Please Explain the Biblical Canon

[ChrisV]

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It makes sense to me that at the time when they created the canon, they were far better suited to understanding the truth of what actually happened at the time.

Think about it for a second, if joe blow writes a book about Jesus Christ saying he was a ham sandwich... If any book that was written about Jesus Christ was considered correct then you would have more reason to be skeptical. But at a time relatively close to his death they decided which books were accurate and which books were not. I'm willing to trust that the consistency found in the gospels is correct above the other lone books that suggest things that contradict these.

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The first Gospel (Mark) wasn't written until around 70 AD, with the others later. If, in modern times, anonymous biographies of a person first appeared 40 years after their deaths, and which biographies were accurate was judged on the basis of hearsay and oral tradition 130 years later, how confident would you be that what you had represented an accurate history? And that's modern times. We're talking about ancient Judea, where generations were a lot shorter, hardly anyone could read and write, and extremely low standards of evidence were the norm.

Also, the consistency of the Gospels (Mark, Matthew and Luke), such as it is, comes from the fact that Matthew and Luke plagiarised a lot of their text straight out of Mark and perhaps a second source. There are only 51 verses in Mark out of 600-odd which don't appear (sometimes paraphrased a little) in Matthew or Luke or both.