Book Review of The Case For Christ by Lee Strobel Part 15: Lee Strobel’s Attempt to Explain Why Matthew is Copying From John-Mark

(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

Part 14: Lee Strobel’s Argument that Church Tradition Must Be True Because the Church Would Have No Reason To Lie

            Lee Strobel believes in Church tradition that the Apostles wrote the Gospel, but one of many problems with Lee Strobel’s argument is that modern scholarship has shown that Matthew and Luke are copied from the Gospel of Mark.  (See part 9).  But if Matthew was an eyewitness, then what was he doing copying from John Mark, who was not an eyewitness?

            Lee Strobel and Craig Blomberg attempt to address this on pages 27-28:

            Blomberg’s mention of Matthew brought to mind another question concerning how the gospels were put together. “Why,” I asked, “would Matthew—purported to be an eyewitness to Jesus—incorporate part of a gospel written by Mark, who everybody agrees was really not an eyewitness?  If Matthew’s gospel was really written by an eyewitness, you would think he would have relied on his own observations.”

            Blomberg smiled.  “It only makes sense if Mark was indeed basing his account on the recollections of the eyewitness Peter,” he said. “As you’ve said yourself, Peter was among the inner circle of Jesus and was privy to seeing and hearing things that the other disciples didn’t.  So it would make sense for Matthew, even though he was an eyewitness, to rely on Peter’s version of events as transmitted through Mark.”

            Yes, I thought to myself, that did make some sense.  In fact, an analogy began to form in my mind from my years as a newspaper reporter.  I recalled being part of a crowd of journalists that once cornered the famous Chicago political patriarch, the late Mayor Richard J. Daley, to pepper him with questions about a scandal that was brewing in the police department.  He made some remarks before escaping to his limousine.

            Even though I was an eyewitness to what had taken place, I immediately went to a radio reporter who had been closer to Daley, and asked him to play back his tape of what Daley had just said.  This way, I could make sure I had his words correctly written down.

            That, I mused, was apparently what Matthew did with Mark—although Matthew had his own recollections as a disciple, his quest for accuracy prompted him to rely on some material that came directly from Peter in Jesus’ inner circle.

            Okay, first, a minor nitpick:  Blomberg says to Lee Strobel, “As you’ve said yourself, Peter was among the inner circle of Jesus and was privy to seeing and hearing things that the other disciples didn’t.” Nowhere in the conversation between Lee Strobel and Craig Blomberg does Lee Strobel actually say this.  Maybe it was part of the conversation that happened off the record.  Or maybe Blomberg just got confused.   I don’t know—your guess is as good as mine.  But it seems like very poor editing either way.  Plus, Lee Strobel is supposed to be pretending to be the skeptic in these conversations.  I know it’s a very poor charade (as I noted in part 1), but, come on, this is really getting ridiculous here if Lee Strobel, the pretend skeptic, is feeding Craig Blomberg the points that Blomberg is using to build his argument. 

            As I was reading this book, I was constantly having to ask myself, “What is going on here?”  It’s like these guys exist in their own separate world that only makes sense to them.

            Right, okay, well let’s get into the meat of their argument here.  A number of points can be made in response to this:

I. This Doesn’t Make Sense

II. This Contradicts the Church Tradition on Which They Are Basing Their Whole Argument

III. They Are Just Making This Whole Theory Up Out of Thin Air

IV. There is Absolutely No Textual Evidence to Support This Theory

V. The Textual Evidence Contradicts This Theory

VI. This Still Wouldn’t Explain Why Matthew Was Copying From Q

          I’ll start with:

I. This Doesn’t Make Sense

          So, this doesn’t make any sense.  At all. 

            It is true that Peter, James and John seemed to have been the more favored disciples.  But how do Strobel and Blomberg jump from “more favored disciple” to “more precise memory”?  Matthew, if he was the greatest among the 12, or the least among the 12, should have been able to narrate the events from his own memory equally as well as Peter’s version. 

            The analogy with the tape-recorder is flawed for a number of obvious reasons that I shouldn’t even have to point out.  Peter’s memory was not like a tape recorder.  (At least as far as we know.)  Peter may have been more favored, but his memory was just as flawed as Matthew’s would have been.  And for this analogy to work, not only would Peter’s mind have to have been like a tape recorder, but John-Mark’s mind would also have to have been like a tape recorder, because the Gospel doesn’t come directly from Peter’s mouth, but (according to Church tradition) it’s John-Mark’s remembrance of what Peter had said that John Mark wrote down after Peter had left.  So both Peter and John-Mark would have to have had amazing memories, and not only that, but Matthew would have had to somehow know about their awesome powers of memorization.  But we have no evidence of any of this.

