Yes, the existence of themes, continuity, overarching principles and whatnot is in the law, just as in religious writing, no evidence that there is any common author lying behind it all. It’s doubtless true that some people who write law think they are in pursuit of some insubstantial essence which is The Law, just as the people who wrote the Bible may in some cases have believed that they were “consulting the Holy Spirit.” But the content is sufficiently accounted for if the authors only imagine that essence, without the essence actually existing.
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I would note that the authorship of 2 Peter and 1 John are likewise widely disputed. Therefore citing them does not in fact resolve any authorship issue.
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For @Mark10.45
David Bentley Hart, a very well respected Orthodox Christian bible scholar writes regarding Epistles 1&2 of Peter
As for the two letters ascribed to Peter (the second being probably the latest New Testament text by a good margin), they were certainly written by two different authors, neither of whom was either the disciple of Jesus or the first leader of the church in Rome. Admittedly, some scholars have tried to argue for a kind of “indirect authenticity” for the first letter, suggesting that it may contain genuine teachings of the Apostle communicated to, and then paraphrased by, a disciple fluent in Greek; but the case against authenticity is far stronger. No credible scholar argues for the authenticity of the second letter, however; it is an extremely late writing, incorporating a great deal of the Letter of Jude practically verbatim.
–D. B. H., The New Testament
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1 John 1:1-4…same author as the gospel.
Seeing as the gospel of John 1:1 references Jesus as present at the beginning of time, similar to how Moses writes Genesis, we can conclude that neither were eyewitnesses. That however, does not invalidate the truth of the writing.
@Mark10.45 is capable of writing in the third person, it’s a pretty common literary tool used throughout the bible and throughout history. It really has no bearing on whether or not @Mark10.45 was an eyewitness to the writing of this post, but we know his testimony is true.
no, this is the “scholarly consensus”…Papias, Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Eusebius, and Tertullian reference Mark as Peter’s scribe. Mark, or John Mark is mentioned frequently, Colossians 4, 2 Timothy 4, Acts 12/15, Philemon, 1 Peter 5…some reference the boy in the garden of Gethsemane to be Mark (Mark 14:51-52), which would make him an eyewitness.
True…but his identity can be deduced from the gospel, Acts, Colossians 4:14, and writings from the early church that affirm his authorship.
Acts 1:3
This is where things get weird for me…there were no printing presses, publishing laws, internet, or academic standard…I don’t understand how the argument that they didn’t follow today’s academic standard 2000 years ago makes any sense.
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Unfortunately, this is the same argument over and over…if you don’t believe, you don’t believe, which is fine…but I believe. I don’t need to win the argument, and I won’t concede to your argument. We are at an impasse. Quite frankly, I don’t care if it was some guy named Stan that lived in his parents basement that wrote the bible, I take it as the word of God that has saved my life in many different ways.
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Yes, if you beg the question by assuming its all true as a matter of faith, then this whole discussion is redundant.
It also makes it irrelevant whether the gospels are “eye witness” accounts or not.
I am mildly curious, in a morbid, ‘looking at a car-wreck’, sort of way, at how clear evidence that Saint Peter did not write the epistles attributed to him does not affect your belief in them.
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I don’t see clear evidence that he didn’t write them. Whether biographical or autobiographical it really doesn’t matter. The early church attributing the writings to him is enough for me. I find many more consistencies in thought and style than inconsistencies. I find that opposition of authorship usually comes from non-believers. Anyone can call themselves a Christian…even Orthodox Christian and still not believe in Christ or the bible. It is actually written in the bible that scoffers would appear and false teachers would attempt to discredit the gospel. I know the truth through revelation from the Holy Spirit. Whether Peter put the words on a scroll or not doesn’t really matter, he lived, he walked with Jesus, he shared the gospel with others. Same thing with John…I actually had a lame Pastor try to preach that John the Baptist wrote Revelation, which is backward for many reasons, it wasn’t his function or role in the gospel and obviously false if you study the bible in its entirety. So, my answer is that there is a lot of false teaching, there will be a lot of false teaching to come, the truth comes through the Holy Spirit, the bible says that in many many verses.
