Can We Trust the Gospels? E-Book

Mark D. Roberts

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 272

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2007

Beschreibung

Attacks on the historical reliability of the Gospels—especially their portrayal of Jesus Christ—are nothing new. But are these attacks legitimate? Is there reason to doubt the accuracy of the Gospels? By examining and refuting some of the most common criticisms of the Gospels, author Mark D. Roberts explains why we can indeed trust the Gospels, nearly two millennia after they were written. Lay readers and scholars alike will benefit from this accessible book, and will walk away confident in the reliability of the Gospels.

Leseprobe

Can We Trust the Gospels? Investigating the Reliability of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John Copyright © 2007 by Mark D. Roberts Published by Crossway Books a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers 1300 Crescent Street Wheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law.

Published in association with Yates and Yates, LLP, Attorneys and Counselors, Orange, California.

Cover design: Josh Dennis Cover illustration: The Bridgeman Art Library

Photo credits: The four views of Half Dome courtesy of Mark D. Roberts. The synagogue in Capernaum, the Pilate inscription, and the Pool of Siloam courtesy of Holy Land Photos (www. HolyLandPhotos.org). The cliffs at El Kursi courtesy of Kim Guess/BiblePlaces.com. All photos used by permission.

First printing 2007 Printed in the United States of America

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture references are from The New Revised Standard Version. Copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Published by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A.

Scripture quotations marked ESV are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®, copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

ISBN-10: 1-58134-866-5 ISBN-13: 978-1-58134-866-8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Roberts, Mark D.Can we trust the Gospels? : investigating the reliability of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John / Mark D. Roberts.p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 978-1-58134-866-8 (tpb)

1. Bible. N.T. Gospels—Criticism, interpretation, etc. I. Title.

BS2555.52.R63 2007 226'.06—dc22

2007005924

VP     16     15     14     13     12     11     10     09     08          10      9       8       7      6       5       4       3      2

This book is dedicated to Don Williams, with gratitude, for his example of faithfulness as a scholar-pastor, for his energetic commitment to the truth, and for the encouragement he’s given me throughout the years

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

1. A Bio and a Blook

2. Can We Know What the Original Gospel Manuscripts Really Said?

3. Did the Evangelists Know Jesus Personally?

4. When Were the Gospels Written?

5. What Sources Did the Gospel Writers Use?

6. Did Early Christian Oral Tradition Reliably Pass Down the Truth about Jesus?

7. What Are the New Testament Gospels?

8. What Difference Does It Make That There Are Four Gospels?

9. Are There Contradictions in the Gospels?

10. If the Gospels Are Theology, Can They Be History?

11. Do Miracles Undermine the Reliability of the Gospels?

12. Do Historical Sources from the Era of the Gospels Support Their Reliability?

13. Does Archeology Support the Reliability of the Gospels?

14. Did the Political Agenda of the Early Church Influence the Content of the Gospels?

15. Why Do We Have Only Four Gospels in the Bible?

16. Can We Trust the Gospels After All?

Illustrations

Page

Figure 5.1: Gospel Source Theories

Following Page

1. Half Dome, first view

2. Half Dome, second view

3. Half Dome, third view

4. Half Dome, fourth view

5. The Synagogue in Capernaum

6. The Pilate Inscription

7. The Pool of Siloam

8. The Cliff at El Kursi

Acknowledgments

First, I want to thank those who have helped to make this book a reality. The visionaries at Crossway Books, Geoff Dennis, Lane Dennis, and Al Fisher, saw the potential in my blog series on the Gospels and encouraged me to turn it into a “blook.” Bill Deckard, my editor at Crossway, has been a great help along the way. My literary agent, Curtis Yates of Yates and Yates, LLP, was, as always, a valued partner. Ben Witherington III was kind enough to read an early manuscript of the book and offer useful criticisms and suggestions.

