The Historical Reliability of the New Testament

[Jenny A]

For skeptics of the traditional authorship of the gospels, some questions:

Your questions make some unwarranted assumptions.

[1]Why would copies of gospels circulate anonymously all over the Roman empire for decades and then suddenly be ascribed to the authors we know today unanimously without dispute in the second century?

The unwarranted assumptions here are that each gospel was circulated all over the Roman empire and that the authors were attributed without dispute.  

[2]When the gospels were being read in the liturgy, how would they have been distinguished one from another if they did not have names such as “The Gospel of Mark” or “The Gospel According to Luke”?

What liturgy? How far back can you place any liturgy?

[3] Why attribute a gospel to someone who had a somewhat dubious track record (like Mark who abandoned Paul on a missionary journey) unless it was true that Mark wrote it? 

[4] Why attribute a gospel written for a Jewish audience to Matthew, a man who would have been hated as a Roman collaborator by that audience, unless it was true that Matthew wrote it?

You are assuming a capacity for historical analysis, that perhaps the compilers of the gospels lacked.  But this is the first real historical criticism you've made.  Where it the only evidence, it might be persuasive.

So what is the evidence that the attributed authors did not write the gospels?

First:  The gospels contradict too much of what we know about concurrent history to have been written by people witnessing the event:

    Herod's Slaughter of the Innocents (Matthew 2:16-18) is not recorded in any other history (or Gospel) — not even by Josephus, who really didn't like Herod and meticulously catalogued his other misdeeds.
   Luke 2:1-4 claims Jesus was born in the year of a universal tax census, but the first such census did not occur until 74 CE - and it is not in the other gospels. [9]
   Luke 2:2 KJV specifically states "And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria." Cyrenius is the Greek name for Publius Sulpicius Quirinius, who came to this position in 6 CE.
   Luke 3:1 KJV references a "Lysanias the tetrarch of Abilene" but the only Lysanias ruling Abilene that can clearly be identified in secular sources was killed by Mark Antony in 36 BCE.
   Luke 3:2 KJV talks about "Annas and Caiaphas being the high priests" but there are a manor problem with that: according to Josephus, Annas and Caiaphas were NEVER high priests together. Annas was high priest c 6 CE - c 15 CE while Caiaphas was high priest c 18 - c 36 CE with a priest called Eleazar the son of Ananus between them.
   The Sanhedrin trial account is totally at odds with the records on how that court actually operated in the 1st century.[1 In fact, a little quirk of the Sanhedrin court was that a unanimous verdict for conviction resulted in acquittal.
   Pontius Pilate is totally out of character based on other accounts. Josephus relates two accounts where Pilate's solution to mobs causing a disturbance was brutally simple--have Roman soldiers go out and kill them until they dispersed. Moreover it is never really explained in the Bible why, if Jesus' only crime was blasphemy, Pilate would need to be involved. If Jesus' crime has been sedition, then there would be no reason for Pilate to involve Herod Antipas--or for the Sanhedrin to be involved for that matter.
   The crucified were left to rot as a warning to others unless there was intervention on the behalf of an important person per The Life of Flavius Josephus
   Given Jesus' short time on the cross and reports of him being out and about afterwards, certainly the Romans might have wondered if they had been tricked. Never mind that theft of a body was a capital crime. Yet there is nothing in the reports about the Romans acting on either possibility. Carrier describe how the Romans would have handled the situation and it is totally at odds with the account in Acts.  

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gospels

Second, the authors do not claim their work.  And the later attributions are strange.  The ancient's didn't generally have title pages like ours but they did claim their works in the body of the text (which the authors of the gospels do not) and other copying or referring to the work referred to it with the author's name in the genitive, or passive case.  So if they had for example referred to one of you posts they would have said Randy's post.  The post according to Randy, is a locution not found anywhere but the gospels. https://adversusapologetica.wordpress.co...e-gospels/

Third the gospels were written much too late for them to have been written by the attributed authors.

Fourth, the attribution doesn't occur until long after they were written.

Fifth, the synoptic gospels are far too much alike and betray signs of all relying on earlier documents, something the attributed authors would not have to do.

Sixth they were written in a language foreign to those supposed to have written them.