> the Corinthians creed

First, the Corinthians creed has terminology (for our sins, according to the Scriptures, he has been raised, on the third day, he was seen, and "by the twelve") in it not used anywhere else in Paul's writings, indicating that Paul is quoting another source.

Secondly, he specifically admits that he received it from a human source (1 Cor. 15.3). The verb he uses (παρέλαβον) is a technical term used by Jewish rabbis for the transmission of sacred tradition. Paul is admitting that the creed is not his own but it was passed to him by others.

When he says in Galatians that he received the gospel directly from Jesus, he is not saying that everything he knows about Christianity he got directly from God, but the message of salvation by grace through faith. That doesn't pertain to what he is writing here in 1 Cor. 15.3-6.

The question remains: Did Paul have any knowledge of the biographical details of Jesus' life? While there is a chance he had met Jesus (Paul was probably about Jesus' age, had been instructed by Gamaliel, possibly in Jerusalem, and may have been acquainted with the members of the Sanhedrin), there is no record of hint of such. But did he know anything about the details of Jesus' life? There's every likelihood that he did; Paul was a dedicated student, and not a slacker scholar. He would have pursued learning about Jesus.

1. Paul was acquainted with what Christians believed, and was persecuting them for it. It's without doubt that he heard the stories of things Jesus said and did, without a doubt. (Acts 8.3. He was going from house to house. Are you claiming he knew nothing of Jesus, his teachings, his miracles, or any basis for what the people whom he was persecuting believed?)

2. S/Paul was present at the stoning of Stephen. He was even possibly on the Sanhedrin that was hearing so many stories about Jesus (Acts 6.14). Are we to assume that studious Saul knew nothing of the life of Jesus Stephen was preaching, but giving to his approval to Stephen's execution? That hardly seems reasonable.

3. Immediately upon his conversion (Acts 9.20), S/Paul began to preach that Jesus is the Son of God. If S/Paul only knew Jesus from the vision, he would have used a different term, maybe that Jesus was God, or an angel. This was a Gospel term for Jesus, not a Pauline one. S/Paul had spent several days with the disciples in Damascus after his conversion, before he started to preach. Are you claiming they didn't tell him anything about who Jesus was, what he said, or anything he did? Highly unlikely that Paul "knew no such details."

4. In Acts 9.22 S/Paul "baffled the Jews by proving that Jesus was the Messiah." He would have had to have known many details about Jesus' life to do this convincingly.

There is every reason to believe Paul knew many details of Jesus' life, but they weren't part of his message. His message was salvation by grace through faith, not rehearsing Jesus stories.

> The creed of 1 Cor. 15.3-7 was an extremely early creed that had been passed on verbally for decades before Paul committed it to writing.

We don't know that the Corinthians creed is actually pre-Pauline, but there are solid arguments that it is, so I'll grant that it's possible he didn't come up with it. However, I'll note that Paul himself would insist that he didn't learn it from anyone; he claims quite strenuously in Galatians that "the gospel that was proclaimed by me is not of human origin; for I did not receive it from a human source, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ."

We certainly don't know that it was "passed on verbally for decades". The earliest evidence we have of it is 1 Corinthians; even if an argument can be made that it predates Paul, there's no way to know by how much it predates Paul. Most importantly, though, bringing it up is a non sequitur. You can't cite orally transmitted doctrinal creeds to support the existence of orally transmitted biographical narratives. 1 Cor 15 begins with Jesus' death and resurrection (known, by the way, "according to the scriptures", not according to any historical source), and does not relate anything he said or did.

> Instead, Mark was gathering his evidences and resources to portray Jesus as Mark and thousands of others were truly convinced he was: the Messiah, the incarnation of God himself.

I don't dispute that he was doing just that (although I'm not sure on the "thousands" part). But as I've stated, that is a very good motive for making up the stories. Indeed, it's a better motive for fabrication than it is for accurate recording, as reality is typically far more mundane.

> This is odd for you to say since previously you said "he's a terrible historian."

Not at all. One can be excellent at faithfully and accurately copying what others have written, and incredibly skilled at finding the relevant documents, and still be a terrible historian.

> Paul's story is the theological sequel, not a biographical redux.

This still misses my point, particularly since Paul shows no knowledge of the biographical details in the first place. Yes, Paul was writing doctrinal letters, not telling the story of Jesus' life. I get that argument. But why would those biographical details never come up?

