Where Did The Bible Come From? Is It Reliable?
1) Authors of the Bible and who copied who?
a) Gospel of Mark, 68–70 CE. Mark, like all the gospels, is anonymous. It relies on several underlying sources, varying in form and in theology, which is evidence against the tradition that its author was John Mark (Mark the Evangelist), the companion of Peter, or that it was based on Peter's preaching (Theissen, Gerd and Annette Merz. The historical Jesus: a comprehensive guide. Fortress Press. 1998. translated from German (1996 edition). pp. 24–27.)
Various elements within the gospel, including the importance of the authority of Peter and the broadness of the basic theology, suggest that the author wrote in Roman Syria or Palestine for a non-Jewish, Christian community. The community had earlier absorbed the influence of pre-Pauline beliefs, and then developed them further; independent of Paul the Apostle. As the above states, there is no evidence that Mark wrote the gospel of Mark. The author is unknown.
b) Gospel of Matthew, 80–90 CE. The majority of modern scholars believe it is unlikely that this gospel was written by an eyewitness to the ministry of Jesus. Internal evidence suggests that the author was an ethnic Jewish, male scribe from a Hellenised city, possibly Antioch in Syria, and that he used a variety of oral traditions and written sources about Jesus, most importantly Mark and the hypothetical collection of sayings known as the Q source.
Once again, now Christian scholars believe the Gospel of Matthew was not written by Matthew. It is known that this ‘Matthew’ copied the works of Mark freely with his own edits.
c) Gospel of Luke and Acts of the Apostles, 80–90 CE. There is general agreement that Luke and Acts originated as a two-volume work by a single author. This author was an "amateur Hellenistic historian", who was versed in Greek rhetoric, that being the standard training for historians in the ancient world. According to tradition the author was Luke the Evangelist, the companion of the Paul the Apostle, but modern scholars believe that the work was written by an anonymous Christian author who was not an eyewitness to any of the events within the text.
d) Gospel of John, 90–110 CE. John 21:24 identifies "the beloved disciple" as the author of at least some of the gospel, and from the late 2nd century this figure, unnamed in the Gospel itself, was identified as John the Evangelist, the author of the entire gospel. Today, however, most scholars agree that John 21 is an appendix to the Gospel, which originally ended at John 20:30–31. and believe that the author made use of two major sources,
John did not write the entire Gospel of John.
Not any of these saints were around during the time of Jesus. There work is all based on word of mouth, oral tradition. This was not a direct word from Jesus to the book. There were several men between the word of Jesus and the writings in the book.
e) Mathew and Luke copied Marks bible
Biblical scholars agree almost universally that Mark is our earliest gospel which was later used by Matthew and Luke as a major source. As Matthew and Luke used Mark, they made certain changes and alterations to its accounts. The alterations range from improving Mark’s grammar, smoothing Mark’s negative portrayal of the apostles, changing the order of events, enhancing Mark’s image of Jesus, expanding Marcan stories, and editing Mark in certain other ways. Thus, Matthew and Luke corrected Mark since they did not find Mark to be an altogether satisfactory account. That Matthew and Luke made a variety of changes to Marcan stories is no longer a controversial issue and virtually all scholars acknowledge Matthew and Luke’s use of Mark. The different types of corrections and adaptions of Mark’s stories by Matthew and Luke can be clearly seen when similar stories between the three are compared with one another.
Clearly from the above, it is agreed that works were copied and edited, how can one edit the word of God, or even the word of Jesus? How can one be allowed to alter the true word of God or Jesus?
The late eminent Catholic scholar, Raymond Brown, wrote:
“…neither evangelist liked Marks’s redundancies, awkward Greek expressions, uncomplimentary presentation of the disciples and Mary, and embarrassing statements about Jesus. When using Mark, both expanded the Markan accounts in the light of post-resurrectional faith.”
The fact that Matthew and Luke freely altered and “corrected” Mark strongly suggests that they did not consider it to be inviolable “inspired scripture”, as Al-A’zami correctly notes:
“The earliest gospel, Mark, was scavenged as source material by the later authors of Matthew and Luke, who altered, omitted, and abbreviated many of Mark’s stories. Such treatment would never have taken place had they thought that Mark was inspired by God, or that his words were the unqualified truth”
If Matthew and Luke did deem Mark to be the “inerrant inspired” word of God, or “Scripture,” then why did they make such adaptations to its stories? Clearly this is an example of men changing the words of another man who wrote about Jesus. But even then Mark was not present at the time of Jesus, so he also heard the stories from others. Therefore we do not have an eye witness account of the bible.
