Background of the Gospels

It seems like the more I dig into this, the more material I come up with background information, so I'm not sure how much longer I'll be giving some background sessions. But what I'm trying to do in this, it's not that I'm trying to put off getting into the Gospels, but there's a lot of background material we need to cover because as we get into the Gospels, we'll be covering and coming across a lot of questions, topics, issues that will come up again and again in the Gospels. What I'm trying to do is take care of a lot of those questions and answer them up front, so we don't take away from it when we get into actually going through the Gospels there.

I do have a couple of new people here today. Unfortunately, I forgot to bring some copies of the Harmony of the Gospels here. Give me or Beth Bradford your name afterwards and we'll pass it on to you there. Again, if you haven't written your name in it, too, please do that because there's about 60 or 70 of them just like it here in the room, so you wouldn't want to get that mixed up. In the last class several weeks ago, we discussed the backgrounds of the four Gospels covering who the writers were, what their backgrounds were, who those Gospels were written to, and the different themes or different emphases that each writer had. Today we'll continue with some of the other background information about the Gospels and talk about some other issues and questions. I will comment, too. I know last class we went through a lot of material very quickly. We'll do that same today because there's a lot of material on the cover here, so I apologize in advance for that, but we will. We are posting these on the Denver website at denver.ucg.org, and the messages are up there, so if you want to go back and listen to them again, you can do that.

So today, I'd like to cover several different background topics. One is, one exactly are the Gospels. The word gospel means, of course, good news or good message, and the Gospels certainly contain good news or good message about the life and death and resurrection of the Messiah, Jesus Christ. But those titles are somewhat misleading because we don't talk about gospel as a word. It's not a word we would use every day. What we're really looking at is the testimony, the witness of these four writers here, the testimony of those men to the events it took place during the earthly ministry of Jesus Christ. And these four books of the Bible do bear witness, the other witnesses of these events. Now, they're not the only witnesses because the apostles, the twelve of them, were witnesses as well. You might write down Acts 1 and verse 22. Acts 1 and 22, we won't turn there, but this is where the apostles, Judas has committed suicide after betraying Jesus, and the apostles get together. They are casting lots to choose a replacement. And there's an interesting phrase here because Peter says that they must choose someone to, quote, become a witness with us of his resurrection, to become a witness with us of his resurrection. So this tells us that the apostles were to be witnesses.

That was a primary part of their responsibilities. These were men who had been with Jesus since the beginning of his ministry, and they were called to be witnesses there. And that is, again, essentially what the gospels are. They are the witnesses. They are the testimony of what happened during Jesus Christ's ministry. And it was important that there not be one, not be two, not be four, but there be twelve witnesses to Jesus Christ's death and resurrection. These men were the official witnesses, but in fact there were many other witnesses as well. At the end of the Harmony, you'll read there where Paul wrote that there were five hundred who saw Jesus alive again after his resurrection. And it was important that there be multiple witnesses for several reasons. One is simply that it wasn't something that would normally be believed easily, that a man was dead, was in the tomb for three days and three nights, and then rose again. And if you heard that story today, how many of you would believe it? It's what was very important, that there be multiple witnesses to his life, death, and resurrection from the dead. You might also write down Numbers 35 and verse 30. It's Numbers 35 and verse 30. And Deuteronomy 19.15. Deuteronomy 19.15. And as we know, the principle of multiple witnesses was an integral part of the legal system that God established for the Old Testament. And both of these verses tell us that by law, for a legal fact to be established, there had to be multiple witnesses to that event, either two or three witnesses, that one witness was not enough to establish a legal fact of truth or finding there. There had to be multiple witnesses of that, and that's reflected in those two verses I gave to you there. So with the Gospels, if you think about it, we have the law required two witnesses. What do we have? We have four Gospels. So actually, God has given us double the amount of required witnesses to legally establish a fact here. In line with this, maybe you've wondered why did Jesus not write his own Gospel? Why didn't he just do that? Why did he write down his own teachings for us? Why instead did he give the job to four other people several decades after the fact? Well, Jesus gives the answer to that himself in John 5, verse 31.

