The bible was written 4 decades after the supposed events, how could they get the story correct?

Answer 1

4 decades is really a good number of years, It is like writing in 2006 about an event that took place in 1966. Another question is what Christians followed before the new testament was written. Lot of beliefs which current Christians believe is derived from New Testament, like the belief that Jesus died for our sins. So the question is whether people before New testament was written believe in these.
Or in other words, did Christianity start with Jesus or 40 years after Jesus ?

Answer 2

The Old Testament had been complete centuries prior to the arrival of Jesus Christ. (See the Dead Sea Scrolls, most of which are dated to at least 150 B.C., and the Septuagint even earlier, 285-246 B.C.) The New Testament began to be compiled within just a few years of the events. The letter to the Galatians, for example, was written around 48 A.D., which was little more than a decade after the resurrection. There is even a fragment of John's Gospel dated to about the turn from the 1st to the 2nd century. Although John's Gospel had been written in Ephesus, this manuscript fragment was discovered in the upper Nile region. A distance of around 1,000 miles. For ancient times, that was practically a news flash. The canon of the Bible was discussed at great length during several councils, of which the first council of Nicea was one, which occurred in 325 A.D. In order for the books of the New Testament to be considered for inclusion, they had to meet three criteria: 1) They had to have been written by or for an apostle. 2) They had to agree with the common faith practice of the plurality of the churches. 3) They had to be accepted by the plurality of the churches.

Answer 3

The Bible was not written all at once. Parts of it were oral for centuries before being written down. Others were written perhaps within ten years of their subject. But I get your point.

The Bible is NOT history. It is a guide to living that often uses stories based on history to get its messages across. It includes good examples and bad examples. And the elements or the message of one story may sometimes contradict the elements or message of another story. The story doesn't HAVE to be "correct", as long as the meaning is understood.

But people get hung up on the characters and the events and forget the messages, reducing the Bible to a trivia manual rather than a source of wisdom.

Answer 4

Much of the New Testament was written by EYE WITNESSES. Moses wrote some of the first part of the Old Testament. Moses!! Not a rookie. Whether written 4 hours or 4 decades after the event the event and it's results remain the same. Example...J.F.K. was assassinated in 1963. If a book was written about it today, would that make it a fable?

Answer 5

actually the last N.T. book was written about 40 years after Jesus died by the eye witness John the apostle. The other books were written before that and there are also various church leader letters which contain a lot of the N.T. in their content. There are about 5,600 Greek N.T. manuscripts and over 10,000 Latin ones besides other ones. There are no other documents that have so many copies and so close to the originals, bar none. If anyone would doubt the validity of the N.T. copies they would have to doubt all other historic writings up until recent times also to be consistent.

Answer 6

4 decades???

You must be talking about the New Testament...The first four Books, Matthew, Mark, Luke & John were written between 75 & 120 AD...(Jesus was crucified between 31-33 AD)...Other letters by Peter, Paul, etc. were collected and saved, and later added in the 3 Centuries that followed...

The Old Tetsament was finalized in 600 BC. However Moses lived in the 15th Century BC, Joseph in the 18th Century BC, Abraham in the 20th Century BC, and Noah, the 24th Century BC, or even earlier...If there was an Adam, he would have lived in the 1st year of the Jewish calendar...38th Century BC...These names were passed on by the oral tradition for at least 2,000 years, before ever being recorded...initially by Moses (Genesis & the 10 Commandments)...

Answer 7

There is actually considerable debate about the dates of the Gospels authorship (which I am assuming you address here). Some scholars put the writing far closer, about 50 - 60 AD. It would not be unusually for there to be a lapse of time, given that this culture was primarily aural and memorized. No person had books or written documens in their position. So the writing would probably come later, towards the end of the lives of the apostles or in some cases after, to record their messages. There was not much blogging, back then.

Answer 8

The people that witnessed the miracles of Jesus and His death and resurrection were still alive when the Gospels were written. The Gospel of John and the epistles of John as well as the book of Revelation were the last books to be written I would think because the Apostle John was the last of the Apostles to be alive. All the other Apostles were martyered. The books of the New Testament were written over a 40 year period or more. They were not writen all at the same time.

Answer 9

Well, much of the Gospels were already pretty much written as they were before the dates you were probably given. Each Gospel was "completed" when the respective Churches who compiled the accounts felt that it told the whole story as written.

There was also a strict authorship issue. The Gospels were only to be written by those who were either with Jesus (the Disciples) or their first apprentices (the Apostles). They signed it in blood swearing the account was as truthful as they could possibly make it. Any other document not authored in the same way was not put into the New Testament.

Answer 10

Many of the gospels were written within the lifetimes of the apostles. For ancient manuscripts, that's a prime source. By comparison, the two biographies of Alexander the Great were written more than two centuries after his death.

Incidentally, the stories of Jesus told by the apostles were written many years apart, even nations apart, yet they corroborate one another.