Doug Shaver

No, not everything.

But given a contradiction between something he wrote about himself and something somebody else wrote about him many years after his lifetime, to whom do you think I should give the greater credence?

kcdad

not at all

and to call anything found in the New Testament a "book" is a real strangulation of that word. They are manuscripts, long essays... hardly a book, in the way we use the word today.

bacht

It's just a convention. The Protestant Bible is commonly referred to as containing 66 "books", some only a few paragraphs long. Of course the OT was written on scrolls, so you could use that terminology. The codex came in during the early xtian centuries I believe, so if you want to refer to codices that would work.

aa5874

You response is very curious and incredulous.

It is without doubt that letters are far more easily manipulated or forged than books.

The NT is commonly considered to consist of books and letters. There is no need to "strangulate" anything.

There are six books and twenty-one letters. Some of the letters are addressed or directed to certain persons others are to the churches. The books Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts and Revelations are for general readership.

kcdad

Sorry... Letters are dated... the recipients named... language, locations, existence can be checked... books are timeless... when was The Gospel of John written? Duh... No one knows... A letter written by Paul to someone in Jerusalem or about someone in Jerusalem had to be written before Jerusalem was destroyed in (what? 67AD? 70AD?)

You are correct and The New Testament is also commonly referred to as infallible and inerrant... but it doesn't make it so and it doesn't provide and insight in to anything within it. The NT is a collection of documents, parts of documents and incomplete documents... it was stuffed together in a political action intended to eliminate those "heretical" ideas that disagreed with the Roman Church. There are many more and maybe better records of the early church that are not included in the Canon.
Matthew and Luke are poorly constructed forgeries of Mark's Gospel. Adding fairy tales to history is not very ... well... HONEST. John's Gospel takes this fantasy writing to NEW heights. Invented conversations, rearrange events chronologically, mysterious authors, dubious relationships, impossible physics.

So you eliminate three of the Gospels, Revelation of ST John the Divine ("The Divine"????) is a history of first century Rome... the kingdom of man that Jesus was protesting against by introducing the Kingdom of God... is irrelevant to us except as history, 1/3 of the letters attributed to Paul are forgeries... The Bible is a mess.

aa5874

It is like you got conned. Many of the Pauline letters are regarded as forgeries.

Now, show me the dates on the Pauline letters. The letters have no dates. The manipulator must have taken out the dates.


It cannot be proven that gMark was first. That is just an accepted theory probably partly based on the erroneous inclination that Jesus was an historical figure.

Jesus of the NT was a myth and gMatthew confirms the myth from conception to ascension. If a mythical/fictional character is introduced for the very first time, I would expect the author to give some kind of birth narrative, no matter how concise. GMatthew is consistent with such an expectation.

I think 3/3 of the letters were written as late as the 4th century and not at all by a 1st century writer named Paul.

kcdad

Good to know.

aa5874

It is not good to believe you know everything.

I think you know.

kcdad

I didn't mean to imply that anything in particular that you think is good... only that you DO think.

Knowledge, on the other hand, is always good, no matter what that knowledge is.

aa5874

Again, once it is realised that Jesus of the NT did not exist, that the Jesus stories are all fiction, and that the post-ascension stories about Jesus, Peter and Paul are all fictitious events, then it can be easily deduced that the writer called Paul wrote fiction about himself with respect to Jesus, and Peter.

The writer called Paul has no veracity, Jesus and Peter were fictitious characters, the writer is therefore a witness to fiction and also a participant in fictitious events.

These are indication that the writer Paul wrote his letters at a time when the Jesus stories were already known and accepted as true. The writings of Justin Martyr support such a position, since Justin did not account for Acts of the Apostles, the letters of the writers called Paul, James, John or Jude.

My position is that Paul absolutely knew the gospels and his letters were written very late, after Justin Martyr and backdated to appear to be from the 1st century.