Again, you don't necessarily have to turn there, but John 5, verse 31, breaking into a thought, he says, If I bear witness of myself, my witness is not true. If I bear witness to myself, my witness is not true. Now, that's not saying that he's lying. He's not saying that I'm going to say something that is not true. What it means is that it would not be legally valid for someone to bear witness of himself. Again, it gets back to the Old Testament principle of two witnesses. One person could not testify for himself as to a legal fact of law. So basically, what that means is that if Jesus testified on his own behalf, it would not be legally valid, according to the laws given under the Old Testament. And indeed, so both versions translate it that way, that if I bear witnesses of myself, it is not legally valid there. That's the point that is being made. So, the overall thrust of this is that you have to have multiple witnesses, and they have to be independent witnesses. So those are both key facts. You have to be multiple witnesses, and they have to be independent witnesses. In other words, you can't have witnesses who are colluding with themselves. And that is true, as the principle carried on in our legal system today as well.

And so that, in a nutshell, is why we have four Gospels. Not one, not two, not three, but four Gospels. Multiple witnesses. Therefore, that is also why Jesus Christ could not write his own Gospel there. So let's address another question here that comes up from time to time, and that is, when were the Gospels written? When were the Gospels written? I set out a series of questions to make you think about that. And the answers to those questions give us a pretty narrow window into understanding when the Gospels would have been written, or at least Matthew, Mark, and Luke. We'll talk about John at another point, and some other issues we need to go into more detail with that. So one of the questions that I asked was, why does Paul, out of all of his letters, quote from the Gospels only one time? Only one time. And let's see 1 Timothy 5 verse 18.

1 Timothy 5, 18 quotes from Luke 10 in verse 7. That may seem a little surprising to you. Why? Here's Paul. He writes all of these letters, but he only quotes from the Gospels one time and all of that. Why so? Why is that the case there?

Anybody have any thoughts about that? It's pretty...

Because Paul wasn't converted? No, not that. It's interesting. There was a missing element there, but that's not quite it. Yes, Scott.

Yes, yes. He was writing before the Gospels were written down. That's why. That's the missing element that is there. I'll give you a little bit of a time frame here. You may want to write this down. Paul wrote his letters from about AD 50 approximately for the earliest to about AD 66 or 67 when he died, when he was beheaded in Rome. So, the epistle of 1 Timothy was written about 65 AD, probably about the closest we can nail it down. So, this is about one to two years before Paul is executed. He includes a quote from Luke's Gospels. So, I think the simplest answer is simply that the Gospels had not been written during that period, or, conversely, a slight variation on that. Yes, perhaps they were written, but since Paul was traveling so much, perhaps he was not quite aware of them yet, or perhaps they were not written in the final form there. And I'll explain what I mean by that in just a few minutes here. So, here, just a year or two before his death, Paul quotes from the Gospel of Luke. But again, that's the only quote from the Gospels. So, now, let's see, I'm starting to get ahead of myself in my notes here.