Randel Helms writes
All things considered, then, Mark does not begin his story of Jesus very satisfactorily. Indeed, within two or three decades of Mark’s completion, there were at least two, and perhaps three, different writers (or Christian groups) who felt the need to produce an expanded and corrected version. Viewed from their prespective, the Gospel of Mark has some major shortcomings: It contains no birth narrative; it implies that Jesus, a repentant sinner, became the Son of God only at his baptism; it recounts no resurrection narratives appearances; and it ends with the very unsatisfactory notion that the women who found the Empty Tomb were too afraid to speak to anyone about it. Moreover, Mark includes very little of Jesus’ teachings; worse yet, (from Matthew’s point of view) he even misunderstood totally the purpose of Jesus’ use of parables. Indeed, by the last two decades of the first century, Mark’s theology seemed already old-fashioned and even slightly suggestive of heresy. So, working apparently without knowledge of each other, within perhaps twenty or thirty years after Mark, two authors (or Christian groups), now known to us a “Matthew” and “Luke” (and even a third, in the view of some – “John”) set about rewriting and correcting the first unsatisfactory
f) An example of a clear error by Mark:
Mark 1:1 The beginning of the good news about Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God, as it is written in Isaiah the prophet:
“I will send my messenger ahead of you,
who will prepare your way”
“a voice of one calling in the wilderness,
‘Prepare the way for the Lord,
make straight paths for him.’
As you can see from Mark 1:1 he refers to this quote being from Isaiah.
But the first part of this quote is from Malachi 3:1 “I will send my messenger, who will prepare your way....”
The Second part of the quote IS from Isaiah 40:3 “A voice of one calling:
“In the wilderness prepare the way for the Lord;
Clearly Mark made a mistake and referred to the wrong part of the bible. Did God inspire him incorrectly? He got half of it right but this is not acceptable if this is God’s word.
2) Warning from God in the bible against changing his word.
Revelation 22:19 New International Version
“And if anyone takes words away from this scroll of my, God will take away from that person any share in the tree of life and in the Holy City, which are described in this scroll”
Clearly a warning not to change the word of God, yet Christians seem so relaxed in knowing that bible has changes and follow it with 100% with confidence despite Gods warning.
We will come to major changes made by man to the bible later in this document.
3) Origin of the Gospel
Nowhere does the new testament claim to have directly have come from heaven, infact people were inspired. On the contrary they often emphasise on the human nature of the gospels I.e. Luke chapter 1 vs 1 and 2, is especially revealing on the origin of the gospel;
Luke C1:V1-2: just as though who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word delivered them to us, it seemed good to me also, having ad perfect understanding of all things from the very first to write to you an orderly account, most excellent Theophilus.
What Luke is saying is if they can write the gospel then so can I, why cannot I do a better job. That the other writings are not orderly, mine will be an orderly account. He does not claim to be inspired by the holy ghost etc. His inspiration are the people who went before him.
4) The Jesus Seminar
The Jesus Seminar was a group of about 50 critical Biblical scholars and 100 laymen founded in 1985 by Robert Funk that originated under the auspices of the Westar Institute.
The purpose of the Jesus seminar was to analyse thoroughly the authenticity of the bible. This was done by Christians. They came up with many conclusions and here are some of them
1. Distinguishing between the Synoptics and John. Since the 1800s, Bible scholars have distinguished between the Jesus of the Synoptic gospels ( Mark, Matthew, and Luke) and the Jesus in John, generally favouring the synoptics as more historical and seeing John as more spiritual.
- Identifying Mark as the first gospel. By 1900, critical scholars had largely concluded that Mark came before Matthew and Luke and served as a source for each.
The seminar looked for several characteristics that, in their judgment, identified a saying as inauthentic, including self-reference, leadership issues, and apocalyptic themes
Self-reference: Does the text have Jesus referring to himself? For example, "I am the way, and I am the truth, and I am life" (John 14:1–14)
The Seminar also concluded that half of the words attributed to Jesus were words put in the gospel by followers in reflection of their own hope and followers. Some these are below
John 3:16 For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
John 14:6 Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.
Note the Jesus seminar goes into a lot of detail. We recommend you read into them.
