From unnamed questioner:
The subject of the authenticity of the New Testament is too large, I believe, to be tackled in one post. The New Testament consists of The Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John), The Book of Acts, The Book of Revelations, and the rest of the books of the New Testament which are all letters. Most of these letters have fairly undisputed authors. Paul wrote most of them but they include letters from James (Jesus’s brother), the apostle Peter, the apostle John, and Judas (Jesus’s brother). Hebrews has two authors that have been claimed but was probably not written by Paul. So without arguing the content of these letters, my question is:
Were these letters authentic letters written within the Christian community during the very early church and have they been factually passed down to us? Or, were they significantly modified by the church after their original authors wrote them? Or, were they complete fabrications by the church. If they were fabrications, when were they probably written and by whom?
My response:
What needs to be understood is how Jewish monotheists of the first century AD were so quick to treat Jesus in ways formerly reserved only for Yahweh. In other words, “how did Jesus become a God”? How did these early Jewish Christians become binitarianists?
Let look at this from a dual understanding or perspective. We first have to try to understand how Jesus came to be regarded as divine: the most simplistic point of view, as purported by Christian scholars is that Jesus claimed to be divine through his teaching—a conclusion that his followers simply adopted. However, many theologians argue that this belief demonstrates a naïve, ignorant and/or ahistorical mindset. The second pole derives from the school of thought that concluded that Jesus’ divine status was the outgrowth of a process of syncretism in the ancient world. That is, as Christianity moved into the Hellenistic world “pagan” influences led to a divinization of their leader. The contention here is that only within a Gentile Christianity that had separated from its Jewish roots did Jesus eventually come to be regarded as divine.
Instead of you hearing my perspective, look at this documentary and then follow up the given facts with your own research.