As Bart Ehrman writes in Jesus Interrupted....
The problem is that Ehrman then goes on to postulate that "oral tales" were told and that the discrepancies are because different authors heard different stories. However, he conveniently ignores the fact that there is no way to determine the authenticity of oral tales that no one has ever heard.
Quote:What sources do we have for Jesus? Well, we have multiple
sources in the Gospels of the New Testament. That part is good. But
they are not written by eyewitnesses who were contemporary with the events they narrate. They were written thirty-five to sixty-fi ve
years after Jesus’ death by people who did not know him, did not see
anything he did or hear anything that he taught, people who spoke
a different language from his and lived in a different country from
him. The accounts they produced are not disinterested; they are narratives produced by Christians who actually believed in Jesus, and
therefore were not immune from slanting the stories in light of their
biases. They are not completely free of collaboration, since Mark
was used as a source for Matthew and Luke. And rather than being
fully consistent with one another, they are widely inconsistent, with
discrepancies filling their pages, both contradictions in details and
divergent large-scale understandings of who Jesus was.
Pgs 143-144
The problem is that Ehrman then goes on to postulate that "oral tales" were told and that the discrepancies are because different authors heard different stories. However, he conveniently ignores the fact that there is no way to determine the authenticity of oral tales that no one has ever heard.
