Posted on 07/03/2003 3:29:55 AM PDT by Jeff F
The Book of Matthew has been under attack since the beginning of the alleged "New Thinking" of the late 19th century. It was about that time that it was decided that Matthew wasn't an eyewitness account of the life of Christ, but rather that Matthew was a later forgery.
These alleged New "Thinkers" decided that Matthew wasn't the author, eventually assigning authorship of the book to a mysterious author, or group of authors, collectively known as "Q" from the German word "quelle," meaning "source."
The New "Thinkers," after much exhaustive study, concluded the following: Most of what Jesus said, He didn't say; He wasn't the Son of God; He didn't perform miracles; He was just a guy to whom people assigned god-like powers after His death.
Recently, the incongruously-named "Jesus Seminar" produced "The Five Gospels" that went into great detail about the things that Jesus never said, as if that would have any meaning, if one accepted the earlier premises that He was a fraud in the first place.
The whole basis for the credibility of the four Gospels – and their contents is this: All four Gospel writers claim to be eyewitnesses of the events they describe.
If Matthew, Mark, Luke or John were written after their deaths, then why were they named for them? If this were the case, they certainly couldn't be their eyewitness accounts. At best they would be second-hand accounts based on hearsay. So the issue of when Matthew and the other Gospels were written is of more than passing importance to Christianity.
It should be noted that the favorite tactic of unbelieving "liberal theologians" is to seek to "late date" the writing of every biblical book they attack.
An amazing story in the Kansas City Star detailed a find from a most unlikely source. It was a source the "scholarly" Jesus Seminar evidently overlooked in their "exhaustive research." And mind you, they are so confident of their "research," that they have no compunction in using it to declare the faith of a billion people to be built upon a fraud.
Interestingly, although the piece details considerable new information that tends to support the authenticity of the Bible and cast doubt on decades of the liberal's "New Thinking," the Star ran the story in its "Entertainment" section.
In an essay written for the book, "Passover and Easter: Origin and History to Modern Times," Israel J. Yuval of Jerusalem's Hebrew University, reports the Star, writes about a leading rabbinical scholar of the first century named Gamaliel, who is mentioned in Acts 5:34 and 22:3. Yuval declares that Gamaliel is "considered to have authored a sophisticated parody of the Gospel according to Matthew."
Because the date of Gamaliel's death is known, it places the publication of the Book of Matthew some time before AD 73. The fact that it was a parody demands that the Book of Matthew had extensive circulation and was well known. Otherwise, no one would have gotten the joke.
The fact the parody exists, and the date it was written is known, "badly undercuts (the biblical critics') claims of a late date of A.D. 85-90 or later," said Bob Newman, professor of New Testament at Biblical Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, according to the article.
Similarly, the earlier the Gospel was written, the more likely eyewitnesses to Jesus' life would still be alive.
The Gospels relate events such as the time a man was carried through the streets of Jerusalem on a pallet. The roof was ripped off a synagogue so the man, bed-ridden from birth, as attested to by witnesses, could be lowered into the crowded room. There, according to the Gospels, Jesus told the man to pick up his bed and walk. The man walked out the front door.
Imagine how a book that claimed Kennedy was really killed by a fall in a bathtub in Boise, Idaho, would be received today, 40 years after the fact. The conspiracy nuts would love it, but there are just too many eyewitnesses that saw his assassination at Dealey Plaza as it happened for that story to ever fly. There would be a firestorm of contradiction from those eyewitnesses.
There are thousands of specific details in the Gospels that were witnessed by contemporaries who were hostile to Jesus and his disciples. If they could have disproven any of them, they had every reason to do so. But there is no evidence of any attempts to prove factual contradictions in the Gospels found in the writings of that period. And this despite the fact that Jerusalem was a small place with one of the most highly literate societies of antiquity. Instead of attempting to disprove the testimony of the eyewitnesses, they sought to put them to death, which in itself proves they had no answer.
The eyewitness accounts concerning Jesus were so well known and documented, that when the Apostle Paul was on trial in Caesarea for his faith in Jesus as Messiah before the royalty and officials of the region, "For the king knows about these matters, and I speak to him also with confidence, since I am persuaded that none of these things escape his notice; for this has not been done in a corner." (Acts 26:26) And this was only 27 years after the crucifixion of Jesus.
Dr. Simon Greenleaf is one of the greatest legal minds in American history. He was head of the Harvard Law School for some 30 years. He wrote the definitive work for evaluating evidence in the courtroom called, "The Laws of Legal Evidence."
