Jesus is the Son of God who Died on the Cross

(2) The Gospel writers have a proven track record of historical reliability. Luke 1:1-4 is written in classical Greek terminology such as was used by Greek historians. He speaks of his lengthy investigation of the story he's about to tell and assures us that it is based on eyewitness information. The places, customs, beliefs, geography and so on of Luke has been confirmed from archaeology and other historical writers (3) There were significant restraints on the embellishment of traditions about Jesus, such as the presence of eyewitnesses and the apostles' supervision;. not to mention (4) the multiple independent attestation gives a solid case for these documents' credibility. "we don't know who wrote the gospels" The "anonymity" of the Gospels authors is something that many Skeptics claim. Yet, in making this argument, critics never explain to us how their arguments would work if applied equally to secular ancient documents whose authenticity and authorship is never (or is no longer) questioned, but are every bit as "anonymous" in the same sense that the Gospels are. The Gospel authors nowhere name themselves in their texts, but this applies equally to numerous other ancient documents, such as Tacitus' Annals. Authorial attributions are found not in the text proper, but in titles, just like the Gospels. If Con claims these were added later to the Gospels, must provide textual evidence of this (i.e., a copy of Matthew with no title attribution to Matthew, and dated earlier than those with titles), and at any rate, why is it not supposed that the titles were added later to the secular works as well? The book, Texts and Tranmission (Clarendon Press, 1993) records similar data for classic works from around the time of the NT whose authorship and date no one questions, which are recorded as having the earliest copy between the 5th and 9th century, earliest attributions at the same period (for example, Celsus' De medicina is attested no earlier than 990 AD, and then not again until 1300), and having so little textual support that if they were treated as the NT is, all of antiquity would be reduced to a blank walls. The Gospels authorship is attested much earlier by many more witnesses! Second-century testimony is unanimous in attributing the four Gospels to the persons that now carry their name. This suggests that they received their titles early; for if they had not, there would have been a great deal of speculation as to who had written them - a variation of titles would have inevitably risen, as had happened with the apocryphal gospels. It is rather harder to believe that the Gospels circulated anonymously for 60 or more years and then someone finally thought to put authors on them -- and managed to get the whole church across the Roman Empire to agree. Why then were such unlikely characters chosen as authors? Luke is a very obscure personage. Matthew was an apostle, but also a tax collector - would you pick the IRS man, and an obscure apostle, to author your Gospel? Were obscure persons were deliberately chosen as authors in order to fool us into thinking that this would mean they were authentic? It is doubtful that the Gospels could have gotten anywhere unless they were certainly attributable to someone who was recognized as knowing what they were writing about. The Gospels must have received their titles immediately - not in the second century. For an anonymous author to have penned a Gospel, and have it accepted as from the hand of any authoritative person, would have required them to first produce the Gospel, then present it as the work of another; they would have to concoct some story as to how it came peculiarly to be in their possession; get around the problem of why a work by such a person disappeared or was previously unknown; then get the church at large, first in his area and then throughout the Roman Empire (and would not the claimed discovery of such a document cause a sensation, and controversy?), to accept this work as genuine. Can Con explain how these logistic difficulties were overcome? Can he get down to the specifics of how anyone could have managed to pull off such a hoax on the church as a whole. Is there any parallel to this in secular history, where an enormous group at large was bamboozled by (and continued to be bamboozled by) not just one forgery, but four, attributed in a couple of cases to members of an inner circle, in widely separated places and times? We have early witnesses to the authorship of some of the Gospels. Papias wrote around 110-130, and knew the apostle John. How could anyone have dared to attribute the Gospels to anyone other than the genuine authors with these first- and second-generation witnesses still alive? Believers in the 70s-90s, when critics suppose that the Gospels were authored anonymously, would have known of no works of Matthew and the others; believers after the 90s who descended from this generation and lived into the lifetime of Papias would have had no tradition of such documents. "I would like the source material from which my opponent finds the logic in using the 5 points he provided to prove something beyond reasonable doubt." Con can read all about in the Wikipedia under "Historical Method." "the works of Luke may in fact be in part derived from the writings of Josephus" I have demonstrated that Luke wrote before 70 CE, and Paul in the 50s was already quoting Luke; Josephus wrote near 100 CE, long after Luke was composed. As for discrepancies in the NT, Con didn't list any, to bad I won't have chance to reconcile them. "The bible has been under constant reform and revision since it discovery, and all we know from the gospels have most likely been manipulated by early church leaders" Of the four Gospels alone, there are 19,368 citations by the church fathers from the late first century on. Even if we had no manuscripts, virtually the entire New Testament could be reconstructed from these quotations. This argues powerfully that the Gospels were in existence before the end of the first century, while some eyewitnesses (including John) were still alive. Because of time and wear many of the historical documents from the ancient world have few manuscripts to which we can refer. For instance, we only have eight copies of Herodotus's historical works, whose originals were written in 480-425 BC. Likewise, only 5 copies of Aristotle's writings have found their way to the 20th century, while only 10 copies of the writings of Caesar, along with another 20 copies of the historian Tacitus, and 7 copies from the historian Pliny, who all originally wrote in the first century, are available today (McDowell 1972:42). These are indeed very few. When we consider the New Testament, however, we find a completely different scenario. We have today in our possession 5,300 known Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, another 10,000 Latin Vulgates, and 9,300 other early versions (MSS), giving us more than 24,000 manuscript copies of portions of the New Testament in existence today! (taken from McDowell's Evidence That demands a Verdict, vol.1, 1972 pgs.40-48; and Time, January 23, 1995, pg.57). With such a wealth of documentation at our disposal with which to compare, we can delineate quite closely what those originals contained. Scholars compare modern Bibles with ancient MSS and find they are substantially the same. Con actually compares Charles Manson to Jesus; I'll simply ask Con to quote one single example of an embarrassing event recorded in a canonical writing which his followers hold to be inspired of God. He argues that people are dumb and gullible, therefore we shouldn't believe them when they say Jesus rose from the dead, yet he believes an angel delivered the Qur'an to a man in a cave? "I agree that Jesus died," Half-way there, Vote Pro! He says we shouldn't believe anything written on papyrus, that's so much history to reject its laughable!