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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