The authors of the four gospels sourced from myths, not directly from eyewitnesses

Introduction I thank Con for his continued participation. I will offer rebuttals to his introductory points, and I expect in the following rounds that Con will offer worthy rebuttals to my points in Round 2. I will quote Con in italics below. Rebuttals While Pro states that much have been lost in translation, he is wrong. Gods word is every ones word. It is told at many years ago during the time of Babel all Men spoke the same and the word was with all. Then something happened," Let us Go and Confuse and divide man". While this is not the word per word translation of what is written the General meaning is the same. A thing that is gospel is true regardless of what language it is spoken or written in. The Identity of God never changes. The same yesterday as today. It is not my wish to denigrate the religious faith of Con. Unfortunately, however, assertions resting entirely on trust in religious traditions do not have significant authority in this particular debate, regardless of the soundness of interpretations of Scriptures. I would like to call Con’s attention to the third rule that I listed in Round 1: “Biblical texts qualify as legitimate sources, but the claims of the canon should not be assumed to be historically reliable. They will be treated roughly the same as other written sources from ancient history (either trustworthy or untrustworthy, as the evidences and sound arguments suggest).” If Con overlooked that rule when he accepted the contention, then I am afraid that he is in a tough present situation. Either he may argue without resting on religious assumptions or he may forfeit the debate. Also as far as pro suggesting that every thing was simply made up this is a fallacy. In fact, I never made such a suggestion, nor do I believe it. I accept the point that not everything in the gospels was made up, much the same way as not everything in Flavius Philostratus’ The Life of Apollonius was made up, though this biography, also, attributes to the hero a miraculous birth, the status as the Son of God, prophecies, miraculous healings, casting out demons, raising the dead, and his own resurrection [4]. Very probably, there was an actual historical Apollonius who roughly fit the profile and many details of the mythical account, and it is even more certain that there was a historical Jesus of Nazareth who fit the rough profile and many details of Jesus Christ in the gospels. The misunderstanding may emerge from my use of the word, “myth,” in the resolution. The word may imply, to many English speakers, that an account is primarily or entirely false. This is not what I mean, because the scholarly definition is slightly different, and I anticipated this misunderstanding. I call attention again to Round 1, where I presented the definition of “myth”: “A ‘myth’ is a system of linguistic information (i.e. story) that is contained at one end of a long successively-branching and evolving chain of communication, either written, spoken or both.” Using this definition, a “myth” does not necessarily entail complete falsehood. It seems plausible that if a man was healing and performing miracles several people would speak about it. And equally plausible it wold have been a crowd writing to disprove as well as disprove what had been said. Assuming that miracles were performed, it is certainly plausible that people would write about it. However, the premise of historical miracles is perhaps the most implausible hypothesis that we can imagine, almost by the definition of “miracle,” and it should not be merely accepted as a premise without very good arguments. As I described in Problem #3 of Round 2, miracles are far more expected of myths than eyewitness accounts, and I gave several ancient examples to that effect. Con may address the proposed problem of miracles in his next round. The remainder of the points again seems to assume trust in Christian Scriptures, and I hope this error can be corrected in future rounds. I wish Con all the best. Reference [4] Bart D. Ehrman, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, 3rd edition, 2004, pp. 19-20.