I want also to thank my congregation at Irvine Presbyterian Church for their ongoing partnership in ministry. I’m especially grateful to the members of the Pastor’s Study for their support and teamwork in the search for God’s truth.

Thanks are due to many blog readers who expressed appreciation for my series on the Gospels, as well as to those whose critical comments urged me to sharpen my arguments.

I’m grateful to those who have helped me understand the Gospels through their teachings and writings, including: George MacRae, Harvey Cox, Helmut Koester, Ben Witherington III, N. T. Wright, Craig L. Blomberg, and F. F. Bruce.

Thanks to friends who have cheered me on in the writing of this book: Hugh Hewitt, Tod Bolsinger, Lee Strobel, Tim McCalmont, Bill White, Doug Gregg, and Terry Tigner.

As always, my heartfelt thanks go to my wife, Linda, and my children, Nathan and Kara, for their tireless love and support. They are my best partners in all things.

Chapter 1

A Bio and a Blook

In this book I seek to answer a simple question: Can we trust the Gospels?

I’m thinking of two different but related dimensions of trust. On the one hand, I’m asking if the Gospels provide reliable historical information about Jesus of Nazareth. On the other hand, I’m wondering if they offer a trustworthy basis for faith in Jesus. In this book I will focus almost exclusively on the historical dimension of trusting the Gospels.

When I speak of “the Gospels,” I’m referring to the first four books of the Christian New Testament. There are other so-called “Gospels” among extrabiblical collections of ancient writings, most famously in the Nag Hammadi Library of Gnostic writings. Though these documents rarely focus on the life and ministry of the human Jesus, they may occasionally contain tidbits of historical data about him. I’ll refer to the noncanonical Gospels when appropriate in this book, but they are not my primary concern.

I should come clean at this point and admit that I do indeed believe that the Gospels are trustworthy. But I have not always been so confident about their reliability. There was a time when I would have answered the “Can we trust the Gospels?” question with, “Well, maybe, at least somewhat. But I have my doubts.” How I got to a place of confidence from this earlier point of uncertainty is a story that will help you grasp “where I’m coming from,” as we would say in California.

Doubting the Gospels

I grew up in a solid evangelical church. The Gospels were assumed to be not only historically accurate but also inspired by God. In my teenage years I wondered about the trustworthiness of the Gospels. But my youth leaders reassured me. I was encouraged to learn that the inspiration of the Gospels was proved by the similarities between Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Who else, besides the Holy Spirit, could inspire the evangelists1 to compose such amazingly parallel accounts of Jesus?

I went to college at Harvard. Though founded as a Christian school, and though the university seal continues to proclaim veritas christo et ecclesiae, “Truth for Christ and the Church,” Harvard in the 1970s wasn’t exactly a bastion of Christian faith. Plus, I was planning to major in philosophy, a discipline notorious for its atheistic bias. Many of my friends back home worried that I would lose my faith at “godless Harvard.”

During my freshman year, it wasn’t my philosophy courses that threw my faith for a loop, however. It was a New Testament class. Religion 140, “Introduction to Early Christian Literature,” was taught by Professor George MacRae, a top-notch New Testament scholar. As the semester began, I had my guard up, expecting Professor MacRae to be a Dr. Frankenstein who would create a monster to devour my faith. In fact, however, Professor MacRae was no mad scientist. One of the best lecturers I ever had at Harvard, he seasoned his reasonable pre sentations with humorous quips among hundreds of valuable insights. His first lecture on the challenges of studying early Christianity was so impressive to me that I still remember his main points and use them when I teach seminary courses on the New Testament.

Professor MacRae followed this lecture with a fascinating exploration of the world of early Christianity. Next he turned to the letters of Paul. Though he investigated them as a critical scholar,2 his insights fit more or less with what I had learned in church. My guard began to come down.

