Why The Gospels Are Not Based on Eyewitness Testimony

About This Post
In the previous post, I wrote at length about why the Gospels could not be eyewitness testimony in my attempts to review The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel.
Since that specific book is only of interest to people who have read it, I thought I would reprint the same information here as a kind of general statement on why the Gospels are not based on eyewitness testimony.  For whatever it may or may not be worth.  If you've been reading my thoughts on The Case for Christ all along, there's no new information here.  Rather, I am taking information from the previous book review, and just deleting any specific references to The Case for Christ so that the information can stand on its own, outside the book review.
I'm not a scholar, but this is based on what I've learned from the following sources: My Introduction to religion courses back at Calvin College, The Yale Lectures on the New Testament by Dale Martin, Jesus, Interrupted by Bart Ehrman, Bart Erhman's Lectures on the New Testament, and The Unauthorized Version by Robin Lane Fox.  (And one or two arguments borrowed from The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine, and Forged and Misquoting Jesus by Bart Ehrman).  Also supplemented with some research on the web, the appropriate web sites are usually linked to.  And also for some of the examples, I've done a bit of my own leg work reading through my Bible and finding the appropriate examples, but I have no doubt that I'm just duplicating what has probably been noted thousands of times by other people somewhere.
(Robin Lane Fox, by the way, although I use his work as a reference, would part company with me on this slightly.  He believes that the Gospel of John actually was written by an eyewitness, even if the other 3 Gospels were not.  For his view, however, you'll need to read his book.)

I'll argue my case in 3 parts:
Part 1: A preliminary argument that, even if the Gospels were based on eyewitness evidence, that would not ipso facto mean that they were 100% Reliable.
Part 2: Even according to Church tradition, most of the Gospels are not based on eyewitness evidence.
and finally in Part 3 I'll get around to arguing why the Gospels were not actually written by the Apostles of Church tradition.

First 

Part 1: Even if the Gospels Were Based on Eyewitnesses Evidence, That Would Not, Ipso Facto, Mean That They Were 100% Reliable.

      First of all, it's important to remember that even if you have eyewitness testimony, it can sometimes be unreliable.  (In fact, as Bart Ehrman points out in Jesus, Interrupted, our entire legal system is predicated on the assumption that eyewitness testimony is not always reliable.)

When attempting to prove the validity of a religion based on eyewitness testimony, a number of points can be made in response:

I. People Claim to be Eyewitnesses to Crazy Things All the Time, and We Are Not Always Obligated to Believe Them

II. Throughout History, Messianic Figures Have Captivated Millions of Eyewitnesses

III. The Majority of Eyewitness to Jesus in First Century Palestine Did Not Actually Become Believers

IV. All That Being Said, Let Me Admit the Obvious: An Identifiable Eyewitness Source is better than an Anonymous Second Hand Source

I. People Claim to be Eyewitnesses to Crazy Things All the Time, and We Are Not Always Obligated to Believe Them

            In fact, if we were slaves to every eyewitness who claimed to see something supernatural, then we would have to believe in every UFO story, every person who saw Jesus in their tortilla, every Elvis sighting, and every bigfoot sighting.

            I’m currently living in Cambodia, where the superstitious Cambodian people believe in regular occurrences of the supernatural, and one is constantly hearing stories of demon possession, sorcery, miracles, and ghosts.  Walter Mason comments on this extensively in his book about Cambodia, but I’ve experienced it plenty enough myself.  In areas of the world like Cambodia where people have a world view that allows them to turn to the supernatural for explanation of events, it’s amazing how often the supernatural is invoked.

            Often one hears testimony first hand from Cambodian friends who swore that they once saw a ghost, or that there was black magic in their village.  Or, you hear about these stories and rumors and superstitions second hand where Cambodian friends claimed to know from very reliable sources that miraculous supernatural events occurred.

            Often, these supernatural rumors get large enough to make the papers, such as Spirit Possessions Mark End to Chinese New Year, Sorcerers, Magic Coconut Trees .  And then there were all the miracles that were attributed to King Sihanouk after his death, which thousands of Cambodians swore they saw

             For most of us, however, if we did not personally witness these miraculous events ourselves, we are under no obligation to believe them, no matter the number of eyewitnesses.  So, although thousands of Cambodians believe they saw King Sihanouk after he died, I am under no obligation to believe it myself.  In my experience of the world, I do not consider it likely that black magic and ghosts exist, nor are these phenomena accounted for by science.  On the other hand, I have enough experience of the world to know that sometimes people lie, sometimes people are deceived, sometimes people see what they want to see, and often rumours can get out of control very quickly.

II. Throughout History, Messianic Figures Have Captivated Millions of Eyewitnesses

            Throughout history there have been plenty of Messianic movements, in which those claiming to be chosen by God have captivated thousands of eyewitnesses.  There was the Mahdi (W) who fought Gordon in Khartoum, who attracted thousands of followers.  Millions  of Chinese peasants joined the Taiping rebellion when Hong Xiuquan (W) claimed to be the half-brother of Jesus Christ.  Others were attracted by Jim Jones (W) and David Koresh (W). 

III. The Majority of Eyewitness to Jesus in First Century Palestine Did Not Actually Become Believers

         Christian apologists sometimes try to make much out of the fact that no 1st Century Jew every left a document disproving that Jesus did all the miraculous things attributed to him.

            In fact, this is actually not so surprising.  Given how low literacy rates were throughout history at any point before the industrial revolution, it is highly unlikely any of the people who had witnessed Jesus in person would have been able to write such a document, even assuming it had been a priority for them.  (This same reason is why scholars find it highly unlikely that the highly stylized Greek found in the Gospels could have been written by Jesus’s uneducated Aramaic speaking followers—but I’ll get to that later.)

            Secondly, even if the majority of First Century Jews could read and write, it would have been almost impossible for them to witness a negative.  I mean, unless someone had made it their life’s mission to watch Jesus 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, then how could you prove that he never did any miracles ever?

            As for Jesus’s resurrection, although all 4 Gospels give contradictory accounts, in no account of Jesus’s resurrection does he ever make public appearances after he rose from the dead.  Jesus only appeared in resurrected form to the disciples in secret.  A first century Jewish skeptic, even if he could read or write, is not going to be able to say that he witnessed Jesus not appearing to his disciples in secret.

            However, despite the fact that we don’t have any people explicitly writing down that they witnessed Jesus not doing something, we can infer a lot from the conversion rates among the Jews in first century Palestine.  And we can infer that the majority of eyewitnesses to Jesus were not impressed.

            Jesus had a handful of loyal followers, but the vast majority of eyewitnesses in Galilee and Jerusalem did not convert to Christianity.  If the people who actually witnessed Jesus had found him actually convincing, then there would never have been a split between Judaism and Christianity.  And this is to be weighed against the handful any eyewitness documents that the Church may think it has.

