Mark D. Roberts. Can We Trust the Gospels?

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

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those 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