Can We Truly Believe the Gospels Represent Eyewitness Testimony?
When I was teaching Sunday school, I did a series of classes using Lee Strobel's works. The following is from The Case for Christ, chapter 1. While there may be the stray original item from me, I deserve no credit for what is written in this particular article. It is properly attributed to Lee Strobel in its entirety.
It is important to acknowledge that strictly speaking, the gospels are anonymous. But the uniform testimony of the of the early church was that Matthew, also known as Levi, the tax collector and one of the twelve disciples, was the author of the first gospel in the New Testament; that John Mark, a companion of Peter, was the author of the gospel we call Mark; and that Luke, known as Paul’s ‘beloved physician,’ wrote both the gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles.
There are no known competitors for these three gospels; apparently it was just not in dispute. And there was no real motivation for anyone to lie by claiming these people wrote the gospels when they really didn’t. Remember, these are unlikely characters - Mark and Luke weren’t even among the twelve disciples. Matthew was, but as a former hated tax collector, he would have been the most infamous character next to Judas Iscariot! Contrast this with what happened when the fanciful apocryphal gospels were written much later. People chose the names of well-known and exemplary figures to be their fictitious authors - Philip, Peter, Mary, James.
John is the one exception - the name isn’t in doubt, it’s certainly John, but the question is whether is was John the apostle or another John. In 125 AD Christian writer Papias refers to John the apostle and John the elder. From the context it’s not clear whether he’s talking about one person from two different perspectives or two different people. But granted that exception, the rest of early testimony is unanimous that is was John the apostle - son of Zebedee - who wrote the gospel. There is some indication that its concluding verses may have been finalized by an editor, but in any event, the gospel is obviously based on eyewitness material, as are the other three gospels.
What specific evidence do we have that they are the authors of the gospels? The oldest and probably most significant testimony comes from Papias who affirmed in about 125 AD that Mark had carefully and accurately recorded Peter’s eyewitness observations. In fact, he said Mark ‘made no mistake’ and did not include ‘any false statement.’ And Papias said Matthew had preserved the teachings of Jesus as well.
Then Irenaeus confirmed the traditional authorship writing in about 180 AD. “Matthew published his own Gospel among the Hebrews in their own tongue, when Peter and Paul were preaching the Gospel in Rome and founding the church there. After their departure, Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, himself handed down to us in writing the substance of Peter’s preaching. Luke, the follower of Paul, set down in a book the Gospel preached by his teacher. Then John, the disciple of the Lord, who also leaned on his breast, himself produced his Gospel while he was living at Ephesus in Asia.”
Therefore, we can have confidence that the gospels were written by the disciples Matthew and John, by Mark, the companion of the disciple Peter, and by Luke, the historian, companion of Paul, and sort of a first-century journalist and that the events they record are based on either direct or indirect eyewitness testimony.
The are some important differences to note between ancient and modern biographies. Modern day biographies thoroughly delve into the person’s life, but Mark doesn’t even talk about the birth of Jesus or much of anything through His early adult years. There are two reasons - literary and theological.
On the literary side, they didn’t have the sense that it was important to give equal proportion to all periods of an individual’s life. Or necessary to tell the story in strictly chronological order. Or even quote people verbatim as long as the essence of what they said was preserved. Ancient Greek and Hebrew didn’t even have a symbol for quotation marks. History was worth recording when there were some lessons to be learned from the characters described. Therefore, the biographer wanted to dwell on those portions of the of the person’s life that were exemplary, that were illustrative, that could help other people, or that gave meaning to a period of history.
Theologically, Christians believe that as wonderful as Jesus’ life and teachings and miracles were, they were meaningless if it were not historically factual that Christ died and was raised form the dead and that this provided atonement for the sins of humanity. So Mark in particular devotes roughly half his narrative to the events leading up to and including one week’s period of time and culminating in Christ’s death and resurrection. Given the significance of the Crucifixion, this makes perfect sense in ancient literature.
In addition to the four gospels, scholars often refer to what they call Q, which stands for the German word Quelle, or “source.” Because of similarities in language and content, it has traditionally been assumed that Matthew and Luke drew upon Mark’s earlier gospel in writing their own. In addition, scholars have said that Matthew and Luke also incorporate some material from this mysterious Q, material that is absent from Mark.
Q is nothing more than a hypothesis. With few exceptions, it’s just sayings or teachings of Jesus, which may have once formed an independent, separate document. It was a common literary genre to collect sayings of respected teachers - kind of the way we compile the top music of a singer and put it in a “best of” album. Q may have been something like that. At least that’s the theory. If Q did exist before Matthew and Mark, it would constitute early material about Jesus.
If we isolate just the material from Q, what kind of picture of Jesus do we get? Remember it’s just a collection of sayings, so we don’t have the narrative material that would give us a more fully formed picture of Jesus. Even still, we find Jesus making some pretty strong claims - that he was wisdom personified and that he was the one by whom God will judge all humanity, whether they confess him or disavow him. A book argued recently that if you isolate all the Q sayings, you still get the same kind of picture of Jesus as you find in the gospels more generally.
This brings up a related question: Why would Matthew (an eyewitness to Jesus) incorporate part of the gospel written by Mark, who everybody agrees was not an eyewitness? It makes sense if Mark was indeed basing his account on the recollections of the eyewitness Peter. Peter was among the inner circle of Jesus and was privy to seeing and hearing things the other disciples didn’t. So it would make sense for Matthew, even though he was an eyewitness, to rely on Peter’s version of events as transmitted through Mark.
