Anonymous asked:We not only don’t know when the gospels were written exactly, but more importantly we don’t know who wrote them. How can we accept them as the truth?Fr. Dave Dwyer replied:"I would say there is a bit of a misconception even within the question. We do know with probably as much certainty as we know anything about the ancient world that within a couple of years when those documents were written. We have dated those ... The scholarship we have now places it between 65 and 70 [A.D.] ... that's pretty darn close for two thousand years later. If we said we didn’t know, 'let's see was it written in the 200s or the 300s?' I could see somebody scratching their head.Mike Hayes added:"I would even say wow, there was an oral tradition for those seventy years that people sort of passed around and someone was smart enough to write it down after a lot of time."Fr. Dave Dwyer added:"My one word answer to this question is faith. If we can prove it all, if we've got DNA, if we've got CSI evidence on all of it, then it's not really faith is it? We need to have faith that this is God's gift to us ... There's some books where we say the attributed author, the name at the top of the page that we have in our bible is not the person who wrote it. But that doesn't mean that we don't know who wrote it. The scholarship would have researched through these many centuries and said 'well it was a common practice at the time for someone to honor someone else by using their nom de plume, by writing on under their name.' That happened a lot with the letters of Saint Paul. People would say it's a letter of Paul when in fact they were in the school of Paul ...God is the primary author. That's what we believe in terms of inspired scripture ... Did God date it (Mark's gospel) at 71 A.D. or at 68 A.D. February? I just wonder why that would be so important to someone? Why that is the hinge on whether or not we believe it's truly inspired by God? I would think the more mystery that is involved with something the more likely that it does come from a supernatural source ..." Copyrights:© 2013 Busted Halo®Editor's note: This is an excerpt of the answer provided. For the complete response download the podcast. |  Click icon for archived podcast answering this question in its entirety. Show air date: November 30, 2007 Name of show: #131 Guest comments by: Fr. Dave Dwyer, Mike Hayes Question appeared in show: 8:50 |
