Thursday, August 14, 2014

Book Review of The Case For Christ by Lee Strobel Part 11: My explanation of the Problems With the Gospel of Luke



See Part 1 General Comments

            I’ll make my points on Luke in the following order
I. Lee Strobel’s Confusion over the Church Tradition He is Trying to Defend.
II. The Debate over Whether or Not the Apostle Luke wrote the Gospel of Luke and Acts
III. Luke’s Record for Accuracy
IV. Luke’s Record as a Historian
V. How Careful is Luke with his Sources?

First:
I. Lee Strobel’s Confusion over the Church Tradition He is Trying to Defend.
            As already noted in part 4, even according to the Church tradition he is trying to defend, Lee Strobel shouldn’t be claiming that all of the Gospels are based on eyewitness material.  Luke is, according to its own introduction, at best a 3rd hand source.
            Lee Strobel will remember this occasionally, and forget this occasionally.  Occasionally he will make reference to Luke’s work as a “historian” or “journalist”, but far too often he and his apologist buddies will just slip into claiming that all the Gospels are eyewitness materials.
            Even when Lee Strobel remembers that Luke is not an eyewitness, he still manages to get his facts muddled.  Take for example his quote from page 20, which he uses to set up his chapter “proving” the eyewitness evidence:
            But what eyewitness accounts do we possess?  Do we have the testimony of anyone who personally interacted with Jesus, who listened to his teachings, who saw his miracles, who witnessed his death, and who perhaps even encountered him after his alleged resurrection?  Do we have any records from first century “journalists” who interviewed eyewitnesses, asked tough questions, and faithfully recorded what they scrupulously determined to be true?  Equally important, how well would these accounts withstand the scrutiny of skeptics? (p.20)

            Okay, now look again at that sentence: Do we have any records from first century “journalists” who interviewed eyewitnesses, asked tough questions, and faithfully recorded what they scrupulously determined to be true?
            Presumably the first-century “journalist” he’s talking about is Luke—Luke wasn’t actually a journalist by trade (even by Church tradition) but of the four Gospellers, he’s the only one who remotely fits this description, and it’s something Lee Strobel confirms later on page 25 by calling Luke “sort of a first century journalist.
             But look at all the things he implies in this question which are either flat out wrong, or blatantly unprovable: Luke didn’t interview eyewitnesses.  In his own preface, Luke states he was looking at written material that other people had collected from eyewitnesses (Luke 1:1-3).  And did Luke ask tough questions, and scrupulously record what he determined to be true?  Well, it’s impossible to say, because Luke didn’t leave us any insight into his methodology.  He could have been asking really tough questions, or he could have been asking soft questions.  We don’t know.  He could have been examining everything carefully, or he could have just believed any old rumor he heard.  We have no idea. 

            (Sometimes, you have to wonder if Lee Strobel is just incredibly stupid and doesn’t understand what he’s writing about, or if he’s too clever by half and knows exactly what he’s doing.  I mean, look at how he phrased that whole section as a series of questions instead of as statements.  Is this because he knew he couldn’t prove any of this, so he deliberately used questions so he could get away with implying what he couldn’t prove?)

            Throughout this whole section on the Gospels, Lee Strobel is just way too eager to assume the best case scenario for all 4 of the Gospels, but we really have no idea if the methodology was scrupulous or fallacious.  The Gospellers don’t quote their sources, and they don’t explain their methodology.  Your only reason for assuming that they “asked tough questions, and faithfully recorded what they scrupulously determined to be true” would be if you were already a believer, but based on the evidence of the documents alone you certainly couldn’t prove any of this to a skeptic.

II. The Debate over Whether or Not the Apostle Luke wrote the Gospel of Luke and Acts

            Since Lee Strobel is basing his case for Christ on the evidence of eyewitness testimony, for our purposes here it doesn’t matter so much if the Gospel of Luke was written by the apostle Luke using 3rd hand sources, or by an anonymous writer using 3rd hand sources.  Either way, Lee Strobel shouldn’t be claiming him as an eyewitness.