But then we came to the Gospels. Professor MacRae did not deny their usefulness as historical sources. But he did argue that these documents, though containing some historical remembrances, were chock-full of legendary elements, including miracle stories, exorcisms, and prophecies. These were not to be taken as part of the historical record, he said. Rather, they were best understood as fictional elements added by the early Christians to increase the attractiveness of Jesus in the Greco-Roman world. The Gospels were not so much historical or biographical documents as they were theological tractates weaving together powerful fictions with a few factual data.

Perhaps what most shook my faith in the trustworthiness of the Gospels was Professor MacRae’s treatment of the similarities among Matthew, Mark, and Luke. He explained persuasively that Mark was the first of the Gospels to be written, and that Matthew and Luke used Mark in their writing. In the process, he also demonstrated how Matthew and Luke changed Mark, interjecting “contradictions” into the Gospel record.

Listening to this explanation of why the Synoptic3 Gospels were so similar, I felt the rug being pulled out from under my confidence in these writings. Where I had once been taught that these similarities were evidence of divine inspiration, I discovered that a straightforward historical explanation provided a simpler account of the data. How many other things have I been taught about the Gospels that aren’t true? I wondered.

Uncertain about My Uncertainty

After finishing Religion 140, I could not trust the Gospels to provide historically accurate knowledge of Jesus. Yet, as much as I found this skeptical perspective compelling, it didn’t fully satisfy me. Ironically, my studies of philosophy contributed to my uncertainty about my Gospel uncertainty. As a “phil concentrator” I was learning to scrutinize the theoretical underpinnings of all beliefs. It seemed only right to subject what I had learned about the New Testament to this sort of investigation. When I did, I began to wonder if my new perspective on the Gospels was too simplistic.

For example, one of the things that bothered me about Professor MacRae’s position was how quickly he concluded that there were contradictions among the Gospels. In my philosophy classes I was being trained to assume that a document was consistent unless every effort to discern consistency failed. Though the Gospels were not written by one author, it seemed that Professor MacRae had rushed to judgment about the contradictory nature of the Gospels without considering how varying Gospel accounts might have been complementary.

In my undergraduate years I began to think critically, not only about the New Testament but also about the methodologies and presuppositions of New Testament scholarship. Sometimes, I discovered, academic consensus was built on the shifting sand of weak philosophy, peculiar methodology,4 and atheistic theology. Perhaps other approaches were possible, ones that involved rigorous New Testament scholarship and led to a more positive appraisal of the Gospels’ reliability.

A Strange Twist in the Road

My road to confidence in the Gospels took a strange twist during my junior year. I enrolled in a seminar with Professor MacRae called “Christians, Jews, and Gnostics.” Among the documents we studied in this course were several Gnostic writings that had just been published in English. Some of these documents, written in Coptic, had been translated by Professor MacRae for The Nag Hammadi Library in English5. This meant I had the chance to study these Gnostic texts with one of the world’s foremost authorities on them. It never dawned on me, by the way, that someday people outside of academia would care about the contents of the Gnostic Gospels.

In “Christians, Jews, and Gnostics” I learned to dig deeply into the meaning of the ancient texts and to ask all sorts of questions about them. Professor MacRae was willing to engage any serious question, including challenges to his own perspectives. During this second class with him I began to see the Gospels as more reliable than I had once thought, in part, as I compared them to the wildly fictional portraits of Jesus in the Gnostic Gospels.

By the end of this seminar, Professor MacRae encouraged me to pursue graduate work in New Testament. His openness to my questions was one of the reasons I decided to remain at Harvard for my doctoral work. Ironically, the one who was most responsible for my loss of confidence in the Gospels became a primary reason for my growing trust in them.6

Critical New Testament Scholarship: Up Close and Personal

Without exception, my grad school teachers echoed Professor MacRae’s conclusions about the historical limitations of the New Testament Gospels. In fact, several faculty members made him look rather conservative. I did learn a great deal from these scholars, however. Their knowledge of the world of early Christianity was encyclopedic, and their ability to interpret ancient texts critically was superlative. Yet I began to see how often their interpretations were saturated by unquestioned philosophical presuppositions. If, for example, a passage from the Gospels included a prophecy of Jesus concerning his death, it was assumed without argument that this had been added later by the church because prophecy didn’t fit within the naturalistic worldview of my profs.7

The more I spent time with some of the leading New Testament scholars in the world, the more I came to respect their brilliance and, at the same time, to recognize the limitations of their scholarly perspectives. I saw how often conclusions based on unsophisticated assumptions were accepted without question by the reigning scholarly community, and taught uncritically as if they were, well, the Gospel truth.

