We KNOW Who Wrote The Gospels... Here's Why 

Because they are😂 The majority of biblical scholars agree.

Most editions of the Bible openly acknowledge that the gospels are anonymous in the first few pages, in the forward. It is tradition that they are attributed to the apostles.

@daveblodgett2438 That's why I drew the distinction between internal and external anonymity at the very beginning of the video before getting into the arguments.

Your external evidence is not evidence, but assertion. 1. is the black swan fallacy, because never having found a gospel mislabeled or unlabeled does not mean one labeled differently does not, or did not exist, only that we have not found one. 2. The Early church? Like before the council of Nicaea, when Constantine assembled the Catholic Bible, which evolved into all the others? We have no good records of that "early" church. 3. The assertions of other early Christians do not amount to evidence either, they too are assertions. This is the appeal to popularity fallacy. 4.The "early" church accepted ONLY those four gospels? What do you mean by early, because the entire apocrypha, includes many other gospels which were accepted by "early" Christians, but disavowed by the church over time. So, what do you mean, the Early post Constantine Christians, as early "Christian"? 5. Those four Gospels were not the only one used by 1st Century Christians, all the apocryphal ones were as well. It was under Constantine, when he converted and made Christianity a formal Roman religion, that the council of Nicaea was held. There the Emperor had gathered all the Christian religious leaders of his day, at spearpoint, to discuss and decide which books to include and which to exclude. After they decided Constantine had all other books declared Non-Canonical and ordered troops empire wide to find and destroy them. That is why so few remained. 6. The book of Hebrews is not relevant in the slightest and there are debates about who might have written the canonical gospels. 7. The names chosen are not in the slightest, evidence. Rather they are an idea which aligns with your existing belief, and thus it seems of significance due to your own cognitive bias in favor of the whole thing being true. I find your religion repugnant and morally bankrupt. Imagine that you loved me beyond all measure, but I robbed a bank and killed someone in the process. Instead of allowing me to be captured, tried and sentenced, you stepped forward and falsely confessed, being tried and sentenced for my crime. What kind of person would I be to allow you to do that? Doubly so if I loved you. Vicarious redemption is morally bankrupt. I find it repugnant because it is all a blood magic faith. Blood is required for an all-powerful God to be able to forgive. We mere humans do not require blood, and so in that sense are better at forgiveness than God? Now your God concept has fallen apart. My friend, you are trapped in a religious bubble. I suggest you give this a watch to see how you sound to all those outside your bubble. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-URr0O9aHW38.html @@theepitomeministry

@daveblodgett2438 OH wow. That's a lot of New Atheist talking points that have been dealt with decisively in the literature, but I'll address a few. 1) I did not fall into the black swan fallacy, because I didn't say no manuscripts with false names on them don't exist. I said none have been found. And it is reasonable to follow the evidence. 2) You seem to be falling into the conspiracy theory found in the Da Vinci Code, which is a fictional story, and has no bearing in reality. 3) As far as your comments go about forgiveness, Christ offers you forgiveness, and all you have to do is come to him in faith. I pray that you make that decision.

I'm definitely familiar with why skeptics claim they're anonymous, but I don't think the anonymous gospel hypothesis can explain all of the data. The very fact that they are called "the memoirs of the apostles" betrays knowledge that they aren't anonymous. If they were truly anonymous, then they wouldn't be designated to "the apostles." We can also see very clearly in Papias' writings that the oral traditions were not passed down anonymously without the supervision of the apostles. Early fathers valued the "living voice" of those still alive during his day, which was a common proverb for historians at that time for obtaining eyewitness testimony as preferred to what is passed on otherwise. It's also very unlikely that Theophilus would receive a letter from some random guy (referring to Luke), etc. There are lots of reasons why the anonymous Gospel hypothesis can't explain all of the data we have.

@@theepitomeministry Still, I would say according to the "traditional hypothesis", it is very odd that no citations prior to Irenaeus name the authors, while most citations afterwards do. If Hebrews was believed to come from some authority without the Church fathers knowing who, it is not inconceivable that the same would be true for the Gospels. And the oral tradition of the church does not seem all that reliable either: for instance Irenaeus claimed the apostles who knew John had taught him that Jesus became almost 50 years old and died in the reign of Claudius. Likewise Papias contradict almost every other source regarding the deaths of Judas and of John. The dedication to Theophilus may have been symbolic ("God-lover"), or else there is a hypothesis that the first two chapters of Luke were added later (why chap. 3 sounds a lot like an opening).

