ALL CLAIMS OF JESUS and almost all historical claims about anyone - Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Muhammed, you name 'em DERIVE FROM HEARSAY ACCOUNTS
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We actually have pretty good ideas about who wrote Mark and Luke and that the authors were close associates of Peter and Paul, respectively.
Not only do we not know who wrote them, consider that none of the Gospels existed during the alleged life of Jesus, nor do the unknown authors make the claim to have met an earthly Jesus.
Of course gospels describing Jesus death and resurrection weren't written before those events. That the authors didn't meet Jesus themselves isn't relevant, they wrote based on information they received from people who know Jesus.
Add to this that none of the original gospel manuscripts exist; we only have copies of copies.
We only have copies of copies of almost all ancient manuscripts. The oldest manuscript of the OT for example only goes back a little over 1000 years.
The consensus of many biblical historians put the dating of the earliest Gospel, that of Mark, at sometime after 70 C.E., and the last Gospel, John after 90 C.E. [Pagels, 1995; Helms]. This would make it some 40 years after the alleged crucifixion of Jesus ...
First 40 years isn't that long. Second, the view they were written before 70CE is gaining ground among scholars.
The gospel of Mark describes the first written Bible gospel. And although Mark appears deceptively after the Matthew gospel,
The order of books in the NT isn't important. The NT isn't chronologically organized. Ditto for the OT too.
we can deduce that the author of Mark had neither heard Jesus nor served as his personal follower. Whoever wrote the gospel, he simply accepted the mythology of Jesus without question and wrote a crude an ungrammatical account
Mark was Peter's scribe. Peter was a follower of Jesus. Calling his testimony "mythology" is bogus. Mark is also not crude and ungrammatical. Its too long to get into but Mark has a very complicated internal structure. There are common thematic elements in the account of Jesus's baptism (the introduction of his public ministry) that are echoed in the account of his death on the cross, for example.
I don't have the time to continue picking at that shoddy essay. I'll just close by saying like most atheist writings its written to deceive the gullible. |