I also discovered how rarely my professors entertained perspectives by scholars who didn’t share their naturalistic worldview. Evangelical scholars8 were usually ignored simply because they were conservative. This fact was driven home once when I was on winter break in Southern California. I needed to read a few books for one of my courses, so I went to the Fuller Seminary library because it was close to my home. What I found at Fuller stunned me. Fuller students were required to read many of the same books I was assigned, and also books written from an evangelical perspective. Whereas I was getting one party line, Fuller students were challenged to think more broadly and, dare I admit it, more critically. This put an arrogant Harvard student in his place, let me tell you. It also helped me see how much my own education was lopsided. Only once in my entire graduate school experience was I assigned a book by an evangelical scholar.9

Critical Scholarship and Confidence in the Gospels

Beginning with my days at Harvard and continuing throughout the last three decades, I have worked away on the question of the trustworthiness of the Gospels. I have come to believe that there are solid reasons for accepting them as reliable both for history and for faith.

You may be surprised to learn that I agree with about three-quarters of what I learned from Professor MacRae in Religion 140. We affirm the same basic facts: the raw data of ancient documents and archeological discoveries. The differences between our views have to do with how we evaluate the data, and here the gap between what Professor MacRae taught and what I believe today is often wide and deep.

You may also be surprised to discover that my arguments in this book are often friendlier to critical scholarship than you might expect. For example, many defenses of the historical reliability of the Gospel of John depend on an early date of composition (pre–A.D. 70). I will not base my own conclusions upon this early date, though I think there are persuasive arguments in its favor.

While reading this book, an evangelical who is well acquainted with New Testament scholarship might periodically object, “But there are even stronger arguments than the ones you’re making.” So be it! I’m open to these positions and glad for those who articulate them. But I have chosen to base my case, for the most part, on that which most even-handed critical scholars, including non-evangelicals, would affirm. I’ve done this for two reasons.

First, I want to encourage the person who is troubled by negative views of the Gospels, perhaps in a college New Testament course or in a popular “Gospels-debunking” book. In a sense, I’m writing for the Mark Roberts who once felt perplexed in Religion 140. To the “old me” and others like him I want to say, “Look, even if you believe most of ‘assured results of scholarship’ concerning the Gospels, you can still trust them.”

Second, I believe this book will have broader impact if I don’t fill it with theories that, however plausible, are popular only among conservative scholars. For example, it may well be that the disciples of Jesus had been trained to memorize sayings of their religious mentors, much like later rabbinic students.10. This view is ably defended by Birger Gerhardsson in If this is true, it would greatly increase the likelihood that the sayings of Jesus in the Gospels closely reflect what Jesus himself had once said. But since the jury is still out on the question of whether or not the disciples were trained in technical memorization, I won’t base my conclusions upon this possibility.

My basic point in this book is that if you look squarely at the facts as they are widely understood, and if you do not color them with pejorative bias or atheistic presuppositions, then you’ll find that it’s reasonable to trust the Gospels.

For those not familiar with the Bible, I should explain that there are four Gospels in the New Testament, a collection of twenty-seven early Christian writings. The New Testament is the second part of the Christian Bible, which also contains a collection of thirty-nine Jewish writings which Christians call the Old Testament. Jews refer to these thirty-nine writings as the Bible or the Tanakh (from the Hebrew words for law, prophecy, and writings).

