Contents
List of Illustrations 9
Acknowledgments 11
1. A Bio and a Blook 13
2. Can We Know What the Original Gospel Manuscripts
Really Said? 25
3. Did the Evangelists Know Jesus Personally? 39
4. When Were the Gospels Written? 53
5. What Sources Did the Gospel Writers Use? 63
6. Did Early Christian Oral Tradition Reliably Pass Down
the Truth about Jesus? 71
7. What Are the New Testament Gospels? 83
8. What Difference Does It Make That There Are Four
Gospels? 93
9. Are There Contradictions in the Gospels? 101
10. If the Gospels Are Theology, Can They Be
History? 115
11. Do Miracles Undermine the Reliability of the
Gospels? 127
8
12. Do Historical Sources from the Era of the Gospels
Support Their Reliability? 139
13. Does Archeology Support the Reliability of the
Gospels? 151
14. Did the Political Agenda of the Early Church Influence
the Content of the Gospels? 163
15. Why Do We Have Only Four Gospels in
the Bible? 173
16. Can We Trust the Gospels After All? 187
General Index 197
Scripture Index 201
Acknowledgments
'HQRS
*V@MSSNSG@MJthose who have
helped to make this book a reality. The visionaries at Crossway
Books, Geoff Dennis, Lane Dennis, and Al Fisher, saw the potential in my blog series on the Gospels and encouraged me to
turn it into a “blook.” Bill Deckard, my editor at Crossway, has
been a great help along the way. My literary agent, Curtis Yates
of Yates and Yates, LLP, was, as always, a valued partner. Ben
Witherington III was kind enough to read an early manuscript
of the book and offer useful criticisms and suggestions.
I want also to thank my congregation at Irvine Presbyterian
Church for their ongoing partnership in ministry. I’m especially
grateful to the members of the Pastor’s Study for their support
and teamwork in the search for God’s truth.
Thanks are due to many blog readers who expressed appreciation for my series on the Gospels, as well as to those whose
critical comments urged me to sharpen my arguments.
I’m grateful to those who have helped me understand the
Gospels through their teachings and writings, including: George
MacRae, Harvey Cox, Helmut Koester, Ben Witherington III,
N. T. Wright, Craig L. Blomberg, and F. F. Bruce.
12
Acknowledgments
Thanks to friends who have cheered me on in the writing of
this book: Hugh Hewitt, Tod Bolsinger, Lee Strobel, Tim McCalmont, Bill White, Doug Gregg, and Terry Tigner.
As always, my heartfelt thanks go to my wife, Linda, and my
children, Nathan and Kara, for their tireless love and support.
They are my best partners in all things.
CHAPTER 1. A Bio and a Blook
IN THIS BOOK I seek to answer a simple question: Can
we trust the Gospels?
I’m thinking of two different but related dimensions of trust.
On the one hand, I’m asking if the Gospels provide reliable
historical information about Jesus of Nazareth. On the other
hand, I’m wondering if they offer a trustworthy basis for faith
in Jesus. In this book I will focus almost exclusively on the
historical dimension of trusting the Gospels.
When I speak of “the Gospels,” I’m referring to the first
four books of the Christian New Testament. There are other
so-called “Gospels” among extrabiblical collections of ancient writings, most famously in the Nag Hammadi Library
of Gnostic writings. Though these documents rarely focus on
the life and ministry of the human Jesus, they may occasionally contain tidbits of historical data about him. I’ll refer to
the noncanonical Gospels when appropriate in this book, but
they are not my primary concern.
I should come clean at this point and admit that I do indeed
believe that the Gospels are trustworthy. But I have not always
14
Can We Trust the Gospels?
been so confident about their reliability. There was a time when
I would have answered the “Can we trust the Gospels?” question with, “Well, maybe, at least somewhat. But I have my
doubts.” How I got to a place of confidence from this earlier
point of uncertainty is a story that will help you grasp “where
I’m coming from,” as we would say in California.
Doubting the Gospels
I grew up in a solid evangelical church. The Gospels were
assumed to be not only historically accurate but also inspired
by God. In my teenage years I wondered about the trustworthiness of the Gospels. But my youth leaders reassured me. I was
encouraged to learn that the inspiration of the Gospels was
proved by the similarities between Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
Who else, besides the Holy Spirit, could inspire the evangelists1
to compose such amazingly parallel accounts of Jesus?
I went to college at Harvard. Though founded as a Christian
school, and though the university seal continues to proclaim
veritas christo et ecclesiae, “Truth for Christ and the Church,”
Harvard in the 1970s wasn’t exactly a bastion of Christian
faith. Plus, I was planning to major in philosophy, a discipline
notorious for its atheistic bias. Many of my friends back home
worried that I would lose my faith at “godless Harvard.”
During my freshman year, it wasn’t my philosophy courses
that threw my faith for a loop, however. It was a New Testament
class. Religion 140, “Introduction to Early Christian Literature,” was taught by Professor George MacRae, a top-notch
New Testament scholar. As the semester began, I had my guard
up, expecting Professor MacRae to be a Dr. Frankenstein who
would create a monster to devour my faith. In fact, however,
Professor MacRae was no mad scientist. One of the best lecturers I ever had at Harvard, he seasoned his reasonable presentations with humorous quips among hundreds of valuable
insights. His first lecture on the challenges of studying early
Christianity was so impressive to me that I still remember his
main points and use them when I teach seminary courses on
the New Testament.
Professor MacRae followed this lecture with a fascinating
exploration of the world of early Christianity. Next he turned
to the letters of Paul. Though he investigated them as a critical
scholar,2
his insights fit more or less with what I had learned
in church. My guard began to come down.
But then we came to the Gospels. Professor MacRae did not
deny their usefulness as historical sources. But he did argue
that these documents, though containing some historical remembrances, were chock-full of legendary elements, including
miracle stories, exorcisms, and prophecies. These were not
to be taken as part of the historical record, he said. Rather,
they were best understood as fictional elements added by the
early Christians to increase the attractiveness of Jesus in the
Greco-Roman world. The Gospels were not so much historical
or biographical documents as they were theological tractates
weaving together powerful fictions with a few factual data.
Perhaps what most shook my faith in the trustworthiness
of the Gospels was Professor MacRae’s treatment of the similarities among Matthew, Mark, and Luke. He explained persuasively that Mark was the first of the Gospels to be written,
and that Matthew and Luke used Mark in their writing. In the
process, he also demonstrated how Matthew and Luke changed
Mark, interjecting “contradictions” into the Gospel record.
Listening to this explanation of why the Synoptic3
Gospels
were so similar, I felt the rug being pulled out from under my confidence in these writings. Where I had once been taught that
these similarities were evidence of divine inspiration, I discovered that a straightforward historical explanation provided a
simpler account of the data. How many other things have I
been taught about the Gospels that aren’t true? I wondered.
Uncertain about My Uncertainty
After finishing Religion 140, I could not trust the Gospels to
provide historically accurate knowledge of Jesus. Yet, as much
as I found this skeptical perspective compelling, it didn’t fully
satisfy me. Ironically, my studies of philosophy contributed to
my uncertainty about my Gospel uncertainty. As a “phil concentrator” I was learning to scrutinize the theoretical underpinnings of all beliefs. It seemed only right to subject what I had
learned about the New Testament to this sort of investigation.
When I did, I began to wonder if my new perspective on the
Gospels was too simplistic.
For example, one of the things that bothered me about Professor MacRae’s position was how quickly he concluded that
there were contradictions among the Gospels. In my philosophy
classes I was being trained to assume that a document was consistent unless every effort to discern consistency failed. Though
the Gospels were not written by one author, it seemed that
Professor MacRae had rushed to judgment about the contradictory nature of the Gospels without considering how varying
Gospel accounts might have been complementary.
In my undergraduate years I began to think critically, not
only about the New Testament but also about the methodologies and presuppositions of New Testament scholarship.
Sometimes, I discovered, academic consensus was built on the
shifting sand of weak philosophy, peculiar methodology,4
and atheistic theology. Perhaps other approaches were possible,
ones that involved rigorous New Testament scholarship and
led to a more positive appraisal of the Gospels’ reliability.
A Strange Twist in the Road
My road to confidence in the Gospels took a strange twist
during my junior year. I enrolled in a seminar with Professor MacRae called “Christians, Jews, and Gnostics.” Among
the documents we studied in this course were several Gnostic
writings that had just been published in English. Some of these
documents, written in Coptic, had been translated by Professor MacRae for The Nag Hammadi Library in English.
5
This
meant I had the chance to study these Gnostic texts with one
of the world’s foremost authorities on them. It never dawned
on me, by the way, that someday people outside of academia
would care about the contents of the Gnostic Gospels.
In “Christians, Jews, and Gnostics” I learned to dig deeply
into the meaning of the ancient texts and to ask all sorts of
questions about them. Professor MacRae was willing to engage any serious question, including challenges to his own
perspectives. During this second class with him I began to see
the Gospels as more reliable than I had once thought, in part,
as I compared them to the wildly fictional portraits of Jesus in
the Gnostic Gospels.
By the end of this seminar, Professor MacRae encouraged
me to pursue graduate work in New Testament. His openness
to my questions was one of the reasons I decided to remain at
Harvard for my doctoral work. Ironically, the one who was
most responsible for my loss of confidence in the Gospels became a primary reason for my growing trust in them.6
Critical New Testament Scholarship: Up Close and Personal
Without exception, my grad school teachers echoed Professor MacRae’s conclusions about the historical limitations of
the New Testament Gospels. In fact, several faculty members
made him look rather conservative. I did learn a great deal
from these scholars, however. Their knowledge of the world
of early Christianity was encyclopedic, and their ability to interpret ancient texts critically was superlative. Yet I began to
see how often their interpretations were saturated by unquestioned philosophical presuppositions. If, for example, a passage
from the Gospels included a prophecy of Jesus concerning his
death, it was assumed without argument that this had been
added later by the church because prophecy didn’t fit within
the naturalistic worldview of my profs.7
The more I spent time with some of the leading New Testament scholars in the world, the more I came to respect their
brilliance and, at the same time, to recognize the limitations
of their scholarly perspectives. I saw how often conclusions
based on unsophisticated assumptions were accepted without
question by the reigning scholarly community, and taught uncritically as if they were, well, the Gospel truth.
I also discovered how rarely my professors entertained
perspectives by scholars who didn’t share their naturalistic
worldview. Evangelical scholars8
were usually ignored simply
because they were conservative. This fact was driven home once
when I was on winter break in Southern California. I needed
to read a few books for one of my courses, so I went to the
Fuller Seminary library because it was close to my home. What
I found at Fuller stunned me. Fuller students were required to read many of the same books I was assigned, and also books
written from an evangelical perspective. Whereas I was getting one party line, Fuller students were challenged to think
more broadly and, dare I admit it, more critically. This put an
arrogant Harvard student in his place, let me tell you. It also
helped me see how much my own education was lopsided. Only
once in my entire graduate school experience was I assigned a
book by an evangelical scholar.9
Critical Scholarship and Confidence in the Gospels
Beginning with my days at Harvard and continuing throughout the last three decades, I have worked away on the question
of the trustworthiness of the Gospels. I have come to believe
that there are solid reasons for accepting them as reliable both
for history and for faith.
You may be surprised to learn that I agree with about threequarters of what I learned from Professor MacRae in Religion
140. We affirm the same basic facts: the raw data of ancient
documents and archeological discoveries. The differences between our views have to do with how we evaluate the data,
and here the gap between what Professor MacRae taught and
what I believe today is often wide and deep.
You may also be surprised to discover that my arguments in
this book are often friendlier to critical scholarship than you
might expect. For example, many defenses of the historical
reliability of the Gospel of John depend on an early date of
composition (pre–a.d. 70). I will not base my own conclusions
upon this early date, though I think there are persuasive arguments in its favor.
While reading this book, an evangelical who is well acquainted with New Testament scholarship might periodically object, “But there are even stronger arguments than the ones
you’re making.” So be it! I’m open to these positions and glad
for those who articulate them. But I have chosen to base my
case, for the most part, on that which most even-handed critical
scholars, including non-evangelicals, would affirm. I’ve done
this for two reasons.
First, I want to encourage the person who is troubled by
negative views of the Gospels, perhaps in a college New Testament course or in a popular “Gospels-debunking” book.
In a sense, I’m writing for the Mark Roberts who once felt
perplexed in Religion 140. To the “old me” and others like
him I want to say, “Look, even if you believe most of ‘assured
results of scholarship’ concerning the Gospels, you can still
trust them.”
Second, I believe this book will have broader impact if I
don’t fill it with theories that, however plausible, are popular
only among conservative scholars. For example, it may well
be that the disciples of Jesus had been trained to memorize
sayings of their religious mentors, much like later rabbinic
students.10 If this is true, it would greatly increase the likelihood that the sayings of Jesus in the Gospels closely reflect
what Jesus himself had once said. But since the jury is still out
on the question of whether or not the disciples were trained
in technical memorization, I won’t base my conclusions upon
this possibility.
My basic point in this book is that if you look squarely at
the facts as they are widely understood, and if you do not color
them with pejorative bias or atheistic presuppositions, then
you’ll find that it’s reasonable to trust the Gospels.
For those not familiar with the Bible, I should explain that
there are four Gospels in the New Testament, a collection of
twenty-seven early Christian writings. The New Testament is
the second part of the Christian Bible, which also contains a
collection of thirty-nine Jewish writings which Christians call the Old Testament. Jews refer to these thirty-nine writings
as the Bible or the Tanakh (from the Hebrew words for law,
prophecy, and writings).
The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are the
first four books of the New Testament, though they are not
the earliest of the New Testament writings. They focus on
certain aspects of the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth,
and especially on his death and resurrection. There are other
early Christian writings called Gospels, perhaps two or three
dozen depending on what counts as a Gospel. For reasons that
I’ll explain in this book, the extrabiblical Gospels are not as
reliable as historical sources for Jesus, though they sometimes
describe Jesus’ sayings or actions accurately.
The Birth of a “Blook”
This book is a direct result of my engagement with many
attempts to undermine confidence in the Gospels. In the last
two years I have publicly defended the Gospels against assaults
from a Newsweek cover story,11 the Jesus Seminar,12 the book
Misquoting Jesus, by Bart Ehrman,13 the claims made about
the Gospel of Judas by some scholars,14 and, most of all, Dan
Brown’s best-selling novel, The Da Vinci Code.
15 My apologetic16
writings have appeared on my web site, www.markdroberts.com, and in other online or print media. As I endeavored to fend
off attacks upon the Gospels, it occurred to me that I ought to
write a short, popular, positive case for trusting these embattled
portraits of Jesus. So in the fall of 2005 I wrote an extended blog
series entitled Are the New Testament Gospels Reliable?17
Since the release of that series I have received hundreds of
gratifying e-mails from people who have thanked me. Some
notes have included questions or points of correction. Of course
I’ve also received correspondence from people who disagree
with my positions. These have helped me clarify and refine
my arguments.
