CAN WE TRUST THE GOSPELS? | The Four Gospels Study Introduction

Before beginning our verse-by-verse study of the Gospels, we step back and ask some foundational questions about the four Gospels. Why do we have Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John? Why do they sometimes emphasize different events or arrange their material differently? And can these ancient accounts really be trusted?

In this introductory session, Glenn and Steve examine the distinct audiences and emphases of the four Gospels, with Matthew presenting Jesus to a predominantly Jewish audience and emphasizing Him as the promised King. They also discuss the so-called “synoptic problem,” literary and form criticism, the claim that the Gospels were originally anonymous, and arguments that the accounts were written too late to preserve reliable testimony. 

Most importantly, the discussion considers the eyewitness foundation behind the Gospel accounts and why similarities and differences between them do not require us to treat them as myths or legends. This session provides the foundation for the RTTB verse-by-verse journey through Matthew. 

Matthew Series — Session 1 | Introduction to the Four Gospels

Questions discussed in this session include: 

• What are the distinctions in the gospels? 
• Why are there four gospels instead of just one? 
• Who wrote them and can we trust their writings? 
• What does the term “gospel” mean and why is it important to us? 
• When were the gospels written? 
• How long was it between the events of Jesus and when they were written down?
• Who were the intended audiences for the gospels? 
• Were the gospels anonymous, or how can we be sure who wrote them? 
• Is there a synoptic problem?  

Transcript

Why The Gospels Matter

SPEAKER_01 0:16

Welcome to Reasoning Through the Bible. What we're going to do today is introduce people to the Gospels. We're going to do kind of an overview session on the four Gospels and answer a few questions about them before we jump into Matthew. What I want to do is to talk a little bit about why four gospels? What are the distinctions and some about the authors and a little bit about the sources and why are there four? Who are their audiences and things like that? Steve, I think we can have a valuable discussion about the four gospels. They take up a huge portion of the New Testament, just the gospel accounts. So I think it's valuable to look at them from a high level first before we start diving into our regular verse-by-verse study. As a beginning for this, what does it even mean to gospel? What does that word mean? Gospel means good news. And of course, it tells us the good news of Jesus Christ. The good news is that we don't have to stay lost and we don't have to work our way to heaven. The good news is Jesus paid the price. That's the message of the four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. It is good news in the sense that we now have a way back to God, and I don't have to work hard to get there. All I have to do is accept Jesus as payment, and I get Jesus' new life that he gives me. I get credited with his righteousness, and we get to live the resurrected life.

SPEAKER_00 1:38

That is good news, eh?

SPEAKER_01 1:39

And that is good news.

Who Each Gospel Targets

SPEAKER_01 1:40

So there are four Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. They are different in the sense that they are different authors written to different audiences for a different purpose. And I think it's good to talk for just a second about what are those distinctions. Matthew, we know, was written to Jewish people. And we know that by just if you read the Gospel of Matthew, he talks a lot about the fulfillment of prophecy towards the beginning of the book. He talks a lot of Jewish terms and things that he doesn't explain to his audience, and he just assumes that they know these things. Matthew, according to the church fathers, all said Matthew wrote first. Looking at it back today, we would still probably hold that, although there's not a lot of external evidence to prove that. Mark, on the other hand, has a lot of going and doing. It's more action than it is long speeches. Matthew has long sermons, two, three chapters at a time of Jesus' words. Mark doesn't have any long speeches. It's a lot of action, a lot of going and doing. If you read just even the first chapter of Mark, Jesus did this and immediately did that. Then he did this, then immediately did this. It's a lot of action. So we would conclude Mark was written to Romans. Luke, we know from reading Acts, was a physician. He was an educated Greek person. And so he wrote from that perspective, written to the Greek audience from a perspective of a Gentile. And John, most every scholar would hold that he wrote later, after the church was very well established and included both Jews and Gentiles. And there had been questions that had arisen by then about Jesus and about different things. John writes with a very different perspective. We would hold that John was written to the church that consisted of both Jews and Gentiles, and was showing some things about Jesus presenting him as God.

SPEAKER_00 3:37

For my looking at an in in brief study, the scholars seem to agree that Matthew, Mark, and Luke were written within 25, 35 years of the death and resurrection of Jesus, and John four years or so after that. So this is still relatively close to the time as the activities that were happening.

SPEAKER_01 3:58

So Matthew is written to a Jewish audience and presents Jesus as king. That's very clear from a couple of passages. He has the genealogy of the king at the beginning. He has triumphal entry where Jesus rides into the temple area as king.

