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> The gospels are the best historical records available for Jesus but they have their flaws The Bible is written by men, specifically prophets and apostles. As

• cogman10 2y ago
  > specifically prophets and apostles Well, not all of it (depending on your definitions of course). The gospels, for example, have no known authorship. Several of the epistles are believed to be pseudepigrapha. A problem to contend with in bible authorship is the name on the book/epistle isn't always going to be the actual person that penned that book/epistle. A great example of this is Isaiah, which is believed to have at least 2 to 3 authors (with most scholars, afaik, believing it's probably 3). This wasn't really a nefarious action, because the people that wrote the bible didn't believe they were writing infallible works of religious text. Much like the telling of tall tales, it was simply acceptable to write (or relay through spoken tradition) fables of favorite historical characters. So what if Moses didn't exist, it's pretty cool to use him as a figure to unify the Canaanite tribes. (Fun fact, biblical scholars/historians believe that the ancestors of the Jews were Canaanite and that the story of moses was mostly there to unify them). The bible is a mishmash of historic documents mostly solidified in ~400CE.