God chose the men He wanted to record His word in the manner He chose.
bkmk
The truth of the resurrection does NOT depend on our opinion of it or the men who documented it.It stands on it’s own.
Yes
Many who witnessed Christ after the resurrection were martyred because of their faith. It’s hard to believe someone would risk death over a lie.
Back then, a hobby among some professionals such as Luke, was to collect stories in addition to writing stories that had circulated verbally over time.
That is, some people who were well read and also writers, sought to preserve.
Luke, Paul, plus scribes who wrote on behalf of Paul, were effectively witnesses of some of the people who personally had contact with or observed Jesus.
Back then, literature and libraries were bundled under systems of management consisting of various social, political, economic, and religious leaders, plus scholars.
There was, then, as there remains today, a variety of characters and purposes in that general body.
So, the characters and purposes affected what was stored, written, or dismissed.
The truth might survive, or not. Somebody might bury a truth, and another person might broadcast fiction.
Paul’s education and abilities lent credence to his being a witness of history; and that added some weight, as if a super notary, to the Gospels, that some detractors attempted to weaken by discrediting the Gospels on the basis of negative comments about the lower and uneducated witnesses of Jesus.
Interesting. I doubt such attempts at “proof” will sway many unbelievers though.
Paul was not a witness to the resurrection.
Hebrews 11:1
Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
Gary Habermass has just published a 1000 page book analyzing the evidence for the resurrection. It is highly documented. The evidence for the resurrection is overwhelming.
Bump
Meanwhile, the Revelation at Sinai is the only self-verifying claim of a Divine Revelation in human history. But let’s ignore that and continue to pretend that the Hebrew Bible is a chrstian document!
“Textual critics” of the Gospels argue that the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew/Mark/Luke) were written after the 70 AD destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem, which supposedly shows that Jesus did not actually predict the destruction of the Temple, and so the Gospel writers instead attributed the prediction to him after the fact.
This argument falls on several grounds, the first being that the veracity of Jesus’ prophecy doesn’t depend on when the Gospels were written, just their faithfulness to the words of Christ. Even if they wrote it after 70 AD, or 200 AD, it in no way disproves an authentic account of the words of Christ.
The next problem with the argument is that, be it 30 years or 150 years afterwards, the Gospels recorded in writing the oral traditions started by the witnesses to Christ. It then becomes even more remarkable that, as the author notes, the Gospels are so consistent with one another, especially John as an accompaniment with and expansion on the Synoptics. Textual critics like to claim that since the three Synoptics are so similar, they’re really just the re-telling of one another, or of a single source, which they have invented and called “Q”. Again, the Gospels recorded what witnesses saw, so they necessarily have commonalities — in fact, as the author says, if they diverged from one another that would display inauthenticity, whereas they do not. Their similarities affirm the authenticity of the witnesses. (Craig Blomberg’s “The Historical Reliability of the Gospels” goes through all this thoroughly.) Here again, the dating of the Gospels as to before or after 70 AD doesn’t matter.
If the Gospels, and we include here Acts (originally composed and distributed together with the Gospel of Luke, anyway) were 1) inventions; 2) written after 70 AD, then why weren’t other significant events included? If the prediction of the destruction of the Temple was needed to prove Christ’s divinity, why not include other later events, such as the 50 AD Passover riot, the AD 64 Great Fire of Rome and subsequent persecution and martyrdom of Christians, especially Peter and Paul, or the eruption of Vesuvius? (John, who likely did write his Gospel after Peter’s death, mentions Jesus’ vague prophecy of it.)
Finally, these critics assume human invention for the Gospels. However, given their consistency, depth, genius, and utter novelty, faith is not even needed to see that God’s hand guided the authors, who each spoke to individual experiences and focus, yet completely affirm one another, to tell greatest and most important story ever.
God chose the men He wanted to record His word in the manner He chose.