Reddit mentions of Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony

To be honest, there's not a ton of evidence. The martyrdoms of Peter, James, and Paul are pretty well attested, and there is some evidence for Andrews death as well. The rest is mostly legend and some of the legends are contradictory. That doesn't mean they weren't martyred, just that we don't have historical documentation.

This is a decent enough summary. I know you said you didn't have time for a book, but I can't recommend highly enough Richard Bauckham's book Jesus and the Eyewitnesses when you do have time.

Not sure if it's exactly what you're looking for, but I found Richard Baukham's Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony a worthwhile read. It does offer arguments addressing the reliability and dating aspects of the question.

These resources will help answer your questions:

• Can We Trust the Gospels? by Peter Williams. Williams received his PhD from the University of Cambridge. The book is a great first introduction to these issues. It's short, but scholarly.
  
  
• Who Wrote the Gospels? by Tim McGrew. McGrew is a Christian professor of philosophy and also a Christian apologist who has debated atheists like Bart Ehrman.
  
  
• Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony by Richard Bauckham. Bauckham (PhD, University of Cambridge) is one of the world's foremost authorities on the New Testament. This is a very scholarly book. It's long, but has tremendous depth.
  
  
• The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach by Michael Licona. Licona also holds a doctorate. He's a Christian apologist. This book is a very long, but it addresses virtually every major issue and debate about the resurrection of Jesus.

The Resurrection of the Son of God by N.T. Wright is the best one, though keep in mind it is over 700 pages. It is highly respected and compelling, even among non-Christian, critical Bible scholars.

A completely separate argument (though more easily summarized) is Gary Habermas' "Minimal Fact" argument, where he argues using only historical facts agreed upon nearly unanimously by critical Bible scholars (including skeptics and secular historians.)

A more general book about the historical reliability of the Gospel narratives is Jesus and the Eyewitnesses by Richard Bauckham. Keep in mind this is also lengthy and academic in nature.

The best summary of these arguments I've come across is in chapters 7 and 13 of The Reason for God by Timothy Keller. This is the book that turned my faith around. He's also great at citations and includes a very helpful annotated bibliography.

TL;DR - Everyone should read The Reason for God by Tim Keller.

Why is this downvoted? Serious, conservative scholars like Bauckham hold that John the Elder wrote much of the Johannine material, including Revelation. This is based on both internal as well as external evidence from church history.

Edit: a bit more content for those who want to know. First: John was one of the most common first names for 1st century Jews living in Israel. We should not at all be surprised that there are more than one John involved - on the contrary, it would be very strange if there was only one.

Eusebius, writing around the year 325, speaks of Papias, a man who lived in the first and second century, in Hierapolis near Ephesus in modern Turkey. Papias was a Christian and whenever other Christians came through Hierapolis from Ephesus, Papias would ask them..

>“What Andrew or Peter said, or Philip, or Thomas or James, or John or Matthew or any of the Lord’s disciples, and whatever Aristion and the elder John, the disciples of the Lord, were saying”

Papias wrote this in the 2nd century and Eusebius is quoting him. Papias talks about two Johns - one in the list of Apostles, and one he calls 'the elder John'. Bauckham considers these to be two different Johns: John the son of Zebedee (one of the Twelve) and John the Elder (another disciple, but not one of the twelve). Both apparently are eyewitnesses to the work of Christ.

The author of 1 John addresses his audience as 'little children' which is fitting for an elder. The author of 2 and 3 John identifies himself as 'the Elder', in the opening verses of these epistles. So it's not at all unlikely that the writer of the epistles (and possibly Revelation) is this elder John, not John the son of Zebedee.

The authorship of the Gospel of John is also never mentioned in the Bible, though the author does claim to be an eyewitness. Bauckham makes the case for 'the beloved disciple' (a Jerusalem based disciple of the Lord with familial ties to the highpriestly family) as the author, instead of the son of Zebedee.

Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0802874312/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_U_wwLvDbGX3JG90

Kruger, on the other hand, doesn't seem to agree, though he isn't responding to Bauckham in this blog post: https://www.michaeljkruger.com/did-papias-know-the-apostle-john/

>Also, that doesn't explain why the other Gospels include it because there would have been people to illustrate the Resurrection account.

I agree that you've made a salient point, but I think we can resolve this by examining the facts a little bit more closely.

First, we can take a hint by looking at the scholarly datings for the synoptic^1 Gospels: late 50s-late 70s for Mark, early 60s-100 for Matthew, early 60s-110 for Luke (see my original reply above for citations). The vast majority of scholars agree that Mark is earliest. Many agree that Matthew was written after Mark, and then Luke was written after Matthew. If we approximate Mark to AD 65-70, and posit that (for instance) Matthew came about a decade later and Luke about another decade after that, then the reason why Matthew/Luke include the resurrection information becomes clear. That is: the witnesses to the resurrection, who were alive to orally "fill in the blanks" while Mark was being disseminated, were beginning to die off due to passage of time. Therefore, collecting the resurrection testimony and putting it in written form would have felt like an imminent and important task to the authors of Matthew and Luke.

Second, the above hypothesis fits well into what we already know about Matthew and Luke's use of Mark as a source (more than 90% of Mark's Gospel is used in Matthew, and more than 50% of Mark's Gospel is used in Luke).^2 If one of the primary goals of Matthew/Luke's authors was to expand Mark's Gospel to create a fuller written account including the resurrection testimony, then it only makes sense that they'd cite Mark rather extensively in the process of doing so.^3

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Footnotes and Citations

1. I'm leaving John out of this line of thought purposefully, as I believe there is strong evidence that the author of John was, in fact, the apostle John, who himself was an eyewitness (to Jesus' ministry, as well as to His crucifixion and resurrection). An excellent resource on this topic is Jesus and the Eyewitnesses by Richard J. Bauckham (see especially, chapters 14-17 for a discussion of John as an eyewitness; however, the whole book goes into substantial detail on the general topic of eyewitness evidence for Jesus). Here's a link to the Amazon listing if you want to purchase it.
   
   
2. Encyclopedia Britannica, "Gospel According to Mark"
   
   
3. This doesn't mean that Mark was their only source of genuine information, of course. Luke, for example, begins his Gospel by explicitly referencing multiple lines of attestation: "Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things that have been accomplished among us, just as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word have delivered them to us, it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, that you may have certainty concerning the things you have been taught." (Luke 1:1-4)
   
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   Anyway, thanks for the interesting discussion! God bless you my friend, and may the peace of Christ be with you. :)

For books, I'd recommend something like Jesus and the Eyewitnesses by Richard Bauckham for a start. While I haven't read it myself (it's on my wishlist though, lol) many of the apologists I watch have cited it and its scholarship in their arguments. Bacukham in general is a good author by my understanding.

For videos, I would consider some of the following:

This Playlist

^ He also has some debates on his channel on the subject

Or this playlist