IV. All That Being Said, Let Me Admit the Obvious: An Identifiable Eyewitness Source is better than an Anonymous Second Hand Source

            It is true, however, that eye-witness accounts are better than anonymous accounts.  So the case for the Gospels is going to get even worse for when (as we will see later) we don’t even know who wrote the Gospels.  But even if they were written by the apostles this doesn’t mean we are under any obligation to believe something which contradicts our common sense. 

            As Thomas Paine said: When also I am told that a woman called the Virgin Mary, said, or gave out, that she was with child without any cohabitation with a man, and that her betrothed husband, Joseph, said that an angel told him so, I have a right to believe them or not; such circumstance requires a much stronger evidence than their bare word for it; but we have not even this—for neither Joseph nor Mary wrote any such matter themselves; it is only reported by others that they said so—it is hearsay upon hearsay, and I do not choose to rest my belief upon such evidence.

Update October 20, 2015: This video here is a great explanation of all the problems with eye witness testimony.  It's about the problems with eye witness testimony in regards to UFO sightings, but much of this also applies to over-reliance on eye-witness testimony in the Gospels as well.

Part 2: Even according to Church tradition, most of the Gospels are not based on eyewitness evidence

            Cven according to Church tradition most of the Gospels are second hand evidence.  I’ll address this in the following points.

I. A Clarification on What the Church Tradition Actually Is

II. Even According to the Church Tradition, 2 out of the 4 Gospels are Not Eyewitness Accounts

III. Parts of the Gospel of Mark and the Gospel of John were Added Later, and We Have No Idea Who Added Them

IV. Even for the Remaining Two Gospels, They Can Only be Called Eyewitness Testimony for the Parts that the Apostles Actually Witnessed

V. A Discussion of What to Make of All the Material in the Gospels that Was Clearly Not Witnessed By Anyone, And Is Attributable to No Clear Source

I. A Clarification on What the Church Tradition Actually Is

According to Church tradition, Matthew’s Gospel was written first in Hebrew (it was the Gospel for the Jews), and then later translated into Greek.  Mark’s Gospel is attributed to John Mark, who was a travelling companion of Peter for many years, and after Peter died, John Mark was encouraged by the Church to write down everything Peter had told him over the years about Jesus, so John Mark did so (although because John Mark wasn’t actually present for any of these things, he didn’t know what order Peter’s stories were supposed to go in, so Church fathers admit he may have fudged up the order of the stories.)  Luke was a travelling companion of Paul who wasn’t an eyewitness to any of the things in his Gospel, but he did some research.  And John, like Matthew, was an apostle of Jesus.

II. Even According to the Church Tradition, 2 out of the 4 Gospels are Not Eye-Witness Accounts

            Now, before we get any further into this, it’s worth noting that even if we accept Church tradition, we can only claim two of the four Gospels as eyewitness testimony.  Mark’s Gospel is second hand, and Luke’s Gospel (by the author’s own admission) is even farther removed.  As Luke himself writes: “Dear Theophilus, many people have done their best to write a report of the things that have taken place among us. They wrote what we have been told by those who saw these things from the beginning, and who proclaimed the message. And so, Your Excellency, because I have carefully studied all these matters from their beginning, I thought it would be good to write an orderly account for you.” (Luke 1:1-3).

            So Luke is basing his account off of written documents, which were themselves written by other people who were reporting what they had been told by the eyewitnesses.  By my count, that means Luke is, at best, 3rd hand testimony.

            

III. Parts of the Gospel of Mark and the Gospel of John were Added Later, and We Have No Idea Who Added Them

            Also, even if you assume that the Apostles of Church tradition originally wrote the Gospels, you would still have to account for the parts of the Gospels that were added later by anonymous scribes.

            The earliest and most reliable ancient Greek manuscripts do not contain Mark 16:9-20 (when Jesus appears to his disciples after the resurrection) and John 8:1-11 (the  story of the woman caught in adultery—the one where Jesus says, “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.”).  This is beyond dispute, so much so that even the people who print your Bible have footnoted these passages.  

            So, where do these passages come from?  You can only claim these are eyewitness testimony by more wishful thinking.  We have no idea what the source for these passages are.

            So even assuming the Church tradition we would still have a whole half chapter of the Gospel of Mark, and a whole story from the Gospel of John, that we have no idea who wrote them. 

IV. Even for the Remaining Two Gospels, They Can Only be Called Eyewitness Testimony for the Parts that the Apostles Actually Witnessed

            So only Matthew and John can be called eyewitness testimony, and even here it can only be eyewitness testimony for what Matthew and John were physically eyewitnesses to.  

So, all the stories in Matthew in which Jesus takes Peter, James and John aside from the rest of the apostles is not eye-witness testimony—for example the transfiguration, and the Garden of Gethsemane, et cetera.  These events could only be called second hand evidence at best.  Of the four Gospel writers, only John would have been an actual eye-witness to these events.  But strangely enough, John’s Gospel is the only Gospel not to mention these events.  The transfiguration (of which John would have been the only eyewitness out of the 4 Gospellers) is not even mentioned in John’s Gospel.  So even by Lee Strobel’s criteria, we have absolutely no direct eye-witness testimony of one of the most miraculous events of Jesus’s life.  Nor is the story about Jesus taking Peter, James and John into the Garden of Gethsemane mentioned in John. 

            It’s possible the Gospel writers could have gotten these events second hand from Peter, James and John, but this certainly isn’t eye-witness testimony.  (By the way, the fact that John just forgets to write about all these big events he was supposedly an eye-witness to is also problematic for Lee Strobel, but we’ll get to that later).

            And then there were all the events during which none of the apostle could have been eye-witnesses.  The birth narrative in Matthew, for example, can not be based on eyewitness testimony.  Nor the section on the death of John the Baptist and Herod’s dancing daughter in Matthew 14.  Nor could Matthew have been an eyewitness to the secret meeting of the high priests to plot against Jesus in Matthew 26.  Or Judas meeting the high priests to plan Jesus’s betrayal.  Or the story about the guards at the tomb and Pilate and the chief priests plotting to bribe the guards.  Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

            So where does this information come from?  Well, we have no idea.  It’s theoretically possible that some of this could have come down to Matthew second hand from other sources, but we don’t know.  Matthew doesn’t state his sources.  We don’t know how accurate his sources were, or how reliably the material was preserved, or anything.  To assume that this is all accurate material is either just wishful thinking, or pure faith.  There’s no indication of the source, and there’s certainly no proof.

                 And then there’s plenty of material in the Gospels for which there were no eyewitnesses at all.  In the Gospel of Matthew, the wise-men are warned in a dream not to return to King Herod, and so returned to their country by another road.  Now, notice that not only could Matthew not have been an eyewitness to this, it's hard to imagine anyone being a source of this information.  Unless someone went all the way into the East and tracked these men down, what source could this information possibly have come from?  It's not just a matter of this being 1st versus 2nd hand--it's a matter of the source being completely inexplicable.

