The Canonical Gospels Have No Authority

[FallentoReason]

I partly agree with what you're saying. Except where your example fails is that it's not representing the actual reality of things. To make it true to our dilemma at hand, your example should have you posting in a car forum and only then if you never once mentioned your 1967 Mustang or 64 Ranchero can the person 100 years from now rightfully conclude that you never owned them, with the assumption being that it's incredibly unlikely that you wouldn't mention such information. Remember that we're not dealing with mindless data. We're dealing with people who have certain *intentions* and from these intentions we can justifiably expect certain things of them.

It's sort of the same deal here. We have Church Fathers and apologists exhausting all the resources they have on hand in order to defend the faith, yet the most glaringly obvious documents they should have referenced are nowhere to be found in their writings. Take Papias for example - 5 volumes of what Christ had to say, and not one word he uttered appears again in our Gospels.

Fishy eh? And I'm not talking about the age of Pisces in which Jesus was born

But again with out a complete record to draw from the certainty in which this book makes its assumptions is based of fallacious reasoning. In short 'the car forum' in which the assumptions are made are no where near complete.

Like I said, you have to remember that people have intentions. The early Church Fathers (and apologists) obviously wanted to defend the faith. Put yourself in their position, and tell me which books would be your go-to sources to take on such a task? Obviously the eye-witness Gospels, among other things perhaps. The fact that they haven't mentioned them is (1) bizarre and not in line with their intentions and (2) the chances of our records being such that we're missing exactly those people who *did* mention our Gospels is extremely low, because it's a random assortment of extant documents.