            ….But, just by the bye, we might mention in passing that there is some debate about whether the apostle Luke really wrote the Gospel attributed to him, before moving onto the more pressing subject of Luke’s accuracy

            The reasons for thinking Luke wrote the Gospel are because of church tradition (although we’ve already seen in part 7 all the problems with the church tradition), and because when describing some of the voyages of Paul in Acts, the author slips into using “we” when describing Paul’s voyages.  (Luke and Acts are by the same author)

            The reasons against thinking Luke is the author of the Gospel of Luke and Acts are that:
1)  The apostle Luke was a follower of Paul, but the Gospel of Luke contradicts Paul’s theology.  (See Jesus, Interrupted by Bart Ehrman for more on this.)
2). Paul’s own accounts of his travels in Galatians 1&2 contradict the account of his travels given in Acts.
3). There are lots of mistakes and problems with geographical references in Luke and Acts, which indicate that the author wasn’t actually personally on these voyages.

            So, if Luke didn’t write the Gospel of Luke and Acts, then how to explain the “we” passages in Acts.
            Scholars have several theories.  Some people say that this was a common literary style in the first century, especially when describing travel by sea.  Other people say it was a literary device to add immediacy to the text.  Other people say the author could have been inserting material from a different source into the text at this point.  (One of the oddities of the book of Acts is that the "we" passages jump in quite abruptly, with no explanation of who "we" is, or how "we" joined up with Paul, so it's been hypothesized that the author of Acts might have been borrowing from someone else's travel diary.)

            In Forged, Bart Ehrman argues that the “we” passages are a deliberate forgery designed to give the appearance that the author was close to Paul, and thus give more authority to the author’s text.  [I’ve included the full quotation in my review here].
            Was Acts a deliberate forgery?  Well…maybe.  It’s hard to say for certain, of course, but it has to be at least entertained as a possibility that the “we” passages are a deliberate falsehood.  It’s not inconceivable, of course.  Human beings have made falsehoods before.  (However, this is something that never crosses the minds of Lee Strobel and his apologists.  They continue to believe that everything written in the Bible must be true because it is written down.)

            On the other hand, Robin Lane Fox is an atheist, but believes that Luke and Acts were probably written by Luke.  Or at least, by a travelling companion of Paul.  Luke is never explicitly identified as the author of Acts, so those “we” passages could have been written by any travelling companion of Paul.  Assigning the authorship to Luke specifically appears to have been the result of a certain amount of guesswork by the early church.

            Indeed, if Christians cling too much to the “we” passages in Acts as proof of the apostle Luke’s authorship, it causes certain paradoxes.  If the presence of the first person narrative in Acts means proof of an eyewitness account, then what to make of the absence of any first person narratives in all four of the Gospels?  And what to make of the fact that in the book of Acts, the apostle Luke himself is mentioned only in the third person.  (The author slips into a “we” narrative, but never does he use “I” to identify the apostle Luke when Luke is mentioned in Acts.)

III. Luke’s Record for Accuracy
            In his book The Unauthorized Version, Robin Lane Fox defends the possibility that a travelling companion of Paul might have written Acts even though he got so many geographical references wrong because humans, after all, get things wrong some times.  Journalists and travelers, even eyewitnesses, often get the details muddled when they later write up their adventures.
            This may or may not be convincing, but it’s a fair enough argument.
            It is quite another matter, however, for Lee Strobel and his friends to argue that the author of Luke and Acts never make a single mistake ever. 
            It’s extremely significant that Luke has been established to be a scrupulously accurate historian, even in the smallest details.  One prominent archaeologist carefully examined Luke’s references to thirty-two countries, fifty-four cities, and nine islands, finding not a single mistake.  Here’s the bottom line: “If Luke was so painstakingly accurate in his historical reporting,” said one book on the topic, “on what logical basis may we assume he was credulous or inaccurate in his reporting of matters that were far more important, not only to him but to others as well?” (p. 98-99)
           
            Okay, I know what jumps out in that above quote is that fact that Lee Strobel is shamelessly trying to use Luke’s supposed accuracy on geographic references as a way to prove that his claims about the supernatural are also correct.  But put that aside for now.
            What’s important here is that Lee Strobel making all sorts of claims about Luke’s accuracy that he has no business making.  These type of statements are true only in fundamentalist Christian circles—this is NOT the scholarly consensus on Luke’s accuracy.

