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Who wrote the bible?

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  • 10-03-2011 11:34pm
    #1
    Birroc
    Closed Accounts Posts: 1,070 ✭✭✭


    Hi, can you answer of questions that have always confused me:

    Who wrote the bible (new testament) and when?
    Were the 4 gospels also disciples?
    What are the major discrepancies between the 4 gospels?
    Where did Jesus disappear to from age 12 to 30?
    How different is the original bible from the church edited version we see today?


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    #2
    amacachi
    Closed Accounts Posts: 23,316 ✭✭✭✭amacachi


    God, duh.


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    #3
    pH
    Registered Users Posts: 4,188 ✭✭✭pH


    Birroc wrote: »
    Hi, can you answer of questions that have always confused me:

    Who wrote the bible (new testament) and when?
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorship_of_the_Bible#New_Testament
    Were the 4 gospels also disciples?
    If you're asking were the gospel authors also disciples, then the answer is almost certainly no.
    What are the major discrepancies between the 4 gospels?
    A quick google will find you lots of web pages of these for example:
    http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/paul_carlson/nt_contradictions.html
    Where did Jesus disappear to from age 12 to 30?
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infancy_Gospel_of_Thomas
    How different is the original bible from the church edited version we see today?
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_the_Christian_Biblical_canon


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    #4
    strobe
    Closed Accounts Posts: 7,872 ✭✭✭strobe


    Also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorship_of_the_Bible

    Jimmy Wales is my Messiah.


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    #5
    robindch
    Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 24,399 Mod ✭✭✭✭robindch


    Uhm, I think you have to read the bible with your heart or something. Then, none of those questions will seem very important.


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    #6
    Dr. Loon
    Registered Users Posts: 3,522 ✭✭✭Dr. Loon


    Birroc wrote: »
    Where did Jesus disappear to from age 12 to 30?

    I think pseudo-Matthew has a bit of young Jesus in it. They may have hushed it up, because he kills people, and stares down dragons in it. This is the word of the lord.


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    #7
    DonalN
    Registered Users Posts: 868 ✭✭✭DonalN


    My bible used to be the Christy Moore songbook - back when I was a young fella learning to strum a few tunes.


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    #8
    challengemaster
    Registered Users Posts: 16,931 ✭✭✭✭challengemaster


    robindch wrote: »
    Uhm, I think you have to read the bible with your heart or something. Then, none of those questions will seem very important.

    As long as it isn't your brain you use :pac:


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    #9
    krudler
    Registered Users Posts: 34,788 ✭✭✭✭krudler


    Birroc wrote: »
    Hi, can you answer of questions that have always confused me:


    Where did Jesus disappear to from age 12 to 30?

    Hogwarts


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    #10
    eyescreamcone
    Banned (with Prison Access) Posts: 2,562 ✭✭✭eyescreamcone


    I'm Brian...

    ...and so is my wife :)


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    #11
    MagicMarker
    Banned (with Prison Access) Posts: 32,865 ✭✭✭✭MagicMarker


    krudler wrote: »
    Hogwarts
    Where he dabbled in soft drugs and homosexuality afaik.


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    #12
    Zombrex
    Closed Accounts Posts: 25,848 ✭✭✭✭Zombrex


    Birroc wrote: »
    Who wrote the bible (new testament) and when?
    The New Testament was written by early Christians, including Paul, from about 20 years after Jesus' death up to about 70 years after his death. Most of the books, excluding the letters, probably survived as oral stories before they were committed to paper.
    Birroc wrote: »
    Were the 4 gospels also disciples?
    Probably not.
    Birroc wrote: »
    What are the major discrepancies between the 4 gospels?
    http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_john.htm
    Birroc wrote: »
    Where did Jesus disappear to from age 12 to 30?
    He is described as growing up in Israel, so I'm not sure what this refers to.
    Birroc wrote: »
    How different is the original bible from the church edited version we see today?

    We are not in possession of the original Bible so that is impossible to tell. All surviving Bible are more or less similar, with some minor (or major depending on your position) alterations. The oldest surviving complete copies, the Codex Sinitcus and Codex Vaticanis are believed to have been based on the same document. Without access to this document, which probably originated in the 2nd Century, and older copies it is impossible to tell if the Bible has changed from when it was first written and when the oldest surviving copies were written.


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    #13
    goose2005
    Registered Users Posts: 4,798 ✭✭✭goose2005


    Where did Jesus disappear to from age 12 to 30?

    The gospels are vague as to when his ministry began, only Luke said he was "about 30" when he began preaching.


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    #14
    cosmicfart
    Closed Accounts Posts: 1,298 ✭✭✭cosmicfart


    surely you got lost on your way to the Christian forums OP?


