Is it right to neglect the Bible because following Muslims, any author of the NT never talked to Jesus or even saw him?

let's talk the scholars...

You reject the Bible because:

“ any author of the NT never talked to Jesus or even saw him?” or because they “collected fairy tales”

>> this is your opinion, and this is again a logical fallacy…called non sequitur, sic…you will never learn (this is “the Hammer” as Germans say)

“ Authors of the NT lived after at least 40 years past Jesus’ death”

>>Here we go: ….. for a starter...the earliest collection of ahadith dates from 150 to 200 years after Muhammad's death. al-Bukhari collected over 600’000 reports, but kept only 7,397 as truth (that says a lot about they are truth worth)

Now let’s give a look a) if what you say is true, b) what’s about the Qur’an (thank you again…hehehe ;-)) a) Let’s start with your statements on the Bible:

“ any author of the NT never talked to Jesus or even saw him?”

>> It is well accepted by all Scholars of Christianity, that the writer of Mark’s Gospel was John Mark, who was related to Barnabas the Apostle (Colossians 4.10). His house was a meeting place in the earliest days of the Apostles and the early Church (12.12), and he would therefore have known personally all the Apostles, and kept company with them for some considerable time. We have as well the Testimony of Papias (here), who knew the aged Apostle John, and was acquainted with men who had known the other Apostles. He lived towards the end of the 1st century AD. Papias wrote about ‘Mark who wrote the Gospel’, saying, “ Mark having become the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately whatever he remembered.

What Papias Says About Matthew : with regard to Matthew, Papias made the following statement, “Matthew put together the oracles of the Lord”. We know that Matthew had been a tax collector (Matthew 9.9 and parallels) and responded to the call of Jesus, introducing Jesus to his friends (Matthew 9.10-13). In Matthew 10.3 he is named as an Apostle as ‘Matthew the tax collector’. Mark 3.18 and Luke 6.15 both name him among the Apostles.

!!!Now, let’s just think one second: If one of the writers of the Gospel was named following a Jewish tax collector (they were seen as traitors and very despised by the own Jewish people), it must be historical evident that he’s the actual real writer of the Gospel, otherwise they would have done everything to cancel this embarrassing situation!!!!

Luke : he wrote a two part account which we know as Luke’s Gospel and the Acts, and there is no reason to doubt his authorship. He was not an especially prominent figure in the early church and there is absolutely no reason why authorship would be imputed to him unless it were true. He went about the matter of writing his history methodically, with the specific purpose of recording the testimony of eyewitnesses (Luke 1.2) and claims that he was in a special position to do so having had a complete understanding ‘of all things from the very first’ (Luke 1.3). He clearly knew the Apostles, and James, the Lord’s brother (Acts 21.18).

He also knew of writings by ‘many’ (Luke 1.1), of which we now have no information, and was concerned that the true facts should be recorded. We know that he made use of Mark’s Gospel. He was clearly concerned that what he would present should be an accurate account. It is apparent from his writings that he was widely knowledgeable about the background and history of his times and that he was a literary expert. By profession he was a physician (Colossians 4.14) and went around extensively with Paul.

John Like Luke’s Gospel the Gospel of John states who ‘the writer’ is. He is ‘the disciple whom Jesus loved’ who leaned on His breast (i.e. lay next to Him) at the Last Supper (John 21.24 with verse 20). This demonstrates that it must have been an Apostle, and all the evidence in the Gospel points to John, who is never directly mentioned, while ‘the disciple whom Jesus loved’ regularly is in places where it is clear that the person spoken of is one of the inner band. Compare also how John the baptiser is called simply ‘John’ because there was no need to distinguish him from the Apostle, when the Apostle was the author. This authorship is confirmed by the constant testimony of the early church, which is that John gave out the Gospel at Ephesus ‘in his old age’.

“ There were many Gospels prior to 325 (Council of Nicaea) but a pagan (?) Emperor of Rome Constantine I and some bishops (not Jesus definitely!) decided that only Gospels by Mathew, Mark, Luke and John should become canonical”

>>…Well, you are wrong. It seems that you only read the “da Vince Code”…!!!hahaha. You should know that a) it has not been neither Emperor Constantine neither the Council of Niceae that decided anything on this topic. …the Canon had to be established because of the proliferation of heresies and apocryphal writings about Jesus (we could argue that the Qur’an is, in some way, an apocryphal, or at least it took over some of these writings…but on that later). It had to be done because at that time there were a lot of dangerous heresies around (See Irenaeus’ “Adversus Haereses vs the Arian controversy. here; here and here a more detailed analysis about the origins of the Gospels :

Already Around 200 A.D. with Irenaeus, the four canonical Gospels were accepted. And we have as well the Muratorian fragment (Link), around 170 A.D., that’s to say at the time of Ireneus), where you can find described and listed almost all writings that will be officially declared later on, not in Nicea and by the Council and not by “some Bishops”.

From Wikipedia: (Link)

“A four gospel canon (the Tetramorph) was in place by the time of Irenaeus, c. 160, who refers to it directly. (…) Likewise by 200 the Muratorian fragment shows that there existed a set of Christian writings somewhat similar to what is now the New Testament, which included four gospels and argued against objections to them. Thus, while there was a good measure of debate in the Early Church over the New Testament canon, the major writings were accepted by almost all Christians by the middle of the second century. In his Easter letter of 367, Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, gave a list of exactly the same books as what would become the New Testament canon, and he used the word "canonized" (kanonizomena) in regards to them. The African Synod of Hippo, in 393, approved the New Testament, as it stands today, together with the Septuagint books, a decision that was confirmed by Councils of Carthage in 397 and 419. These councils were under the authority of St. Augustine, who regarded the canon as already closed. Pope Damasus I's Council of Rome in 382, if the Decretum Gelasianum is correctly associated with it, issued a biblical canon identical to that mentioned above.

“ Who is the author of Old Testament, Moses” False! Ask Israel Finkelstein or Richard Elliott Friedman. Learn about Jahwist source, Elohist source, Deuteronomy source, Priestly source, Redactor! Jews lost original Old Testament at least twice and then recovered (?).

>>You are failing to make some progress here, because in any Theological Christian University, all these things are studied and teached. You have not invented anything here. Moreover, where have you come up with the “2x lost” hypothesis? And what does it mean by “recovered”? Are you reading Mickey Mouse? For centuries the Scientific Community believed that it couldn’t be Moses that had written the Torah, because there was no evidence of the existence of a writing at that time. But then, the Black Stele was found, with the Hammurabi code, written around 300 years before Moses, in the same region. They then discovered as well the Tablets of Ebla (around 17’000, 2’300 years BC, 100 years before Moses). There were as well heavy doubts about the reliability of the whole Jewish Bible, because the oldest MS that we had till 1948 was from around 916 AD: (the Masoretic text). With the discovery 1948 of the dead sea scroll MS of Qumran (dated between 125 BC and max 70 AD.), scholars could see that , except minor differences in spelling and writing errors (but not on the doctrinal side), the two, more than 1000 years apart texts, were practically identical. Actually never, neither the OT or the NT have been edited or “rectified” as in the case of the Qur’an with Uthman (on that, more climax at the end of this post).

IHS