            And there are many stories in the Gospel like this which don't seem possible to attribute to any eyewitness source.  When Jesus goes into the desert to be tempted by Satan, no one else was there—it was just Jesus and the Devil. Unless Jesus told his disciples specifically what had happened ("Now, when you write your Gospels, don't forget to include the part about how Satan said to me..."), then this information is not coming from anywhere.

            In John’s Gospel, there is a lengthy conversation between Jesus and Pilate that took place away from eyes of the crowds.  As the incident is described in John’s Gospel, there don’t appear to have been any other eyewitnesses. 

            And then there’s Jesus praying to God in the garden of Gethsemane after all the other disciples have fallen asleep.  Again, no eyewitnesses to this except Jesus and God.  Unless Jesus specifically told his disciples about this afterwards, then this information is not coming from any source.  ("Now, when you write the Gospels, don't forget to include the part about how I pleaded with God to spare me from my fate.  And make sure you write that I was sweating blood, and that an Angel came down to comfort me.")

           

V. A Discussion of What to Make of All the Material in the Gospels that Was Clearly Not Witnessed By Anyone, And Is Attributable to No Clear Source

            So how doesone get around the fact that much of the Gospels just physically can’t be based on eyewitness testimony?  

                    

            Many Christians just rely on the idea of divine revelation—the idea that God was telling the Gospellers exactly what to write, so that anything that the Gospellers weren’t personally eyewitnesses to can be explained by God just zapping their minds.  This of course can neither be proved nor disproved—you just have to take it or leave it on faith the same way you’d have to take the Koran on faith or the book of Mormon on faith. 

            The problem with the divine revelation argument, however, is that it means that the Gospels are a divine document rather than a human document.  Which is going to make things sticky when we get around to discussing the mistakes and the contradictions.

         For example, one popular way conservative Christians have come up with to explain the contradictions in the resurrection account is to attribute this to the human frailty of the eyewitness testimony.  But if the Gospels are based on divine revelation, then how to explain the contradictions?

        Assuming human authors of the Gospels, you can get away with some discrepancies.  Assuming this is divine inspiration, it’s not clear why God is always contradicting himself from one Gospel to another.

            So, to sum-up, even assuming Church tradition, it is a very weak case to argue that the Gospels are based on eyewitness testimony.  However it becomes even  less tenable because we now know that Church tradition about the Gospels are completely wrong.

Part 3 Why the Gospels were not Actually Written by the Apostles of Church Tradition.

The Gospels referred to as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John do not actual claim to be written by Matthew, Mark, Luke or John.  Nowhere inside any of the Gospels, or anywhere else in the bible, is any sort of author for the Gospels identified—they were written as anonymous documents.

            The designation of the authors Matthew, Mark, Luke and John come not from the Gospels themselves, but from Church tradition dating from the 2nd Century A.D, about a century after the apostles were dead.

            Modern scholarship has established, for a variety of reasons, that it was extremely unlikely the apostles could have written the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke or John.  This is so well established now that it is currently being taught in both conservative protestant and catholic colleges. 

            [I personally attended Calvin College which is not a liberal institution—to put it mildly.  (The faculty are currently prevented from writing anything on the issue of homosexuality, and in the ordination of woman is still regarded as controversial—to give you some idea.)  Our religion professors taught us what is commonly established as the scholarly consensus—that the Gospels could not have been actually written by the apostles.  I recently compared notes with a friend who grew up in a conservative catholic high school, and he told me the priests there had also taught them that the Gospels were not written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.]

            This is one of those things that is widely known in Christian seminaries and colleges, but never gets communicated to the people who attend Church every week.  (You could write a whole book about the Christian scholarship that never gets communicated to the regular church-goers, but that’s another topic.) 

            The only people who currently believe that the Gospels were written by the Apostles are the extreme fundamentalists, or people who are ignorant of any modern scholarship.  (The latter category overlaps heavily with the former.) 

        In the following sections I’ll try to lay out the reasons why scholars are pretty much unanimous in agreeing that the Gospels couldn’t have been written by the apostles.  

In the next several sections I’ll be showing that the Gospels couldn’t have been written by the apostles for the following reasons.

I. The Absence of Any Internal Evidence inside the Gospels

II. The Problems with Church Tradition

III. The Linguistic and Literacy Problems

IV. Cultural and Geographic Problems

V The Synoptic Problem

VI. The Q Hypothesis

VII. The Problem of John and Synoptics

VIII. The Problems with the Gospel of Luke

and, as a bonus, I’ll put in my own thoughts on

IX. Does It Matter that the Gospels are Anonymous?

I. The Absence of Any Internal Evidence inside the Gospels
  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, 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.”         

          

            Christian scholars argue that this coda was written later, and 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.  

            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.

II. The Problems with Church Tradition

The tradition that the Gospels were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John does not date back to the time of the apostles themselves.  We have nothing from within their lifetime that indicates they authored these Gospels

            Our earliest copies of the Gospels do not contain the titles of Matthew, Mark, Luke or John.  (Granted, our earliest copies of the Gospels are just fragments, so it’s difficult to draw too much from this.)

            Also, the earliest quotations we have of the Gospels from the writings of the early Church fathers do not contain the names of Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. 

            In ancient fragments, there’s substantial variation on how the titles are written, which indicates these were not part of the original text.  Furthermore, as Bart Ehrman points out, Matthew would never have titled his Gospel: “The Gospel According to Matthew”.  He would have just simply said “by Matthew” as the title line. [MORE ON THAT HERE]

            The names of the Gospels were not settled on until the mid second century.

            The earliest source we have on the authors of the Gospels is Papias, who wrote somewhere between 110 and 140 125 A.D., long after the apostles themselves would have been dead. 

            Papias only commented on the authorship of Matthew and Mark.  (He said nothing about the Gospels of Luke and John).

            As Bart Ehrman points out in Jesus, Interrupted, Papias is problematic to use as a source because he had a credibility problem.  The Church historian Eusebius (W) called Papias “a man of very small intelligence.”  Papias also seems to have believed in a lot of crazy stuff.  Papias believed that after betraying Judas betrayed Jesus, Judas was cursed to bloat up, becoming so fat that eventually he couldn’t walk down the street because his head couldn’t fit between buildings, and eventually exploded and died. Ehrman cites other writings of Papias (surviving in Eusebius’s records) in which Papias quotes bizarre sayings of Jesus that no one today takes seriously at all.  Papias claimed that these sayings came from via the same church elders who vouched for Mark’s authorship. As Bart Ehrman notes, the only reason Christians ever bring up Papias is to establish the authorship of the Gospels.  Other than that, everything else he wrote is completely disregarded.  But, Erhman asks, if we can’t trust Papias on any of his other writings, why trust him about the authorship of the Gospels?

