Book Review of The Case For Christ by Lee Strobel Part 14: Lee Strobel’s Argument that Church Tradition Must Be True Because the Church Would Have No Reason To Lie

(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

Part 12: Does It Matter That the Gospels are Anonymous?

Part 13: Lee Strobel’s Argument that Church Tradition is True because Church Tradition Says It Is

            Lee Strobel’s second argument is Church Tradition Must Be True Because the Church Would Have No Reason To Lie

          From page 23:

            Even so, I wanted to test the issue further.  “Excuse my skepticism,” I said, “but would anyone have had a motivation to lie by claiming these people wrote these gospels, when they really didn’t?”

            Blomberg shook his head. “Probably not. Remember, these were unlikely characters,” he said, a grin breaking on his face.  “Mark and Luke weren’t even among the twelve disciples. Matthew was, but as a former hated tax collector, he would have been the most infamous character next to Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus!

            “Contrast that with what happened when the fanciful apocryphal gospels were written much later.  People chose the names of well-known and exemplary figures to be their fictitious authors—Philip, Peter, Mary, James. Those names carried a lot more weight than the names of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. So to answer your question, there would not have been any reason to attribute authorship to these three less respected people if it weren’t true.”

There are several points to make in response to this:

I. This Doesn’t Actually Prove Anything

II. Anonymous Literary Texts Tend to Attract Apocryphal Oral Traditions about Their Authors, and You Don’t Necessarily Need to Prove an Ulterior Motive

III. That Being Said the Church Did Actually Have Plenty of Reasons for Wanting to Claim Apostolic Authorship

IV. His Own Examples Are Undermining the Point He is Trying to Make

V. By His Own Criteria, This Means Any Gospel Bearing the Name of a Minor Apostle Must Be Authentic

VI. By His Own Criteria, This Means the Gospel of John is Probably Falsely Attributed

VII. Matthew, John-Mark and Luke are Not Actually as Problematic as He’s Making Them

VIII. He’s Going to Contradict His Own Argument Here on Page 27 When He Tries to Claim that Mark’s Gospel is Actually Directly from Peter

            Starting then with the first point:

I. This Doesn’t Actually Prove Anything

           First of all, notice how incredibly weak this is as a proof.  The most Craig Blomberg and Lee Strobel should be able to say from this is, “Hmm, isn’t it strange that the Church used some names of minor apostles instead of naming everything after Peter, James and John.  Maybe something’s going on here, maybe not.”

            In no way does this “prove” that the Apostles actually wrote the Gospels.  But this is typical of how the whole book is written.  Every little piece of evidence, no matter how flimsy, is immediately declared to “prove” Christianity.

            By the way, this is it.  This is their whole argument on Apostolic Authorship of the Gospels.  Church tradition is true because church tradition says it is (which we examined in part 13), and then this.  The whole rest of the section on eyewitnesses they either launch into defensive mode (explaining away the difficulties with their position) or advance completely contradicting theories (oral tradition).

II. Anonymous Literary Texts Tend to Attract Apocryphal Oral Traditions about Their Authors, and You Don’t Necessarily Need to Prove an Ulterior Motive

            In secular history, there is a debate about the authorship of The Iliad.  Tradition assigns the epic poem to a poor blind poet named Homer, but many scholars doubt that Homer actually existed.

            Now, whatever you think about Homer, notice that it is not a valid argument to say: “Well, Homer must exist!  Why would the ancient Greeks ever lie about it?  What would they have to gain?  Why wouldn’t they have assigned The Iliad to a great king like Alexander the Great instead of to a poor blind poet?”

            You don’t actually need to prove a motive when apocryphal authors get assigned to anonymous texts.  The fact is that a text as important to the Greeks as the Iliad was bound to attract speculation about its author.  And if nothing was known about him, theories were bound to develop.

            How much more true this must have been for the early Church when they believed their eternal salvation relied on their faith in these documents.

