Gospels are not eye witness accounts

Greetings all,

Regarding the eye-witnesses to Jesus - I thought readers may be
interested in this essay by Diogenes the Cynic (not, not the original)
about the Gospels.


The Gospels are not eyewitness accounts
---------------------------------------

by Diogenes the Cynic (from Internet Infidels)
http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?t=117382


Only two of the canonical Gospels, Matthew and John, are alleged by
tradition to have been written by eywitnesses but I'm going to address
Mark and Luke as well because I feel like wrecking those authorship
traditions just to be thorough.


First of all, I should say that none of the four canonical Gospels
names its own author, none of them claim to be eywitness accounts or
even to have spoken to eyewitness of Jesus. All are written in the
third person and none of the authors tell us anything about themselves.
All of the traditional ascriptions of authorship come from 2nd century
tradition.


[b]G.Mark[/b]

The first gospel written is Mark. Mark is not by tradition an
eyewitness account but 2nd century tradition casts him as a secretary
of the Apostle Peter who haphazardly wrote down everything Peter said
in no particular order.

The basis for this tradition stems from a single claim by Papias who
said (c. 130 CE) that he got the information from John the Presbyter
(not to be confused with John the Apostle). That's it. That's the
entire case for Mark as a secretary of Peter.

Now let's examine the credibility of this claim.

First, Mark does not say that he knew Peter, talked to Peter, ever met
Peter or got any information from any eyewitness.

Secondly, the author is extremely hostile to Peter. Mark is a decidedly
Pauline, anti-Jewish and anti-Petrine diatribe. Mark is very hostile to
the apostles in general and to Peter in particular. He takes every
opportunity to depict the apostles as being dense and not getting
Jesus' true message (reflecting the tension between Pauline communities
and the Jerusalem cult in the last half of the first century). More to
the point (and this is important) Mark does not give Peter any
redemption after his betrayal. Mark does not grant Peter and appearance
from Jesus. Mark's Peter denies Jesus, runs away and that's it. Now why
would a Petrine memoir not include a Petrine witness of the
resurrection? Wouldn't that be the most important part? How does it
make any sense to exclude it?

Thirdly, the book is quote obviously a literary construction and is
manifestly not a transcription of oral anecdotes. The literary
structure of Mark, both in its chiastic forms and its use of the Hebrew
Bible as a allusory template or "hypertext" preclude the possibility of
transcribed oral tradition. GMark is a carefully constructed literary
work.

It should also be mentioned that Mark is a Greek composition which
shows no signs of translation from Aramaic, the language of Peter and
the language he would have dictated his memoirs in.

Fourth, Mark makes a number of errors regarding Palestininan geography
and Jewish laws and customs which show that his information could not
have been collected from a Palestinian Jew. Mark's passion, in
particular, is so riddled with factual. historical and legal
inaccuracies that it cannot be historical and cannot have come from an
eyewitness. (I will address the specific errors in the section devoted
to that subject)

Fifth, the book could not have been written during the lifetime of
Peter. Mark knows about the destruction of the Temple which means that
Peter was dead (at least by Christian tradition) when the book was
written.

To summarize, the canonical Gospel of Mark is an anonymous book written
outside of Palestine in a Gentile language to a Gentile audience
sometime during or after the Jewish-Roman War. The author is hostile to
Jews and to the apostles. He does not know Jewish laws or customs. He
does not know the geography of Palestine. He does not like Peter. He
never makes any claim to have known Peter or to have ever been to
Palestine.

In 130 CE some guy said he heard from another guy that the author was a
secretary of Peter's.


[b]G.Matthew[/b]

Let's move on to Matthew. The Gospel of Matthew, by tradition, is
attributed to the apostle of that name. Like Mark, this authorship
tradition stems from Papias (it was also claimed by Irenaeus but he was
probably parroting Papias). Papias clamed that, "Matthew composed the
sayings [of Jesus] in the Hebrew language, and each one interpreted
them as best he could." In Adv. Haer. 3.1.1.

If such a Logia ever existed, it is not Canonical Matthew. GMatt is not
a sayings gospel for one thing and was not written in Hebrew for
another. Furthermore, GMatt is largely dependent on Mark and (most
probably)another written sayings tradition (in Greek, not Hebrew)
called Q. Matt's dependence on Mark also puts its date somewhere around
80 CE (if not later) which is pushing the envelope for the plausibility
of the author being a contemporary of Jesus. It's not impossible, of
course, but this is an era when people generally didn't live much past
forty or fifty years of age.

The bigger obstacle for apostolic authorship is that fact that Matthew
copies so extensively from secondary sources. An eyewitness should not
be expected to copy verbatim from a non-eyewitness.

There is also the fact that GMatt contains some of the more
demonstrable fictions and signs of OT cannibalism but more on those
aspects in their proper sections.

It also bears repeating that the author Matthew never claims to have
been an apostle or a witness, never states his name and never claims to
have known any other witnesses.

To sum up for Matthew:

Papias claims that an apostle named Matthew compiled a sayings Gospel
in Hebrew.

The Canonical Gospel of Matthew is written in literary Greek and is not
a sayings gospel. The author never claims to have been an apostle or an
eyewitness. It relies heavily on secondary Greek sources as well as the
Septuagint. Once again, an eyewitness would not rely on the accounts of
non-witnesses to recount events that he had supposedly seen for
himself. It was written at least 50 years after the alleged
crucifixion. The author includes demonstrable fictions which can
clearly be shown to have been derived from the Septuagint.

