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by
Brant Pitre
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November 20, 2018 - April 15, 2019
Christianity is a historical religion which claims that the God who made the universe actually became a man— a real human being who lived in a particular time and in a particular place.
the Jewish roots of Jesus’s divinity.
were written too late in the first century AD to be based on reliable eyewitness testimony.
In fact, some scholars argued that these “lost gospels,” especially the Gospel of Thomas,
Finally, and most significant of all, I began to realize that many contemporary New Testament scholars do not believe that Jesus of Nazareth ever actually claimed to be God.
most scholars admit that Jesus does claim to be divine in the Gospel of John.
In ancient Jewish Scripture, “I am” was the name of God—
three earlier Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke (known as the Synoptic Gospels).
I couldn’t find any anonymous copies.
there are no anonymous manuscripts of the four Gospels. They don’t exist.
there are compelling reasons for concluding that the four Gospels are first-century biographies of Jesus, written within the lifetime of the apostles, and based directly on eyewitness testimony.
You have to go back and read the Synoptic Gospels from an ancient Jewish perspective.
charged him with “blasphemy” and handed him over to the Romans to be crucified.
in a first-century Jewish context, it wasn’t blasphemy to claim to be the Messiah. But it was blasphemy to claim to be God.
I gradually realized that confusion about who Jesus claimed to be is everywhe...
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the Jewish roots of Jesus’s divinity.
no anonymous copies of Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John have ever been found.
the utter implausibility that a book circulating around the Roman Empire without a title for almost a hundred years could somehow at some point be attributed to exactly the same author by scribes throughout the world and yet leave no trace of disagreement in any manuscripts.
Virtually all scholars agree that the apocryphal gospels—such as the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Thomas, and the Gospel of Judas—are forgeries that were falsely attributed to disciples of Jesus long after the apostles were all dead.
Because it is the authors of the apocryphal gospels who wanted to give much-needed authority to their writings by falsely ascribing them to people with the closest possible connections to Jesus.
notice that all three references to Luke also contain references to Mark!
early “church fathers.”
completely unambiguous and totally unanimous about who wrote the four Gospels.
When ancient witnesses from such geographically diverse regions agree with one another, their testimony needs to be taken very seriously.
there is not the slightest trace of an idea that the Gospel was ever anonymous.
Matthew, the eyewitness to Jesus’s life and one of the twelve apostles.
there is not the slightest trace of an idea that the Gospel of Mark was ever originally anonymous.
They are very open about Luke’s status as a second-generation Christian.
the Gospel was composed by Luke for the “Gentiles”—that is, non-Jewish Christians.
John and the book of Revelation, there was no debate about the apostolic authorship of the Gospel of John.
the Gospel of John was written to defend the divinity of Jesus against the teachings of a man named Cerinthus and a group known as the Ebionites, both of whom denied that Jesus was divine.
In any case, however it was written, the early church fathers are unanimous in attributing the book to the apostle John.
Remarkably, this is even true of the pagan writer Celsus, who lived in the late second century AD.
Notice here that Celsus definitely thinks that the Gospels are fiction.
However, he never questions that they were actually written by “disciples of Jesus.”
This is extremely significant, since Celsus could have easily strengthened his case against Christianity by arguing that none of the Gospels we...
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there is not the slightest trace of external evidence to support the now popular claim that the four Gospels were originally anonymous.
orthodox or heretic, pagan or Christian—
apocryphal gospels, from the Greek word apokryphon, meaning “hidden book.”
eyewitnesses such as Peter, Judas, or Thomas.
Unlike the four Gospels, the “lost gospels” were almost immediately rejected as fakes and forgeries.
the existence of these books has been known for a very, very long time.
correspond remarkably well to what we know about the second-century Christian groups known as “gnostics” (from Greek gnōsis, meaning “knowledge”).
we still have to look at the literary genre of the Gospels.
What kind of book is this?
because genre matters.
That’s also why the Bible is arranged according to genres:
because some scholars today claim that the Gospels are much more like folklore than biography or history.
Justin Martyr refers to the Gospels as “the memoirs of [the] apostles”
Augustine of Hippo described the four Gospels as “trustworthy testimonies,”
