02 – The Importance of the Four Gospels

[McNeely] Okay. All right. Well, we've got another hour here. So this is our second class. We're still continuing on with some background material. We covered quite a bit of the Pax Romana in the first class and should have erased that so we have more room to write here in the second class.

We don't have a class secretary yet, do we, to do these things? So I guess I'll have to do it. So let's go ahead and make a mess up here. Maybe we won't. That's even worse.

We'll fill in as we go along. I did want to build off of the last class and show, as we had talked about, the Pax Romana, the Age of Augustus, and all that created the order of that time and the fullness of the time for the birth of Christ.

I did mention that understanding that part of the world historically as a setting and also for the current world is critical too. This may be a little bit dark. It's another one of those AI-generated maps, but it's the Middle East today.

And if you are aware, and I think all of us should be aware of our world and have a working knowledge of current events, world trends, what's happening, to be able to understand the world, prophecy, and also to make the connection to the biblical story, the entire biblical story, and particularly in the area of the Middle East.

This map shows, kind of right now, 2026, the power conflict that is going on, and the reddish country is the nation of Iran, where American and Israeli ships and planes and bombs have been attacking since late February of this year.

As I'm speaking, there's been a hot war going on in Judea, shown down in the area of Jerusalem and Israel. There's the conflict in Gaza. There's Lebanon to the north, where Israel has been in conflict with Hamas and what are called Hezbollah, factions of Muslim terrorist groups and organizations whose primary purpose is to spread their version of Islam but also destroy Israel and to rule all of the Middle East, even all of their Arab Muslim brother nations such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the Gulf States, and to control the Middle East.

And my purpose in going into this is to at least draw you to the fact that in the first century, there was conflict in the world, and particularly in Jerusalem and Judea, that was kept in check by the power of Rome, which allowed for the birth of Christ, the work of God, the plan of God to progress at that point in time.

As we look at the world today, that region is still under conflict. There are political and particularly religious streams and conflicts creating unrest and a lack of order and threatening to reassemble the status of nations and relationships among the nations in the Middle East and the larger world right now.

Why is that important? Well, it's important historically because the world does go on around us, and regardless of what your life and my life will consist of every day, there's a world of big events going on, and I do think that a disciple of Jesus Christ should have a working knowledge of what's going on in the world.

You're going to study Daniel. You've already known the basic outline of Daniel's life. You've been taught and heard sermons about Daniel. His time in Babylon, Daniel in the lions' den, Daniel and his three friends, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, and a fiery furnace. The story of Daniel is well known.

I've taught Daniel many times. Daniel was a disciple. He was a disciple of God, we would say. I would, you know, be a bit more exact of his time setting at least. I read Daniel, and I see more Christian living in Daniel than I see prophecy. Does that surprise you? Daniel prayed three times a day.

Daniel resisted giving in to the culture of his world. Daniel also wanted to know what in the world happened to his people, Jerusalem, Jews. Why was he living in Babylon? Why were they taken captive? Why? Why, God, did You do this?

God gave him wisdom, understanding, and light of the time and place to have at least an outline that, hey, it happened for a reason. And here's what's going on in the world, and he could interpret dreams. He had his own dreams.

Daniel was a disciple of his time, and I think he, I really do think he had a thirst for understanding. And I think you and I should as well.

Why is the world the way it is today? Why did my gas jump 60 cents from one week to the next in recent weeks? Did any of you ever see that? Why did that happen? What does that mean? Because it gets into your pocketbook. It gets into our quality of life.

And you trace it all the way back, and you can gain understanding as to why. And it's more than just a ship of oil and pumping oil or this or that. There are conflicts that shape our world and that part of the world.

In the Middle East, the Strait of Hormuz. Why is that so important?

Why is that a bone of contention? It's circled here on the lower right of the map there. President Trump says he's going to claim the Strait of Hormuz as a territory of the United States. Oh boy, here we go again. That's a big one.

