The Authenticity of the Gospels

Peter L P Simpson

• Publisher: Elm Hill
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781400325443
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Authorship

That the Gospels are the writings of their traditional Apostolic authors was long held to be settled truth. It was also long held that Matthew was first and as early as the 40sAD, followed by Mark and Luke, and lastly by John, and that all were written before about 70AD. These views have been doubted or denied by New Testament scholars from about the end of the 18thCentury. The dominant view is that the Gospels were not written by eyewitnesses, though they depend on material that may go back to eyewitnesses. Mark is said to have been written first and not much before 70AD. Matthew and Luke are later and depend on Mark and some unknown sources. John is last, follows an independent tradition, and could be as late as 100AD.

The reason for this change of views is the so-called historical critical method, which claims to be scientific and up to date in literary criticism and the detection of different temporal layers in written texts. The method also assumes that reports of miracles and other supernatural phenomena are not historical but later inventions added for religious purposes.

This book shows that the historical critical method is not historical or critical or even a method. For the method assumes but cannot prove that supernatural happenings are unhistorical; it ignores the historical evidence about the origin and authorship of the Gospels; its literary criticism is unimaginative and its application of it to questions of dating arbitrary. There is no reason to accept its results as well founded or even believable. The traditional dating and authorship of the Gospels is the only account that makes sense.

Nevertheless, elements of the historical critical method have a legitimate use if they are applied fairly and taken along with the historical evidence and the fact (well established by eyewitnesses) of supernatural realities. When these elements are so used they can be shown to give plausible and defensible accounts of the origin, in particular, of the Gospels of Mark and Luke, which, along with Matthew, show signs of dependence and overlap. If the historical evidence is taken seriously, and if literary criticism is applied fairly, a plausible account can be given of the origin in particular of the Gospel of Mark, of how it arose from the preaching of Peter relative to the older Gospel of Matthew and to the newer Gospel of Luke sponsored by the Apostle Paul.

This alternative account of the origins of Mark and Luke is a fine example of how historical evidence and literary criticism can be used to explain otherwise puzzling phenomena. This account is perhaps not the only one to save all the phenomena. But it shows how the traditional authorship and dating of the Gospels, contrary to the historical critical method, make excellent sense of all the phenomena: literary, historical, and rational. The traditional view about the Gospels is the only sensible view to adopt.

 

CHAPTER 1

THE EXISTENTIAL CONTEXT

Section 1: Existential History

The historical critical method as standardly practiced is not so much historical as ideological (the fact will be established in chapter 2). But ideology and dependence on it to resist historical facts in the matter of the Gospels are neither eliminable nor surprising. The Gospels, if historically true, present a challenge to every man about his life, his origin, and his destiny. The challenge is uncomfortable and it provokes to all kinds of excuses to gain escape. Ideology, or systems of ideas that, while powerfully self-reinforcing, rest on flimsy foundations and faulty logic, are the escape favored by the learned (cruder escapes are also available, as alternatives or supplements).

But the Gospel challenge remains. To accept it is indeed to embrace the promise of liberation from sin and death, but it is also to be committed to a way of life and a conviction of judgment that the spirit of the world will always reject. By the spirit of the world is meant the preference for temporal goods, for wealth, fame, power, and the immediate pleasures that bring release from pain. We are material creatures and creature-comforts have an immediate attraction and fascination for us. But they are frequently deceptive, and discipline and self-control are needed to resist the deceit. To accept the truth of the Gospels is to take up the cross daily – the cross not so much of other people as of oneself.

Such inwardly generated hostility to the Gospel and its message is as explicable by human passions as it is predicted by the Gospel itself. In a way, then, we could say that the historical critical method (as far as it purports to be history) was predictable from the beginning. For indeed it happened from the beginning.

When St. Paul preached the resurrection of Christ at Athens he was mocked and few believed him, even though he could and did give eyewitness evidence in its favor (Acts 17:30-33). What people objected to was not only the resurrection as a real fact (for daily experience was contrary), but also reformation of life. The moral message of the Gospel was, to be sure, not new. Philosophers and even the higher elements of pagan religion also taught the like, for they taught virtue and self-discipline and restraint of passion. Philosophers and pagans also taught a judgment after death, though admixed with elements of multiple lives and multiple deaths (as in Plato’s myths and Hindu and Buddhist beliefs). The historical and therewith theological message of the Gospel, however, was new. It taught the Incarnation along with the Resurrection and a final judgment of all men by the man who had been Resurrected.

