Re: Bible Origins
You present nothing, absolutely nothing to counter the fact that the gospels
are anonymous books.
The majority of bible scholars and ministers now accept the fact that the
gospel authors are anonymous. They also accept that fact that many of the
books attributed to Paul are forgeries.
However, there is that segment who struggle with their belief that the bible
is inerrant - even though there are conflicts galore and rules they don't
follow, that they have to grasp at straws to maintain their belief. That
the bible is inerrant has been the foundation of the church trying to control
everyone else for centuries.
http://hwarmstrong.com/who-wrote-the-gospels.htm
WHO WROTE THE
GOSPELS?
Introduction:
Who Wrote The Gospels?
No
one would trouble to ask such a question if it were not that all four of the
biblical gospels are deliberately, even playfully, anonymous in their texts. The
Third Gospel for example carefully names its audience, Theophilus ("Friend
of God"--Luke 1:3), but never its author; while the last chapter of the
Fourth Gospel takes great pains to identify the author of that work as "the
disciple whom Jesus loved" (John 21:7, 20), and then never tells us his
name! The gospels are so anonymous that their titles, all second-century
guesses, are all four wrong. Christians in the second century, possessing
anonymous manuscripts and eager to give names to them, fastened upon four
historical figures--the Apostles Matthew and John, Luke the "beloved
physician" of Paul (Col. 4:14), and John Mark of Jerusalem, the
"son" of Peter (Acts 12:12; I Peter 5:13). It's relatively easy to
show that these identifications are imaginary and based on wishful thinking, and
I will do so below. But that really is not the most amazing part: what still
surprises is that, paradoxically, though the four gospels are anonymous they in
fact tell us more about their authors than they do about their ostensible
subject, the historical Jesus of Nazareth.
If
the paragraph above surprises you, welcome to the ongoing debate; biblical
scholarship is still chewing on the truly groundbreaking argument of Rudolf
Bultmann, propounded some seventy years ago, that any gospel is a primary source
for the historical situation out of which it arose, and is only a secondary
source for the historical details concerning which it gives information. (Bultmann,
1960, 38)
That
the gospels tell us more about the situations of their origin than about their
subject is a disturbing idea, and remains controversial. As Robert Funk has
recently put it:
Biblical
scholars have not been able to make up their minds whether the biblical
narratives are about real or fictive events. Or, if they are about both, which
is which. The test is a simple one: did the events depicted as having taken
place actually take place? Are the gospels essentially fiction or biography?
(Funk, 1997, 179)........ (more at the site)