            Papias’s own writings do not survive (the other Church fathers apparently thought Papias’s writing were not worth saving), but some of his quotations survive in other writers. 

            Papias’s writings survive in the records of Eusebius.  Eusebius quotes Papias as saying that he personally talked to Christians who knew a bunch of people called the elders who vouched that Mark had written one of the Gospels.  (You can see already how this information is already 4th hand: theory of some anonymous elders, via anonymous groups of Christians, via Papais, as quoted in Eusebius).

            For Matthew, Papias doesn’t even say what his source is.

            Other than Papias, we don’t get any identification of the Gospels until Irenaeus in 180 A.D.  Here, for the first time, is someone now vouching for the authorship of Luke and John, after the apostles have all now been dead for quite some time.

            The time difference here is really quite incredible.  (As one blogger put it, this is like me now identifying the author of someone who wrote during the American Civil War.)

            Plus, there are any number of textual problems with the Church tradition inherited from Papias and Irenaeus.

            Ireneaus claims Matthew wrote his Gospel first (before Mark, Luke or John), and that it was originally written in Hebrew, and then only translated into Greek later.  (Papias also believes the Gospel of Matthew was originally written in Hebrew.) 

            But all evidence points to Matthew being an originally Greek document.  No Hebrew copies of it have survived.  And as Robin Lane Fox points out, we know something about how the ancients translated documents, and we can generally tell if something was written originally in Greek, or if it was translated into Greek from another language.  There’s no textual evidence that Matthew was originally translated from Hebrew.  (And if Matthew had been originally written in Hebrew, then that would make the Synoptic problem that much more of an issue—but we’ll get to the synoptic problem in part 9).

            As Bart Ehrman points out, the probably reason that the Church tradition on the Apostolic authorship for the Gospels emerged in the late 2nd Century is that this was about the time that a lot of heretical Gospels started popping up that were forged under the names of the apostles (for example Peter, Thomas, Philip, et cetera).  Since the heretics were claiming that their Gospels were authored directly by the apostles, the Orthodox Church fathers needed to start coming up with traditions that linked their established Gospels back to the apostles.  The Orthodox Christians couldn’t be using Gospels with anonymous authors when the heretics claimed that their Gospels came directly from the apostles.

So Why Did the Church Fathers Then Settle on Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Instead of Attributing the Gospels to More Major Apostles like Peter, Paul, and James?

          There are a couple different theories for this:

            Bart Ehrman argues that it’s possible in the first and second centuries these names carried more weight in early Christian circles than they do today.  John-Mark, after all, was closely associated with both the missionary activities of both Peter and Paul.  Matthew and Luke may also have been bigger names back then than we realize.

(It’s notable that a lot of the heretic Gospels were attributed to apostles who are today considered minor—Thomas, Philip, Andrew, Mary Magdalene—but may have had more weight in some early Christian circles.)

            The big three names of the early apostles were Peter, James, John and Paul.  We already have the Gospel of John.  Luke was closely associated with Paul, and John-Mark was closely associated with Peter.  This was possibly a way of tying the Orthodox tradition directly to the big names of the Apostles, and yet at the same time not being too obvious about it.  (If they were too obvious about it, it might have invited the Gnostics and other unorthodox Christians to refute the authorship claims.)

           

            Robin Lane Fox, however, argues that it could be precisely because these figures were so minor that it was easy to attribute Gospels to them.  In the second century, Peter could have been too well known in Church circles to falsely attribute something to him—it might have been too well known by Peter’s associates that he never actually sat down and wrote a Gospel.  But minor figures like Matthew, John-Mark, and Luke would have been much more obscure, and harder to check up on if you claimed a Gospel was written by them.

            Also, it’s important to remember that the 4 Gospels were not originally forged under false names.  (Although other New Testament documents—Titus, 1&2 Timothy, 1&2 Peter—were forged, but that’s a separate topic.)  The Gospels were written anonymously, and only later did the Church try to assign names to them.  

            Robin Lane Fox suggests that the Church probably worked backwards from clues that they had in the Gospels.  For example Matthew is the only Gospel which defines the apostle Matthew by name (instead of “Levi” used in Mark), and the only Gospel that gives Matthew’s job as a tax collector.  Matthew’s Gospel also includes descriptions of sums of money in Jesus’s parables—the type of thing a tax payer would notice.  This kind of guess work might have caused the early church to attribute the Gospel to Matthew.  (Robin Lane Fox has similar theories for Mark and Luke.  I won’t list all the details here, but it’s the same kind of thing—they also involve working backwards from clues in the Bible.)

            The Gospel of Luke, because it’s preface makes clear the author was not an eyewitness, could never have been attributed to a major Apostle anyway, but it could easily be attributed to a companion of Paul.

III. The Linguistic and Literacy Problems

          The big problem with arguing for the traditional authorship of the Gospels is that the Gospels are written in a highly educated Greek.  It is unlikely that this could have been written by the disciples, because they (like Jesus) spoke Aramaic, not Greek.  And, like most people in the first century, they would almost certainly have been unable to read or write.

            In the ancient world, only a very privileged few were able to read and write, and the disciples would not have been among this privileged few. 

            If you require extra persuasion on this, in his book Forged Bart Ehrman spends considerable time running the numbers of literacy in the ancient world, and explaining why there is almost zero chance the fisherman in Galilee would have been able to read and write. 

            But if simple common sense didn’t tell us this already, then the books of Acts tells us explicitly that Peter and John were illiterate.  Acts 4:13 “The members of the Council were amazed to see how bold Peter and John were and to learn that they were ordinary men of no education.”  The Greek word used here for “no education” specifically means illiterate.

            Matthew is questionable.  As Bart Ehrman points out, it’s possible that Matthew, as a tax collector would have had some education if he was high up the ladder.  But if he was just a low-level tax collector, he probably wouldn’t have been educated.

            But though Matthew may be questionable, John was certainly not educated enough to write the highly stylistic Greek Gospel that appears under his name.

            In addition, some of the double entendres in the Gospel only work in Greek, and could not have originated in Aramaic.  Bart Ehrman gives the example of Jesus’s conversation with Nicodemus.  The confusion over the words “born again” between Jesus and Nicodemus come from the fact that these words have two different meanings in Greek, but this would not have been true in Aramaic.

[The section from Bart Ehrman is as follows: In the Gospel of John, chapter 3, Jesus has a famous conversation with Nicodemus in which he says, “You must be born again.”  The Greek word translated “again” actually has two meanings: it can mean not only “a second time” but also “from above.”  Whenever it is used elsewhere in the John, it means “from above” (John 19:11, 23).  That is what Jesus appears to mean in John 3 when he speaks with Nicodemus: a person must be born from above in order to have eternal life in heaven above.  Nicodemus misunderstands, though, and thinks Jesus intends the other meaning of the word, that he has to be born a second time.  “How can I crawl back into my mother’s womb?” he asks, out of some frustration.  Jesus corrects him: he’s not talking about a second physical birth, but a heavenly birth, from above.