Perhaps the most surprising positive response to my blog
series came from the publishers at Crossway Books. They said
they were interested in turning my series into a book. At first I
hesitated, realizing that there are other fine books on the reliability of the Gospels. I fondly remember the classic volume
by F. F. Bruce, The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable?18 which helped me survive my collegiate doubts about
the Gospels. I also thought of the more detailed and up-to-date
book by Craig Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the
Gospels.
19 And I knew that a solid defense of the Gospels called
Reinventing Jesus was soon to be published.20 Moreover, I have
seen how effective Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ has been as
a popular apologetic introduction to Jesus and the Gospels.21
But the more I received communication from people who had
been helped by my blog series, the more I realized that I could offer something unique to book readers. The result, is an expanded and, I hope, improved version of my original blog series. It is, according to the new lingo,
a blook—a book based on a blog.
Many of the basic facts and arguments in this book can be
found elsewhere, though numerous points and illustrations
are new. What makes this book distinctive is its availability to
nonspecialists, including non-Christian readers. I realize this
will be frustrating for a few readers who are familiar with New
Testament scholarship and who will want more extensive discussion and documentation. But Can We Trust the Gospels? is
meant to be a shorter book that can be easily grasped by people
who don’t have specialized academic knowledge and who don’t
want to wade through a much longer tome. This volume could
easily have been 500 pages with 5,000 footnotes. But then I’d
completely miss my intended audience . . . the ordinary person
who wonders, Can I trust the Gospels?
Though no longer linked electronically to my web site, this
“blook” will continue to be supported through online conversation, clarification, and revision. At www.markdroberts.com
there will be a place for you to log your comments, ask your
questions, or listen in on an ongoing conversation. My web
site will also allow me to relate Can We Trust the Gospels? to
new assaults on their historical reliability. No doubt there will
be many of these in the years to come.22
F.A.Q. Format
Influence of the Internet can also be seen in the basic format
of this book. Millions of web sites use a F.A.Q. page—Frequently
Asked Questions—to respond to the most common inquiries
from visitors. Can We Trust the Gospels? is an extended F.A.Q. It
is structured by a series of basic questions about the Gospels:
• Can we know what the original Gospel manuscripts really
said?
• Did the evangelists know Jesus personally?
• When were the Gospels written?
• What sources did the Gospel writers use?
• Did early Christian oral tradition reliably pass down the
truth about Jesus?
• What are the New Testament Gospels?
• What difference does it make that there are four Gospels?
• Are there contradictions in the Gospels?
• If the Gospels are theology, can they be history?
• Do miracles undermine the reliability of the Gospels?
• Do historical sources from the era of the Gospels support
their reliability?
• Does archeology support the reliability of the Gospels?
• Did the political agenda of the early church influence the
content of the Gospels?
• Why do we have only four Gospels in the Bible?
• Can we trust the Gospels after all?
The pages ahead contain answers that are the result of more
than three decades of investigation, involving hundreds of
hours of seminary teaching, thousands of hours of thinking,
and myriads of pages of reading. For the sake of my intended
audience, I have condensed all of this into relatively few pages.
You won’t find complex arguments with elaborate footnotes
in this book, even though many of my conclusions grow out
of such complexity and elaboration. If you’re looking for more
data than I can provide here, I’ll try to point you in helpful
directions through the footnotes.
My hope is that, as you read this book, you will come to believe that you can trust the biblical Gospels. Even as Luke wrote
the third Gospel so that his readers might “know the truth”
concerning Jesus (Luke 1:4), so have I written this book.
1. In biblical studies, “evangelists” refers to the writers of the Gospels. “Gospel” in Greek is euangelion. From this we get the word “evangelist,” meaning “preacher of good news.”
2. Critical scholarship involves historical, literary, linguistic, and sociological analysis of the New Testament. It is not necessarily critical in the sense of being negative. In fact hundreds of critical New Testament scholars also affirm the reliability of the Gospels. But many academics, especially in secular institutions, blend critical scholarship with pessimistic appraisals of the New Testament, and often with their own personal denigration of Christianity in general.
3. “Synoptic” means “capable of being read side by side, or synoptically.” Matthew, Mark, and Luke are synoptic because they are so similar in form and content
4. For example, ever since I first learned about the “criterion of dissimilarity,” a scholarly tool for establishing the validity of historical claims about Jesus, it seemed to me that this was obviously and woefully inadequate, even though it was accepted without hesitation by many critical scholars. For a brief critique of the criterion of dissimilarity, see http://www.markdroberts.com/htmfiles/resources/unmaskingthejesus. htm#sep1405.
5. James M. Robinson, ed., The Nag Hammadi Library in English (New York: Harper & Row, 1977).
6. Professor MacRae would have been my dissertation advisor, had it not been for his untimely death in 1985.
7. “Naturalism” is the philosophical position that assumes there is nothing beyond nature, or physical existence. A naturalistic worldview makes no room for supernatural events or a supernatural God.
8. Evangelical scholars are those who believe that the Bible is, in some strong sense, God’s inspired Word. Some refer to Scripture as inerrant; others prefer the term infallible. Many evangelical scholars are also critical scholars in that they investigate biblical documents with the tools of academia and engage in dialogue with critical scholars across the theological spectrum.
9. Professor Krister Stendahl assigned a commentary on Matthew by Robert H. Gundry (Matthew: A Commentary on His Literary and Theological Art [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1982]). Ironically, this book was roundly criticized by many evangelicals as buying too much into non-evangelical approaches to the Gospels.
10. This view is ably defended by Birger Gerhardsson in The Reliability of the Gospel Tradition (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2001).
11. Mark D. Roberts, The Birth of Jesus: Hype or History? http://www.markd roberts.com/htmfiles/resources/jesusbirth.htm.
12. Mark D. Roberts, Unmasking the Jesus Seminar, http://www.markdroberts. com/htmfiles/resources/unmaskingthejesus.htm.
13. Mark D. Roberts, The Bible, the Qur’an, Bart Ehrman, and the Words of God, http://www.markdroberts.com/htmfiles/resources/biblequran.htm. See Bart D. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus: The Story behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005).
14. Mark D. Roberts, The Gospel of Judas: A Special Report, http://www.markdroberts.com/htmfiles/resources/davinciopportunity3.htm#apr906.
15. Mark D. Roberts, The Da Vinci Opportunity, http://www.markdroberts. com/htmfiles/resources/davinciopportunity.htm.
16. “Apologetic” writings offer a reasonable defense of some belief. The word “apologetic” comes from the Greek term apologia, which means “defense (written or spoken).” It has no connection at all with the concept of “apologizing” for something.
17. Mark D. Roberts, Are the New Testament Gospels Reliable? http://www. markdroberts.com/htmfiles/resources/gospelsreliable.htm.
18. F. F. Bruce, The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1960).
19. Craig L. Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1987). Blomberg’s book is excellent, and I recommend it highly. It is more detailed than this book and is suitable for readers with knowledge of New Testament studies.
20. J. Ed Komoszewski, M. James Sawyer, and Daniel B. Wallace, Reinventing Jesus: What the Da Vinci Code and Other Novel Speculations Don’t Tell You (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Kregel, 2006).
21. Lee Strobel, The Case for Christ: A Journalist’s Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1998)
22. For example, as I’m editing this manuscript, a television documentary claims that the bones of Jesus have been found, thus invalidating the Gospel accounts of his death and resurrection.
CHAPTER 2. Can We Know What
the Original Gospel
Manuscripts Really Said?
If you open a Bible and look for the Gospels,
you’ll find them in English translation, neatly collected at the beginning of the New Testament. You’ll see book names, chapter
and verse numbers, punctuation, and paragraphs. None of these
items were present in the original manuscripts of the writings we
call Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Most manuscripts didn’t
even have spaces between the words! Aren’tyougladthingshave
changed? What you read in your Bible is the result of centuries
of preservation, translation, and publication. Thus you might
sensibly wonder, Do the Gospels bear any resemblance to what
the original writers actually penned almost 2,000 years ago?
It is common these days for people to answer no to this
question. Critics of Christianity often allege that the Gospels
as we know them don’t resemble the originals. This criticism
appears, for example, on the lips of Sir Leigh Teabing, a fictional historian in Dan Brown’s wildly popular novel The Da
Vinci Code. Teabing “reveals” the true nature of the Bible in
this way:
“The Bible is a product of man. . . . Not of God. The Bible did
not fall magically from the clouds. Man created it as a historical
record of tumultuous times, and it has evolved through countless translations, additions, and revisions. History has never
had a definitive version of the book.”1
There is a measure of truth here. The Bible is indeed a
human product, though this in no way requires that it could
not also be “of God.” For centuries, Christians have affirmed
that the Bible was written by human authors who were inspired by God.
It’s true that the Bible “did not fall magically from the
clouds.” It was in fact written by human beings who lived in
“tumultuous times.” Yet the biblical documents were not created primarily as a “historical record” of these times. Though
there is plenty of history in Scripture, the biblical writers weren’t
telling merely a human story. Rather, they focused primarily on
the actions of God in history, especially on the story of God’s
salvation of the world.
Teabing exaggerates in saying that the Bible has “evolved
through countless translations.” It has indeed been translated into more languages than any other book, by far. At
last count, the New Testament has been translated into 1,541
languages.2
But the Bible has not “evolved through countless
translations,” as if our English versions stand at the end of
a long chain of multilingual transformations. Every modern
translation of Scripture is based on manuscripts written in
the same languages as those used by the original writers. The
Old Testament in English comes directly from Hebrew and
Aramaic manuscripts. Our New Testament is translated from
Greek manuscripts.
The Relationship between Existing Manuscripts
and the Original Compositions
The documents we know as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and
John were written sometime in the second half of the first
century a.d. (I’ll say more about the dating of the Gospels in
chapter 4.) They were written on scrolls of papyrus (a rough,
paper-like substance). Papyrus was popular because it was
readily available and relatively inexpensive. But, unfortunately, it wasn’t especially durable. Thus it is highly unlikely
that any of the original Gospel manuscripts, called by the
technical term autographs, exist today. Probably, the biblical
autographs were worn out through use, though they could
also have been misplaced by absentminded church leaders,
destroyed by persecutors of the early Christians, or even eaten
by critters.3
Because ancient documents tended to have a relatively short
shelf life, people who valued them had a way of preserving
their contents: copying. Professional copyists, called scribes,
would copy the words of one text into a fresh papyrus or parchment (a longer lasting material made from animal skins). Their
training taught the scribes to minimize errors and maximize
accuracy.
Yet copying manuscripts was not a slavish task, with scribal
accuracy matching modern photocopy technology. At times
scribes would make intentional changes as they copied. For
example, they would correct what they believed to be a spelling error in their source text. And even the best of scribes also
sometimes made unintended errors. Thus the best extant4
manuscripts of the Gospels are likely to differ in some measure
from the autographs.
Moreover, it is probable that many of the first copies of
the Gospels were made, not by professional scribes, but by
literate lay copyists. As the early church rapidly expanded
throughout the Roman world in the first centuries a.d., there
was a pressing need for multiple copies of authoritative Christian documents, including Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
Nonprofessional copyists must have stepped in to meet this
need.
The fact that the original Gospel manuscripts have not survived to this day, combined with the fact that for centuries the
text was passed on through a careful but imperfect process
of copying, makes us wonder whether we can trust that the
Greek text we have today looks anything like what the authors
originally wrote down. Can we know what the original Gospel
manuscripts actually said?
Standards for Evaluating the Reliability
of Gospel Manuscripts
Before we examine the data, let’s think for a moment about
what might allow us to put confidence in the manuscripts of
the Gospels.
First, we would look for antiquity. We’d want the manuscripts in existence to be old, the closer to the autographs the
better. Less time between the original and an existing copy
decreases the possibility of changes being introduced through
many acts of copying.
Second, we would prefer multiplicity. Clearly, it would be
better to have many manuscripts at our disposal rather than
just a few. An abundance of manuscripts would put us in a
much better position to determine the original wording.
Third, we would want trustworthy scholarly methodology.
If the academics who study the biblical manuscripts, known
as textual critics, utilize reliable methods, ones that maximize
objectivity, then we would have greater confidence in their
conclusions.
Fourth, we would look at the quantity and quality of textually ambiguous passages (made up of differences, called variants, among the manuscripts). If the existing copies of the
Gospels contain a high proportion of textual variants, then
we would question our ability to know what was originally
written. If, on the contrary, the differences among extant manuscripts are relatively insignificant, then we would rightly place
confidence in the critical Greek texts5
upon which our translations are based.
So how does reality measure up to these standards?
The Antiquity of the Gospel Manuscripts
The oldest manuscript of the Gospels is a papyrus fragment of the Gospel of John. It is called P52, text-critical shorthand for “Papyrus 52.” This fragment, which contains part of
Jesus’ conversation with Pilate prior to the crucifixion (John
18:31–33, 37–38), has been dated to around a.d. 125. This
means the copy of John of which P52 is a tiny part was made
within a couple of generations of the original writing of John’s
Gospel.6
The next oldest manuscripts of the Gospels come from
the latter part of the second century and the early part of the
third century. P4
, P45, P64, P66, P67, and P75 include significant
portions of all four Gospels.
As we move further into the third century and beyond,
we find many more extant manuscripts, including one of the
most important parchment copies of the entire Bible, known as
Codex Sinaiticus. This book was found in the mid-nineteenth
century in a monastery near Mt. Sinai, from which it derives its name. It has been dated to the fourth century a.d., and it
contains the whole New Testament along with major sections
of the Old Testament in Greek.7
How should we evaluate the antiquity of the Gospel manuscripts? The smallest time gap, the one between P52 and the
autograph of John’s Gospel, is two generations. The more
complete manuscripts are about a century later than the original writings, with extant copies of the whole New Testament
more than two centuries later than the time of composition.
From our point of view, the period between the extant manuscripts of the Gospels and the autographs may seem awfully
long, and may raise doubts about the reliability of the Gospel
manuscripts.
But if we compare the antiquity of the Gospel manuscripts
with similar ancient writings, the case for trusting the Gospels
gains considerable strength. Consider, for example, the writings of three historians more or less contemporaneous with
the evangelists: the Jewish historian Josephus and the Roman
historians Tacitus and Suetonius. The oldest extant manuscripts
of Tacitus and Suetonius come from the ninth century.8
Those
of Josephus date back only to the eleventh century.9
We’re
talking about a time gap of 800 to 1,000 years between the
autographs and the extant manuscripts, yet historians accept
the manuscripts as basically reliable representations of what
was originally written. Lest it seem that I’ve chosen examples
that are unusual, the oldest manuscripts of the classical historians Herodotus and Thucydides are separated from their
autographs by about 500 years.10
If someone were to claim that we can’t have confidence in the
original content of the Gospels because the existing manuscripts are too far removed from the autographs, then that person
would also have to cast doubt upon our knowledge of almost
all ancient history and literature. Such skepticism, which is
not found among classical scholars and historians, would be
extreme and unwarranted.
