I beg your pardon? Thucydides was not only a contemporary of the Peloponnesian War of which he writes, he participated in the first part of it as a general and says so explicitly in the text.
Perhaps you’re thinking of Herodotus? Who did indeed write down many rumors and legends that had supposedly happened centuries earlier?
You state this as an established fact. Not a qualified statement, such as “scholars believe it unlikely. . .”, but as a fact. How would you know whether any of the authors of the Gospels ever met Jesus?
A misleading statement. Life expectancy was low because infant mortality was high. Most people who reached adulthood could expect to live for several decades past 40. If Jesus’ ministry was during A.D. 29-30, people who saw him preach as teenagers or young adults would have been in their 60s when the first two Gospels were completed.
Also, remember that life expectancy is an average. Statistically, you have a 50% chance of exceeding this age, and there are always a few people who live into their 90’s or 100’s.
Yep. As a fact.
Because of the dating, the language, the theology and the dependency on other sources. An eyewitness would not have to rely on other sources.
There wouldn’t be too many of them and that still doesn’t mitigate against my other points in this regard.
As someone who has written history and biography, I find this statement the least supportable. Even an eyewitness cannot be everywhere at all times, and remember everything.
I worked for a year under someone who is now in the Bush administration’s cabinet, and I can assure you if I were to write a biography of this person, even if covering only the year I spent working for this person, I would need other sources, despite my status as an eyewitness.
In this case, we have not only a reliance on other sources, but a reliance on a fictional miracle narrative. There is nothing in the book that is primary. There isn’t even anything which the book claims for itself to be primary.
I also think that it’s unreasonable to keep demanding more and more dispositive evdence that a legendary character called John of Zebedee was the author of a book which was written 70 years after the events that person is supposed to have witnessed, which is written in a literary language that person would not have known, which espouses theological ideas foreign to this person’s cultural and geographical background, which makes anachronistic errors as to events which would have been important to that person, which has a fictional account of miracle stories embedded in it, which contains polemic attacks against that person’s religion, and which (perhaps most importantly) does not itself even claim to be written by that person, or any other eyewitness and which only acquired a traditional attribution of authorship some 80 years after it was composed.
The question is, what possible reason is there to hypothesize Johannite authorship in the first place? What positive evidence exists that he did so, other than 2nd century tradition (and if you’re a historian I don’t have to tell you what a common practice pseudonymous attribution was in the ancient world)?
I would argue that it’s incumbant upon anyone arguing Johannite authorship to actually pony up some verifiable evidence rather than simply retreating into gaps in the circumstancial case against that hypothesis.
Sorry. I’ve been debating this same subject in another thread. It’s late, and I got mixed up and thought I was in the GD thread (I got here from my user CP rather than cruising the forum and I wasn’t paying attention). My apologies for the overwrought response.
As to the substance of your post, there are only two gospels which even have any tradition of being authored by eyewitnesses, Matthew and John. Both are anonymous works, neither makes any claim to apostollic authorship and neither author claims to have ever met Jesus.
I’ve already dealt with John, so on to Matthew.
Matthew dates to about 80 CE, it’s written in good Koine Greek and it is abjectly dependent on both Mark and Q. It also uses the Greek Septuagint rather than the Hebrew Tanakh which pretty much guarantees that author did not know Hebrew, and hence, was very unlikely to have been a Palestinian Jew. Any Jew educated enough to to know Koine would have to know Hebrew as well. The Material which is Matthew’s own is obviously fictionalized (eg, Herod’s slaughter of the innocents and Jesus’ flight to Egypt).
Once again I will reiterate that Matthew makes no personal claim to first hand knowledge of Jesus, and neither does any other gospel.
Again, I would ask, what reason is there to believe that the author of Matthew (writing 50 years after the crucifixion) did meet Jesus, and if he did, why didn’t he say so?
As I understand things, at the time the Gospels were written there was a dispute between two factions, (much simplified) one insisting that all “the law” had to be followed and the other saying no, there was a new deal and all “the law” no longer applied. Some things, such as circumcision, could be dropped. So it’s possible that the Gospels started as political tracts arguing the second view to potential converts and to the other side in the dispute.