Call it a territory. Ours, you know. I guess we'll call it the Strait of America. I don't know what he has in mind. But why is that area so important? What does it mean for the history of the world?

What might it give us broad clues in terms of the prophecies of Daniel and Revelation that you will study? That might give us certain insight, broad, not always specific in particular.

If you understand the political, the religious, cultural, economic, and historic trends of that part of the world, especially from our Bible and what little history you might study and what little I will give you as we go along, you can have that understanding.

What's going on over there today with the regional conflict has its roots in the setting of the first century, but even further back to the story of Abraham.

As you know, been taught, Abraham had a son named Isaac who had a son named Jacob, called Israel, but he also had a son called Ishmael who was the father of the Arab peoples.

And that story is in the book of Genesis. You'll study that as you go through it.

So the conflict among the descendants of Abraham, called the Abrahamic peoples, that are still going on are important to that part of the world and to our life today.

In recent years, President Trump tried to create peace among all those nations, and he called it, it was called the Abrahamic Accord, still active, still being pursued. But it goes back to a biblical name of the patriarch.

And you should have an understanding of that. You should know what that means. That's part of what it means to be biblically literate to the story of the Bible as it relates to our world today.

So I'll throw in a few of those as we go along. I would have done a, always did it with Daniel, had a lot more of it, but I'll try to throw that in as we move along here.

All right, so let's shift gears. We discussed the Pax Romana in a background, large background. But let's talk about the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and what we have, how we can rely upon them, and what we should know about those books that we will be going into in great detail.

The Bible itself, I think all of us, hope you know, we have the Old Testament and the New Testament. In the Old Testament, you have the law. What does the books of the law, what comprise the books of the law? Anybody know? It's called the Pentateuch, but which books make up the Pentateuch? Somebody else? Aiden? Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Five books called the Pentateuch, books of the law.

There are also prophetic books, the major prophets. Somebody name one major prophet. Raise your hand. Raise your hands, and I'll call on you. Isaiah, a major prophet. You have others in the minor prophets.

There's also a major segment of the Old Testament called the writings. Can anybody name me one of the writings of the Old Testament? What do we call it? Abigail? Proverbs. Yeah, Proverbs would be an example of the writings. So you have the law, the writings, and the prophets. Three major sections of the Old Testament.

In the New Testament, we have the Gospels. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. There you go. That's the interactive part of the class. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

We also have letters written by the apostle Paul. Name me one of the letters that the apostle Paul wrote. Ode? Ephesians. We also have a book of history.

Anybody know what that book might be? Yes. Acts. We also have a book of prophecy. What might that be?

Revelation. So we have a conglomeration of different types of books that make up the New Testament. Letters of Paul, a book of history of the Church.

When we look at the Gospels, we might, some might say, well, they're kind of biographies. And in a sense, they are. It's a biography of one person, Jesus Christ. And so that's a type of writing literature. We still have biographies today.

In the first-century world, there were biographies of prominent people as well. Julius Caesar, who I might have mentioned, Julius Caesar wrote his own autobiography and his own story. He was ahead of his time. He wrote about his military campaigns in France, or what was then called Gaul.

And so when we look at biographies, if you and I were to sit down and write our story, if I were to write mine, it's called an autobiography, self-written story. If I were to write Calen's story, she becomes a famous person, and I would be writing her biography.

And so when we look at the Gospels in terms of a genre, a type of writing or literature, we refer to them as the Gospels, which is shorthand for good news.

Evangelion, the Greek word, means good news or the announcement of the good news. We had a magazine, for years, one of our magazines, our flagship magazine before Beyond Today was called Good News. We took that from our Worldwide Church of God background, where we had a magazine called The Good News.

But the title, the good news, commonly used in religious circles today means really it's talking about the gospel. And so the Gospels tell us about the story of Jesus Christ, but they're not written by Christ. Christ did not write His story in the sense that He sat down with a scroll and a pen and wrote it out.