SPEAKER_00 4:15

And this was the expectation of the Jewish people. They were waiting for their king to come to restore the nation of Israel.

SPEAKER_01 4:22

Matthew focuses a lot on fulfilled prophecy, brings in a lot of things from the Old Testament. Mark, on the other hand, has a lot, as we said, of going and doing and what Jesus accomplished. So Mark was written to the Romans and presents Jesus as an accomplisher. He accomplished things or as a servant.

SPEAKER_00 4:40

Now, why would Mark want to focus on the Romans? They were occupying Israel at that time. They were the major empire at this particular point in time.

SPEAKER_01 4:50

Church Fathers in church tradition holds that Mark was a follower of Peter. He was one of the disciples of Peter. So a lot of what we have in Mark is probably reflected of Peter. And Peter was a man of action. And he, according to church tradition, was living and working from Rome, or at least the later part of his life. So he had a Roman audience and was influenced by a Roman congregation. He was therefore focusing on Roman things. Luke presents Jesus as a man, focuses on history, a lot of details about the historical accounts and things like that for an educated world. For example, the first three verses of Luke chapter three has a long list of who was the king, who was the local governor, who was the Caesar at the time, placed it in a very detailed historical context for a recording history. So Luke knew he was recording history.

SPEAKER_00 5:51

And he also mentions at the beginning what I'm relaying to you is something that I've researched very well.

SPEAKER_01 5:58

So John was written writing to a church later, a few decades later, and he presents Jesus as God, the very first verse. The word was God. And he focuses a lot on the spiritual aspects of Jesus, as passages, I in you and you in me, things like that.

Style And Structure Differences

SPEAKER_01 6:15

We also see the hand of these writers in the style of their writing. Matthew was a tax collector whose job was to keep long lists of details. As a tax collector, you had to be very precise and exact. Therefore, his gospel has a long list of details. There's specific names for some of the monetary designations, whereas the other writers used a more broad term for the money. Matthew actually names the exact coin that's used in a couple of places. John was a simple fisherman. And so the language in there was relatively simple. A lot of one syllable, two-syllable words. You don't see a lot of long technical details. He wrote very simply, but he had a long time to think about it. The concepts presented in John are very profound.

SPEAKER_00 7:04

The picture you're painting is that through these four gospels, we're getting a diversity of view of Jesus and a cross-section across different segments of the people at the time. And it's not just a one view, it's a broad view of Jesus. And through the four gospels that we have, we get a clearer and better picture of Jesus rather than just by having one person write something.

SPEAKER_01 7:29

It's multifaceted and different purposes for different audience. They also don't all claim to be in chronological sequence. If you look at Matthew, for example, it has Sermon on the Mount's three chapters, and then there's several chapters of just miracles, and then another section with parables. So it's almost a topical outline. He doesn't follow it exactly all the way through, but for the most part, there's large sections that only have one type of thing in it. And even Luke tells us that he put it down in an orderly manner, but it's not necessarily chronological. That's one of the mistakes sometimes people can make. So we have very interesting here. Matthew is writing primarily Jewish audience, and he quotes a lot of the Old Testament, whereas like Mark doesn't do that. So that explains some of these things. That's sort of what I wanted to get into, but I also wanted to, before we just jump into the Gospels, kind of topical sequence here, answer some questions that have arisen about the Gospels that many of our listeners probably bump into sooner or later. We'll talk a little bit about some of these questions and hopefully answer them.

