Do you think jesus christ existed

[Aractus]

I am assuming that you have no idea of the difference between primary and secondary evidence so ill explain it.

Primary evidence is actual artifact. Secondary evidence is Narrative. Here is an example.

Le'ts take an imaginary battle from 1500 CE We have reports that x number of people were there. These change from person to person and from how long afterwards the events happened so they aren't very reliable. This is secondary evidence.

However lets say we find stack of bills for provisions and munitions and a book of accounts. this is primary evidence, it will give us a far better idea of how many people were there.

The Gospels are at best very poor primary evidence based on testimony, probably second hand, from decades before.

a Good analogy would be a court case. Witness testimony is considered to be the worst evidence. Indeed courts in the UK will only accept narrative from notes if the notes were written within 24 hours and they don't accept hearsay and yet you believe 30 year old memories (at best) and hearsay are actually good evidence

The Gospel of John is written by an eyewitness. The Epistle of James is written by the brother of Jesus, another eyewitness. I don't expect either of those points to convince you, much less would I expect you to believe 1/2 Peter is written by Peter.

Luke-Acts is written by Luke - or at the very least a single author (concensus view), and he is a companion of Pual. More than half of the events recorded in Acts happened at the time of the author's involvement in the church and many of them were witnessed by him.

Paul is the undisputed author of 7 Epistles, but he's the author of a total of 13-14 Epistles. Paul is an early church leader, he knew the apostles personally and he knew James and the family of Jesus, and he knew other early church leaders.

So for those 9 books you have no recourse to say that they are bad quality evidence at all based on the authorship criteria.

Scholars don't stop with that criteria, they look at far more things than you have bothered to list. Luke obviously made use of the Gospel of Mark believing it to be a reliable source.

Here's some examples...

Luke-John bound together:



Further evidence that Luke-Acts is written by the one author comes from Codex Bezae, which contains all the gospels and acts, and has an anti-Semitic strain found only in Luke-Acts. Thus the strain has to go back to a copy that was made containing only Luke-Acts bound together. Since all four gospels were bound together by the middle of the second century, it's believed that you can't date the inception of this "corrupted" copy of Luke-Acts after that. Thus the Luke-Acts component was a separate codex bound together and written no later than mid 2nd century.

Sceptics like yourself believe that John was written in the second century, or at the very earliest in the AD 90's. Yet there are more early manuscripts for John dating to the second century than for any other gospel, and one that may even date to the first century (but likely dates to the early 2nd century). The most important of these is this one:


(Papyrus 66)

It is near-complete. Like all early manuscripts, it contains the nomina sacra, which itself is strong evidence of canonization. It has the title "Gospel according to John" as is found on every copy - every one (this is true for all the Gospels). But you know what's interesting is the sceptics say this gospel had to have been written no earlier than the very late first century, they say it's written after all the other Gospels - yet the manuscript evidence is the reverse and we have more early copies of John than any other Gospel, so what evidence is this based on?