Therefore, on the antiquity scale, the New Testament Gospels receive a top score.
The Multiplicity of the Gospel Manuscripts
Currently, scholars are aware of more than 5,700 manuscripts that contain some portion of the New Testament, and
the total is growing slowly as additional manuscripts are discovered. Among these manuscripts, a couple thousand contain
all or portions of the biblical Gospels.
Once again we should evaluate this total in light of comparable writings from the same period. What do we find if we
look again at Tacitus, Suetonius, and Josephus? The histories of
Tacitus exist today in three manuscripts, none of which contain
all of his writings.11 We’re better off in the case of Suetonius,
whose writings are found in more than 200 extant manuscripts.
For Josephus we have 133 manuscripts.12 Once again, if it
seems like I’m stacking the deck in my own favor, there are 75
manuscripts of Herodotus, and only 20 of Thucydides.
The number of Gospel manuscripts in existence is about 20
times larger than the average number of extant manuscripts
of comparable writings. I have not even considered the tens of
thousands of manuscripts of Gospel translations into languages
such as Latin and Syriac, many of which were made in the
earliest centuries a.d. I have also not taken into account the
hundreds of thousands of quotations of the Gospels found in
the writings of early church leaders. Here’s what Bruce Metzger
and Bart Ehrman have to say about these citations:
Besides textual evidence derived from the New Testament Greek
manuscripts and from early versions, the textual critic has available the numerous scriptural quotations included in the commentaries, sermons, and other treatises written by early Church
fathers. Indeed, so extensive are these citations that if all other
sources for our knowledge of the text of the New Testament
were destroyed, they would be sufficient alone for the reconstruction of practically the entire New Testament.13
After comparing the manuscripts of the New Testament with
those for other ancient literature, Metzger and Ehrman conclude that “the textual critic of the New Testament is embarrassed by the wealth of material.”14
The Reliability of Text-Critical Methodology
Yet this “wealth of material” also complicates the work of
textual criticism. What methods do text critics use to determine
the earliest form of the Gospel text?
First, they collect all of the known manuscripts, including
ancient translations and writings of the early church fathers.
The individual text critic doesn’t actually do this alone, of
course, but relies on the work of hundreds of other scholars,
both present and past.
Second, text critics evaluate the manuscripts, looking for
variants and seeking to determine which readings are the
most likely to be original. They examine what is called external evidence and internal evidence. External evidence has to
do with the number, antiquity, and relationships among the
manuscripts. For example, if a variant is found in many, old
manuscripts, then it is more reliable than one found in few,
later manuscripts. Internal evidence concerns the actual content
of the writing.
Though there is certainly a measure of subjectivity in text
criticism, it is by far the most objective discipline in New Testament studies. If you were to take two different teams of text
critics and ask them to work independently on a critical edition
of the Greek New Testament, they would agree more than 99
percent of the time. In fact, for the vast majority of words in
the Gospels, text critics have come to an extremely high level of
confidence concerning what was written in the autographs.
The Quantity and Quality of Textual Variants
Skeptics who try to cast doubt upon the reliability of the New
Testament manuscripts point to the apparently large number of
variants they contain. Bart Ehrman, for example, in Misquoting Jesus, suggests that there are 200,000 to 400,000 variants
among the New Testament manuscripts. He adds, dramatically,
“There are more variations among our manuscripts than there
are words in the New Testament.”15 That sounds ominous,
doesn’t it? But, in fact, the data give us no reason to doubt the
reliability of the manuscripts. Let me explain why.
We have such a large number of variants because there are
so many extant manuscripts. Considering that the four Gospels
contain a total of 64,000 words, and we have about 2,000
manuscripts of the Gospels, that’s a lot of potential variants.
But as I’ve already shown, having many manuscripts actually
increases the likelihood of our getting back to the original
text. It also adds to the number of variants, however, which
can sound negative to one who isn’t familiar with text-critical
issues.
Let me suggest a more hypothetical example that might
make clear what I’m saying. This book contains almost 50,000
words. Suppose I asked two people to make copies of this book
by hand. Suppose, further, that they made one mistake every
1,000 words (99.9 percent accuracy). When they finished, each
of their manuscripts would have 50 mistakes, for a total of
100. This doesn’t sound too bad, does it? But suppose I asked 2,000 people to make copies of my book. And suppose they
also made a mistake every 1,000 words. When they finished,
the total of mistakes in their manuscripts would be 100,000.
This sounds like a lot of variants—more variants than words
in my book, Bart Ehrman would say. But in fact the large
number of variants is a simple product of the large number
of manuscripts. Moreover, if text critics, lacking access to the
original version (the autograph) of my book, were going to
try and determine what my original version said, they’d be
in a much stronger position if they had 2,000 copies to work
from, even though they would be dealing with 100,000 variants. With 2,000 manuscripts, the text critics would be able to
evaluate the variants more astutely and come up with something very close to what I originally wrote. If they had only
two manuscripts, however, even though these included only
100 variants, they would find it harder to determine what the
original manuscript said.
So, the fact “there are more variations among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament” isn’t surprising. Nor is it bad news. It is a reflection of the wealth of
the manuscript evidence available to us. The actual number of
variants represents a tiny percentage of the variants that could
have occurred among the manuscripts.
Moreover, the vast majority of variants in the New Testament manuscripts are insignificant, either because they appear
so rarely that they are obviously not original, or because they
don’t appear in the older manuscripts, or because they don’t
impact the meaning of the text. In fact, the majority of variants that show up in enough older manuscripts to impact our
reading of the text are spelling variations or errors.16 Text critic
Daniel Wallace concludes that “only about 1% of the textual
variants” make any substantive difference.17 And few, if any,
of these have any bearing on theologically important matters.
If you actually took out of the Gospels every word that was text-critically uncertain, the impact on your understanding of
Jesus would be negligible.
Consider, for example, the two most obvious and significant
textual variants in the Gospels. One of these appears in John
7:53–8:11, the story of the woman caught in adultery. Virtually all modern translations put this story in brackets, adding
a note that says something like, “The earliest manuscripts do
not include this passage.” It’s likely that this story is true, but
that it was added to John well after the evangelist finished his
task. Similarly, the ending of Mark includes a bracketed passage because the old manuscripts do not include anything after
Mark 16:8. These two disputed passages, though significant
in some ways, do not substantially alter our understanding
of Jesus.
Do the Gospel Manuscripts Misquote Jesus?
At this point I should say a few words about Bart Ehrman’s
currently popular book Misquoting Jesus. Even when this book
has fallen from the best-seller lists, its ideas will still be floating
around in the cultural stream like bits of post-hurricane flotsam
in the sea. (If you’re looking for a more extensive critique of
Misquoting Jesus, check what I’ve written on my web site,18
as well as several excellent scholarly reviews.19)
Ehrman’s book is a popular introduction to textual criticism. When he sticks to objective descriptions, Ehrman’s insights are both helpful and readable. For a scholar, he’s an
unusually effective popular communicator. Unfortunately,
however, this book was not written merely to introduce people
to textual criticism but also to undermine their confidence
in the New Testament itself. I’m not reading between the lines here. Ehrman is very clear about his intentions from
the beginning.20
One of the ironies of Ehrman’s book is the title, Misquoting Jesus. You would expect to find a book full of instances
in which the sayings of Jesus found in the Gospels were corrupted by the scribes. In fact, however, very little of the book
is actually about misquoting Jesus. As Craig L. Blomberg says
in his trenchant review, “the title appears designed to attract
attention and sell copies of the book rather than to represent
its contents accurately.”21
Another irony comes when Ehrman talks about the number of
variants among the New Testament manuscripts. As just noted,
he says, “there are more variations among our manuscripts than
there are words in the New Testament.”22 This startling sound
bite appears to undermine the reliability of the manuscripts. But
Ehrman also qualifies this observation. He writes:
To be sure, of all the hundreds of thousands of textual changes
found among our manuscripts, most of them are completely
insignificant, immaterial, and of no real importance for anything
other than showing that scribes could not spell or keep focused
any better than the rest of us.23
The changes [the scribes] made—at least the intentional ones—
were no doubt seen as improvements of the text, possibly made
because the scribes were convinced that the copyists before
them had themselves mistakenly altered the words of the text.
For the most part, their intention was to conserve the tradition,
not to change it.24
One would expect to find these claims in a book touting the
reliability of the New Testament manuscripts. Ehrman, in spite
of his bias, is too good a scholar not to tell the truth here.
The greatest irony in Misquoting Jesus lies at the heart of
Ehrman’s argument against the trustworthiness of the manuscripts. The main point of his book is to undermine confidence
in the New Testament on the ground that copyists changed the
manuscripts, both intentionally and accidentally. One would
expect Ehrman to put forth dozens of examples where we simply
don’t have any idea what the autographs actually said. Such
repeated uncertainty would lead to the conclusion that we
can’t know with assurance what the New Testament writers,
including the Gospel authors, actually wrote.
But, in fact, Ehrman’s book is filled with examples that prove
the opposite point. He does indeed offer many cases of textual
variants. In virtually every case, Ehrman confidently explains
what the change was, what the earlier manuscript actually said,
and what motivated the copyist. In other words, Ehrman’s
book, though intending to weaken our certainty about the
New Testament text, actually demonstrates how the abundance
of manuscripts and the antiquity of manuscripts, when run
through the mill of text-critical methodology, allow us to know
with a very high level of probability what the evangelists and
other New Testament authors wrote. This might explain why
there are many textual critics who are committed Christians
with an evangelical view of Scripture.25
Conclusion
Can we know what the original Gospel manuscripts really
said? Yes, we can. We can have confidence that the critical
Greek texts of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John represent, with
a very high degree of probability, what the autographs of the
Gospels actually contained.
Chapter 3. Did the Evangelists Know
Jesus Personally?
Most christian believe that two of the
Gospels were written by people who knew Jesus personally:
the first Gospel, by Matthew; and the fourth Gospel, by John.
The titles of these Gospels appear to reveal their authorship:
“The Gospel According to Matthew” and “The Gospel According to John.” And Jesus is known to have had disciples
named Matthew and John. So when scholars start wondering
if Matthew and John really wrote these Gospels, people get
bugged. Why can’t scholars leave well enough alone?
Moreover, there’s something appealing about the idea that
the first Gospel reflects Matthew’s immediate experience of
Jesus and the fourth Gospel John’s intimate knowledge of the
Lord. This relational dynamic makes the Gospels seem more
personal and less didactic. Furthermore, authorship by Matthew and John seems to increase the likelihood of both Gospels
being historically accurate. And, since they overlap considerably with the other two Gospels, the historicity of the second and third Gospels gets a boost from the witness of Matthew
and John. Authorship of the Gospels by eyewitnesses of Jesus
doesn’t guarantee historical accuracy, of course, because people
can misrepresent what they know, or they can forget, or remember imprecisely. But it certainly feels better to know that
Matthew and John really knew Jesus, even if Mark and Luke
did not.
You won’t be surprised to learn that many scholars doubt
these traditional views of Gospel authorship. They don’t believe
any of the Gospels were written by one of “the Twelve.” Yet,
given the tendency of much modern scholarship to be overly
skeptical, you may be pleasantly surprised to learn that quite
a few scholars believe that the Gospels, if not actually written
by one of Jesus’ disciples, nevertheless reflect genuine reminiscences by these disciples.
Evidence for Gospel Authorship
The basic problem we face when it comes to the authorship
of the Gospels is that they are anonymous, or at least they were
at first. There’s no evidence to suggest that whoever wrote
Matthew entitled his narrative about Jesus: “The Gospel According to Matthew.” Ditto with the other biblical Gospels. It
wasn’t until sometime in the second century that scribes began
to put the names “Matthew,” “Mark,” “Luke,” and “John”
alongside the Gospels supposedly written by them.
Ironically, the Gospels that do often include a named author are the noncanonical varieties. The Gospel of Thomas,
for example, begins: “These are the secret sayings which the
living Jesus spoke and which Didymos Judas Thomas wrote
down.” Almost no scholar believes that the extrabiblical Gospels were actually written by their purported authors. They
are pseudonymous (falsely named) rather than anonymous.
I’ll have more to say about the significance of this distinction
later in the chapter.
Similar to what we saw in the case of textual criticism,
the evidence for Gospel authorship falls into two categories:
external evidence and internal evidence. External evidence
is testimony from the early church about who wrote the
Gospels. Internal evidence is that which can be gleaned from
the texts of the Gospels themselves (or, in the case of Luke,
from Acts as well, since the same author wrote both Luke
and Acts).
External Evidence for Gospel Authorship
In the second century a.d. it became common to identify
the authors of the New Testament Gospels as Matthew, Mark,
Luke, and John. By early in the third century these identifications were solidly entrenched. We can’t be sure exactly how
the tradition developed in the second century, but we can note
a few significant signposts along the way.
Around a.d. 180, Irenaeus, the bishop of Lugundum in
Roman Gaul (now Lyons, France), wrote a treatise defending
orthodox Christianity against a wide spectrum of supposedly
Christian but, in Irenaeus’s perspective, unacceptable theologies. In Against Heresies, Irenaeus specifically mentioned Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as the authors of the Gospels. For
example, in one section of his work Irenaeus wrote:
Matthew also issued a written Gospel among the Hebrews in
their own dialect, while Peter and Paul were preaching at Rome,
and laying the foundations of the Church. After their departure,
Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, did also hand down
to us in writing what had been preached by Peter. Luke also, the
companion of Paul, recorded in a book the Gospel preached by
him. Afterwards, John, the disciple of the Lord, who also had
leaned upon His breast, did himself publish a Gospel during
his residence at Ephesus in Asia.1
Given the brevity of this paragraph and the lack of explanation,
it seems that these traditions had already been well established
in the church circles in which Irenaeus was a leader.
About a decade before Irenaeus wrote Against Heresies some
anonymous early Christian compiled a list of authoritative
writings. The Muratorian Canon, named after the person who
published it in 1740, refers to four Gospels, though the manuscript no longer contains the specifics concerning the first two.
It does mention Luke and John by name:
. . . at which nevertheless he was present, and so he placed [them
in his narrative]. The third book of the Gospel is that according
to Luke. Luke, the well-known physician, after the ascension of
Christ, when Paul had taken with him as one zealous for the law,
composed it in his own name, according to [the general] belief.
Yet he himself had not seen the Lord in the flesh; and therefore,
as he was able to ascertain events, so indeed he begins to tell
the story from the birth of John. The fourth of the Gospels is
that of John, [one] of the disciples. . . .2
It’s interesting to note that Luke is identified explicitly as one
who was not an eyewitness to Jesus.
The earliest bit of external evidence for Gospel authorship
comes from a church leader who served during the first half
of the second century. About fifty years before Irenaeus, a
bishop named Papias, who lived in Hierapolis (now in western
Turkey), wrote a document called Expositions of the Oracles
of the Lord. This document doesn’t exist anymore, but it is
quoted in other early Christian writings that we do have today.
