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My last article was about how the first five books of the Hebrew bible, the Pentateuch, were not actually written by Moses. So I thought I’d write about how the New Testament wasn’t written by the names we associate with the text.
This is, I want to stress, not new information. I am only writing to spread the painstaking research of scholars from the last 200 years to otherwise casual students of history who read my essays and articles and whatnot.
If you want to get the info straight from the scholar’s mouth I recommend the Misquoting Jesus podcast and Digital Hammurabi. That being said this is relatively common. As I think most of us know from our days in school, a lot of people are happy to misappropriate other’s words as their own and people are equally happy to put their own words in someone else’s name.
So Moses didn’t write the Torah. Mark didn’t write the gospel of Mark. Matthew didn’t write the Gospel of Matthew. Even several of Paul’s epistles in the New testament weren’t written by Paul. Plate wrote plays putting his words in his teacher Socrates’ mouth. And if I start talking about who actually wrote the Koran I’m likely to get killed.
So why do scholars think the gospels weren’t written by the disciples of Jesus. Well for one thing the time of writing. The gospel of Mark was written the earliest, around…