The Synoptic Question Explained

SPEAKER_01 8:36

One of the things that has cropped up over the years and the decades is if you look at the four gospels, there's some similarities. They talk about some of the same types of things. Jesus was here for three years in ministry, and at the end of the book of John, he even says if we wrote down everything that Jesus ever did, the world couldn't contain the books. So there was a lot of things that Jesus did that didn't get mentioned. And that's okay. It's just that if we look at the gospels we have, many of them contain some of the same stories or similar stories, some of the same accounts. Of course, the death and resurrection isn't all of them. That's normal. But there's other things with the parables and the ministries. So many people ask the question, and I think it's a legitimate question, is where were the commonalities and how did those come about? That whole field of study, trying to determine like who wrote first and who may have used the other one as a source, things like that, that has been labeled with a modern label that I don't like the label, but the label that is used out there, and if you're researching it, it's just the term everybody uses, is called the synoptic problem. Synoptic problem. And synopsis or synoptic just means the more sequential ones, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. John's kind of over in a separate category. But if you ever hear the term synoptic problem, and if you ever just go online and do a search for that, you'll get more reading than you ever care to do. But there have been many people that have dived in with this subject trying to find out who wrote first, who may have used the others as a source, questions like that. The reason I don't like the term synoptic problem is because I think the word problem makes people think in a common that there's a problem. That there's a problem. And that the only problem is the question of who may have written first, because that we don't really know. We don't really know which one of the gospels wrote first. We know Luke wasn't first because he tells us in the first two or three verses of Luke's gospel, he says, insofar as many have taken in hand to write an account. We know there was some prior to Luke, so we'd say Luke's not first. But beyond that, most of the scholars would guess that John was last, but we don't really know who wrote first or who may have had the other one in hand when they wrote their account. That's an interesting question, and it's a legitimate question. But if we label it synoptic problem and we start diving into these nuances, because not all the stories are exactly the same. And if we start diving into some of those nuances, it makes the average person think, oh, there's some sort of error here. Do you even think that it's relevant who who wrote first? I think it's a valid valid question to pursue, but I don't think it's very fruitful. And I don't, one, I don't think it's fruitful because I don't think the question can be answered. And two, I think in the end, it's not really fruitful because each of the four authors were eyewitnesses, they had access to eyewitnesses, and even if they did use sources, it doesn't mean they couldn't intelligently evaluate those sources to determine whether or not they were true. If Luke tells us there were many that had written, then obviously there were many, many that aren't passed down to us that we don't have today. Yeah, that weren't preserved. And Luke would have, Luke and all the other gospel writers would have been intelligent enough to look at the sources they may have had in front of them, whether those were oral sources, go to Peter, go to John, go to Thaddeus, whoever, and say, Tell me what you saw, and I'm writing that down. Or whether they lived in this community with the 12 apostles and picked up a written source and knew, okay, this is the part I'm going to include in my gospel. So I don't think that this whole question of the synoptic question, as I like to call it, is valid in the sense that whatever we determine about the who wrote first or what sources they may have used doesn't override the eyewitness accounts. That is what they're claiming. They claim to be eyewitnesses. And I don't think we can sit here 2,000 years later and question an eyewitness.

SPEAKER_00 12:56

So, what would be the purpose of somebody wanting to question that? What would even be the purpose of that?

SPEAKER_01 13:02

Some people just legitimately interested in it. They find it a fascinating question. Some of the things I pursue, people would ask the same question, why in the world would somebody want to study that? It's a valid question, I think, to research those things. I just don't think that when we could come to an answer, whatever is ever concluded. There's not some research that's going to come up next year or the year after that's going to overwhelm the fact that Peter and Luke say we were eyewitnesses of this. Second Peter, I think it's chapter one, says we didn't go off and make up cunningly devised fables, is the way he phrases it, but we're eyewitnesses of his majesty.

SPEAKER_00 13:38

So that that kind of goes with my question. Do you think that the motivation of some of this question is be to try and disprove them or something? That by questioning when they were written in the order and when they were written, that it would disprove that what they're writing is that part of?

SPEAKER_01 13:52

I'm not going to question the motivation of the people pursuing that field of study, but I think that happens as an effect.

SPEAKER_00 13:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:59

I think it does, as a side effect of that, end up impacting people's faith. And I think our enemies, the skeptics and the atheists that want to undermine the take advantage of. Take advantage of that. So that's why I want to deal with this today. We give up front that Matthew, Mark, and Luke contain some common material that the others use. There's some of the similar stories. And no one is truly positive who wrote the first. If you look at the people that study the synoptics, there's not a consensus. Church fathers held that Matthew is probably first. There's many today that hold Mark's first. There's some today that would look at scholarly research and the documents and hold that Matthew was first. But there isn't a consensus. Combine the best scholarship today, you're not going to get a uniform position that most scholars would hold to the point of being like a 90 or 95. You're not going to get 100% of the people to agree on what day it is, let alone uh on any other thing in the world. But if you were to get 80, 90% of scholarship to agree on something, I'd say it'd be solid. And you're not going to get that. It's not anywhere close to that. Some modern scholars say Mark was first because it's shorter. And I think that's an invalid attempt because it takes a more of like an evolutionary approach to documents. It would say that, well, Mark's shorter and it's simpler, and the others are longer and more complicated. So, as these people would say, the later ones added on and added things to it and had time to embellish it. Therefore, the shorter ones probably first and the longer ones are later. And I would reject that. I don't think that's valid. It very well could have been that the longer ones were first, and that, like for example, there's one author's speculation. He was saying that it very well could have been that Peter was asked to give a series of lectures in Rome. And he may have had Matthew and Luke in front of him, and over a series of evenings, given a series of talks, and read from Matthew for a little while, and then pick up Luke and read from him for a little while, and then go back to Matthew. And Mark might have been over in a corner taking notes of what Peter's lectures were. Right. And that that's why it had a lot of the going and doing is because it started out as Peter's lectures. That guy's opinion's as valid as anybody else's. What I don't think is valid is the whole idea of just because it's shorter, it had to be first. I don't think that holds much water. It could have been first, but I don't think it's just because it's shorter. So again, just because there may have been sources doesn't mean that eyewitness accounts couldn't have used discretion on what they were doing. I think there's some hint that there was some commonality. In both Matthew and Mark, later in their books, they're talking about some judgments to come. Jesus is talking about some judgment to come, and he he talks about what is called the abomination of desolation, which is the abominable one who desolates. There's going to be an end times disaster that comes about.

