See Part 1 General Comments
Part 11: The Problems with Luke
Okay
having, I hope, established all the reasons why it’s impossible that Matthew,
Mark, Luke and John could have written the Gospels assigned to them, I’ll now
finally get around to looking at Lee Strobel’s arguments.
Lee
Strobel, and his apologist for this section Craig Blomberg, talk about this for
pages 22-28. During these pages, I’ve
divided their arguments into 2 sections, which I’ll address separately.
I.
Church Tradition is True Because Church Tradition Says It Is.
Having
thus “proved” the truth of Church tradition on the Gospels, Lee Strobel and
Craig Blomberg get around to trying to explain away the central awkwardness of
their position: Why Matthew, the eyewitness, is copying from Mark, who is not
an eyewitness. I’ll address this in the
third section.
I’ll start
with Lee Strobel’s first point:
I.
Church Tradition is True Because Church Tradition Says It Is.
From page 22-23:
“Tell me this,” I said with an edge of
challenge in my voice, “is it really possible to be an intelligent, critically
thinking person and still believe that the four gospels were written by the
people whose name have been attached to them?”
Blomberg set his cup of coffee on
the edge of his desk and looked intently at me.
“The answer is yes,” he said with conviction.
He sat back and continued. “It’s important to acknowledge that strictly
speaking the gospels are anonymous. But the uniform testimony of the early
church was that Matthew, also known as Levi, the tax collector and one of the twelve
disciples, was the author of the first gospel in the New Testament; that John
Mark, a companion of Peter, was the author of the Gospel we call Mark; and that
Luke, known as Paul’s ‘beloved physician’ wrote both the gospel of Luke and the
Acts of the Apostles.”
“How uniform was the belief that
they were the authors?” I asked.
“There are no known competitors for
these three Gospels,” he said. “Apparently,
it was just not in dispute.”
Okay,
as I said in part 1, in order to refute Lee Strobel’s book, I’m
going to have to point out the ridiculously obvious reasons why his
ridiculously stupid arguments don’t work, so just bear with me here as we work
through the obvious.
In
a book trying to prove the truth of Christianity, the accuracy of the uniform testimony of the early church is
precisely what is in dispute. You can’t
point to Church tradition as a proof of Church tradition in and of
itself. (I can’t believe I just had to
say that.)
Secondly,
we have absolutely no documents or testimony from before the 2nd Century to
indicate that these any of these Gospels were written by these people. There is nothing that goes back to the
lifetime of the apostles to support the authorship. So when Craig Blomberg cites the “early” church, it’s important to
remember this is a relative term.
The
fact that there were no known competitors for the authorship in ancient times
is not convincing. When disproving a
legend, you don’t actually need to cite a competing legendary tradition in
order to cast doubt on the first one.
For example, no modern historian takes seriously the legendary story
about Romulus and Remus and the founding of Rome. And no one ever has tried to prove the truth
of this story by saying, “But in Roman tradition, Romulus
and Remus had no other competitors for the founding of Rome.
In fact it doesn’t even seem to have been in dispute among the ancient
Romans.” (You also can’t prove a
tradition by just simply saying that it wasn’t in dispute among the people it
developed in.)
Okay,
so exactly what is the early Church tradition these guys are relying on? They get into that on pages 24-25:
“Let’s go back to Mark, Matthew, and Luke,”
I said. “What specific evidence do you
have that they are the authors of the gospels?”
Bloomberg leaned forward. “Again, the oldest and probably most
significant testimony comes from Papias, who in about A.D. 125 specifically
affirmed that Mark had carefully and accurately recorded Peter’s eyewitness
observations. In fact, he said Mark ‘made
no mistakes’ and did not include ‘any false statement.’ And Papias said Matthew
had preserved the teachings of Jesus as well.
“Then Irenaeus, writing about A.D.
180, confirmed the traditional authorship.
In fact, here—,” he said, reaching for a book. He flipped it open and read Irenaeus’ words.
Matthew published his own Gospel among the Hebrews in their own tongue, when Peter and Paul were preaching the Gospel in Rome and founding the Church there. After their departure, Mark the disciple and interpreter of Peter himself, handed down to us in writing the substance of Peter’s preaching. Luke, the follower of Paul, set down in a book the Gospel preached by his teacher. Then John, the disciple of the Lord, who also leaned on his breast, himself produced his Gospel while he was living at Ephesus in Asia.
I looked up from the notes I was
taking. “OK, let me clarify this,” I
said. “If we can have confidence that the gospels were written by the disciples
Matthew and John, by Mark, the companion of the disciple Peter, and by Luke,
the historian, companion of Paul, and sort of a first-century journalist, we
can be assured that the events they record are based on either direct or
indirect eyewitness testimony.”
As I was speaking, Blomberg was
mentally sifting my words. When I finished, he nodded.
“Exactly,” he said crisply.
Right,
so there are several points to be made in response to this:
I. First of all, there are a lot of problems with both the testimony
of Papias and Ireneaus. I already went
over all this in Part 7, so I’m not going to repeat myself here.
II. This is a minor nitpick, but as I said
in Part 7, Papias’s writings may have been as late as 140 A.D.
III. Note carefully all the things they establish
here, because in just 2 more pages (on page 27) they’re going to completely
contradict almost everything they say here.
In the quote above they’re admitting that by Church tradition Matthew
wrote first, Matthew wrote in Hebrew, Mark wrote after Matthew, and Mark wrote
after Peter and Paul had departed. They’re going to completely contradict themselves on all of these points when they try to explain away why Matthew is copying from John Mark on page 27.
IV. Scholars generally date Mark to 70
A.D., Matthew and Luke to 90, and John somewhere between 90-120. Look how big the gap is between the Ireneaus’s
testimony and when the actual material that was produced.
The
problem is bad enough if we go by the secular account, but it gets much worse
if we accept the timeline that Craig Blomberg and Lee Strobel propose on page
33-34. They want to argue that Acts “cannot be dated any later than A.D. 62. Having established that, we can then work
backwards from there. Since Acts is the
second of a two-part work, we know the first part—the gospel of Luke—must have
been written earlier than that. And
since Luke incorporates parts of the Gospel of Mark, that means Mark is even
earlier. If you allow maybe a year for each of those, you end up with Mark
written no later than about A.D. 60, maybe even the late 50s.” (p.33-34)
Now,
no serious scholar takes Lee Strobel’s timeline seriously, but I’m not going to
get into that here. The point for now is
that judged by their own timeline that they themselves want to use, there’s a
huge gap between when the Gospels were actually written and the testimony of
Ireneaus. It’s over a 120 year gap. This is like someone now establishing the
authorship of a Victorian Era document.
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