@jaojao1768 I actually don't think it's that odd, and I do believe there are good explanations for this, but it does play a bit into my theory on how Matthew was written, so humor me for a moment on this. I believe Matthew was written at the "headquarters," so to speak, of the church, at the church in Jerusalem as a Gospel that was representative of the entire apostolic witness. In other words, I believe Matthew was written with MULTIPLE eyewitness testimonies from the apostles included, especially Peter's with the inclusion of 90% of Mark. This explains why Matthew appears to be the most widely spread Gospel in the early Church, because it was understood to be the Gospel account on behalf of all the apostles. When we see 1 Clement, the Didache, etc, they all quote from Matthew more than the other Gospels. This also explains why Mark wasn't used as much until later centuries, because Peter's testimony was understood to have been included in Matthew. This makes sense of when the Didache quotes Matthew, they call it "the Gospel of the Lord," because Matthew was seen as representative of all the apostles, but it's ultimately a biography about Jesus. The focus is on Jesus, not the authors, but later traditions thought it well to preserve who wrote them because that will tell us if they are trustworthy or not. Many ancient biographies are internally anonymous like the Gospels, but we trust we know who wrote them due to later attributions. The attributions to the Gospel writers is BETTER attested to, and yet we doubt them. There is a double standard here. We will trust later attributions to secular biographies, but be hyper-skeptical of the Gospels. We have to ask ourselves why we are raising the bar for these document so much higher than others, because this topic is completely separate from the theological nature of the works. We can investigate who wrote these documents without worrying about the claims within them. And when we do that, we will see there is an obvious double standard here. Personally, I think people reject the authorship because if they accept them, they have to reckon with the fact that this very-well could be eyewitness testimony, and that wouldn't be good for their unbelief.

@@theepitomeministry Interesting theory, though still odd that Church fathers from Irenaeus onwards suddenly start citing Gospels by the evangelist's name. In addition, the relationship between Mark and Matthew is clearly literary rather than oral, as they have passages that are identical in Greek. Most ancient biographies I am aware of may not mention the author's name within the text, but still say something about who they are, especially when that would be relevant (if they knew the subject of the biography for instance). For instance from Suetonius' Lives of the Caesars we understand that the author: had a grandfather who was in contact with courtiers in the reign of Caligula, a father named Suetonius Laetus who was an officer under Otho, that he was a young man when Nero-impersonators appeared 20 years after the emperor's death, likewise remembered an event in the reign of Domitian, and was in contact with one of the emperors. How much in comparison do Mark or Matthew say about themselves in their Gospels? In addition, Suetonius' older contemporary Pliny the Younger wrote several letters to and about him, indicating that he was a scholar and author. Similarly with Tacitus, he makes it clear in his Annals and Histories that he was a Roman senator whose career started under the Flavians and continued into the Nervan-Antonine period, and as I mentioned he says several in his Life of Agricola that he knew the general and was his son-in-law. It is really this internal evidence that is most important when determining the authorship of biographies, as they are not cited that regularly by later writers. But we also have Pliny's contemporary letters, where Tacitus is mentioned and written to as a senator and an author. Plutarch often writes about people long before his own time, but when he has any sort of connection to the biography he chooses to mention it. For instance in his Life of Themistocles he says he is friends with one of the general's descendants, in the biography of Antony he cites stories his grandfather had heard from a physician at the court, and in his Life of Otho he mentions having talked with one of the officers in the civil war. In fact every Greek or Roman biographer of the 1st and 2nd centuries who was an eyewitness mentions a personal connection to the subject (besides the examples above, also Nepos and Lucian), and when later Christians write biographies, they tend to do the same (Pontius' Life of Cyprian, Athanasius' Life of Antony, Sulpicius' Life of Martin, &c). Apologies for not properly citing these, but I thought my comment is getting too long anyway, and can do so in a separate comment for any you would request. And scholars constantly doubt the authorship of non-Christian works as well! For example the Letters of Plato are all disputed, as is the attribution of the Constitution of the Athenians to Xenophon. The same is also the case for Apollodorus' Mythography and Hyginus' Fables. And most early Greek poets are now regarded as fictitious (Homer, Orpheus, Epimenides, and possibly also Hesiod). Christian works are not at all special in this regard. I would say the opposite is true as well: since many churches have traditional authorship as dogma, it becomes difficult for them to accept that scholarly concensus goes against it.

