Book Review of The Case For Christ by Lee Strobel Part 5: My Explanation of Why the Church Tradition on the Apostolic Authorship of the Gospels is Incorrect (Overview)

(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

            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 the ordination of woman is still regarded as controversial—to give you some idea.)  Our religion professors taught us what is commonly regarded 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.) 

           Lee Strobel himself appears to be aware that the evidence against apostolic authorship is too overwhelming, which I suspect is why he only makes a half-hearted attempt to defend it, and then quickly switches gears and goes instead into his defense of how the Gospels came from well preserved oral traditions.  (But then once he’s tried to cover his bases on both sides, he will go back and forth between them, and throughout the book he will continually cite the eyewitness testimony of the apostles as proof of the Gospels).

            In the next several posts, 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.  Then, once I’ve established what is currently the scholarly consensus, I’ll return to look at how Lee Strobel deals with the issue.

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?

            In tomorrow’s post, I’ll deal with the first of these points: the absence of any internal evidence inside the Gospels: