Mark D. Roberts 's Can We Trust The Gospels?

In Examining the Record section, Strobel supports the historical reliability of the New Testament. He examines the eyewitness evidence, the documentary evidence, the corroborating evidence, the scientific evidence, and the rebuttal evidence. Strobel writes about his first interview with Craig Blomberg regarding the four gospels. Blomberg proposes that the four gospels were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. A hypothesis was made that Matthew and Luke are constructed on Mark which means it’s not likely that Matthew and Luke fully

1. When the Gospel of Thomas was discovered in December of 1945 at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, many people questioned if this book belonged with the other four gospels. Thomas (Hebrew) or Didymus (Greek) also nicknamed as “Doubting Thomas,” described as a man who would not believe until he saw it with his own two eyes. He ceaselessly questioned and was misanthropic about Jesus while the other eleven disciples believed from the beginning. Thomas’s book was full of Jesus’s sayings whereas the other four books contains Jesus’s sayings as well, but in a story format that starts from the beginning of when Jesus was born to the day he resurrects from the dead. Thomas wrote down Jesus’s 114 sayings when he was his disciple. Elaine Pagels’s Beyond

William C. Placher states a question about whether to believe the truth of the Bible in “Is the Bible True?” He, in this article, starts by asking a question whether the Bible is true. While reading the paper, readers know that Placher actually believes the Bible is true. However, not like other authors, he does not explain to readers which particular chapter or sentence in the Bible is true, but on the other hand, he looks from the genre, the culture and the language of the Bible. In this way, he helps readers to think the authenticity of the Bible in a different aspect.

Revelations about the book's origin have been a cause of doubt as to its authenticity and factual accounts, and the

Throughout the history of the Bible, few words have had more controversy than the words, faith, works, and justification. James’ uses a powerful interrogative to pose the

Though scholars perform standards of examination to determine the reliability of a passage of Scripture, seldom can one find a list of these principles, due in part to some standards being preferred over others by individual scholars.[16] Habermas assembles a list of those criteria most generally agreed to by Biblical critics when examining a passage for historical accuracy: Early evidence is strongly preferred to later contributions; whenever there are sources with eyewitnesses there is preference; attestation by more than once source; discontinuity of the quotation, meaning it could not have possibly come from another source; the presence of Aramaic words or other indications of Palestinian origin; coherence to other facts that are established; disparaging remarks about the author, indicating truthfulness and a lack of obfuscation; and finally, enemy attestation, especially when it is not in their own best interest to do so.[17] It is with these generally acceptable standards that the minimal facts speak to the truth of the resurrection.

In this paper, I am writing about the Gospel of Mark. The Gospel of Mark is the shortest Gospel, but is a really cool one. It covers a lot of key events that happened during Jesus’ lifetime. After reading the chapters, we pointed out things that stood out to us, which we thought were strange or interesting. We also pointed out spiritual lessons that taught us about our faith. We also wrote down questions that we had about the material.

Many scholars claim the New Testament is not reliable for many reasons. Some claim that the Bible is not reliably transmitted because it's like the telephone game. Others say that the Bible has been copied so many times there is no way it's accurate. When examining documents like the Bible, we can find out it's reliability by asking some fundamental questions. Was the document written close to the events it describes? Is the document able to be corroborated by multiple external sources? Has the document been reliably transmitted or copied? If we answer yes to these questions, we determine the document is reliable.

To understand the correlation or the relationship between the New Testament Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, biblical scholars argued with a Synoptic Problem. The synoptic relationship consists of the “Two-Source Hypothesis, Griesbach, and Farrer. The Synoptic Problem define how these three gospels share similar commonalities and they speak verbatim in some passages of scripture, but still share the same meaning and facts. There are two key concepts that can be useful in this relationship of the Synoptic Problems, “The oral circulation of stories about Jesus prior to any written accounts and the artistry of the individual Gospel authors, each combining and reworking older source traditions in new ways.”

When judging the historical reliability of the gospels many factors come into paly. In judging the historical reliability of the Gospels the kind of the gospels is important in understanding the intentions of the writers concerning the historical value of the text. When ranking the following sayings of Jesus:

The common belief among source critics is that, the Gospel of Mark is the oldest and Matthew and Luke used his gospel along with an unknown source to write their Gospels. Evidence supporting this view make the makes four points. First, the Luke’s Gospel is contains approximately half of Mark’s information and Matthew’s Gospel encompasses almost all of Mark’s views. Second, Mark’s words are used verbatium Matthew and Luke. Third, Matthew and Luke follow the same sequence of events as Mark. Finally, Matthew and Luke sometimes reword Mark’s uncomfortable passages of scripture to allow smooth transitions and ease of understanding.[5]

The literary relationship between the Synoptic Gospels of the New Testament has intrigued Bible scholars for centuries. The arrangement of the Gospels, their content, and their portraits of Jesus offer something unique and create three books to be read independently of each other. Upon close examination, however, a wealth of evidence exists to prove that Mark was written first. The two-source hypothesis demonstrates the influence Mark had on the authors of Matthew and Luke, and the subsequent Gospels they wrote.

Filled with mythical and non-historical information, and heavily edited over time, the Gospels certainly should not convince critics to trust even the more mundane claims made therein.” (Raphael) He tries to use the bible and how the content is written to try and claim that it couldn’t be factual enough. He says that “the gospels fail to name themselves,”(Raphael) even though the first four books of the new testament are their names. I think that is good enough for me.

This research assignment aims to analyse and interpret an influential part of the New Testament – Mark’s Gospel. An analysis of Mark and his community will be discussed as well as interpreting Jesus’ teachings and his significant theme of Discipleship as it was then and in present society.

It can be argued that the similarities and differences of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke can cause the reader to either see both of these accounts to complement one another with their different perspectives or that they contradict one another by certain events being mentioned in one birth narrative but not the other. Different aspects of both of these birth narratives such as the way Matthew and Luke treat Mary, the extent to which they use the Old Testament and the audience to whom they are writing to reveals the authors’ agenda as they allow their culture and own personal beliefs to influence what they write. These factors could be argued to have an effect on the historical authenticity of these texts as it could be possible that they could have caused the authors to twist the truth to fit in with their own beliefs.