MikeFerrara:
Do you think it's reasonable to think that a creator who created the universe for his own purpose rather than ours might be a bit put off by the folks who repeatedly turn their noses up at him and insist on having everything their own way?
this is a-priori reasoning: it assumes the existance of a creator who created
the universe for his own purposes
Mike, the latest biblical scholarship is that none of the writers of the gospels
knew Jesus. read the gospels. none of them claim to.
don't you think that would be a great selling point? "Brothers as sisters, I spoke
with Jesus personally, and he said to me "xyz""
not there.
why not?
John has some hints, but everybody agrees that John was the last gospel to
be written, and JOhn would have been close to 90 by the time it was written,
a very unlikely age in that time period. also, internal stylistic shifts
are pretty clear that John was written by two separate authors, and then
combined later (or perhaps re-written later, with passages added, the
most famous of which is chapter 21, which almost everyone agrees
is a much later addition)
as to the claims of being "Peter," this was a common device at the time,
meant not to deceive, but to add authority to the text. it's hard for us
to understand, but that's the way it was back then.
basically, we have NO EYEWITNESS account of Jesus's life, even in
the New Testament.
this isn't fatal. what the authors did was gather the various events of
Jesus' life they knew, plus whatever written materials they had, and
recorded it for a specific audience. there must have been quite a few
of these Gospels around.
http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_ntb1.htm