Few other factors to consider here. The book of Acts ends at about AD 63, and it ends with Paul in prison in Rome. And most people think, well, Paul was in prison in Rome, he was beheaded there. Not so. Actually, after the book of Acts ends, Paul was released for several years. And then later, several years later, he was re-imprisoned during the reign of Nero and the persecutions there. And he was executed again at that time, about AD 66, AD 67 there. So, Luke also says, the introduction, first few verses of his Gospel, well, excuse me, actually then Acts, yes, he writes that he had written the Gospel of Luke before he wrote the book of Acts. So, if the book of Acts ends at AD 63, then obviously the book of Luke had to be written a little bit earlier than that, or some period earlier than that. So, putting all these factors together there, we can assume that the Gospels were probably written around 58, 59, up to AD 63, or at least at least Luke's Gospel in particular, and probably Matthew's and Mark's around the same time frame. At least that's the majority of the scholars that I've looked into, at least those who believe the Bible do accept that. Now, there's a whole other issue or school of thought in that, and that is the Gospels were not written in the first century at all. You'll find a lot of sources from people who don't believe the Bible, and they attribute the Gospels anywhere from 120, 130, as late as 180 or so AD, well over a century after the fact. And they do that to say, well, the Gospels were never written by eyewitnesses. They're all made up of fables and this sort of stuff. But, as we'll see going through, there's just too much firsthand evidence that's recorded there that shows that is not the case. That would be a whole hour-long discussion in itself that we won't get into. But that is why scholars who don't believe the Bible place them much later there. It's basically to discredit the Bible there. So, another question I asked. Okay, so we've established one point for when the Gospels might have been written there by the dating of the book of Acts and so on. And the fact that Paul does not mention them when he is writing there. So, I ask another question. That is, what event took place in the first century of great significance and also gives us a clue as to when the Gospels might have been written before that event. Anyone given any thought to that? Yes, Scott? Yes, yes. Destruction of Jerusalem, 70 AD. Why was that significant? It was significant because it totally transformed that part of the world there. The Romans came in, destroyed Jerusalem, destroyed not only Jerusalem, but the temple totally eliminated the temple. Josephus describes the destruction, devastation of Jerusalem as being so bad that you could walk by and not even tell a city had been there. I think that's a little bit of exaggeration, but still it gives you some idea of the devastation there. And when the temple went, that also transformed everything having to do with first century Judaism because without a temple you had no priesthood. Without a priesthood you had no sacrificial system. You had no religious authority in essence there. That was all gone, all wiped out in 70 AD. And in the Gospels, what do we find? We find no reference whatsoever to that. We do find many references to the temple, to the priesthood. We even find in the book of Acts of priests being called into the church, Pharisees being called into the church, all of this. But you don't find any evidence, any reference to the temple's destruction as a past event. Yes, we do find in Matthew 24, we all have a prophecy, clear references, where Jesus says there's not going to be one stone left on top of another of the temple. That's how bad the destruction is going to be.

But you find no reference to that as a fact that is past. So that tells us these Gospels had to be written before the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD, because there's no reference to that. Obviously, because Jesus prophesied it, had it happened, the writers of the Gospels would have included it in there and said, yes, this is a fulfillment of the prophecy of Jesus Christ there.

Now, incidentally, I mention also a lot of scholars who don't believe the Bible place the writing of the Gospels much later than that. Why do they do that? Well, they do it. Relates to the same thing. It's just the flip side of the coin. They say Jesus could not have been a prophet. He could not have known the temple would have been destroyed. Therefore, the Gospels had to be written afterwards to make it look like he prophesied that.

It's just they're twisted or shrinking. They're not able to conceive that Jesus could have prophesied something so specific there. So they say, therefore, the Gospels had to have been written later. Mr. Hamill's sermonette about Daniel, same thing. A lot of scholars date the book of Daniel to somewhere between 200 and 100 BC, because they say there's no way Daniel could have foreseen all the things that he wrote as prophecies in his book about the rise of Alexander the Great and the rise of the Persian Empire and the Grecian Empire that would overthrow the Persian Empire and the rise of the Roman Empire and all of this sort of thing. They say, no, Daniel had to have been written later. It's the same thing. People just cannot accept that the Bible contains prophecy, and therefore they have to redate the books to centuries after they were actually written. So, let's see. Okay, let's address another question here, and that is a rather obvious one, Dan. If the Gospels weren't written until starting around 60 AD, if Jesus was crucified in 31 AD, why wait? Why wait three decades before writing this down? Any any thoughts about that? Why would they wait? Yes, Mark? I think that the implications of the thought that Jesus Christ was going to return very quickly than the time that the ends of a generation would be exactly there. Right, right, right, right, precisely. I think that's the primary reason, I believe. They just saw no need to because they thought Jesus is going to return. Very soon you find reference to that in 1 Corinthians 15, where Paul talks about the resurrection. He says, we who are alive and remain at Christ's coming. So, he's including we, we who are alive. He expected it to happen in his lifetime, clearly. And, no doubt, the apostles also believe that as well. Yes, Arthur? Yes, yes, yes, true.