Fear of judgment for evil done in life (from which no one is free save by divine grace) makes people deny it, for if judgment does not exist there is no reason to fear it, as the Epicureans taught.⁵ To deny judgment is to deny a just God who exacts judgment, or to deny a God who cannot be bought off by gifts and sacrifices but only placated by conversion of life. Old Cephalus in Plato’s Republic perhaps manifests the phenomenon – a man who had grown rich, perhaps by not altogether worthy means, and, now close to natural death, sought to escape his fears by sacrifice to the gods. His son, Polemarchus, young, not expecting death, and not too particular perhaps about how his father acquired wealth, had no such qualms. He could listen with more equanimity to the insistent moral probings of Socrates.⁶

The things that thus make men oppose the Gospel message – escape from the fear of death, love of wealth, love of fame, power, and pleasure – are summed by St. John as the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, the pride of life (1 John 2:16). The Gospel calls to conversion from all three. The men of Athens who heard St. Paul preach and rejected what he preached are representative of us all. It is in the light of this existential reality, and indeed paradox, of human life that the question of the historicity of the Gospels must be seen if the controversies about them are to be understood. The historical critical method, for all its professed scientific objectivity, is as suffused, if in unacknowledged ways, by the anxious existentialities of human life as the writings of Camus or Sartre.⁷

This point about existentiality can be expanded to cover all history and all concern with history. For by history we mean at least two things. First, we mean all the things that have happened, from the trivial to the important, from the personal to the foreign, from the ordinary to the exotic. What I had for breakfast this morning and whether I brushed my teeth last night are matters of history, as are also who won an election and how damaging a tsunami was and what ancient temple was found beneath the desert sands. But the trivial and ordinary happenings, especially those that happen to most people most of the time, are forgotten or ignored, even by the protagonists, almost as soon as they happen. A Pepys might record them in his diary, and a Proust might make his novel out of them, but these exceptional cases prove the general rule: most of what happens disappears from memory as quickly as it disappears from the present moment. The loss of such history causes neither harm nor concern.

The other sense of history, the sense we typically mean by the term, is not all the things that happen but the few things among what happens that dedicated men choose to record and write down. Herodotus, the reputed father of history in this sense, has the original use of the term. His history is expressly a historie, by which he means what the Greek word itself first means, namely an investigation.⁸ In Herodotus’ case it is an investigation into the causes of the wars between the Persians and the Greeks, and it records all the words and deeds it does record in the service of such investigation. These wars were great and stirring events in ancient Greece, and Herodotus chose to investigate them precisely for that reason. Thucydides does the same for the wars between the Athenians and the Spartans in his history, and he chose these wars too because of the great movement in human affairs that they proved to be. Thucydides expressly understood his history as “a possession for ever,” because it told through particular happenings universal truths about the human things, the human condition.⁹ Livy and Tacitus do something similar for their histories of Rome, and Mercy Otis Warren, to come to more recent times, does the same for the American Revolution.¹⁰

History in this sense of recording and writing down great events, which is the most common, is a conscious human act undertaken by deliberate choice. It is therefore an act undertaken in view of some good. It is also an act about acts, or about things done by and to men. It is an act, therefore, that is doubly focused on the human good – the good the historian had in view in his writing, and the good the men he writes about had in view in their acting.

Now the men and the acts recorded, and the actual recording itself, are particulars, not universals. They point, or can point, to universals insofar as the particulars are exemplary and display in themselves and their causes universal features of human life. Such at any rate is what Thucydides thought, and Herodotus too. A history, as focused on particulars, is not properly a science, but it can be preparatory to science, for it is preparatory to the science of the human good, or of what is really worth doing, namely the science of ethics and politics and ultimately theology. What men do and what they suffer because of what they do, and what doings and sufferings other men take it upon themselves to record and write down, because they all do it for the sake of some good, tell us about the good they do these things for. History is a chosen human good about other chosen human goods, the goods that men choose to live and die for. It is an existential act about existential acts. Even histories that are mere collections of data, or mere chronicles of things done, are existential, though without the intensity of focus on the human drama that one finds in Thucydides or Herodotus.

Section 2: The Existential Gospels

Some histories focus chiefly on great deeds, as the Persian or Peloponnesian Wars. Others focus chiefly on great men, as Plutarch does in his Parallel Lives.¹¹ But a life is not great without great deeds, and great deeds are not done without great men. And neither men nor deeds are great without great goods being won or lost. Plutarch speaks of great deeds as much as Thucydides and Herodotus speak of great men. The phenomenon is universal, and other cultures and peoples have produced their great deeds and men and histories.

It is in the context of what is meant by history in this sense, namely that it is an existential act about existential acts, that any study of the Gospels must be placed. For, without begging questions about their historicity and authenticity, the Gospels come to us as records of a great man and great deeds. Indeed, they come to us as records of a supernaturally great man and supernaturally great deeds. This supernatural dimension is what leads many, of course, to say they are not histories. But that they have this dimension, and what they accordingly say about the great man, make the Gospels more intensely existential, for reader and writer, than Thucydides or Herodotus or Plutarch. They raise, in the most pressing form, the most pressing of existential questions: “where do we come from, what are we, where are we going?”¹²

For this reason, the most pressing question that the Gospels force us to ask about the Gospels is precisely the question of their truth and authenticity. Are the writers reliable eyewitnesses? Is what the great man says, about us and about himself, true? All other questions about the Gospels are secondary and subordinate to this question of their truth. If we are indeed able to decide that the Gospels are not true, or not fully or not literally, because not authentic, we might, for diversion or in an idle hour, investigate their real provenance or their composition. But if we so divert ourselves without deciding the question of truth, or if we decide this question on irrelevant or partisan grounds, as the Athenians did about Paul, we have as much missed or distorted the point as they did.

