Utterly false. For example, name ONE source which establishes, say, the temptation of Christ by Satan.
I see… you’re one of those who think that making a statement rise up and walk on all fours will show it to be false. Obviously I didn’t mean every facet of Jesus life. Not even the gospels themselves cover that. The point I was making still stands, and here’s a clue, not even the most liberal but respected scholars of today deny the existence of Jesus. That’s how well established it is.
This is a lie (not saying you are lying, just that whoever told you this is). There are ZERO copies which date to the first century.
There once was a famous Chef named Harland David Sanders (aka Colonel Sanders) who had a special 8 page multi-million dollar recipe for fried chicken. Suppose he gave full copies of the recipe to 8 very trusted close friends for safe keeping before he opened his first restaurant in 1930. After about 30 years his Kentucky Fried Chicken business had become very popular. Then in 1964 racial riots begun to break out around the country. Also around that time some business men approached Sanders, who were interested in buying his business and recipe. However the store where he had stored his original recipe was burned to the ground by rioters. So the Colonel called one of his 8 friends who had a copy of the recipe, but his friend told him his copy had been destroyed years ago in a flood. Another friend had been burglarized some time back and the thieves trashed his house. Only about three pages of his copy of the recipe survived. After calling his other 6 remaining friends he found all had similar bad news for the Colonel. But amazingly he discovered that each friend had lost only a different section of their copies and the Colonel was able to piece together a complete copy of the actual original recipe using all the remaining pieces of copies.
What I have just described here of course is fiction but it is an example of what is called the science of textual criticism, and how it works and works quite well. Historian F.E. Peterson tells us that the New Testament books were the most widely copied and circulated books of all of antiquity. Today there are more than 5,300 Greek manuscript copies that date to within a century of the actual event. There are more than 10,000 Latin manuscript copies, and 9300 other early manuscript copies from that time period. Also we have more than 24,000 manuscript portions of copies of the New Testament, some that date to within 50 years of the crucifixion.
https://winteryknight.com/2012/02/11/earliest-manuscript-of-the-new-testament-discovered/
http://blog.godreports.com/2012/02/earliest-fragment-from-book-of-mark-found/
The gospels were not written by the Apostles…
Untrue, consider the testimonies we have that say otherwise. Papias in around A.D. 125 specifically confirmed that Mark carefully and accurately recorded Peter's eyewitness accounts of the events, and even stated that Mark made no mistake and did not include any false statement. Papias also told us that Matthew (
the disciple) had preserved the teachings of Jesus as well.
Irenaeus of Lyons writing in about A.D. 180 confirmed the authorship of Matthew that Matthew had written his own Gospel account among the Hebrews in their own tongue. He said when Peter and Paul were preaching in Rome they found the church there. After their departure, Mark, “
the disciple” and interpreter of Peter “
the disciple,” himself handed down to us in writing the substance of Peter's preaching. Luke, the follower of Paul, set down in a book the Gospel preached by his teacher. Then John, “
the disciple” of the Lord, who also leaned on his breast, himself produced his Gospel while he was living at Ephesus in Asia.
How can you say that they WOULD HAVE written corrective documents…
For starters Philo-Judaeus lived in the Roman providence of Egypt at the time. I guess he didn’t get CNN so he probably didn’t know what was happening over in Israel. However Roman/Jewish war reporter Josephus wrote about the subject. He was a non-Christian “Jewish” first century historian (meaning he was unsympathetic to the cause), who described the stoning of "
James the brother of Jesus" for transgressing the Law of God. His writings date to around A.D. 93 and describe "
a wise man named Jesus, who performed many surprising feats, won over many Jews, was condemned to be crucified by Pilate, and the tribe of Christians who called after him has still to this day not disappeared." Josephus was mainly only concerned in his writings with reporting about the Jewish war, so of course there wasn’t much there. Archaeology has substantiated all of his claims concerning the war, which is evidence he was a reliable historian. We would not have expected Josephus as a non-Christian to be too interested in spending a lot of time or details surrounding Jesus. However what he does establish for us is: A) Jesus was a spiritual leader because He “won over many Jews.” B) Jesus was crucified as the gospels claim by a Roman leader named Pilate. C) Jesus had started some sort of movement that was still active over 60 years after His death.
Now at this point is where anyone who has been listening to the liberal critics, will want to cry foul ball. “The Josephus comments were tampered with by Christian zealots…so we can’t trust them as reliable”…right? Well the thing that these critics seem to miss is yes there is a citation of Josephus that is known to have been tampered with by zealots, but there are actually other citations that were not. Citations such as were published by Professor Shlomo Pines in 1971 which were found in both Arabic and Syriac. These citations did not have the tampered with portions. They were written just as I stated above showing he was a reliable source.