The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are the first four books of the New Testament, though they are not the earliest of the New Testament writings. They focus on certain aspects of the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth, and especially on his death and resurrection. There are other early Christian writings called Gospels, perhaps two or three dozen depending on what counts as a Gospel. For reasons that I’ll explain in this book, the extrabiblical Gospels are not as reliable as historical sources for Jesus, though they sometimes describe Jesus’ sayings or actions accurately.

The Birth of a “Blook”

This book is a direct result of my engagement with many attempts to undermine confidence in the Gospels. In the last two years I have publicly defended the Gospels against assaults from a Newsweek cover story,11. Mark D. Roberts, the Jesus Seminar,12. Mark D. Roberts, the book Misquoting Jesus, by Bart Ehrman,13. Mark D. Roberts, the claims made about the Gospel of Judas by some scholars,14. Mark D. Roberts, and, most of all, Dan Brown’s best-selling novel, The Da Vinci Code.15. Mark D. Roberts, My apologetic16 writings have appeared on my web site, www.markdroberts. com, and in other online or print media. As I endeavored to fend off attacks upon the Gospels, it occurred to me that I ought to write a short, popular, positive case for trusting these embattled portraits of Jesus. So in the fall of 2005 I wrote an extended blog series entitled Are the New Testament Gospels Reliable?17. Mark D. Roberts,

Since the release of that series I have received hundreds of gratifying e-mails from people who have thanked me. Some notes have included questions or points of correction. Of course I’ve also received correspondence from people who disagree with my positions. These have helped me clarify and refine my arguments.

Perhaps the most surprising positive response to my blog series came from the publishers at Crossway Books. They said they were interested in turning my series into a book. At first I hesitated, realizing that there are other fine books on the reliability of the Gospels. I fondly remember the classic volume by F. F. Bruce, The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? 18 which helped me survive my collegiate doubts about the Gospels. I also thought of the more detailed and up-to-date book by Craig Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels.19. Craig L. Blomberg, And I knew that a solid defense of the Gospels called Reinventing Jesus was soon to be published.20. J. Ed Komoszewski, M. James Sawyer, and Daniel B. Wallace, Moreover, I have seen how effective Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ has been as a popular apologetic introduction to Jesus and the Gospels.21. Lee Strobel, But the more I received communication from people who had been helped by my blog series, the more I realized that I could offer something unique to book readers. The result, Can We Trust the Gospels? is an expanded and, I hope, improved version of my original blog series. It is, according to the new lingo, a blook—a book based on a blog.

Many of the basic facts and arguments in this book can be found elsewhere, though numerous points and illustrations are new. What makes this book distinctive is its availability to nonspecialists, including non-Christian readers. I realize this will be frustrating for a few readers who are familiar with New Testament scholarship and who will want more extensive discussion and documentation. But Can We Trust the Gospels? is meant to be a shorter book that can be easily grasped by people who don’t have specialized academic knowledge and who don’t want to wade through a much longer tome. This volume could easily have been 500 pages with 5,000 footnotes. But then I’d completely miss my intended audience . . . the ordinary person who wonders, Can I trust the Gospels?

Though no longer linked electronically to my web site, this “blook” will continue to be supported through online conversation, clarification, and revision. At www.markdroberts.com there will be a place for you to log your comments, ask your questions, or listen in on an ongoing conversation. My web site will also allow me to relate Can We Trust the Gospels? to new assaults on their historical reliability. No doubt there will be many of these in the years to come.22. For example, as I’m editing this manuscript, a television documentary claims

F.A.Q. Format

Influence of the Internet can also be seen in the basic format of this book. Millions of web sites use a F.A.Q. page—Frequently Asked Questions—to respond to the most common inquiries from visitors. Can We Trust the Gospels? is an extended F.A.Q. It is structured by a series of basic questions about the Gospels:

Can we know what the original Gospel manuscripts really said?

Did the evangelists know Jesus personally?

When were the Gospels written?

What sources did the Gospel writers use?

Did early Christian oral tradition reliably pass down the truth about Jesus?

