asaris

Yes, yes it does. This is, as far as I know, simply how historical scholarship works. Sources closer to the events they describe are more reliable than sources at a further remove. Why? Well in this case, it's easy. Even if the authors of Luke and Mark didn't know Jesus (and I'm not sure this is the case), they knew lots of people who did know Jesus. So they were able to rely on eyewitness accounts. Even when John was written (assuming a late date in the 80s, and assuming it wasn't written by the apostle), there may well have still been eyewitnesses around.

Another point I want to make is that the council's decision to include some gospels and exclude others wasn't arbitrary. Even if Matthew, John, Paul's and Peter's letters weren't all written by the people they purport to be written by, they were generally believed to have been written by these apostles, as opposed to those excluded, and so the decision made sense.

It's been suggested that the criterion 'fits with what we already believe' is an invalid criterion. But that just doesn't make sense. If we believe some things about Jesus, we're going to favor those texts that agree with what we believe and disfavor what disagrees with what we believe. Two examples; someone here suggested that they like the Gospel of Thomas because they liked the idea of a Buddhist Jesus. But that's just the same use of the criterion as the council used when fixing the canon. Similarly, if we believe that Hannibal crossed the Alps to get to Italy, we're going to discount a source that says he landed in Naples.

Finally, I don't see how gnostics could have been around before Jesus, since gnosticism refers to a specific Christian heresy (or, if you prefer, a specific sort of 'christian' belief). It's fair to describe some pre-Christian beliefs as 'proto-gnostic', but to describe them as gnostic is simply historical error.

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"Die Deutschen meinen, daß die Kraft sich in Härte und Grausamkeit offenbaren müsse, sie unterwerfen sich dann gerne und mit Bewunderung:[...]. Daß es Kraft giebt in der Milde und Stille, das glauben sie nicht leicht."

"The Germans believe that power must reveal itself in hardness and cruelty and then submit themselves gladly and with admiration[...]. They do not believe readily that there is power in meekness and calm."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche