I’m having some trouble accepting that the gospels couldn’t have been written by their traditional authors. It seems abundantly clear that Matthew Mark Luke and John were illiterate and unable to actually write them physically. Is it not possible, though, that they just hired a scribe to take down their testamonies, and – going even further – wouldn’t it also have been possible for that scribe to have been writing in Greek?
If that were so, why did they not give their name as the “author” of the gospel? Matthew refers to himself in the third person in “his” gospel, which is a strange thing for a dictator to do to a scribe. If they wanted to show the legitimacy of the gospel, I would think they would emphasize the eyewitness testimony as much as possible.
Similarly, they copy each other verbatim in some instances, which only makes sense if these are written later by people who were not there, and are thus using prior writings as source material. This isn’t necessarily a defeater for the authorship of Luke, but for the other synoptics it poses a problem.
The dating is also a problem, since they are all written after the Pauline epistles, and it seems to me are written precisely to reinforce and add detail to what Paul and the early Christians were saying about Jesus. I would think that eyewitness accounts should predate Paul’s letters, but admit that it’s not a necessary criterion.
There are textual criticism answers that are much more fulfilling I’m sure, but this is the basic “sniff test” for authorship to me.
BDEhrman
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Robert
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