@Subduction Zone said : “The earliest is fifty years after Mark was written, assuming a 65 CE dating for it. At that point it is merely a weak unsubstantiated belief. It is why modern scholars do not think that the names on the Gospels reflect authorship at all. They were all written by people well educated in Koine Greek. That does not appear to describe any of the earliest of followers of Jesus.”
@Brian2 said : “I think that is pretty good textual testimony really even if the synoptics were written in the 50s. I don't think that is why modern scholars don't think the names on the Gospels reflect authorship. It is because the dates for their writing have been pushed to after 70AD. That is the reason.”
I reviewed only the parts of your discussion that had to do with
authorship and simply wanted to make a specific point that all Old and New Testament book are pseudoepigraphs since no one knows and no one can prove who wrote any of them.
This does not mean the original source text was not written by the person they are attributed to
by tradition, merely that one cannot know the author of the original source text.
As an aside, one
can determine with somewhat greater accuracy regarding what early Christians believed about the writings and how they interpreted the various texts as the amount of early Christian literature increases as the Jesus movement spreads.
In any case, good luck to both of you in coming to your own historical models regarding these early texts.
Clear
p.s. Brian2, I also agree with you that historians make a LOT of "assumptions", but they give them clever names that sound more credible (like "historical models", theories, etc). They then give their reasons for believing the models they make. In this context, almost all of the historical models are tentative and subject to improvement and correction.
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