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by
Brant Pitre
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June 17 - August 24, 2024
“Forget everything you thought you knew about who wrote the Gospels.”
“Forget everything you thought you knew about who wrote the Gospels.”
I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God.” That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse.
I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God.” That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse.
Liar: Jesus knew he wasn’t God, but he said he was; 2. Lunatic: Jesus thought he was God, but he actually wasn’t; 3. Lord: Jesus was who he said he was—God come in the flesh.
First, according to this theory, all four Gospels were originally published without any titles or headings identifying the authors.4 This means no “Gospel according to Matthew,” no “Gospel according to Mark,” no “Gospel according to Luke,” and no “Gospel according to John.”
Second, all four Gospels supposedly circulated without any titles for almost a century before anyone attributed them to Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John.
Third, it was only much later—sometime after the disciples of Jesus were dead and buried—that the titles were finally added to the manuscripts.
Fourth and finally, and perhaps most significant of all, according to this theory, because the Gospels were originally anonymous, it is reasonable to conclude that none of them was actually written by an eyewitness.
The only problem is that the theory is almost completely baseless. It has no foundation in the earliest manuscripts of the Gospels, it fails to take seriously how ancient books were copied and circulated, and it suffers from an overall lack of historical plausibility.
In short, the earliest and best copies of the four Gospels are unanimously attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. There is absolutely no manuscript evidence—and thus no actual historical evidence—to support the claim that “originally” the Gospels had no titles.
In short, the earliest and best copies of the four Gospels are unanimously attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. There is absolutely no manuscript evidence—and thus no actual historical evidence—to support the claim that “originally” the Gospels had no titles.
If you wanted to give authority to your anonymous book, would you pick Luke, who was neither an eyewitness himself nor a follower of an eyewitness, but a companion of Paul, who never met Jesus during his earthly life? And if you wanted to give authority to your anonymous life of Jesus, would you pick Mark, who was not himself a disciple of Jesus?
[F]or the most part,
Theophilus,
Search him
Pope Benedict XVI states: “[T]he disciple whom Jesus loved…is once again named as the author of the Gospel in John 21:24.”29 To be sure, the combined use of “I” (first person singular) with “we” (first person plural) and “his testimony” (third person) can be a bit confusing. However, even a quick look at other passages in the Gospel show Jesus doing the same thing: he speaks about himself in the third person (“the Son of Man”) and shifts from “I” to “we” when giving a solemn pronouncement (see John 3:10-15; 6:52-58).30 That is what the Beloved Disciple is doing here: he is solemnly pronouncing
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Look at scripture
Even more, some of these writings come from authors who either knew the apostles themselves, or who were only one generation removed from the apostles. The church fathers not only confirm the evidence from the manuscripts and titles discussed in the last chapter, they also add to the mix important insights into the authors and origins of the four Gospels. Again, this is what scholars refer to as external evidence.
And the elder [John] used to say this: “Mark, having become Peter’s interpreter, wrote down accurately everything he remembered, though not in order,
Notice that Papias admits that Mark was not an eyewitness to Jesus: “he neither heard the Lord nor followed him.”14
Second, and perhaps even more important, 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.
Maybe, just maybe, it is because the four Gospels never were anonymous. And maybe, just maybe, it is because the four first-century Gospels—in contrast to the later apocryphal gospels—were actually authored by the apostles and their followers.
This idea that the Gospels are like folklore is alive and well. For example, in his best-selling introduction to the New Testament—once again, the textbook I used when I was in school—Bart Ehrman claims that ancient Christians weren’t all that concerned about historical truth, since they believed that a story about Jesus could be true “whether or not it happened.”7
THREE STAGES IN THE FORMATION OF THE GOSPELS Stage 1. The Life and Teaching of Jesus As a Jewish “rabbi” (rabbi), Jesus “taught” (didaskō) his “students” (mathētai) in the context of a rabbi-student relationship. His students lived with him and learned from him for some three years. During this time, Jesus expected his students to “remember” (mnēmoneuō) what he said and instructed them to begin “teaching” (didaskō) others while he was still alive (see Mark 4:1-20; 6:1-13, 30; 8:18; 9:5; 11:21; and parallels).6 Stage 2. The Preaching of Jesus’s Students After Jesus’s death, the students of
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As the Gospels make clear, it also meant remembering what he said (Matthew 16:9; Mark 8:18; John 15:20; 16:4). In the words of John Meier:
Look at these scriptures
In fact, as Dale Allison points out, the disciples would have likely begun “rehearsing” the teachings of Jesus already during his lifetime, starting with the first time they were sent on mission by Jesus himself (see Matthew 10:1-23; Mark 6:7-12; Luke 9:1-10).12 One reason this is important is that, as Richard Bauckham states, “Frequent recall is an important factor in both retaining the memory and retaining it accurately.”13
Josephus says that he wanted to write his own autobiography “while there are still persons living who can either disprove or corroborate my testimony” (Antiquities, 20.266).
