3 reasons for Christians to start questionng their faith

[FallentoReason]

With Mark being the first Gospel written, why did "Matthew", a supposed witness, feel the need to use the content in Mark as opposed to his own eyewitness testimony? Why is it written in third person?

Mark was the account already written. He could have simply not wanted to repeat a story already told in another way.

Weak. Witness testimony > hearsay any day, especially when one is going through the trouble of setting up a new religion.

Mark was the historical account and first written. Matthew was trying to convert Jews. Matthew is laced with OT references and genealogies and prophesies fulfilled and whatnot that the Jews at the time loved.

Such as the prophecy that Jesus would be called a Nazarene, which is nowhere to be found in the OT?

http://www.blueletterbible.org/search/tr...t=KJV&sf=5

Mark never mentions himself. John never mentions himself. Matthew doesn't either. This wasn't a letter, it was a book to tell the story.

Excellent. You've set out your work to prove Tradition is correct in asserting authorship like it has.

John is a clear example of rumours being hyped up, which indicates it couldn't have been an eyewitness who wrote it, otherwise we wouldn't see this clear exaggeration in e.g. theology.

Do you believe all the conspiracy websites? Perhaps those websites are a conspiracy themselves...

Funny you mention "conspiracy". There's some Christian friends I know in real life who fervently believe NASA never went to the moon and that 9/11 was an inside job by the US government. I'm not surprised in the least to see that they believe conspiracy theories, because the backwards thinking required to justify those views are the very same that are required to believe in religion.

Anyway, the reason you say John has "hyped up rumors" must be because you really want there to be a flaw, because this is quite the stretch. Lets put this book at 100 A.D. to make this easy. You're going to tell me, that rumors got hyped up so amazingly high within the course of 60-70 years, that some guy wrote a book in which the dude claims to be God... and everyone believes it? Wouldn't most of the people be able to ask their friend about the dude? So there is a group that starts making racket about this guy, and no one stops and thinks, "I should probably ask people who were also there"? Such a stretch.

1 John 4:1-3
1Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits, whether they are of God; because many false prophets have gone out into the world. 2By this you know the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, 3and every spirit that does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is not of God.

Don't you find it incredible that within this generation, we have a full spectrum of Christians that can't decide what the truth is? I mean, if you think I'm stretching the truth, then how about your early comrades in the 1st century preaching a spiritual Christ? CLEARLY it wasn't so easy as simply asking someone "who was there", because otherwise we wouldn't have (what you might call a conspiracy nut) preaching a spiritual Christ when Jesus was apparently just on earth. The conviction in those Christians' hearts as well as their belief in a spiritual Christ should logically seem like a mutually exclusive thing, yet we had people saying they believed in God and this spiritual messiah.