(March 25, 2010 at 11:00 pm)Minimalist Wrote:Quote:ZenBadger,tavarish and chatpilot the Four Gospels were written by men that were living at the same time that Jesus walked this earth.
A patently absurd suggestion but about what one can expect from people like you.
Indeed; estimates for writing of the Gospels vary ,from 80 CE at the earliest to 120 CE. IE FROM about 50 years after the death of Jesus (born sometime between 7 and 4 BCE,dying at age 33)
@ Redfish :The question of the source material, called 'the Q document' is far from resolved,remaining in dispute amongst biblical scholars.
Quote:The Q document or Q (from the German Quelle, "source") is a postulated lost textual source for the Gospel of Matthew and Gospel of Luke. It is a theoretical collection of Jesus' sayings, written in Koine Greek. Although many scholars believe that "Q" was a real document, no actual document or fragment has been found.
Quote:If the two-source hypothesis is correct, then the second source, Q, would almost certainly have to be a written document. If Q were merely a shared oral tradition, it could not account for the nearly identical word-for-word similarities between Matthew and Luke when quoting Q material.
Similarly, it is possible to deduce that the Q document, in the form that Matthew and Luke had access to, was written in Greek. If Matthew and Luke were referring to a document that had been written in some other language (for example Aramaic), it is highly unlikely that two independent translations would have exactly the same wording.
The Q document must have been composed prior to the Gospels of both Matthew and Luke. Some scholars even suggest Q may have predated Mark. A date for the final Q document is often placed in the 40s or 50s of the first century, with some arguing the sapiential layer (1Q) being written as early as the 30s [5].
The Q document, if it did exist, has since been lost, but scholars believe it can be partially reconstructed by examining elements common to Matthew and Luke (but absent from Mark). This reconstructed Q is notable in that it generally does not describe the events of the life of Jesus: Q does not mention Jesus' birth, his selection of the 12 disciples, his crucifixion, or the resurrection. Instead, it appears to be a collection of Jesus' sayings and teachings.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_document