been one of his sources, but I doubt it. As I already said, the people who lived back then don't say he copied.

Read a good conservative historian. They agree with me, not you. The historical questions that you mention have been answered. Your alleged problems with the historical record are due to your claiming that you know more about what happened than you do. We have some unanswered questions about this history as about any history, but we can posit reasonable guesses. As I said, Luke is considered a good historian (read some good conservative historians) and an honest investigator gives someone the benefit of the doubt when they are continually accurate and then tell of something that they have no reason to lie about and which the people alive at the time (who could check it out) saw no problem in. Remember, the people who question the historicity are the same kind that riduculed the Bible because it mentioned the Hittites. They said that there never were such a people. When we discovered later that they were a major power in ancient history that we were just ignorant about, they didn't apologize and give the Bible credit for its accuracy, they just went looking for some other lame excuse to deny it.

aChristian

Good night all. I need to go to work tomorrow.

Diogenes the Cynic

Matthew and Mark were not written by eywitnesses.
Luke knows Josephus as well as Mark and Q. Josephus puts it well into the 90's and probably later.
It's the written Greek source that he shared with Matthew.
We can SEE that he copied.
They've been apologized for with some incredibly specious arguments. They haven't been answered.

Vorkosigan

Most of us have. Also liberal, and radical, and right and left wing, and everyone in between. Nobody seriously dates Luke to the 60s except a few right-wing conservatives. Luke is generally dated in the 90s, as the writer of Luke depends on Mark, who certainly wrote after 70. Thus, Luke cannot possibly be from the 60s. The writer of Luke is also aware of the destruction of Jerusalem as well. Acts also appears to depend on Josephus Antiquities and is probably from after 95. See Steve Mason's Josephus and the New Testament, especially Chapter 6. A new edition is out, but if you email me at turtonm@yahoo.com, I'll be happy to forward you an e-version placed on the internet by the publisher several years ago.

Obviously, Matt and Luke and John felt that Mark needed reworking and supplementing. Mark contained numerous ideas that were embarrasing and even heretical to later writers, such as the baptism of Jesus by John, and an Adoptionist Christology (the writer of Mark seems to think Jesus was adopted, rather than born, as God's Son). Mark was almost lost because it was incorporated into those later texts.

Au contraire, aChristian. The Patristic fathers were aware that there was a relationship between the texts (witness Augustine's remark that Mark was a simple-minded summary of Matt that added nothing; you can see more about Augustine's position on Steve Carlson's website below) but they got the evolution of the texts wrong, is all. The ancients were in no position to know who wrote the texts and when either; all of the stories we have about their composition are apocryphal.

Meanwhile, modern scholarship has conclusively shown that Matt and Luke both depended on Mark. For information on this see Steve Carlson's Synoptic Problem Home Page. if you have specific issues to discuss, by all means bring them forward. But simply saying "read any good conservative scholar" is just pointless piffle. Everyone here has. Instead, bring forth an argument that refutes all of modern mainstream scholarship.

Vorkosigan

Amaleq13

I just did and Paul doesn't locate the resurrection in time or space. You know, like someone would do if they weren't being vague in terms of establishing something as a historical fact.

I've read many and they don't appear sound to me in the sense of logic and reason. Instead, they seem to start with strong, faith-based assumptions and procede to support those assumptions with arguments that require even more faith to be considered credible.

Perhaps you could offer a specific example you find particularly strong?

Whether you think your belief makes sense isn't actually relevant since it doesn't adequately address the evidence. The evidence clearly indicates there is a textual relationship between the Synoptics. Denying that evidence simply doesn't make sense.

Each subsequent author felt the original needed some changes.

Why do you think it is only the conservative Christian scholars who reach this conclusion? It seems to me that the most obvious factor that makes them unique among biblical scholars is their great faith. Doesn't it make sense to wonder if their conclusion follows more from that faith than any greater ability to understand the evidence than various other Christian scholars?

johntheapostate

You seem like the fundamentalist sort. Therefore if I can prove that if even one of these "eyewitnesses" is a liar, that should be sufficient to throw the integrity of your Bible into disarray.

The author of the book of Matthew is a liar, and I can prove it.

Matthew 27:50-53 “ And when Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, he gave up the spirit. At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook and the rocks split. The tombs broke open and the bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. They came out of the tombs and after Jesus’s restriction they went into the holy city and appeared to many people.�

I remember reading this passage for the first time when I was still a believer. I was dumbfounded by the implications an event like this would have had on the history of Jerusalem, both secular and religious.

I mean who were these holy people. If They had been the prophets of old and they were resurrected and testified to the validity of Jesus’s claim, surely there would not have not been one person left in the city who would have not believed. I had always been a little confused by Jesus’s statement that no sign would be given to the Jews other than the sign of Jonah which meant that he would emerge alive from the bowels of the earth, alive after three day and three nights of being deceived. ( which if one is to count the days and nights Jesus was in his tomb, he did not fulfill anyway) Yet combined with all his spectacular miracles and this the mother of them all, how could anybody have not believed.

I could kind of accept the fact that Jesus had not presented himself in triumph before those who had conspired against him, but what would have kept these holy people from doing so?

I wondered why had Matthew limited his description of this event to only two verses. Surely whole volumes should have been fill with their testimony concerning Jesus. I wondered to whom exactly did they present themselves and why was not the name and testimony of at least one such witness included in the text.

I knew that guards had been appointed to guard the tomb of Jesus because certain leaders were afraid that the disciples would come and steal his body, but wouldn’t that have been the least of their problems considering the multitude of saints wandering about the tombs waiting for the resurrection of Jesus so they could enter the holy city?

I wondered what exactly had happened to these resurrected people. Did they live long lives and then die again? Did they go back to their graves and cover themselves up again.? What?

I was a little perplexed that the author of Matthew had dropped such a bombshell and left no explanation to my questions

Now that I am an atheist, I can look at the gospels and find it rather odd that between the four of them they share so many of the same stories. I guess one could construe it to mean that the holy spirit had worked within the authors to concentrate on the most important events even though each of them ( if they were eyewitnesses) would have had a much wider spectrum of testimony to work with.

But I thought an event such as this one, had it occurred, it would have been of such significance that no one testifying to the truth of Jesus’s claims would fail to mention it. Surely the other books of the New Testament would clarify what the author of Matthew testified to.

I was surprised and very disappointed when I finally realized that those two short verses in the book of Matthew was all the information that I would be getting. I remember thinking if this was anything other than the word of god, I would dismiss this story as a blatant lie.

This was not the last contradiction that battered the stronghold of my thoroughly indoctrinated faith, but it is the one that caused me to read the whole Bible with a critical eye. Many years later I can pronounce that those two verses in Matthew are a deliberate lie, and the only reason not to accept this fact is a overwhelming desire not to.

I have now established to the satisfaction of anyone who is not allowing faith to overwhelm reason, that the author of the book of Matthew included at least one deliberate lie in his testimony concerning Jesus.

Really there is no logical reason compelling me to believe any of the extraordinary claims of a perjurer.

rlogan

hello aChristian. What I am looking for please are specific citations we can inspect as opposed to "Luke said it" or "John was there" and the like.

I am still hoping that the individual who was crowing on about eyewitness tesimoiny will show up and carry his own water. But if you are willing, then great.

I realize that some of the heavyweights are on here throwing power punches all at the same time, so it's a lot to contend with. They are also bringing in material that was decisive for me in dating the gospels later & etc.

But I think it is more than that. I don't see that even if we give the NT the benefit of the doubt that it even proclaims specific eyewitness testimony to Jesus. Where are those passages so indicating?

Thank you.