Bible Studies

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Many atheist or skeptical arguments against Christianity challenge the validity of the gospels. These arguments usually claim that the gospels were written such a long time after the life of the person they are referring to (Christ) that the writer could not have possibly known Christ personally, and majority of the gospel was folklore added to the story of an ordinary man, or, possibly, a completely made up man.
The problem with this argument was that every book in the New Testament (including the four gospels) was written within the first century A.D. Seeing the Christ died (and was resurrected) in the mid thirties A.D., the latest any books in the New Testament could have been written was seventy years after Christ’s death. With that amount of time it is possible that someone who personally witnessed the acts of Christ would be available to testify to even the youngest New Testament writings; and those peoples children would have certainly been around to validate, or debunk, those claims made in the gospels (and other New Testament books). If the gospels were false, certainly someone would say something about it—they said this guy was God, after all.
The earliest gospel written was the gospel of Mark, followed by Matthew and Luke, and finally, John. Because of their similarity, it is generally claimed the authors of Matthew and Luke copied the gospel of Mark, adding a few extras along the way (the obvious assertion that the similarity descends from their being genuinely factual is usually ignored).
The youngest canonized gospel, John, is the one I will deal with first. The gospel of John is claimed to be written by none other than the Disciple by that name, but skeptics claim the gospel was written too far after the time of Christ for this person to possibly be alive. Let us imagine, however, that Christ died in thirty five A. D., and John was fifteen at the time (which is well within possibility, as a Jew he would have been considered a man at the age of twelve), by the time the gospel of John was written (around ninety A.D.), John, if alive, would have been eighty five. He would have been old, but his being alive would be well within the realm of possibility.
At this point, a skeptic may argue that life expectancy at that time was much lower than it is today, and it would be miraculous for a person to live to that age. It is true that life expectancy of that time period was much lower than today; however, life expectancy statistics are often misleading because they are produced from all deaths, and child mortality rates were much higher in those times than in ours. If the person made it past childhood (as the author of the gospel of John obviously did) they could be expected to live a fairly good span of time. With that, comes the other gospel supposedly written by a disciple, Matthew. Because it was written several years before John, and it was well within possibility that John was indeed alive when that book was written, the chances that Matthew was alive when the gospel bearing his name was written must be even higher. It seems the possibility exists that two of the gospels were, in fact, first hand accounts of Christ.
The first gospel written was the gospel of Mark, and even though it was not a first hand account of the life of Christ, it might of well had been; because Mark was the son of Peter, a disciple (see the end of 1st Peter for proof). So it seems that the gospel of Mark was in fact the memoirs of a disciple. Of course, it is possible that it was a different Mark, Matthew and John were both dead, and nobody was around who cared enough debunk the gospels—but that seems doubtful.
The gospel of Luke was written about the same time as the gospel of Matthew, and should be of particular interest to modern day Christians because it was written by a gentile, as opposed to the other three gospels, which were written by Jews. Luke was written to explain to the newly developed Greek Church exactly what this Jesus guy did, and was paired with the book of Acts, the story of the early church. Seeing as the writer of Luke was not Jewish, he would have had no reason to glorify a normal person in order to make them fulfill the messianic prophecies, and it seems unlikely that the writer would have just copied the story down from Mark, because of the traditional Greek emphasis on the value of knowledge; and, if anyone ever found out the information was gained in such an unreliable fashion, it would spell big trouble for the author. The books of Acts is another piece of evidence that the writer of Luke did not merely copy from Mark; he obviously did not copy Acts from another source, but most certainly did research before writing, would the writer not use the same method in creating the gospel itself?
It seems that the gospels hold some teeth after all; and if we assume they are valid, we can assume a few other things. First of all, if they are valid, then Jesus fulfilled some of the Messianic prophecies (the rest he’ll get to later), which means the Old Testament prophets were right, prophets who lived hundreds of years before Christ; giving the Old Testament a few teeth of its own.

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