What are the New Testament Gospels?

What difference does it make that there are four Gospels?

Are there contradictions in the Gospels?

If the Gospels are theology, can they be history?

Do miracles undermine the reliability of the Gospels?

Do historical sources from the era of the Gospels support their reliability?

Does archeology support the reliability of the Gospels?

Did the political agenda of the early church influence the content of the Gospels?

Why do we have only four Gospels in the Bible?

Can we trust the Gospels after all?

The pages ahead contain answers that are the result of more than three decades of investigation, involving hundreds of hours of seminary teaching, thousands of hours of thinking, and myriads of pages of reading. For the sake of my intended audience, I have condensed all of this into relatively few pages. You won’t find complex arguments with elaborate footnotes in this book, even though many of my conclusions grow out of such complexity and elaboration. If you’re looking for more data than I can provide here, I’ll try to point you in helpful directions through the footnotes.

My hope is that, as you read this book, you will come to believe that you can trust the biblical Gospels. Even as Luke wrote the third Gospel so that his readers might “know the truth” concerning Jesus (Luke 1:4), so have I written this book.

1. In biblical studies, “evangelists” refers to the writers of the Gospels. “Gospel” in Greek is euangelion. From this we get the word “evangelist,” meaning “preacher of good news.”

2. Critical scholarship involves historical, literary, linguistic, and sociological analysis of the New Testament. It is not necessarily critical in the sense of being negative. In fact hundreds of critical New Testament scholars also affirm the reliability of the Gospels. But many academics, especially in secular institutions, blend critical scholarship with pessimistic appraisals of the New Testament, and often with their own personal denigration of Christianity in general.

3. “Synoptic” means “capable of being read side by side, or synoptically.” Matthew, Mark, and Luke are synoptic because they are so similar in form and content.

4. For example, ever since I first learned about the “criterion of dissimilarity,” a scholarly tool for establishing the validity of historical claims about Jesus, it seemed to me that this was obviously and woefully inadequate, even though it was accepted without hesitation by many critical scholars. For a brief critique of the criterion of dissimilarity, see http://www.markdroberts.com/htmfiles/resources/unmaskingthejesus. htm#sep1405.

5. James M. Robinson, ed., The Nag Hammadi Library in English (New York: Harper & Row, 1977).

6. Professor MacRae would have been my dissertation advisor, had it not been for his untimely death in 1985.

7. “Naturalism” is the philosophical position that assumes there is nothing beyond nature, or physical existence. A naturalistic worldview makes no room for supernatural events or a supernatural God.

8. Evangelical scholars are those who believe that the Bible is, in some strong sense, God’s inspired Word. Some refer to Scripture as inerrant; others prefer the term infallible. Many evangelical scholars are also critical scholars in that they investigate biblical documents with the tools of academia and engage in dialogue with critical scholars across the theological spectrum.

9. Professor Krister Stendahl assigned a commentary on Matthew by Robert H. Gundry (Matthew: A Commentary on His Literary and Theological Art [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1982]). Ironically, this book was roundly criticized by many evangelicals as buying too much into non-evangelical approaches to the Gospels.

10. This view is ably defended by Birger Gerhardsson in The Reliability of the Gospel Tradition (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 2001).

11. Mark D. Roberts, The Birth of Jesus: Hype or History? http://www.markd roberts.com/htmfiles/resources/jesusbirth.htm.

12. Mark D. Roberts, Unmasking the Jesus Seminar, http://www.markdroberts. com/htmfiles/resources/unmaskingthejesus.htm.

13. Mark D. Roberts, The Bible, the Qur’an, Bart Ehrman, and the Words of God, http://www.markdroberts.com/htmfiles/resources/biblequran.htm. See Bart D. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus: The Story behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005).

14. Mark D. Roberts, The Gospel of Judas: A Special Report, http://www.mark-droberts. com/htmfiles/resources/davinciopportunity3.htm#apr906.