Now, we can say, well, He was God, and as a member of the God family, He inspired, after His resurrection and ascension to heaven, He inspired all the writers of the New Testament to write. And yes, He did.

So it is God-breathed. The Bible is God-breathed in that way. But we have the titles of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John on the four accounts of His life and teachings. He didn't write them Himself.

Now, let's look at a couple of scriptures to give us a little background to understand what we're looking at and why we have the four different Gospels.

Turn then to the book of Acts, and let's look at chapter 1. This is the post-resurrection account of Christ.

After His resurrection, in the period of the 40 days that He taught His disciples, and He is on the Mount of Olives with them here in Acts 1, before His final ascension to heaven. Acts 1, and in verse 21, this is actually, this is the post-resurrection period of time.

While we're here, let's go back just to get this in context. Let's read verse 8. This is His words before He ascends. Acts 1, verse 8. He tells the disciples, stay in Jerusalem, you will receive power from the Father.

"When the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you shall be witnesses to Me in Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria to the end of the earth." (Acts 1:8)

These are four geographic regions that spread out from Jerusalem. But notice this, "you will be witnesses to Me." (Acts 1:8) That's a very important word. You have a little bit of space to start writing again. You're going to be a witness.

What's a witness? Anybody? You ever been a witness in any situation? Someone who sees, and what do they do? They retell. They give an account for what they saw.

You're called into court in a case. As a witness, you will stand under oath there, and you will say, I saw this, and I say that it is true. If you're in a workplace, or if something happens, we hope that doesn't happen here at ABC, a little problem, and you may have witnessed something between, let's say, two other students, maybe Mr. Pramar or Mr. Dunkel is going to call an inquiry. And you might have been a witness to it, so you will have to tell your version of it.

All right, so Jesus says, you're going to be a witness of Me to basically, to the world.

Now let's go to verses 21 and 22. They are selecting the replacement for Judas. And the qualifications are given.

Verse 21, "Therefore, of these men who have accompanied us all the time that the Lord went in and went out among us," (Acts 1:21) this is Peter talking, "beginning from the baptism of John to the day He was taken up from us, one of these must become a witness with us of His resurrection." (Acts 1:22)

So there are two qualifications at the moment for the replacement to Judas. They had to have been with Jesus from the time of John the Baptist, and they had to have been a witness with their own eyes of the resurrected Christ.

The story goes on. They select Matthias. But Jesus holds out the very important key. You're going to be a witness. You're going to tell about Me what I said and what I did, about His teaching and everything about it.

Now, it was important that there be multiple witnesses. There's a principle from the law in the Old Testament that "in the mouth of two or three witnesses a matter is established." (Deuteronomy 19:15)

So that's written into the law. Jesus provided four witnesses in the writing of His story for the world, for us, of what He was, said, and did. All right? That's important to understand.

Now, there were hundreds who saw Him, thousands who saw Him in His ministry. We are told in one case, I believe this is in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul will write that upwards of 500 people saw the resurrected Christ after He came out of the tomb. So there were hundreds who saw the resurrected Christ. But in the accounts of the Gospels, we have four that are written.

Now, let's ask another question. Why didn't Jesus write His own again? Why didn't He even dictate it? Well, in a sense, He probably did dictate it in that as He was teaching, it's logical to assume or to infer that somebody like a Matthew was writing down what He wrote, what He said.

Matthew. What was Matthew's job before he became a disciple? Does anybody know? Luke? He was a tax collector. An accountant. What's an accountant? Has to keep track of things, money, writing it down. Anybody, any of you watch The Chosen?

Okay, a few of you. Did you note the character of Matthew in The Chosen? He was writing things down, heading right. And I remember seeing that, I thought, yeah, that's probably logical. That's probably what he did. He was off to the side writing things down.