SPEAKER_00 16:58

That's actually a term that's taken out of Daniel.

SPEAKER_01 17:01

Yes, he's quoting Daniel. And in Matthew 24, 15, and again in Mark 13, 14, there's a narrator's note that appears in both those passages where he's talking about this abomination of desolation, and then there's a parentheses in the English that says, let the reader understand. And I think that is some degree of validation that there was some written commonality that was going on between those. Simply because it's talking to a reader and using a term that would normally be used in writing and not in some other form like an oral form. But beyond things like that, just because there's a common story, then I think it's not really valid to just assume that they used a common source.

SPEAKER_00 17:46

So because that term was used, if it was a term that was used by writers in general, that in itself wouldn't mean that there was a common source.

SPEAKER_01 17:55

And see, that's that's your problem. Yeah. Is that any of these techniques doesn't really prove anything. It's not like a math formula where you can redo the math formula and it either works or it doesn't. Or it's not a tabletop experiment where you can take three ounces of this and heat it to you know 100 degrees and mix it together and redo it again tomorrow. History is not like that. Literature is not like that. You have styles and clues, so all you have is indications. And that's why I would say this whole field of synoptic questions, it's not ever going to come to a hard conclusion. That's why I think it causes more problems than it solves. It's a legitimate field of study for some scholars that are interested in these things. But I just don't think that it's very fruitful in that it it doesn't enlighten things more than it causes problems. So that's part of what's going on.

Form Criticism And Its Limits

SPEAKER_01 18:49

The other thing that goes on is there's a field called form criticism, or some people call it literary criticism. And what they do there is they look at literary styles. And they'll look at one writing and they'll say, This is a style, and they'll look at another writing and then say, Oh, does that use the same style? Genres is one of the terms that it uses. They try to compare documents both inside the Bible and outside the Bible, and look at the genre of the writing, look at the form and the style of the writing, and try to try to draw conclusions around that. Some of that can be legitimate. For example, in the Old Testament, you have poetry. There's also figures of speech. So when it uses poetic language, say in the Old Testament, when it says the the hills sing for joy, we know it's not the hill singing like a human sings. It's really a poetic language, it's descriptive language, and that's part of the genre. Well, while that comes important, is because some of those same passages talk about God's arm, God's hand, God's finger. There's even passages talking about God's hair, his nostrils. How do we know that when it talks about God being spirit, that that's true? And the part where it talks about his his hand and his nostrils and his hair is a figure of speech. There are illustrations there to give us a better understanding. We have to understand that, yeah, or we can come to some very, very bad conclusions. That's what's tried to happen in form criticism, is they try to look at the form. The legitimate part of form criticism is where we can say, well, this is poetic language, that's a history, historical account, and this is something else. So when we look at Old Testament poetry, we can say that that's poetic. When we look at Luke chapter three, where he talks about the 15th year of Tiberius Caesar, and this guy was governor and that guy was this, that's not poetry. It's just a historical account. That's the good part of this genre or form criticism, literary criticism. The downside is that beyond the large things like this is poetry and this is history, then it really gets to be a lot of opinion. And we start to see pictures in the clouds, is the way I like to see it. People look at a cloud and see two or three different things. Well, you can look at literary styles and see two or three different things. And you can see, oh, this style's similar, that one's not. And it gets to be this guy's seeing a figure of speech here when this guy's seeing it to be historical.

SPEAKER_00 21:27

And then there's influences on the person's background of study, perhaps, or even the background that they come from that could influence what they're seeing.

