>The first account of Jesus was written at least 50 years after he presumbly died by someone who could not have been alive when Jesus was alive.
That's a bit off... it's like 15 years (the last of the big four was written about 60 years after), but still, as I said in an earlier post, the writers of the Gospels never claimed to have ever met or even seen Jesus in person.
Actually, along with everything else....there is much dispute over which was the first written account of Jesus. I read somewhere that the first written acct. of Jesus was not even by one of the disciples; that there was a historical reference made by Josephus in his writings circa 90 CE. However, some speculate that his original writings were amended by Christians later by interjecting an account of Jesus. Of course, that is disputed as well.
Others have argued that Mark's gospel was the first written account, surfacing around 70 CE. Now that would have been roughly 40 years after the death of Jesus....wasn't he 30 years old when he died? Of course then, no one is really sure what year Jesus was born.......conveniently, his birth was placed in the last year of Herod's reign I think. That allowed them to make Herod an important figure in Jesus's birth.
"2.2.1 The length of time between the events and their recording in the gospels is not much more than two generations, even on the latest dating now proposed. The majority of New Testament scholars still date Mark's gospel shortly before or shortly after AD 70, Matthew and Luke roughly 80-90, and John close to the end of the first century. No part of this scheme, however, is uncontested, both the relative dating of the gospels /15/ and the overall period of their composition being increasingly debated. While J. A. T. Robinson's view that all the gospels were completed before AD 70 has few adherents in its entirety, many are now prepared to argue that both Matthew and Luke could have been written in the sixties (and therefore, for most scholars, Mark would be still earlier) /16/. This would give barely more than one generation between the events and the final Synoptic record of them."
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