Did any author in the New Testament actually know Jesus?

ah no problemim sorry, i should have expanded on it a bit more myself.It was actually the apostles who related the prophecy to Jesus ... Notice Vs 17 (bolded)Mathew 2:16"Then Herod, seeing he had been outwitted by the astrologers, fell into a great rage, and he sent out and had all the boys in Beth”le·hem and in all its districts done away with, from two years of age and under, according to the time that he had carefully ascertained from the astrologers. 17Then that was fulfilled which was spoken through Jeremiah the prophet, saying: 18“A voice was heard in Ra”mah, weeping and much wailing; it was Rachel weeping for her children, and she was unwilling to take comfort, because they are no more.”

quote:

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Acts 2:29“Men, brothers, it is allowable to speak with freeness of speech to YOU concerning the family head David, that he both deceased and was buried and his tomb is among us to this day. 30Therefore, because he was a prophet and knew that God had sworn to him with an oath that he would seat one from the fruitage of his loins upon his throne, 31he saw beforehand and spoke concerning the resurrection of the Christ, that neither was he forsaken in Ha”des nor did his flesh see corruption. 32This Jesus God resurrected, of which fact we are all witnesses.

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These are peters words as penned by Luke. Peter was most certainly an eye witness

i dont think it was overlooked by everybody at allThe christian congregation were organized and the teachings were not just ramblings by individuals. the teachings were unified. they had a governing body made up of apostles and older men who would discussed these matters..mathews account was accepted by the other apostles therefore it must be assumed that they agreed with the prophecies application.

[qs-8upwidit2]You are confusing eye witness and what somebody wrote about an eye witness. [/qs]how can you say Peter was not an eye witness? he was one of Jesus 12 apostles.Luke wrote his gospel directly from the word of Peter who was most certainly an eye witness.By what you are saying, all media that reports on any event is heresay and not to be trusted. Thank goodness we have television hey.

the point was, did josephus confirm the existence of Jesus or not?clearly he did. It doesnt matter whether he believed in him or not (obviously he didnt)he didnt believe him, just as the majority of the jews did not believe in him. but it wasnt really the point.

just like the jews in jesus day, your understanding of what the messiah's purpose is wrong.

handwriting analysis lolim sure you know that would be impossible. The way we know that he wrote the book is because the earliest church historians are all unanimous about his authorship. There is a line of eyewitness testimony to the fact that Mathew was the writer of the gospel and historians such as Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Origen and Tertulian all testify to this fact.

Huntard, you do realise that if anything that was writen in the gospels was infactual, the followers of christ...who were eyewitnesses to many of jesus miracles... would be able to refute itbut non of the eye witnesses refuted any of the writings. If the christians wrote anything that was untrue, it would have been a well publicized forgery.

you think any ruler would have such an event recorded?i cant imagine any ruler in their right mind would make a written record of such an event.

Justin Martyr - a Gentile, born about 110C.E. in Samaria in the city of Flavia Neapolis, the modern Nablus. He called himself a Samaritan and was a diligent student of philosophy. Unsatisfied in his search among the Stoics, Peripatetics, and Pythagoreans, he pursued the ideas of Plato.Iraneaus - a native of Asia Minor, born between 120C.E. and 140C.E. in or near the city of Smyrna. Irenaeus personally testifies that in his early youth, he was acquainted with Polycarp, an overseer in the Smyrna congregation.Origen was born about 185C.E. in the Egyptian city of Alexandria and schooled in Greek literature. He became a noted scholar and a prolific writer. He is most famous for his Hexapla, a 50-volume edition of the Hebrew Scriptures. Origen arranged the Hexapla in six parallel columns containing: (1)the Hebrew and Aramaic text, (2)a Greek transliterationof that text, (3)Aquila’s Greek version, (4)Symmachus’ Greek version, (5)the Greek Septuagint, which Origen revised to correspond more exactly to the Hebrew text, and (6)Theodotion’s Greek version. “By this combination of texts,”Tertullian was a writer in the 2nd and 3rd centuriesC.E. He came to be known as one of the most prolific sources of the history of the Church and of the doctrines which were taught in his time.

there is too much evidence that it all did happen

hi grannymagda, because faith is not a possession of all people. Seeing is not necessarily believing and believing does not necessarily motivate one to follow.Perhaps Josephus was well aware of what it meant to be a christian in those days and didnt want to be hunted down and burned alive or fed to the lions.

what they say holds a lot of value.historians didnt' just write the goings on of the things that were happening in their own day.they were researchers of things of the past too, just as they are today. For instance Josephus, in the first centuryC.E., records the Jewish tradition that Alexander The Great was met by the Jewish high priest and was shown the divinely inspired prophecies recorded by Daniel foretelling the lightning conquests by Greece.he wrote about things that happened centuries before his time. He also wrote about the destruction of the temple in 70CE, something he did witness and his account also states that the repository of the archives, housing the genealogical records of tribal and family descent and inheritance rights, was put to the fire. (The Jewish War, VI, 250, 251 [iv, 5]; II, 426-428 [xvii, 6]; VI, 354 [vi, 3])this shows us that the jews did keep records of all births and jewish families and housed these records in temple. much the same way our government has a registry of births deaths and marriages...no much has changed since ancient times.

if you dont mind me asking, what is the reasoning behind this? Is this based on the age of the manuscripts we have currently, or on some other method?

based on the opinions of scholars of what time period?