III. That Being Said the Church Did Actually Have Plenty of Reasons for Wanting to Claim Apostolic Authorship

          So, hopefully anyone with an ounce of common sense can see plainly enough that the Church actually did have a motive for connecting their key texts with the Apostolic tradition.  What Craig Blomberg and Lee Strobel really should be saying is that, according to their logic, the appeal of claiming authorship from the minor Apostles is not nearly as great as the appeal of claiming authorship from the major Apostles.  But that’s not the same as saying the early church would have had no motivation.  Any connection at all with the Apostles is preferable than anonymous texts that have no authority.

            In fact, the irony is that Lee Strobel attempts to base his whole argument for Christ on the testimony of the eyewitness apostles, and yet at the same time doesn’t realize that someone with the same ideological agenda as him could have had a motivation to falsely attribute these documents.

            The early church had plenty of reasons to attribute these Gospels to the apostles.  In the battle between what would later become orthodox Christianity and the different heresies, each side needed to claim that their Gospels were connected directly to the apostles.  What’s more, in order to be accepted into the New Testament Canon, the early Church made it an explicit condition that the Gospels had to be written by an Apostle or an associate of an Apostle.  So there’s plenty of motivation right there.

            The fact that Lee Strobel and Craig Blomberg think Peter, James and John would have been the more obvious choice is altogether different from saying that there would be no motivation.

IV. His Own Examples Are Undermining the Point He is Trying to Make

          It’s hard to believe Lee Strobel and Craig Blomberg think they’re proving the point they want to be proving.  The evidence they’re citing proves the exact opposite of the point they want to make.

          Contrast that with what happened when the fanciful apocryphal gospels were written much later.  People chose the names of well-known and exemplary figures to be their fictitious authors—Philip, Peter, Mary, James. Those names carried a lot more weight than the names of Matthew, Mark, and Luke.

            First of all, he’s already admitting that in early Christianity lots of Gospels were found under false names.  Why does it escape his imagination that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John could be under false names?  (He says these apocryphal Gospels were written later, which is true.  The apocryphal Gospels are from the second Century, whereas Matthew Mark and Luke were from the late first century.  BUT, although canonical Gospels were written earlier, they didn’t have the Apostolic names assigned to them until the same period as the apocryphal Gospels starting appearing.)

            Secondly, Peter and James I’ll give him, but how does Philip make the list? Surely Philip has got to be just as obscure an apostle as Matthew, right?  So which point is he trying to prove anyway?

           

            And then there’s the Gospel of Mary.  There are 3 Marys in the New Testament, but the apocryphal Gospel he’s referring to here is the Gospel of Mary Magdalene.  
This is, by the way, one of the many slimy "slight of hand" little tricks that Strobel and Blomberg employ throughout this section (and that Lee Strobel employs throughout this book).  Mary the mother of Christ has been venerated into a semi-divine figure in Catholic tradition, and would definitely have been a source that carried a lot of weight in the Catholic Church.  Mary Magdalene, on the other hand, was assumed by Church tradition to be a prostitute--she was a sympathetic figure in Church mythology, but she was a fallen figure, one of Jesus's many imperfect followers.  Blomberg knows that his argument would carry more weight if the readers think he is referring to Mary the mother of Christ, and that furthermore this is probably the Mary that the readers would naturally think of first anyway. So he just leaves the reference deliberately unclear to try to get away with inferring something that's not true.
But the apocryphal he is referring to here, the only "Gospel of Mary" we possess, is the Gospel of Mary Magdalene (W).

Citing the Gospel of Mary Magdalene as one of the “names that carried a lot more weight than the names of Matthew, Mark, and Luke” is a very interesting choice, because later in the book Lee Strobel is going to argue that the testimony of women was not respected in the ancient world.

            In fact on pages 217 and 218, Lee Strobel argues that the story of the Mary Magdalene and the women visiting the empty tomb “proves” the resurrection, because in the ancient world the testimony of women was not considered valid, and so the Gospellers would have no incentive to make up such a story were it not true.

            Here, he’s arguing that the choice of Mary Magdalene as a Gospel writer would have had more credibility in the ancient world than the Matthew, Mark and Luke. 

            Surely he can’t have it both ways.