And so Matthew's account is unique, and it's detailed. So in a sense, Jesus might have, we could say, He dictated to a transcription, but He didn't write it out Himself. These men came up with it later on. And in John 5, let's turn to another scripture, the Gospel of John 5.

And Christ makes a statement that we might just read over. One thing you should learn as you go through all the Bible here this year, the Bible can be, you can speed-read the Bible.

You can pore over every word of the Bible. You can look up every Greek and Hebrew reference on it.

But however you study and read the Bible, pay attention. Every word is important. And even when you think, why is this in the Bible? It's there for a reason. My wife reads through the Bible every year. And when she comes to the book of Job, she just labors with Job.

And every once in a while, she'll look up and say to me, why is Job in the Bible? I keep saying, just get to chapter 38, honey, and you'll find out that the answer is in chapter 38. But you've got to read to that point. And it's all about God and Job.

I've been going through the major prophets this summer, listening to it on an audio recording while I'm reading it on the app in my phone. And I mean, some of those things in Isaiah and Ezekiel and Jeremiah, I've asked the same, why is this here 15 times, God? Babylon. Woe to Babylon. And all of the various nations and, you know, just on and on.

And it's just heavy, heavy, heavy. I'm thinking, oh man, I've got to go clean the garage. I need to go do something. Why is this here? And I keep coming back. There's a reason. Every word of God is inspired.

So it's there for a reason. I don't know why I got off on that. I get off on certain tangents and have to come back into it. Let's look at what Jesus says here in John 5 and verse 31.

He says, oh yeah, I know what He said. You got to read it carefully. "If I bear witness of Myself, My witness is not true." (John 5:31)

Is that contradictory? What's Jesus saying? Again, this is an example where sometimes you just need to pause and stop. And what's He saying? Wait a minute. Is that a contradiction? No, it's not.

So what does He say? "If I bear witness of Myself," (John 5:31) we just talked about in Acts that the disciples were to be witnesses in the world, but Jesus says, "My witness is not true." (John 5:31)

Well, is Christ true? Yes, He was. He said, "My word is truth." "I am the way of the truth." He lived the truth. He taught it. He personified truth.

But what does He mean, "My witness is not true"? (John 5:31) Well, there's one very obvious possibility here. He's not saying that He's lying. His point is it's not legally valid. Being a self-witness is not enough.

There had to be independent witnesses, even within the law, "in the mouth of two or three witnesses." And again, the 500 after the resurrection. And so Jesus couldn't just do it Himself, which is why He called 12 disciples, and many others who heard what He said, and then upwards of 500 were eyewitnesses of His resurrection.

But He is true. And so He gives us four accounts of the gospel, of what is going on here in His life and in His story.

Now, at this point, let me pause. A lot of each of our classes, Gospels, Epistles, will be what we call apologetic. You have a class for Mr. Mohr on apologetics. I think you have that tomorrow for the first time. Very important class.

But in a sense, so much of what we teach is an apologetic. In other words, an explanation, not an "I'm sorry this was written," "I'm sorry" type thing, an apologetic in the sense that we prove the Bible to be true.

That's what the apologetics class is about here. And so there's a fair amount of that in not only this class, but all of our classes here, to explain or to defend truth, or as we might call our belief.

God says for each of us to be able to give an answer for the hope that lies within us. Have any of you ever been asked why you don't keep Christmas? Why you keep the Sabbath? Did you give a good explanation? Or did you hem and haw? Did you go tell my minister? Or we got a booklet on that, which is okay, but I hope you gave them an answer from your own heart, showing that it's your conviction, it's your belief.

That's what the Scripture is talking about. And in that way, we accurately defend our belief. When it comes to the Gospels, you can trace it historically. We can actually even see the origins of it in the Gospel story itself.