One of these quotations appears in the writings of the church
historian Eusebius:
Mark having become the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately, though not in order, whatsoever he remembered of
the things said or done by Christ. For he neither heard the Lord nor followed him, but afterward, as I said, he followed Peter,
who adapted his teaching to the needs of his hearers, but with
no intention of giving a connected account of the Lord’s discourses, so that Mark committed no error while he thus wrote
some things as he remembered them. For he was careful of one
thing, not to omit any of the things which he had heard, and
not to state any of them falsely. . . . So then Matthew wrote
the oracles in the Hebrew language, and every one interpreted
them as he was able.3
I’ll have more to say about this statement later. For now I simply
want to note that by about a.d. 130 the tradition of Matthew’s
and Mark’s authorship was being passed down authoritatively,
since Papias claims to have received this information from an
unidentified “elder.”
For various reasons, however, many scholars doubt the accuracy of the second-century traditions about Gospel authorship. This is true even though the ancient tradition is almost
unanimous in attributing the Gospels to Matthew, Mark, Luke,
and John. Scholarly doubts about Gospel authorship usually
have to do with internal evidence, what the Gospels themselves
reveal about who wrote them (or not).
Internal Evidence for Gospel Authorship
Most of the internal evidence for Gospel authorship is fairly
speculative. It involves such questions as:
Does the apparent reliance of the first Gospel on the second Gospel count against the theory that Matthew, a
disciple of Jesus, wrote the first Gospel? Would he have
based his work on the writing of somebody who didn’t
even know Jesus personally? Since the vocabulary of the second Gospel includes Latinisms (Latin terms in a Greek text—for example: legion in
5:9; denarius in 6:37; centurion in 15:39), does this support the notion that the author was writing in a location
where Latin was the primary language, such as Rome, and
thus that he might have been Mark, Peter’s companion
in Rome?
Since the theology of the third Gospel (plus Acts) seems
to differ from that of Paul in some respects, is it sensible
to believe that the author of these writings had been a
close companion of Paul?
Does the presence of lots of authentic local color in the
fourth Gospel support authorship by John?
As you can see, there’s a lot of wiggle room in questions like
these. The same is true for most of the internal evidence for
the identity of the evangelists.
There are two pieces of internal evidence which, it seems
to me, deserve serious consideration. One has to do with the
authorship of the third Gospel, the other with the authorship
of the fourth Gospel.
Was the Author of the Third Gospel a Companion of Paul?
Second-century Christian tradition ascribes the authorship
of the third Gospel to Luke, a companion of Paul. Indeed,
a person named Luke is mentioned in three of Paul’s letters
(Philem. 24; Col. 4:14; 2 Tim. 4:11). Colossians adds that Luke
is the “beloved physician” (Col. 4:14).
Internal evidence for Luke’s authorship of the third Gospel
comes primarily from the Acts of the Apostles, which was
written by the author of the third Gospel (compare Luke 1:1–4
and Acts 1:1–5). There are passages in Acts where the author
speaks as if he were a companion of Paul during some of his
journeys (for example, Acts 16:10–17). Piecing these clues and others together, commentators have for centuries concluded
that Luke was this companion of Paul, and therefore was the
author both of Acts and the third Gospel. Many scholars today
believe this is a credible inference, while others deny it, largely
on the basis of supposed differences between Luke’s theology
and Paul’s theology, and because the “we” sections in Acts are
seen as a literary device, not as evidence that the author of Acts
was truly a companion of Paul.
If the connection between Luke and Paul can be made, this
does increase the feeling of Luke’s overall trustworthiness.
His writings have an apostolic imprimatur, as it were. But, of
course, the curious thing about this connection is that Paul
never knew Jesus during his earthly life. So linking Luke with
Paul, though it might increase Luke’s general believability,
doesn’t provide evidence of how Luke knew the truth about
Jesus.
Was the Author of the Fourth Gospel John, the Disciple of
Jesus?
The most obvious, yet still tantalizingly cryptic, internal
evidence for a writer of a New Testament Gospel comes in
the fourth Gospel. This Gospel actually makes reference to its
writer near the end of the book:
Peter turned and saw the disciple whom Jesus loved following
them; he was the one who had reclined next to Jesus at the
supper and had said, “Lord, who is it that is going to betray
you?” When Peter saw him, he said to Jesus, “Lord, what
about him?” Jesus said to him, “If it is my will that he remain
until I come, what is that to you? Follow me!” So the rumor
spread in the community that this disciple would not die. Yet
Jesus did not say to him that he would not die, but, “If it is
my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you?”
This is the disciple who is testifying to these things and has
written them, and we know that his testimony is true (John
21:20–24).
This passage appears to identify the writer of the Gospel, though
the Greek phrase behind “has written them” could mean “has
caused them to be written,” which would identify the disciple
as the inspiration for the writing of the fourth Gospel but not
necessarily its actual author. Moreover, the phrase “we know
that his testimony is true” suggests that others were involved
in the writing and/or editing of the fourth Gospel, at least to
some extent.
The text of the fourth Gospel identifies the primary author
of the book as “this . . . disciple,” namely, “the disciple whom
Jesus loved.” This identification points to one of the great mysteries of biblical interpretation: Who is the Beloved Disciple?
Given Jesus’ love for all of his disciples, the phrase “the
disciple whom Jesus loved” seems peculiar. Nevertheless, it
appears elsewhere in the fourth Gospel. The one known as the
Beloved Disciple reclined with Jesus at the Last Supper (13:23),
stayed with him as he was crucified (19:26), ran to the tomb
on Easter morning (20:2), and joined the resurrected Jesus at
the Sea of Galilee (21:7, 20). Traditionally, he has been seen
as John, the son of Zebedee, though this identification is never
made explicitly in the fourth Gospel itself. What is claimed,
however, is that the one who wrote (or whose testimony stood
behind) the fourth Gospel was a disciple of Jesus, one whom
Jesus dearly loved. This could well have been John, though
surely Jesus might have loved another disciple, someone whose
name we don’t know. For example, Ben Witherington III has
presented intriguing arguments in favor of Lazarus as the Beloved Disciple.4
This identification is supported by the fact
that Lazarus is specifically and unusually described as one who
was loved by Jesus (11:3, 5, 11, 36).
For our purposes, it doesn’t really matter whether the Beloved Disciple was John, Lazarus, or some other disciple of
Jesus. The important point is that the fourth Gospel claims to
contain the writing of someone who was a close follower of Jesus. If this is true, then it surely increases the trustworthiness
of the fourth Gospel.
Some scholars have doubted this conclusion because the
content of Jesus’ teaching in the fourth Gospel is so different
from what we find in the Synoptic Gospels. When it comes
to the basic forms of discourse, this is surely true. In the Synoptics Jesus usually utters short statements or parables. In
the fourth Gospel, he speaks in long discourses. Moreover,
the central point of Jesus’ teaching in the Synoptic Gospels is
the kingdom of God. In John, the kingdom is a minor theme.
Jesus emphasizes far more his personal identity and the need
to believe in him.
Nobody disputes the variations between the fourth Gospel
and the Synoptic Gospels with respect to form and content.
Yet there is a wide difference of opinion over the implications
of this variance. Some scholars focus so much on the differences between the Synoptics and the fourth Gospel that they
seem to overlook the extensive thematic similarities shared
among them. Christians throughout the centuries have seen
in the fourth Gospel a picture of Jesus complementary to the
one found in the Synoptics.5
I’ll have more to say about the
differences and similarities between the fourth Gospel and the
Synoptics in chapter 8. For now, let me conclude simply by saying that I find no compelling reason to reject the idea that the
fourth Gospel was written by someone who had been one of
Jesus’ closest disciples, and many reasons to accept this idea.
Summing Up the Question of Gospel Authorship
Most of the internal evidence for Gospel authorship, apart
from the identification of the Beloved Disciple, is quite speculative. Even the identity of the Beloved Disciple cannot be known with certainty. Scholarly opinion, therefore, rests largely on
the weight given to the second-century traditions. Those who
think that Irenaeus, Papias, and the rest knew and passed on
the truth tend to affirm traditional views of Gospel authorship.
Those who doubt these traditions argue for more anonymity.
Why, you might wonder, would a scholar in the twenty-first
century doubt the traditions that go back into the second century? Doesn’t it make sense to think that those early traditions
were based on actual testimony? Wouldn’t you suppose that
those who passed along the Gospels also passed along information about who actually wrote them?
All of this seems quite reasonable, unless you approach the
tradition with a hermeneutic of suspicion, in which the claims
made by church leaders are presumed to be “guilty until proven
innocent.” Quite a few scholars have argued that the names
of the Gospel writers were made up in order to gain authority for the writings. This is surely true when you consider the
broader collection of Christian (or semi-Christian) Gospels.
In the noncanonical writings you find such documents as the
Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Mary
(Magdalene), the Gospel of Judas, the Gospel of Bartholomew,
the Gospel of Peter, as well as many others. It’s clear to almost
all observers that these books were not actually written by the
supposed authors. The names were attached to give authority
to the writings. So, some have concluded, the same is true of
the New Testament Gospels.
This argument could explain the naming of Matthew and
John, though I think it reflects unwarranted skepticism about
early Christian tradition. But the main flaw in this argument
is obvious: Two of the biblical Gospels were named after relatively inconsequential characters who did not actually know
Jesus in the flesh. If you were some second-century Christian
wanting to make up an author for a Gospel, you would never
choose Mark, even if he was believed to have been a companion
of Peter. And you would never choose Luke because he had no
direct connection to Jesus at all, even though he played a bit
part in the writings of Paul. If second-century Christians were fabricating traditional authorship for the canonical Gospels,
surely they could have done a better job.
So, ironically, the tendency of the noncanonical Gospels
to assign Gospel authorship to prominent disciples actually
increases the likelihood that the traditions concerning New
Testament Gospel authorship are true, at least with respect to
Mark and Luke. And if the orthodox tradition can be seen as
trustworthy in these cases, then the presumption of suspicion
about the tradition must be wrongheaded. We should accept
the ancient tradition unless we have good reason to do otherwise. Moreover, the anonymity of the biblical Gospels bears the
stamp of truth whereas the pseudonymity of the noncanonical
Gospels suggests their falsehood.
Did the Gospel writers know Jesus personally? With confidence, we can say “no” in the cases of the second and third Gospels. But these evangelists had access to reliable traditions about
Jesus, as I’ll explain later. Moreover, the fact that the second
Gospel was so quickly accepted by the early church (including
the other evangelists) lends credence to the notion that it was
based on reliable source(s), like Peter, as Papias claimed.
In the case of the first and fourth Gospels, it is possible that
the writers were eyewitnesses of Jesus himself. There was a
time when critical scholars seemed to discard this possibility
energetically, almost glibly. But in recent years many have come
to believe that the first and fourth Gospels reflect the memory
and the perspective of Jesus’ own disciples, both Matthew and
John (or another Beloved Disciple, at any rate). Matthew and
John may not have been the ones who finally put pen to papyrus, but they, their memory, and their authority stand behind
the Gospels that bear their names.
So, did the Gospel writers know Jesus personally? Mark and
Luke did not. Matthew and John might have, but we can’t be
positive. Yet the reliability of the New Testament Gospels does
not depend on who wrote them so much as on the nature and
purpose of the writings themselves. These matters fill out the
rest of this book, in which I will use the traditional names to
identify the Gospels and their writers.
Mark, Luke, and the Early Christian Commitment to Truth
I want to conclude this chapter by reflecting a bit further
on the traditional assignment of the second and third Gospels
to Mark and Luke. Early Christian tradition is unified in the
identification of Mark and Luke as Gospel writers. It also contains specific notice that these two evangelists did not know
Jesus personally.
I already mentioned how striking it is that the orthodox
church “settled” for such unspectacular writers. After all, their
theological opponents, the Gnostics, were making all sorts of
claims that their Gospels and other revelations came from the
original disciples of Jesus. It must have been tempting for the
orthodox believers to counter these claims by connecting their
Gospels with more authoritative writers who had actually been
with Jesus. Why not exaggerate just a bit and call the second
Gospel the Gospel of Peter, even though it was written by his
associate and not by Peter himself? Yet Papias, Irenaeus, and
the like resolutely refused to do this sort of thing. In fact, they
openly acknowledged that two of their Gospels were not written by eyewitnesses.
I’ve suggested that this strongly supports the theory that
Mark and Luke were the writers of the second and third Gospels. But, in a broader perspective, the refusal of early orthodox Christians to fudge on the question of Gospel authorship
reveals their commitment to truth. They steadfastly affirmed
what they believed to be true, even when their opponents appeared to trump Mark and Luke with Gospels by Thomas,
Philip, and the like. The orthodox dedication to truth won out
over any supposed orthodox agenda to uphold the true faith
versus Gnosticism.
I am belaboring this point because among many scholars
who discount the historical reliability of the Gospels you’ll
find an assumption that the early Christians made up all sorts
of things when it supported their evangelistic or apologetic
agendas. Need a miracle story to compete with pagan gods?
Make it up! Need a saying of Jesus to advance your cause? Go ahead and create one! In many scholarly quarters the creativity of the early Christian movement with respect to Jesus is
assumed without argument.
I am not claiming that second-century attribution of Gospels
to Mark and Luke proves that Christians never made anything
up. This would be to claim more than the evidence supports at
this point. But I do think the consistent testimony of authorship
by Mark and Luke offers a clear instance in which orthodox
Christians might have been tempted to bend the truth to fit their
agenda yet in which they resolutely hung on to the truth. This
would suggest that scholars who neglect the early Christian
commitment to truth have missed the truth themselves.
CHAPTER 4. When Were the Gospels
Written?
Everybody seems to be talking about the Gospels these days, and not just the biblical Gospels but especially
the noncanonical ones. The shelves of secular bookstores
feature books promising to reveal the secrets of the hidden
Gospels. For the first time in history, the Gnostic Gospels
named after Mary and Philip have emerged from hiding in
musty academic libraries, owing to their cameo appearance
in The Da Vinci Code. Then there was the publication of the
Gospel of Judas, accompanied with blaring media fanfare
and insinuations by scholars that we might finally have access to the truth about the relationship between Judas and
Jesus. No doubt there will be more of the same in the years
to come.
Much of today’s babble about the Gospels seems to assume
that they are all more or less of equal historical value. If something’s called a Gospel, people figure, it must give us authentic information about Jesus, no matter where it came from or
when it was written. Some folks have even argued that the
extrabiblical Gospels are better historical sources than Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The Da Vinci Code’s fictitious
Sir Leigh Teabing is the most popular proponent of this view,
but he’s not alone.1
Although parts of this discussion have been academically
responsible, it reminds me of a story I heard from one of my
college philosophy professors. I had asked Hillary Putnam,
“What is the strangest paper you’ve ever received in one of
your courses?”