            (By the way, when you get to the empty tomb stories later in this book, remember that Lee Strobel has already conceded that the testimony of a woman in the ancient world was popular enough for a group of Christians to follow her apocryphal gospel.)

V. By His Own Criteria, This Means Any Gospel Bearing the Name of a Minor Apostle Must Be Authentic

          So, guess what, in the early Christian era there were tons of apocryphal Gospels claiming to be written by all sorts of apostles major and minor: the Gospel of Thomas, Nicodemus, Andrew, Bartholomew, Judas, Pilate, Joseph.... (see list at Wikipedia Here)

            Now, according to Lee Strobel and Craig Blomberg, any Gospel bearing the name of a minor Apostle must be authentic, because no one would ever falsely attribute any Gospel to anyone who wasn’t Peter, James, or John.  (And for some reason, in their logic Philip and Mary Magdalene make this list?)  So they would have to recognize all of these apocryphal Gospels then, right?

            But of course they’re not going to.

VI. By His Own Criteria, This Means the Gospel of John is Probably Falsely Attributed

          So the logic that Craig Blomberg and Lee Strobel are advancing is that the early Church would only have had motivation to falsely attribute authorship to the major Apostles: Peter, James, and John.

            Well, guess what?  John is already spoken for as the author of one of the 4 Gospels.  Doesn’t this mean, by their own criteria, that we should be highly suspicious of the Gospel of John?

            To his credit, Lee Strobel asks Craig Blomberg about this problem directly.  But then to Craig Blomberg’s discredit, he gives a long and convoluted answer about something on a completely different subject.  And then Lee Strobel accepts this.  It’s a truly bizarre exchange.

            That sounded logical, but it was obvious that he was conveniently leaving out one of the gospel writers.  “What about John?” I asked. “He was extremely prominent; in fact, he wasn’t just one of the twelve disciples, but one of Jesus’ inner three, along with James and Peter.”

            “Yes, he’s the one exception,” Blomberg conceded with a nod.  “And interestingly, John is the only gospel about which there is some question about the authorship.”

            “What exactly is in dispute?”

            “The name of the author isn’t in doubt—it’s certainly John,” Blomberg replied. “The question is whether it was John the apostle or a different John.

            “You see, the testimony of Christian writer named Papias, dated about A.D. 125, refers to John the apostle and John the elder, and its not clear from the context whether he’s talking about one person from two perspectives or two different people. But granted that exception, the rest of the early testimony is unanimous that it was John the apostle—the son of Zebedee—who wrote the gospel.” (p.23)

           

            Okay, first of all even if you take what he’s saying at face value, notice how this adds nothing to the discussion.  He briefly mentions some sort of dispute just to cloud the waters, and then promptly dismisses it and returns to what he’s been saying all along.  Nowhere at all does this address what should have been the principle concern: according to the criteria he himself introduced, the Gospel of John is a likely candidate for false attribution. 

            Instead, that whole digression is essentially the equivalent of him yelling, “Hey, look over there!  Now what where we talking about again?”

           

            Secondly, Papias never wrote anything about the Gospel of John (Papias only wrote about the Gospels of Matthew and Mark.  See Part 7 ).  So if Papias occasionally confused John the elder and John the apostle, it was never in the context of discussing the authorship of the Gospel of John.  And he knows this, because he recites Papias’s testimony on the following page (see Part 13).  So he’s deliberately bringing in something he knows has absolutely nothing to do with this.  (Boy!  You really have to watch these guys closely!  Talk about slimy debating tricks!)

Okay, continuing on with Lee Strobel and Blomberg:

            “And,” I said in an effort to pin him down further, “you’re convinced that he did?”

            “Yes, I believe the substantial majority of the material goes back to the apostle,” he replied. “However, if you read the gospel closely, you can see some indication that its concluding verses may have been finalized by an editor. Personally I have no problem believing that somebody closely associated with John may have functioned in that role, putting the last verses into shape and potentially creating the stylistic uniformity of the entire document.

            “But in any event,” he stressed, “the gospel is obviously based on eyewitness material, as are the other three gospels.” (p.24)

           

            The issue of the “editor” was already discussed in part 6, and I’m not going to repeat myself here.