The present book rests on the truth that the truth of the Gospels as authentic, historical records is the most important fact about them. If they are not such records we may ignore them or put them on a par with poetic imaginings like Ovid’s Metamorphoses or J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter. If they are such records, they command the whole of all our lives, past, present, and future, and transcend in importance everything else combined. Only from this perspective, the existential perspective, which is the true and human perspective, can the Gospels be properly assessed as the records they claim to be. What value they may otherwise have, as literature, or rhetoric, or religious curiosity, pales by comparison.

Of course, one may, and should, make the same argument about other religious documents, as the Qur’an or the Vedas, namely that what matters in their case too is the truth, the truth about the message they contain, and so about the history they contain that is integral to the message (as it is in the case of the Gospels). Here, though, the focus is the Gospels, and not just because of personal choice or commitment, but because of a certain, but not exclusive, presumptive priority. If the Gospels are historical documents and true, they become the measure for all other religious documents – not for dismissing them (since these other documents may also contain truth), but for qualifying and contextualizing them. Let the same be said of the Qur’an or the Vedas, and let others who, by happenstance of birth or predilection, start there pursue the same search for truth in the same way and with the same motive.

Section 3: Unexistential Gospel Analysis

John P. Meier, who is one of the more prolific and learned of contemporary devotees of the historical critical method as applied to the Gospels, would seem to accept the bearing of the above argument about the existentiality of history. At any rate at the beginning of his multi-volume work, which is as comprehensive in its modern scholarship and its coverage of the Gospel material as one could wish, he speaks in the following way:

There are certain great questions that each human being has to work out for himself or herself. We learn from past quests, to be sure, but we cannot substitute the lessons of others for our own personal wrestling with the central problems of life…the unexamined life is not worthy living, and we cannot pay someone else to take it for us.

If this be true of every person’s need to search for answers about the nature of truth, the reality of God, the meaning of life and death, and what may lie beyond, it is also true of every Christian’s need to search for answers about the reality and meaning of the man named Jesus…¹³

The existential sentiment here is compelling, but Meier seems not to carry it through. He does say that, in view of Jesus’ impact on all of Western civilization (why only Western, for the impact was worldwide, even from the beginning?), no person or no religious person can be considered educated who has not investigated to some degree what historical research can tell us about Jesus.¹⁴ One would therefore expect Meier to provide the necessary research, and in all its existential urgency too. He does indeed provide research but in a peculiar way and with no little existential loss. For he proceeds to set out a strange understanding of history and a strange method of historical research.¹⁵

The understanding of history is that no history of anyone is possible. The reason is that there is a difference between the “real” person and the “historical” person. The total reality of a person, he says, is in principle unknowable, because all historical knowledge about human persons is limited by the nature of the case. We can have more or less of such knowledge, and considerable amounts in the case of modern times, where for instance we may have live recordings of what people say, as with the notorious Watergate tapes, or actual movies of what they said and did. In the case of some ancient figures, like Cicero, we have their own writings as well as many letters. But in Jesus’ case we have nothing comparable. The historical Jesus, the Jesus portrayed in the Gospels, may give us fragments of the “real” person but nothing more. The Gospels, he says, do not portray, and do not claim to portray, the real Jesus with the full range of everything he ever said or did in public or before his disciples in private.¹⁶

One wonders what the point of the remark is. Would we only know the “real” Jesus if we knew, among other things, how often he washed his hair or cut his finger nails?

The contrast Meier draws is unreal and makes what one may call a category mistake: the mistake of confusing the different ways things exist and are. A real person, like any real thing, is ontologically multiple, being both substance and accidents, as the metaphysicians say. The accidents are indefinitely large in number since they include even the slightest modifications (how often and how quickly a person breathed in any given minute, for instance). The substance is the primary thing that has the accidents, and it is essentially one and stable.

Each of us is the same substance now as when we were born. But by person we typically mean not just the substance but the character. Character refers to a distinct class of accidents in a substance, namely habits, and habits are stable dispositions of voluntary action, action undertak...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Existential Context
• Chapter 2: The Method of History
• Chapter 3: Literary Criticism
• Chapter 4: External Historical Evidence
• Chapter 5: Historical Answers
• Conclusion: Tradition Revived
• Horne on Evidence for the Gospels
• Bibliography
• Back cover