That comment is also consistent with the bible…John 8, Galatians 4, Jude, 2 Peter 2…I am no fanatic, but I am confident in my faith. I am also a scholar and a Christian, so there’s that. I don’t demonize anyone, you can’t bully me into believing that either. This is actually why I stopped engaging with this forum, there is no encouragement to discuss truth, man’s knowledge seems to be the only thing that matters, which is sad.
Given that there are very few of your brand of ‘Christian’ here, there is very little repugnance. 
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That’s not what he did. @tim, please take it down a few notches? 
I agree you didn’t…
But that’s a little far.
I’m sorry to hear that. I’ve really appreciated your contributions.
I’m not sure why the intensity escalates in some of these exchanges. If we can do better as @moderators, please let me know.
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While I would agree that a definite majority of most-cited scholars reject the authenticity of 2 Peter as traditionally attributed to St. Peter the apostle, David B. Hart is being hyperbolic when he says that “no credible scholar” argues for that authenticity. I can think of many, some of whom I worked with long ago. (Indeed, I was involved in a computer-based stylometric comparison of 1Peter and 2Peter back in the 1980’s which was a part of one “credible scholar’s” attempt to bring new data to the Petrine authenticity question.)
Moreover, some thirty-five years later I can still think of a number of active scholars who would be quite comfortable with this statement:
I don’t want to start a sub-thread on the authorship of 2 Peter but just want to point out that in the academy in which I participated for most of my career, the “no credible scholar” pronouncement should always be approached carefully—and sometimes with a grain of salt.
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Thanks for that response…why is it that such intensity arises over the authorship? I have come to faith in Christ through the Galatians 1:10-12 method. In my early walk, nothing made sense until I prayed, then I received understanding. So, it is difficult for me to understand why the authorship is so important. If truth is revealed to the person seeking truth, it shouldn’t matter by what method that came about. But this has happened before and will happen again, the bible says so, whoever wrote it.
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Agreed…sorry…too far. I apologize. Retracted.
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Due to a neurological problem, I must type more concisely on this fascinating topic than I would wish. So here’s some main points only:
Because 2 Peter 1:1 attributes the letter to Simon Peter (and reinforces Petrine authorship repeatedly), authenticity has become a doctrine of Biblical Inerrancy pillar for many. So when many scholars casually attribute 2Peter (and 1Peter) to the common practice of pseudepigraphy in ancient times (i.e., writing in the name of a respected authority), evangelicals have reacted strongly.
1Peter and 2Peter exhibit very different language styles. That has never bothered me because the amanuensis (i.e., the scribe, secretary, assistant) can have a huge impact on the style and “sophistication” of a text. And that practice, such as the role of Silvanus in 1Peter 5:12 (AKA Silas, who also wrote for the Apostle Paul) in no way poses a threat to all but the most extreme forms of inerrancy doctrine. (We don’t need to assume that Silvanus’ role was one of strict transcription of Peter’s words. And some might even argue that 2 Peter might have been appropriately ascribed to Peter by means of his scribe years later—but I will not evaluate that tangent herein.)
A Petrine authorship “credible scholar” who comes to mind is Michael J. Kruger, who is the Samuel C. Patterson Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Reformed Theological Seminary in Charlotte, NC.
I don’t think the issue of pseudepigraphy of any NT book is more hotly debated than 2Peter.
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While it may be true that there are some conservative scholars who accept Petrine authenticity of 2Peter, D.B.H has stated, at least in his opinion, no credible scholar accepts Petrine authorship.
There are some scientists who dispute evolution, but I would similarly argue no credible scientist disputes evolution.
Evolution is fact. Some conservative Christian bible scholars, constrained by their dogmatic worldview (and, indeed, often their dogmatic employers who require their employees to hold to said dogmatic worldview to keep their jobs) would reject evolution, but none of them are credible in rejecting evolution and arguing for YEC.
The fact that basically all YECs hold to a dogmatic inerrantist view of authorship of the bible (imagine the Venn diagram of YECs and those who hold onto traditional authorship) should also be telling about how accurate their heuristic methodology is at reaching objective truth and reality.
