Open debate: What does Jesus teach?

[Aractus]

the accounts are so dubious, so self-contradictory and so contradictory of what we know of history that we have an unsolvable mess.

Rubbish. You can have a high degree of confidence in some facts and a very low degree of confidence in others, that doesn't mean that because some things are unsubstantiated and probably not factually based that everything isn't.

I'd love to see some source material here. Even apologists seldom try to push Mark any earlier than 70 CE. This is because the "little apocalypse" of chapter 13 places the dates after the destruction of the temple in 70 CE.

So what? The first temple had fallen to siege, Jerusalem had fallen to siege at least 4 times just in the past millennium. It since fell to siege several more times since. Jesus didn't know that the second temple would fall in 70AD and if it had instead fallen in say 120AD then you'd be trying to push the date after 120AD. Your neo-scepticism is completely irrational.

Luke and Matt are clearly derived from Mark so that puts their dates even later.

That's not entirely the case, but yes they were written later than Mark but not necessarily much later.

But let's get back to Mark. Since the other Gospels are based upon Mark (with the exception of John, which is a different story about a different Jesus, as tacitly admitted by the Christian use of the word "synoptic" (similar) to classify the other three Gospel accounts), he's your star witness. The problems with Mark's credibility include:

• Dubious Source: Mark is considered the author of the Gospel by "tradition"
  
• Hearsay: This same "tradition" tells us that he penned the Gospel based on what Peter taught him.
  
• Testimony Based on Much Later Recollections: It was penned at least 40 years after the events.
  
• Contamination: We know of at least one very significant alteration to the original publication (Mark 16:8)
  
• Hearsay on Top of Hearsay: Some of the events in the Gospel are ones that Peter would not have witnessed, as admitted to in the Gospel itself. For example, it places Peter with the servants while Pilate interrogates Jesus.
  

And he's your star witness.

"Mine"? No he isn't. Luke and Paul are. Luke (or whoever the author of Luke-Acts was) is a credible author although he does not get all his facts right. Paul is also a credible author, however by volume if you reject the 2 Thessalonians and the 3 pastoral epistles he only wrote about 2/3ds of what Luke did (in 7-9 separate epistles).

We don't know who the authors of Mark/Matthew are, but that hardly matters in the question of whether they're reliable, and we don't know for certain the author of Luke-Acts but we do know at least that it's a single author.

Now the fact that Luke makes extensive use of Mark is what gives that credibility to Mark.

Luke admits in the very beginning of his Gospel that he's not a witness but has collected and recorded his accounts. Luke was a companion of Paul who in turn only met Jesus in a vision after Jesus had died.

Correct, however he is in fact a witness to much of the later part of Acts (from about chapter 15 on).

Luke can't possibly be the author of Acts of the Apostles due to a contradiction on the day that Jesus rose into the sky, surely an important detail that one would expect a single witness to be consistent about. Luke's Gospel places the ascension on the day of the resurrection while Acts places it 40 days later.

Most scholars believe Luke-Acts is the work of a single author. The resurrection (Acts 1:2 "the day he was taken up") and ascension (Acts 1:9-11) are two different days that occur 40 days apart. Again, though, Luke is allowed to get some details wrong - he's only human - that isn't enough to cast doubt over whether there's a single author or not.

Matt is clearly a liar, as evident by his misquotes of OT scripture and assertions about non-existent OT "prophecies" where he should have known better.

Again here you go making sweeping assumptions instead of examining evidence. Yes the Is. 7:14 Prophecy is "wrong", however as it appears quoted in Matt it is near letter-for-letter identical in the LXX meaning that one had to have been copied from the other or that both were copied from a single common source. So there is is entirely possible that Matthew is simply copying from a proto-lxx Isiah document.

John's Jesus is a completely different Character set in a completely different story. Cataloging all the differences would require a dissertation and I trust it isn't necessary seeing how the incompatibility is all but admitted to by even the Christians themselves.

So what? Different people should have different impressions of the same person if that person is indeed a genuine person. Have you ever had friends who had physically abusive partners? Ask them to give you a description of that person and compare it to say their parent's description of the same person. Get what I'm saying?

A consistent timeline that includes all four Gospel accounts is impossible to construct. Matt has Jesus born before 4 BCE under the reign of King Herod. Luke has Jesus conceived under the reign of King Herod but not born until the administration of Quirinius after 6 CE, meaning Mary's pregnancy lasted at least 10 years.

Again, Luke simply got that detail wrong. That's the most logical explanation since we can place his baptism by John in 28-29 AD and John had to have been at least 30 to start his ministry as dictated by OT law (not to mention that it clearly says Jesus is about thirty in the gospel accounts). The nativity has other problems between the accounts too, but that doesn't change the reliability of other parts of those same books like say the baptism by John which is widely acknowledged as a firm historical event.

If we fudge what "about 30" means, perhaps Jesus was 28, then we can make Luke's dates fit nicely with the birth in 6 CE, JtB's imprisonment in 34 CE

No, that number you can't fudge. As I told you it would mean that both John and Jesus were breaking OT law (or at least tradition) by beginning a ministry before their 30th year (Numbers 4:2-3). That would have been especially noteworthy had it been the case.

When Jesus is baptized, and this story is one that clearly got better with the telling, the synoptic Gospels tell us that he immediately went into the wilderness for 40 days but John's Gospel tells us he gathered disciples attended a wedding.

John's gospel is certainly not chronological. It's organized by topic and this has lead theologians and scholars over the centuries to suggest it was written later. But that's not necessarily true, and certainly there's no way of pinning down the date it was written to a firm period within the context of the other NT texts.

The "when"s and "where"s are hard to reconcile as are the "who" and "what" Jesus was. The synoptic Gospels have Jesus as a man who is clearly separate from and subordinate to his father while John's Gospel is more consistent with Trinitarian ideas about Jesus.

You have that wrong, but I'm not surprised - many Christians don't know the difference either. The Trinitatian doctrine doesn't contradict the teaching that Jesus is eternally subordinate to the father, it's only in very recent years that the eternal subordination has come into question in Christian churches, even though it has never been questioned since the early church in Jerusalem and Rome.

Fine. I'll assume for the sake of argument that The Historical Jesus existed ...and its moot because we'll never know what the true story was.

That's not accurate - you do know much of the story. Same with Ned Kelly in Australia - some biographies written within a couple of decades after his death have erroneous details, but it doesn't change the fact that those same biographies also contain detail historically relevant and accurate accounts too.