            This conversation with Nicodemus is predicated on the circumstance that a certain Greek word has two meanings (a double entendre).  Absent the double entendre, the conversation makes little sense.  The problem is this: Jesus and this Jewish leader in Jerusalem would not have been speaking Greek, but Aramaic.  But the Aramaic word for “from above” does not also mean “second time.”  This is a double entendre that works only in Greek.  So it looks as though this conversation could not have happened—at least not as it is described in the Gospel of John. (From Jesus, Interrupted p. 154-155).]

            Also, in the Gospel of John, the following exchange is recorded between Peter and Jesus:

            After they had eaten, Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Simon son of John, do you love me more than these others do?”

            “Yes, Lord,” he answered, “you know that I love you.”

            Jesus said to him, “Take care of my lambs.”  A second time Jesus said to him, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?”

            “Yes, Lord,” he answered, “you know that I love you.”

            Jesus said to him, “Take care of my sheep.”  A third time Jesus said, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?”

            Peter became sad because Jesus asked him the third time, “Do you love me?” and so he said to him, “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you!

            Jesus said to him.  “Take care of my sheep…..”

John 21: 15-17 Today’s English Version

            Now, in the English translation, some of the nuances of the original Greek are lost, but I suspect many of us who grew up in Sunday School have had the original Greek meaning expounded to us at one point or another.  (In my case, I had the significance of the original Greek explained to me twice in my upbringing—once it was the subject of a sermon our pastor preached in church, and once it was a lesson my 8th Grade Bible teacher taught.)

            In the Greek, Jesus is using the word “agape” for love—what is often translated as a deep kind of love.  Peter is using the word “philio” which supposedly means a brotherly kind of love.  Jesus asks Peter twice using the word “agape” and then in the final question switches to “philio”.  The significance (as it’s usually explained) is that by the third time Jesus was willing to meet Peter on his own level, and accept whatever kind of love Peter was willing to give.

            Where this becomes problematic for Christian conservatives is that Jesus and Peter would have been speaking Aramaic, not Greek.  And the distinction between philio and agape would only work in the Greek—there is no equivalent distinction in Aramaic.

IV. Cultural and Geographic Problems

         In addition to the fact that the Gospels are written in an educated style of Greek, and Jesus and his followers were illiterate Aramaic speaking fisherman, there are other indications which make scholars think that the Gospels were probably written by educated Greek-speaking Gentiles in other parts of the Roman Empire, and not people who lived near Jesus or Palestine.  The Gospels make a number of mistakes when describing geography in Palestine, and they also make mistakes when describing ancient Jewish customs  

 I'd be lying if I said that the geography of Palestine was my area of expertise, but it is my understanding that for serious scholars this has been one of the reasons they doubt the Gospel writers could have been eyewitnesses.  Bart Ehrman says this in Jesus, Interrupted.   

There's also plenty of information on the web listing the geographical mistakes in the Gospels: see here.  And here.

There also appears to be a number of cultural mistakes about the first century Jewish community that indicates the authors were Gentiles from elsewhere in the Roman Empire.  Again, I'm not an expert myself.  However Bart Ehrman says one of the passages frequently cited is Mark 7, in which the Gospeller claims all Jews had to wash their hands before eating, which was a tradition they acquired from their elders.  In fact, no such tradition was followed by the majority of Jews, only by some of the more strict sects, and the Gospeller should have known something this basic if he had actually lived in Palestine.  [For more commentary on that chapter see here  and here].
Robin Lane Fox mentions the same incident, and says the whole story about Pharisees going all the way down from Jerusalem to Galilee to inspect the hand-washing of Jesus's disciples seems suspect to begin with.
There is also the problem of the Sanhedrin meeting during Jesus's trial.  According to the rules of the Sanhedrin, they were forbidden from meeting during the three days of the Passover, and from meeting at night.  In the trial of Jesus as recorded by the Gospels, they did both.  This is often cited as a further example of the Gospellers being ignorant of the customs.  [For more commentary on the inaccuracies in the Sanhedrin trail see here and here.]
Dale Martin in his Yale Lectures mentions in passing some of what appear to be anachronism in the Gospel of John in which the heated 2nd Century debate between Jews and Christians is projected back into Jesus's lifetime--the blind man whom Jesus healed being expelled from the Jewish synagogue is cited as an anachronism.
The Gospel of John also is unable to distinguish between the different Jewish groups in 1st Century Palestine, referring to all the different sects of Judaism simply as "the Jews".  
(To quote from an old paper I wrote back in my Calvin days Whereas the other gospels distinguish between which groups sought the death of Jesus (the Pharisees, the Sanhedrin, et cetera), John makes no distinction, referring to Jesus’ enemies as simply “The Jews”. )

V The Synoptic Problem

     Matthew, Mark and Luke are called the synoptic Gospels, because they all present a similar view of Jesus’s life and ministry.  (This is in contrast to the Gospel of John, who presents a much different view.  I’ll write about the problems between John and the synoptics in the next section.)

            However, careful analysis of the synoptic Gospels shows that not only do they have the same view points, but the synoptic Gospels are word for word identical for much of the time.

            This means that they aren’t 3 independent accounts.  Someone was obviously copying from someone else.

            Bart Ehrman, in his lectures on the New Testament, says that he often has trouble making his students believe that 3 independent accounts cannot by coincidence alone produce passages that are word-for-word exactly the same.  So he says he does an exercise where he walks into class and rearranges things on his desk for 5 minutes without saying anything.  Then he has everyone in the class write down a description of what has happened, and afterwards the class compares to see if anyone produced sentences exactly the same as someone else.  Inevitably, there are no exact duplicates of sentences.  “So,” Ehrman asks, “if you find a group of documents that were written many years after the event, and they all had sentences that were word for word exactly the same, what would this tell you?”  At this point, Ehrman claims, someone in the class will usually yell out, “It’s a miracle.”

            Well, says Ehrman, those are our two options.  Either the synoptic Gospels were copied from each other, or else there was some sort of divine miracle that caused them to be word-for-word the same at certain passages.  However, Ehrman adds, if you assume a divine miracle for the passages that are the same, then you are going to have trouble explaining the contradictions in passages that are different.  As I’ve already mentioned, a certain amount of discrepancy might be excusable in human eyewitnesses, but in divine revelation it doesn’t make sense that God is always contradicting himself.

            So, if the synoptic Gospels are copied from each other, then which one is the original, and which two are the copies?

            Scholars have generally assumed that Mark is the original, because the Gospel of Mark is the shortest, and Matthew and Luke both contain most of the material that is in Mark, plus their own substantial additions.  Scholars assume that it is more likely that Matthew and Luke would be adding material to their source material, and less likely that Mark’s Gospel would be deleting material from his source material. 