In fact, Wiesel published two volumes of his memoirs in the late 1990s.16 In other words, some people die young; other people live long and write books.
If you know anything at all about the history of Israel, then you know that the Temple and the city of Jerusalem had already been destroyed in 586 BC—over five hundred years before the birth of Jesus. The first destruction of the Temple by the Babylonian Empire is described in the book of Kings:
In fact, that is exactly what Luke does in the Acts of the Apostles with regard to another prophecy that was actually fulfilled before his book was written: Now in these days prophets came down from Jerusalem to Antioch. And one of them named Agabus stood up and foretold by the Spirit that there would be a great famine over all the world; and this took place in the days of Claudius. (Acts 11:27-28)
According to this theory, the Gospel of Mark was the first to be written. Around the same time, a hypothetical gospel, which modern scholars refer to as “Q” (from the German Quelle, meaning “source”), also supposedly came into existence. Later on, the Gospels of Luke and Matthew used both Mark and “Q” as their two primary sources in writing their Gospels.
What does all of this have to do with the Transfiguration? The answer is simple but profound. On the mountain of the Transfiguration, Moses and Elijah are finally allowed to see what they could not see during their earthly lives: the unveiled face of God. How is this possible? Because the God who appeared to them on Mount Sinai has now become man. In Jesus of Nazareth, the one God now has a human face.
If you’ve ever sat down and read the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, or Luke from beginning to end, one of the most striking things you might have noticed is how Jesus often instructs the demons, his disciples, and others not to tell anyone who he is. For example, during his many exorcisms, Jesus “would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him” (Mark 1:34). In one case, when the demons cry out, “You are the Son of God,” Jesus “strictly ordered them not to make him known” (Mark 3:11-12). After he heals a man of leprosy, he “sternly charged him” to “say nothing to any one” about what had
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Why does'nt Christ ask God not to do this, if he is truly human. Most children do this.😀
Jesus knew anything at all about the political situation in Jerusalem, he would know that a public messianic claim would lead to his almost immediate execution.2
“My son, your sins are forgiven.”
I find this odd because I thought Jesus did not think sin caused a person to be a paraplegic.
Psalm 110
Read this
If there’s any aspect of the life of Jesus that has given rise to doubts about whether he really was the Messiah and the divine Son of God, it is the fact that he was crucified. Already in the first century AD, the apostle Paul could refer to the crucifixion of Christ as a “stumbling block (Greek skandalon) to the Jews and folly (Greek mō ria) to Gentiles” (1 Corinthians 1:23). If you look carefully at the two Greek terms Paul uses here, you can see that we get the English words “scandal” and “moron” from them. In other words, Paul is saying that the very idea of “Christ crucified”—a crucified
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“My God, My God, Why Have You Forsaken Me?”
Yea, dogs are round about
forsaken by God, he is revealing that not only is his death part of the divine plan; it is also the event that will trigger the conversion of “all the families of the nations”
(Mark 10:45)—changes everything. For if love covers a multitude of sins, then divine love—infinite love—covers an infinite multitude of sins.
“We preach Christ crucified,
In some ways, the sheer power of “Christ crucified” (1 Corinthians 1:23) almost makes it tempting to stop at the foot of the cross. But as anyone familiar with the Gospels knows, the story of Jesus of Nazareth by no means ends with his death and burial. We have to press on and ask the question: What about the resurrection? Why did the closest disciples of Jesus come to believe that he had been raised from the dead? And what did it mean for them, as first-century Jews, to say that Jesus was “resurrected”? What is resurrection?
earliest followers believed that his spirit “went to heaven” after he died, that he was somehow exalted or taken up into the presence of God.
He was God, why did his spirit need to be raised?
According to the Acts of the Apostles, within a couple years after Jesus’s death, some “five thousand” Jews came to believe in his “resurrection” (see Acts 4:1-4).
First, when the Jewish disciples of Jesus spoke about his resurrection, they were not claiming that he had simply come back to ordinary earthly life.2 This is what we would call “resuscitation.”
Second, when the Jewish disciples of Jesus spoke about his resurrection, they were also not claiming that Jesus’s soul or spirit was “alive” with God.5
Many first-century Jews believed that death was the separation of the “soul” (Greek psychē) from the body, and that the soul could live on in a state of “immortality”
Likewise, Jesus talks about how Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are still “living,” even though the remains of their bodies were still on earth and long since corrupted (Luke 20:37-38).
“Rabboni!” (which means Teacher). Jesus said to her, “Do not hold me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father; but go to my brethren and say to them, I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” (John 20:16-17)
I dont really understand.