For many years the assumption was that John knew everything Matthew, Mark and Luke wrote, and he saw no need to repeat it, so he consciously chose to supplement them. More recently it has been assumed that John is largely independent of the other three gospels, which could account for not only the different choices of material but also the different perspectives on Jesus.
Some believe there are contradictions that are due to John being written later, and therefore embellishments begin to creep in. For instance, John makes very explicit claims of Jesus being God. But the theme of deity exists in the synoptics as well. Walking on water (Mat 14:22-33; Mark 6:45-52). Most English translations hide the Greek when Jesus actually says, “Fear not, I am.” It is the same as Jesus said in John 8:58 when taking on the divine name ‘I am’ which is the way God revealed himself to Moses in the burning bush in Exodus 3:14. So Jesus is revealing himself as the one who has the same divine power over nature as Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament.
“Son of Man” in the first three gospels. Contrary to popular belief, it does not primarily refer to Jesus’ humanity but is a direct allusion to Daniel 7:13-14. In addition, Jesus claims to forgive sins in the synoptics, and that is something only God can do. Jesus accepts prayer and worship. Jesus says, “Whoever acknowledges me, I will acknowledge before my Father in heaven.”
So final judgement is based on one’s reaction to - whom? This mere human being? That would be a very arrogant claim. No, final judgement is based on one’s reaction to Jesus as God. It’s clear then that there’s all sorts of material in the synoptics about the deity of Christ; it merely becomes more explicit in John’s gospel.
Don’t the theological motivations cast doubt on their ability and willingness to accurately report what happened? Isn’t it likely their theological agenda would prompt them to color and twist the history they recorded?
As with any ideological document, we have to consider that as a possibility. There are people with axes to grind who have distorted history to serve their ideological ends. But it’s a mistake to conclude that it always happens. In the ancient world the idea of writing dispassionate, objective history merely to chronicle events, with no ideological purpose, was unheard of. Nobody wrote history if there wasn’t a reason to learn from it. One might say that makes everything suspect then.
But if we can reconstruct reasonably accurate history from all kinds of other ancient sources, we ought to be able to do that from the gospels, even though they too are ideological. For example, some people deny or downplay the horrors of the Holocaust. But it has been the Jewish scholars who have created museums, written books, preserved artifacts, and documented eyewitness testimony concerning the Holocaust. Now, they have a very ideological purpose, but they have been the most faithful and objective in their reporting of historical truth.
Christianity was likewise based on certain historical claims that God uniquely entered into space and time in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, so the very ideology that Christians were trying to promote required as careful historical work as possible.
Even if the gospels are rooted in direct or indirect eyewitness testimony, why should we believe this information was reliably preserved until it was finally written down years later? Former nun Karen Armstrong says we actually know very little about Jesus. The first full-length account of his life comes from Mark, written about the year 70, some forty years after his death. She and other scholars say the gospels were written so far after the events that legend developed and distorted the truth, turning Jesus from a wise teacher into the mythological Son of God.
Two issues are actually at play here. First, standard scholarly dating (even in very liberal circles) is Mark in the 70s, Matthew and Luke in the 80s and John in the 90s - that’s all within the lifetime of various eyewitnesses of the life of Jesus, including hostile eyewitnesses who would have served as a corrective if false teachings about Jesus were going around. So the late dates of the gospels aren’t really all that late. By comparison, the two earliest biographies of Alexander the Great were written by Arrian and Plutarch more than four hundred years after his death in 323 BC, yet historians consider them to be generally trustworthy. Yes, legendary material did develop, but it was only in the centuries after these two writers, more than 500 years after Alexander’s death. The amount of time for the gospels is negligible by comparison
Second, there’s actually good reason to believe the gospels were written sooner than the dates we’ve mentioned. Acts is written by Luke and ends apparently unfinished. Paul is a central figure, and he’s under house arrest in Rome. With that, the book abruptly halts. What happens to Paul? We don’t find out from Acts, probably because the book was written before Paul was put to death. That means Acts can’t be dated any later than AD 62. Acts is the second of a two-part work - the first part is the gospel of Luke, which must have been written earlier than that. And since Luke incorporates parts of the gospel of Mark, that means Mark is even earlier. If you allow maybe a year for each of those, you end up with Mark written no later than about AD 60, maybe even the late 50s. If Jesus was put to death in AD 30 or 33, we’re talking about a maximum gap of 30 years or so. Historically speaking, that’s like a news flash!
But can we go back even further? The gospels were written after almost all the letters of Paul, whose writing ministry probably began in the late 40s. To find the earliest information, one goes to Paul’s epistles and then asks, “Are there signs that even earlier sources were used in writing them?” Paul incorporated some creeds, confessions of faith, or hymns from the earliest Christian church. These go way back to the dawning of the church soon after the Resurrection.
The most famous creeds include Philippians 2:6-11 which talks about Jesus being “in very nature God” and Colossians 1:15-20 which describes him as being “the image of the invisible God,” who created all things and through whom all things are reconciled with God “by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.”
Those are certainly important in explaining what the earliest Christians were convinced of concerning Jesus. But perhaps the most important creed concerning the historical Jesus is 1 Corinthians 15, where Paul uses technical language to indicate he was passing along this oral tradition in relatively fixed form: “For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles.”
If the Crucifixion was as early as AD 30, Paul’s conversion was about 32. Immediately Paul was ushered into Damascus, where he met with a Christian named Ananias and some other disciples. His first meeting with the apostles in Jerusalem would have been about AD 35. At some point along there, Paul was given this creed, which had already been formulated and was being used in the early church. So here you have the key facts about Jesus' death for our sins, plus a detailed list of those to whom he appeared in resurrected form - all dating back to within 2 to 5 years of the events themselves!