(October 7, 2021 at 5:41 pm)ayost Wrote: So I go ok, it's reasonable to believe that what was originally written is what I'm reading. Then I read the 4 gospels telling me the same story form different points of view. And I say to myself this is what theses first century men wrote, they are all four telling the same story, what evidence do I have that contradicts what they are saying? Shoot, there's no evidence against what they're saying except skepticism. Maybe people resurrecting from the dead is enough to make you say this is a myth, fair enough. So what other evidence do I have that they were telling me the truth? Oh, wow, they were all violently killed instead of recanting because the were so sold out to what they believed? This seems to have truth to it.
You make a number of statements here as fact with which few if any critical New Testament scholars would agree. For example, the claim that the gospels tell "the same story form different points of view." The vast inconsistencies between the gospel accounts have been documented for centuries, and many of them are quite significant. For example, on what day was Jesus crucified and what were his last words? While some might not be complete inconsistencies, attempts to harmonize them into a single account require tortuous contrivances that defy the principle of analogy and insult reason. Even more important that where the gospels differ is where they are identical, word for word. This is clear evidence they were not independent accounts but were copied from one another. These are works of plagiarism in which the authors of later gospels reworked earlier ones to make them better align with their own theologies.
New Testament Chrisitan scholar Richard Bauckham holds to traditional authorship of the gospels but has admitted, “That the texts of our Gospels are close to the eyewitness reports of the words and deeds of Jesus — runs counter to almost all recent New Testament scholarship. . . . [T]he prevalent view is that a long period of oral transmission in the churches intervened between whatever the eyewitnesses said and the Jesus traditions as they reached the Evangelists. No doubt the eyewitnesses started the process of oral tradition, but it passed through many retellings, reformulations, and expansions before the Evangelists themselves did their own editorial work on it.”
Also, what is your basis for claiming the gospel writers "were all violently killed instead of recanting because the were so sold out to what they believed?" I'm not aware of a single record of any gospel writer being violently killed because of his Christian faith after refusing to recant. This Christian persecution claim is a myth.