Pliny the Younger wrote a lot about Pliny the Elder. Tacitus was interested in the elder Pliny, so he wrote a letter to his friend the younger Pliny asking for details about his uncle's heroic death, the circumstances of which were "so memorable that it is likely to make his name live forever". So Pliny the Younger wrote back, giving an extensive eyewitness account of about 1500 words. (About half the length of Galatians, one of Paul's shortest letters.) We learn that Pliny the Elder died of respiratory failure after breathing the ash from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. He gives as much detail as he himself witnessed, and what those present told him. Tacitus was intrigued, so he asked more questions and wrote again, asking what the younger Pliny did in the following days. Pliny the Younger obliged with another detailed letter.

That's what letter writing about a famous person looks like. Humans are curious about their heroes, and want to know things about them. We know that people were eventually curious to know things about Jesus, because we have over 40 gospels, hundreds of forged letters, and half a dozen Acts, the vast majority of which are universally considered inauthentic. Indeed, the letters of Paul are overflowing with interest in Jesus' death, and what it accomplished, and what words Jesus revealed to his apostles; it beggars belief that Paul and his congregations were interested in that and nothing else.

You'd expect something to come up just by happenstance. Paul reveals, as minor asides, things like baptizing the dead (1 Cor 15.29), fear of what angels might do if Christian women don't cover their hair in church (1 Cor 11.9-10), or the fact that Christians will one day judge the angels (1 Cor 6.3). We can learn countless incidental details about early Christian belief from Paul, not because he was focused on telling us about such things, but because you can't avoid passing references like that in correspondence. Those kinds of details pop up for all kinds of subjects, but not for the life of Jesus, which is improbable unless Paul knew no such details.

Ehrman is a formidable scholar, but his bias has knocked him to the side. His weakness (or one of them) is to pick on the parts of Scripture that are known to be not part of Scripture (Jn. 8.1-11; Mk. 16.9-20) and use them as straw men to disabuse people of their Christian faith. His work is routinely disemboweled by other scholars, despite his being held in such high regard by the atheist community looking so desperately for a hero. Many of his hypotheses lack substantiation by any actual data, and some of his critiques are just flat out wrong. Scholars like he and Richard Carrier keep peddling their wares to the gullible crowds despite academic refutation.

> And yet not one affidavit

What is it you are requiring here—a legal stamp of approval? Then you need to throw out most of what we know of ancient history. Are you claiming that multiple attestation is the only criterion for truth? Again, you may have to throw out much of ancient history. Do we look for extra-Egyptian corroboration before we accept what the Egyptian historians have written? We're pretty thrilled to get it, but often there just is no such extant document. So also Assyrian, Mesopotamian, Babylonian, Greek, not to mention Chinese, Indian, etc. Often we're pleased to have one source. What are you demanding for the Bible that's not a double standard?

"We complain about the culture, but the culture gets its heartbeat from the people in it." I didn't reveal my source—does that make my statement untrue?

> I don't think there is any reason to trust these authors above any other authors other than they appear in a certain collection of books.

We come to trust authors on a broad spectrum of criteria. The Bible doesn't get a special pass, but it also needs to be evaluated on the same criteria as other historical and literary documents. You seem to be content to throw it out on inadequate bases (because they didn't reveal their sources; because some copying occurred—neither of which are legitimate bases for claiming them to be fictional).

> As for oral cultures there is no evidence that their stories don't change overtime.

That's why a chain of custody is so important. Any investigator wants to know "Where did you get that information?", and then he talks to that source, and to the source behind him, and to the one behind him. The gospel message has such a chain of custody. There is a solid chain of custody from the Apostles through Ignatius, Papias, Palycarp. Irenaeus, etc. There is a chain from Peter to Mark to the first five African bishops, all the way to Eusebius of Caesarea. We can trace the story back to the eyewitnesses to discover what consistencies and what changes, and yet what the examination of the Gospels brings to light is consistencies.

Ehrman is an imminent New Testament scholar. He knows his analysis. I suspect that there are naturally many who disagree with the the analysis, however the analysis is not lacking.

> The veracity of the NT text is evidenced by the sheer number of eyewitnesses (for instance, 500...

And yet not one affidavit. This is nothing by hearsay.

For whatever reason the authors wrote the fact is their sources are not in evidence outside of basically copying Mark and Q into Matthew and Luke. I don't think there is any reason to trust these authors above any other authors other than they appear in a certain collection of books.

