See Part 1 General Comments
Part 11: The Problems with Luke
Lee
Strobel’s second argument is Church
Tradition Must Be True Because the Church Would Have No Reason To Lie
From page
23:
Even so, I wanted to test the issue
further. “Excuse my skepticism,” I said,
“but would anyone have had a motivation to lie by claiming these people wrote
these gospels, when they really didn’t?”
Blomberg shook his head. “Probably
not. Remember, these were unlikely characters,” he said, a grin breaking on his
face. “Mark and Luke weren’t even among
the twelve disciples. Matthew was, but as a former hated tax collector, he
would have been the most infamous character next to Judas Iscariot, who
betrayed Jesus!
“Contrast that with what happened
when the fanciful apocryphal gospels were written much later. People chose the names of well-known and exemplary
figures to be their fictitious authors—Philip, Peter, Mary, James. Those names
carried a lot more weight than the names of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. So to
answer your question, there would not have been any reason to attribute
authorship to these three less respected people if it weren’t true.”
There are several points to make in
response to this:
I. This
Doesn’t Actually Prove Anything
II. Anonymous
Literary Texts Tend to Attract Apocryphal Oral Traditions about Their Authors,
and You Don’t Necessarily Need to Prove an Ulterior Motive
III.
That Being Said the Church Did
Actually Have Plenty of Reasons for Wanting to Claim Apostolic Authorship
IV.
His Own Examples Are Undermining the Point He is Trying to Make
V. By
His Own Criteria, This Means Any Gospel Bearing the Name of a Minor Apostle
Must Be Authentic
VI. By
His Own Criteria, This Means the Gospel of John is Probably Falsely Attributed
VII.
Matthew, John-Mark and Luke are Not Actually as Problematic as He’s Making Them
VIII.
He’s Going to Contradict His Own Argument Here on Page 27 When He Tries to
Claim that Mark’s Gospel is Actually Directly from Peter
Starting
then with the first point:
I. This
Doesn’t Actually Prove Anything
First of all,
notice how incredibly weak this is as a proof.
The most Craig Blomberg and Lee Strobel should be able to say from this
is, “Hmm, isn’t it strange that the Church used some names of minor apostles
instead of naming everything after Peter, James and John. Maybe something’s going on here, maybe not.”
In
no way does this “prove” that the Apostles actually wrote the Gospels. But this is typical of how the whole book is
written. Every little piece of evidence,
no matter how flimsy, is immediately declared to “prove” Christianity.
By
the way, this is it. This is their whole
argument on Apostolic Authorship of the Gospels. Church tradition is true because church
tradition says it is (which we examined in part 13), and then this. The whole rest of the section on eyewitnesses
they either launch into defensive mode (explaining away the difficulties with
their position) or advance completely contradicting theories (oral tradition).
II. Anonymous
Literary Texts Tend to Attract Apocryphal Oral Traditions about Their Authors,
and You Don’t Necessarily Need to Prove an Ulterior Motive
In
secular history, there is a debate about the authorship of The Iliad.
Tradition assigns the epic poem to a poor blind poet named Homer, but
many scholars doubt that Homer actually existed.
Now,
whatever you think about Homer, notice that it is not a valid argument to say: “Well,
Homer must exist! Why would the ancient
Greeks ever lie about it? What would
they have to gain? Why wouldn’t they have
assigned The Iliad to a great king
like Alexander the Great instead of to a poor blind poet?”
You
don’t actually need to prove a motive when apocryphal authors get assigned to
anonymous texts. The fact is that a text
as important to the Greeks as the Iliad
was bound to attract speculation about its author. And if nothing was known about him, theories
were bound to develop.
How
much more true this must have been for the early Church when they believed
their eternal salvation relied on their faith in these documents.
III.
That Being Said the Church Did
Actually Have Plenty of Reasons for Wanting to Claim Apostolic Authorship
So,
hopefully anyone with an ounce of common sense can see plainly enough that the
Church actually did have a motive for connecting their key texts with the
Apostolic tradition. What Craig Blomberg
and Lee Strobel really should be saying is that, according to their logic, the
appeal of claiming authorship from the minor Apostles is not nearly as great as
the appeal of claiming authorship from the major Apostles. But that’s not the same as saying the early
church would have had no motivation. Any
connection at all with the Apostles is preferable than anonymous texts that
have no authority.