            This is problematic for Church tradition, because Church tradition says that Matthew wrote his Gospel first.  In order to try to preserve this Church tradition, at one time there used to be a theory that Matthew could have written his gospel first, and then Mark wrote his gospel which was intended as a short summary of Matthew.  But that doesn’t really make sense for a whole bunch of technical linguistic reasons.  For example, Matthew seems to be correcting factual mistakes in Mark, or fixing the grammar, or getting rid of the redundancies.   It makes sense that Matthew would be trying to improve on the original material that he was using as a source but it doesn’t make sense that Mark would be taking Matthew’s account and adding mistakes or deliberately sabotaging the grammar, or adding in redundancies.

            This is just a very brief summary of the issue.  Whole books are written on the synoptic issue, so for more hard hitting analysis of the technical side of it see HERE, HERE, or HERE.

            Moreover, whenever Matthew and Luke can both use Mark as a source, they tell the same story (with occasionally some added minor details or changes).  But when Matthew and Luke are writing stories for which they can not go to Mark as a common source, then they contradict each other wildly.

            For example, there is nothing written in Mark’s Gospel about the birth of Jesus.  (Mark’s Gospel just starts when Jesus is already an adult.)  So Matthew and Luke have no common source for the birth stories, and have to make up the stories on their own.

            In Matthew’s Gospel, Joseph and Mary start by living in Bethlehem, then have to flee to Egypt when Herod kills all the newborn baby boys.  Then later, after Herod dies, they return from Egypt, but are warned in a dream not to go back to Bethlehem so they resettle in Nazareth instead.

            In Luke, Mary and Joseph start by living in Nazareth, but then there is some sort of strange census which for some reason requires everyone to go back to their ancestral town, so they go down to Bethlehem for the birth of Jesus, and then return to their home in Nazareth after the birth.

            (Sidenote: The details of either birth story, by the way, are not supported by history.  We have no record of Herod killing all the newborn baby boys in Bethlehem, or of this Empire-wide Roman census that required everyone to go back to their ancestral towns.  It appears Matthew and Luke are just making their stories up.  Both seem to be trying, in separate ways, to get around an awkward problem: Jesus was well known to have been from Nazareth but the prophesies predicted the Messiah would from Bethlehem.  So how to explain that Jesus was born in Bethlehem even though he was from Nazareth?)

            Another example is that in Mark, in its original form, Jesus never appears to anyone after the resurrection.  (Mark 16:9-20 was added much later.  This should be footnoted in your Bible).  In Mark as it was originally written, the women see the empty tomb, they run away, and then the Gospel just ends there, and Jesus never makes any appearances after his death. 

            So Matthew and Luke, when they were writing their Gospels, could copy from Mark only up to the point of the empty tomb story, but then after the empty tomb, they were left on their own to write the stories of the resurrected Jesus’s appearance to the disciples, and for this section they again contradict each other wildly.  In fact, they contradict each other on just about every point that it’s possible to contradict on.

            In Matthew’s Gospel, the disciples are told that Jesus has been resurrected, and to prove it he will meet them in Galilee.  So they all trudge all the way out to Galilee (the Gospel says many of them were still skeptical that Jesus had risen, but they went out to Galilee anyway) where Jesus met them.  In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus appears to the disciples while they are still in Jerusalem, and then leads them out to Bethany, where he ascends into heaven from there.  In Acts (which is written by the same author as Luke) the disciples are explicitly told not to leave Jerusalem until they receive the gifts of the Holy Spirit.

            Unless you assume Mark was the first Gospel, it doesn’t make sense that Matthew and Luke would both follow Mark for the points that Mark had written on, but then go off on completely different stories at precisely the points on which Mark is silent.

            Now again, none of this is crazy left-wing scholarship.  All of this was explained to me in my religion 101 class at my conservative Christian college.  I remember this lecture very well, because I remember at this point getting very confused, and I raised my hand and asked, “But, wasn’t Matthew an eyewitness?”

            “Exactly!” the professor responded.  “So why would Matthew, who was an eye-witness, be copying down from John Mark, who wasn’t even there?  This is one of the reasons scholars think the Gospel of Matthew wasn’t actually written by Matthew.” 

            The professor then went on to explain some of the other reasons why scholars don’t think the Gospels were written by their traditional authors.

VI. The Q Hypothesis

          There are sections of Matthew and Luke which are word for word the same, but do not appear in Mark.  More specifically, there are a number of sayings of Jesus which are word for word the same, and which furthermore appear in the same order in both Matthew and Luke, but not Mark.

            Once again, note that this could not have been from coincidence.  They had to be copying from somewhere.

            So, since these passages are not in Mark, is Matthew copying from Luke or is Luke copying from Matthew?

            Well, probably neither.  Or at least if the author of Matthew knew about Luke, or vice-versa, then he obviously didn’t trust him above half.  Remember in the places where Mark is not a common source—the birth narratives and the resurrection appearances—Matthew and Luke tell completely different stories which contradict each other on everything.  So if somehow the author of Luke knew about Matthew, he obviously didn’t trust anything Matthew had to say about the birth of Christ or the resurrection.

            So since the authors of the Gospels Matthew and Luke either didn’t know each other, or mistrusted each other, it is hypothesized by scholars that there must have been some collections of sayings of Jesus (so named as the “Q” source) which both Matthew and Luke were copying from, and which has since been lost to history.

            This is another reason why it is problematic to claim that Matthew’s Gospel is direct eye-witness testimony.  The author of Matthew is apparently copying straight out of the Q source, and we don’t even know who wrote the Q source, or how reliable it is.  Did an eyewitness write Q?  Is it a collected oral tradition?  Or did someone somewhere just make it up?  Scholarship has no idea, and church tradition is entirely silent on the issue.

VII. The Problem of John and Synoptics

With the Gospel of John, there is no synoptic problem—none of the other Gospels are copying from John, and although occasionally some of the stories are similar, the wording is always different.  John is a completely independent source. 

            But the problem is that it’s too different from the Synoptics. There are so many differences between John and the Synoptics that it’s problematic to claim that they’re both eyewitnesses to the same events.  If the Synoptics are based on eyewitness testimony, then John can not be a reliable eyewitness, and if John is eyewitness testimony, then the Synoptics are not reliable.

            For example, many of the most famous stories in the Synoptics are not in John.  None of Jesus’s parables are in John.  There’s no mention in John of Jesus going out into the desert.  Jesus performs many exorcisms in the Synoptics, no exorcisms are mentioned in John. 

