GOSPEL ERRORS PROVE GOSPELS NOT WRITTEN
BY PEOPLE FAMILIAR WITH PALESTINE OR THE JEWS OF THAT TIME

In plain language: the Gospels were not and could not have been written by the Apostles. See the following information found in “The Fallible Gospels”:

“It would no doubt be an unwelcome revelation to many churchgoers that analysis of the gospels reveals that they were not written by disciples or different eyewitnesses to the same events, but years later in different countries and another language by collectors of traditions and editors of documents; and that two generations of oral transmission and theological development had by then resulted in exaggeration, suppression, reinterpretation and invention.

“This is not just a cynical or secular ‘attitude’ towards the Gospels. We have already seen examples of the kinds of ‘corrections’ made to Mark by Matthew and Luke. These are never the corrections of eyewitness detail, but always the reinforcement of justification of theology and belief.

“The distance of the Gospel writers themselves from Palestine and the Jews is revealed in endless ways. They have lepers wandering around Palestine, when they were confined in caves and camps for fear of contagion. Their need to convert the casually brutal disposal of a troublemaker into dignified formal proceedings for a significant figure reveals a woeful ignorance of Jewish legal proceedings. This gives us the impossible trials, with the Sanhedrin dragged out of bed in the middle of the night, and the blasphemy charge that makes no sense. A proper trial for a serious offence against religious law would firstly not be able to take place at night if it could involve a capital charge; and secondly it would have required two separate sessions of the court on two consecutive days before passing sentence. It was therefore impossible to have such a trial starting on the day before a sabbath or a feast day, as this would prevent the holding of the second session on the next day.

“Another revealing feature is their unfamiliarity with Palestinian geography:

“‘Returning from the district of Tyre, he went by way of Sidon towards the Sea of Galilee....’ (Mark 7.31)

“If Jesus was starting from Tyre, Sidon would have been in the opposite direction from the Sea of Galilee. This would have been a bit like going from Manchester to Newcastle-upon-Tyne by way of London, or from Sacramento to Carson City by way of San Francisco. Furthermore, in the first century there was a road from Tyre to the Sea of Galilee - but there wasn't a road from Sidon to the Sea of Galilee.

“Luke says ‘he resolutely took the road for Jerusalem’ (9.51), and then has Jesus wandering all over the place for a long and leisurely journey. He starts out by the short route to Jerusalem, through Samaria, but he arrives the long way round, via Jericho. Although by 13.22 he is still ‘making his way to Jerusalem’, four chapters later he seems to have gone backwards as he is ‘along the border between Samaria and Galilee’ (17.11).

“Luke's alienation from not just the geography but the climate and culture of Palestine is revealed in other interesting ways. In Mark, there is a story of the cure of a paralytic at 2.1-12, probably most famous for the phrase "Pick up your stretcher and walk". He is carried to the house where Jesus is, but his friends can not get near him for the crowds. They have to actually dig a hole through the flat mud roof and lower him through. The flat mud roof is typical of the construction of an ordinary house in Palestine, but it was not typical of houses where Luke lived. He turns it into a Roman style house with a tiled roof, and the paralytic is lowered through the tiles (Luke 5.17-25).

“Luke also misunderstands the technical detail (but not the moral point) of a parable from Q. Matthew preserves the original Palestinian story (7.24-27) of the comparison between a man building his house on rock and a man building his house on sand. In Palestine, this would have referred to a wadi, dry in summer but a raging torrent in the rainy season, knocking the house down. Luke, unfamiliar with the phenomenon of the wadi, thinks that the essential difference is between building on the surface and digging down to build foundations on the underlying rock. In his version (6.47-49), the house built on the surface is washed away by the flooding of a river. The meaning and essence of the story remain the same: this is just another interesting illustration of the change in the form and content of the stories, as they spread from one location to another and responded to the needs or understanding of a new readership."
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"History is an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools." —Ambrose Bierce