So who is the holy ghost then?.

[mikebravo]

On the Cross, Jesus said, 'Father forgive them, for they know not what they do'. If God is the father, and Jesus and God are one, who was he talking to?.

[chakka35]

Clanad, you still don't get it, do you? You are the one who is claiming things about the gospels, their authors and their context. The onus is therefore on you to supply evidence for those claims (I have never been foolsh enough to ask for 'proof'; that is your word).

I'm not obliged to say that the authors of the gospels are unknown. I can just pretend ignorance about the whole thing and ask you to tell me who they were, please. If you were then just to quote the names later given to them I would probably come back politely and ask the same questions about them that I asked in my last post. Then how would you answer?

Again you quote others. And I repeat that no-one can know more than you and I do. All we have is Paul, the four NT gospel authors and a couple of non-NT gospels. That's all there is. Authors can write books until they' blue in the face but they cannot add anything to those scant pickings.

Enough. It was my fault from the beginning, asking you a question which I knew you could not answer. Was I just being mischievous? I honestly don't know. It may just have been an occasional bout of exasperation I have when people glibly quote those four names as if it was well-known who they were and their credentials had been long established. Let's leave it.

[Clanad]

No, chakka, you haven't asked a question I can't answer, only that I can't answer it to your level of your demands. Heck, fact is you can't get any answers to those standards on even more recent history let alone ancient history. Show me the references you would use to "prove" your great-great-grandfather existed on your father's side (let alone your mother's side since the west has been a patriarichal society for centuries).
I do quite a bit of genealogical work for my own family and for others and it's always amusing to see the family "myths" that were so firmly believed before evidence was uncovered "proving" otherwise.
So, it seems to me that you give absolutely no credence to men and women that devote their entire lives to rigorous study and publishing documents to be peer reviewed of ancient history.

So be it... but you're not being truthful if you say you don't consult the studies of others... unless, as I've previously stated, you're in a position to do the original study yourself. Even then, since you probably weren't there in person, you'd have to rely on someone previous to have placed the information in your grasp.

A brief response to your second paragraph... I would answer, as would any other historian, that, based on such and such evidence here's my position... some areas more firm that others. Same applies to Gaius Julius Caesar, by the way.

Look, I've given good examples defending my position, you've given none, zip, nada, zero, so who's being disengenious here?

Finally, I don't believe for a minute that it really matters, in the final analysis, who wrote the Gospels, since they are so obviously a product of their time and relate historical events accurately and, most importantly, were accepted by the earliest witnesses available. This is on of the most primary of demands for any document, near-by or ancient... and those witnesses were willing to di

[Clanad]

Contd.
die for. No other person in the history of the world has had more impact on civilization than Yehsua. If your willing to adhere to the philosophy expressed by Samuel Beckett in Waiting for Godot wherein he depicts the meaninglessness of life--with its repetitive plot, where nothing much happens. His statement that "...Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave-digger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. (He listens.) But habit is a great deadener..." is dreary and I choose not to follow that path, especially since the "evidence" so greatly favors "life more abundantly", my non-retrodictive friend...

[Twirls]

Try reading "The Shack". It's a great book about the Trinity.

http://theshackbook.com/

[chakka35]

No, Clanad, we really are talking different languages. I repeat that I don't have to supply anything. You are claiming magical events, so the onus is on you to support that claim.
If, astonishingly, you think that the gospels 'relate historical events accurately' then you must justify that. But you can't unless you know who the writers were, what sort of people they were, how and whence they got their information and so on.

(Though under no obligation to, I could again ask how there can be two mutually-contradictory accounts of the nativity, on what historical basis "Luke" gives Mary a pregnancy lasting at least ten years, makes Joseph in Galilee subject to a census that applied only to Judaea and Syria, why "Luke" gives a wildly inaccurate account of the census of Quirinius and how on earth these two writers "Luke" and "Matthew" could know anything about the state of Mary's hymen nearly a century after the event when it had never been mentioned before and something only Mary would have known about anyway. Historical events indeed!)

But I won't, because you'll only obfuscate again. I'm done on this thread. If you ever find out who the gospel writers were I'll read about it in the newspapers and be the first to congratulate you.

Cheers.