As to eyewitness in court:

Since the 1990s, when DNA testing was first introduced, Innocence Project researchers have reported that 73 percent of the 239 convictions overturned through DNA testing were based on eyewitness testimony. One third of these overturned cases rested on the testimony of two or more mistaken eyewitnesses.

As for oral cultures there is no evidence that their stories don't change overtime. Given human nature one would expect that stories would change overtime. In fact repeating stories over time can and does induce false memories. Just asserting that they don't or didn't isn't sufficient. It should be researched. As it happens it has been researched. Ehrman provides some of the research into this method of memory which has found the stories do change in oral cultures.

> The stories of Jesus circulated as oral tradition..."We do not know this."

We most certainly and assuredly do. The creed of 1 Cor. 15.3-7 was an extremely early creed that had been passed on verbally for decades before Paul committed it to writing. There are similar creeds in Acts, 1 Tim. 3.16, Phil. 2.5-11, 1 Cor. 8.6, and elsewhere. Oral communication of the stories of Jesus, his words, and doctrine were alive and well before Paul wrote it down 25 years later.

> If, as you admit, Mark's goal was to present Jesus as the Messiah, he would have no choice but to claim that Jesus fulfilled messianic prophecy, whether it was true or not.

You make it sound as if he was painted into a corner if he wanted to fabricate the tale at hand. Instead, Mark was gathering his evidences and resources to portray Jesus as Mark and thousands of others were truly convinced he was: the Messiah, the incarnation of God himself.

> Mark 14.3-9

Anointing with oil was a sign of respect and honor, in this case an act of pure devotion. The woman didn't know she was anointing Jesus for his burial; this is the interpretation Jesus put on it as a way of prophesying his death. What Jesus said to her, to affirm her, that she would understand, is "She has done a beautiful thing to me." At that point you can visualize her looking at him and smiling. But then he said, to the surprise of everyone, "She poured perfume on my body beforehand to prepare for my burial." The woman didn't have that in mind, but Jesus was letting them all know that his death was imminent. The story shows us the deep love of Jesus' followers as well as Jesus' prescience about his impending death.

> It's clear that Luke had a wide base of knowledge from which to draw, and had sufficient skill at research to get local history correct.

This is odd for you to say since previously you said "he's a terrible historian." I can say either "make up your mind," or "you are contradicting yourself."

> The problem is, this means trouble for any claim that early Christians were interested in accurately preserving stories about Jesus' life. Because Paul, and everyone he ever wrote to, was so entirely disinterested in that life that it never came up. It never even slipped into conversation as an aside. You'd have to work very hard to write 20,000 words about Jesus without ever telling a story about things he did or mentioning something he said, unless of course you knew no such stories or sayings.

Again you misunderstand, misinterpreting focus for disinterest. Matthew's focus was presenting Jesus as a teacher (the new David and Moses), Mark's as the suffering Messiah, Luke's as the fulfillment of prophecy, John's as God himself, and Paul's, following all those, as the one whose death and resurrection bought salvation for the whole world. Paul's story is the theological sequel, not a biographical redux.

> The stories of Jesus circulated as oral tradition for several decades.

We do not know this. The first we see of any stories about Jesus' life is Mark. Could the author have been drawing on stories circulating orally about Jesus? Yes. Do we have good reason to believe that's the case? Not necessarily. Is it even particularly relevant? No. We can go through every scene in Mark and identify which ones are rewrites of Jewish scripture, which ones are drawn from the Illiad, which ones parallel Josephus' Jewish War, and so on, until we've eliminated everything except those few scenes for which we have no identifiable precedent. We can then assert that, despite his quite apparent literary genius, the author of Mark couldn't possibly have made them up himself, and must have been using orally transmitted stories. This does not in any way confirm that such stories contain authentic, historically reliable information.

> The prophecies of Mark, for instance (that you quoted), are not boring rehashing of old material, but dynamic proof that Jesus was the fulfillment of the ancient prophecies of the one who was to come.

I never said they were boring rehashes. They're in fact quite clever examples of the Jewish practice of midrash. But you can't simply assume that Mark records that the prophecy was fulfilled because it actually was. If, as you admit, Mark's goal was to present Jesus as the Messiah, he would have no choice but to claim that Jesus fulfilled messianic prophecy, whether it was true or not.

> While the Gospel writers don't mention their sources, at least one possibility for that is that three of the four authors could easily have been eyewitnesses to many events.