Without hesitation he answered, “It was in a modern philosophy class I taught several years ago. A student submitted
a term paper comparing the philosophies of John Locke [a
seventeenth-century English philosopher] and Jean-Paul Sartre [a twentieth-century French philosopher]. He found some
notable parallels between Locke and Sartre. Unfortunately,
however, his main thesis was that Locke had borrowed many
of his key ideas from Sartre. This student had never bothered
to find out that Sartre came along almost three centuries after
Locke.”
So it is with much of the popular conversation about the
Gospels. People are making claims that are almost laughable,
except for the fact that they seem to believe them, as do others
who are unaware of when the Gospels were written.
In this chapter I plan to answer two main questions:
1. When were the biblical Gospels written?
2. What do the dates of composition for the Gospels—both
biblical and noncanonical—tell us about their trustworthiness as historical sources?
When Were the Biblical Gospels Written?
The dating of the Gospels involves a generous helping of
subjectivity and therefore leads to considerable disagreement
among scholars. The main problem is a lack of evidence. The
evangelists didn’t identify when they were writing, adding a
preface that might read something like, “In the twelfth year of
the reign of the Emperor Nero . . .” So, the dating of the New
Testament Gospels is rather like a treasure hunt, with scholars
searching high and low for relevant clues.
These clues fall into two categories that will, by now, sound
familiar. First, there is external evidence. This includes the early
manuscripts of the Gospels as well as references to them or
citations from them in other works of ancient literature. Second, there is internal evidence. This has to do with what can
be discovered about the time of writing from the content of
each Gospel. Consider this obvious example. All of the Gospels
identify Pontius Pilate as the Roman governor of Judea during
the time of Jesus. Since we know that Pilate governed from
about 26 to 37 a.d., the Gospels couldn’t have been written
before this time.
External Evidence for the Dating of the Gospels
As I explained in chapter 2, there are papyrus manuscripts
of the biblical Gospels that can be dated to the last part of the
second century a.d. Therefore the originals must have been
written earlier. For John we have P52, which has been dated to
around a.d. 125, thus ensuring that this Gospel was written
no later than the first part of the second century.2
Besides the extant manuscripts, we find references to the
Gospels in writings by second-century church leaders. Irenaeus, who wrote his treatise Against Heresies around a.d.
180, specifically mentioned Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John
as being the only authoritative Gospels.3
His description of the
evangelists puts their writing in the latter half of the first century a.d. Against Heresies establishes a latest possible date for
the composition of the Gospels and suggests that they were in
fact written quite a bit earlier. The Muratorian Canon, written
perhaps ten years before Irenaeus, mentions Luke and John by
name, and probably included Matthew and Mark as well.
A half-century before Irenaeus, Papias said that Mark wrote
down things that Peter taught about Jesus, and that Matthew
compiled reports about Jesus “in the Hebrew language.”4
It
seems likely that Papias is referring to what we know as the
Gospel of Mark, and perhaps to the Gospel of Matthew. If
so, then we have a reliable latest possible date for the writing
of Mark and maybe Matthew: prior to a.d. 130 or so, when
Papias wrote. Moreover, what Papias said about these Gospels
dates their authorship to the first century.
There are no earlier references to the biblical Gospels, but
there are possible quotations of the Gospels in Christian writings from the first decade of the second century. Ignatius, Bishop
of Antioch, while on his way to Rome to be martyred, wrote
several letters in which he seems to have quoted from Matthew.5
The so-called Didache (“teaching” in Greek), written
around the same time, also shows what might be knowledge
of Matthew.6
If the passages in Ignatius and the Didache are
indeed quotations from Matthew, and not simply reflections of
oral tradition, then we have external evidence for Matthew’s
having been written by the end of the first century a.d.
The most extensive quotation of the Gospels comes from
the Gospels themselves. As I’ll explain in the next chapter,
most scholars believe that Matthew and Luke used Mark as a
source for their writing. If this is true, then Mark must have
been written before either of these Gospels, and early enough
to have been known by both writers. This pushes the writing
of Mark near the middle of the first century a.d.
Internal Evidence for the Dating of the Gospels
Scholarly arguments from internal evidence abound. If you’re
interested in the details, check out any commentary on the
Gospels or a standard New Testament introduction.7
Most of
these arguments try to squeeze chronological water from very
dry stones, however. The best analyses try to “fit” the Gospels
into what is known about early Christian history. For example,
the Gospel of John seems to reflect a time when Christians and
Jews were experiencing considerable conflict. This suggests a
date in the last two decades of the first century a.d. But, of
course, the fourth Gospel may have been written earlier in a
community where conflict with Jews happened locally before
it became a widespread phenomenon. “Good fit” arguments
depend on lots of historical reconstruction that is probable at
best.8
The most common arguments for dating the Gospels based
on internal evidence refer to the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple in a.d. 70. This was, no doubt, a cataclysmic event for many early Christians, especially those who
continued to think of themselves as Jews. Scholars examine the
Gospels for evidence of knowledge—or lack of knowledge—of the events of a.d. 70. You can find some commentators who
argue that the Gospels reflect no specific knowledge of these
events, and therefore must be dated prior to 70. Yet you’ll
find others who see between the lines of the Gospels ample
references to the fall of Jerusalem, and therefore date all of
the Gospels after 70. For my own part, I find some of the
arguments for earlier dating enticing, but not so compelling
as to convince me that they are correct. All of these kinds of
positions are filled with conjecture about what an evangelist
“surely would have said” or “might have meant.” These arguments offer packed sand upon which to date the Gospels, but
hardly a rock-solid foundation.9
Accepted Dates of Composition
If you were to do a survey of New Testament scholarship
today, you would find the majority of scholars falling somewhere
within the following ranges for the dating of the Gospels:
Matthew: 65–85 a.d.
Mark: 60–75 a.d.
Luke: 65–95 a.d.
John: 75–100 a.d.
If these accepted ranges are accurate, then the biblical
Gospels were written around 30–70 years after the death of
Jesus.
Does this time lapse help us trust the Gospels? Before I
answer this question, I need to address two other issues. First,
I should comment on how the dating of the biblical Gospels
compares with the dating of their extrabiblical cousins. I’ll address this in just a moment. Second, I need to explain
in some detail how the evangelists got their information
about Jesus. Did they depend upon their own memories?
Did they make it up as they went along? Or did they use
reliable sources? This discussion I’ll save for the next two
chapters.
When Were the Noncanonical Gospels Written?
The noncanonical Gospels are ancient writings in which
Jesus (or an otherworldly Christ, at any rate) sometimes figures prominently. A few of the extrabiblical Gospels purport
to describe events in the life of Jesus. An example would be
the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, which supposedly chronicles
miracles by the boy Jesus. Most of the noncanonical Gospels,
especially those known as the Gnostic Gospels because of their
theology, say almost nothing about the human Jesus. Instead,
they contain what are portrayed as secret revelations from the
divine Christ. The Gospel of Thomas exemplifies this type of
writing. Other Gnostic Gospels, like the Gospel of Truth, are
theological tractates that have little to do directly with Christ.
Depending on what you count as a Gospel, there are two or
three dozen noncanonical Gospels. For the most part, these
can be found in what is called the New Testament Apocrypha10
or the Nag Hammadi Library.11 If we have little evidence for
conclusive dating of the canonical Gospels, the situation with
the noncanonicals is even less helpful. In some cases we have
external evidence for dating. Irenaeus, for example, mentions
a Gospel of Truth that may be the same as the one found in the
Nag Hammadi Library.12 He rejects its authority, of course. For
the most part, however, external evidence for the noncanonical
Gospels is minimal.
Internal evidence often relates to the dependence of the
noncanonical Gospels upon the biblical versions. Many of
the extrabiblical Gospels quote from Matthew, Mark, Luke,
and John, and often from other New Testament writings as
well, such as the letters of Paul. Such quotations don’t allow
for a precise dating of the noncanonical documents, but they
do indicate that they were written after the biblical books
being quoted.
Most scholars put the composition of all the noncanonical
Gospels in the second century a.d. or later, with one exception
that I’ll address in a moment. At the latter end of the scale you
would find the Gospel of Philip, which was composed during the last part of the second century or the first part of the
third century. Other texts, such as the Gospel of Truth and the
Gospel of Mary, are believed to have been written earlier in
the second century.
The one major exception to the “noncanonicals in the second
century” rule is the Gospel of Thomas. Perhaps no Gospel has
enjoyed a wider range of possible dates. Some scholars have
tried to place the composition of Thomas to within twenty
years of Jesus’ ministry, while others argue that this Gospel
was written well into the second century. Careful comparisons
between Thomas and the biblical Gospels have made a strong
case for the latter date, and I’m inclined to agree.13 They show
how Thomas is dependent upon a range of biblical writings,
and thus must have been written well after those writings were
composed.14
What Do the Dates of Composition for the Gospels Tell Us
about Their Trustworthiness?
Usually we would put more confidence in a historical description that was closer to an event than in a later testimony,
especially when the later testimony was dependent on the earlier
source. Therefore, we can conclude that the biblical Gospels
are more trustworthy as historical sources for Jesus than the
noncanonical Gospels, though these later Gospels might sometimes contain bits and pieces of authentic tradition that are not
found in the Bible.
But as I noted earlier, the writing of the biblical Gospels happened two or three generations after Jesus’ ministry. This time
gap makes us wonder what the evangelists depended on when
they wrote. Were they relying on memory? On written descriptions? On hearsay? What happened with stories about Jesus
during the years after his ministry and before the writing of the
Gospels? To these questions we’ll turn in the next chapter.
CHAPTER 5. What Sources Did
the Gospel Writers Use?
Good sources are treasure for historians. Even when
writing about an event they experienced personally, careful
historians will consult sources beyond their personal knowledge. They’ll interview other witnesses. They’ll comb through
published accounts. This is what responsible historiography
always entails.
As I explained in chapter 3, at least two of the Gospel writers were not eyewitnesses of Jesus. The other two, Matthew
and John, may well have been among Jesus’ inner circle, but
we can’t be positive about this. What we do know for sure
is that at least one of the evangelists made up for his lack of
direct knowledge of Jesus by carefully collecting and utilizing
historical sources. We know this because Luke tells us right
up front.
Luke and His Sources
The Gospel of Luke begins with a prologue similar to something an ancient historian would have written:
Since many have undertaken to set down an orderly account
of the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as they
were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were
eyewitnesses and servants of the word, I too decided, after
investigating everything carefully from the very first, to write
an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that
you may know the truth concerning the things about which
you have been instructed (Luke 1:1–4).
We don’t know who Theophilus was, though apparently he
knew Luke and was willing to receive instruction from him.
Theophilus may have been Luke’s patron (financial supporter),
perhaps a newer Christian who looked up to Luke.
Our interest lies chiefly in the sources Luke identifies. Notice
carefully what he claims:
1. “Many” have already “set down an orderly account” of
the events concerning Jesus. The phrase “set down an orderly
account” refers to writing a narrative. Luke consciously drew
upon more than one or two written sources.
2. The events concerning Jesus “were handed on to us by
those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants
of the word.” “Handed on” is the language of oral tradition.
It conveys the intentional passing on of stories and sayings.
“Eyewitnesses” are those who actually saw and heard Jesus in
the flesh. “Servants of the word” are those who preached and
taught. So Luke attests to a thriving oral tradition about Jesus
which was passed on by preachers and teachers. Yet these were
not just any old servants of the word. Luke paid particular
attention to those who based their preaching and teaching on
their own eyewitness experience of Jesus.
3. Luke decided to write his Gospel “after investigating
everything carefully.” In other words, he read the “many”
written accounts of Jesus studiously, and made an effort to sift through the relevant oral traditions. Luke claims to be a
thorough historian who has done his scholarly homework.
4. What is the point of Luke’s effort? He writes so that
Theophilus “may know the truth” concerning Jesus. The ESV
translates a bit more literally, “so that you may have certainty
concerning the things you have been taught” (Luke 1:4). Luke
has written his Gospel, paying close attention to the sources
at his disposal, so that the reader might have confidence concerning who Jesus was, what he did, and why he matters. The
“why he matters” part is expanded in Luke’s second volume,
which we call the Acts of the Apostles.
I’ll have more to say about the prologue to Luke’s Gospel
later. For our present purposes, I am most interested in Luke’s
identification of two sorts of sources for his writing: oral sources
and written sources. Both of these, according to Luke, derive
from eyewitnesses who were also teachers in the church.
Written Sources for the Gospels
Unfortunately, Luke did not name his written sources. Neither did the other evangelists, if indeed they also used written
sources. For centuries scholars have pondered the question of
Gospel sources. Classically, it was believed that Matthew was
the first Gospel, and that Matthew influenced Mark and Luke.
Some scholars still argue for this conclusion. The majority, however, have come to believe that the “two-source” hypothesis best
explains the relationship between the Synoptic Gospels. This
hypothesis is captured in the diagram on the following page.
Though I don’t have the space to explain the reasons for this
schema, I do want to make five quick comments.
1. “Q” is an abbreviation for Quelle, the German word for
“source.” It is a hypothetical document, invented to explain
the complex relationships among the Synoptic Gospels. Q is a
collection of more than 200 sayings that appear in both Matthew and Luke but not in Mark. Though a few scholars try
to explain the existence of these sayings by arguing that Luke used Matthew in addition to Mark, this theory hasn’t gained
widespread acceptance.
2. The majority of New Testament scholars believe that
Matthew used Mark as one of his major sources. Matthew’s
other sources included Q and “M,” which is shorthand for
“Matthean sources.” M would contain material that is unique
to Matthew, such as the visit of the Magi. There are a few scholars who argue that Matthew wrote first, and Mark abridged
Matthew, but it’s hard to account for the peculiarities of Matthew and Mark according to this scenario.
3. “L” is shorthand for “Lukan sources,” which would
include, for example, the infancy narratives in Luke. Some
have suggested that L contains remembrances of Mary, Jesus’
mother.
4. The Gospel of John stands apart from the Synoptic Gospels both in style and in some of its content, though similarities
between John and the Synoptics abound. Some scholars have
argued that John knew Mark’s Gospel account and wrote to
supplement it. Others have disputed this claim. Most students
of John believe that he used one or more sources, especially a
“Signs Source,” and perhaps a source containing discourses
of Jesus and a source describing Jesus’ death. We can’t be sure
about these theories, however.
5. My guess is that reality was actually more complex than
what is depicted in the chart above. L, for example, may have
been several documents. Likewise with M, and perhaps even
Q. Remember that Luke refers to “many” written accounts
upon which he based his Gospel.
In light of Luke’s prologue and the nature of the Gospels
themselves, it seems likely that some framework like the one
pictured above accurately reflects the sources for the Gospels.
Q belongs to the same time period as Mark, given its use
by Matthew and Luke. But it is impossible to date the written sources precisely, though some scholars have given it the
ol’ college try. Nevertheless, the fact that the evangelists used
older sources increases the likelihood that what they portrayed
about Jesus actually happened. Matthew, Luke, and John, and
perhaps Mark, based their compositions upon older sources
that were written within fifteen to thirty years of Jesus’ death.
