Zobel said:
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And given we know the answers to none of these things, seems we should also question the basic authorship claim as well.
This is where you lose me. When we have universal consensus in antiquity, which is not a given by any means, it seems that you need to find reasons to dismiss that consensus rather than default to the position of questioning it.
But I don't. There is no default position no assumption that the fathers were wrong, and that's my point, we have internal evidence of varying degrees of strength certainty and persuasion. We have external evidence of varying degrees of strength certainty and persuasion. You have been trying to dismiss modern scholarship as inconsequential. It just isn't. The evidence is quite significant in many respects. It wasn't flippantly that the external claims were largely dismissed as incorrect by academics. It was through a comparative weight of evidence and plausibility of various scenarios being true, including the scenario in which the gospels are not authored by eyewitness or people with close access.
And remember this is all under the gracious assumption of a relatively early date. Once we start talking about authorship occurring later things get even more problematic.
I see no reasonable argument by which internal evidence can be dismissed by external evidence. And even external evidence isn't all in favor of patristic tradition when we get to reviewing who was quoting what and when.
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The fact that we don't know the answer to these questions doesn't go any further than that. What I means is that there is no claim. On top of that, we don't know, so we can't say for sure.
Seems like a great reason to look at the evidence in total. I don't think anyone is saying we can claim much of anything for sure. We can only say where the preponderance of the available evidence is pointing.
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We do know without a doubt that the authorship was affirmatively claimed over and over again in unambiguous terms. Equating the two topics is an error.
I don't think they even need to be equal, if only similar. The nearest sources are still well removed more than enough to plausibly be wrong, not just about order. In fact it becomes an unreasonable position to try and come up with a coherent theory by which the early fathers were completely correct in their assertions. We need not go out of our way to dismiss anyone, we simply look at all the evidence available.