Biography of Jesus
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Biography of Jesus
When Jesus was a man on this Earth He lived such an important life that it needed to be recorded for all of history to read. Jesus himself didnt keep a record of His life himself but there was four men who recorded the events of His life. The four gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John have raised a lot of questions not only in the secular community but in the Christian community as well. How are we sure they wrote these gospels and were they all eyewitnesses to these events, and many more questions.
How can we be sure the Gospels were really written by these men that say they wrote them? Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were very unlikely characters. Matthew and John were disciples but Mark and Luke were not. Also when people at that time were choosing names for their fictitious authors they didnt choose names like Matthew, Mark, or Luke because these names carried no weight in that time, they were much more like to have chosen names like Philip, Peter, Mary, or James. The Gospel that has been questioned the most for its authorship is John because he was so prominent at that time, he was not only
a disciple but one of the inner three. But is made clear in the testimony the writing are by the Apostle John son of Zebedee not the elder John.
The question is also asked if all of the authors of the gospels were eyewitnesses. This, in my opinion is a great question because it seems very unlikely that they were all witnessing the same events at the same time. We learn from this article that Mark recorded Peters eyewitness accounts while Matthew recorded from Peter and Paul and lastly Luke received his accounts from Paul. John however was a direct eyewitness to the events. Whether the eyewitness accounts were direct or indirect, as long as we have confidence that the gospels were written by these men then we can be assured these are true events based on the testimony.
Another question is the mysterious “Q.” The “Q” was a separate document that was left out of Mark and was a collection of sayings from Jesus himself. The article states that we would perceive Jesus in the same light with or without the “Q.” The “Q” according to the article can be compared to an artist making a “best of” album. From what this article told me, it was just a compilation of things Jesus said.
The first three books of the New Testament Matthew, Mark, and Luke are called the synoptics. The last of the gospels, John, is written very differently and this has raised suspicions about the validity of the writings because of the contradictions between the two. There are two different assumed reasonings for why this is. The first is that John already knew what Matthew, Mark, and Luke had written and he felt no need to repeat it. The second is that John is largely independent of the other gospels which may be the reason behind the different