They didn’t just make things up from scratch.
Oral Sources for the Gospels
Nor did they use only written materials. Luke states specifically what is surely true of the other evangelists as well, that
they incorporated in their writings materials that “were handed
on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses
and servants of the word” (Luke 1:2). These were handed on
orally in the community of the early followers of Jesus.
The second-century church leader Papias, whom we have
met previously in this book, described the history of the Gospel
of Mark in a way that is curiously similar to Luke’s prologue.
Here, once again, is Papias’s description:
Mark having become the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately, though not in order, whatsoever he remembered of
the things said or done by Christ. For he neither heard the Lord
nor followed him, but afterward, as I said, he followed Peter,
who adapted his teaching to the needs of his hearers, but with
no intention of giving a connected account of the Lord’s discourses, so that Mark committed no error while he thus wrote
some things as he remembered them. For he was careful of one
thing, not to omit any of the things which he had heard, and
not to state any of them falsely.1
Mark, who was not an eyewitness of Jesus, depended on
sources, in this case the things he had heard Peter teach. Peter
could surely be described as one who from the beginning was
an eyewitness and a servant of the word, to use Luke’s wording.
Whether Mark used sources besides what he had learned from
Peter we do not know, though it’s certainly possible.
Luke was not the only New Testament writer to refer to the
process of oral tradition. The verb “to hand on,” a technical
term for the passing on of oral tradition, appears in one of
Paul’s letters to the Corinthians, where he describes receiving
and delivering oral traditions about Jesus:
For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn
had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with
the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised
on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he
appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve (1 Cor. 15:3–5).
Paul’s testimony concerning early Christian oral tradition is
significant for several reasons. Among them is the fact that
he wrote his first letter to the Corinthians in the early 50s
a.d., prior to the composition of the Gospels. Thus, within
about twenty years of Jesus’ death we have clear evidence that
the early Christians were passing on information about Jesus.
Moreover, the wording of the tradition Paul mentions sounds
stylized, which would have facilitated the accurate transmission
of that tradition. Paul was delivering to the Corinthians the
exact message that had been given to him earlier. This doesn’t
mean that all of the early traditions about Jesus were memorized and passed on verbatim, of course, but it does suggest that
this sort of thing both could and did happen, and that it was important to the early followers of Jesus to pass on traditions
about him accurately.
Following the death and resurrection of Jesus, his early followers passed on stories about him and things he said. This
often happened, as Luke mentions in his prologue, in the context of the ministry of the word, namely preaching and teaching. At an early stage in this process the teachings of Jesus
were translated from Aramaic, the primary language spoken
by Jesus, to Greek, the dominant language of the Mediterranean world. No doubt this happened in bilingual communities,
where people spoke both Aramaic and Greek, and in missionary efforts among Greek-speaking Gentiles. Not too long after
Jesus’ death, his teachings were being passed on mostly in a
language different from the one in which he had taught, except
for a few words that echoed his original Aramaic (words like
abba, Aramaic for “father,” in Mark 14:36; and talitha cum,
Aramaic for “Little girl, get up!” in Mark 5:41).2
It’s certainly possible that at a very early date some of the
stories and sayings of Jesus were written down, but we have no
evidence to prove this conjecture. The fact is that the culture
in which the first disciples of Jesus lived was predominantly
an oral, not a literary one. People told and remembered things
more than recording them in writing. The rabbis were adept at
remembering and passing on the oral Torah to their disciples,
who accurately retained both the oral Torah and the commentary of their masters. But even first-century Jewish pop
culture had a strong oral component. In the synagogue and
around the family table, in religious gatherings and at parties,
in educational settings and at wedding receptions, people told
stories, quoted bits of wisdom, and in so doing shaped the
culture in which they lived.
This is the culture in which early Christianity flourished, in
which eyewitnesses of Jesus spoke of what they had seen, in which communities of his followers heard, remembered, and
passed on what they had been told. Thus Luke and the other
evangelists found themselves with ample material for putting
in writing what had mainly been passed on verbally.
But was this oral tradition reliable? Did early Christian stories about Jesus accurately portray what really happened? Did
the Christian version of the teachings of Jesus reflect what he
had once proclaimed? I’ll address these questions in the next
chapter.
CHAPTER 6. Did Early Christian
Oral Tradition Reliably
Pass Down the Truth
about Jesus?
Those who discount the historical reliability of
the Gospels claim that the oral tradition concerning Jesus was
corrupted by human error and the hyperactive imaginations
of the early Christians. To prove their point, critics sometimes
roll out the example of playing “Telephone.”
If you’re not familiar with Telephone, which is sometimes
called “Whisper Down the Alley,” let me explain. First, you
get a bunch of people to sit in a circle. Then somebody starts
by secretly writing down a sentence. Usually it’s something
like: “Pastor Mark is going to the fair tomorrow because he’s
meeting a friend there.” After writing down the sentence, the
writer whispers it to the next person in the circle. Then that
person turns to the next person and whispers the message. So it goes, all the way around the circle. When the message comes
to the last person, that one says out loud what he or she thinks
is the right message. Then the person who started the communication reads the original message for all to hear. Inevitably,
the final sentence is quite different from the original. “Pastor
Mark is going to the fair tomorrow because he’s meeting a
friend there” has become “Pastor Mark is going to float up
into the air tomorrow because he’s so full of hot air.”
Does the game of Telephone prove that the oral tradition
about Jesus cannot be trusted? No. In fact, the limitations of
the Telephone analogy will help us understand why we can
put trust in the oral traditions about Jesus that are found in
the Gospels.
The Context of the Oral Tradition about Jesus
The game of Telephone works because we aren’t adept at
memorizing. Let’s face it. We don’t memorize very well because we don’t have to. Consider the case of phone numbers.
When I was young, I had memorized at least twenty-five phone
numbers. I could call my friends, my grandparents, the local
movie theater . . . all from memory. But along came memory
chips and phones that “remember” frequently called numbers.
Now I may have less then ten phone numbers in my brain. Even
some that I call most frequently, like my wife’s cell phone, I
don’t know by heart.
Yet people can be trained to memorize, even in today’s visual, electronic culture. When my wife was training to be a
marriage and family counselor, she was expected to write out
“verbatims” of her sessions with clients. Verbatims were accurate, in-depth transcripts of what was discussed over the
course of an hour. In time, Linda became quite proficient at
this. Why? It was a matter of necessity and practice. Her professional context required and supported it.
The early followers of Jesus lived in an oral culture. Relatively few people were literate. Only the wealthy had access to libraries and literature. So people needed good memories. They
remembered stories, sayings, Scripture passages, and you name
it (well, not phone numbers!). Their oral culture had contexts
in which crucial information, like religious stories, would be
passed on faithfully. Teachers and storytellers were expected
to hand on what they had been told accurately, though with a
modicum of freedom. Since they did their work in community
gatherings, if they got the story substantially wrong, the community in which they functioned would hold them accountable
for their mistake.1
I don’t know if anybody has ever tried playing Telephone with
people from an oral culture. My guess is this game wouldn’t
be much fun among such people because they would pass on
the message accurately. Yet when it comes to the oral tradition about Jesus, we have much more than merely the cultural
context to assure its accurate transmission.
The People of the Oral Tradition about Jesus
As I’ve already mentioned, the Telephone game works, in
part, because the players aren’t adept at memorization. Those
who passed on the traditions about Jesus were, on the contrary,
trained by culture to memorize and recount with considerable accuracy. Moreover, if Birger Gerhardsson’s connection
of early Christianity with Jewish rabbinic traditions holds
any water, then some of those who passed on the sayings of
Jesus had been specifically trained to do this with exemplary
precision.2
n the years before the Gospels were written. They passed these
accounts on to their friends and children. But this doesn’t mean
that just anybody could tell and retell these stories in the gathered Christian community. Don’t forget Luke’s claim that he
had received the traditions from “those who from the beginning
were eyewitnesses and servants of the word” (Luke 1:2). He’s
referring here to the people we call the apostles, in particular the
apostles who had been with Jesus during his earthly ministry.
These eyewitnesses, who had been set apart by Jesus himself,
were the official “players” in the Jesus Telephone game.
On top of this, we must remember who started up the early
Christian game of Telephone: Jesus himself. He was the first
player, if you will, the one who first spoke the message to be
passed along. And he wasn’t just any old player, at least in the
eyes of his followers. They thought he was the Messiah, the
Savior of Israel, and the One through whom God was inaugurating his kingdom. They saw Jesus not only as a wise teacher
but also, in some way, as the very embodiment of God’s Wisdom. And, in what was shocking to the majority of Jews in the
first century, the earliest Christians confessed Jesus to be Lord:
not just an authoritative human being, but somehow God in
human form. Thus they had lots of motivation to remember
what he said and to transmit it accurately. They weren’t just
playing games at a party.
The Content of the Oral Tradition about Jesus
The early Christians also thought that Jesus’ teaching was
uniquely true and more important than any other ideas in the
world. Consider, for example, the following passages from
the Gospels:
“Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on
them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock”
(Matt. 7:24).
“Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass
away” (Mark 13:31).
“It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless. The words that
I have spoken to you are spirit and life” (John 6:63).
So Jesus asked the twelve, “Do you also wish to go away?”
Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom can we go? You
have the words of eternal life” (John 6:67–68).
“If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you” (John 15:7).
The early Christians believed all these things to be true about
Jesus’ words. Thus they had every reason to pass on the sayings of Jesus accurately. The same would go for accounts of
his actions, by the way.
Moreover, the forms in which the sayings and deeds of Jesus
were transmitted contributed to the precision of the transmission. One of the reasons the Telephone game works is that
the sentence being passed around the circle is usually odd and
hard to repeat verbatim. If the originator of the process were
to write a short poem, with obvious meter and rhyme, and if
that poem made sense, then odds are much higher that it would
be passed around correctly.
Many of the sayings of Jesus facilitate memorization. Some
involve striking images that you won’t soon forget: “It is easier
for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God” (Mark 10:25).
Others use few words to make the point: “You cannot serve
God and wealth” (Matt. 6:24). Still others use parallelism of
some kind (for example, the house built on the sand versus the
house built on the rock, Matt. 7:24–27). Of course many of
Jesus’ key teachings come in the form of parables, short stories
that leave a strong impression on the mind.
In the last century, New Testament scholars studied the oral
forms in which the traditions about Jesus were passed along
before they were written down. Many of the first “form critics,” like Rudolf Bultmann, combined form criticism with a
high degree of skepticism about the historicity of the Gospels—
unnecessarily, I might add. In fact, the formal nature of oral
tradition contributes to memorization and faithful transmission. If, for example, you’re trying to learn the Beatitudes in
Matthew 5, think of how much it helps that each line has the
form: “Blessed are (they) . . . for theirs (they) . . .”
The oral forms of the Jesus tradition also ensured the truthful
passing down of stories about him. Consider the example of
the miracle stories in the Gospels. They almost always include
the following elements: a statement of the problem; the brief
description of the miracle; a statement of the response. This
makes logical sense, of course, but it also conditions the mind
to remember and relate miracle stories faithfully. It’s rather
like how jokes can take on a familiar form, thus helping us
to remember them: “A priest, a minister, and a rabbi . . .” or
“Knock, knock . . .”
The Community of the Oral Tradition about Jesus
My favorite high school teacher was Mr. Bottaro. He was
my English teacher in tenth grade, and I was blessed to have
him in twelfth grade as well. Mr. Bottaro was energetic, incisive, and passionate. I can still remember his ardent reading of
Dylan Thomas’s poem, “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good
Night,” as he tried to get fifteen-year-old kids to think about
their mortality. Mr. Bottaro was always talking about death
and how taking it seriously helped us to live to the fullest.
One day during the spring of my senior year, my fellow
students and I arrived in Mr. Bottaro’s class, but he wasn’t
there. When the bell rang, we were still without a teacher.
Then, about five minutes later, the school principal showed
up. He informed us that Mr. Bottaro had died in his sleep the
night before. We sat in stunned silence. Many students began
to weep. It was one of the saddest days of my life.
During the days that followed, we reminisced plenty about
Mr. Bottaro, in class, during the lunch hour, and after his memorial service. Apart from being a fine teacher, he was a character,
and an eminently quotable one at that. In the telling of stories
we shared our common grief over our loss and our common
joy over having had such a wonderful teacher.
In those days of storytelling, the community of Mr. Bottaro’s students reinforced our corporate memory. By agreeing
together about what our teacher had done and said, we celebrated his life and we fixed certain events and sayings in our
minds. If, during that time, somebody had told a story about
Mr. Bottaro that contradicted our common memory—if, for
example, someone had accused him of playing favorites or of
disliking “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” then
we would have surely set that person right. Our community
ensured the basic truthfulness of oral traditions about our
beloved teacher.
And so it was with the community of Jesus in the first years
after his death. Not only were there recognized leaders, those
who had walked with Jesus and been inundated with his teachings, but also the whole community acted together to provide
a place for the telling of stories about Jesus and for weighing
those stories by community memory.
Sometimes you’ll hear skeptics talk about the oral period
before the writing of the Gospels as if it were a free-for-all, a
time when anybody could be inspired by the Spirit to put all
sorts of words into Jesus’ mouth. But there is little evidence
that this sort of thing actually happened, and plenty of evidence
that it did not happen. After all, the early Christians believed
Jesus was uniquely special as a teacher, and they believed his
words were both authoritative and life-giving. Thus they had
strong motivation to remember and accurately pass on what
he had said, even when it was translated from Aramaic into
Greek. The early Christian community helped to make sure
this happened effectively. Here’s what Birger Gerhardsson
concludes about the purported creativity of the oral tradition
about Jesus:
My contention is thus that we have every reason to proceed on
the assumption that Jesus’ closest disciples had an authoritative position in early Christianity as witnesses and bearers of
the traditions of what Jesus had said and done. There is no
reason to suppose that any believer in the early church could
create traditions about Jesus and expect that his word would
be accepted.3
Gerhardsson’s observation is confirmed by the fact that so
much in the oral tradition about Jesus does not reflect the
needs of the early church. At some points it even appears to
contradict those needs. If Christians were making up sayings of
Jesus willy-nilly, and if these were being accepted uncritically by
the church, then we should expect to have much more helpful
instruction from Jesus concerning such contentious issues as
Jewish-Christian relationships, the Sabbath, women in ministry,
apostolic authority, and even his own messiahship. But this is
not what we have in the Gospels. In fact, the community of
Jesus’ followers carefully conserved what he had said, making
sure the process of oral tradition was faithful to what Jesus
really said and didn’t say.
The Process of the Oral Tradition about Jesus
The Telephone game assumes that the communication of
the key sentence will be done secretly, with players whispering
to each other.
Think of what would happen in Telephone if somebody
changed the rules. Rather than whispering the sentence, the first
player says it out loud to the person next in line. This person
says the same sentence out loud to the next person, and so forth
and so on. This would be a boring game, to say the least, because
all players would hear what was being passed around.