In
fact, the irony is that Lee Strobel attempts to base his whole argument for
Christ on the testimony of the eyewitness apostles, and yet at the same time
doesn’t realize that someone with the same ideological agenda as him could have
had a motivation to falsely attribute these documents.
The
early church had plenty of reasons to attribute these Gospels to the
apostles. In the battle between what
would later become orthodox Christianity and the different heresies, each side
needed to claim that their Gospels were connected directly to the apostles. What’s more, in order to be accepted into the
New Testament Canon, the early Church made it an explicit condition that the
Gospels had to be written by an Apostle or an associate of an Apostle. So there’s plenty of motivation right there.
The
fact that Lee Strobel and Craig Blomberg think Peter, James and John would have
been the more obvious choice is altogether different from saying that there
would be no motivation.
IV.
His Own Examples Are Undermining the Point He is Trying to Make
It’s hard
to believe Lee Strobel and Craig Blomberg think they’re proving the point they
want to be proving. The evidence they’re
citing proves the exact opposite of the point they want to make.
Contrast that with what happened when the fanciful apocryphal
gospels were written much later. People
chose the names of well-known and exemplary figures to be their fictitious
authors—Philip, Peter, Mary, James. Those names carried a lot more weight than
the names of Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
First
of all, he’s already admitting that in early Christianity lots of Gospels were
found under false names. Why does it
escape his imagination that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John could be under false
names? (He says these apocryphal Gospels
were written later, which is true. The apocryphal
Gospels are from the second Century, whereas Matthew Mark and Luke were from
the late first century. BUT, although
canonical Gospels were written earlier, they didn’t have the Apostolic names
assigned to them until the same period as the apocryphal Gospels starting
appearing.)
Secondly,
Peter and James I’ll give him, but how does Philip make the list? Surely Philip
has got to be just as obscure an apostle as Matthew, right? So which point is he trying to prove anyway?
And
then there’s the Gospel of Mary. There
are 3 Marys in the New Testament, but the apocryphal Gospel he’s referring to
here is the Gospel of Mary Magdalene.
This is, by the way, one of the many slimy "slight of hand" little tricks that Strobel and Blomberg employ throughout this section (and that Lee Strobel employs throughout this book). Mary the mother of Christ has been venerated into a semi-divine figure in Catholic tradition, and would definitely have been a source that carried a lot of weight in the Catholic Church. Mary Magdalene, on the other hand, was assumed by Church tradition to be a prostitute--she was a sympathetic figure in Church mythology, but she was a fallen figure, one of Jesus's many imperfect followers. Blomberg knows that his argument would carry more weight if the readers think he is referring to Mary the mother of Christ, and that furthermore this is probably the Mary that the readers would naturally think of first anyway. So he just leaves the reference deliberately unclear to try to get away with inferring something that's not true.
But the apocryphal he is referring to here, the only "Gospel of Mary" we possess, is the Gospel of Mary Magdalene (W).
Citing the Gospel of Mary Magdalene as one of the “names that carried a lot more weight than the names of Matthew, Mark, and Luke” is a very interesting choice, because later in the book Lee Strobel is going to argue that the testimony of women was not respected in the ancient world.
This is, by the way, one of the many slimy "slight of hand" little tricks that Strobel and Blomberg employ throughout this section (and that Lee Strobel employs throughout this book). Mary the mother of Christ has been venerated into a semi-divine figure in Catholic tradition, and would definitely have been a source that carried a lot of weight in the Catholic Church. Mary Magdalene, on the other hand, was assumed by Church tradition to be a prostitute--she was a sympathetic figure in Church mythology, but she was a fallen figure, one of Jesus's many imperfect followers. Blomberg knows that his argument would carry more weight if the readers think he is referring to Mary the mother of Christ, and that furthermore this is probably the Mary that the readers would naturally think of first anyway. So he just leaves the reference deliberately unclear to try to get away with inferring something that's not true.
But the apocryphal he is referring to here, the only "Gospel of Mary" we possess, is the Gospel of Mary Magdalene (W).
Citing the Gospel of Mary Magdalene as one of the “names that carried a lot more weight than the names of Matthew, Mark, and Luke” is a very interesting choice, because later in the book Lee Strobel is going to argue that the testimony of women was not respected in the ancient world.