SPEAKER_01 21:36

When we apply this to the Bible, what they're trying to do with form criticism is they're trying to say, Can I look at this Bible book and find the source that he used? And that's where I think it breaks down. People can look at a genre and say, This is poetry or that's history. What I don't think you can do is look at a book and say, This sentence has a style of this person, but this next sentence has a style of this other. Person, therefore, this editor cludes these together. That's where I just don't think it's valid. And my little example is this there was a Christian author of the name of C.S. Lewis, and he wrote many different styles. He wrote science fiction books, children's stories, allegories, heavy philosophy. He wrote commentaries on the Bible. And if somebody 2,000 years from now was to dig up a modern library and see all of those books with this one guy's name on it, if you're applying form criticism as, oh, how could one guy have all those different styles? Probably what happened, you would have to conclude if you used the same logic. Oh, somebody picked a mythical guy, C. S. Lewis, or maybe there was some real person, we don't know, and they just used his name. But there were different authors because they had all these different styles. Well, how come one author can't write in different styles? That's where it breaks down. Scholars can't really agree on a universal objective way to go through these literary styles. The real problem comes in. There's theologians in the past, Rudolf Bultmann looks at the gospels and says this is myth. And it's our job is to demythologize. Bultmann would say the whole dying on a cross and rising from the dead was all a myth. It's our job to try to dig under that and try to find the answer. That's where it gets into a problem. The critics invariably introduce their own bias into their conclusions. And there's a large amount of disagreements between the individual cases. So what I would say is a bottom line to this whole synoptic question and form criticism question. No one knows who wrote first. The gospel writers were eyewitnesses of a very profound event and had extensive first-person knowledge of the details. So the authors are writing things that they believed were the very words of God. They believed it was the most important thing in the history of mankind. They would have been very careful in getting it right. Whether or not all of us believe it's the word of God, they did. They believed it was the very words of God. And they believed they were writing down the most profound thing in humanity. They weren't being loosey-goosey with it. They weren't being loosey-goosey with it. They thought about it very carefully. And as we're going to talk for a minute about the dating, then the accounts were written very early.

SPEAKER_00 24:17

If you're giving the good news to people and you're writing it down at the time or close proximity to when it happened, you have other people that are there at that time that could call you out and say, no, that didn't happen, or this didn't happen. It's not something that was written 300 years later, and there's nobody to this dispute what would happen. So to me, they also would want to be truthful just from the standpoint that this is what happened and it could be validated by other people.

SPEAKER_01 24:49

And what you pointed out brings up a very important point.

Eyewitness Memory Versus Telephone Game

SPEAKER_01 24:53

Our skeptic friends accuse the gospels of being an ancient version of what we would call today the telephone game, where you get a bunch of kids in a circle and you whisper in a message in one person's ear, and they whisper it into the next person, and it goes all the way around the circle. And by the time you get down to the end, it's totally different. And everybody laughs. Well, that's not how it happened. It wasn't one person to the next to the next to the next to the next to the next. It was one person to this whole room full of people. And if anybody gets it wrong, the community memory said, wait a minute, you missed one. That's why the Jews in the synagogues had memorized most of the Old Testament, was because from the time they were young until they were old, the entire community remembered it as a group. And it wasn't one person to the next to the next, it was all of us remembering it together, and we get together every week and repeat it to each other so that we don't get it wrong. That plus, there is a verse, John 14, 26, where Jesus tells his disciples, the Holy Spirit will remind them of all of my teachings. The Holy Spirit will bring to your remembrance what you need to know. Therefore, we conclude that the Gospels are reliable and trustworthy. What our critics are trying to do is to put the Gospels into a paradox, into a no-win situation. If this whole synoptic problem comes in, that when they start to look at there's a similar story, but they don't use the exact same words. That's where the question comes in. If we have a story that appears exactly word for word, the exact same, they say that author didn't write that because it's similar to the other persons. They had to have had a common source. But when it's different, then they say, Oh, wait a minute, now they invented something. It's obviously wrong. So either way you go, whether it matches exactly or whether there's something different, they question the source. There's never any room for, oh, this guy was an eyewitness. So there are things like only Matthew has Jesus going to Egypt as a baby. So there's questions like that where there's some commonalities between Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Most of Mark can be found in Matthew and Luke. And there's things in Matthew and Luke that are not in Mark. And there's things that are only in Matthew, such as going to Egypt as a baby. If you're approaching this from a secular person and you have to ask, Where did we get this? They don't allow the fact that Matthew was an eyewitness and he's writing down to a Jewish audience, and that's part of Matthew's story. They have to say, Oh, it Matthew wanted to invent something to fulfill a prophecy, and it's just not valid.

SPEAKER_00 27:36

Yeah, well, and in that he's writing to a Jewish audience. Part of the prophecy of the Messiah was that he would be born in Bethlehem, he would come out of Egypt, and he'd be a Nazarene. It makes sense that he would record that item. He's making a couple of things. He's making a case. Yeah, he's making a case to the audience that he is the Messiah.

