Gospels and Reliability

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Hello, I came across a few websites that say the Gospels are forgeries and the 12 apostles are not real, and fabricated evidence was created. Another makes the claim that the final chapter of the Gospel of John (21) is a sixth-century forgery. Is there any truth to any of these claims? And how could this be refuted?

Here are the websites in question:

vridar.wordpress.com/2009/05/25/manufacturing-evidence-for-the-historicity-of-12-apostles/

bibliotecapleyades.net/biblianazar/esp_biblianazar_40.htm
 
Hello lemon beam. I am not an apologist or Biblical expert by any means but wanted to see at least one reply to your OP and maybe get people smarter than me to answer.

Your first link goes to the discrepancies on the 12 Apostles and their names and uses John Meier’s opus on the historical Christ in its footnotes but then rushes to conclude: “Ancient historians who explore the course of democratic Athens and imperial Rome work with facts such as archaeological monuments, inscriptions, coins, clay shards and other artefacts that testify of individuals, political bodies, voting customs and economic structures, and literary works whose contents are in many respects supported by such evidence. They work with the data they have, and see how it can be best interpreted and understood. They do not attempt to establish the existence of a fact by criteria that work exclusively at the conceptual level of thought-experiments.”

Well, in comparison to other historical works written at the time the Bible has much more “artefacts” and “testifications” to point to its veracity than any other work of the similar period. But of course, Roman pagan texts are never put under the microscope to the extent the Bible is. There were 12 apostles and it seems the writer of that blog wants to have it go backwards with wishful thinking that the 12 was a post-hoc addition (then why Judas?)

Paul’s Letters were already being written within 20 years of Christ’s crucifixion, a fact attested by even many liberal theologians. In St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans, he is already writing to a Christian community that independently sprung up there BEFORE Paul even took his mission to the Gentiles. The message of Christ had spread so rapidly that Nero of Rome in 64 A.D. ordered the Christians destroyed. What exactly do anti-Christian writers think these Christians (livingwithin some 30 years of Christ’s crucifixion) actually believed: it was of course Christ not Mithras or some such).

The Gospels were all written within the lifetime of witnesses to Jesus, John possibly the latest. The late Catholic Father Raymond Brown’s Introduction to the New Testament gives a centrist approach to explaining the origins, authors, and timing of the Bible. If you can get it at a library, interesting reading.books.google.ca/books?id=qE_bIgAACAAJ&dq=Raymond+Brown&lr=
 
The second link goes to a bizarre site claiming our New Testament was forged and specifically by Constantine. Old hat. Of course, deep theological points were allowed to be hammered out at Church Councils (like the Nicene Creed) when Rome finally legalized Christianity. And of course there were theological disputations on some of the finer points of the Trinity. But Christianity already was “established” in central beliefs.

The author’s quotes from the Catholic Encyclopedia showing no firm time date for the writing of the Gospels is not pertinent, however. That Encyclopedia, which also appears at the top of our Forum, was however edited in 1914. Since then we have found more artifacts and learned much more so that biblical historians can make very good arguments as to the timing of the Gospels and to which communities they appear to have been written to.

The Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus exemplify the discrepancies that were bound to occur as a result of scribal copying, both lacking the last eleven verses of Mark’s gospel, and John’s story of the woman taken in adultery. However, since the finding of Sinaiticus, significant quantities of other even earlier documentation relating to Jesus have been found - albeit in often fragementary form. We have papyrus fragments of John at Magdalen College, Oxford, written between 100 and 125 A.D. We have fragments of the Egerton Papyrus dating to 150 A.D. From such and other material it is possible to deduce that written copies of gospels as carried among Jesus’ earliest followers took the form of codices or booklets, with relatively small, numbered pages. From Ian Wilson’s Jesus: The Evidence

chapters.indigo.ca/books/Jesus-Evidence-Latest-Research-Discoveries-Ian-Wilson/9780062514721-item.html?s_campaign=Google_BookSearch_organic&pticket=j5o3eg55geyo0155sc0oo245%2frLB0wi1UKlXE5IVRHqLbteDpcM%3d

As for Constantine opening up ballots at the First Council of Nicaea to vote on Krishna or Mithras, this is hilarious. It’s not true but a joke. Even Wikipedia is more veracious than this guy’s anti-Christian site. Just look en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Council_of_Nicaea

Anyway, don’t know if this helps but I tried a little. 🙂
 
lemonbeam said:
Hello, I came across a few websites that say the Gospels are forgeries and the 12 apostles are not real, and fabricated evidence was created. Another makes the claim that the final chapter of the Gospel of John (21) is a sixth-century forgery. Is there any truth to any of these claims? And how could this be refuted?

Here are the websites in question:

vridar.wordpress.com/2009/05/25/manufacturing-evidence-for-the-historicity-of-12-apostles/

bibliotecapleyades.net/biblianazar/esp_biblianazar_40.htm
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Thousands of people met and talked with the 12 Apostles. Some outlived them all. The Gospels were all accepted throughout the Church as Scripture by about 150, and accepted as factual records by 105 or so – just five to ten years after the Gospel of John was published. The historic evidence for that reality is beyond a reasonable doubt.
No, the last chapter of John’s Gospel isn’t from the Sixth Century – Bible teaching was very widespread by then and an addition would have certainly been noticed – and even though it might have been recorded later, such additions were part of the normal process, like editing a post and adding something, though a manuscript could get an addition from someone who had heard the author say something. Remember that John had said there wasn’t enough room in the world for enough books to note all the things Jesus did.
 
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