Fallen Angel said:
Why say that? The various gospels of the New Testament describe a series of events and statements by Jesus, accounts that differ from one another just about exactly what modern criminologist expect eyewitness accounts to differ from one another. Scholars have researched the books (I think they are called fornesic lexicographers or something like that) and the consensus is that the included books are indeed written by different people and apparently first-hand accounts.
We seem to be reading different evaluations of the synoptic gospels then. Concentrating on the eyewitness question alone for the moment:
Luke was no eyewitness and alludes to that fact himself (Lk.1:1-14), and anyway his chronology is
wrong: e.g. Herod (of Judea) died in 4 BCE, and Quirinius ordered no census until 6 CE, and furthermore, as Mary and Joseph were from Galilee and subject to Herod Antipas, they would not have been subject to that census. (None of which proves that Luke's account of Jesus' mission is wrong, but it does mean we should take great care before accepting anything he says for the simple reason that it is hearsay and garbled hearsay at that.)
Mark -the earliest gospel by common assent amongst scholars of the subject- has a grasp of geography as flawed as Luke's grasp of history, but at least with Mark there are numerous variant texts in existance that allow some wiggle room to explain away the discrepancies. Mk. 5:1 -in the Revised Standard Edition the text refers to
the country of the Gerasenes. In the King James, it is the country of the
Gadarenes. In some -not all- of the surviving early manuscripts, it is rendered as the country of the
Gergesenes. All of these place names are real, specific places whose locations are known, and none of them are where the text says they are. (Matt. 8:28 gives the name
Gadarenes, except in some early ms. that give it as
Gerasenes: but those places still don't fit the story.) In addition, Mark demonstrates in Mk. 10:11,12 that he is ignorant of Jewish law, by having Jesus preach in Judea about a woman divorcing her husband -a legal absurdity under Jewish law in that period! All of which supports the contention that Mark could not have been an eyewitness.
Matthew also presents problems if he was an eyewitness, because he describes an angel scaring the guards at Jesus' tomb with an earthquake. Should we accept that he saw that happen? But then there's his use of the phrase, 'to this day' (Mt. 28:15b -
this story has been spread among the Jews to this day."): that rather suggests the POV of someone looking back to something from a later period. While it isn't impossible that he's recalling what he witnessed from his old age, the choice of 'to this day' is more in keeping with an account of things that someone has been told by other people.
John does however claim to be an eyewitness, but that causes problems with the gospels of Mark, Luke and Matthew. Specifically, much of what is in those gospels is omitted by John (e.g. most of the parables, nearly all of the miracles), and most of what is in John (e.g. raising of Lazarus, the Wedding at Cana) is omitted by the other gospel witers. Some highly respected biblical scholars have apparently claimed that the discrepancies are so marked that accepting John's claim as an eyewitness would necessitate the discarding of the other 3 gospels
entirely. (In which case, you can have John as an eyewitness; IMO, it'd simplify things, increase the internal consistency of the NT
and it'd help shorten my posts!
)
If that isn't supporting documentation I don't know what you'd call it. With regard to physical evidence of human habitations and the like, the middle east has been a cross roads, heavily inhabited at times, sparsely at others,
Which means what exactly? Can you think of many cities more built and re-built upon than the City of London? And have Roman and ancient British remains never been excavated within the City? The fact that the so-called Holy Land has been much tromped upon by both the shoed and the unshod and is therefore not amenable to the normal methods of archeology is a false premise: the subsequent structures are built one atop the othe other, year upon year, decade upon decade -this is what the most basic of dating technique relies on! No special conditions apply to archeology in the Holy Land beyond the political and the religious restrictions: a dig is a dig. It either finds evidence of something, or it doesn't.
and the site of environmental devastation courtesy of the followers of Mohammed (the only good tree is a date palm, but the rest of em down! to hell with the erosion problem)
Ehrr, sources for that? I've seen nothing about the history of the region to suggest that the Muslims have been any more reckless with the environment than anyone else who's ever held sway there.