            And, surprisingly, there’s no mention of the transfiguration in John.  Remember, John was one of the 3 disciples selected to go up on the mountain and see the transfiguration of Moses and Elijah talking to Jesus.  You would think that if someone saw the reincarnated spirits of Moses and Elijah talking to Jesus, this would have made a big enough of an impression on someone to include it in their eyewitness testimony, but there’s nothing in John.  (And ironically, according to Church tradition the Gospel of John would have been the only eyewitness to this.  The only Gospellers who wrote about it, Matthew, John-Mark, and Luke, weren’t even there, and the one person who was there didn’t even write about it!)

            Then there’s an equally great problem going the other way: all sorts of fantastic stories which are in John, but not in the Synoptics.

            For example, the Gospel of John is the only Gospel which contains the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead.  It’s hard to believe that if this really happened, the other 3 apostles simply forgot to put this into their account.  You would think someone being raised from the dead would be the kind of thing you’d remember. 

            According to the Gospel of John, the miracle of raising Lazarus from the dead was not a private little affair that no one knew about—in John 12 many Jews are flocking to believe in Jesus because of the miracle of Lazarus, so much so that John reports that the chief priests plot to assassinate Lazarus to take away the proof that Jesus raised someone from the dead. 

            Did Matthew and Mark just forget about this?

            And what about Luke?  Although Luke is all 3rd hand information (at best) Luke’s introduction claims that the author was scrupulously researching all the documents available about Jesus.  It’s hard to believe that Luke missed this story if it really happened, and if it was as big a deal as the author of John claimed.

            Also, remember that none of the Gospel writers knew that their Gospel would later be bound up together in the Bible alongside the other Gospels.  The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were not originally bound up and sold as a package deal.  Each Gospel original existed completely independent of the others, and each Gospel writer at the time must have assumed that for their readers, this one Gospel was the only Gospel they might ever read.  So the authors of Synoptic Gospels could not possibly have been thinking, “Oh, its okay.  We’ll leave these parts out, because people can read about them in John’s Gospel.”  (Plus the synoptic Gospels were written first, so John’s Gospel wouldn’t even have existed at the time they were writing!)  If the synoptic Gospels left something out, that’s an indication that they didn’t know it happened, or they didn’t believe it happened.

            And then besides the omissions, there are lots of explicit contradictions between John’s Gospel and the Synoptics.  For example, in the Synoptic Gospels Jesus is crucified after the Passover meal, but in John’s Gospel Jesus is crucified before it.  In the Synoptic Gospels the trial of Jesus before Pilate takes place in public, but in John’s Gospel Jesus and Pilate have private conversations.
All four Gospels contradict each other on the resurrection.  Mark only writes of the empty tomb, so Matthew and Luke contradict each other on everything after the empty tomb.  John has a separate account all together of story of the resurrection.  In the Synoptic Gospels, all three agree that Mary Magdalene arrived at the tomb, and the angels told her Christ had risen.  In the Gospel of John, Mary simply sees an empty tomb, and cries because she believes Christ body has been stolen by his enemies, until she encounters someone who she believes was a gardener, and who turns out to be Christ.  

As with all the other subjects I'm touching on, I'm not really doing this justice.  Whole books are written on the differences between John and the Synoptics (something Lee Strobel and Craig Blomberg admit during their discussions).  But this chart at this website here is a very useful quick and dirty breakdown of the differences.

            Okay, so the contradictions and the omissions are one problem.  The second problem is that John’s Gospel is the only Gospel where Jesus claims to be God.  In the synoptic Gospels Jesus gives himself many titles (son of man, son of God, the Messiah), but nowhere in Matthew, Mark and Luke does Jesus ever make the claim to be an incarnation of God, nor does anyone else make that claim on his behalf.

            In John, all of a sudden, the narrator of the Gospel and Jesus himself are both making the claim that Jesus is God descended into human form.

            That…that seems a bit of a major detail for Matthew, Mark and Luke to forget to write about, doesn’t it?  According to John’s Gospel, Jesus is walking around claiming to be God incarnate, and Matthew, Mark, and Luke just forget to write it down?  (And again remember, they couldn’t have assumed that their readers would just learn it from John.  The Bible didn’t exist yet, and John’s Gospel hadn’t even been written yet when they were writing.  If Matthew, Mark and Luke weren’t telling their readers that Jesus was really God incarnate, they must not have believed it was important for their readers to know this.)

Christian apologists will sometimes argue that John already knew about the previous Gospels, and so he saw no need to repeat what Matthew, John-Mark, and Luke had already written down.  but this is problematic for a number of reasons.

           

            First of all, there’s no evidence or proof for this supposition.   It’s just an assumption, bereft of any evidence, that is used to retrospectively explain away a difficulty. 

            Secondly, you would have to ask why.  Was there a papyrus shortage going on or something?  Was John limited to a certain amount of words?  Given how hotly disputed these stories were in the first and second century (the intense debating between Jews and Christians) why wouldn’t John have wanted to just add his eyewitness support to reinforce the stories that were already appearing in the Synoptics.  Especially some of the more fantastical stories (the transfiguration, for example, or the story in Matthew that all the dead rose out of their graves after Jesus was crucified).

            Thirdly, this assumption, even if you granted it, would only explain the omissions in one direction.  It might explain why John didn’t write about the big stories in the Synoptics, but it wouldn’t explain why the Synoptic writers omitted the big stories from the Gospel of John.  (Again, I know I’m repeating myself, but it’s important to remember they could have had no way of knowing that John would supplement whatever stories they left out.)

            Fourthly, it’s not even entirely consistent as an explanation, because then how to explain the stories the stories that John does repeat (for example, Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem)? 

            Fifthly, if you assume that John knew about the Synoptics, then it would make it much, much harder to explain the all the explicit contradictions between John’s Gospel and the Synoptics.

VIII. The Problems with the Gospel of Luke

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

            Since the purpose of this post is to discuss the question of eyewitness testimony of the Gospels, for our purposes here it doesn’t matter so much if the Gospel of Luke was written by the apostle Luke as using 3rd hand sources, or by an anonymous writer using 3rd hand sources.  Either way, the Gospel of Luke can't  be claimed as eyewitness testimony.

            ….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 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.  

            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.)

B. 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 Christians to claim that Luke was extremely accurate in everything he wrote.

            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.  

            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.

                      

            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. 

          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 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?

C. Luke’s Record as a Historian

            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, all the problems between John and the Synoptic Gospels would also seem to cast further doubt on Luke’s accuracy as a historian.

D. How Careful is Luke With His Sources?

          As already mentioned, 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. 

IX. Does It Matter that the Gospels are Anonymous?

  I hope I have by this point adequately proven that the Gospels are not eyewitness accounts, and that the Gospels were not written by the apostles assigned to them by Church tradition.

           

            I’m going to take a brief digression to ask the question: Does it matter?

           A point I should re-emphasize here is that most Christian scholars believe the Gospels are anonymous, and in fact I was first taught this at a conservative Christian college.  And it apparently doesn’t affect their faith.