That’s more or less what happened in the early Christian
community when it came to passing down the teaching of Jesus.
It was not done secretly, but openly. Remember that Luke got his information from eyewitnesses who were also “servants of
the word” (Luke 1:2). They were teaching about Jesus in the
public square and in the church. Their stories about Jesus and
their accounts of his sayings were part of the public record, if
you will, or at least the public church record.
When you think of how little material actually appears in the
Gospels compared with all that Jesus would have done and said,
it’s obvious that the “servants of the word” tended to repeat
themselves a lot. The same stories about Jesus were told and
retold. Given the variation we see in the Gospels, these stories
and sayings weren’t delivered in exactly the same words every
time. This would be especially true when the original Aramaic
of Jesus was translated into Greek. Nevertheless, the members
of the earliest churches would have heard the same stories and
sayings again and again in much the same way they were first
told by the eyewitnesses.
Repetition facilitates memory, even precise memory. I can
say the Lord’s Prayer, the 23rd Psalm, the Pledge of Allegiance,
and even my VISA card number because I have repeated them
so often. I can sing more than a hundred hymns and songs,
not because I’m so musical but because I’m in four worship
services every weekend and I rarely miss church! The early
Christians came to know a core of Jesus’ sayings and stories
about him because they heard them and repeated them so
frequently.
Curiously enough, there was one tradition in early Christianity
that prized itself on having secret teachings from Jesus, ones
that were not widely known among most Christians. This
was a core feature of Christian Gnosticism. When orthodox Christians objected that Gnostic theology didn’t come
from Jesus, the Gnostics claimed that the divine Christ had
revealed secret information to a few select disciples. They
were the only ones privy to the secret, and they passed it on
only to the few elites who could receive the revelation. But
this essential element of Gnostic tradition, its secrecy, counts
strongly against the possibility that it truly represents the
teachings of Jesus.
Closing Thoughts
When my daughter, Kara, was four years old, I decided to
teach her the Lord’s Prayer. Did I simplify the language so she
might understand it? Of course not. I wanted my daughter to
learn the “real words” of the Lord’s Prayer. So I taught Kara
the old-fashioned words that my parents had once taught me
(except I used my Presbyterian “debts” instead of their Methodist “trespasses”).
Kara didn’t understand what many of the words meant.
Fancy that! But she tried her best to imitate my sounds. Some
of her efforts were delightful. When I said, “Our Father who
art in heaven, hallowed be thy name,” she said, “Our Father who art in heaven, Hollywood be my name.” Or when I
prayed, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors,” she
said, “Forgive us our dents, as we forgive our dentist.” How
logical! Yet because I cared that Kara learn the real words, I
gently corrected her and helped her get both the sounds and
the meaning right. Today, my eleven-year-old daughter says
the Lord’s Prayer flawlessly. I expect that someday she’ll pass
it on to her children.
Similarly, the early Christians, and especially the teachers,
made sure that the words of Jesus were carefully though not
slavishly preserved. They had their transitions from “trespasses”
to “debts,” or from the Aramaic abba to the Greek pater. But
the community made sure that innovations like “Hollywood
be my name” never made it into the authoritative tradition!
Rather, they remembered what Jesus said and made sure this
was passed down accurately.
The idea of early Christians memorizing substantial traditions about Jesus may seem unrealistic, even given what I’ve
said about the context, people, content, community, and process of the oral tradition about Jesus. But consider the following contemporary analogy.
All Muslims are expected to memorize portions of the
Qur’an. But many go on to memorize the entire book, which
contains more than 80,000 Arabic words. The one who does this is called a Hafiz and is highly regarded among other Muslims. Muslims claim that millions of the faithful have achieved
this status, even today.
What enables a Muslim to memorize the entire Qur’an?
Context helps, in that even though most Muslims can read,
their religious life is inundated by the recitation of the Qur’an.
This repetition is reinforced by the poetic nature of the Qur’an
itself, and by the way it is chanted. Of course the respect given
to the Hafiz encourages Muslims who are trying to memorize the whole book. But the greatest motivation of all for a
pious Muslim is the belief that the Qur’an contains Allah’s
own words. To memorize the Qur’an is to internalize the very
words of God.
In a similar vein, the early followers of Jesus had both the
ability and the motivation to pass on oral tradition with accuracy. The combination of context, people, content, community,
and process helped them to faithfully recount what Jesus did
and said. A study of the Gospels shows that the early Christians
did this very thing with considerable success. Thus the firstcentury dating of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, combined
with their use of earlier oral traditions, combined with early
Christian faithfulness in passing on these oral traditions, add
up to a convincing rationale for trusting the Gospels. What we
find in these books accurately represents what Jesus himself
actually did and said. We may not have the original Aramaic
words of Jesus, except in a few cases, and we may not have the
first Aramaic stories about him, but we have Greek translations
that faithfully reproduce Jesus’ actual words and deeds.
CHAPTER 7. What Are the New
Testament Gospels?
What are the New Testament Gospels? Are
they histories? Biographies? Novels? Or . . . ? To which genre
should they be assigned? And why does this matter when we’re
considering the trustworthiness of the Gospels?
To answer the last question first, if we know the genre of
the Gospels, this will help us interpret them appropriately. If
it turns out, for example, that the Gospels are short novels,
then we ought not to fret too much about their historicity. If
they are biographies or histories, however, then we would be
wise to evaluate them as to whether they are valid sources of
information about their main character, Jesus of Nazareth.
One of the greatest problems when it comes to the genre of
the Gospels is the natural tendency to compare them to contemporary examples. This problem manifests itself in a variety
of ways. For example, if we think of the Gospels in terms of
modern biographies, then they are woefully inadequate. They
lack much of what we have come to expect in a biography: background on the person’s family; insight into contemporary
social events; stories of the person’s childhood; and so forth and
so on. Plus, the Gospels are way too short. So, if we’re thinking in modern terms, then the Gospels are not biographies, or
else they’re poor ones.1
And yet they are biographical in a sense. They focus on one
person. They narrate events from his life. They include some of
his sayings. They have much to say, relatively speaking, about
his death. We expect such things from biographies.
We’re in a similar quandary if we think of the Gospels in
terms of modern historical writing. They are far too short to
be displayed in the “History” section of your local bookstore.
This is true in comparison not only to recent historiography
but also to classics of ancient history. The Gospels are not
nearly as long as the histories of Herodotus and Thucydides,
or the first-century Jewish historian Josephus. So it would seem
strange to label the Gospels as histories.
And yet they seem to be historical in a sense. They purport
to relate what happened in a certain period of time. They connect those events to important personages, like King Herod or
Pontius Pilate. Luke, in particular, looks rather like some sort
of history. I have previously mentioned how much the prologue
to the third Gospel resembles the sort of thing we would find
in the history writing of Luke’s day. Moreover, the third Gospel
is the first part of a longer work that includes Acts. Luke/Acts
has the kind of breadth we associate with a work of history.
The Gospels as Hellenistic Biographies
Not long ago it was common for New Testament scholars
to give up trying to fit the Gospels into existing genres, such as
biography or history. The Gospels are unique, it was claimed.
No other kind of literature narrates a small number of stories and sayings of a particular individual and then spends a disproportionate amount of space describing his death. What is the
genre of the Gospels? They are Gospels, plain and simple.
This was the party line when I began my academic studies
in New Testament. The Gospels were said to be like ancient
biographies, histories, romances, and “aretologies” (accounts
of a famous person’s great deeds). But, given their peculiar
form and their focus on the death of Jesus, the Gospels were
said to be a unique genre. There is still a measure of truth in
this perspective, because the biblical Gospels are unique in
some ways. And, I might add, they are quite different in form
from the noncanonical so-called Gospels, few of which relate
stories of Jesus’ life or focus on his death. Nevertheless, recent
scholarship on the New Testament Gospels has tended to recognize how much they are a kind of biography, not modern
biography so much as Hellenistic biography.2
By and large, Greco-Roman biographies were not the mammoth tomes we find in our bookstores today but shorter and
more focused works. It was common for a biography to skip
over major parts of a character’s life, limiting discussion to
key events or speeches. These deeds and words were chosen
and organized, not out of antiquarian curiosity but rather to
make a moral statement for the readers. The subject of the
biography exemplified certain virtues. Emphasizing these encouraged readers to emulate the virtuous life of the biographical subject.
When seen in this light, the New Testament Gospels fit quite
nicely within the genre of Hellenistic biography. The Gospels
are distinctive in some ways, including their theological emphases and their focus on the death of Jesus, but they fit the
general category of Hellenistic biography.
Luke is unique among the Gospels in having a companion
volume that narrates the events of the early church. If one thinks of Luke/Acts together, biography isn’t the most appropriate
genre, although Acts focuses mainly on the activities of Peter
and Paul and thus has biographical touches. It would be better to see Luke/Acts as fitting within the genre of Hellenistic
history. In fact, it also bears resemblance to the Old Testament
histories (1 and 2 Samuel, etc.), which focus primarily on major
individuals as they unfold the story of God’s saving work in
the world.
Hellenistic biography and history share in common an ordered narrative of the past. Yet these were not academic treatises. Writings in these genres sought primarily to derive moral
lessons from the people and events of the past. They were
written to teach, to exhort, and to improve their readers.
The Literary Freedom of the Hellenistic Biographer
or Historian
Those who do not believe that the New Testament Gospels
provide reliable historical information about Jesus often point
to variations in the wording of sayings as they appear in different Gospels, to differences in the order of events between the
Gospels, or other characteristics that seem inconsistent with
the genres of biography and history. For example, when Jesus
is baptized by John in the Jordan River, a voice from heaven
speaks, but the words differ slightly between Matthew and
Mark (Luke agrees with Mark):
And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, the Beloved,
with whom I am well pleased” (Matt. 3:17).
And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved;
with you I am well pleased” (Mark 1:11).
This sort of difference delights detractors of the Gospels and
perplexes the faithful. It would be pretty hard to argue that
the voice from heaven said the same sentence twice in slightly
different ways (though I expect this argument has been made somewhere). No, it seems more likely that Matthew and Mark
used slightly different words for the same vocal event. If Matthew was using Mark, as is likely, then he made a few changes.
How could he do this if he is writing biography or history? Do
the differences between Matthew and Mark prove that one of
the Gospels is wrong? Does this mean that either Matthew or
Mark was a sloppy historian?
If we evaluate the evangelists in light of contemporary history
writing, then we would have to say that one of them doesn’t
measure up. We expect historians and biographers to quote
their sources with precision. For example, my friend Ronald
C. White, Jr., wrote a highly acclaimed study of Abraham
Lincoln’s second Inaugural, Lincoln’s Greatest Speech.
3
If Ron
had misquoted Lincoln’s words, or paraphrased them and
put them in quotation marks, he would have been blasted by
critics. In fact, his book would never have been published in
such a form.
Yet in the ancient world, before there were transcripts, tape
recordings, and podcasts, biographers and historians exercised
greater freedom in paraphrasing or slightly altering spoken
words for stylistic reasons. A good historian, if he knew that
a character had made a speech at a certain time, would get
available information about that speech and then write the
speech with his own words as if these words had been uttered
by the character. Nowadays, a historian who did this would
be considered sloppy at best, or even dishonest. (Remember
the case of Jayson Blair, not a historian, but a reporter for
the New York Times. He disgraced the Times and himself by,
among other things, making up quotes that his sources could
have said but didn’t in fact say.)
So, assuming for a moment that Matthew used Mark as a
source, if we evaluate Matthew according to today’s standards,
then we would say he’s not completely reliable, even though
he mostly agrees with Mark. Yet this sort of anachronistic approach is unhelpful, not to mention unfair to Matthew. For
reasons of style or story, Matthew was doing what historians
and biographers in his day were expected to do. Nobody would
have accused him of falsehood back then. Nor should we.
The proof of this is obvious and, I think, incontrovertible.
Both Matthew and Mark were accepted as authoritative in
the early church, even though the sayings of Jesus are usually
worded differently in Matthew and Mark. The events of the
Gospels don’t always come in exactly the same order, either.
The early Christians didn’t see these variations as a problem
because that’s what they were accustomed to in their biographical and historical writings.
It sometimes comes as a shock when Christians discover
that the Gospels don’t present the sayings of Jesus in exactly
the same way, or don’t give the same details when telling what
must obviously be the same story. Skeptics love this sort of
thing and use it to diminish confidence in the Gospels. But both
scandalized Christians and zealous skeptics must learn to see
the Gospels in the context of their own time and history.
Moreover, we must remember that the Gospels give us what
is technically called the ipsissima vox (“his own voice”) of Jesus
rather than the ipsissima verba (“his own words”). Since it’s
highly unlikely that Jesus did much teaching in Greek, the autographs of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John did not preserve
his original words (except in a few cases). They do, however,
authentically capture his voice.
“All Truth Is God’s Truth”
When I was a freshman in college and was struggling with
my first New Testament class, I wondered if faith and reason
simply didn’t fit together. I feared that if I wanted to be a confident Christian, I would have to avoid thinking carefully and
critically about my faith, especially the Bible. Discovering the
variations among the Gospels unsettled my confidence in their
reliability. I couldn’t deny the facts of these differences among the Gospels; but I couldn’t figure out how to reconcile them
with what I had previously believed about their trustworthiness. For this reason, and others like it, I entered an extended
season of doubting the veracity of the Gospels. I described this
in more detail in chapter 1.
In the midst of my intellectual turmoil, John R. W. Stott visited the Harvard campus. A highly respected Christian thinker
and expert in the New Testament, Dr. Stott attended an informal dessert gathering hosted by a friend of mine. Here was
my chance to talk with someone who might understand my
dilemma, I thought. Maybe I can get some help from him.
When another student finished a conversation, I seized my
chance. “Dr. Stott,” I said, “I’m taking a New Testament class.
Much of what I’m being taught contradicts what I believe about
the Bible. I’m beginning to wonder if it’s unwise to study Scripture in an academic way. I’d like to take more classes in New
Testament, yet I’m afraid that what I learn will undermine my
faith. What should I do?”
“I can understand your conflict and your fear,” Dr. Stott
began, “because I’ve felt them myself. Many of the popular
theories in New Testament scholarship do challenge orthodox
Christianity.”
“But,” he continued, “you don’t have to be afraid. Let me
tell you something that will give you confidence as you study:
All truth is God’s truth. There isn’t anything true about the
Bible that God doesn’t already know. You don’t have to fear
that if you dig too deeply you’ll undermine genuine Christian
faith. You may indeed discover that some of your beliefs aren’t
correct. In fact, I hope you do make this discovery, many times
over. That’s what happens when you live under biblical authority. But you never have to be afraid of seeking the genuine truth
because all truth is God’s truth.”
