07-06-2003, 10:13 PM
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Senior Member
Join Date: Aug 2002
Location: Just north of here.
Posts: 544
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"Support for authenticity of book of Matthew comes from an unlikely place"??
Anyone heard anything of this?
http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansas...nt/6014126.htm
Quote:
Buried in ancient texts of Jewish historical works are fragments of evidence that appear to show the first book of the New Testament actually was written by one of Jesus' apostles.
One of these texts also challenges a long-held assertion that no ancient text except the Bible mentions Jesus' birth.
Taken together, the information lends support to the claims of some Christian scholars that Matthew actually wrote the Gospel bearing his name, a Gospel that more than the three others emphasized Jesus' Jewish roots.
"One of the reasons that people have not come to grips with the Jewishness of Jesus is that it makes the accounts of the Gospels plausible," Craig Blomberg, distinguished professor of New Testament at Denver Theological Seminary, said in an interview this week. "For the Jewish or Christian believer, it helps them better understand who Jesus was, what he stood for and what to do with this Gospel."
Since the 1800s groups of scholars have argued that Jesus might have been a real person, but that he wasn't the son of God, that he didn't perform miracles and that the four Gospels are mostly myths composed by people who assigned to Jesus godlike powers.
More recently the scholarship has taken the form of the Jesus Seminar, a group of about 200 academics who have been studying the Gospels since the mid-1980s. The seminar created a media splash a decade ago when it publicly announced its conclusions that Jesus said only 18 percent of what's conventionally attributed to him in the New Testament. The Gospels, they concluded, are not historically reliable.
But as scholars of Judaism continue to research the history of early Christianity, they are uncovering evidence that appears to show the Gospels of the New Testament may be more reliable than some thought.
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