            Over the years, I’ve somewhat regretted that I didn’t raise my hand in Religion 101, when my Christian college professor first told us that the Gospels were written anonymously, and ask, “But if we don’t even know who wrote the Gospels, how can we trust what’s inside of them?”  I regret this because today I am very curious to know what the professor’s answer would have been, and how he would have reconciled the uncertainty of the Gospel’s authorship with the certainty of Christian faith.

            However, when I was 18 and first learning all this for the first time, I was not yet in a position to ask this question.  I “knew” that the Christian faith was true, and I “knew” that the Gospels were inspired by God, and whether they were written by the Apostles, or whether they were written by some anonymous person didn’t affect my faith. 

            And indeed, if you start from the assumption that you “know” the Gospels are inspired by God, then it doesn’t really matter much who wrote them.  But this is just circular logic.  You believe in God because the Bible says so, and you believe in the Bible because God inspired it.  If at a certain point you get off this circular merry-go-round to stop and ask, “But how do we really know any of this stuff?  How do we know that the Bible was inspired?”, then it becomes a lot more difficult.

         

            When the early church was deciding what books were canonical, and what books were not canonical, one criteria they used is that all canonical books had to be written by an apostle or the associate of an apostle.  (This was something I learned in my confirmation class, as I wrote in this paper years ago, but Dale Martin also makes the same point in his Yale lectures.)  So, the Gospels of Matthew and John were admitted into the Canon because they were apostles, and Mark and Luke were admitted because they were associates of the apostles.  But take away the authorship of these books, and you've also taken away much of their original justification for being admitted into the canon into the first place.

            But more than that, if we accept that the early Church was wrong about the authorship of the Gospels, then I think it’s a legitimate question to ask how we know they were right about the Gospels being inspired by God?

I mean, consider this: at no point in history did God come down  from heaven and tell us explicitly what books of the Bible were inspired by him, and which books were not.  Nor is the divine inspiration of the books self-evident from their content.  There is simply no proof that any of the books of the Bible are divinely inspired.  As Thomas Paine said, These books, beginning with Genesis and ending with Revelation ...., are, we are told, the word of God.  It is, therefore, proper to for us to know who told us so, that we may know what credit to give to the report.  The answer to this question is, that nobody can tell, except that we tell one another so.
One just has to take it on faith that the church fathers, hundreds of years ago, were able to accurately judge which books where divinely inspired and which ones were not

But on what basis can we say the Church fathers were wrong about the authorship of these books, and yet right about the divine inspiration?  If we now know that the church fathers were mistaken in some of their assumptions about these books, doesn't it raise questions about their credibility on other assumptions?

            And leaving aside the question of divine inspiration, and using the Gospels simply as historical documents to prove the truth of Christ (as Lee Strobel tries to do), you have serious problems of reliability once you admit the Gospels were not eyewitness documents, and that you have no idea who wrote them.

When talking about the first five books of the Bible, Thomas Paine wrote that he did not believe the books were really written by Moses, and that consequently the books must be anonymous, and consequently they could not be believed.  He justified his thinking in this way:
I know, however, but of one ancient book that authoritatively challenges universal consent and belief, and that is Euclid’s Elements of Geometry; and the reason is, because it is a book of self-evident demonstration, entirely independent of its author , and of everything relating to time, place, and circumstances.  The matters contained in that book would have the same authority they have now, had they been written by any other person, or had the work been anonymous, or had the author never been known; for the identical certainty of who was the author, makes no part of our belief of the matters contained in the book.  But it is quite otherwise with respect to the books ascribed to Moses, to Joshua, to Samuel, etc; these are books of testimony, and they testify of things naturally incredible; and therefore, the whole of our belief as to the authenticity of those books rests, in the first place, upon the certainty that they were written by Moses, Joshua, and Samuel; secondly upon the credit we give to the testimony.  We may believe the first, that is we may believe the certainty of the authorship, and yet not the testimony; in the same manner that we may believe that a certain person gave evidence upon a case and yet not believe the evidence that he gave.  But if it should be found that the books ascribed to Moses, Joshua and Samuel were not written by Moses, Joshua, and Samuel, every part of the authority and authenticity of those books is gone at once; for there can be no such thing as forged or invented testimony; neither can there be anonymous testimony, more especially as to things naturally incredible, such as that of talking with God face to face, or that of the sun and moon standing still at the command of a man.

Change the names here from Moses to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and the same critique could be made of the Gospels.  If we know that they are anonymous, how can we put our faith in their testimony?

            And leaving aside the question of divine inspiration, and using the Gospels simply as historical documents to prove the truth of Christ, you have serious problems of reliability once you admit the Gospels were not eyewitness documents, and that you have no idea who wrote them.

            Since many Christian scholars know the Gospels were anonymous and still believe in them, I’d be interested in hearing their defense of the Christian faith. 

            [I have a friend who was raised in a conservative Catholic school, and he told me that from the age of high school the priests let him in on the secret that the Gospels had not been written by the Apostles, but had been written anonymously.  But that didn’t matter, because God had inspired them nonetheless, and the anonymous human scribe who wrote down God’s words was of no importance.  This he believed for several years afterwards, he told me, until he found all the contradictions in the Gospels too problematic.  If God had inspired the Gospels, then why was God always contradicting himself?]

            In my opinion, I think you may be able to argue some sort of weak version of Christianity based on anonymous Gospels.  Something like: there probably is some sort of benevolent God, and he probably reveals some of the truth about himself in the Bible, and maybe we can use some of the teachings.

           

            But I don’t think based on anonymous Gospels you can argue the old-time-religion strong view of Christianity—the version that we are right, and everyone else is wrong, and your eternal salvation depends on if you believe in the Bible or not. 

            You certainly couldn’t launch missionary work based on this kind of view of the Bible.  You can’t go up into the hill tribes and say, “We have these 4 Gospels.  We don’t know who wrote them, or what their sources were, and we’re pretty sure they weren’t eye-witnesses to the events that they describe.  The Church believed they were inspired by God based on the mistaken assumption that the Apostles wrote them.  And they all contradict each other on the key points of the birth, death and resurrection of Christ—in other words, all the key parts of the doctrine.  But anyway, you have to believe in them or you’re going to hell for all eternity.”

            That would be absurd, right?  And yet, missionary groups continue to set out.  (I see them all the time here in Cambodia).  What do you think these missionaries are telling people?

            Also, if you believe, as Christians do, that the resurrection of Christ was the most momentous event in human history, then why didn’t God leave us better documentation of it?  Especially concerning all the other areas of history that are much better documented.  (We have more surviving eye-witness accounts of Marie Antoinette’s tea parties than we do of the resurrection of Christ.)  If God really wanted us to believe in this, why wouldn’t he have left us with more reliable documentation?

            Well, anyway, those are all my thoughts on that problem.

Link of the Day
Noam Chomsky: The Future of Humanity