Tim responds to a progressive pastor who claims the authors of the Gospels did not know Jesus.
Transcript
Caleb: All right, I’ve got my Bible here, and I’m ready to read to you absolutely every book of the Bible that was written by someone who had met Jesus.
Tim: All right, let’s hear it.
Caleb: We can go ahead and skip the Hebrew Bible, since Jesus wasn’t alive when that was written, and go straight to the New Testament. You ready? [FLIPS THROUGH BIBLE] Not a single word. There is not one book of the Bible that was written by someone who had met Jesus.
Tim: Notice, so far, we have a claim. But here’s the thing: Anyone can make a claim. What really matters is the evidence to back it up. So, in situations like this, it’s totally appropriate to ask, How did you come to that conclusion? In other words, Why should we believe you? Let’s see what Caleb says.
Caleb: Yes, some of the Gospels are attributed to Jesus’ disciples, but scholars agree that they didn’t write them.
Tim: Scholars agree, huh? Like which scholars? Because scholars like Richard Bauckham, Craig Keener, Simon Gathercole, Peter J. Williams, Martin Hengel, and N.T. Wright all disagree. They believe we have good reason to think that the Gospels are based on eyewitness testimony or close companions of eyewitnesses.
Caleb: They were written decades after Jesus’ death. The earliest Gospel that we have in the New Testament is the Gospel of Mark, and it was probably written around 70 of the Common Era.
Tim: Yes, the Gospels were written decades later. So what? That’s still within the lifetime of people who could have known, remembered, and testified about Jesus. My grandma died three decades ago. I was a witness to her life and could testify about her. So, merely being written decades later doesn’t automatically rule out eyewitness testimony.
Caleb: The attribution of those Gospels to disciples didn’t happen for many years.
Tim: Not true. There’s no good evidence the Gospels were originally anonymous, with attributions to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John coming many years later. In fact, the weight of the manuscript and historical evidence points in the other direction.
First, while the Gospels don’t include the author’s name within the body of the text, that doesn’t mean they were originally anonymous. In fact, New Testament scholar Simon Gathercole, who’s done some really great research on this, shows that early Greek manuscripts all include titles attributing them to either Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. As scholar Brant Pitre puts it, there’s absolutely no manuscript evidence to support the claim that originally the Gospels had no titles.
Second, the early church fathers are also unanimous in attributing the four Gospels to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—and no one else.
Now, think about why this matters. If the Gospels started out anonymous and then were copied and circulated and recopied and copied again and circulated for decades around the Roman Empire—from Judea to Rome to Egypt to France—then here’s the question: How did the scribes and early church fathers conspire to unanimously attribute all the Gospels with the exact same four names? No confusion. No disagreement. No alternatives. That’s not how anonymous documents behave.
Just compare this with the book of Hebrews, which is genuinely anonymous. Notice how there was lots of debate about its authorship then, just as there is today. That’s what we should expect if a writing is truly, originally anonymous.
Third, let’s imagine for the sake of the argument that the Gospels were originally anonymous, but, much later on, Christians conspired to deceive the masses by falsely attributing them just to give them more authority. Okay. Why choose names like Mark and Luke? If you’re making stuff up, wouldn’t you pick eyewitnesses like Peter or Thomas or even Jesus himself? In fact, that’s precisely what the writers of the apocryphal gospels do.
So, no, Caleb, the most likely conclusion is that the attributions of authorship are as original as the Gospels themselves.
Caleb: They also don’t read like eyewitness accounts and don’t even claim to have been written by the disciples.
Tim: Really? The Gospel of John literally ends by saying, “This is the disciple who is testifying to these things and wrote these things, and we know that his testimony is true” (John 21:24). That sounds pretty eyewitnessy, doesn’t it? Also, Luke opens his Gospel by saying he investigated everything carefully and wrote it out so that you may know the exact truth about the things that you’ve been taught. Again, that sounds like someone trying to get the details right, even though Luke wasn’t an eyewitness himself.
Caleb: Paul’s letters weren’t written by someone who had met Jesus. Paul, by his own admission, had never met Jesus. And even that great narrative we have about Saul encountering the risen Christ on the road to Damascus is something that the author of Luke-Acts—the same author wrote both the Gospel of Luke and the book of Acts—it’s something that he invented for the narrative. Paul never makes a mention of that. And, surely, if he had encountered the risen Christ, he would have mentioned it.
Tim: Wrong again. Paul explicitly claims to have seen the risen Jesus. While defending his apostleship to the Corinthians, Paul writes, “Have I not seen Jesus our Lord? In fact, Paul anchors his authority as an apostle to his encounter with Jesus. And of course, in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul lists Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances and includes himself.
Caleb: All of the other epistles in the Bible are later, and the book of Revelation is later. None of those authors had ever met Jesus.
Tim: Again, these are just assertions. No argument. No evidence. Just trust me, bro. I could just as easily claim that Peter, John, James, and Jude did know Jesus and wrote these epistles. My point is, what is claimed without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
All right. That’s enough for now.
Let me end where I think Caleb and I would agree. You shouldn’t trust someone just because they’re wearing a fancy stole or standing behind a pulpit. Go investigate these claims for yourself, and see where the evidence leads.