The first four chapters of Thessalonians all make similar references there to Paul's belief that Jesus Christ would return during his lifetime there. Of course, that didn't pan out, so what happens? Things start to change. You know, initially, also, yeah, they, well, several reasons. I think we can build off that to understand. One is, if you were Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, would you even consider writing more books for the Bible? Think about that. Put yourself in their sandals for a while. You know, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and Paul, and others who were writing the books of the New Testament, who did they, who did they quote as their authority? They quoted Moses, they quoted Daniel, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Ezra, Nehemiah, others like that. Those were their sources of authority. They would not have even crossed their minds to write more books to the Bible. Just as us today, we wouldn't sit down and think, oh, I need to write some more books to the Bible. I need to finish off the book of Acts or something like that. No. They probably thought that was a rather blasphemous idea, that they're going to sit down and write more books to the Bible. So that is why what we have, we don't have anybody who sat down to write another book of the Bible. What we have is letters, memoirs, a huge long prophecy in the book of Revelation, revealed to John. And in the Gospels, what do we have? We have a collection of stories, a collection of events by four different authors, again, collecting, giving us a portrait of Jesus Christ. They weren't writing a biography as we would think about it today. You know, today we sit down and we think of writing a biography. We're going to start with, you know, so-and-so was born on such and such a day. He did this and this and this and this and this and then he died.

So we tend to think that the Gospels are written in chronological order. No, that's not really true. As I covered last time, they're organized differently. They didn't necessarily think of history the way we do it today. They didn't have word processes. We can write all your material and go back and rearrange it all nice and neatly later. No, they collected a series of stories, organized it according to the emphasis of their particular Gospel. As we covered last time, Matthew organizes his Gospel around five great collections of teachings, of oral teachings, by Jesus. Mark seems to have organized his material chronologically. Luke organized his geographically. He put the things that happen around Galilee in one part of his Gospel, put the things around Judea and Jerusalem in another part. John is a totally different story. He doesn't really pay much attention at all to chronology or those other factors. So, they all organized their material in different ways there. I'm just hopelessly away from my notes here on that tangent.

Let me get myself back on track here in a minute. Another factor this ties in with what Mark mentioned about them expecting Jesus to come back during that time. That is another reason I don't think I wrote the Gospels right away is because there were many witnesses to those events already out there. Again, there were 500 who saw Jesus after he was resurrected. So, if you have all of these people, you have the 12 apostles, you have other family members, church members, 500 witnesses, you have all these witnesses around, you don't need to write it down. Who needs it? Because you've got all the witnesses. You can go and talk to them firsthand and find out what Jesus did or what he taught or so on. You don't need to write it down. But a decade passes, and another decade passes, and another decade passes, and what's happening to all these witnesses. They're dying off. Some are being martyred. The church is being scattered by the persecution that rises up in Jerusalem. The apostles themselves are starting to be martyred like James, half-brother of Jesus. The other apostles start to scatter out to other parts of the Middle East, other parts of the Roman Empire.

And eventually, the realization hits them, you know, we aren't getting any younger. We've got to write it down. We're some of the few witnesses that are left now. Many have passed. Many have scattered to the Four Winds, so they decide they need to start writing these things down. And they do. They're at that point. So the conditions have changed, too. I think that is another factor why they realized after several decades they need to write this down.

And another factor in that, too, is because they were scattered, they did not have the opportunity to sit down and collectively collaborate and produce one huge gospel. No, what you have is four sets of recollections by four different authors here. They weren't collaborating together and getting all their story in exact chronological historical order as we would do a biography today. Again, they just weren't thinking about a historical record in that way.

So when these men finished writing their gospels, what would have happened? Again, put yourself in the sandals of a member of the first century church.