            Lee Strobel and his apologist buddies are full of praise for the author of Luke.  Lee Strobel calls him “a scrupulously accurate historian, even in the smallest details” (p.98) And “an especially careful historian” (p.209).  And indeed, in Church circles Luke enjoys a reputation for precision and accuracy.  I heard this several times in Sunday School growing up, and like anything you hear many times, you begin to accept it as truth without really bothering to investigate it for yourself.  Lee Strobel and his buddies know they are talking to a Christian audience, and so just repeat the myth about Luke’s accuracy, and feel confident that they don’t have to explain anything.

            In reality, however, there are several reasons to doubt Luke’s accuracy.  The accounts in the Gospel of Luke and Acts contradict not only secular history at several points, but they also contradict the other accounts in the Bible.

            There are several points where Luke appears to contradict established history.  For example, Luke records that at the time of the birth of Christ there was a census that took place across the whole Roman Empire.  We have no records of this census, and secular historians are convinced that if such a census had taken place, we would at least have some kind of record.  Also according to Luke, everyone had to return to their ancestral town to register for the census, but this was not the way censuses usually worked in the Roman Empire (then, as now, the governments were interested in where people were living now, not where their ancestors had come from.)  Plus Judea was at the time a client kingdom of Rome, so wouldn’t have been directly taxed by Rome anyway, so they wouldn’t have been included in the census.
             Luke also places Jesus as being born when Quirinius was governor of Syria, and when Herod was King of Judea, despite the fact that according to secular history Herod was long dead by the time Quirinius was appointed.
            The portrait of the bleeding-heart liberal Pontius Pilate produced in Luke and the other Gospels seems inconsistent with the harsh Pontius Pilate we know from history.  The death of Herod Antipas in Acts 12 contradicts the account we have in other historical sources.  And many more examples.
            Of course, Lee Strobel and his Christian buddies live in the Christian fundamentalist bubble, where every time there is a problem between secular history and the Bible, they assume the problem must be with secular history.  (Some of these problems are dealt with briefly in Lee Strobel’s book.  On the problem of the Census, he and his friends just assume the historical records must have gotten lost somewhere.)  So in their own little world, they can get away with making these type of statements, and it’s true for them.
            Okay, fair enough, I guess.  It’s a free country, and everyone can believe what they want to believe.  But once you step outside of the Christian bubble, looking at the whole thing from a secular perspective you can’t “prove” Luke’s accuracy by looking at how well he holds up against the historical record.  Instead you would have to prove Luke’s accuracy in spite of how well he holds up against the historical record.
           
            And then there are all the places even inside the Bible where Luke-Acts is contradicted.  Luke’s account of the birth of Christ contradicts the Gospel of Matthew.  Luke’s account of the appearance of the resurrected Christ contradicts Matthew’s account.  Luke’s accounts of Paul’s missions contradicts Paul himself.
            Christian fundamentalists have spent great energy into coming up with lengthy explanations to explain away all the apparent contradictions in the Bible, so although secular scholars count these as contradictions, Lee Strobel and his buddies can wriggle out of these as well if they want to.  (They don’t go into any details in the book.  Never once inside the book does Lee Strobel ever mention the contradictions between Luke and Matthew’s birth narratives, or between Galatians and Acts.  All of these are cans of worms best not opened for them.  But I have to assume that they relying on these convoluted explanations in order to get away with the kind of statements they are making about Luke’s accuracy.)

            Okay, once again, fair enough.  I can’t get them to admit that there are problems with Luke’s historical accuracy if they’re committed to finding convoluted ways to explain away all the contradictions they find.

            But there are two points to make.
            The first is that, once again, this type of logic doesn’t “prove” Christianity.  This type of logic is already starting from the assumption that Christianity is true, and then working backwards to try to explain away the difficulties.

            The second is that, even assuming you use this logic to keep from admitting there are errors in Luke-Acts, you would still have to admit that there are sins of omission.  And this brings us to our next point.  If Luke was such a great historian, how did he miss all this information that is in other parts of the Bible?

IV. Luke’s Record as a Historian
            On page 120 of this book, Lee Strobel and apologist Gregory Boyd are discussing the differences between Christianity and several other mystery cults that arose in the Roman Empire around the same time.  Their contention is (of course) that Christianity is qualitatively different from the mystery cults like that of Apollonius.  To prove it Gregory Boyd cites the difference in writing style between the biography of Apollonius, written by his follower Philostratus, and the Gospels.
            Also the way Philostratus writes is very different than the gospels.  The gospels have a very confident eyewitness perspective, as if they had a camera there.  But Philostratus includes a lot of tentative statements like, ‘It is reported that…’ or ‘Some say this young girl had died; others say she was just ill’.  To his credit, he backs off and treats stories like stories.