We don't know who the authors of the Gospels were. Traditional attribution doesn't make sense, because it would argue that the eyewitness accounts are Matthew, Luke, and John, while Mark was recording what he heard from Peter. However, since the former three all use Mark as a source, and it would be ridiculous for the eyewitnesses to base their accounts on the work of someone who wasn't, this idea falls apart. Only one Gospel claims to have an eyewitness source; John claims to have gotten information from the Beloved Disciple. The Beloved Disciple is often thought to be nameless, which makes him a suspect source in the first place. But he's not nameless. Only one person in John is repeatedly referred to as 'the one whom Jesus loved': Lazarus (Jn 11.3, 5, 36). And he's depicted as reclining with Jesus at a meal after his resurrection (12.1-2, 9-11), so we're clearly supposed to realize he's the one reclining with Jesus after the Last Supper (13.23-25).

But there's a problem, because we know Lazarus is fictional. The story of Lazarus' resurrection is John's refutation of the parable of Lazarus that appears in, and only in, Luke. In Luke's parable, a rich man dies and goes to hell, and sees a beggar he once knew named Lazarus 'reclining on the bosom of Abraham'. He begs Abraham to resurrect Lazarus and send him to warn others to avoid the rich man's sad fate, but Abraham tells him that he will not do so, and that even if he did, 'If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.' But John's theology is very much opposed to the messiah being hidden, so he flips everything around. A fictional Lazarus becomes a real Lazarus, who is resurrected, and whose resurrection does convince a lot of people. And this Lazarus even 'reclines on the bosom of Jesus', casting Jesus as the new and better Abraham.

John pulls Lazarus out of Luke's fiction, makes him real, and uses him throughout the Gospel to refute the parable that openly claimed that even a resurrection wouldn't convince people. Luke clearly said it wouldn't work, so John has it work tremendously well.

> Another factor to consider is that what they were writing was a theography, not a biography, so source notation took a back seat to their purpose in using the genre of Gospel.

That's certainly a relevant point. But hardly one that argues for the historical accuracy of the works.

> In that sense you are guilty of presentism, expecting the ancient world to have worked the way our modern world does.

Not at all. I wouldn't expect any ancient author to meet our standards. I would expect an ancient historian to meet the standards of historians of the time, and when they don't do this, I don't trust them as much. And the Gospels don't follow any of the methods of critical historians of the 1st century, not even Luke; he writes in a mode like that of a historian, and fills out his account with historical detail (pulled, most likely, from Josephus' Antiquities), but making his account look like a history and actually doing history are two different things.

> This is no lame rewriting of legends but the point of the Evangelists and the purpose of the Gospel writings.

I entirely agree. But that purpose is quite good motivation for fabricating those stories and sayings. This is not an unknown practice; the Mishnah was supposed to be the orally transmitted collected teachings of Moses, and it is almost certainly no such thing.

> You claim the Gospel writers "[fail] to actually write as though they were [writing with objectivity and accuracy]," but the only hook you have to hang that hat on is in the miracle stories, for which you have no evidence for your claim that these are legends and myths.

Not at all. Even the events of the story which have no miracle content are products of literary construction. There are even instances where we don't know the symbolism intended by a story, but can still tell it was clearly not meant to be taken literally. For instance, Mark 14.3-9. A woman spontaneously, for no historically intelligible reason, anoints Jesus with extraordinarily expensive oil from a priceless jar. No random nameless stranger would anoint someone for death days before that death, especially when Mark tells us that no one was expecting him to die. And they certainly wouldn't be carrying around an $18,000 jar of oil, much less break it over someone's head, just to make an allegorical point. Mark doesn't explain why it had to be 'pure nard oil', why it had to be an alabaster jar, why this woman isn't given a name but is supposed to be eternally remembered, or why she got it in her head to waste so much money on a pointless gesture. She was not mentioned before this, and is never mentioned again. She's a literary device, and this never happened.

> A study of Luke's accuracy rating proves him to be at least 99% accurate

This is basically irrelevant. Luke could be 100% accurate on all publicly available facts, and it would mean nothing other than that he made use of the work of a reliable historian to add detail to his story. It's clear that Luke had a wide base of knowledge from which to draw, and had sufficient skill at research to get local history correct. But the question is whether he's reliable regarding information that wasn't generally available, whether he was able to critically evaluate multiple sources, sift through conflicting claims, skillfully interrogate witnesses, etc. And he shows none of the signs that ancient historians give us of being good at any of this.

