All right, this is really exciting as we begin the second part of our course in introduction to salvation history on the New Testament. But we have a little bit of work to do because before we dive into the infancy narratives and the highlights on the public life of Jesus and the Paschal Mysteries and these different types of wonderful stories that we have of our Lord, we need to lay down some groundwork here, some foundations. So lesson 27, this lesson here is entitled What Are The Gospels? I could have entitled it as well, Are The Gospels Reliable?
Are they believable? Are they historical? However you want to slice it. And this is really important because as we get to the life of Christ, it's going to be very, very easy for many to dismiss Jesus, his claims, his words, his deeds, his whole real story, his whole narrative as just a bunch of pogwash, right?
It's just a nice warm and fuzzy story. So we need to do this work. What are the Gospels? Next lesson, lesson 28, we're going to look at whether, like, who is Jesus?
What we're going to title that? Who is Jesus? Did he actually claim to be divine and do some apologetic work? So this is a very important lesson.
This lesson too is a little bit of apologetics. It's extremely crucial to understand the Gospels. What are they? Are they believable?
Are they reliable? So the first thing that we want to look at is the question of authorship. Who wrote the Gospels? And this is a very profound debate, a raging debate in a lot of modern circles because modernists want to disconnect the historical Jesus, the real Jesus who lived and breathed and walked and talked among us 2000 years ago from the so-called Jesus of Faith.
The Jesus that many Christians across the world, from any centuries, believe about him, he's divine, he is the savior of the world, he was born of a virgin and resurrected from the dead and all these things. What moderns want to do is separate the two of them. The Jesus of faith, the Jesus that we believe in is not the real historical Jesus because the Gospels present this Jesus of Faith. But it's a Jesus of Faith that's filled, or the Gospels that are filled with these pious legends and folklore and there's no real historical credibility.
It's just a whole bunch of, well, just like I said, folklore and pious legends and myth, mythology or legends. And this is, there's a lot of reasons why this, my modernists argue this. I really recommend here on the note's a great book, a handbook for Catholic apologetics by Peter Creifton de Shelley as well. They do a great job explaining all the different motives behind the modernists, the modernist scripture scholars who try to discredit the Gospels and discredit Jesus Christ and his claims.
And it pretty much amounts to a refusal to submit to Jesus really, a refusal to repent and submit to Christ and therefore you're going to reject anything that is super natural or miraculous or divine in any way. So you could consult their book, the references here in your notes. But this is essentially what the modernists want to do. And this is a problem because the modernist scripture scholars, they have infiltrated the American university system and certainly you could argue in Europe as well.
And you have kind of this trickle-down education where you go into a college course, and this happened to me as well, when I went to undergraduate school. You go into a course and they start to make this distinction between the historical Jesus of Faith and they discredit the Gospels as pious legends, and then of course a kid, a young kid, a freshman, sophomore, whatever it might be, they begin to lose their faith. They're a Protestant, they're a Catholic, they've always believed in the Bible, and now they're in college, they want to learn more, and then all of a sudden they have this doctor so-and-so telling them it's all a bunch of gibberish. So this is why people lose their faith in college so much because they're undermining the Gospels.
So what is the claim? The claim is that the Gospels are actually anonymous. Originally, they were written as anonymous, not by Matthew, not by Mark, not by Luke, not by John. And they're just anonymously written and they're just simply the devout recollections of communities of Christians decades after Jesus lived.
They're not written by eyewitnesses and therefore with this claim that they're anonymous, written decades and decades and decades, almost, you know, depending on who you read, it's very much a long time after Jesus lived, not by eyewitnesses. Of course, you don't have any historicity or credibility. It's just these pious collections of this Jesus who is somehow miraculous and divine that can cock it in their brains. At best, the Gospels are full of moral stories like the Golden Rule, the one to others as you would have them do unto you.
That's kind of like the highlights or the point of these Gospels. Okay, and the Bart Ehrman, he's very famous and I have to say at this point, I highly, highly recommend one of the best books on defending Jesus and defending the Gospels by Dr. Brant Petrie. He's one of my favorite, favorite, favorite Catholic scholars today, who's living today.
He's awesome. He's written many books. I'm going to rely heavily on his book, The Case for Jesus in this particular lecture. There are many great books out there defending Christ, defending his divinity, his miracles, defending the Gospels.
But this one just is so easy to read for anybody and he really distills the arguments in such a way that it's just a full, you just can't put it down. It's so good from one argument to another. So I really recommend The Case for Jesus and then your footnotes here in the notes, if you have them, I recommend some other great books as well, Richard Bachmann and Bruce MacDell over. There's some other ones in there you can consult.
But I really encourage all of my students to go out and buy The Case for Jesus, read it once, sit on it, read it again because it's just that good. So I'm going to rely heavily on a lot of his arguments because they've just been presented so well. Well, Brant Petrie shares this quote from Bar Airmen, who is one of the most famous anti-Christian biblical scholars living. It's super ironic how this happens.
A lot of the biblical scholars that you have out there, they just don't have any faith whatsoever. It's a very sad situation. Well, he recounts Bar Airmen's famous explanation on how the Gospels became anonymous. It's with a telephone game and it's on page four of his book.
So again, I hardly encourage you to go out and get his book, but this is how it reads. So this is Brant Petrie quoting Bar Airmen and it's a famous argument against the Gospels, the telephone game. All right, so it reads like this. Nearly all of these storytellers of the Gospels, of course, had no independent knowledge of what happened to Jesus.
