When I was a Bible believing Evangelical Christian, uh, attending Moody Bible Institute before I began my serious scholarship on the New Testament, before I began to read it in Greek and before I saw what Sir scholars of the world had to say about it, I was absolutely convinced that the gospels not only contained eyewitness tradition, but that they were written by two eyewitnesses, Matthew and John, and by two people who were close companions to people who were eyewitnesses.
Mark and Luke, intense research has a way of changing your mind about things, but I don’t want you to think that this is a reason for you not to use your brain.
Even if you are the most hardcore Bible believing evangelical on the planet, you surely think that God gave you a brain.
Use your brain, Craig and I will agree on this.
God gave you a brain to think with apply reason.
That’s why God made you a human being instead of a slug.
Don’t be afraid of using your intelligence to find out the truth.
The truth may not be what you were taught, but if it’s true, you should believe it, not run from it.
As I studied more and more using my intelligence as an evangelical, but also praying about it, I became convinced that the New Testament gospels were not written by eyewitnesses, were by people who knew eyewitnesses.
The first point to make is the rather obvious one, that the Gospels don’t claim to be written by eyewitnesses.
They are all anonymous.
The titles in your gospels, the gospel, according to Matthew and so forth, were added by later editors.
They were not put there by the original authors.
Second point, none of the gospels claims to be written by the person whose name it bears.
They don’t claim to be written by eyewitnesses and they don’t claim to be written by people named Matthew, mark, Luke, and John.
Those are later traditions that were added to the gospels.
These traditions do not start appearing for about a hundred years.
Some people think that there is an early church father named Papus who attests to the witness of Mark and Matthew, but in fact, there are very solid reasons for thinking that Papus who lived around the year one 20 to one 40 is not referring to our mark or our Matthew.
The first time anybody refers to Matthew, mark, Luke, and John by name is Iron.
In the year 180, a hundred years after these books were written, my understanding of the gospels that they’ve come down to us is that they were anonymous and we don’t know their names and they’re not built on eyewitness testimony.
But the important point that I wanna make is that even if the gospels were written by eyewitnesses, or even if they did contain eyewitness accounts, that would not guarantee that they were accurate.
Think about our legal system today.
Are eyewitnesses always accurate in what they report? If so, why do we have trials that call in testimony more than one eye witness? If eyewitnesses were always a hundred percent accurate in what they report, we wouldn’t need law courts if we wanted to know what would happen, what happened.
We would simply ask somebody.
Eyewitnesses do not always get all the information right, but even if they did, it wouldn’t matter because the gospels of the New Testament don’t claim to be written by eyewitnesses, and in fact, they were not written by eyewitnesses.
The gospel writers were living 40 to 50 to 60 years after Jesus died.
They wrote the gospels in Greek.
Jesus’ language was Aramaic.
These gospel writers were living in a different country decades later.
Where did they get their information from? They were not the followers of Jesus.
They don’t claim to be followers of Jesus the disciples.
They’re written by later people, decades later in a different language.
Where did they get their information from? They heard stories about Jesus that had been in circulation year after year after year, decade after decade, down to the time that the gospel writers living in a different country, speaking a different language, heard the stories.
What happens to oral stories when they are transmitted orally, they change The gospel.
Writers have discrepancies among themselves because the stories that were told and retold were changed over time, and the gospel writers themselves sometimes changed the stories.
That’s why there are discrepancies.
That’s why scholars might be able to tell you generally what Jesus was about.
They can list eight things that Jesus did, but they can’t tell you the details and agree.
Why can’t scholars agree? Because there are so many discrepancies that the gospels are not reliable.