He was challenged to use these laws to investigate the claims of Christianity. The result was a book he wrote called, "The Testimony Of The Four Evangelists." He concluded that the evidence supporting the Gospels is better than the evidence supporting any history of antiquity.
Dr. Greenleaf is the kind of scholar that most impresses me. He evaluates evidence objectively. Not in the highly subjective manner of the Jesus Seminar group. These so called "scholars" are best described by this Scripture about false teachers in the Last Days: "... holding to a form of godliness, although they have denied its power; and avoid such men as these. For among them are those who enter into households and captivate weak women weighed down with sins, led on by various impulses, always learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth." (2 Timothy 3:1-7)
There is a forum for Religion.
No need to yell. Sorry you offend so easily. The problem is yours and not mine. Understand?
Perhaps they'll all scurry off to 'prove' the parody to be a forgery planted by christians to prove that Matthew was genuine.
Considered by whom? This is the first time I ever heard of it.
Secondly, John's authorship is quite murky. The "source" for it being John of Zebedee who wrote the book of John was from a bishop over 150 years after Jesus was crucified, who said that he was told when he was a young boy, by an old man, that John of Zebedee wrote it. That is why most serious scholars doubt it. It could be possibly true, but there really is no solid evidence suggesting which follower wrote it.
People like Hal Lindsay are missing the point anyways. The authorship isn't so much important as the message. There were no signatures on the gospels. They were written in the enclaves of newly sprung christian communities to share the faith tradition and to keep the message of Jesus alive.
These tracts were often necessarily anonymous. Study pre-revolutionary history, and one will find that several of the founders, published anon tracts, to get a message out, while not singling themselves out for persecution from political opponents or the Brits. Later, we have discovered who wrote some of them, by analyzing styles, but that road is tougher, when you don't have works to compare it to other than itself.
That is why for example, biblical scholars question the authorship of pieces in the bible, and can do so, without attacking the message itself.
Many biblical scholars seriously question that Paul wrote Titus and Timothy, because the linguistic style was noticably different than the letters Paul wrote to congregations. A codex has been found in one piece, dating to the late first century, which only contains Paul's letters that scholars thought "sounded" like Paul, that justifies their scholarship.
This is serious scholarly business, and Chicken Little people like Hal Lindsay who make false prophecies would be wise to not toss stones in their glass houses while they criticize biblical scholarship.
You have two choices. Either Hal Lindsay was correct that scripture stated the world would end in 1988, and God didn't act as he promised, or Hal Lindsay doesn't know what in the heck he is talking about.
I wouldn't use quite those words, but I for one agree with them. I am not bashing "catholic truth" or "synoptic truth" for that matter. There is however strong evidence from letters at the time, that there was alot more "heretical" work than Phillip, Mary, and Thomas floating around at the time, that the orthodoxy felt quite justified in burning, denouncing, etc.
From the catholic perspective, they had every justification. Different followers had radically divergent thoughts on the message of Jesus. It was something bound to happen. When an oral tradition gets retold, translated, replaced by written tradition, wildly different philosophies can arise.
As an example, I will highlight in bold a keyword in a sentence twice as the point of inflection. Depending on which word a reader inflects, it does change the meaning of the sentence.
You should not speak ill of your friends.
You should not speak ill of your friends
Same written words, but slightly different effect on the reader depending on how one reads it. Many of Christ's followers were fluent in just aramaic, which was the common tongue, though some had a smattering of greek. If you got americans who spoke passable say Russian, and you had them interview followers of Kruschev today, and asked them to share the key points, key sayings of Kruschev, you would get vastly different books, different philosophies.
The core message of communism would remain, just as the core message of salvation through Christ remains. Details, kep points, what Jesus was trying to say though gets wildly divergent interpretations by those who listened.
Let us not forget that it is believed that Jesus key ministry at the end lasted over 3 years. The 4 gospels does not even begin to cover the amount that Jesus spoke upon. John and Matthew for example had wildly different purposes in their accounts, even though they got the core message.
There were other accounts. Many of these were written by smaller sects, who had different interpretations. They weren't "orthodox", but it does not mean that quotations of Christ weren't in there.
John does not report every time that Jesus asked for a refill of water, or, what time Jesus went to sleep at night. For John, those were insignifigant details. A gospel that detailed such minutae, might be accurate, but viewed too "earthly" and considered offensive, and non spiritual.
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