This was a watershed moment in my life. On the one hand,
it pointed me in the direction of biblical scholarship, a path I
have followed for the last thirty years and which has enabled
me to write this book. On the other hand, though Dr. Stott
didn’t have time to deal with my specific struggles, the fact that he knew what I was going through and had managed to
maintain a solid faith in biblical authority encouraged me to
keep on seeking the truth about the Bible.
I expect that some readers of my book will be unsettled by
part of what I’m saying about the Gospels. So far I’ve questioned whether or not John wrote the fourth Gospel and I’ve
noted that Matthew and Mark use slightly different words for
God’s proclamation when Jesus was baptized. This may be unsettling for some folks, maybe even for you. My encouragement
is to keep on pressing for what is true. Don’t take my word for
it. Don’t settle for believing things about the Gospels that are
not true. And don’t fear that some undiscovered truth out there
will overturn your trust in the Gospels. John Stott was right:
“There isn’t anything true about the Bible that God doesn’t
already know.” Indeed, “all truth is God’s truth.”
Before I leave this story, I want to make another point. I
have told you about my encounter with Dr. Stott to the very
best of my memory. I’m quite sure that I have the main facts
correct. It was Dr. Stott with whom I spoke, not C. S. Lewis.
The conversation did happen during the spring semester of
my freshman year. And Dr. Stott did encourage me to keep
on looking for truth. I’m almost positive he said, “All truth
is God’s truth.” (I found out later that Dr. Stott was quoting
from the Christian theologian St. Augustine.) But I don’t have
a tape recording of that conversation. And I didn’t rush back
to my dorm to write down exactly what Dr. Stott had said. In
telling this story, I have made up words and put them in Dr.
Stott’s mouth. Though I’m confident I have his ipsissima vox,
I don’t have his ipsissima verba, except for “All truth is God’s
truth.” Moreover, I’ve told this story before in print—in my
book Dare to Be True—using slightly different words.4
Therefore, what I’ve done in telling this story is similar in many ways
to what Hellenistic historians and biographers—including the
evangelists—used to do.
Does my admission surprise you? I doubt it. Though you
may not have considered this as you read, I expect you sensed
that I was telling the story from memory, using my own words,
even as I “quoted” Dr. Stott. You knew from the kind of narrative I was offering that I was not using a tape or transcript.
Moreover, now that you have my confession, do you doubt
the truthfulness of my story? I doubt this too. You probably
believe that, though I may not have gotten every jot and tittle
absolutely right, I have related my conversation with Dr. Stott
in a trustworthy manner. (At least I hope you believe this! And
if you don’t believe that I’m usually a truthful person, you
probably shouldn’t bother reading this book!)
Is it possible to trust a biographical or historical writing
that offers the ipsissima vox rather than the ipsissima verba?
I believe it is. Of course this depends on your evaluation of
the overall trustworthiness of the writer and the sources at his
or her disposal. I’ve already talked about the sources used by
the evangelists and how they contribute to the historicity of
the Gospels. I’ll have much more to say about their general
trustworthiness in the rest of this book.
The Genre of the Gospels and Their Reliability
I know I’ve covered a lot of ground in a short time, but let
me wrap up this chapter with a few conclusions.
1. The Gospels are best understood as Hellenistic biographies with several characteristics that reflect the uniqueness of
their subject matter and purpose. Luke straddles the fence of
biography and history.
2. The Gospel writers functioned in the mode of the biography and history writers of their day. This means they were
permitted greater freedom in certain matters than would be
granted to modern biographers and historians. Paraphrasing
or rephrasing statements and speeches was acceptable, as was
arranging events in thematic rather than chronological order.
3. When we evaluate the New Testament Gospels in their
own literary and cultural context, we can understand how
reliable they are and the ways in which they are reliable. For
example, the Gospels can faithfully represent the ipsissima vox
of Jesus without reproducing his ipsissima verba. Minor variations of wording or a different ordering of events do not mean
that we should discount the reliability of the Gospels as sources
of genuine knowledge of Jesus. They do mean that we must
closely examine the intent and process of the Gospel writers,
however, in order not to misconstrue their purposes.
4. Naysayers who deride the reliability of the Gospels because of such things as verbal inconsistencies between the Gospels are making an error of anachronism. Their negativity is
almost as silly as criticizing the Gospels for failing to include
digital photographs of Jesus.
My mentioning the inconsistencies between the Gospels
raises the question of how the existence of four biblical Gospels
impacts our evaluation of their reliability. To this topic we’ll
turn in the next chapter.
CHAPTER 8. What Difference Does
It Make That There
Are Four Gospels?
Around 178 A.D. a Syrian Christian named Tatian
produced a comprehensive harmony of Matthew, Mark, Luke,
and John called the Diatessaron. It included almost all of the
four Gospels, with strands carefully woven together into a
seamless narrative of the ministry of Jesus. The Greek word
diatessaron means “through four.” Tatian had created one
Gospel harmony “through four” originals. In his work of harmonization, he “cleaned up” the narrative that had been given
to him in the New Testament Gospels, harmonizing apparent
discrepancies, eliminating redundancies, and so forth.
For many years Tatian’s harmony was the standard version
of the story of Jesus in parts of the Roman empire, especially in
Syria. But even there the Diatessaron was eventually replaced by the canonical four Gospels, which elsewhere in the early
church had always been authoritative in their separate versions.
The church preferred the four distinct voices of Matthew, Mark,
Luke, and John, even if this distinctiveness sometimes seemed
discordant. Though you would think the church might have
liked the neatness and simplicity of a single, sanitized story of
Jesus, in fact it hung on to the original stories in all of their
peculiar richness and messiness.
So, today, we have four separate Gospels in the New Testament rather than one harmonized account of Jesus. What
difference does this make in the discussion of the reliability of
these Gospels?
The Benefit of Multiple Witnesses
On the most obvious level, the fact that we have four early
witnesses to the ministry of Jesus increases our confidence that
we can know what Jesus actually did and said. This is a matter
of common sense.
Several years ago I served on a jury in a criminal case. The
defendant was accused of possessing controlled substances (illegal drugs, including cocaine). Not surprisingly, he claimed that
he was innocent, that the drugs found in his car were not his,
and that he had no idea how they got there. But the prosecution presented several witnesses to contradict this man’s story.
One of the police officers who arrested him explained how he
saw the defendant scurry to hide the drugs when pulled over
for a traffic violation. Others bore witness to his having full
awareness of the drugs in his possession.
When it came time for the jury to deliberate, we reviewed
the evidence that had been presented to us. The fact that multiple witnesses testified to the defendant’s guilt was persuasive.
Without too much effort, we found him guilty as charged.
If we want to know something about Jesus, we’re better off
with four Gospels than if we had only one. And we’re better off having the distinct perspectives of the evangelists rather than
one blended Diatessaron, even if this gets untidy sometimes.
Our situation in trying to find out about Jesus from multiple
sources is similar to that of scholars trying to discover something
about the real Socrates. The famous fifth-century Greek philosopher didn’t write anything down, or at least none of his writings have survived. Almost everything we know about Socrates
comes from three writers: Plato, Xenophon, and Aristophanes.
The first two were disciples of Socrates who, after the death of
their master, wrote dialogues in which Socrates played a major
role. Aristophanes was a comic playwright who, in his drama
The Clouds, made Socrates out to be a buffoon. Most scholars
consider Plato and Xenophon to be more reliable sources than
Aristophanes for information about the historical Socrates,
though their tendency to idolize their master may be balanced
by Aristophanes’ more critical albeit exaggerated picture. Nevertheless, the existence of three perspectives on the life of Socrates
allows scholars to determine with greater confidence what he
was really like and what he really taught.
In the case of Jesus, we have four different portraits, a situation that puts us in a better position than those who are seeking the real Socrates. Yet we do not have a contrary picture,
like that of Aristophanes. To our knowledge, no writer in the
first century wrote a satire of Jesus. We have to wait until the
second century for open criticism of Jesus. The most famous
of these critics was Celsus, who said of Jesus that he “invented
his birth from a virgin.” Celsus accused Jesus of being
born in a certain Jewish village, of a poor woman of the country,
who gained her subsistence by spinning, and who was turned
out of doors by her husband, a carpenter by trade, because she
was convicted of adultery; that after being driven away by her
husband, and wandering about for a time, she disgracefully gave
birth to Jesus, an illegitimate child, who having hired himself
out as a servant in Egypt on account of his poverty, and having
there acquired some miraculous powers, on which the Egyptians
greatly pride themselves, returned to his own country, highly elated on account of them, and by means of these proclaimed
himself a God.1
Note: it would be unwise to consider Celsus a reliable, independent witness to Jesus. In chapter 12 I’ll examine in much greater
detail the evidence for Jesus outside of the New Testament
Gospels.
Similarities and Differences among the Four Gospels
In my first New Testament class in college, I learned about
a relatively new scholarly discipline called redaction criticism
(from the German term Redaktionsgeschichte, meaning “the
history of editing” of the Gospels). Redaction critics, assuming
that Matthew and Luke used Mark and Q as sources, studied the editorial changes made by Matthew and Luke. These
changes revealed the distinctive theologies of their Gospels. I say
“distinctive.” What I heard in class, however, was “distinctive
and contradictory.” In that religion class, and throughout my
graduate studies in New Testament, it was popular to emphasize
the unique perspectives of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John,
and to minimize what they had in common, or even to deny
that they had much in common at all. I heard plenty about the
“contradictions” between the Gospels as my professors engaged
in redaction criticism.
Some conservative scholars reacted negatively to redaction
criticism, even suggesting that the discipline itself was inconsistent with biblical authority. But most evangelical scholars have
come to see both the good and the bad in redaction criticism.
The good has been identifying the distinctive efforts of the
Gospel writers, who didn’t merely collect material and paste
it together, but who carefully wove that material into a coherent and creative narrative. Redaction criticism has raised the respect given to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as creative,
careful writers, and not mere collectors of traditions.
The bad part of redaction criticism has been the tendency
of many who use this methodology to exaggerate the differences among the Gospels. Nobody doubts that there are
such differences and that they are significant. But sometimes
in focusing so much on the different trees one loses sight of
the common forest. Think for a moment. If you were to sit
down and read Mark, and then Matthew, do you think you
would come away thinking, Now there are two unique, virtually incompatible pictures of Jesus? Hardly! In fact, I think
you would be more inclined to say, after reading Matthew,
Well, he adds some more fascinating material (like the visit
of the Magi or the Sermon on the Mount) but that’s mostly
the same story as I found in Mark. It was rather redundant
in parts, actually.
Now I freely grant that there are significant differences
among the four biblical Gospels on a number of key topics.
For example, Matthew alone tells the story of the Magi’s visit
to the child Jesus, while Luke alone has shepherds abiding
in the fields keeping watch over their flock by night. John is
the most different of all, narrating the ministry of Jesus with
a chronology that is more complex than what we find in the
Synoptics, and adding extended discourses that are distinctive
in both form and content.
Features Common to All Four Gospels
I’ll have more to say about the differences among the Gospels
later in this book. For now I want to focus on something that
is often overlooked by scholars but is generally acknowledged
by careful readers who have lots of common sense: the striking similarities between the pictures of Jesus found in the New
Testament Gospels.
Here is a list of some of the details about Jesus’ life and ministry that are found in all four Gospels—yes, including John:
• Jesus was a Jewish man.
• Jesus ministered during the time when Pontius Pilate was
prefect of Judea (around 27 to 37 a.d.).
• Jesus had a close connection with John the Baptist, and
his ministry superseded that of John.
• John the Baptist was involved with the descent of the
Spirit on Jesus.
• Jesus’ ministry took place in Galilee, especially his early
ministry.
• Jesus’ ministry concluded in Jerusalem.
• Jesus gathered disciples around him. (This is important:
Jewish teachers in the time of Jesus didn’t recruit their
own students; rather, the students came to them.)
• The brothers Andrew and Simon (Peter) were among
Jesus’ first disciples.
• The followers of Jesus referred to him as “rabbi.”
• Jesus taught women, and they were included among the
larger group of his followers. (This, by the way, sets Jesus
apart from other Jewish teachers of his day.)
• Jesus taught in Jewish synagogues.
• Jesus was popular with the masses.
• At times, however, Jesus left the crowds to be alone.
• Jesus proclaimed the “kingdom of God” (in Matthew,
more commonly the “kingdom of heaven”).
• Jesus called people to believe in God and in God’s saving
activity.
• The ministry of Jesus involved conflict with supernatural
evil powers, including Satan and demons.
• Jesus used the cryptic title “Son of Man” in reference to
himself and in order to explain his mission. (Jesus’ fondness for and use of this title was very unusual in his day,
and was not picked up by the early church.)
• Jesus saw his mission as the Son of Man as leading to his
death. (The dying of the Son of Man was unprecedented in Judaism. Even among Jesus’ followers it was both unexpected and unwelcome.)
• Jesus, though apparently understanding himself to be Israel’s promised Messiah, was curiously circumspect about
this identification. (This is striking, given the early and
widespread confession of Christians that Jesus was the
Messiah.)
• Jesus did various sorts of miracles, including healings and
“nature miracles.”
• At least one of Jesus’ miracles involved the multiplication of food so that thousands could eat when they were
hungry.
• Jesus even raised the dead.
• The miracles of Jesus were understood as signs of God’s
power that pointed to truth beyond the miracle itself.
• Jesus was misunderstood by almost everybody, including
his own disciples.
• Jewish opponents of Jesus accused him of being empowered by supernatural evil.
• Jesus experienced conflict with many Jewish leaders, especially the Pharisees and ultimately the temple-centered
leadership in Jerusalem.
• Jesus spoke and acted in ways that undermined the temple
in Jerusalem.
• Jesus spoke and acted in ways that implied he had a unique
connection with God.
• Jesus referred to God as Father, thus claiming unusual
intimacy with God.
• Jesus was crucified in Jerusalem, at the time of Passover,
under the authority of Pontius Pilate, and with the cooperation of some Jewish leaders in Jerusalem. (There are
quite a few more details concerning the death of Jesus
that are shared by all four Gospels.)
• Most of Jesus’ followers either abandoned him or denied
him during his crucifixion.
• Jesus was raised from the dead on the first day of the
week.
• Women were the first witnesses to the evidence of Jesus’
resurrection. (This is especially significant, since the testimony of women was not highly regarded in first-century
Jewish culture. Nobody would have made up stories with
women as witnesses if they wanted those stories to gain
ready acceptance.)
This is certainly an impressive list of similarities shared by
all four Gospels. It’s especially significant because I’ve included
the Gospel of John here, even though it is the most different
among the biblical Gospels. It shows that John shares with
the Synoptics the same basic narrative. Thus the four biblical
testimonies about Jesus are impressively similar at the core.
Because Matthew and Luke used Mark, their witnesses aren’t
independent, but they do corroborate Mark’s account. Thus
the fact that there are four Gospels contributes significantly
to our confidence in their historical accuracy.
But what about the differences among the Gospels? How
do they impact our evaluation of the trustworthiness of these
writings? Are there contradictions in the Gospels? We’ll turn
to these questions in the next chapte
