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Originally Posted by TawG
I find this highly unlikely. We're not talking modern times, most people didnt live untill they were 80-100 in biblical times. Life expetancy back then must have been something around 40 years tops for someone like the apostles.
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When it comes to to pre-modern medicine times, life expectancy figures can be very misleading. In Roman times the life expectancy may have been around forty, but that doesn't mean that most people lived until forty and then croaked, it means that many people died very young, during their early childhood from diseases and accidents. So even in Roman times, if you made it to adulthood, you had about the same chances of living to be 80-100 as you do today. The life expectancy is the average not the mode.
Example: There is a group of 1000 people, 400 of them die between 1 and 5, 100 of them die between 6 and 15, the rest die at 70 to 90. Average life expectancy, around 42 years.(Calculated using the middle of the age ranges as the life time of the age group).
So the Apostles could all have lived to see 80 or more, but I just don't buy that they were able to write down word for word conversations and sayings that they had decades before. I can't even remember the exact words of a conversation I had ten minutes ago, much less 40 years.