07-10-2012, 05:03 PM
Quote:OTOH, I do believe that the people who wrote eyewitness accounts were either writing what they saw, or what they remembered they'd seen, in those cases where they wrote at a later time. Caesar, Pliny, John, Luke, they saw what they saw and wrote what they wrote
Ehrman and others consider it highly unlikely that aramaic speaking (and probably illiterate) jewish peasants from c 30 CE could've written gospels in refined Greek over half a century later. The gospels weren't even attributed to specific apostles until a century after they were written. It's most parsimonious to attribute them to unknown Greek christians born after the events of 30-33 CE.