And, I’d like to add, whoever the writers of the four gospels were, they almost certainly had never met Jesus either, having written the gospels several decades after his death (assuming, of course, that he indeed lived).
In my opinion, there is a vast difference in the quantity and quality of credible evidence for Socrates and for Jesus.
Take a look who the OP is. If you still don’t understand, then you obviously don’t get to GQ much.
The gospel of Matthew was written about 50 years after Jesus’s death. This alone would make it an unreliable source for any birth story especially considering that Jesus lived his first 30 years in obscurity. Matthew wrote with a specific intention. He wanted spread the news that Jesus was the Messiah. Jesus was going to free the long suffering Jews and bring them to a promised land just as Moses had done. Jesus was the “King of the Jews”.
Any reference to shepherds in the fields would have been created by the author to signify Jesus as the “lamb of God” or one that will be sacrificed. The story of the three kings also falls in line with this.
I cannot see any detail in the nativity story as having any factual basis.
Hey, folks, I think a debate on the historicity of Jesus and the questionable reliability of the Gospels would be a wonderful great debate. But if you’ll notice, the OP asked what historians say about Christ’s birthday, which has, I think, been answered as well as the rather sparse data permit.
I am not venturing to play junior mod here, but simply to ask that those wanting to discuss the issue further either ask a mod. to move this thread over to GD, or start a new one that addresses their particular issues better. And I’m posting this rather than doing it myself (risking a Jr Mod accusation) because I don’t particularly care if or how it’s handled, so I’m leaving it to the other interested parties to make the choice.
I think it’s pretty unanimous among scholars that Mark was the first gospel written, and Matthew and Luke were derived from that.
Yes, but each gospel was written for a different audience.
This is what’s called the Synoptic Problem, and it’s a “problem” because, while what you say is accurate, there is no clear proof of the conclusions reached.
Briefly, here’s what the evidence is:
A. About 95% of Mark’s Gospel duplicates about two-thirds of Matthew’s, including large chunks of text either verbatim identical or “variant by pattern” (e.g., “Kingdom of God” in one is always “Kingdom of Heaven” in the other, and otherwise a near-verbatim match).
B. Large portions of Luke match the Matthew-Mark equivalences.
C. The differences are largely, but not exclusively, in: (1) Each Gospel has a somewhat different Crucifixion-Resurrection account; (2) Matthew and Luke add Infancy narratives and genealogies at the beginning; (3) Matthew and Luke each add large amounts of Jesus’s teaching to what Mark records.
D. Something over half of the teachings in Matthew and Luke are duplicative of each other, going well beyond what duplicates Mark.
E. Where Jesus is alleged to have given a teaching often does not match between Gospels, particularly in the material common to Matthew and Luke but not Mark.
F. The early Christian historian Eusebius quotes the even earlier writer Papias as claiming that "Matthew wrote the logia of Jesus first, in the Hebrew language.
G. This does not match Matthew’s Gospel as we have it, which (1) gives every sign of having been written in Greek, as opposed to being a translation; (2) shows clear signs of having borrowed heavily from Mark and another text; (3) is not a logia document (as the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas is – i.e., a collection of short teachings, not put in any context) but a life-and-teachings narrative.
H. What Luke has spread throughout his narrative about teachings is largely concentrated in Matthew in five long topical teachings, of which the Sermon on the Mount and the Eschatological Discourse are typical.
Most scholars are convinced that Mark was written before the other two, and that they were compiled by editors using Mark and a hypothetical document tagged “Q” (for German quelle, “source”). Matthew and Luke used Mark as “frame story,” inserting teachings material from Q in different locations (Matthew almost certainly topically, Luke quite probably as accurate in terms of setting as its author could get). A significant minority of Bible scholars, including myself, are convinced that what Papias spoke of as written by Matthew is actually what we reference as “Q.”
The traditional attributions of the existing Gospels are the subject of skeptical questioning, as there is no proof they were written by the men they are attributed to, and some circumstantial evidence that suggests they were not.
Who the OP is doesn’t give you Carte Blanche. It also doesn’t mean that the OP is the only one reading the thread. A valueless post is still a valueless post.
I happen to know this because June 24 is today celebrated as the Fête nationale in French Canada. It was originally known as “La fête de St-Jean Baptiste”, back when Quebec was very Catholic, because John the Baptist was the patron sint of French Canadians.
Sorry to be so nit-picky! 