@jaojao1768 Do you think there could be something within the late first century context that would cause them to not identify the authors by name, yet still knowing who they are? There was a lot of persecution at the time, for example. I'd also like to point out that people like Justin Martyr do seem to know who the authors are. It's important to know that he calls them "gospels," and not just the memoirs of the apostles. Also, notice the definite pronoun, 'the.' The apostles were a specific group of people. Most importantly, he says that the Gospels were written by the apostles "and those who accompanied them." This means that at least two Gospels are written by apostles and at least two are written by their followers, because of the plural use of the nouns. That perfectly describes the 4 Gospels we have - Matthew and John being apostles, and Mark and Luke being those that accompanied them. Then, when we analyze the internal evidence of these claims, it holds up. Matthew, the tax collector is the most specific about coins and transactions in the Gospels. Mark is clearly written from the point of view of Peter. Luke, a physician, uses TONS of medical language that isn't present in the other Gospels and even quotes the most prominent medical book at the time in his prologue. John is more detailed in things described where he is in other Gospels, etc. There is, in other words, lots of internal AND external reasons to trust traditional authorship.

No one cares what an atheist like Bart Ehrman has to say. The Gospels were not anonymously written, "the Gospel according to..." refers to the story and words of Jesus as either John, Luke, Mark or Matthew saw or heard it. They absolutely did write those books and there is no reason to doubt except if you're a disbeliever purposefully trying to spread hatred and disinformation on Christianity.

John does claim to be an eyewitness account. Each gospel has a title that says "The Gospel according to

Where does John claim to be an eye witness? Luke even states this right at the beginning of his gospel that he is not an eye witness. The gospels are also all completely anonomous. Consider this there are two endings in the book of mark. The original ending or short ending of Mark is Chapt 16 verse 8 where the women discover the tomb empty and they ran away and told no one for they were afraid. If they didn't tell anyone about the empty tomb then how did the author of Mark find out about it? @@skiamach6208

The reason I think that's the case is because I believe Matthew's Gospel was on behalf of all of the apostles, and they all had a hand in writing it - Peter was off starting churches in Rome, so in order to get Peter's testimony in the Gospel, they used Mark, since Mark was Peter's testimony. This explains why Matthew is BY FAR the most widespread Gospel in early Church history, because it was understood to have been written on behalf of them all.

​@@theepitomeministrywhat is your dating for the gospels? And for the deaths of the apostles (and where and how)?

​@@theepitomeministryYou believing in something doesn't make it true

@@exaucemayunga22 I never said it did?

@@theepitomeministry How did that work? Did they each write a couple chapters? Why are they still copying Mark sometimes word for word instead of giving their own version of events?

It's pretty easy to strawman an argument rather than deal with it head-on. Your comment assumes the traditions came out of thin air with nothing in reality to correspond to. If they're just making things up as they go, you cannot explain to me why there are only these 4 Gospels which are authoritative. If they don't care about truth, why did they only accept these? And why did they use these names? The best explanation is that those were the actual people involved in writing them, rather than a hypothesis that claims it was just being made up... and they just attached unpopular names to the documents for no reason. The ONLY reason to doubt the 4 names given is because two of them claim to have witnessed miracles and died for those claims (and the other two knew people who made the same claims)... that'd be pretty inconvenient for an atheist worldview to deal with.

If you think the reason we believe is "just because the book claims itself to be the holy truth," then you need to hang around more educated Christians. I don't do circular reasoning on this channel.

This bovine acrement keeps getting repeated over and over by Christian fundamentalists and atheists alike and it is absolutely false. Nowhere in the entire corpus of the literature is that claim made. That is a much later theological dogma that gets pasted on top of it.