SPEAKER_01 27:56

Matthew was trying to write to a Jewish audience, and he spent three years with Jesus, therefore we trust the eyewitness accounts. Luke, we mentioned this earlier, chapter one, verses two and three, says this just as they were handed down to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, it seemed fitting to me as well, having investigated everything carefully from the beginning, to write it out for you. Second Peter one sixteen. For we did not follow cleverly devised fables when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty. First John chapter one, the first three verses, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked upon and touched with our hands concerning the word of life, we proclaim to you. In that three verses, first John one, first three verses, nine times in three verses, John says he saw him, touched him, his hands handled him. We heard what he said. So he was right there with them. They were eyewitnesses. John 21 24, John claims, my testimony is true. This is he who saw these things and his testimony is true. 3 John 12, John claims his testimony is true. 2 Peter 1.16, my testimony is true. And so they claim to be their eyewitnesses of these things. And we do not have grounds. We do not have logical grounds, we do not have evidential grounds to sit here 2,000 years later and say that eyewitness account was wrong. There is no evidence, no logic, no reason that would question that.

SPEAKER_00 29:35

And Jesus wasn't operating in a clandestine manner. He wasn't off in a secret society. He was out in the public doing miracles among massive crowds of 5,000, thousands of people at a time and throughout the land, from you know Jerusalem and all the way up to the northern area. So he was a widely known public figure. So there were a lot of events, like what you mentioned. John says we couldn't even record them all. I guess the point I'm trying to make is that there were a lot of events that were there that could be recorded by eyewitnesses. It wasn't something that it was a liberty pocket of 12 guys, and Jesus was telling them secrets and things that were happening. He had a public ministry.

SPEAKER_01 30:19

That was Peter's point in 2 Peter. He's saying these things didn't happen in a corner. This was a very public thing.

Are The Gospels Really Anonymous

SPEAKER_01 30:25

So, next little question that we get here sometimes that I've heard from, and we'll just touch on this quickly, is modern skeptics say, well, the gospels were anonymous and they were written way late, so we really don't know who wrote them. That criticism is only a modern criticism that was not there for many centuries simply because it was never questioned up until somebody went off looking for something to criticize. It's a question that's out there, and there are skeptics and critics that use that today, so we have to respond. No early church father attributed the various gospels to anyone else. You understand, these were people, the first 250 years of the church, it was a capital offense. You'd be punished by death if you stood up in Rome for 250 years and claimed to be a Christian. So these people's lives were on the line, and none of them questioned whether Matthew wrote Matthew, Mark wrote Mark, Luke wrote Luke, or John wrote John. Not a one. For the first many centuries of the church, none of the church fathers that were close to the events, none of them questioned it. Secondly, no manuscript exists. When you manuscripts we're talking about before the printing press, the handwritten copies, no manuscript exists that has anybody else's name on it. And the research I was able to do, at least for Matthew, all known manuscripts of Matthew have according to Matthew on the top of it. Now I couldn't dig up and I'll find it someday, but I couldn't find the authoritative source for the other gospel writers. I mean the fragments obviously excluded. There's little pieces of gospels that don't have the header on them. If you think about it, even in modern books, how many books have you read that had the author's name down in the body of the book? It's never there. It's on the cover, it's on the title page. But the book is the book. It's the same way. And these people, again, were writing something about Jesus. They weren't saying, look at me, look at what I did. It wasn't an autobiography. It's not an autobiography. It's not placing myself in fact, they they did things to diminish themselves. Matthew is the only one who writes that he was a tax collector. That was an insult. That would have undermined your authority. That would have, oh yeah, by the way, I was this lousy, no good, scheming, thieving tax collector.

SPEAKER_00 32:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 32:40

That's what he put in there. You would never puff yourself up by saying, Oh, I was right there with him. No early church father attributed anybody else to it than the four gospel writers. No manuscript exists that had anybody else's name on it. All of at least for Matthew, have Matthew's name on it. So there's really no evidence that they were anonymous. It's just factually incorrect. John in John 21, 24, tells us he was there, but he doesn't even use his name. He says, This is that person. And that's the way of saying I was the writer.

SPEAKER_00 33:09

Another area says the disciple who Jesus loves doesn't use his name.

