Dating the four gospels

Aware of the tradition, Matthew concerned himself with another kind of “realism” or verisimilitude.

When the bystanders heard Jesus crying, according to Mark, to “) for one to Elijah—the words are too dissimilar.

First-century Christians believed that the career of Jesus, even down to minor details, was predicted in their sacred writings.

By a remarkably creative fiat of interpretation, the Jewish scriptures (especially in Greek translation) became a book that had never existed before, the How do we know that the Gospel story is true?

_________________________________ Originally I started this blog as a vehicle to debunk Scientology for a Spanish-speaking audience.Paul was an ecstatic visionary who experienced, for what seems to be a period of nearly thirty years after the death of Jesus, visions of a heavenly being he called “Christ” and “the Lord,” and the fact is that neither Paul nor any other first-century Christian felt a need to distinguish between the heavenly being and the “historical Jesus.” What is surprising is the great differences among the stories, even though they share, for the most part, similar sources.For example, according to Matthew and Mark, the dying words of Jesus were, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?So Matthew self-consciously evoked yet another literary tradition in the service both of verisimilitude and of greater faithfulness to the Scriptures: not the Aramaic of Psalm 22:1 but the Hebrew, which he too transliterated into Greek—” Luke is even more self-conscious literary and fictive than Matthew in his crucifixion scene.Though, as I have said, he knew perfectly well what Mark had written as the dying words of Jesus, he created new ones more suitable to his understanding of what the death of Jesus meant—an act with at least two critical implications.