@@theepitomeministry Simple question: Animals want to live their lives just like u do. U thank God for giving life to u & also for giving life to animals for u to take their lives & eat them. Don't u see how they've tricked you to believe in an imaginary God by fooling u to arrogantly ignoring your hypocrisy & narcissism?

@@AtamMardes How did this go from saying the Bible is superstition to talking about veganism? Stay on topic lol

@@theepitomeministry What is the reason you believe in religious fairy tales, fictions, and myths?

There's no reason to think they wouldn't be bilingual on a multi-cultural area. Mark and Luke could absolutely speak Greek, Matthew most likely could as a tax collector, and John lived a long life and wrote towards the end of it- there's no reason to think he couldn't have learned Greek by then... also, scribes existed. Even if none of them were bilingual, there is no reason to think scribes couldn't have written down into Greek what they were saying.

@@theepitomeministry but who commissioned these writings ?

@@dennisharvey5852 The apostles themselves. Christ commissioned them as His representatives on earth, and then the apostles wrote down what they remembered from His ministry.

@@theepitomeministry 40 to 70 years after the resurrection, why the delay ?

@dennisharvey5852 Great question! First of all, I do believe in an earlier dating of the Synoptic Gospels, but I do think John was written sometime after 90AD. But let's assume a late dating for the sake of conversation - what we find within the Synoptic tradition are clear oral teachings that were passed down with specific people's authority attached to it, namely, the eyewitnesses to the events recorded. So it's not as if Jesus died and no one heard anything about Him again for 30-70 years. The apostles were going around and preaching the message they received, and if you're right that they wrote them down late, then they must have wanted to record it down precisely before the passed away so that the original message could be preserved without alterations and embellishments. But, if I'm right, and the Synoptics were written early (I'd say some time in the 40s-60s), then it wasn't written down with a huge delay.

Right? Americans can't be wrong. It's a scientific fact.

ESPECIALLY fundamentalist christian american youtubers..................no way they are not as well versed in the facts as the experts...................... I mean, they have the ONE TRUE RELIGION and are sure of it, how could they be wrong?

🤣🤣🤣 Nice bro. That was funny.

Touché.

Yeah, I think atheists watch and comment on Christian content more than Christians do. That's sad, but it's an evangelistic opportunity, so I take it in stride!

@@theepitomeministry It is!! I think it’s great. It helps me understand where they are coming from. Conversations about this stuff helps with learning and it’s edifying. Thanks for all you do and your faithfulness.

@SaraAddington417 Thanks for watching, and John and I are going to reach the world with this stuff, and bring glory to His name. And you'll definitely learn a lot about where atheists are by reading this comment section 🤣

Two things about your statement: 1) the idea that someone from the time of Jesus' teaching and death could not be alive 40 years later is ludicrous. There were people who lived in their 60's, 70's, 80's, and even 90's even way back then. 2) The only reason the synoptic gospels get dated to 70 AD and later is because they include a story of Jesus predicting the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem. (Which actually occurred in 70 AD when Rome put down a Jewish revolt.) So, most scholars reject anything that even *might* be considered supernatural. I personally don't think we even need to go to the supernatural for this prediction. A wise person might be able to predict a Judean revolt. Jesus' own disciples were asking him to lead a revolt against Rome. There was plenty of unrest around that time. Most of the contention centered around the temple. So, if Jesus was wise enough to think there would be a revolt, he could also have foreseen the destruction of the temple. So, the gospels could have been written as soon as a year after Jesus' death as far as anyone today knows.

I should add that it is even possible that notes were being taken by some of Jesus' disciples while he was alive and teaching.

ummm what?? there not eyewitness bc of 30 years after?? u crazy bruh

Your critique of this video is on-target.

I am actually aware of critical scholarship, and I find their methodology to be questionable at best. Paulogia gives the standard skeptical arguments that I believe to have been thoroughly debunked. Early Christianity did not have wide varieties of beliefs actually. People held to these 4 Gospels alone from the beginning, and I'm unaware of an exception to that. This is because, as Bauckham has definitively shown, the oral tradition wasn't distributed anonymously completely independent of the eyewitnesses. We can see this through the use of names in the documents themselves as well as the way our earliest writers like Papias discuss favoring "the living voice," a common proverb for historians which refers to their preference of either being eyewitnesses themselves of the events they describe, and if they weren't, favoring direct testimony from eyewitnesses over receiving it second or third hand. The perception of the scholarship among layman simply hasn't caught up with the current tide of the work being done contending for more traditional views. Thank you for watching and for disagreeing respectfully! God bless you.

