(March 14, 2015 at 1:30 pm)Lek Wrote: Okay. I'm going to do a more comprehensive study of the subject from christian and non-christian scholars and see what I come up with. I'm going to try to be totally objective.
You guys are making me work, and that's good. I pretty much stayed on the internet, but I consulted secular and christian sources. Anyway, it does appear that you are right in that none of the gospels were likely penned by the individuals they were named after. I'm not even sure that the church fathers believed they were, but rather that they believed they were written based on traditions that came down from these men. I had already known that the synoptic gospels all drew from a common source or sources. The gospel of John, of course, is attributed to a tradition that was likely passed on through a community associated directly with the apostle John.
Having said this, I don't believe that the accounts in the gospels were not from eyewitnesses. Saying that eyewitnesses didn't write the gospels doesn't mean that the accounts were not from people who viewed the events. We don't know who wrote the sources, such as Q, that the synoptic writers relied on, but they were very likely eyewitnesses. If the apostle John was the source for the gospel of John, then the source was obviously an eyewitness to Jesus.
I realize that my presentation isn't very scholarly, but it does state where I stand on the matter. And, of course, I believe in the intervention of the Holy Spirit in ensuring that the bible included the truth which God intended to be relayed to us.