Again, these writers didn't have word processors. They didn't have photocopy machines. They didn't have printing presses where they could just distribute these by the hundreds or the thousands of copies. And yet, obviously, there are a lot of believers, thousands of members on the church. They're going to want copies of this. The church is down in Asia, for instance, or up in Asia Minor, or up in Syria, places like this. So they're going to want copies of these. So what's going to happen as soon as Matthew finishes writing his gospel? Probably what happened, knowing the way publications were distributed in those days, Matthew would hand his scroll off to a scribe, he would sit down and start copying it, just as your eye would. If we didn't have a photocopy machine or something to make a copy of something, we'd sit down and write out a hand copied version of that. Or another way things were mass-produced, you might say, is a man would go into a room, and he may have three or five or ten scribes sitting there. And he would start doing what I'm doing. He would dictate it. He would read it. Read the original. His scribes would be there, madly scribbling away, trying to copy everything down. Now another factor to consider is, in this setting, the gospels were not considered scripture yet. Now we know a word, at least hopefully we know, from the way the books of the Old Testament were written. There were meticulous standards for copying those books to the point that they would count literally every letter, every word in a book of the Old Testament, to make sure that it was an exact copy, that not a letter would be left out, or not a letter would be added, that should not be there. Very meticulous standards. And if the scroll was not perfect, if the copy was not perfect, it would be destroyed. It was a huge waste of time and expense to go in the trash. They were very meticulous about that. The gospels, when they were first copied, are not considered a scripture, as they would have muted, the Jewish tribes would have muted in that day. So the standards for copying were not as exact, and that is why, if you read some of the criticisms of the New Testament, the gospels in particular, you'll see scholars saying, oh, there's all kinds of mistakes in the gospels. They differ all over the place. They can't be inspired by God because they don't agree in every way. But think about it, if you're hand copying a document, anybody done that and not made a mistake? Hi, Helen. I can barely write my name without getting it right there. So these men would have, just as a process of copying, or if somebody is dictating to other men taking dictation, you're going to have errors introduced. So you're going to misspell something. You're going to misspell somebody's name or the name of a place. You write down a number wrong. You're going to leave out a word or so. If you're a scribe writing away and your quill runs out of ink, you're going to dip it and maybe miss a word or two that is read off here. So when scholars talk about the gospels being full of mistakes and discrepancies and this sort of thing, this is the kind of mistakes that they're talking about. It's really not mistakes that affect anything teaching-wise or doctrinal-wise. It's this type of grammatical mistakes, misspellings, different spellings of different names and this sort of thing. It's not really anything that affects our beliefs and our teachings here. They don't bother to explain that, but that's the fact then. So let's see. Let me catch up again here.

All right. Let's talk about another area of scholarly inquiry. And the reason I'm going into a fair amount of this is if you get into this and start studying it on your own, you're going to come across a lot of ideas. Frankly, some of them are pretty wacky, so I want to kind of inoculate you and help you understand the background and perspective of these before you come into some of that. Scholars in general believe that of the four Gospels, they think that Mark's Gospel was written first. And why would they think that? Well, because you read Matthew and Luke, you find about 90% of Mark's Gospel is included in either Matthew or Luke. So obviously, then Matthew and Luke were copied from Mark's Gospel, right? Yeah, maybe not, because in the areas where they are copying from Mark, it's not always the same. So if they're working from a written copy of Mark, why are there differences? Why does Matthew take a portion out of Mark and write it down and leave out some things? Why does Luke take the same portion of Mark and write out and include other things or leave other things out or change the word order, change things around, leave out different details, change the details sometimes? So the idea that there is that Matthew and Luke are copying Mark, there's problems with that. There's serious problems with that idea, but most scholars do believe it that way, again, because of the amount of overlap here.

I'll explain that in just a minute here, but scholars refer to Matthew, Mark, and Luke as the synoptic gospels. Synoptic is a fancy Greek word that means well sin, s-y-n, not s-i-n, means wit. Optic is referring to seeing or view or vision or something like that. So they're called, basically what it means is the same viewpoint, the same perspective as we would explain it today, meaning that they give basically the same type of picture, contain generally the same type of material. And this is in contrast to John's gospel, which is very, very different. Again, we'll get into that at some point later on. So many years ago scholars, basically German, European scholars, were looking at the gospels, coined this term synoptic, to apply to those three.

