There is zero external evidence of Judaism being nearly 6000 years old. In fact, there is some counterevidence. The oldest reference to the Israelite ethnicity is in the Merneptah Stele, composed around 1200 BCE. Egypt had ruled Canaan for about 300 years before that, with nobody making any references to the Israelite ethnicity.

Not long after Merneptah is a period of great disorder and strife in the eastern Mediterranean. The Mycenaean Greek palaces were destroyed, as was the Hittite Empire. The Levant had a lot of destruction, and Egypt's leaders bragged about their triumph over the Sea Peoples -- in the Nile Delta. A rather Baghdad-Bob sort of triumph, since their Levantine empire was now gone.

Starting around 1000 BCE (Iron Age I), the people in the Israelite highlands stopped eating pork. There are much fewer pig bones there than in the Philistine areas, in the coastal valleys. So that's why I dated Judaism at 3000 years. A later landmark might be Hilkiah's claimed discovery of the "book of the law" in the Jerusalem Temple around 622 BCE. Another landmark might be Persian king Cyrus's decreeing the end of the Babylonian Exile in 538 BCE.

Yes, I know about that mistranslation part. Also it seems like Isaiah was referring to some event around his time, not far in the future.

As to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, we don't know who the real authors are of the documents that are attributed to them. Those authors did not identify themselves, though the author of Luke brags about all the work that he had done in his writing.

As to false claims of authorship, Revelation 22:18-19 is telling. It essentially says "Don't rewrite this book -- or else!!!"

@lpetrich lol i will take your word for it re revelations. i've never been christian and have only glimpsed randomly into the christian bible, usually when someone quotes it -- to see if they've got it remotely right. turns out there are so many translations it's really hard to tell.

yeah, the christian interpretation of isaiah is WAY off base, no matter what one considers the bible to be. as it happens,i think it's a multi-authored (and too many cooks definitely spoil the narrative) mish-mash of an attempt at genealogy, since no one just telling a wild story would throw in a boring bunch of begats, a little glorified royal history, and a whole lotta out-and-out fantasy, and one need look no farther than the talking snake (if indeed one is already inclined to overlook the first fantastical character, the purported star of the show).

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@lpetrich i have not heard any of that before. nonetheless, someone started counting and they're up to 5779. i will reserve judgment at this point.

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Yes, a big mishmash, and not just from book book. The contents of individual books are sometimes very stylistically jumpy. Like alternating between genealogies and anecdotes. It seems me that the contents represented respected traditions, however incoherent their assemblage was.

@lpetrich Some people try to give the bible extra ceredibility by saying that the original was written in very good, Greek/Hebrew. But in those days nearly everyone employed professional scribes to do their writing for them, who, while not educated in the modern sense, were very adept at their job no doubt, and given that what comes down to us probably passed through dozens of such hands before the earliest copies we have, it is likely that at least one in the chain would be a very good stylist. That does not mean therefore that the originals were not written by primitive barely literate goatherds.

@Fernapple Indeed; I suspect the gospels benefitted from particularly good scribes hired by some entity like the Jerusalem Council in a conscious effort to establish their orthodoxy over against that of the gnostics. If Jesus was a real person they may not have originally paid to have them written, but they would have likely paid to have them polished and tweaked. If, as I suspect, Jesus was not a real person, they may even have commissioned at least Mark, and maybe some faction later paid to put together John to put a somewhat different spin on things.

I think it's a little too convenient to disparage most NT writings as the fevered scribbling of goatherds. Paul and Luke (or whoever used those names as avatars) appeared to be more educated than that, and were products of the Hellenistic culture that was a notch or two up from earlier civilizations. It's just that they were riffing on Judaism, which was more properly the product of Bronze age goatherds.