When were the gospels written?

[SonOfMan]

If they were all copied from one source, then why DON’T they agree with one another?

Different people copied them. Copies of copies, different motivations by different people at different times, small details in language changed etc.?

 

[Randy_Carson]

Different people copied them. Copies of copies, different motivations by different people at different times, small details in language changed etc.?

:nope:

In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul writes:

1 Corinthians 15:3-6
For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance[a]: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, 5 and that he appeared to Cephas,** and then to the Twelve. 6 After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep.

What Paul is saying, in effect, is this: “Look, here is the gospel about Jesus Christ…hundreds of people witnessed these things and most of them are still alive. You can check with them if you don’t believe me.”

The point is that people who heard Paul preach WOULD have been able to access the living eyewitnesses who were still alive at the time the NT was being written. If anything that Paul or any of the NT authors wrote did not match up with the eyewitness testimony, it would have been rejected by those who saw what Jesus did with their own eyes.

SoM, you’re argument simply doesn’t hold up.**

 

[Randy_Carson]

Different people copied them. Copies of copies, different motivations by different people at different times, small details in language changed etc.?

Now, about this copies of copies thing…this actually works in FAVOR of the New Testament. We can know that the text we have today is accurate by comparing multiple copies. Here’s how that works:

Each author of a NT book wrote an original manuscript which I’ll call “M”. Using M, copies were made and sent to various Churches in the NT era. I’ll call these second-generation copies, C1, C2 & C3. The number of copies is not important for this illustration. Now, imagine that copies of the copies were made as the Christian Church expanded since every local congregation wanted to have a copy of these important texts. I’ll call the copies of C1, C1a, C1b & C1c. There would also be C2a, C2b, and so forth. With me so far? I sure hope the following diagram reproduces well…think of each column as a generation. The copies which have not been lost are in bold.

M—C1—C1a—C1a1
-------------C1b—C1b1
----------------------C1b2
-------------C1c—C1c1
----------------------C1c2
------C2—C2a—C2a1
-------------C2b—C2b1
------C3—C3a—C3a1
----------------------C3a2
-------------C3b—C3b1
-------------C3c—C3c1
----------------------C3c2
----------------------C3c3

Now, imagine further that M, C1, C2 & C3 along with C1a, C2a, C3a & C3b have all been lost, but that C1b, C1c, C2b & C3c are all in museums scattered around the world - Moscow, London, the Vatican, etc. Additionally, all of the copies of those copies still exist (I’m simplifying, of course).

We know that M must have existed, and logic dictates that C1, C2 & C3 must have existed (though we may be unsure of the number of first-generation copies). We can learn that both C1 & C2 must have existed by comparing the extant copies C1b & C2b and discovering subtle variations in the texts - copyists glosses or “typos”, if you will. If C1 was slightly different from C2, then those differences will be reflected in C1a and C2a along with all of the subsequent copies of those copies. Variations were passed on from generation to generation. Make sense?

So, how can we know with certainty what the Bible actually said if we don’t have the original autograph (M) or if errors (variations) crept into the text? By comparing the existing texts, scholars can work backwards to determine what M actually said. This process can never be perfect since humans are involved, but we can have a high degree of confidence that the Bible we have to day contains the message that the original authors intended to convey.

 

[PseuTonym]

For the sake of discussion, let’s assume the believers were killed. Were they true martyrs, dying willingly for their claims or were they simply assasinated/executed for trespassing on foreign soil, without being given the choice to either recant their views and save themselves, or persist in their message and be put to death?

That sounds very ahistorical. Wasn’t the Apostle Paul taken to Rome for a trial because he had appealed to Caesar in order to get the opportunity for a trial by the central authority rather than hope for the best in an outlying region that had been conquered by Rome, and that might not operate strictly according to Roman law?

Missionaries went to places like Central America, North America and South America before there were well-established European colonies there, but I am not aware of any Christian missionaries who put together an entire package of financing, shipbuilding, navigation, linguistics, security, selection of what to import and what to export to cover the costs of the venture, etc.

Of course, it is possible for a given individual to be killed for venturing into a place where people consider the individual to be an outsider. Maybe somebody thought that JFK spoke with an accent that indicated he did not belong in Dallas, and for that reason alone he was assassinated. Maybe he simply ventured into a dangerous city where some people considered him to be a foreigner.

That explanation for why JFK was killed sounds like a parody of a conspiracy theory, but if one is going to speculate in completely general terms about human motivations without reference to any historical specifics, then one can construct that kind of narrative. Whether it seems plausible, laugh-out-loud funny, or simply bizarre will depend on what you know or believe about the USA of the 1960s.

Einstein thought that Stalin’s show trials might have actually been real trials, with the judges independent of the legislative and executive branches in the USSR, and the judges believing that the accused were guilty. If you can invent curved space and time dilation to explain contradictions between Newtonian physics and the constancy of the speed of light, then maybe it should not be surprising that you can also imagine that the show trials in Stalin’s USSR were fair trials. You can consider anything that you can imagine.