            Okay, Gregory Boyd and Lee Strobel are too dense to realize it, but this is precisely the problem with Luke.  He wasn’t present at any of the events he reported in his Gospel, and yet he speaks with the exact same style as the Gospels which Church tradition claims are eyewitnesses.
            The problem is that Luke, as a historian using 3rd hand sources, really should be making statements like, “It is reported that…” or “Some say this, other people say this.”

            Robin Lane Fox points out that ancient historians, even though they did freely mix truth and legend together in a way that would appall modern historians, would sometimes give two alternative accounts when they weren’t sure which one was true, and then perhaps say which one they thought was the more reliable and why.  (And by the way, having read some ancient history in my youth, I can attest to this as well.)  This is how historians write.

            Notice the complete absence of any of this in Luke.  He is not writing as a historian, he’s writing as a religious propagandist.  There is one account of what happened, and one account only.

            And what makes this all the more striking is that we know from the other Gospels that there were multiple accounts of what happened.  If Luke was such a thorough historian, how come he completely missed everything that Matthew had to say about the birth of Christ?  Either Luke didn’t do his research thoroughly, or Luke heard it but didn’t believe it, or the stories didn’t exist prior to Matthew’s Gospel because Matthew just made them up by himself.
            The same question could be asked of the conflicting accounts in Matthew and Luke of Jesus appearing to his disciples after the resurrection.  Even if you accepted the convoluted logic that fundamentalists have come up with to explain away all the contradictions, then you still have to ask the question: if Luke was such a thorough historian, how come he never came across any of the stories in Matthew?  (How did Luke ever miss, for example, the story reported in Matthew that all the saints rose out of their graves after the crucifixion of Christ?)

            And then, as we have already noted in part 10, all the problems between John and the Synoptic Gospels would also seem to cast further doubt on Luke’s accuracy as a historian.

V. How Careful is Luke With His Sources?
          As already mentioned in part 9, scholars have identified two of Luke’s sources: The Gospel of Mark, and the Q source.  So we know where at least some of his information is coming from.  As for information not found in the Mark and Q, we have no idea where Luke got it from.  Lee Strobel assumes it is all coming from reliable impeccable sources, but we really have no idea.  We also have no idea how careful Luke was with his other sources.  Again, Lee Strobel assumes that Luke was always carefully faithful to the records of eyewitnesses left behind, but we really have no idea how careful or faithful he was to any of his sources, except for the ones we can identify: Mark and Q.  And it’s worth noting, Luke takes quite a few liberties with his source material in the Gospel of Mark.

            Both Matthew and Luke are copying out of Mark, but it’s important to remember that they are not always slavishly copying from Mark.  They are taking material from Mark and altering it to suit their narrative purposes and they’re theological points of view.

            Both Matthew and Luke “soften” material in Mark that seems to portray Jesus and the disciples in an unsympathetic way, or leave out these passages completely.  Luke omits several passages from Mark which show Jesus exhibiting human emotions, acting in a violent way, or that might seem to portray Jesus as a magician.  For example, in the original Mark, the disciples don’t understand Jesus because they are stupid, but Luke alters this so that the reason the disciples don’t understand everything is because of divine concealment. 
In Jesus, Interrupted, Bart Ehrman notes that Mark and Luke seem to have conflicting theological interpretations of the meaning of the death of Christ.  Mark thinks Christ died as a payment for our sins, Luke thinks that Christ died as a symbol for us to repent.  Whenever Luke comes across any passages in Mark referring to Jesus's death as a payment for sins, he just deletes those passages.

            [I’m just skimming the surface here.  Whole books are written on all the changes that Luke makes to the original material in Mark’s gospel.  Jesus, Interrupted by Bart Ehrman  is a good source on this, but also see HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE and HERE.]

            If these are the liberties Luke took with the material we know about, we have to wonder how faithfully he transcribed the sources we don’t know about.
            …That is, of course, assuming there was a source at all.  For all the material that is collaborated nowhere else in the Bible, or in secular history, we have to at least maintain the possibility that he might have invented some of the details himself.  I know this would never cross the mind of Lee Strobel and his friends, but it’s something a skeptic can’t help but think.

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