@@theepitomeministry "Early Christianity did not have wide varieties of beliefs actually." this alone makes it kinda obvious that yer commin at this from what you want to be true for your faith instead of whats actually true.................... come on my dude, really? lol

@@SwolllenGoat I'm referring to the idea that he said many documents were accepted and then later rejected. This isn't true. Most documents he is referring to were known forgeries.

@@theepitomeministry noooooooooooooo even the accepted books TODAY vary are you a protestant or a catholic? eastern orthadox or maybe ethiopian? and 'forgeries' is a bit much considering the books you still have in the bible, like half of paul or the long end of mark............. you are simply, AGAIN, reciting what you believe while rejecting, out of hand, what you dont............... and showing your provincial way of looking at this...................... maybe you should do a little more reading in history and less in your sects theology? just sayin......................

Do you know WHY they say they're anonymous? Because if you hear their arguments, they're not good. I think the arguments FOR traditional authorship are much stronger (and there are many more than the 4 I mentioned here). We shouldn't just appeal blindly to authority. We must ask, "What are there reasons? And are they good?"

Atheist scholars should get their demonic hands off the Bible.

Some scholars but not all.

Yes, not Gospel manuscripts have ever been found with the wrong name attached, meaning every time we have found a Gospel of Mark, it has his name on it, if we find a Gospel of John, it has his name on it, etc. The pseudopigrapha are documents written later that aren't our Gospels, but were attributed to popular people from the past.

1) Having a document be debated for centuries over who wrote it, and then eventually a consensus is met is completely different than documents that as far as we know were NEVER debated by anyone. 2) What about my other 2 points? Why weren't other Gospels accepted and why does all of the manuscript evidence unanimously agree?

@@theepitomeministry Why do you think Matthew and John were never debated by anyone? The Marcionites and Manichaeans seem to have rejected the authorship of both gospels, for instance. We even find a dramatization of this kind of debate in the _Dialog of Adamantius_ (82.1-86.8[2.12-14]; see also J. Lieu, _Marcion_ (2015, Cambridge U. Press), p120). Of course, whether it was debated or not isn't really relevant IMO. For instance, some titles simply "prevailed" over others, as we find in the case of some of the works of Porphyry's mentor Plotinus (cf. _Life of Plotinus_ 4). In other words, there is no guarantee that every anonymous book is going to be received in the same way. But Hebrews shows that sometimes books that were anonymous could nevertheless eventually come to be falsely attributed to an author and/or differently titled, by the majority of readers. As for your questions, you ask first: Why weren't other Gospels accepted? I don't know. But one obvious possibility is that theology had a lot to do with it. We have one example, a short excerpt of a letter by Serapion, where he rejects the Gospel of Peter in part because he believed it to be docetic. So, maybe other gospels were also rejected on theological grounds (rather than due to historical knowledge of authorship). But that's just a suspicion. Unfortunately, the church writers usually don't tell us most of the time what they thought about that sort of thing. Even in the case of Serapion, I'm not sure I believe his story completely. You also ask: why does all of the manuscript evidence unanimously agree? The manuscript evidence goes to show that the gospels were well-accepted in the orthodox church as written by their traditional authors, no later than the fourth century. The only manuscripts we have prior to the fourth century are fragmentary. You have noted in your video that one of them (𝔓1) lacks a title, so they do not all unanimously agree. There's also 𝔓66, a fragment of the gospel of John which according to some paleographers seems to have originally been untitled but whose title was added with a later hand. But prior to the fourth century, we just don't really have much in the way of manuscript evidence to work with. And so as another person pointed out, it's not going to be too helpful in determining what was going on in the first and second centuries.

@@HatsoffHistory don’t forget that the alogi also rejected the gospel of John. Because they thought it was written by Cerinthus

@@nopainnogain3345 Yup! This is reported in Epiphanius' _Panarion_ 2(51).