And they saw so many similarities to Matthew, Mark, and Luke that they thought, well, they must all be working from a common source. And they came up with the idea of what is called the Q gospel. How many of you have heard or come across that term before? The Q gospel. We're not talking about Q from the Star Trek series a while ago, but Q, or the Q document its several different names. Q, the reason they call it that Q is from the German word quel, Q-U-E-L-L-E, which means source. So they said there had to be a source that Matthew, Mark, and Luke were copying from. And therefore, they said there was this earlier gospel called Q, or the Q document there. Now again, this is strictly theoretical, strictly hypothetical, because they've never found such a document there. No traces of it have ever been found. So it's strictly theoretical. They surmise it because of the overlap. Matthew, Mark, and Luke had to be working from a common source there. However, in the last decade or so, scholars have been coming up with another idea, a better explanation, I think, and I would agree with it, as for the similarities between Matthew, Mark, and Luke. And that better explanation is memorization. Or, put simply, there wasn't a written source. There was most likely an oral source for the gospels that Matthew, Mark, and Luke drew on.

Now why do I say that? Again, let's go back to the first century and think about the culture in the context of that time. How many people had a Bible? Nobody. If you wanted to read the Bible, you went down to your local synagogue there, where copies of scrolls were kept in a closet there that would be brought out on the Sabbath and read to everyone there. That's how you learned the Bible. The average person just did not have one. If you were very wealthy, you might have one. You might recall the story in Acts where the Ethiopian eunuch is writing in his chariot, returning after one of the Holy Days, one of the pilgrimage feasts in Jerusalem. And his reading from a scroll, I believe it is, of Isaiah. He was a very wealthy man. He could afford a scroll, a scroll, of the book of Isaiah. It doesn't say anything if you had any of the other books in the Old Testament. He was a wealthy man. Apparently, he only had the one scroll there. So, the average person to learn to make the Bible a part of your life, as Mr. Wilkie was talking about in his sermon there today, you had to memorize it. The kids, the Jewish boys, would go to school, and their school day of that day didn't go to school to learn the three youngers, reading, writing, and arithmetic. They went to school to learn the one T, which is Torah, the five books of Moses. And they would memorize it. That was their job. A 12-year-old boy was expected to memorize the Torah by age 12.

Not just the names of the books. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and Abishti, and Arami. They're expected to memorize the five books, the first five books of the Bible. If you did that, if you were a good student and managed that by age 12, then you would go on for further training. You would become someone like the Apostle Paul, training at the feet of Gamaliel, as it's called in the Bible. They are one of the great Albert Einsteins of the scholars of his day, the rabbi Gamaliel.

You would become one of the superstar rabbis, which is the tract that Paul was on. Paul probably had memorized the entirety of the Old Testament. And I think we see that reflected in his writings. For instance, the book of Romans. You look through, he has 40, 50, 60 quotes from all over the Old Testament just sprinkled throughout the book of Romans. Having Paul write most of his letters, he didn't write most of them by himself. He dictated them to a scribe. So he's going through and talking and dictating his letter. He just throws in scriptures right and left from Genesis, Isaiah, Daniel, Leviticus, Numbers, all over the place just sprinkled throughout his writings here.

Probably because he had the entirety of the Old Testament memorized.

Now we don't realize that because he doesn't say, oh Daniel 11 says this and Deuteronomy 23 says this. They didn't have those references at that day, but they did know the scriptures and some of the great men like Paul knew them by heart. So memorization is very important there. And that is also probably true of how we got the Gospels here. Because think about it. If you're a church member in First History Jerusalem and you've got Matthew and you've got John sitting there at Sabbath services and you want to know about Jesus, what are you going to do? Are you going to go up to Matthew or John and say, tell us about that miracle of the feeding of the 5,000 or tell us about how Jesus healed a blind man and told him to go to the pool of Siloam down the street here in Jerusalem.

