The Gospels Are Eye-Witness Accounts, Right? - Err No, I'm Afraid Not
This is the first in a series of posts dealing with the four canonical Gospels. After this short introduction, I will be doing a separate post on each of the Gospels. I hope that readers will become involved in discussions around this topic and I'm especially interested in the reaction of those of you who are practising Christians.
Introduction
The four canonical Gospels, Mark, Matthew, Luke and John were, despite their names, not written by the disciples of Jesus. In fact, they were not even written by eyewitnesses to Jesus, nor were the authors his contemporaries.
Why Do I Say This?
The Greek manuscripts use the word Κατά in the title meaning “according to” or “handed down from” so they are not naming an author but are indicating that the source of their information were traditions that have been handed down to the early church.[1]
Even more telling is that the author’s names were not even mentioned until around the year 180 AD when they were first recorded by Irenaeus of Lyons. The Christian scholar, Raymond Brown points out that the names were added during a period of vicious canonical disputes (the latter half of the second century AD) and were a means to bestow authority on favoured scriptures.
We do know that the authors of the Gospels were highly literate and well-educated Greek-speaking theologians who were each writing a religious document to push an agenda. As we shall discover, they were not writing a biography of Jesus.
So, all the Gospels are anonymous but when were they written? The general consensus is that the Gospel of Mark was written between 71-73 AD [2], Matthew sometime between 80-110 AD, Luke around 110-120 AD (maybe as late as 130 AD) while John was penned as early as 100 AD (if Luke were written in the 90's) or as late as the 140's AD.[3]
Mark was the first to be written (that made it into the canon anyway) and we will see in future posts how the other three are nothing more than souped-up versions of it which aim to make Jesus increasingly more and more impressive.
It is also worth noting that all four of these Gospels were further re-edited and copied, tampered with and then copied again before we have our first surviving texts sometime between one and a half to two centuries later.[4]
To recap. We have four Gospels that many people today take as eye-witness accounts of historical fact and treat them as a biography of Jesus Christ. This is wrong. As former Catholic priest and New Testament scholar John Dominic Crossan says;
“My point, once again, is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally”[5]
In my next post, we will see how Marks Gospel is a very cleverly designed piece of literature which is pure allegory and not history.
Until next time, thank you for reading.
Sources
[1] David Fitzgerald. Jesus: Mything In Action, Vol 1. Chapter Seven: The Gospel Truth
[2] David Fitzgerald. Jesus: Mything In Action, Vol 1. Citing Helms(1997) p.8
[3] Richard Carrier ‘On the Historicity of Jesus – Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt’ by Richard Carrier – Chapter 10 – ‘The Evidence of the Gospels’ – Section 4 – The Mythology of Mark.
[4] David Fitzgerald. Jesus: Mything In Action, Vol 1. Chapter Seven: The Gospel Truth
[5] John Dominic Crossan, ‘Who is Jesus? Answers to Your Questions About the Historical Jesus’
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