moe said:
First it needs to be realized that the NT was not written the day after the ascension of Christ. It is true that the original transcripts of the NT were written over a period of time. But all of the original manuscripts of the 27 books of NT were all finished before 100 ad.
That's simply a claim, the fact is, we have no extant fragmentary manuscripts of *ANY* NT book prior to about 125CE, with many of them not making an appearance until after the middle of the second century. We don't have a complete copy of the New Testament until the 4th century with the Codex Sinaiticus.
Papias Bishop of Hierapolis published a 5 volume work in about 130 ad in which he discusses the origin and authorship of the gospels.
Assuming you believe what Irenaeus and Eusebius say about his writings, we simply do not have them today. Therefore, anything we hear about what Papias had to say is at least second-hand knowledge. Let's not forget that Eusebius had nothing good to say about Papias, he most certainly was not a fan of his work, calling him "a man of small mental capacity".
It would be rather difficult for Papias to publish a historical work about the origins of the gospels in 130 ad if they were truly in fact written long after the resurrection of Jesus by people who never knew Jesus.
If Jesus actually died around 30CE and Papias actually wrote around 130CE, that leaves 100 years, which is more than the lifespan of most people at the time between the two. Secondly, if we're going to assume that Papias was the disciple of Presbyter John, as the stories go, that only assumes that the stories that John told were true and accurate and since John wasn't an eyewitness of any of the stories, we're again going by oral tradition, not by direct eyewitness.
In fact the entire NT is considered to be by far the most historically substantiated ancient document we posses.
Um, no. While I'm sure a lot of so-called "scholars" may want to think, based on their faith rather than facts, that it's historically substantiated, it's simply not so. There are still a lot of questions about who wrote what and exactly when, at best we can know that a particular fragment of a particular book was written before a particular date because we have said fragment extant today. Just because we have a fragment of Matthew, for instance, that doesn't mean the entire book of Matthew existed at that time, many of the books were piecemealed together over time. Since we do not have the originals of any of the books in the Bible, we can only go by what physical evidence we're able to find.
Secondly, your source makes the common mistake of thinking that ancient historical tradition is the same as modern-day historical writing. People wrote myths and legends and superstitions into their narratives and that was expected by those that read them. Writers were writing about gods and goddesses and magic as explanations of perfectly natural events, certainly the writers of the New Testament, whoever they were, added common mythic elements to their writings in order to "compete" with the surrounding mythologies, we see those threads running all through the Gospels. "Your god had a virgin birth? Oh yeah? Mine did too!"
Third, communication was very slow back in those days, there was no Internet, there was no mass market newspapers, everything was done word-of-mouth, stories told by travellers coming from other towns. You are assuming several things that cannot be demonstrated.
1. That the people who may have disagreed ever heard the stories of a far-off religion's claims or cared enough to refute them.
2. That if they did disagree, they had the ability to write down their refutations. Many people were illiterate, telling your neighbor "hey, that guy is full of crap" doesn't survive through the centuries.
3. Even if they did write it down, that it survived to this day. Not only do we have the obvious difficulties of writings from the time, even with the best preservation, remaining in one piece today, but we have the fact that the church actively purged as many heretical documents as they could get their hands on. Certainly anything that said "that Jesus guy was a fraud" would have been the first to go.
In the end, you can't defend the claims you're making, but that's hardly a surprise.