            Also, notice how he just simply states that all the Gospels are “obviously” based on eyewitness material, even though he and Lee Strobel have done absolutely no work to show that any of the material in the Gospels is the kind of material an eyewitness would report?  (Nor will they.)  This kind of just declaring stuff by fiat is very typical of the whole book, and once again makes me think that Lee Strobel simply wrote this book to make money of off Christians, and it’s not a serious attempt to convince skeptics.

VII. Matthew, John-Mark and Luke are Not Actually as Problematic as He’s Making Them

          Even assuming that Matthew was hated as a tax collector, one of the main themes of the Gospels is that Jesus attracted people who were ordinarily rejected by society.  So it would not be incongruous at all for the Church to assign a Gospel to Matthew’s name. 

            However, the idea that Matthew was the second most hated of all the disciples after Judas is certainly not in evidence from the text of the 4 Gospels themselves.  In fact arguably Matthew comes out looking better than some of the other disciples, like the infamous “doubting Thomas”.  (And yet there’s an apocryphal Gospel forged in Thomas’s name as well, so what does that prove?)

          Really, none of the disciples come out all that well in the Gospels, as Craig Blomberg himself says much later on page 50.  “Mark’s perspective of Peter is pretty consistently unflattering.  And he’s the ringleader!  The disciples repeatedly misunderstand Jesus.  James and John want the places of Jesus’ right and left hand, and he has to teach them hard lessons about servant leadership instead. They look like a bunch of self-serving, self-seeking, dull-witted people a lot of the time.”

            So, really, Craig Blomberg could play this game no matter which disciple the church had picked.  (Imagine right now there’s a parallel universe somewhere in which the Gospels had been attributed to Peter.  And in that parallel universe, there’s a book called The Case for Christ in which Craig Blomberg and Lee Strobel are arguing that the church would have no motivation to falsely assign a Gospel to Peter’s name when Peter comes off as such a dunce in the Gospel narratives.)

            As Craig Blomberg says, it is true that John-Mark and Luke weren’t even part of the 12.  But then remember that no one is claiming that these Gospels were forged in the Apostles names.  (There are deliberate forgeries elsewhere in the New Testament, but that’s a separate subject.)  What people are claiming is that the Gospels were written anonymously in the first century, and then the Church only assigned them names in the second century.  In other words, the Church was constrained by the material that was already written in the Gospel.

            The preface to the Gospel of Luke makes it quite clear the author was not an eyewitness, so the early Church couldn’t have assigned the Gospel of Luke to one of the twelve even if they had wanted to.

            For more on why the early Church chose these particular apostles, see my discussion in part 7.

            As for John-Mark, he was well known as an associate of Peter.  Which brings us to our next section.

VIII. He’s Going to Contradict His Own Argument Here on Page 27 When He Tries to Claim that Mark’s Gospel is Actually Directly from Peter

            We’ll get to this in the next section, but just 4 pages later in the book Lee Strobel is going to contradict himself on the Gospel of Mark.

            When attempting to explain why Matthew had copied from the Gospel of Mark, Strobel will argue that everyone knew that the Gospel of Mark was really straight out of the mouth of the Apostle Peter.  So on one page he’s saying that Church tradition would never assign a Gospel to a nobody like John-Mark when Peter was the more obvious choice, and then just 4 pages later he will argue that according to Church tradition, Mark’s Gospel was really Peter’s direct words. 

            So, to sum up, Craig Blomberg believe that the Church would never falsely assign a Gospel to anyone except the major apostles: Peter, James and John.  (I’m going to just ignore Philip and Mary).

            John is already spoken for, and soon they’ll be claiming Mark as Peter’s Gospel.  That only leaves James! 

            ….So essentially, they’re arguing the Gospels couldn’t have been falsely attributed, because the church forgot about James. 

In the next part, we’ll look at Lee Strobel’s arguments to try to explain away why Matthew is copying from John-Mark. (Advanced warning: hang onto your hat, because things are going to get really… really… really stupid!)