In
fact on pages 217 and 218, Lee Strobel argues that the story of the Mary
Magdalene and the women visiting the empty tomb “proves” the resurrection, because
in the ancient world the testimony of women was not considered valid, and so
the Gospellers would have no incentive to make up such a story were it not true.
Here,
he’s arguing that the choice of Mary Magdalene as a Gospel writer would have
had more credibility in the ancient world than the Matthew, Mark and Luke.
Surely
he can’t have it both ways.
(By
the way, when you get to the empty tomb stories later in this book, remember
that Lee Strobel has already conceded that the testimony of a woman in the
ancient world was popular enough for a group of Christians to follow her apocryphal
gospel.)
V. By
His Own Criteria, This Means Any Gospel Bearing the Name of a Minor Apostle
Must Be Authentic
So, guess
what, in the early Christian era there were tons of apocryphal Gospels claiming
to be written by all sorts of apostles major and minor: the Gospel of Thomas,
Nicodemus, Andrew, Bartholomew, Judas, Pilate, Joseph.... (see list at Wikipedia Here)
Now,
according to Lee Strobel and Craig Blomberg, any Gospel bearing the name of a
minor Apostle must be authentic, because no one would ever falsely attribute
any Gospel to anyone who wasn’t Peter, James, or John. (And for some reason, in their logic Philip
and Mary Magdalene make this list?) So
they would have to recognize all of these apocryphal Gospels then, right?
But
of course they’re not going to.
VI. By
His Own Criteria, This Means the Gospel of John is Probably Falsely Attributed
So the
logic that Craig Blomberg and Lee Strobel are advancing is that the early
Church would only have had motivation to falsely attribute authorship to the
major Apostles: Peter, James, and John.
Well,
guess what? John is already spoken for
as the author of one of the 4 Gospels.
Doesn’t this mean, by their own criteria, that we should be highly
suspicious of the Gospel of John?
To
his credit, Lee Strobel asks Craig Blomberg about this problem directly. But then to Craig Blomberg’s discredit, he
gives a long and convoluted answer about something on a completely different
subject. And then Lee Strobel accepts
this. It’s a truly bizarre exchange.
That sounded logical, but it was obvious
that he was conveniently leaving out one of the gospel writers. “What about John?” I asked. “He was extremely
prominent; in fact, he wasn’t just one of the twelve disciples, but one of
Jesus’ inner three, along with James and Peter.”
“Yes, he’s the one exception,”
Blomberg conceded with a nod. “And
interestingly, John is the only gospel about which there is some question about
the authorship.”
“What exactly is in dispute?”
“The name of the author isn’t in
doubt—it’s certainly John,” Blomberg replied. “The question is whether it was
John the apostle or a different John.
“You see, the testimony of Christian
writer named Papias, dated about A.D. 125, refers to John the apostle and John
the elder, and its not clear from the context whether he’s talking about one
person from two perspectives or two different people. But granted that
exception, the rest of the early testimony is unanimous that it was John the
apostle—the son of Zebedee—who wrote the gospel.” (p.23)
Okay,
first of all even if you take what he’s saying at face value, notice how this
adds nothing to the discussion. He
briefly mentions some sort of dispute just to cloud the waters, and then
promptly dismisses it and returns to what he’s been saying all along. Nowhere at all does this address what should
have been the principle concern: according to the criteria he himself
introduced, the Gospel of John is a likely candidate for false
attribution.
Instead,
that whole digression is essentially the equivalent of him yelling, “Hey, look over
there! Now what where we talking about
again?”
Secondly,
Papias never wrote anything about the Gospel of John (Papias only wrote about
the Gospels of Matthew and Mark. See
Part 7 ). So if Papias occasionally
confused John the elder and John the apostle, it was never in the context of
discussing the authorship of the Gospel of John. And he knows this, because he recites Papias’s
testimony on the following page (see Part 13). So he’s deliberately bringing in something he
knows has absolutely nothing to do with this.
(Boy! You really have to watch
these guys closely! Talk about slimy
debating tricks!)
Okay, continuing on with Lee Strobel and
Blomberg:
“And,” I said in an effort to pin him down further,
“you’re convinced that he did?”
“Yes, I believe the substantial
majority of the material goes back to the apostle,” he replied. “However, if
you read the gospel closely, you can see some indication that its concluding
verses may have been finalized by an editor. Personally I have no problem
believing that somebody closely associated with John may have functioned in
that role, putting the last verses into shape and potentially creating the
stylistic uniformity of the entire document.
