Are the gospels reliable accounts of what ACTUALLY happened?

Question

Scholarly studies of the gospels make it quite clear that they could not have been written by eyewitnesses to the events they purport to describe. Even if they were, though, they were not written down until decades after those events supposedly happen. During these decades, the witnesses would have swapped stories with others, pondered the events, heard about similar events, studies other tales, and so forth. All of these things would have contaminated the original memories immeasurably, making them completely unreliable under even the best circumstances.

In point of fact, eyewitness testimony is generally regarded as the least reliable of any sort of evidence that might be submitted during a criminal trial — at least by experts.

Is it a serious mistake to base my core beliefs on a text that is based on the oral stories of things that happened 30 to 40 years after the witness' account? How accurate could these stories be? Ever play the phone game in grade school?

Answer 1

Read this new gospel of Christ:

http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-aRKLij88fqp9dlfrBiQfZ8Vvng0-?cq=1

It will blow your mind.

Answer 2

They are about as reliable as any other histories written at the time, certainly far more reliable than say Herodotus. I majored in Classics with an emphasis in Greek and Latin. At the time I considered myself to be an agnostic, although it dawned on me one day that the history that I was studying and treating as reliable was far older than the Gospel. Why would I treat it as more reliable than the writings of the New Testament. Well, that was the beginning of my starting to believe.

Eyewitness testimony does tend to be flawed. The gospels are pretty interesting though since they are four different accounts, each with a somewhat different perspective, but overall revealing a picture that is consistent.

Even more convincing, what did the apostles have to gain by fabricating these stories? What did they witness that would make them sacrifice it all?

Finally, when you do an in depth comparison of the Old and New Testaments, you realize how consistent they are with each other. On the surface they might seem very different, but if you look at the symbolism you can see that the New Testament is contained in the Old Testament just as a seed contains the whole tree.

Answer 3

While a good portion can be relied on, its not the original witnesses we should be worrying about, it should be the added and changed text that has been done over the centuries.

The problem is the teaching technique. Christians start in the back of the bible, throw their new comers into the water and hope they swim. The Bible has been put together in a certain order and common sense declares that one should start at the begining (that means in Genesis). This way a proper foundation would be placed then one can go into the Christian Text (NT) be able to figure out what is truth and what is added/changed. And then one will be able to make an informed decision on what they want to believe.

Answer 4

The question is not whether you should believe in the accuracy of the gospels, but whether the gospels teach lessons that you believe in. No the gospels aren't accurate and not only were the originals written way after the time of christ, the bible itself was translated from hebrew to greek to latin to english, german, french, etc. And you have to remember most of the copying was before the printing press was invented so every copy was different, there were altered parts and gramatical errors.
But that doesn't matter does the teachings resonate with you, if they do then what does it matter where they came from.

Answer 5

i could say so. watching the gospels from an atheistic attitude, it fairly is not any longer unreasonable to signify that he grow to be a clever guy time-honored as Yeshua ben Yosef, grow to be Jewish, and spent lots of his existence coaching others people stable ethical prepare, the two from the attitude of a Jew and additionally fairly distinctive from the Jewish people on the time. for sure, I fairly have ignored the memories approximately miracles and resurrection and so on... they might fairly have been added later to help the memories of the variety of splendidly super instructor having been around. So I do concur that Jesus could properly have been a real guy or woman, and could properly be a minimum of partly accurately represented interior the Bible. ((((hugs)))) ~Loving easy~

Answer 6

Will go with Voltaire on spiritual stuff, there is the book History in the Bible or something like that that discusses movement of people and governments. Agree completely with some of your conclusion, but can't agree with the whole thing. A MAN named Jesus Christ did exist.

Answer 7

It wasn't necessary for them to be witnesses to the events, as what they were writing was inspired by God. Just remember, when you are reading something like the writings of the Apostle John, he wrote Revelations, first. So he already knew what was in Revelations when he did the rest of his work.

Answer 8

How reliable is anything written in antiquity?

How can we trust anything from that period in human history as an accurate depiction of history?

This is what we should be asking.

Why should we believe what the Egyptians, Romans, or Greeks wrote about their history, how can their writings be trusted?

Answer 9

No sir,
As with any written documentaion it is mostly one person personal account of what happened. As with most text, there is some leaway given for a writer's exaggeration.

Answer 10

I don't believe this is a question at all... get out your school books and look up what the difference between a question and an argument is.

Answer 11

lets not forget that there were about 72 gospels and out of which only 4 were picked even after discovering more