"Gospel Quest" (or The Jesus Timeline)

[Jenny A]

No one suggested an eyewitness wrote the gospels. That does not prove they did not get the accounts from eyewitnesses and those that might have written things down in the meantime.

Whoa! You mean that unless it can be shown that the writer of an ancient document did not talk to eyewitnesses, we should assume he did talk to eyewitnesses? I don't think so. Maybe we should assume that Homer talked to Odysseus. You see there are good reasons that that's not the we evaluate other documents for historical purposes. When deciding if an account is true the very first thing to do is tho figure out how the writer got his information.

However, in this case Luke tells us that he collected stories said to be eyewitness accounts "handed down to us." What you have here at best is hearsay reported by the writers of the gospels.

Since many have undertaken to set down an orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled among us, 2 just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, 3 I too decided, after investigating everything carefully from the very first,[a] to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, 4 so that you may know the truth concerning the things about which you have been instructed.

My parents are perfectly capable of telling me about events that happened 40 years ago in great detail down to the color of the carpet and who said what when.

Then your parents are amazing people--godlike in fact. Mine can't tell a story between them without interrupting each other with corrections. If fact I don't know anyone who talks accurately about things that happened forty years ago. I've read enough eye witness accounts of auto accidents to know that people don't remember accurately thirty minutes later. And the things we get most wrong are the things we are most sure of. That's because we tend to make coherent stories out of our past when the past is really rather chaotic---stuff just happens mostly.

Forty, fifty, sixty years later is a long, long time to wait to write out an account of anything, especially during a period when the average life span was around forty years. What we have at very best in the gospels is oral tradition passed down and embellished by many people.

If they had taken notes while following around a revolutionary teacher (which would be more probably than not), these stories would be even more accurate. I can write better and type faster than either can and would produce a better finished product about their memories than they would. We can even discuss the final product around the dinner table a few nights to see if I wrote everything down correctly. Your conclusion that since 40 years past and and the writer was not the eyewitness and therefore there is something inherently wrong with the account is faulty logic.

There is no evidence that the disciples or anyone else did anything like taking notes. For one thing, they were probably illiterate. For another, if they had written things down they'd have published just a hair earlier don't you think? Paul's letters circulated much earlier than the gospels.

Isaiah 7:14 - how can you say that that verse does not talk about the Messiah? Immanuel means "God with us"?

Have you read Isaiah 7? If not take a minute and read the whole chapter--it's not long. It is a prediction of what will happen before a child is grown. The prediction is made to King Ahaz about the kings coming to war against him currently. Things were rather immediate and dire for Ahaz at the time. The things Isaiah predicted happened long before Jesus was born.

Immanuel does mean God-is-with-us, but many Hebrew names had similar literal meanings about god and Isaiah said that the mother would call him Immanuel. But Mary doesn't call her child Immanuel, she calls him Jesus. Mathew changes "she" to "they" to make the prophecy fit except that he never really gets around to telling us about how people actually did call Jesus Immanuel. He just say Joseph heard it in a dream. Mathew is the only place Jesus is ever called Immanuel in the gospels and then, only in that one verse about a dream.