Bart Ehrman’s voice echoed off the drying walls I’d been painting as my portable DVD player delivered one of his lectures. I had chosen to listen to his The Making of the New Testament Canon lectures while I worked on some much-needed interior design. However, I didn’t like what I was hearing about the gospels.
As a 17 year-old in the Evangelical community, I already knew that the gospels were written by eyewitnesses to the events of Jesus’ life (except Luke, who interviewed the eyewitnesses). Everyone knew that, I thought. Sure, there were minor conflicting details in the gospels, but all eyewitnesses differ on some details. And yes, it was weird that the tax-collector Matthew seemingly wrote about himself in the third-person when he wrote the Gospel of Matthew. But the gospels were divinely inspired despite their somehow-explain-away-able shortcomings. But Ehrman discussed how the gospels were written anonymously, how their structures lent themselves to having worked from earlier sources, and how their contradictions were highly characteristic of those developing from oral tradition. Well, not wanting to accidentally get wall paint on a Bible while looking into it, I dismissed his arguments as that anti-Jesus rhetoric I’d always been hearing about on par with The DaVinci Code.[1] Everybody hatin’ on Jesus.
A few weeks later, I finally purchased my textbooks for my first Bible college semester. As I flipped through my fancy new books, one book stood out. It was called a Synopsis of the Four Gospels, and I had never seen anything like it. Basically, it puts the narratives in the gospels that are similar to each other side-by-side so that the reader can compare. The amount of information that one can learn about the gospels by reading them horizontally may surprise you. It surprised me. In the moments that I examined it, a wave of confusion came over me. I always knew that the stories read similarly, but in many areas, Matthew, Mark, and Luke were strangely identical. As though they occasionally copied one another, or maybe they all copied a mutual source. I had just never noticed it. Whatever the case, there was certainly a lot of sharing going on. But why would any of these writers need to copy from anything if they were all eyewitnesses?
On my first day of Bible college, I practically shook with excitement in my Gospel Narratives class. That is, until my professor stated exactly what that agnostic New Testament scholar had said on video back in that half-painted room—that the gospels were not written by eyewitnesses. In fact, the stories were told over and over by people (most of whom couldn’t read) for decades before anyone wrote them down. My professor discussed the different hypotheses as to the sourcing for the gospels, any of which made far more sense than what I was always taught. As he presented his case to the class of angry freshmen, I remembered back to that synopsis of the gospels. Clearly there was something to this. While I knew I would have to think on it, his case was difficult to argue.
It was rather straightforward when looking at that synopsis, actually. The specific way in which parts of Matthew, Mark, and Luke read similarly to each other (often word-for-word) leads scholars to think that the authors of Matthew and Luke copied a bit from Mark. You see, Mark[2] is thought to have been written first, likely following Nero’s persecution of Christians.[3] However, in some areas, Matthew and Luke (both clearly written later) share mutual passages that Mark doesn’t even have. What does that suggest? Well, Matthew and Luke probably used a separate source for those. We don’t have any manuscripts of that source, but Matthew and Luke provide good evidence that it existed. Scholars have come to name it “Q Source.”[4] And anything else that is exclusive to either Matthew or Luke, they likely got from sources of their own. The Gospel of John is clearly off on its own, ostensibly having been compiled from a variety of literary sources[5] around the turn of the century.[6]
It wasn’t so much the lack of glamor in the making of the four gospels that frustrated me. Yes, their averageness and human-made-ness as I came to discover it was certainly disappointing. Decades of oral tradition, then copying from each other and unknown literary sources? That doesn’t sound very divinely-inspired—or reliable. Of course, lots of educated Christians know this information and don’t find it threatening to their faith. What frustrated me was the confidence with which I was always given the churchy “eyewitness authorship” explanation—a simplistic story on par with the stork explanation for childbirth. Either the pastors and church leaders around whom I’d grown up simply didn’t know the real story, or they’d rejected it and swept all of its evidence under the rug. And here was my feeling: if the Bible is so credible, why not share this bit of information with us? But the churches I grew up in avoided talking about the origins and making of the New Testament at all costs. I had always noticed their lack of enthusiasm when it came to in-depth historical Biblical studies. Perhaps this is what they were afraid of—educating their congregants out of the faith. I always thought this concern motivated them to tiptoe around education in biology, philosophy, and world religions—but never the Bible.
