Book Review of The Case For Christ by Lee Strobel Part 12: My Personal Thoughts on Whether It Matter That the Gospels are Anonymous

(Book Review)

See Part 1 General Comments

Part 2: An Overview of Lee Strobel’s Argument that the Gospels are Based on Eyewitness Evidence

Part 3: Even if the Gospels Were Based on Eyewitnesses Evidence, That Would Not, Ipso Facto, Mean That They Were 100% Reliable

Part 4: Even if Lee Strobel Were Able to Prove that the Church Tradition about the Gospels Was Correct, Most of the Gospel Stories Still Would Not Be Based on Eyewitness Testimony

Part 5: Why the Church Tradition on the Apostolic Authorship of the Gospels is Incorrect

Part 6: The Gospels Do Not Contain Any Internal Evidence that they were Written by the Apostles.

Part 7:  Problems with Church Tradition Concerning the Apostolic Authorship of the Gospels

Part 8: Linguistic, Literacy, Cultural, and Geographic Problems Which Indicate the Gospels Were Not Written by the Apostles

Part 9: The Synoptic Problem and the Q Hypothesis

Part 10:  The Problem of the Synoptic Gospels and the Gospels of John

Part 11: The Problems with Luke

            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?

            Well, to Lee Strobel it obviously does, because much of his book is based off the argument that the Gospels are the eyewitness testimony of the Apostles.  And with the claim of eyewitness testimony gone, so goes most of the rest of Lee Strobel’s case.

            But 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 it’s also something that Lee Strobel believes and repeats on page 66 of his book.  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?

            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.  (In other words, the version Lee Strobel is arguing.)

            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 eyewitnesses 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.

            Next post I’ll finally get around to critiquing Lee Strobel’s arguments about why he thinks the Gospels were written actually written by the apostles.