[quote]Brother Chris wrote:
[quote]forlife wrote:
[quote]Brother Chris wrote:
[quote]forlife wrote:
[quote]Brother Chris wrote:
[quote]forlife wrote:
What would motivate priests way back in the second century to write false letters that weren’t historically accurate?[/quote]
What motivates priests/pastors/ministers/whatever they want to call themselves, now to write heretical books and letters? I don’t know.
I would guess for profit and fame.[/quote]
Knowing that people write fraudulent history, rather than factual history, to serve their own selfish purposes casts doubt on these ancient letters. Especially when even most biblical scholars agree that none of these letters were written by people that lived during the time of Jesus, and actually met him. Paul may well have been the biggest fraud of them all, although like Joseph Smith he may have actually believed he had a vision. He never met or knew the historical Jesus. Just because people claim visions, whether Christian, Muslim, or Hindu, doesn’t mean those visions reflect reality.[/quote]
I don’t know which scholars you are listening to, but I can put a dime on it that they are likely unorthodox in their methods of scholarly work. Half the time they don’t even have the credentials. But, I digress.
Mark was written in 55 and the passion account likely came from Peter earliest as 37 but current scholarly work holds it at 45. All the people that knew Jesus weren’t martyred or assumed until a generation after which is within the time the rough drafts were written.
What doesn’t cast doubt is that they died for what was said in these ancient letters. Why would Peter die for something he knew was false?[/quote]
From Wiki on the Historicity of Jesus:
[quote]The majority of biblical scholars who study Early Christianity
believe that the Gospels do contain some reliable information about
Jesus, agreeing that Jesus was a Jew who was regarded as a teacher and
healer, that he was baptized by John the Baptist, and was crucified in
Jerusalem on the orders of the Roman Prefect of Judaea, Pontius
Pilate, on the charge of sedition against the Roman Empire. According
to traditional Christian Church teaching, the Gospels of John and
Matthew were written by eyewitnesses. However, a majority of modern
critical biblical scholars no longer believe this is the case.
Material which refers to Jesus includes the books of the New
Testament, statements from the early Church Fathers, hypothetical
sources which many biblical scholars argue lie behind the New
Testament, brief references in histories produced decades or centuries
later by pagan and Jewish sources such as Josephus, gnostic and other
apocryphal documents, and early Christian creeds. Not everything
contained in the gospels is considered to be historically reliable,
and elements whose historical authenticity is disputed include the two
accounts of the nativity of Jesus, as well as the resurrection and
certain details about the crucifixion…
Ehrman has stated “…they are not written by eyewitnesses who were
contemporary with the events they narrate. They were written
thirty to sixty years after Jesus’ death by people who did not
know him, did not see anything he did or hear anything that he taught,
people who spoke a different language from his and lived in a
different country from him.”[/quote]
I think there probably was a real person, but most of the supernatural
events subsequently ascribed to this person are historically
questionable or outright fraudulent.
On Peter’s crucifixion, history is filled with the stories of people
that were killed for their religious beliefs. That doesn’t mean
Peter’s beliefs were any more based in reality than the beliefs of
Joseph Smith, Savonarola, or David Koresh.
[/quote]
Let me give you a clue (not that you don’t have one) but ‘modern critical biblical scholar’ is a qualifying statement. The majority of biblical scholars (at least one with any credentials and ability to be a biblical scholar) place Acts at 65 (because it was written before the destruction of the temple at 70), which would mean that Luke was written around 60, and Mark being written before Luke would be placed around 55 and the account of the Passion is at 45 or earliest of 37. Now, Mark may not have been there with Jesus, but who he was dictating surely was as it was St. Peter.
The point being is that it was written early enough that those who knew better would have pointed that out about the letters.[/quote]
You’ve admitted there were spurious and fraudulent letters written during this time, yet none of them were pointed out by those who supposedly knew better. It was all secondhand information, and even many of the books contained in the current bible have been discredited. How many believers even realize that Matthew and Luke weren’t written by Matthew and Luke, and are actually knockoffs based on other source documents? The only remotely reliable facts are that Jesus was a Galilean teacher who was probably crucified, although the details of the crucifixion, and any mention of a resurrection or the nativity are not accepted as accurate by the majority of biblical scholars.
It’s far from being the ironclad historical proof that many naively believe, and relatively few even bother to educate themselves enough to realize this.