“But in any event,” he stressed, “the
gospel is obviously based on eyewitness material, as are the other three
gospels.” (p.24)
The
issue of the “editor” was already discussed in part 6, and I’m not
going to repeat myself here.
Also,
notice how he just simply states that all the Gospels are “obviously” based on eyewitness material, even though he and Lee
Strobel have done absolutely no work to show that any of the material in the
Gospels is the kind of material an eyewitness would report? (Nor will they.) This kind of just declaring stuff by fiat is
very typical of the whole book, and once again makes me think that Lee Strobel
simply wrote this book to make money of off Christians, and it’s not a serious
attempt to convince skeptics.
VII.
Matthew, John-Mark and Luke are Not Actually as Problematic as He’s Making Them
Even
assuming that Matthew was hated as a tax collector, one of the main themes of
the Gospels is that Jesus attracted people who were ordinarily rejected by
society. So it would not be incongruous
at all for the Church to assign a Gospel to Matthew’s name.
However,
the idea that Matthew was the second most hated of all the disciples after
Judas is certainly not in evidence from the text of the 4 Gospels themselves. In fact arguably Matthew comes out looking
better than some of the other disciples, like the infamous “doubting Thomas”. (And yet there’s an apocryphal Gospel forged
in Thomas’s name as well, so what does that prove?)
Really,
none of the disciples come out all that well in the Gospels, as Craig Blomberg
himself says much later on page 50. “Mark’s perspective of Peter is pretty
consistently unflattering. And he’s the
ringleader! The disciples repeatedly misunderstand
Jesus. James and John want the places of
Jesus’ right and left hand, and he has to teach them hard lessons about servant
leadership instead. They look like a bunch of self-serving, self-seeking,
dull-witted people a lot of the time.”
So,
really, Craig Blomberg could play this game no matter which disciple the church
had picked. (Imagine right now
there’s a parallel universe somewhere in which the Gospels had been attributed
to Peter. And in that parallel universe,
there’s a book called The Case for Christ
in which Craig Blomberg and Lee Strobel are arguing that the church would have
no motivation to falsely assign a Gospel to Peter’s name when Peter comes off
as such a dunce in the Gospel narratives.)
As
Craig Blomberg says, it is true that John-Mark and Luke weren’t even part of the
12. But then remember that no one is
claiming that these Gospels were forged in the Apostles names. (There are deliberate forgeries elsewhere in the New Testament, but that’s a separate subject.) What people are claiming is that the Gospels
were written anonymously in the first century, and then the Church only assigned
them names in the second century. In
other words, the Church was constrained by the material that was already written
in the Gospel.
The
preface to the Gospel of Luke makes it quite clear the author was not an
eyewitness, so the early Church couldn’t have assigned the Gospel of Luke to
one of the twelve even if they had wanted to.
For
more on why the early Church chose these particular apostles, see my discussion
in part 7.
As
for John-Mark, he was well known as an associate of Peter. Which brings us to our next section.
VIII.
He’s Going to Contradict His Own Argument Here on Page 27 When He Tries to
Claim that Mark’s Gospel is Actually Directly from Peter
We’ll get to this in the next section, but just 4 pages later in the book Lee Strobel
is going to contradict himself on the Gospel of Mark.
When
attempting to explain why Matthew had copied from the Gospel of Mark, Strobel
will argue that everyone knew that the Gospel of Mark was really straight out
of the mouth of the Apostle Peter. So on
one page he’s saying that Church tradition would never assign a Gospel to a
nobody like John-Mark when Peter was the more obvious choice, and then just 4
pages later he will argue that according to Church tradition, Mark’s Gospel was
really Peter’s direct words.
So,
to sum up, Craig Blomberg believe that the Church would never falsely assign a
Gospel to anyone except the major apostles: Peter, James and John. (I’m going to just ignore Philip and Mary).
John
is already spoken for, and soon they’ll be claiming Mark as Peter’s
Gospel. That only leaves James!
….So
essentially, they’re arguing the Gospels couldn’t have been falsely attributed,
because the church forgot about James.
In the next part, we’ll look at Lee Strobel’s arguments to try to explain away why Matthew is copying from John-Mark.
(Advanced warning: hang onto your hat, because things are going to get really…
really… really stupid!)
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