Right, they were written in the third person...and if third person view was the literary plan, then you obviously WOULDN'T have pronouns like "I" or "we" narrative, because if you did, then that WOULDN'T be third person view, now would it?
Second, unless the anonymous authors made up some cockamany story out of the clear blue sky regarding Jesus, then how else do you explain the fact that the narratives have recorded accounts that only the people that were there would know??
Again, if you were to go as far as to say that at least 85-90% of what is recorded in the narratives are a figment of the author's imagination, then there is no way to explain how you will get Jesus' exact words, his daily routines, his encounters with other people...there is no way you will get that kind of info if it WASN'T from eyewitnesses...which harmonizes with what Luke said when he said "..just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word".
I know you don't believe Luke, but he is saying that the very source of info comes from eyewitnesses, which would make sense based on the narratives. Only someone that was there would know those kind of specifications.
Either that or, as I said, you would have to believe that the bulk of that narratives have almost no truth value whatsoever.
I don't think there is very much "truth value" contained in the gospels. I think there is some, but we need to be extremely careful in sorting it out. There certainly isn't enough "truth value" in there of think that they were written either by eyewitnesses, or anyone who was close to an eyewitness.
I do think that they are based to a large extent on oral tradition and possibly on other older written material. But I see no evidence that any of these authors are writing from direct experience, and I doubt they even personally knew anyone who could speak from personal experience.
As for the specifications you refer to, the Gospels contain specifications of things that happened when no one was there who could possibly report them. These specifications can only be understood as fictional creations, included to flesh out the story. Now I know it is a common claim made by apologists that ancient people just didn't write like that. But in fact they did. We have fictional accounts of both real and mythological people (Alexander the Great, Hercules) that include very specific details. And we have other Gospels written (the Gospel of Peter) that even apologists agree are not really written by eye witnesses that contain just such invented details.
I see no reason to believe that any of the Gospels do contain Jesus's exact words, or exact details of his daily routine (that are real and not invented). As I said they are to some extent based on earlier oral traditions, and some parts might reasonably convey some of Jesus's ideas. They also attribute certain ideas to Jesus that I think he did not express. But not one of the Gospels contains a single word that Jesus actually spoke. Why, because they are written in Greek, and Jesus didn't speak Greek.
And my response to this was in Ancient Egypt the life span of an average person was early to mid 30's...but Ramesses the Great lived to be in his 90's. In other words, there are exceptions.
But remember what you are trying to do here. You are trying to present a historical case. At least I think that is what you are trying to do.
And history is based on what is the most likely explanation of the available evidence. When you talk about something being an "exception" you mean it is not the usual, it is rare, uncommon, unlikely. In this case for it would be extremely "exceptional" for a lower class Aramaic speaker to be able to write as if they were a well educated Greek speaking person. If you admit that this would be exceptional, you cannot then go ahead and claim it is the best inference form the evidence.
You are assuming that oldest copies implies oldest originals, which would seem non-sequitur.
I don't need to make such an assumption, we know that these documents were composed in the Greek language. We can tell the difference between a document that was composed in Greek, and a document that was composed in a different language and translated into Greek. If there existed older Gospels that were composed in Hebrew or Aramaic, those are not the Gospels we have.
We know that the Gospel writers quote the old testament in Greek. Just like if I gave you a quote from the old Testament you would be able to tell if I was quoting the King James version, or some other version. If I used the exact words that appear in the King James version, you would know that I did not go and get a Hebrew Bible and do the translation myself (not that I could do that). And this is how we know that the gospel writers were working from Greek documents, not Hebrew documents.
I would assume that a tax collector (Matthew) would be able to do more than just math.
Not an assumption I would make. Don't think as a "tax collector" as being something like a modern day accountant, or an IRS agent. These guys were thugs who went around collecting money for the Romans. It was not a job that required a higher education. And it certainly did not require them to be able to write in Greek, like a highly educated Greek.
As far as John is concerned, maybe one of his disciples wrote his Gospel based on John's account to him, so technically, it would still be "The Gospel according to John"
I have been waiting for you to make this argument.
First if you are imagining John actually dictating it and someone else writing it down, the problem still applies. In order to produce the document we have he would have had to dictate it in Greek, a language he didn't speak. He would have had to quote the old testament in Greek, a language he couldn't read.
Second if you mean that John just told his story to someone who then went and wrote it down using their own words, well then John didn't write it. If that is what happened then the Gospel of John was written by some unknown author.
And while we are talking about John I have another question. If this was really written by John (even indirectly) how do we explain the radically different view of Jesus that he presents from the other three Gospels? If gMatthew was really written by Matthew, and if gMark was really telling that Peter told him how do you explain the different view that these present of Jesus. gJohn has such a radically different Christology from the synoptic Gospels it is impossible to imagine that these authors both really knew Jesus, and that they actually knew each other.
Then my question would be "what reason would these people have to say that these people wrote it if it weren't true?"
As I keep emphasizing, Mark and Luke weren't even disciples, so of all of the 11 disciples they decided that they would claim that two non-disciples that never met Jesus would be attributed as authors? What reason would they have for this if it weren't true? And as you mentioned above, Acts tells us that Peter and John were looked at as "uneducated"...well, that is why the church fathers stated that the Gospel of Mark was written by Peter's friend, Mark...perhaps maybe precisely BECAUSE Peter was illiterate and Mark wasn't.
I don't know why they claimed these particular people for these particular books. They themselves gave no reason for thinking that these people actually wrote these books, and neither have you.
Maybe they did say that Mark wrote that Gospel because Peter was illiterate, but that does not mean that it is true. The fact that Peter was illiterate does not prove Mark was literate, and it does not prove that he wrote that Gospel.
I am not saying they lied about how wrote them, they may very well have believe this. But if they really believe that these were the authors of the Gospels, they were wrong, for the reasons I have pointed out.