In the same vein, most scholars would accept pseudopigraphy of 2Peter as fact, as D. B. H. clearly does and has clearly written. He is clear elsewhere where he states his opinion on the authorship of other epistles. He is not being hyperbolic here, at least, in his opinion. D. B. H. further wrote
I suppose, having said all of this, I should pause to say also that I understand that there are those who object quite fiercely to such statements, and even regard them as implicit denials of the truthfulness of scripture or of sacred tradition. But the evidence supporting some of them is quite substantial, and most of it is drawn directly from the texts themselves, and the scholarship is not, at its best, flimsy or capricious. All Christians believe that the New Testament is divinely inspired; but any coherent account of what this means must involve an acknowledgment that God speaks through human beings, in all their historical, cultural, and personal contingency.
For those, however, who not only believe that scripture is inspired, but who are also deeply committed to “literalist,” “inerrantist,” or “dictational” understandings of inspiration, all the words of the Bible must be understood as direct locutions of God, passing through their human authors like sunlight through the clearest glass, and the canon of the New Testament—even though it took a few centuries to concresce into its present form, and has never really existed as anything but a shimmering cloud of countless variants—must be understood as a flawlessly immediate communication, in its every historical and lexical detail, of the teaching of the Holy Spirit and of the faith of the apostolic church.
That has never been the only, or even the dominant, Christian understanding of scriptural inspiration; many modern Christians, in fact, might be quite surprised at the speculative boldness and critical diffidence with which some of the greatest exegetes of Christian late antiquity and the Middle Ages approached the Bible. Still, it is a view of scripture that has had adherents, whether reflective or instinctive, in every epoch, and that with the rise of the fundamentalist movement of the twentieth century has spread far and wide in an especially acute and virulent form. I imagine that, for such believers in “verbal inspiration,” the suggestion that the authors of some of the books of the New Testament were not in fact who they represented themselves as being must seem especially intolerable. It is unlikely, moreover, that it will assuage the distress of the aggrieved textual literalist to observe that such pseudonymy was a common and even marginally acceptable practice in late antiquity, and that religious and speculative texts were often written “in the voice” of authorities long dead or even merely legendary, and that—by antiquity’s more generous standards of “authenticity”—a text composed of redacted or rearranged materials by an author, or even merely composed by disciples of his school, could still be attributed to him.
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I mean more specifically around some topics on the forum.
I think we’d all be better served and have more fun, if it was less contentious without due cause.
Hopefully we can discuss controversy without coming to blows. The central issue at present, which I don’t think anyone has so far articulated, is whether faith or personal revelation is a “way of knowing”. My answer would be that it’s a way of believing, and that’s not the same thing. But how would we tell? We accept science as a way of knowing because it seems to work; we generate reliable knowledge that can be tested against new data. What can personal revelation be tested against? How can it be related to the world?
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That is really a discussion for another topic.
Here, we are starting from the undeniable fact that some people believe certain things about Adam and Eve, and wonder if that is in conflict with evolutionary science. From there, our first job as scientists is to give them a coherent, honest and rigorous answer.
There are times when the “no credible scholar” hyperbole is just another version of the “No True Scotsman” fallacy.
POSTSCRIPT:
@Mark10.45, whenever a discussion drifts into “no credible scholar” territory, it brings back memories from the 1970’s when, for example, my favorite professor confidently declared, “No credible scholar doubts the Documentary Hypothesis.” In the decade which followed, I observed that claim being dethroned with a serious of heavy blows in the peer-reviewed literature—and eventually I realized that my professor’s claim wasn’t even true at the time he decreed it. That memory led me just now to do a quick review online, which included a nice summary statement that confirmed what colleagues had been telling me for years:
A version of the documentary hypothesis, frequently identified with the German scholar Julius Wellhausen, was almost universally accepted for most of the 20th century, but the consensus has now collapsed.[7]
In Biblical studies, as in science, one must always be willing to weigh new evidence and the latest peer-reviewed scholarship. Most of all one must be humble and cautious.
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I have stated before regarding my own personal testimony that it was only through repentance and prayer that I received revelation regarding scripture. I studied prior and though I thought I understood, I really did not until God unveiled the truth to me. Can I provide evidence of this, no. So, I am considered a “fanatic”. It is in fact scriptural, but the unbeliever can’t understand until they experience it, which doesn’t happen until they believe. So, never.