Saturday, August 09, 2014

Book Review of The Case For Christ by Lee Strobel Part 6: My Explanation of How The Gospels Do Not Contain Any Internal Evidence that they were Written by the Apostles



See Part 1 General Comments

            It’s worth noting that if the church hadn’t put the Apostles’ names on the Gospels, there would be absolutely no internal evidence inside the Gospel to indicate that they are written by the apostles, or that they are eye-witness accounts.
            The author of the Gospel of Matthew, for example, never self-identifies himself as Matthew.  He never uses the words “I” or “we” when talking about himself or the disciples.  The style of the narrator is 3rd person omniscient throughout, and the parts in which Matthew could not have been an eyewitness (the secret meeting of the Sanhedrin, for example) are written in the same style as the parts in which he would have been a witness.  And the same is true for the other Gospels.  And note that Mark and Luke (who were not eyewitnesses) use exactly the same narrative styles as Matthew and John (who were supposedly eyewitnesses).
            And don’t imagine for a minute that this is simply because the ancients didn’t know how to write in the first person.  For a Biblical book that’s actually written as an eyewitness testimony, check out the book of Nehemiah.  Scholars can debate whether the book is genuine or forged but there’s no doubt the book is intended to be read as an eyewitness account.  The narrator uses the first person, explicitly identifies himself with the historical personage of Nehemiah and tells us his own thoughts and intentions, but doesn’t have access to the thoughts of anyone else. Contrast that with the gospels.
            Furthermore, church tradition identifies Luke as a travelling companion of Paul precisely because the author slips into the 1st person narrative (using the pronoun “we”) during some of the voyages.  Scholars debate whether this was genuine or a forgery (more on that in part 11) but for here just note that if we identify Luke as the author of Acts because of the “we” passages, then how much more striking do the absence of any “we” passages look in Matthew and John?

            Another indication that the Gospels are written in 3rd person omniscient style of narration, and not as eyewitnesses, is that the Gospellers claim to know the thoughts of everyone in their story.  For example, just by flipping through the Gospel of Matthew I can find several instances where the Gospeller claims insight into other’s thought processes. In Matthew 14, the Gospeller tells us what Herod was thinking, what Herod wanted to do, what Herod was afraid of, when he was pleased, and when he became sad.  In Matthew 19, the Gospeller knows the intentions of the Pharisees who tried to trap Jesus, and the emotions of the rich young man.  In Matthew 22, the Gospeller knows what Jesus is thinking when he is aware of the Pharisee’s plan.  In Matthew 26, the Gospeller knows what Judas is thinking, and later what Peter remembers.  In Matthew 27, the Gospeller knows what Pilate’s thoughts are as he tries Jesus.  And many more examples.
            This is precisely what we would expect from an omniscient 3rd person narrator, and not from an eyewitness account.  (Also, as I noted before in part 4, these passages, which could not have been written by an eye-witness, are very difficult to explain unless you simply fall back on the idea that God directly revealed this information to the Gospellers.  But that assumption can neither be proven nor disproven.  It must simply be taken as an article of faith.)

The Gospel of John
          Judged solely on their internal contents, Matthew, Mark and Luke make no claim to be based on any sort of direct eye-witness testimony.
            The same, however, can not be said of the Gospel of John, which does contain a coda in which the author seems to be trying to base his story on the eyewitness of an apostle. 
            At the end of the Gospel, the writer references an unnamed anonymous disciple, referred to only as “the disciple whom Jesus loved” and says: “He is the disciple who spoke of these things, the one who also wrote them down, and we know that what he said is true.” (John 21:24) 
            So, is this an example of direct eye-witness testimony?
            Possibly.  Although the first point to make is that we don’t necessarily have to take the writer at his word.  He could be accurately representing the disciple’s story, or he could just be using this as a literary technique to give authority to his Gospel—we don’t know.
            The second point is that, as Bart Ehrman pointed out in Jesus, Interrupted, whoever wrote this couldn’t possibly have been the disciple, because they make a distinction between the disciple’s testimony, and what we know.  we know that what he said is true.”  The “we” includes the author, and is distinct from the disciple’s testimony “what he said.”

            Lee Strobel and his friends try to get around this difficulty by positing that the end of the Gospel of John was written by an editor.  From page 24, Lee Strobel quotes Craig Blomberg as saying: “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. (p.24, Craig Blomberg quoted by Lee Strobel).

            Well…maybe.  As with everything else that spouts out of Craig Blomberg’s mouth during his interview with Lee Strobel, he’s just assuming stuff here without any sort of evidence at all.  We actually have no records of this, or any insight whatsoever into any editorial process that went on when any of the gospels were written.  Did John have an editor who worked closely with him on the Gospel?  Or was this last bit added by some anonymous scribe who didn’t even know John?  Or was the whole Gospel written second hand all along?  Or is that last bit just a complete lie?

            In Lee Strobel’s defense, I’ll say that they have at least one atheist scholar who agrees with them: Robin Lane Fox, an atheist, also makes the assumption that the coda to John was a later edition.  Although Robin Lane Fox believes it was some later scribe who took it upon himself to add the ending.  To assume that it was “somebody closely associated with John,” as Blomberg and Strobel do, is really assuming too much.  We have no evidence, at all, whether it was somebody closely associated with John or not.

            But whatever you think about the ending coda, it’s worth noting that whatever way you side on this question, it means the Gospel of John was written anonymously.  If the coda was added by a later scribe, then the Gospel, as it was originally written, was anonymous and made no claims to eyewitness testimony.  If the coda was written by the author of the Gospel of John, then the Gospel was based on (at best) second-hand evidence.

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