Those who hold to traditional authorship don't rule out the possibility that scribes were used while the apostles narrated what they should write, which is what I believe happened.

thats going too far into wishful thinking, if scribes where used why not other jews? why greek? or why the only language used is greek ? they could have done it in Hebrew and then translated to greek if that was the case. and why they coppy from each other ? the evidence tells us that most likely there used to be one gospel , probably not narrated by the apostols but created and coppied by greek scholars. @@theepitomeministry

It's called Son of God! It came out in 2014 I think

No, because they are known forgeries, weren't accepted as any of the churches as authentic, they have clearly gnostic theology, which opposes what we know about the teachings of Jesus... lots of reasons.

@@theepitomeministry Circular reasoning: "My theology is true because it comes from Matthew, Mark, Luke and John." How do you know they are the authors? "Because they have what I consider the orthodox theology."

@markchilders That wasn't my reasoning at all. I believe the authors are Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John because that's what history tells us when you look into it. And when you research the apocryphal gospels? They are known forgeries and never accepted by anyone. And their theology is clearly gnostic, an early heresy dealt with by multiple apostles in the NT.

That's correct, which is why I'm consistently reading books - to learn.

I think the idea that Eusebius isn't reliable is weird. I've never heard that take before. Eusebius is typically considered to be a good source to cite. As far as what Papias says about Matthew, I'm not sure that's an issue for traditional authorship. I believe Matthew was written as a Gospel account on behalf of all the apostles, which is why he includes Mark, because that's Peter's testimony. As far as what he wrote in Hebrew that was later translated, it could be the sayings of Jesus, as many things unique to Matthew's Gospel are sayings of Jesus - it could be the case that he took notes during Jesus' ministry in Hebrew, which was translated later. I don't think we have to assume because Matthew copied Mark that Matthew wasn't behind it. This hypothesis I'm putting forward makes sense of it. It also makes sense of why Luke uses so much of Mark - he says in his prologue that most of his information is from eyewitnesses - and he has 50% of Mark in his Gospel... Mark is clearly understood as eyewitness testimony to the early writers.

Appealing to credentials is obviously fallacious without a reason. Do you have any particular reason to believe my conclusion is false or that my conclusion is wrong?

I think what it shows is that they cared about truth. They weren't interested in just taking random testimony from unknown people written much later. They were only willing to accept the testimony of known sources believed to be based on what the eyewitnesses themselves were claiming. People don't accept anonymous documents as authoritative or holy. It sounds obvious when we say it, but since scholars have taken on this absurd hypothesis, sometimes obvious things need to be said. Common sense is important.

Yes, the future of the channel is going to largely be defending the historicity of the Gospels, the books of Acts, and Paul's epistles. I was just talking with my editor about this last night. That's going to be our niche moving forward. Just getting started.

I'm not trying to be famous. Just trying to get the word out about my faith. And I'm consistently reading between 30 and 50 books a year for the last few years and continue to do so, so maybe one day I will be, though I'm well aware I'm not one now

@@theepitomeministry Read everything. It won't do you much good unless you learn how to think carefully and critically. All good about "getting your faith out there". Not sure if that's of any use to anyone but yourself. You must be the first You Tuber who is not trying to be famous!

@ggauche3465 I don't do this for fame. I don't care if my channel stays small. I hope it grows so more people can know the Gospel, but it's not about me. I'm definitely reading all angles. I read from critical scholars, I listen to atheist give lectures, etc. I am, however, convinced Christianity is true despite their talking points. I think the arguments for the faith are much stronger than those against

​@@theepitomeministry +1 We don't learn much by just seeking out info that simply matches our current perspective.

Thanks for watching and commenting!

Not sure what that means, but thank you for watching!

@@theepitomeministry Ironic of a response, but I would highly recommend taking a look at the concept. It helps prevent embarrassment.

@bobSeigar Ah, I gotcha. You're calling me incompetent and overconfident. That's okay. Do you have reasons for saying that?

@@theepitomeministry Ignorant* speaking through arrogance*. I do, you have attempted to draw a dichotomy that does not exist. It is abundantly clear that you are not well versed in exegesis, yet are still passing this as a fact, when in fact, it is a half baked theory at best. Also, 'Proof me wrong!' Dialectics are not science. You made a claim, failed to substantiate it, and still posted it.