Papias' Logia, if it existed, has never been found.



[b]G.Luke[/b]

The traditional author of Luke-Acts is supposedly a physician and
travelling companion of Paul named Luke. Neither Luke nor Paul is a
witness of Jesus even by tradition so I suppose I could stop right
there but I think I'll take the time to point out that even the
tradition which does exist is dubious. First of all, the author of
Luke-Acts never claims to have known Paul. The earliest known claim for
this tradition comes from Irenaeus in the late 2nd century who probably
based his conclusion on the "we passages" from Acts as well as a stray
mention of someone named Luke in Philemon (the name turns up in a
couple of the non-authentic Pauline letters as well but the authentic
corpus onle mentions the name once in passing).

There is no reason whatever to suppose that the Luke mentioned by Paul
has aything to do with either GLuke or Acts.

The "we" passages in Acts are those passages during which the narrative
voice changes from third person to first person plural. This is the
source of the supposition that the author of Luke-Acts was a companion
of Paul's but Vernon Robbins has shown that this was merely a Greek
literary device for describing sea voyages.

Furthermore, Luke knew Josephus, which puts that gospel into the mid
90's CE at a bare minimum and probably later. This means that Paul had
been dead 30 years before Luke-Acts was written. It is highly unlikely,
then, that the book was written by a companion of Paul and there is
absolutely no reason to connect the "Luke" who is so casually mentioned
by Paul in one letter to the composition of Luke-Acts.

Furthermore, Luke is dependent on both Mark and Q which (contrary to
some Christian folklore) means that Luke had no access to first hand
accounts from other witneses.

There are also historical inaccuracies in Luke as well as
contradictions with other Gospels which I will get to in time.

So, to sum up Luke, it is an anonymous gospel whose author makes no
claim to first hand knowledge and no claim to knowledge even of Paul.
It was written more than a half century after the crucifixion, is
dependent on secondary sources and contains numerous historical errors
and contradictions with the other gospels.

The fable of a physician named Luke who travelled with Paul comes from
a claim made 150 years after the crucifixion and is corroborated by
nothing in the text itself.


[b]G.John[/b]

By tradition, the GJohn is written by the apostle of that name and is
also identified as the mysterious "Beloved Disciple" mentioned within
the text. This tradition, like Luke, stems from a late 2nd century
claim by Irenaeus (who is known to have confused John the Apostle with
another John, called 'the Presbyter" and may have been doing so again).

As with the other canonical Gospels, the author of GJohn does not
identify himself or claim to be a witness (The seeming
self-identification in 21:24 is a later redaction to the book, not part
of the orginal manuscript and did not name the author "John" in any
case. It is also not really a first person singular assertion, ("I
wrote this") but a first person plural avowel that "we know" these were
the words of a disciple (without naming the disciple).

Looking at the text of GJohn, we can see that any claim to the book as
an eyewitness account does not hold water. First of all there is the
very late date (c. 100 CE if not later) which puts it at the absolute
edge of any plausible lifespan for a contemporary of Jesus. It also
shows a heavy Hellenistic influence, both in its literary style and its
theology. How does an illiterate Palestinian fisherman suddenly become
proficient in stylized literary Greek and become aware of Alexandrian
Jewish-Greek concepts like the Logos?

GJohn is also arguably the most anti-Jewish work. It goes beyond being
just a polemic against the Pharisees or the priests and becomes a full
on indictment of all Jewish people. Kind of weird since the author
(like Jesus) was allegedly a Jew.

GJohn contains some of the longest, most otherwordly and most
implausible speeches for Jesus. The length of the discourses in itself
mitigates against their historicity simply by virtue of the
implausibilty of those speeches surviving verbatim for 70 or more years
in the memory of this fisherman (and nowhere else. These discourses are
found nowhere else in early Christian literature). They do not have the
short and sweet anecdotal quality of the Q pericopes which are easy to
remember and transmit through oral tradition.

GJohn also shows layered authorship. It is not the contiguous work of a
single author but the result of multiple redactions by multiple hands.

What is really the nail in the coffin, though, is that GJohn
anachronistically retrojects the expulsion of Christians from Jewish
synagogues (an event which occurred c. 85-95 CE) to within the life of
Jesus. An eyewitness could not have made this mistake.

To sum up for John, it is an early 2nd century book which is heavily
Hellenistic in its language and theology. It is markedly anti-Jewish,
it contains speeches for Jesus which are not only incompatible with the
character of Jesus as he is presented in the synoptics (not to mention
that it simply strains all credulity that a 1st century Jewish audience
would tolerate a guy claiming he was God) but simply cannot be credibly
defended as authentic transcriptions of speeches remembered verbatim
for 70 years by an illiterate Palestinian fisherman (and by nobody
else) and then translated into Greek by that same fisherman. It
contains contradictions with the synoptics which I will get to in time.
It shows muliple hands of authorship and it contains an anachronism so
glaring that it is a fatal blow to any consideration of eyewitness
testimony.

Its traditional authorship stems from a single unreliable claim by
Irenaeus (a guy who couldn't keep his "Johns" straight) around 180 CE.

.

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