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To: Pelham
"John and Matthew were two of the Apostles. Mark was Peter's amanuensis. Luke was an historian and companion of Paul. He set out to record an accurate history of the remarkable events that had just occurred. He would have interviewed the eleven and any other witnesses he could find. It would be hard to imagine a scenario in which they didn't know each other, and know each other extremely well."

Oh?

The Gospel of Luke is written anonymously, and is at best a secondary source based on earlier accounts of the life of Jesus. It borrowed from the Gospel of Mark for his chronology and some other source document for many of Jesus' teachings that did not survive to modern times.

The Gospel of Mark is also written anonymously, and its attribution to the secretary of Peter is little more than tradition. It certainly contains errors of geography that no real secretary of Peter would have made. It was written about the time of the destruction of the Jewish Temple in 70 AD.

The Gospel of Matthew was also written by a person whose actual name is unknown to us, almost certainly a Jewish Christian near the end of the 1st century. The most "Jewish" of the Gospels, it also is a secondary Gospel that borrowed heavily from Mark and the lost collection of Jesus sayings, and appears to have been originally written in Greek.

And the Gospel of John? Well it's the wild card, the most theologically evolved and least historically reliable of the four canonical Gospels. Also being the last written, it was clearly composed in stages, edited, redacted and re-edited at least three times.

In short... there is no good reason to believe that any of the "evangelists" are more than unreliable tradition,
81 posted on 02/11/2010 9:35:35 PM PST by EnderWiggins
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To: EnderWiggins
In short... there is no good reason to believe that any of the "evangelists" are more than unreliable tradition,

Yep. And with a modern conspira-scope we can look back and see what really happened.

83 posted on 02/11/2010 9:49:40 PM PST by AndyTheBear
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To: EnderWiggins

There’s something like 26 volumes of the writings of the anteNicene fathers. An example being Polycarp, companion and student of John. Polycarp learned directly from the Apostles. Irenaeus learned from Polycarp and others who had known the Apostles. And so on. There’s a chain of church fathers going all the way back to the Apostles.

Somehow I think that these people had an idea of who wrote the NT documents, and oddly enough they failed to express a lot of doubt about their authorship. In some cases they even knew the reputed authors. Probably they had a better idea of the provenance of the writings than someone 20 centuries later play acting at being a junior David Hume, claiming that you just can’t know much of anything. It’s really just a simple case of the rules of evidence that courts use every day.


92 posted on 02/12/2010 9:09:25 PM PST by Pelham
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