Wow...Sarah10...that was a mouthful.

If I may, I'd like to take issue with your comment:

"The revered book is about the human's superstitions, beliefs without fact"

Ok.. that is mildly true, in the sense that superstitions are indeed 'reported' in the Bible. (i.e. the superstitions of pagans)

But 'Beliefs without fact'.....if u are referring to beliefs about Jesus, well the nicest way I can put it is this -"you might want to reflect on that"

-Which beliefs ?
-Which facts ?

I suspect you said that as 'inherited opinion' rather than from original research.

Let me show by example how much effort Luke placed on connecting the reality of Jesus to real and contemporary world events.

Luke 3:1-2

In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar
-when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea,
-Herod tetrarch of Galilee,
-his brother Philip tetrarch of Iturea and Traconitis, and
-Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene
-during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas,

.... the word of God came to John.

He could have easily began simply with 'The word of God came to John'....but no, he specifically ties this reality to a host of other verifiable ones.

*think* and do some serious research next time b4 speaking :)

To gain more insight on just how accurate this is.. do some research on why Luke mentions the "Hight priesthood of Annas AND....Caiaphas"
rather than just mentioning one name.

blessings.

Philoe
Quote "The gospels were composed from scripts written by eyewitnesses to the events." Totally wrong! The bibles are anonymous documents written decades after the events they portray by UNKNOWN writers.
Couldn't these unknown writers be using eye witness accounts you ask? Nope. Because they have so many glaring errors that an eye witness wouldn't make. Let's look at them:
Luke got most of his information from Paul & has far too many errors to be rated even a competant historian. Example Luke declares that Jesus was born when Quirinus was govenor of Syria [6 CE] & Heros was king (4 BCE). That's a ten year difference Philo. Did Mary experience the world's first 10 year pregnancy?

That's only one of many examples where Luke got it wrong. If he was writing history he rarely if ever checked his facts no matter what he claimed.

Now let's look at the other gospels. If Matthew wrote the gospel that bares his name why did he need to borrow so much of his material from Mark who wasn't one of the 12?

If Mark was really written by John Mark why didn't he know more about the country, the people & the language?

If John was written by the apostle John why does he leave out EVERY event at which the others claim he was an eye witness? He even start of his gospel with a quote from an ancient Greek philosophical work "Parmenides' the way of truth" Did John study Greek philosophy while he was waiting to pull in the nets?

Face it philo. NONE of these writers are who the church says they are!

Bosk has it right. Most reputable biblical scholars will agree. Which leads me to the point of my article, we cannot judge these documents in terms of modernism, they may be based on historical event but they are much much more. They are more preaching than history and any attempt to dissect out what actually happened will fail as the recent Jesus seminar must show. Paul is the only writer whose identity we are sure of. We know that Luke wrote his gospel as well as Acts and that John wrote the Johanine letters. Even all of the Pauline letters cannot be attributed to Paul. The synoptic theory, that Mark was first and that Luke and Matthew drew on him and added material of his own holds. As for John, it is very late in the piece and the least historical. But this does not discredit it. It is the most theologically developed and in some ways the most profound. Proximity to the event does not equate to truth.

Priscillian.
What have you been reading! You really should take more effort in your research because what you have asserted is shear foolishness. Paul had no role in selecting the gospels, that came much later and he certainly was no gnostic. Seems to me you have gotten hold of some cranky book about Christianity and swallowed it whole.

Ah sells
No less an authority than Elaine Pagels argues that Paul WAS a Gnostic.

"Much of what passes for "historical" interpretation of Paul & for objective analysis of his letters can be traced to the 2nd-century heresiologists. If the apostle were so unequivocally anti-Gnostic, how could the Gnostics claim him as their great Pneumatic teacher? How could they say they are following his examples when they offer secret teaching of wisdom & Gnosis "to the innitiates"? How could they claim his resurrection theology as the source for their own, citing his words as decisive evidence AGAINST the ecclesiastical doctrines of bodily resurrection?" From the Gnostic Paul by Elain Pagels.

Hardly a light-weight authority sells. As for myself I am indifferent on the matter.

So Peter,

We have then the Christ of theology and the historical Christ. As you have admitted, Mark, Matthew, Luke and John were written many years after the fact (actually Mark, the earliest, dates to about 35AD and John as late as 120 AD. Luke was certainly after the Jerusalem Uprising of 66AD).

There is no doubt that the figure of the historical Christ is sadly lacking in facts, both in geography and time-line, and there are numerous examples, some listed above but many many more which I won't list here. There is the ever present vail of "Secrecy" that Mark refers to - How can you keep a secret of raising someone from the dead - surely such a miracle would have made the local headlines!

However as you have said, despite the obvious errors in the writtings there is also plenty of evidence to suggest, and I'm sure that most Bible Scholars would agree, that a man, latter to be known as Jesus, wandered around 1st Century Palestine preaching a view of Judaism. It is probable that this man was crucified for crimes against Rome.

In the end, Christians are left with the Christ of Faith. You either believe in a divine Christ or you don't. Much the same as believing in the Tooth Fairy or not.

Bosk, It's simply not true to say that the Gospels contain so many errors they could not be written by eyewitnesses. What can be said is that at a distance of 2000 years there are some statements which are difficult to reconcile with our current knowledge of the times. While Luke's dating of the birth of Jesus is difficult to understand at this point, there may be a simple answer which we cannot see from this distance. It was once commonplace to reject the existence of Pontius Pilate or the town of Nazareth on the basis that there was 'no historical evidence'. New discoveries have proven both these to have existed.

The documentary hypothesis is not inconsistent with eyewitness input. Neither is a gap of 20-40 years between events and writing - in ancient history terms this is miniscule. It is quite possible that Matthew Mark and Luke all used a common body of material (Q) because they knew that this material had been gathered from eywitnesses and was accurate. Clearly they each had a particular group they wanted to address with different emphases on parts of Jesus life and character, but this doesn't make them innacurate - different newspaper reports often do the same thing. It is false to draw a distinction between the Jesus of History and the Christ of faith. The two are too intimately linked to separate - which is what the Jesus seminar have really demonstrated.