The Catholic Church does not rely on “conservative” or “liberal” or on any modernist “consensus”, but on Her authority from Christ, the Son of God. “Most biblical scholars”, who are known as “modernists”, dissent from Christ and His Church which, with His authority, declared which Sacred Scriptures are the Word of God, no more and no less. The modernists have no authority. The two thousand years of Tradition in Christ’s Church affirm the Gospels, and there is no basis for dissent.
First, Fr John A Hardon, S.J., in *The Catholic Catechism *(Doubleday, 1975, p 45) points out that the rabbinical school at Jamnia circa A.D. 100 redefined the canon of the Old testament for the Jews, leaving out the seven books from their Palestinian canon because not conforming to the Pentateuch, or written after the time of Esdra (circa 400 B.C.) or not in Hebrew in Palestine, and “made a fence around it.”
Now comes a German scientist, Carsten Peter Thiede, director of the Institute for Basic Epistemological Research in Paderborn, who, with Matthew D’Ancona, is about to dash to pieces the Bultmann-built edifice of modernist exegesis.
Their book,
Eyewitness To Jesus: Amazing New Manuscript Evidence About the Origin of the Gospel (Doubleday, 1996), is about a small piece of papyrus held at Magdalen College, Oxford, which is the oldest fragment of St. Matthew’s Gospel in existence today.
The fragment contains disjointed segments of Matt. 26, but even more important than the writing style, which Thiede p(name removed by moderator)ointed to the time of Jesus’ life, is the use of KS, an abbreviated form of Kyrios, to refer to Jesus as Lord God — meaning that the ancient author believed that Jesus is divine.
Thiede, a papyrologist, furthermore concludes that St. Matthew’s Gospel must have been the first Gospel written. The implications of this are enormous. As Thiede and D’Ancona write in their book:
“Bultmann was wrong: The authors of the Gospel could hear far more than the faintest whisper of Jesus’ voice. Indeed, the first readers of St. Matthew may have heard the very words which the Nazarene preacher spoke during his ministry, may have listened to the parables when they were first delivered to the peasant crowd; may even have asked the wise man questions and waited respectfully for answers. The voice they heard was not a whisper but the passionate oratory of a real man of humble origins whose teaching would change the world.”
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