> You berate Paul for not bothering with the stories and teachings of Jesus, but you miss the point that Paul saw so very clearly: The focal point is the blood of his crucifixion and the reality of the resurrection in light of his identity as God.

I get that point. The problem is, this means trouble for any claim that early Christians were interested in accurately preserving stories about Jesus' life. Because Paul, and everyone he ever wrote to, was so entirely disinterested in that life that it never came up. It never even slipped into conversation as an aside. You'd have to work very hard to write 20,000 words about Jesus without ever telling a story about things he did or mentioning something he said, unless of course you knew no such stories or sayings.

Is Oral tradition reliable? You ask me to remember sermons, but please take into account that our culture places little value on memory, and our memory-capabilities are not trained. Most of us can't remember what we had for breakfast. It was very different in the ancient world. You said, "Eyewitness testimony is notoriously flawed and becomes more so as time passes. It just isn't a good prop." I offer you the words of Socrates in rebuttal:

"Words put in writing are incapable of being clear and are only useful to remind someone of what they have heard."

"Written words cannot be defended by argument and cannot teach truth effectively."

"If an author thinks that what he has written has certainty and clarity, it is to his disgrace."

"Written words do not provide opportunity for questioning and teaching."

"Written words are of little value unless an author is able to back them up by explanation."

There was some consensus in the ancient world that writing was merely an act of intellectual laziness. Rabbinic confidence in memorization was so high that some rabbis even banned the writing of oral traditions (Babylonian Talmud, Temurah 14b).

> There certainly aren't any footnotes or references to sources.

While the Gospel writers don't mention their sources, at least one possibility for that is that three of the four authors could easily have been eyewitnesses to many events. Another factor to consider is that what they were writing was a theography, not a biography, so source notation took a back seat to their purpose in using the genre of Gospel. In any case, I often relate stories that are true in my conversation with others and I don't necessarily reveal my sources. This technique is, again, an issue of modern writing, where we are driven to footnote every sentence, and not as much a part of the ancient world. In that sense you are guilty of presentism, expecting the ancient world to have worked the way our modern world does.

> Bart Ehrman's new book

Ehrman has been shown by multiple writers and scholars to be lacking in his analysis of the text. The veracity of the NT text is evidenced by the sheer number of eyewitnesses (for instance, 500 at one time in 1 Cor. 15; thousands of Jerusalemites saved within months of Jesus' resurrection in that city; the early attestation of the 1 Cor. 15.3-7 creed, etc.), particularly in a world trained for memory.

And as far eyewitness testimony, we still use it regularly and reliably in modern courts of law. Slight disagreements are often viewed as giving more depth to the accounts, leading to a better understanding of the event than of creating discrediting contradictory claims.

> The Gospels were written within the lifetimes of many eyewitnesses to Jesus and "earwitnesses" to the things he said.

Do you remember that outstanding sermon you heard 5 years or maybe just 6 months ago? How about today's sermon? Can you quote them in any degree of detail without looking up the text? I can't even remember the details of the few good sermons I managed to preach, the ones I got a lot of pats on the back for. Eyewitness testimony is notoriously flawed and becomes more so as time passes. It just isn't a good prop.

. It was an era of oral tradition when people specifically put to memory historical events that were important to the community. They were tuned, unlike us moderns, to remember important things that were said.

This is a truism without support that often gets repeated without being sourced. I heard in in Bible College and said it often, but where does it come from? I think it is just an assumption.

> The Gospels writers carefully researched and recorded the events and words of Jesus (Lk. 2.1-4).

I'm sure you meant Luke 1:1-4. He says he was accurate in everything, but was he? There certainly aren't any footnotes or references to sources. We know in large measure he just copied and redacted Mark and Q. What is special about that and what is special about Luke that we should take his word for it?

> Several decades is not an amount of time causing concern between the events themselves and these records of them. It's like us bringing to mind events from the mid 80s: Madonna, Mt. St. Helens, the assassination of John Lennon, Michael Jackson's "Thriller", and Ronald Reagan. This is easy.

Other than lyrics how accurately can you quote any of these people? How accurately can you describe the events of John Lennon's assassination? Just off the top of your head...

> They were working off of earlier and still available sources, like us looking at newspapers from the 80, as well as interviewing people who were there. This is easily done.

