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How could the authors of Matthew, Mark & Luke have so accurately quoted Jesus?

Cieza

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How could the authors of Luke, Matthew & Mark so accurately have quoted Jesus? Did Jesus have a transcriber who followed him around every he went with the intent that everything he said would be later written into a book? Or did the authors of Luke, Matthew & Mark make up everything Jesus said merely to suit their personal agendas?
 

AlexBP

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The story of the life of Jesus was transmitted into the gospels by a combination of written and oral sourcing. Exactly what the sources were, we do not know. The probable timeline agreed on by most scholars looks something like this:

30-33 AD: The ministry of Jesus in Galilee and Palestine.

33-40 AD: Formation of the Church, creation of the earliest creeds.

40-60 AD: Paul and James write their epistles.

60-70 AD: Mark's Gospel written.

70-80 AD: Matthew's and Luke's Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles written.

After 80 AD: John's Gospel and latter epistles written.

While we don't know exactly how the information was transmitted, scholars have made informed speculation. There was probably a document called 'Q' bearing the information shared by Matthew and Luke but not Mark. In addition, there were probably separate early sources for material included only in Matthew or only in Mark, commonly called 'M' and 'L'. Luke, at the start of his gospel, refers to "many" previous writings about the life of Jesus. While we can't pin exact dates on these, dates of 50-60 AD seem likely.

As for oral transmission, some people used to assume that it was necessarily unreliable. However, anthropologists have studied oral transmission in primitive cultures and they've found that while works don't stay exactly the same word-for-word, the fundamentals of the work don't change in oral transmission. There can be oral transmission of works as long as 100,000 words and they can be transmitted reliably for centuries. Compared to this, the transmission of the gospel material for 20, 30, or even 40 years would not be remarkable at all.

(It is worth nothing that it's utterly remarkable that anyone would write a biography of Jesus a mere 30 or 40 years after his life. In the ancient world, people rarely wrote biographies of a figures until several centuries after the figure's life. Yet obviously historians trust such biographies all the time.)

To read more about what scholars know about the gospels and their creation. I'd suggest the book Lord or Legend: Wrestling with the Jesus Dilemma, by Gregory A. Boyd and Paul Rhodes Eddy.
 
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Cieza

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You'll get more Christian responses in the Exploring Christianity[/URL] section.
Thank you. If you or the mods can move these threads to that section, that would be great. If not, I'll copy the intro to these threads over there later today.
 
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knux3k

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you need to understand the era and context in which Jesus lived...For example, the disciples of any rabbi tried to memorize any word out of their rabbis mouth-I suggest a book called "More Than a Carpenter". The writer puts Jesus in his context, while showing several proofs as well to Christianity.
 
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lucaspa

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How could the authors of Luke, Matthew & Mark so accurately have quoted Jesus? Did Jesus have a transcriber who followed him around every he went with the intent that everything he said would be later written into a book? Or did the authors of Luke, Matthew & Mark make up everything Jesus said merely to suit their personal agendas?
Why do you say Matthew, Mark, and Luke accurately quoted Jesus but leave out John? Because they have the same quotations?

Biblical scholars agree that those 3 gospels all used a common source, a work of quotes called "Q" by the scholars, as their source for quotes. The Gospel of Thomas is all quotes, no narrative. In those days oral tradition was very strong. So "Q" is based upon oral tradition.

Notice that the different authors put the same quote in different contexts: stage of the ministry, what Jesus said before and after, etc. That's part of the evidence for the inferrence of the common source for quotes.

Matthew and Luke were writing for particular audiences: Jews for Matthew and gentiles for Luke. Many of the differences in the gospels can be explained by those 2 agendas, such as the completely different birth narratives.
 
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Catherineanne

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How could the authors of Luke, Matthew & Mark so accurately have quoted Jesus? Did Jesus have a transcriber who followed him around every he went with the intent that everything he said would be later written into a book? Or did the authors of Luke, Matthew & Mark make up everything Jesus said merely to suit their personal agendas?

No, the Lord did not have a transcriber who followed him around. However, collections of his sayings are likely to have existed before the Gospels, and to have been used by the Gospel writers when they were writing their accounts of the Lord's life.

It is likely that Paul had a copy of these sayings, as indeed did other early apostles and teachers, but unfortunately none has survived to the present day.
 
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JYJ

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The literalist will always be in trouble in this area. Sometimes we forget that the disciples were people just like us as regards speaking, teaching, quoting and voicing opinion. Does a preacher today give the same sermon the same exact way every time he/she chooses that topic? No. If asked about it the questioner will be told that the essence of the sermon is the same. So who not with the disciples too? When they purport of quote Jesus maybe it really is a quote or maybe it's paraphrased. Does it matter? Not to me. I know better than to think that everything in scripture should be believed in a literal sense. Human beings are involved and they are imperfect. OK the apologist will say that "no but the Word of God is perfect" as though this wins the discussion but can we remember that the Word of God, when passed through the mind of a man cannot arrive at the other side in exactly the same way that it was heard. The human mind is incapable of registering such a high degree of accuracy and infallibility.
 
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