The seed of disbelief, unbelief, is constant. There's a reason that the Romans put a guard on the tomb of Jesus. We will read. They thought that His disciples would steal the body and make some grand claims because Jesus said, "Destroy this temple, I'll raise it up in three days." (John 2:19)

And He was already called in His own day illegitimate. An illegitimate child to His mother, Mary. Those stories were already circulating in His own time. Why did she become pregnant before marriage? Joseph wasn't His biological father. That was known. And then He made His claims to be the Son of God.

That just grew through the centuries, and it's still with us today. I just read one of my novels of a storyline that I'm going through on all the... I do read more than history, contrary to belief. When I want to relax, I have my spy thrillers that I read.

And one of them was... the last one I read was actually set in the Vatican. There's always great stories, are always set around the Catholic Church and the Vatican, suspicion and espionage and mystery and everything.

But the core was the historicity of Jesus in the plotline of the story and the Gospels. I thought, oh, that's interesting here. Just getting ready to teach that.

But people have been criticizing the Gospel story of Jesus, His historical validity, the accuracy of the Gospels. He really wasn't resurrected from the dead, they say. That was made up. And that was the line of this, that He really wasn't killed by the Jews, He was killed by the Romans.

Well, the Jews had a part, but because of anti-Semitism and the historical pogroms against the Jews and the anti-Semitism, the Jews had borne that stigma down through the ages.

The point of this book I was telling you about was to basically cut off the story at the trunk, to say that the story of Pilate and the trial and the crucifixion was all bogus. But that's a common canard that is out there. And Jesus couldn't write His own history and story. He lived it, but He provided a witness for that in what we have in the four Gospels and the accounts that are here with us.

Now, as we go through this, let's look at a timing of the Gospels. When were they written? 

The common understanding of historians who look at the evidence of Scripture is that they were all written in the first century. And indeed they were. Which one came first?

Scholars look at the Gospel of Mark, and many conclude that Mark's Gospel was written first.

I'm going to put down Luke and Matthew here.

Mark, Luke, and Matthew are commonly known as the Synoptic Gospels. You'll see that term. What it means is basically one view. And they all present a view of Christ that can be put into one from three different perspectives and synthesize. We get synthesized, synthesized to bring into one unity, this word from synoptic.

And they all tell the story of Jesus with different styles and from different perspectives. Some, Luke includes stories that are not in Mark and Matthew. Matthew has a style about his organization that's different from Luke.

We have the fourth Gospel, which is John, which I'm sure you know is completely different. It's more theological in nature. And it does not trace the story of Jesus in the way that the others do. It's unique. It's not called one of the Synoptic Gospels. But Mark is generally thought to have been written first.

And it is thought to be written probably in Italy or near Rome. Okay. And written to the Church at Rome. This is what many feel. It's generally accepted that Mark is actually Peter's Gospel, the apostle Peter. Okay.

Now this Mark is the one we will see in the book of Acts. His full name is John Mark. He has an interesting role in the book of Acts in that he becomes a companion of the apostle Paul. Then he leaves Paul. But his name is scattered throughout the New Testament.

But he does wind up in Rome. And he's thought, his Gospel, to have been written to the Romans. Now there's reasons for that. When you read the Gospel of Mark, Mark is the shortest. And it is written very direct, quick. And it moves from one story to the other. Jesus went. He did this.

And it is a Gospel that focuses upon the actions of Jesus throughout His ministry in a way that is different. It has some of the teachings. It has the story. It's shorter. Some feel that it was written to the Church at Rome, composed of a number of Romans.

And part of the Roman mentality was to get things done. A Roman soldier would be sent, a Roman citizen would be sent to do something. They would do it. They would come back. And they, mission accomplished.

Mark tends to write the story of Jesus from a very direct, He went, He did, He accomplished, He came. And it's written like that. It's different from the other three. And there's thoughts that this is some of the thinking that it was addressed there. It could have been that it was the earliest, earliest one.

Part of the other thinking is that Mark and, or that Luke and Matthew draw from Mark. Now, this is the way textual criticism works among scholars as they examine a text of the Bible. They take it apart. They look at the language. They look at the setting, the history, the culture of the time. This is done with the Gospels. And it leads in a number of different directions beyond the scope of what we want to get to here.