It takes little imagination to realize what happened to the stories. You're probably familiar with the old birthday party game Telephone. A group of kids sit in a circle, the first tells a brief story to the one sitting next to her, who tells it to the next and to the next and so on until it comes back full circle to the one who started it. Invariably, the story has changed so much in the process of retelling that everyone gets a good laugh.
It's essentially saying that the Gospels are laughable. That's what he's doing. He's very clever. Imagine the same activity taking place, not in a solitary living room with 10 kids one afternoon, but over the expanse of the Roman Empire, some 2,500 miles across with thousands of participants.
All right, so this is very clever, as I've said. It's basically equating the Gospels and the writing of the Gospels, the compilation of the Gospels as to one big telephone game by thousands and thousands of people over many, many miles. And if it's a good laugh for the telephone game, he's undercutting the Gospels and saying it's all laughable. And that's true because the modernists reject anything miraculous and anything supernatural.
They have to reject Christ. Okay, so this is what college kids are getting all over the country for the past number of years, 40, 50 years even longer than that, you could probably argue. And the question then is, were the Gospels really anonymous? Is this claim true?
Because so many people accept it as fact because if our airman is a PhD and he has all these books written, he must know what he's talking about. But is it true? All right, so here's the here's the logical progression of the claim. Number one, all four Gospels were originally published without titles late in the first century.
Okay, just kind of the storytellers, as airman says, they're all storytellers are kind of compiled late in the fourth century with no authorship attached to them. They circulate for however many decades, unknown decades as anonymous. And then finally, there, somebody wakes up and they're like, you know what, we should probably claim that these were written by some sort of apostolic person to give them credibility. Okay, so this is a very ingenious thing to do.
If you want people to believe you, you need authority, you need credibility. So they decide to say, this is from Matthew, this is from Luke, this is from John. Okay, and that happens so long after the life of Christ, it's ridiculous. So the conclusion is they are not written by eyewitnesses.
They're creations of later generations, schools, or communities of Christians. They're not to be believed. And in fact, they're kind of all lies. Okay, now, is this true?
What are the problems with this claim? And Brent Petrie does an amazing job in his book saying that there's basically no evidence or data or proof whatsoever. He, Petrie tells this great story about when he was doing his doctoral work, he asked his professors, Hey, listen, I'd like to go study these anonymous gospels. That sounds very fascinating.
I want to compare them with the gospels as we have them. And sure enough, he goes to try to research and identify where these anonymous gospels when he's doing all this research. And sure enough, he says not a single anonymous copy exists. That's a huge problem for this claim.
If you're going to say we have all of the gospels were originally anonymous for decades and decades of not a century, where are they? And we do not have a single one. In fact, Petrie shows every single ancient copy from the earliest centuries from the early 100s, all of them, no matter the language, no matter the location, they consistently attribute the gospels to Matthew, to Mark, to Luke, and to John. There's no anonymous copies.
And not only that, there are no contradictory titles either. And that's pretty impressive. As Bart Ehrman says, you got 2500 miles across, that's a huge Roman Empire with thousands and thousands of really tens or hundreds of thousands of Christians, but not a single contradictory title. In other words, the gospel of Matthew is not sometimes attributed to, I don't know, Timothy or Peter or whoever it might be.
Every single one, without fail, correctly attributes it to Matthew, then Mark and Luke and John. That's pretty crazy. All right, that just completely crushes the argument that they're originally written as anonymous gospels. And in fact, all scholars agree that there is the gospel of not the gospel, excuse me, the epistle to the Hebrews, that is anonymous, the internal evidence and external witness of the church fathers.
They're all consistent that it's anonymously written. And so some people attribute it to Paul or to Timothy or Barnabas or Luke or whoever it might be. There's a lot of debate in the early church as to who actually composed it. And there's nothing inside the epistle to the Hebrews that says it was clearly written by Paul or Luke or whoever it might be.
So you do have historical witness, right, historical evidence that Hebrews is anonymous, but you don't find that exact same situation with any one of the four gospels. Okay, that's another big argument against this claim. If in the other kind of subject, it's a minor point, but it actually carries some weight with it. If you wanted to give the gospel's authority and credibility, why would you attribute them to Luke or Mark who are not direct eyewitnesses?
You could say that Mark's gospel is Peter's, as I'm going to explain to you a little bit later, that's probably true. I mean, it is true. It's the gospel that Peter just written down by Mark, but still Mark is an indirect witness. Okay, why would you do that?
Why wouldn't you ascribe it to any of the other apostles? Peter, Andrew, how about Mary? Mary would be my favorite. Peter says, why not Jesus?
But I would be autobiographical. I think you could say Mary. For me, Mary would be the top because she was there from the very beginning when the Archangel Gabriel appeared to her with the authority and enciations. So the gospel according to Mary, that would be pretty dynamite if you ask me.
But you don't have that. If you're going to falsely attribute the gospels to some sort of apostolic person, then the question then is why not why? Looker Mark, right? So these are all fantastic arguments that Peter, Dr.
Peter gives against the claim that they were anonymous. Then he goes on to share with us that there's so much evidence, consistent evidence that they were truly written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. So we're going to look at the internal evidence first just for a little bit. It spends some more time on the external evidence, which is basically the witness, the testimony of the early church fathers.
Let's look at the internal evidence first here.