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    #15
    Peregrinus
    Registered Users Posts: 26,150 ✭✭✭✭Peregrinus


    Birroc wrote: »
    Hi, can you answer of questions that have always confused me:

    Who wrote the bible (new testament) and when?

    That’s a big question, since there are a whole bunch of different texts which make up the New Testament, and for each of them the question “who is the author?” has two potential answers - one which looks to the religious tradition about the texts, and the other which looks to modern scholarship. These two answers are not always the same.

    The largest part of the NT is made up of the letters of Paul. Tradition asserts that they were written by Paul of Tarsus, with the possible exception of the Letter to the Romans, which may have been written by a follower of Paul’s. Scholarship largely agrees with this answer, though it would say that there are doubts about one or two of the other letters of Paul.

    The four gospels do not name their authors. Tradition attributes them to authors called Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and further asserts that Luke is also the author of the Acts of the Apostles, and that John is also the author of Revelations. Scholarship has nothing to say about what the authors were named. It agrees that the author of Luke, whatever he was called, also wrote Acts, but denies that the author of John also wrote Revelations.

    Tradition attributes the letters of Peter and James to, naturally, St. Peter and St James. Scholarship doubts this.

    As to when they were composed, scholars differ, but the great bulk of the NT texts were probably written between about AD 55 (e.g. about twenty years after the death of Jesus) and AD 110.

    Birroc wrote: »
    Were the 4 gospels also disciples?

    Tradition says that the authors of Matthew and John were the apostles of those names. Scholarship denies this in the case of Matthew, and strongly doubts it in the case of John, though there is a widespread view that the Gospel of John is the product of a Christian community of which the apostle John was the founder/leader - i.e. the Gospel of John was written by a follower/followers of St John.

    Traditions says that the author of Mark was a follower of St Peter, and that the author of Luke was a follower of St Paul. Scholarship mostly either accepts this or at least regards it as plausible.

    Birroc wrote: »
    What are the major discrepancies between the 4 gospels?

    Depends on what you mean by “discrepancies”.

    Three of the gospels (Mt, Mk, Lk) set out to give a more or less chronological account of the public life of Jesus. Mk is generally reckoned to be the earliest, and Mt and Lk contain significant passages copied word-for-word from Mk. However they also contain extra material, some of which they have in common (indicating that they both drew on another, now lost, source). The end result, in many cases, is three different accounts of many of the teachings of Jesus, or the events of his public life. You’d expect different accounts by different witnesses written for different audiences to be different, and they are, but I don’t know whether you consider that this amounts to “discrepancies”. None of the Gospels set out to write a newspaper-like report of Jesus’ teachings or ministry; they all give a subjective take.

    John is quite different. It’s later than the other three. It makes no attempt (or claim) to present events in chronological order, and it concentrates on present the teachings of Jesus in long “discourses” which may authentically reflect what he taught but are certainly not verbatim accounts of speeches that he delivered. It also presents a much more developed theological view of Jesus than the earlier gospels.

    Birroc wrote: »
    Where did Jesus disappear to from age 12 to 30?

    Neither tradition nor scholarship assert that Jesus “disappeared”. The extreme likelihood is that, until he embarked on a career as an itinerant preacher, his life was completely unremarkable and therefore nobody remarked upon it. As a result there was no material for the gospel writers to incorporate into their narratives. Occam’s razor, and all that.

    A more interesting question would be, how historically reliable are the few gospel passages that refer to the life of Jesus before his public ministry? The answer is, not very historically reliable at all. The nativity, for example, is mentioned in only two of the four gospels (Mt and Lk), and the accounts given in those two gospels are almost completely different from one another. (The nativity story that we are all familiar with is a conflation of the two quite different stories in Mt and Lk.) All that we can say with confidence about the origins of Jesus is that (a) he came from Nazareth, (b) his mother was called Mary, his father was probably called Joseph and he had a brother called James, (c) he was believed by his followers from a very early stage to have been born of a virgin and (d) that’s about it, really.

    Birroc wrote: »
    How different is the original bible from the church edited version we see today?

    I’m not sure the question makes any sense. This collection of texts is only “the bible” because the church has accepted/received these texts as authoritative/inspired/scriptural. There was no pre-existing set of scriptures which the church “edited”.

    There was of course debate about which texts should be received as authoritative. The Infancy Gospel of James, for instance, which was mentioned above, is one of those which the church rejected. These rejected texts mostly survive (you can read them online - Google “apocrypha”) as do contemporary accounts of the debates and discussions about whether they should be regarded as scriptural and the criteria according to which this decision should be made. In general, the church would only accept texts which were linked by a strong tradition to authorship by an apostle, or by somebody close to an apostle. (For what it’s worth, modern scholarship generally agrees that the texts which the church rejected were rightly rejected by reference to that criterion. Most of the rejected texts, for example, were written long after the ones that were accepted.)


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