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Comment by foxglacier | Hacker News Reader

What's the relevant difference between a written Q and oral tradition? Surely people repeating the stories to each other would also have established a fixed wording just as if it was written down. If the gospels were written ~80 years after Jesus's death, there had to be some intermediate source since the authors wouldn't have been personally alive when Jesus was so I don't really see that there's any question to resolve. Is the alternative hypothesis that they all had different sources, like their grandpas or someone with independent lineage back to Jesus?

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You're greatly overestimating how much an oral tradition leads to fixed wording. This is a pretty well-studied field at this point in time, and non-poetry oral traditions just don't generate the kind of long word-for-word identical passages that we see in Luke and Matthew.

There's a lot of debate over the synoptic problem in the academy, but almost nobody doubts that the solution involves a literary source instead of an oral one.

John, generally thought to be the last of the four canonical gospels, is the only Gospel that potentially dates to 80 years after Jesus's death.

Per TFA The synoptic gospels are thought to have been completed no later than 95 CE, with historical dates for the crucifixion (for those that consider the crucifixion factual) 30-33CE, placing them as no more than 65 years after the crucifixion.

Oh, I thought CE started exactly at crucifixion but I guess that wouldn't really be possible if people didn't know when it really was. So it's accepted that those 3 authors may have personally seen Jesus and followed him around collecting stories?

Q being their lived experience is not out of the question. Finding a written Q would for some detract from the quality of the gospels as a primary source.

Lee Strobel has a good take on the authenticity of the Gospel account in his book The Case For Christ [0] and as always the book is better than the movie

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/73186.The_Case_for_Chris...

It's clearer to use the original term and meaning: Anno Domini is "in the year of our Lord", and follows the same year numbering system that has been followed by various kings in history (even Japan still does for their Emperors). The birth of Jesus Christ signified his reign on earth, and that's when AD 1 happened. It's estimated he lived about 33 years until being killed on the cross, but since our current numbering is based on a 16th-centry estimate of how long ago it was, there is room for debate about Jesus's birth being shifted around a few years. Instead of changing our year numbers ("We've decided that 2024 is actually 2030..."), we instead talk about "maybe Jesus was born in 6 BC"

Its the other way around actually. People assume that the gospel were written by 80 years after Jesus SO THEY COULD CLAIM oral tradition.

So they have to claim that, because otherwise their claim of 'oral' tradition falls apart even harder.

However, funny enough nobody seems to quote this oral tradition as evidence anywhere. Most of the church fathers arguing with each other in the 100-150 period never bring up this oral tradition or quote from the 'Q' source or the gospels. We have plenty of text from 100-170 period but somehow the actual supposed words from Jesus himself doesn't seem to interest people very much.

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