While these three are similar in their style, Luke being a little different, Luke is a Gentile. Luke is a historian. All right? He is the only Gentile writer of a book in the New Testament. And he's a doctor. We'll learn about him.

He's a companion of the apostle Paul. And he writes with a precision of a scientist. He's very close in his chronology, dates, facts, locations, and his style. Luke also pays attention to women, the poor, and the gentiles, the non-Israelites, because he's a Gentile. And so his view of the story of Christ is more inclusive.

Matthew writes from a Jewish perspective.

He was a Jewish tax collector. And it's very precise. But there's also understood to be, and we'll note this as we go through it, Matthew writes his story in five large groupings.

And some of that overlaps. And it is why when we go through the Gospel, you'll see certain things at times seem to be out of place chronologically. We'll talk about that as we go.

But all three of these writers, the story is, Luke and Matthew, and maybe John to a degree, but the others drew from Mark. Now, that is a plausible explanation. But I want to talk about something that might be a little bit more critical for us here to consider in terms of the sourcing and what we're seeing here with the time setting of the Gospel.

Let me introduce the concept of memorization.

The Gospels, I said earlier, were written in Greek. In Judea, there was a high level of literacy even among the people living out in the villages of Galilee, etc. But writing, preservation of text was not quite as common or pervasive as it is for us. There were scrolls, there was writing, but it was largely expensive. Not everybody had their own copy of the Old Testament.

They didn't walk around with that. There were scrolls in a synagogue. There was teaching in a synagogue. This picture is a depiction of a teacher in a synagogue. You see the scroll open there, and students around. And they're hearing. Note that they don't have their computers in front of them. They don't have their writing instruments. There were writing instruments in that day.

They're listening. They're listening. They're hearing. When Jesus says, hear this, or your hearing is dull, they would have understood, hey, what do you mean our hearing is dull? We've heard the preacher, the teacher last week in the synagogue, and Jesus is making a deeper point.

Learning was by hearing. And there's something called memorization working here in this setting. It was common for people to memorize whole passages of the Bible, favorite Psalms, maybe all the Psalms.

And if you were to be one who wanted to go to a, would have been called a rabbinical school like the school of Gamaliel, like a young Saul of Tarsus, who became the apostle Paul, did when he went to Jerusalem, he sat in the school like this of Gamaliel.

We'll read about him. Paul became a Pharisee. A Pharisee of the time like Paul would have learned by memory the entire Old Testament. That's why when you read Paul's letters, he's just quoting Isaiah, Amos, as he writes. He's not looking it up, because it's all up here.

People memorized the Scriptures in the first century. And then they passed them on orally to their children. That's how they taught them, to each other. And they told the story orally. What we have working here, and this is where we're bringing it back to the source material.

Why is all this common? There was a basic oral, legal telling of the Old Testament. And in this case, the story of Jesus that begins to develop. And so it's going to be common. There are going to be the major themes and teachings and activities of Jesus are going to be memorized as part of the early Church, passed on orally.

Then along with certain letters, in the case of Paul, that were given to a church like at Corinth or Colossae that contained instruction that then they listened to and heard again and probably heard many times.

But they had the acumen to commit it to memory. What we have working here is the source material for the writing of these three men largely comes out of the context of the culture of the time where the memorization of Scripture is common. That's what they had to do.

You know, we're lazy. I'm lazy. You know how many versions of the Bible I've got on my shelf at home and just in hardback form? Probably 25. And then I've got my apps and my computers. And we've got access to every known translation of the Bible. We can look it up just like that.

It's a great time to be alive, isn't it? We're spoiled. But to memorize it, Dr. Duncan is going to have you memorize Scriptures, right? That's part of your work here. I'm terrible at memorization. I've, over the years, I've got a few I can quote. You'll out-quote me by the end of your year here. I guarantee that.

