(August 2, 2017 at 5:22 pm)Simon Moon Wrote:(August 2, 2017 at 4:00 pm)SteveII Wrote: 4. It is your claim they were not eyewitnesses! They claimed they were. Competing claims...I go with them.
Most scholars believe that Mark was written by a second-generation Christian, around or shortly after the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Second Temple in year 70.
Luke admits, fairly directly that he wasn't an eyewitness.
Matthew used Mark as a source. Why would an eyewitness not use his own account?
There is no consensus about John, but the majority of scholars believe it was unlikely the anonymous author was an eyewitness.
I posted this earlier:
27 books plus Q, possibly L and M as well. The fact that we don't know who wrote 3-4 of them does not mean what you think it means. Of course the recipients would have known the exact provenance of each. In the case of the three gospels, the people who copied the manuscripts for distribution only felt the need to record whose information was contained in the document (Matthew, Mark, John) and not the guy with the pen. Luke was not a disciple and intended to "write an orderly account" in Luke and Acts. If you want actual eyewitnesses with their names on the books, John, Peter, and James.
Regarding the Matthew, Mark and John--the disciples themselves probably didn't pen the works that have their names. That does not mean the accounts were not theirs. The recipients of the books knew them to come from those three "communities (close followers of that particular disciple)" and identified them as such in our earliest mentions of them in the second century.
Why did they us Q, and perhaps M and L? Why not? They would have known who wrote them, have them available to read. If they agreed with their content, they used the information.