@bobSeigar A dichotomy that doesn't exist? What exactly are you referring to? I also didn't attempt to do any exegesis in this video, so I'm not sure why you bring that up. Just seems you're throwing out insults because you don't have a response to the video 🤷

Thanks again for watching! Good to see you back! What topic specifically would you like me to cover? I'm looking to do a lot of stuff in the future on Gospel reliability. Just finished recording a video on why the Gospels are referring to real, historical people and not fictional characters who are made up contrivances of the author's imaginations, and I've got a video coming out next week on why the order of certain things are different. Hopefully those will be entertaining for you as well!

B.S😂 No one knows who wrote them, most biblical scholars agree with that, most will say some seem to be copied from others. The early church cherry picked to suit needs and integrate into culture to take over. But irrelevant as it's all myths and fables with added lies.

@jameswright... Mindless appeals to scholarship won't work here. Their REASONS for believing they are anonymous are ill-founded, and frankly, foolish. However, we have LOTS of reasons to believe we know who wrote the Gospels - 4 of which are in this video. Would you like to refute any of them, or just appeal to scholarship as if that's an argument?

@@theepitomeministry Yeah 🤣 damm those specialists who dedicated their life's to study 🤣 Let's go for a few believer's opinion instead 🤣 Are the last 3 at least arch bishops of Canterbury clueless? They agree with me! Or the last few popes and most bishops and cardinals? The bible is man made by unknown authors after the fact with no original copies. It's historically scientifically and morally wrong.

@@jameswright... The only accurate thing about what you said is that we don't have original copies, but everything else you said is false. And if you understood the nature of scholarship, you'd know it is foolish to mindlessly appeal to them without knowing their reasons for holding such opinions. The majority view of scholarship changes all the time as new scholars come up and old scholars die. It flows like a river. So yeah, we live in a moment where the view in scholarship on Gospel authorship is patently false and filled with foolish reasoning. I bet I could explain to you why they believe it better than you can explain it to me, because you've yet to give a single reason to think that the Gospels are anonymous other than "but muh scholarship."

I disagree for the reasons in the video, and many other reasons I didn't get to. But thank you for watching anyways!

@@theepitomeministry can you give out those other reasons?

@nopainnogain3345 I encourage you to subscribe to the channel (this is not a shameless plug, I promise), and I will be posting many videos in the future defending this thesis. The niche of my channel moving forward will be defending Gospel historicity and the book of Acts as well. But to list a couple off hand without going into too much detail: 1) The idiosyncrasies of the authors - Matthew was said to he a tax collector, and he goes into more detail on transactions (for example, he is the only one to mention what happens with Judas' money after the betrayal), coins, etc. than the other Gospels. Mark was said to be the interpreter of Peter, and we can tell based on how he describes events from Peter's perspective throughout and how the narrative moves along according to Peter's understanding. Luke was said to be a physician, and he uses significantly more details in the healing using ancient medical terminology and in his prologue, he quotes from one of the ancient medical books we have, but inserts details regarding the eyewitnesses of Jesus, etc. So we see here internal evidence for what the external sources tell us. 2) Paul's letters contain many themes found in the Gospels, which would point to an early dating of the Gospels (as Paul was beheaded around 64-65AD, which would point to a higher likelihood that it was written by the traditional authors. 3) Undesigned coincidences (a concept I have a couple of videos on the channel already about, but it was before I had an editor, so you'll notice a significant difference in the editing lol. My current editor is MUCH better than I am at editing) point to eyewitness testimony through the independent corroboration of their stories. This phenomenon is highly unlikely in mythologized legends absent from fact. 4) Artless Similarities (a video on that will be coming out soon on this channel. I've already recorded it) point to the fact that these stories refer to real, historical people. 5) Unexplained Allusions point to an audience that is knowledgeable of the events, again, pointing to an early dating. There are more, but this should do for now.

your brain doesnt work very well, does it? maybe sit down for a bit and rest it, eh?

@@SwolllenGoat How unsurprising the insecure atheist types this kind of comment with his filthy hands.

Wow, I didn't know Michael Goulder, Richard Baukham, Graham Stanton, Donald Guthrie, Raymond Brown, Luke T. Johnson, C.K. Barrett, William L. Lane, F.F. Bruce and D. Moody Smith were all secret atheists and Muslims who hated the Bible. Thank you for sticking your face right up the bull's ass to smell that shit for the rest of us.