The only earlier sources were Mark and Q. Since we don't have Q we don't know how accurately it was used. What sources did Mark use? Tradition says Peter, but there is no textual evidence for that I'm aware of.

You might want to check out Bart Ehrman's new book Jesus Before the Gospels where in he discusses these very issues.

From the book's description: "Many believe that the Gospel stories of Jesus are based on eyewitness testimony and are therefore historically reliable. Now, for the first time, a scholar of the New Testament, New York Times bestselling author Bart D. Ehrman (Misquoting Jesus; and Jesus, Interrupted), surveys research from the fields of psychology, anthropology, and sociology to explore how oral traditions and group memories really work and questions how reliable the Gospels can be. Focusing on the decades-long gap between when Jesus lived and when these documents about him began to appear, Ehrman looks to these varied disciplines to see what they can tell us about how the New Testament developed. In the book, Ehrman examines:

*How cultural anthropologists studied the oral traditions of Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Ghana to reveal how stories always change as they are passed along.

*How psychologists have discovered the routine phenomena of “false memories” and how strongly people contend that these false memories really happened.

*How modern legal scholars and psychologists have shown how unreliable eyewitness testimonies really are, with people regularly distorting what they experienced.

*How sociologists have shown that a group’s collective memory is strongly shaped by the issues and concerns of the remembering community just as much by the events themselves

Were the Gospels written before AD 70? Very possibly, though not provably so. (On the other hand, they can't PROVABLY anything as far as date of writing.) But there is evidence to their pre-70 writing.

1. Acts is later than Luke, and mentions nothing of James' or Peter's death, Nero's persecutions, the Jewish war against Rome, or the fall of Jerusalem. The attitude to Roman power throughout the book makes it difficult to believe that the Neronian persecution of AD 64 had begun. At the end of the book Paul expects a favorable hearing in Rome.

2. Many of the expressions in Acts are early and theologically primitive.

3. Acts deals with issues that were especially important prior to Jerusalem's fall, such as Gentile admission to the church, the relation of Jews and Gentiles in church, and the food requirements of Acts 15.

4. Acts doesn't deal with concerns after Jerusalem's fall, such as the doctrine of the church, the sacraments, and the development of ecclesiological hierarchy.

There are excellent reasons to believe Acts was written before 70, which puts the Synoptic Gospels before 70 as well.

Were they published within the literary circle of the eyewitnesses, and were the eyewitnesses literate? Most likely yes and yes. We know that Paul's letters, written in the 50s, were circulated among the churches. Such a fact provides evidence that the Christian religious documents circulated. Secondly, their circulation implies at least a modicum of literacy, or what would be the point? Thirdly, in the book of Acts (15.23ff.), after the Jerusalem Council, a letter was drafted, copied, and circulated to the Gentile churches. All of this gives evidences of both circulation and literacy.

Were the eyewitnesses motivated to correct the teachings? In Acts 17.11 Luke has written that the Bereans heard Paul's message, and checked it against the written Scriptures to determine its truth and validity. That gives evidence of assessment, discernment, and literacy—the motivation to correct the teachings. In Galatians Paul met privately with the Jewish leaders to discern whether Paul was preaching the truth or not. In other words, there was motivation, wherewithal, and influence to correct the teachings.

Are the copies we have reliably facsimiles of the originals? Yes they are. Manuscript studies and critical analysis guarantee us that the reading of NT that we have is extraordinarily close to the "autograph" manuscripts.

> Assuming that the Jesus monologues we have recorded are fundamentally flawed

Whoa, whoa, whoa, where did THIS assumption come from? Why would I assume this at all, because there's no evidence for it.

> The Gospels were written within the lifetimes of many eyewitnesses to Jesus

At the outside, assuming the most favorable dates in the wide possible ranges suggested by historians.

But that gets you nothing, unless you can ALSO show they were published within the literary circle of the eyewitnesses. AND that the eyewitnesses were literate. AND that the eyewitnesses had the motiviation, wherewithal, and influence to correct the teachings. AND that the corrections would have been preserved as faithfully as the originals. AND that all copies of the originals would be dutifully amended and not promulgated further.

Assuming that the Jesus monologues we have recorded are fundamentally flawed, every single one of those necessary conditions drastically lowers the possibility that your hypothetical eye-witness review board would have fixed it. Frankly, depending on eye-witness correction seems a little foolhardy unless you have a ton of historical supporting evidence showing these factors were all in place.