SPEAKER_01 33:13

Now, there's internal evidence for the validity of the gospel writers. Only in Matthew is he said to be a tax collector, as I said. The author has a great command of both Aramaic and Greek. The author of Matthew assumes the readers know the Jewish traditions. Matthew 2219 mentions a coin that was used in the tax, and Matthew uses the precise technical term for the coin, a gnomisma, which is sort of like saying it was it was a nickel or a quarter. It implies the author was very familiar with the finances and the taxes. Luke was a Greek physician, very highly educated. So I'm told, I'm not a Greek scholar, but read the first four verses of Luke in Greek and tell whether that person knew what they're talking about or not. Supposed to be a very high educated version of Greek. So they reflect this. John was a fisherman, used very simple

Dating The Gospels Earlier Than Critics Claim

SPEAKER_01 34:08

terms. So, dating of the gospel. One of the accusations, oh, these people were written way late. How could we expect people to remember 40 years later something that happened? Well, the first answer to that is that I can remember things very specifically that happened a very long time ago because they were profound events. And everybody's like that. Some profound event is gonna burn it into your brain, and you can remember it. Everybody can remember things exactly from many years later. That's one answer, but I would conclude it wasn't that long, and we don't have to depend on memories for that long. And here's the dating case that it's not a 40-year-later thing. We can tell some things about when they were written, and we can tell some precise timestamps. The book of Acts was written by the same author as the book of Luke, only later. If you look at the first two or three verses of each one, they were obviously written by the same person. Acts 18, verse 12. Paul is in a second of four missionary journeys. He had three journeys plus severity to Rome. And in the middle of the second one, Acts 18.12, there appear before this guy Gallio. And there's this little phrase in Acts 18, 12, Gallio was proconsul of Achaea. And then it goes on with the story. Well, Luke has hundreds of those in there that give very specific historical details. So we know from secular history, Gallio was proconsul of Achaia for one year, the year 52. That's attested in secular history. So we know that Paul was in Achaia in the year 52 in his second missionary journey, second of four. There's time in between them. If you go through the timeline, he stayed in some places for a year and a half before he moved on. So that dates him in the year 52 in the middle of Paul's story. Acts was written at the latest by about 64. We don't know the exact year, but approximately the latest you could put it on and feel good about it is about the year 64. One of the reasons is it doesn't mention the fall of Jerusalem. So if Acts was written by 64, Luke was written prior to that. Luke had to have been written between approximately 55 to 60. Luke 1.1 says that there were many eyewitness accounts that were already written at the time he wrote his gospels. Those would have been written between 50 to 55 at the latest. So we have written accounts of the Gospels written by 50 to 55. Paul, over in his writings in 1 Timothy 5.18, quotes Matthew when he's talking about the laborer is worthy of his wages. In Paul's letters, Matthew was already written. The dating of 1 Timothy was approximately 64. So Matthew and the other accounts had to have been written prior to the year 60. Because they're referred to in these letters. Referred to in their letters. Luke's account presents detailed information that goes back to the time of Jesus' birth through the end of Acts. Another timestamp is 1 Corinthians. The critical scholars, according to Gary Habermas, the critical scholars, date 1 Corinthians about the year 55 approximately. So now we have multiple accounts, the many sources of Luke, Paul's quoting of Matthew, and just the logical working backwards in our timeline on the Gospels, we get multiple, multiple accounts in writing between the years 50 and 55, which is 20 to 25 years after the fact. Now, in those writings, we look at what they wrote. In Paul's writings in Galatians, he talks about two things. In 118, Paul talks about getting saved and then spending three years in Damascus prior to going to Jerusalem to confirm his gospel with Peter and James. In the book of Galatians, he's giving a timeline. And he says, in 118, I was saved. I went three years in Damascus. Then I went up to confirm my gospel with the apostles, Peter and James. Chapter 2, verse 1. He says, then 14 years later, he goes back to Jerusalem and reconfirmed his gospel message with Peter, James, and John. So do the math. He had three years in Damascus, 14-year period, time in between. You start off with 20 to 25 years. You just subtracted 17 of those years between Paul's salvation and when he wrote these things. Now we're way back less than 10 years. And if you look at 1 Corinthians 15, he talks about Corinthians. Last time I was here, I gave you what I was given. In 1 Corinthians 15, the first two or three verses of the chapter, he's talking about a prior trip that he made to the churches of Galatia. And he's saying, Remember when I came last time? Last time I was here, I gave you what I had been given. Namely, and he starts saying that Jesus died, that he resurrected, the gospel message. So if you follow the timeline, 20 to 25 years after multiple accounts already written, and them saying, I was here before, and I gave you what I had already been given that had been confirmed through these multiple trips, confirming with Peter, James, and John. The timeline, if we just read the passages, 20 to 25 years later, they write down an account that had been given to them. Habermass thinks it's less than five years.