Do you believe every scholar on earth holds the opinion that the Gospels are externally anonymous? Because the answer is no. How do you determine which ones are right if your only standard is, "Well these guys have studied a lot and have read all of the relevant documents" ... because so have the scholars who agree with me.

@@theepitomeministry the majority, consensus opinion of the actual experts no offense my dude, but after further review, your 'arguments' are so bad Im not sure how to actually address this................. like the idea that 'all but one' manuscript has a name on it? wat? do you maybe mean 'every COMPLETE manuscript'? because MOST 'manuscripts' that are early are fragments................ obviously they dont have a title atop the page of each or whatever............... and MOST 'manuscripts' are late like 8th century or newer late ESPECIALLY the complete ones so whats the ACTUAL claim? anyway.....................I think ya need to go back to the drawin board, eh?

@swolllengoat8326 So your standard is one that is constantly changing? By your standard, you would have had a completely different opinion 10 years ago lol. That's not a very good standard. If you don't want to address my arguments, that's fine, but I'll quit responding, because there's no point in talking about this if we aren't going to get into the issues themselves.

@@theepitomeministry I have addressed the actual 'points' to some degree............... kinda irrelevent really though as they really are not 'evidence' of anything and are as likely as not to simply be wrong ANYWAY No, the expert consensus has not changed in the past 10 years.................. VERY RARELY, in fact, does the expert consensus on ANYTHING radically change..................instead, like the age of the earth, we tend to 'change' by getting more precise aa we get new information and techniques to address the subject............. the 'lol thats not a good standard' is simply theist talk for 'Im uncomfortable with how actual knowledge is gained and prefer to assume Ive been told everytghing in an old book' it makes obvious that'the truth' really isnt what yer after, eh? SO, in shgort, your 'arguments' suk kinda hard and there is no way in hades that I should give them more weight than the considered opinion of the experts in the field.................

@swolllengoat8326 Has the consensus on this issue EVER changed, yes or no? If so, and you're just blindly accepting the opinions of the "experts," then your opinion will move and shift like a river as new scholars come and old scholars go. That's not a good standard. But rather, you should look at the REASONING behind their consensus (which is obviously not what you've done), and when you see the fallacious nature behind their reasoning, you'll see why I reject it.

Because many skeptics argue that they are anonymous. This video is defending against that claim.

it always amazes me that believers know so little about what they 'believe'

@@SwolllenGoatReally now :[] How so? Actually, before you answer that. 3 questions, 2 off the top. 1. Are you on psychotropic medication? and 2. Do you believe in the Mandela Effect? I'd like to understand your mental state. Your cognitive abilities or lack thereof, before continuing what I can only assume will be an amusing conversation. So?

@@theepitomeministry I understand that. Good work by the way. I was just curious what kind of mind would ask such a strange question. It's like asking, were John, Paul, George and Ringo really the Beatles? It's nonsensical. And in no way does it discredit the Bible.

@@FirstLast-zk5ow how so? lol the STATE of yall................... apparently Dunning called in his pal Krueger to tell us all how only crazy folks dont believe the traditional names on the gospels. FFS are you some sort of legit short bus rider? did you somehow miss the centuries of debate over the matter? or maybe youve not read anything by a modern textural critic? you know, the 'crazy folks' who dont agree with your undereducated opinion that you got from your equally undereducated preacher? you know, the scholrly EXPERTS who spend their lives studying the documents in their original languages and know the actual historic context? ffs you people................................. every one of yall 'know' the 'truth' despite what the experts say.......................... I suspect in a number of other fields as well...................... its, essentially, conspiracy theorism................ or the deepest ignorance one might imagine, like yall live in some sort of cloised community where 'evil secular' worlks aint allowed................ for reals my dude, you sound legit impared.................. smugly confident in your obvious ignorance of the IDEA that actual scholars, A MAJORITY OF THEM IN FACT, dont believe in the same myths you do............ ASTOUNDING tbh you are as wrong as a flat earther, and obviosuly as deluded I suggest you pick up a friggen history book and maybe stop believing everything every random d!psh!t preacher says, eh?