The AD33 crucifixion detail in Judea

[Crispvs]

Acknowledging the forum rules and, like David, aware of the implications a discussion on the accuracy of the New Testament would have, I have refrained from commenting on the last few posts.
However, as someone who trained as a historian at a university which prized academic rigour and was not afraid to send students down for sloppy work, I get very concerned at the freedom some modern commentators seem to feel in arbitrarily rejecting sections of a work emanating from an age outside their own experience, whilst accepting some others uncritically. If all ancient literature was subjected to the same level of piecemeal criticism that the Bible often is, we really would have very little which would be generally accepted about the ancient world. Therefore, from the researcher's point of view, all sources must be given equal weight unless it can be demonstrably proved that this cannot be justified.
Statements to the effect that this bit or that bit was made up for the purpose of winning converts are little more than assumptions - they are subjective judgments which are not based on information either in the Bible or in other contemporary evidence. This is not academic rigour - it is sloppy subjectivity.

Without venturing too far forward into any sort of material which would risk running fowl of the very sensible RAT ban on religious discussion, I do think it is worth examining a few of the statements in your last post.


"There's virtually no possibility the gospels were written by the actual apostles."

Well, perhaps not any one of the 12 apostles, but the term can be justifiably extended to others in the wider group of Jesus' disciples, who must have numbered at least a couple of hundred. This is merely semantics though.
In fact we can be sure that at least two of the gospels were not written by members of the inner 12 apostles. Both Matthew and Luke quote material from an earlier source, known as 'Q', as well as material from Mark's gospel. They would be most unlikely to do this if they were speaking from their own experience of being with Jesus. Therefore, the author of Matthew's gospel could not be the apostle Matthew. However he need not have been a stranger either. A strong case can be made, as has already been discussed in this thread, for the author of Luke's gospel having been the same Luke who is mentioned in the book of Acts, as well as in Paul's letters, who therefore knew people who did have first hand experience of Jesus and could thus benefit from this first hand knowledge.
For Mark's gospel, tradition from at least as early as the second century AD considered Mark's gospel to be an account given by the apostle Peter and written down by a scribe by the name of Mark. There seems little good reason for rejecting this as a valid possibility.
John's gospel is different in character to the other three and includes a good deal of independent material, exactly as we would expect if an author had first hand knowledge of his material.


"There's virtually no possibility the gospels were written by the actual apostles. For one thing, the gospels were written in Greek, whereas the apostles spoke aramaic and were most likely illiterate."

Do you have evidence to back up that claim? It is true that perhaps the majority of Jesus' regular disciples were from Galilee and therefore spoke Aramaic. However, it is equally true that they lived in a Greek speaking world.
In central Africa today, many people speak Lingala with each other, but they are also fluent in French, as all government material is in French and it is the language of trade and a lingua franca for using with speakers of other regional languages. In the same way, all official matters in the Hellenistic world (which included Judea) were dealt with in Greek. This would include public notices and inscriptions. Greek was also the lingua franca for people from different areas and thus the language of trade. Any suggestion that Aramaic speakers would not also be likely to be fluent in Greek is spurious and uninformed.
As far as illiteracy is concerned, it was common for people to be illiterate, but this did not prevent them from getting other people to read things out to them or making use of professional scribes for setting things down in writing, much the same as our own society prior to the 1870s.


"Also the gospel of john was written c 90-95 CE, 60 or so years after the crucifixion."


We don't actually know that for sure, although there are indications that it might have been finished as late as the early AD90s. However, there is no reason why John could not have started it long before this and why whoever did the final work could not have been an attentive and conscientious pupil of his. We know that John was still around at least as late as the late AD60s, and there is no reason to assume that the bulk of his gospel had not already been written by that time.
For the other three gospels we can actually propose a narrower timescale. As pages from all three have now been identified amongst the Dead Sea Scrolls, we can be sure that they were all written before mid AD68, giving a window of 40 years or less, certainly a possible span for living memory. There is also nothing to say that they could not have been sitting for thirty years or more in the Kumran library before the community shut up shop in 68.
From the internal evidence we can be sure that Mark's gospel was the first of the three to be written. The source known as 'Q' which is used by Matthew and Luke, is likely, given it attitude to the Romans, to have been written before AD42. Even if Mark's gospel was written after 'Q', it still puts the earliest extant account of Jesus to within twelve years of the events. Twelve years may seem like quite a while but when you consider that the earliest extant source we have for Alexander the Great, that of Q. Curtius Rufus, was written around three hundred years after Alexander's death. In that sort of context, the gospels are remarkable for their contemporaneity, which is matched by only a very small proportion of the overall surviving ancient historical material.


"It's not likely any apostle was still alive in an age when the average life expectancy was maybe 20-30."

I think you are confusing average life expectancy with maximum life expectancy. An average life expectancy takes into account infant mortality and other premature death. Thus an average life expectancy of 40 (for instance) for ten people might actually be two people who lived to sixty five, three who lived to fifty, two who lived to forty five, one who lived to thirty and one who died at birth. The average life expectancy for these ten is forty, but none of them actually died at this age.

Crispvs