But that's another story. I read my Bible. I study it. But I can't quote it word for word. And I have to be very careful when I'm speaking or teaching at times that I do get it accurate. Well, Paul could get it accurate, and the others could too. And this is what is working here with a great deal of oral accounts from the teaching that is developing.

The time remaining to this, let's talk a little bit about this idea of being a witness. We read that back in Acts 1. And also Christ said, "My witness is true" in the word that He, the teaching that He gave.

But He needed more than just one witness there. What do we have as we look at the Gospels? Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And as we're going to go through them, I already mentioned Luke has different stories than the others. You'll find the prodigal son in the book of Luke, not in the other Gospels. You'll find the parable of the good Samaritan only in Luke, not the others. All right? So we have a lot working there.

We have four views of Jesus, four eyewitnesses, except that Luke wasn't an eyewitness. And Mark is writing down Peter, so we can have confidence in that. Matthew sat at Christ's feet, and certainly the apostle John did. Luke goes and he interviews witnesses. And he talks about that at the beginning of Luke. We'll read that later in the beginning of Acts.

He writes down, and he, I think personally, my supposition, he interviewed Mary, the mother of Jesus. He interviewed some of those people who were recipients of the healings that we will read about in the Gospels. He had the time and the place to do that.

While Paul was in prison, and probably more than a year, I think he went around Galilee and Jerusalem talking to eyewitnesses. And he wrote it down with the precision of a historian and a scientific mind to give us an accurate witness.

So here's the idea of a witness. I mentioned that if you were called to testify to an event that you have seen, how does a witness work? A witness comes to a conclusion of an event, of an occurrence. But that event may have components that not every eyewitness saw.

Let me give you the example. Somebody holds up a convenience store. They shoot a cashier, and they run out the door with money, and they get in a car and drive away. That's the event. There's proof that it happened. A man shot up a store, robbed it, shot somebody, took money, and escaped in a car. He's brought to trial.

There are four witnesses that are key witnesses for the prosecution that are brought into the courtroom. One of them was in the store on another aisle, heard a shot, heard a man groan, and a door opened. And by the time he got back in the milk section, up to the front, the guy was gone.

He heard events. He didn't see the perp. He didn't see the shooting. He saw the result of the shooting.

Eyewitness number two is coming into the store and opening the door just at the moment this person is holding a gun over the cashier, demanding the money, making the shot. He sees it.

He sees the man fall, and the perp rushes him aside, hurrying to get out, and gets in his car, leaves, and this guy goes in and calls 911, tries to give some help to the person shot. He didn't hear the shot. He sees the effect of it, though.

Eyewitness number three, pumping gas out on the far end. This is a Buc-ee's. He's way out of half a mile away. Okay? No Buc-ee's. Yeah. All right. He hears the shot. He doesn't see who shot. He sees the front door open, fly open, and somebody run out, get in the car, and leave. A minute later, he walks into the scene and sees what has happened.

Three eyewitnesses. We'll stop there for the sake of time. One event. One heard, another saw, but didn't hear. But they all give testimony to an event that then conclusively proves the guilt or the actual occurrence of what happened, the story. That's how eyewitnesses work. That's how witnesses are. They will see an event from their perspective, where they were, what they saw, what they heard.

When it's put together for the jury, the conclusion would normally be, yeah, this person accused shot the person, perpetrated the act. It's proven by all of these witnesses' accounts.

Think about that as we look at the eyewitness accounts of the life of Jesus as told through four men, four perspectives that brings us together in a total story, in total picture, to witness to the life, teachings, the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

This is just one part of, let's say, an apologetic, to have confidence in the record that has come down to us in these four books for us to appreciate what has been done.

Next class, I'll give you an example. We'll tie this up with one example from the Scriptures to show what I'm talking about. So we'll do that in the next class. And then start moving into the text itself. So we'll save that for that time.