            And then there are the linguistic problems.  Jesus, Peter, and Matthew all spoke Aramaic, not Greek.  The Gospel of Mark is written in Greek.  Lee Strobel throughout the whole book never mentions the linguistic difficulties, but according to his theory to work we must imagine Peter gave his testimony in Aramaic, John-Mark translated it into Greek, and then Matthew used John-Mark’s Greek translation of what John Mark remembered that Peter remembered that Jesus had originally said in Aramaic.  And all of this, Matthew (a supposed eyewitness, remember) found preferable to simply using his own recollections?

            There are a handful of times when Peter was an eyewitness to things the other disciples weren’t: the transfiguration, the garden of Gethsemane, his own denial, et cetera.  But these exceptions aside, for the majority of Jesus’s life and teachings as recorded in the Gospel, there’s no indication in the Gospels that the other disciples are not getting the same access to Jesus’s words.  (And, incidentally, it is precisely the exceptions, the points where Peter was present but Matthew definitely wasn’t, that are going to be the most problematic for Lee Strobel’s theory, but we’ll get to that in part V).

II. This Contradicts the Church Tradition on Which They Are Basing Their Whole Argument

          Okay, so up until now, the whole argument that Lee Strobel had been using to prove the Church tradition on the Apostolic Authorship has been: “Church Tradition is true because Church tradition says it is” and “Church Tradition Uniformly Agrees on This.”  (In Lee Strobel’s world, this counts as “proving” something.)

            Now, he’s going over and completely re-writing the Church tradition on which he had been basing his whole argument.

            Church tradition does not say that the Apostle Matthew was copying from the Apostle John-Mark.  Church tradition says that Matthew wrote his Gospel first, and John-Mark wrote his Gospel later.  Furthermore, according to Church tradition, the two Gospels weren’t even originally supposed to be in the same language—Matthew was supposed to have first written in Hebrew.

            And Lee Strobel and Craig Blomberg know this because they just got done reciting this Church tradition two pages earlier!
           I mean, really!  What is going on here?  Did Lee Strobel and Craig Blomberg just completely forget everything they were talking about two minutes ago?  Did they just forget the Church tradition that they just got done reciting three pages ago on page 24?

          I've quoted this before in part 13, but at the risk of becoming repetitive, I'm going to quote that section again.  Read it again in conjunction with Lee Strobel's arguments on page 27 quoted above, and then judge for yourself how much of this book appears to be based on the assumption that the reader is just not paying attention:

     “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.

 (p. 24-45)

            Furthermore, according to Church tradition, John-Mark did not copy Peter’s words directly out of Peter’s mouth.  John-Mark wrote the Gospel later after Peter had left.  And because Peter wasn’t around to guide him, according to Church tradition John-Mark wasn’t even sure which order the stories were supposed to go in.  (This has been the traditional explanation the Church used to explain why the same stories occurred in different order in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark.)

          Now, it sounds as if Craig Blomberg and Lee Strobel want to argue that the Gospel of Mark came directly from Peter’s mouth, as if John-Mark had simply been the scribe who had written it down.

            But this is not Church tradition.  And furthermore, if Peter had dictated his Gospel directly, it would have been named “The Gospel according to Peter” and not “The Gospel according to Mark.”  Books get named after the author, not after the scribe.  (Paul used scribes when writing some of his letters.  One of them is named in Romans 16:22: "I, Tertius, the one writing down this letter, greet you in the Lord."  But we don’t call Romans the letter of Tertius.)

III. They Are Just Making This Whole Theory Up Out of Thin Air

          Okay, so at this point, they are just completely making things up.  This little theory they are advancing here is supported by neither Church tradition nor modern scholarship.  (There is no church tradition about the Apostle Matthew copying from the Apostle John-Mark, and modern scholarship does not believe the Apostles wrote the Gospel.)  They are just wandering out in left-field, with this theory they invented out of thin air.

IV. There is Absolutely No Textual Evidence to Support This Theory

            Notice how there is absolutely no textual evidence to support this theory.  Nowhere in the Gospel of Matthew does the author say anything like, “Okay, now at this point I, Matthew, am going to borrow from Peter’s recollections, because I think he remembers it slightly better than I do.”

V. The Textual Evidence Contradicts This Theory

          Furthermore, if you look closely at the passages Matthew copied from Mark, it seems to completely contradict their theory that Matthew regarded Peter’s memory in some sort of awe. 