The unbalanced distribution of evidence to devotion also bothered me. What do I mean by that? The Christian religion requires its adherents to be completely and utterly devoted, even to the point of martyrdom. Go hard or go home. Yet the evidence to support the foundational concepts of Christianity, a faith that demands so much devotion, is lacking.
If the Bible is so convincing and evidenced that I should be a believer, then why do Christians propagate nonsense like eyewitness authorship for the four gospels? Why does pointing out that which is obvious for anyone who has the gospels laid out side-by-side seem so threatening? Seriously—go purchase the Synopsis of the Four Gospels for yourself. It will not only serve as a fantastic Bible study tool, but also as a window for you to see where all these Bible scholars (Christian and non-Christian) are coming from. Now of course, knowing that the gospels were written later probably won’t strip you of your faith. For me, it merely helped to get me thinking critically about the Bible. I began thinking, “How else have I been misled?” I exceled in my Bible classes and engaged in constant biblical studies to figure out where I was wrong. But instead of leading me to a deeper connection with God, the answers led to my departure from Christianity. Had my well-intended Christian leaders been forthright with the truth all my life instead of leaving me to dig for it, it’s hard to say where I would be today.
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Footnotes:
[1] This is amusing in hindsight given that Ehrman wrote a book called Truth and Fiction in The DaVinci Code.
[2] The author of Mark was not familiar with Palestinian geography, as he mistakenly wrote that Jesus and the disciples traveled from Jericho to Jerusalem by first reaching Bethphage and then Bethany (Mark 11:1). A person traveling from Jericho to Jerusalem would first encounter Bethany, then Bethphage. An eyewitness or Peter’s interpreter John Mark (often credited with the Gospel of Mark) would have been far more familiar with this geographical region than the Markan author was. We can also infer that the author was writing from a pre-composed written source due to his faulty and conglomerate Isaiah quotation (rather than having a copy of in front of him, that is) in Mark 1:2-3, which is comprised of Exodus 23:20 from the Septuagint, Malachi 3:1 from the Hebrew, and Isaiah 40:3, though the author claims that his entire quotation is from Isaiah.
[3] Mark was clearly writing to an audience that was aware of the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E., as evidenced by his references in 8:34-8, 13:5-8, and 13:9-19. Perkins, P. (1998). The Synoptic Gospels and Acts of the Apostles Telling the Christian story. In J. Barton (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Biblical Interpretation (Cambridge Companions to Religion, pp. 241-258). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CCOL0521481449.017
[4] “[Q]is a document whose existence we must assume in order to make sense of the other features of the Gospels. […] Put simply, the most efficient and compelling way to explain the relationship among the synoptic gospels—Matthew, Mark, and Luke—is to assume that Mark was used independently as a source for Matthew and Luke. Matthew and Luke, however, share some material that they did not get from Mark, about 4500 words. It is this material that makes up the bulk of Q.” Kloppenborg, John S. 2008. Q: the Earliest gospel. Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville · London. P. 2
[5] Consider reading about these in Chapter 2 of The Johannine Literature by Lindars, Edwards, and Court.
[6] Lincoln, Andrew, p. 18.
Bibliography:
Kloppenborg, John S. 2008. Q: the Earliest gospel. Westminster John Knox Press. Louisville · London.
Moloney, Francis J. 2004. Mark: Storyteller, Interpreter, Evangelist. Hendrickson Publishers. Peabody, MA. p. 11.
Lindars, Barnabas; Edwards, Ruth B.; Court, John M. 2000. The Johannine Literature. Sheffield Academic Press. Sheffield, England.
Lincoln, Andrew. 2005. Gospel According to St John: Black’s New Testament Commentaries. Bloomsbury Publishing. London.
Helms, Randel McCraw. 1997. Who Wrote the Gospels? Millennium Press. Altadena, CA.
Boring, Eugene M. 1988. Mark: A Commentary. Westminster John Knox Press. London. Pp. 12-14
