[larusso]

Well the Bible was written some 300 years after all of this happened. Jesus didn’t own a birth certificate nor was it ever officially written down. As to who decides when what happened and wrote it down I don‘t know.

We have historical figures where we don‘t know exactly when their born. But we don‘t just write a data down.

Here is a link going in more detail and actually contradicts what I wrote. But points about the Santa Claus etc still stand. And I see no real hard evidence to the contrary either.

https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/why-decembe...

[boredhedgehog]

> Well the Bible was written some 300 years after all of this happened.

Are you perhaps confusing writing with the process of canonization? Common estimates would place the writing of the youngest book of the Bible at 95-120 AD.

[Amezarak]

Yeah, usual dates for the new Testament are all first century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dating_the_Bible#Table_IV:_New...

I think it's important to note the primary argument for even that "later" dating of the end of the first/beginning of the second century is that the gospels predict the destruction of Jerusalem. There is no "hard" argument on the lower bound, only the upper bound (earliest known physical evidence.) I don't think it's particularly wild to suggest, even for a secular historiographer, that the vague, flowery language taken to prophesy the destruction of Jerusalem could have been written without any supernatural influence. It had happened before, and tensions were high.

Luke-Acts claims to be written by an eyewitness (the latter part of the narrative of Acts shifts to first person as he describes events he allegedly participated in versus just heard and read about) and John also claims to have been written by an eyewitness. I don't think there's any particularly strong argument against that, but the scholarly consensus goes back and forth over time.

[petesergeant]

I think it’s worth pointing out you’re both talking about the Gospel rather than the Bible, a chunk of which predates Jesus

[larusso]

Yes. You‘re correct. When I wrote written I meant put together. Because the process was more to put a compilation together. I‘m not Christian and also atheist so please forgive any wording that my sound like a debunk the whole process. For me the scientific truth is not given that this person as stated in these gospels ever existed. But I‘m very interested in und history and the history of religions. I visited many churches because of the combination of power, rituals and believe. Even though the first is graspable for me.

[Amezarak]

The formal canonicalization happened later, but most people were using the almost the compilation for centuries beforehand.