Authorship of the Gospels

The Book of Matthew is likely the oldest gospel, possibly dating to around 1-100 years of Jesus’ death and supposed resurrection. But it is obscure as to whether this Mattisyahu (Matthew) is the same mentioned as the Jewish tax collector who taxed his own people on behalf of Caesar. If so, he speaks of himself in the 3rd person. John the Elder or John the Revelator is assumed for the Book of John. Luke is likely a second hand account from Paul of Tarsus. Mark, however, is a third hand and far removed source. In fact, the gospels are so similar grammatically and contextually it would seem that all of them used the same source probably the Gospel of Matthew. Why would God need four versions of essentially the exact same story if it was divinely inspired? Why the need for such redundancy? Same parables, same histrionic tensing, etc regurgitated four times.Matthew was always my favorite gospel and Mark cannot be trusted as authentic at all. The last sentence in the book is a dead giveaway that it was tampered with as the mentioning of handling snakes appears out of nowhere with no context or corroboration from earlier accounts. Hell, when Paul was exiled he suffered a snake bite that nearly killed him. That hardly sounds as if you can safely handle snakes if you have the Holy Ghost in dwelt in you. And if it’s been tampered with then how can you trust any of it?We also know there were other contemporaneous gospels that didn’t make the cut hundreds of years after the fact. Who chose them? People inside of the early papacy. Seems if it were so obviously authored by almighty god that their preservation and authorship would be unambiguous and there would be no need to cast a vote as to which books were canonized and which weren’t. Also seems evident that other gospels, like Judas, which is curiously carbon dated very early, would not exist.As I have found, the more you know about the Bible the less confidence you have in it. The most diehard believers are those that, to quote Paul, are still on milk they’re feel good Christians.Edited by Hyroglyphx, : No reason given.Edited by Hyroglyphx, : No reason given.