SPEAKER_00 39:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 39:59

And what was given, again, back to First Corinthians 15, is what is called a creed. And it's a little sing song, da da da da da da da da da da da da. That he died, that he was raised. What's a memory technique? What he's giving is an early creed that had been memorized by the early church before things were written. And what he is saying was the last trip, I gave you what I had already reconfirmed on those two other trips to Jerusalem to check it out, this little memorized poem that we had all had with the rhyme in it that taught the gospel message that had already been circulated. If we add all that up and do the math on the timing, it gets a memory technique that had been taught to the churches and was widely distributed less than five years using critical scholarship. And I believe it too. There are memory techniques used in the Gospels in Matthew chapter one with the genealogy, the 14, 14, 14. That's a memory technique. They use these things. So it's it's just not the case that we have anonymous gospels that were written 40 years later, that who could test their memory. No, we had things that were memorized within two to three years of the events by the eyewitnesses that were reconfirmed together, that were taught to the church on multiple occasions and written down 20 to 25 years after the fact. So it's just not the case that the gospels are doubted. These are really, really solid

History Or Myth What Experts Notice

SPEAKER_01 41:42

stuff. Now I'm gonna end with two things. People question whether the gospels, well, maybe the whole thing is just a story. Maybe the whole thing is a myth or a religious novel. And I'm gonna submit for the audience consideration. I know of two literary scholars that were teaching at secular universities that were atheists that later became Christians. And one of them was Dr. C. S. Lewis, and the other one was Dr. Holly Ordway. Both of them were adult atheists that were already teaching literature in secular universities and then looked at the gospels and became Christians. So their professional considerations were novels and myths and legend. And I'm going to read a couple of quotes from these people to submit whether or not the question, again, our question is are these the gospel accounts, are these religious novels? Are they just like maybe somebody just wrote the whole thing up and made it look like that timeline work? C.S. Lewis was a PhD that taught at Oxford and Cambridge, may have heard of those universities, but he taught literature. He says, quote, all I am in private life is a literary critic and historian. That's my job. And I am prepared to say on that basis, if anyone thinks the gospels are either legend or novels, then that person is simply showing his incompetence as a literary critic. I've read a great many novels and I know a fair amount about the legends that grew up among early people, and I know perfectly well the gospels are not that kind of stuff. Close quote. Now, my friend, in our audience, if you think that the gospels are a religious novel, I'm not saying this. Lewis says you're incompetent. Now I'm too nice of a guy to say that, but Lewis was a little more straightforward. And if you have an issue, it's not with me, but you're incompetent. Lewis says you are, because he's the expert. Again, taught at Oxford and Cambridge. I also submit Dr. Holly Ordway. Similar situation. She tells in her book, which I would recommend by the way, it's called Not God's Type. In her book, she was making the case she wasn't God's type. And it's a real interesting story of her being pulled against her will into uh salvation. But she talks about growing up as an atheist and being a PhD in literature as an atheist and then considering the Bible. And she says this, quote, I'd been steeped in folklore, fantasy, legend, and myth ever since I was a child. And I had studied these literary genres as an adult. I knew their cadences, their flavor, their rhythm. None of these stylistic fingerprints appeared in the New Testament books I was reading. The Gospels had the ineffable texture of history with all the odd clarity of detail that comes when the author is recounting something so huge that even as he tells it, he doesn't see all the implications. So with that, we have the people that are the literary experts look at these accounts in the gospels and say, this is not a novel. And this isn't a myth.

SPEAKER_00 44:47

And by the fact that they were atheists prior to, they're looking at it very skeptically.

SPEAKER_01 44:53

Yes. So we say all that to say this. As we get into in our reasoning through the Bible podcast here, we're going to be teaching the gospels. And these are very profound. The people that wrote this were eyewitnesses. They wrote it down early, they wrote down what they saw, and it's very profound, and it's very rich. And I hope our audience can stay with us as we go through because it'll be very rewarding.

SPEAKER_00 45:15

And Glenn, probably most of our audience are believers. We're hopeful that there are non-believers that are also listening to us. So this type of a session would be for those, particularly as well, that are having questions, that are non-believers, they're having a little bit of questions, they're hearing some of these other skeptics. You've gone through a very thorough, in my opinion, case in regards to these gospels and how they are from a perspective of logic and reasoning. With that, this will be the end of this session that we have today. We also encourage you to pass these sessions on to your friends and family, those that maybe you've had some conversations with, and hopefully that they'll get some benefit out of it as well.

SPEAKER_01 45:57

And that'll be all for today on Reasoning Through the Black.