All approaches by necessity lean one way or the other. It's the degree of leaning and the methods employed to give that leaning apparent credibility which are considered unethical.
Assumptions of dishonesty, of cunning collusion, of purposeful misrepresentations and exaggerations, of temporal priorities being sufficient to declare indisputable source or cause,
ad infinitum. It just all hints at quackery.
WTF are you talking about? What assumptions of dishonesty, cunning collusion, etc. has anyone recently posting in this thread mentioned? Unethical? WTF are you talking about?
So your methodology upholds the Biblical God? Could have fooled me.
Again, WTF are you talking about?
Here is an example of your preferred needless suspicions in reference to Bible authorship:
My needless suspicions? First, those are not my conclusions, but rather the conclusions of numerous biblical scholars. Most admit now that the authors of the gospels are not known. We know when the ascriptions were first mentioned in the literature. This is not a secret.
Second, what is needless about questioning who wrote the gospels and for what reason? That is the beginning of all such analysis. If I pick up a copy of Moby Dick and see it is authored by Ralph Smelting of Simonton, Conneticut I plan to approach it differently from the copy I have on my desk right now.
The premise, the importance of apostolic legacy doesn't justify the preferred conclusion. In fact, one wonders why you people even prefer to choose suspicion in the first place.
What? Are you trying to tell me that the general consensus among biblical scholars of repute -- that the authorship of the gospels is unknown -- is complete tripe because you don't like it? There are solid reasons why those conclusions have been reached and no evidence -- aside from ascriptions made a century after the fact -- that the names attached to these works are accurate.
Sure (I assume that you are referring to the apostolic tradition). The generally considered first book written was Mark. Mark, even by tradition, was not an eyewitness of the events. Matthew and Luke (another non-witness of the events in the gospels even by tradition) lift entire passages out of Mark's gospel, changing some and leaving much of the rest unaltered. An eyewitness does not generally take another's writings and adopt them whole hog.
John was portrayed as a fisherman in the synoptic gospels. He is expressly mentioned as being either unschooled or illiterate in Acts. Yet, the author of John was highly literate. That book is beautifully written, complex, and philosophical.
You should not assume because I argue that some of the passages in Mark and John appear to work better as metaphors than as straight history that I am arguing that the whole thing is made up. I am not arguing that at all. What I am saying is that it appears to me that the author of Mark, for instance, appears to use particular metaphors in his work that futher his message (that no one knew who Jesus was while he was alive, with a few notable exceptions), and that an overly literal reading of the text may give the wrong impression. That's it. Nothing more. No collusion, no lies. Keep in mind that the teachings are often rendered in parable -- that is the spoken form of teaching that is most like metaphor in writing (or speech).
The authors of these texts firmly believed what they wrote, and they wrote their works in highly literary fashion. The problem arises when folks come at them as though they are bare history -- they weren't meant as bare history, they weren't written as bare history. They are confessional works. Mark's gospel begins with the good news, not "In the year of.....I, John Mark, witnessed these events...." as a history was written at that time. The closest we get to that sort of writing is with Luke's gospel.
The works are also not written from an eyewitness perspective. There is no "I did this, then I saw that". The closest we ever get to that sort of writing comes in a few passages in Acts where Luke suddenly adopts an "I" perspective when discussing Paul's movements, but even those passages are felt by some to represent an intercolation of older sources that were simply placed into Acts. No one knows for sure; assumptions abound on all sides when discussing this material.
Now, also keep in mind, that analyses such as this are not used to
prove that the gospels were not written by disciples (I haven't argued that and I don't think anyone else in the last few pages has either), but that there simply is no contemporary evidence to suppose that they were. Why assume to be true that for which there is no evidence and for which there was a reason to argue apostolic tradition? Books were not included in the canon without an apostolic stamp of approval, so there definitely was impetus to argue that a particular book was handed down in that tradition. No one argues known facts in this situation, only likelihoods. There simply is no certainty in either direction.