            Of course it’s a major assumption of The Case for Christ that the reader is never going to bother to look up anything, ever, so Lee Strobel and his buddies can get away with spouting off all sorts of ridiculous theories.  But notice how this whole theory falls apart the moment you actually start to examine the Bible.

            Both the Gospels of Matthew and Luke were using the Gospel of Mark as their source material, but neither Matthew or Luke felt obliged to reverently copy down Mark exactly when it contrasted with their own theology, or with their own literary agendas.  If you accept Lee Strobel’s theory that Matthew was copying from Mark because Peter had insights and information that Matthew did not, then it makes it all the harder to explain why Matthew is changing details.  [See for example HERE, HERE, and HERE.]

            And this is specifically true for some of the instances when Matthew wasn’t even there.

            Take, for example, the story of Peter’s denial.  Peter was an eyewitness to this, Matthew was not.  So this is one of the few instances where it actually does make sense that Matthew would be copying from John-Mark’s account.  But although Matthew is using Mark as his source, look at all the details that Matthew is changing. 

            Here is Mark’s account: 66 While Peter was below in the courtyard, one of the servant girls of the high priest came by. 67 When she saw Peter warming himself, she looked closely at him. "You also were with that Nazarene, Jesus," she said. 68 But he denied it. "I don't know or understand what you're talking about," he said, and went out into the entryway. 69 When the servant girl saw him there, she said again to those standing around, "This fellow is one of them." 70 Again he denied it. After a little while, those standing near said to Peter, "Surely you are one of them, for you are a Galilean." 71 He began to call down curses on himself, and he swore to them, "I don't know this man you're talking about." 72 Immediately the rooster crowed the second time. Then Peter remembered the word Jesus had spoken to him: "Before the rooster crows twice you will disown me three times." And he broke down and wept.

            And here is Matthew’s account: 69 Now Peter was sitting out in the courtyard, and a servant girl came to him. "You also were with Jesus of Galilee," she said. 70 But he denied it before them all. "I don't know what you're talking about," he said. 71 Then he went out to the gateway, where another girl saw him and said to the people there, "This fellow was with Jesus of Nazareth." 72 He denied it again, with an oath: "I don't know the man!" 73 After a little while, those standing there went up to Peter and said, "Surely you are one of them, for your accent gives you away." 74 Then he began to call down curses on himself and he swore to them, "I don't know the man!" Immediately a rooster crowed. 75 Then Peter remembered the word Jesus had spoken: "Before the rooster crows, you will disown me three times." And he went outside and wept bitterly.

            Did you catch all those little differences?  I’m not going to list them all here, but notice how the rooster crows twice in Mark’s account, but only once in Matthew’s account.  Also notice all the little details.  Mark’s version said “[Peter] broke down and wept.”  Matthew’s version said, “He went outside and wept bitterly.” 

            According to Lee Strobel’s theory, Matthew must have looked at John-Mark’s account and said, “Well, John-Mark’s version comes straight from Peter.  And Peter was there, and I wasn’t.  And Peter’s memory is much better than mine apparently.  But I’m just going to go ahead and change all the details anyway.”  Or "Even though I wasn't even there, I'm fairly sure Peter was weeping bitterly, not just weeping.  I'd better change that detail."

VI. This Still Wouldn’t Explain Why Matthew Was Copying From Q

          Okay, so even if we accept that Matthew, a supposed eyewitness, was copying from Mark because of his reverence for Peter, this still would not explain why Matthew, a supposed eyewitness, was copying from Q.  I mean, we don’t even know who wrote Q.

            Lee Strobel and Craig Blomberg pretty much ignore the problem of Q.  They address Q on pages 26-27, in a subsection entitled “The Mysteries of Q”, in which they kind of concede that Q probably existed.  But they carefully avoid saying anything about Q that would be problematic to them.

            From the perspective of Lee Strobel and Craig Blomberg, there are two points about Q that are problematic for them.  One is that Matthew, a supposed eyewitness, is copying from Q.  The second is that, as far as we can tell, there are no references to Jesus’s resurrection in Q.  (Both Matthew and Luke, who quote from Q when they can, share no common sources on Jesus’s post resurrection appearances to the disciples, so scholars infer Q is silent on the resurrection.)

            Strobel and Blomberg just pretend these questions do not exist.  (As one reviewer of The Case for Christ said, the book is very notable for what it’s not saying.  You get the impression sometimes that these guys know exactly what the problems with their theories are, and are very careful to tiptoe around them.)

            Next section: My Conclusion