15. Mark D. Roberts, The Da Vinci Opportunity, http://www.markdroberts. com/htmfiles/resources/davinciopportunity.htm.

16. “Apologetic” writings offer a reasonable defense of some belief. The word “apologetic” comes from the Greek term apologia, which means “defense (written or spo-ken).” It has no connection at all with the concept of “apologizing” for something.

17. Mark D. Roberts, Are the New Testament Gospels Reliable? http://www. markdroberts.com/htmfiles/resources/gospelsreliable.htm.

18. F. F. Bruce, The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1960).

19. Craig L. Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1987). Blomberg’s book is excellent, and I recommend it highly. It is more detailed than this book and is suitable for readers with knowledge of New Testament studies.

20. J. Ed Komoszewski, M. James Sawyer, and Daniel B. Wallace, Reinventing Jesus: What the Da Vinci Code and Other Novel Speculations Don’t Tell You (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Kregel, 2006).

21. Lee Strobel, The Case for Christ: A Journalist’s Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1998).

22. For example, as I’m editing this manuscript, a television documentary claims that the bones of Jesus have been found, thus invalidating the Gospel accounts of his death and resurrection.

C h a p t e r 2

Can We Know What the Original Gospel Manuscripts Really Said?

If you open a Bible and look for the Gospels, you’ll find them in English translation, neatly collected at the beginning of the New Testament. You’ll see book names, chapter and verse numbers, punctuation, and paragraphs. None of these items were present in the original manuscripts of the writings we call Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Most manuscripts didn’t even have spaces between the words! Aren’tyougladthingshave changed? What you read in your Bible is the result of centuries of preservation, translation, and publication. Thus you might sensibly wonder, Do the Gospels bear any resemblance to what the original writers actually penned almost 2,000 years ago?

It is common these days for people to answer no to this question. Critics of Christianity often allege that the Gospels as we know them don’t resemble the originals. This criticism appears, for example, on the lips of Sir Leigh Teabing, a fic- tional historian in Dan Brown’s wildly popular novel The Da Vinci Code. Teabing “reveals” the true nature of the Bible in this way:

“The Bible is a product of man. . . . Not of God. The Bible did not fall magically from the clouds. Man created it as a historical record of tumultuous times, and it has evolved through countless translations, additions, and revisions. History has never had a definitive version of the book.”1

There is a measure of truth here. The Bible is indeed a human product, though this in no way requires that it could not also be “of God.” For centuries, Christians have affirmed that the Bible was written by human authors who were inspired by God.

It’s true that the Bible “did not fall magically from the clouds.” It was in fact written by human beings who lived in “tumultuous times.” Yet the biblical documents were not created primarily as a “historical record” of these times. Though there is plenty of history in Scripture, the biblical writers weren’t telling merely a human story. Rather, they focused primarily on the actions of God in history, especially on the story of God’s salvation of the world.

Teabing exaggerates in saying that the Bible has “evolved through countless translations.” It has indeed been translated into more languages than any other book, by far. At last count, the New Testament has been translated into 1,541 languages.2 But the Bible has not “evolved through countless translations,” as if our English versions stand at the end of a long chain of multilingual transformations. Every modern translation of Scripture is based on manuscripts written in the same languages as those used by the original writers. The Old Testament in English comes directly from Hebrew and Aramaic manuscripts. Our New Testament is translated from Greek manuscripts.

The Relationship between Existing Manuscripts and the Original Compositions

The documents we know as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were written sometime in the second half of the first century A.D. (I’ll say more about the dating of the Gospels in chapter 4.) They were written on scrolls of papyrus (a rough, paper-like substance). Papyrus was popular because it was readily available and relatively inexpensive. But, unfortunately, it wasn’t especially durable. Thus it is highly unlikely that any of the original Gospel manuscripts, called by the technical term autographs, exist today. Probably, the biblical autographs were worn out through use, though they could also have been misplaced by absentminded church leaders, destroyed by persecutors of the early Christians, or even eaten by critters.3