Tell us about this or that miracle and so on. So the men, the apostles, would have been constantly telling and retelling these stories of the life and ministry of Jesus Christ. And out of this, scholars believe, came an oral Gospel. An oral, a memorized collection of these stories of Jesus's life and ministry and death and resurrection. And that is probably why we see so many similarities there between those books. Now, being an oral Gospel, it wasn't written down, so they wouldn't copy everything down word for word exactly. But they would have the basic outline, the structure, the order of the events. And in many cases they are written down. Several sentences are a paragraph or two, word for word identical between Matthew, Mark, and Luke and so on. So some of these were clearly memorized word for word. But I think that explains why we have both the similarities of those Gospels, as well as why we have some of the differences as well. Because it wasn't written down, the copy word for word, but it was an oral Gospel there as well. And therefore that would account for some of the differences that you see here. Another factor that plays into this, and again let me catch up with my notes here. I get so wound up talking about these things. I lose my place. But yes, for instance, when Matthew, Mark, and Luke are quoting Jesus and apparently quoting in word for word and Jesus said, colon, quotation mark, and continuing on. But they have Jesus saying slightly different things there. And I think again this is probably a reflection of this being an oral tradition that has passed down for several decades in the early church there. The meaning is the same, don't get me wrong, but the wording is slightly different between the accounts. Again, if they're working from a written source, you shouldn't have those differences. But if they're working from an oral source, there would be some differences. And again, we'll come into these as we go through the Gospels here. It's probably another reason that also accounts for some of these differences as well. What language were the Gospels written in?

Anybody? Greek. Greek. Good. What language did Jesus teach in?

Yeah. Hebrew Aramaic. Scholars don't know. So yes, I'll give everybody a right answer. So yes, Hebrew Aramaic. There are different differences, opinions, depending on which scholars you read there. I honestly don't know. I've read good arguments for both. What happens when you're translating? Let's say that five of you out there are translating what I'm saying right now from English into Spanish. Are your translations going to be identical? Of course not, because they're very seldom exact word-for-word translations to get the point across. So if I had five of you out there translating what I'm saying now into Spanish, we'd end up with five different translations. And that also is why I think we have differences in the wording between the Gospels. They're recording, they're taking Jesus' words that are given in Hebrew or Aramaic, and they're translating them into Greek for a Greek-speaking readership. And therefore, you get slight variations in what Jesus said there. So again, we'll come across that, but I wanted to explain that to everybody up front. So we'll hopefully remember that by the time we get into those sections of the Gospels. Let's talk about another point here. I need to pick up the pace a little bit. What about some of the occasions where the Gospel writers record things in a different order? For instance, Matthew may say things happen in the order of A, B, and C. And Mark puts it in the order of A, C, and B. Slightly different order. What's going on there?

These things, some people get troubled by that or don't really realize that's what's going on. And as we start going through the harmony of the Gospels, we'll see that side by side, where they put things in different orders. Well, some people, trying to explain this in a way we can identify with, some people believe the Holy Spirit would inspire by essentially dictation for the men. They would have sat there and the Holy Spirit would have controlled them and forced them to write everything in a particular order.

Is that the way the Bible is written? Well, as we'll see going through this, no, that doesn't work because you do find differences in the way some things are written down. There's a problem with that view. Now, don't get me wrong. The sense is the same, the meaning is the same, the overall thrust of the story is the same. But the wording or the order may be different there.

So why would that be the case? Well, again, it gets back to the concept it talked about earlier, witnesses and testimony. To give you an analogy, let's talk about evidence. Let's assume that we're all members of a jury in a courtroom trial and a case is brought before us, a case of a man who, say, robbed a convenience store and shot the cashier. And we're in the jury box and the witnesses come in. We have four witnesses who come to us and they all give us the exact same version of events down to grammatical mistakes, for example.

Everything's identical, word-for-word testimony. What does that tell you? Collusion. Collusion tells you there's a problem there. On cross-examination, the defense attorney, if he's good, is going to say, you know, how is it you gave word-for-word testimony even down to grammatical mistakes. And you find out the prostitution has coached these witnesses and the evidence has to get thrown out of court.

On another hand, let's again assume we're in the jury box and four witnesses take the stand one after another. And again, we're on the jury. So the first witness comes and he says that he was standing at the counter there when the defendant burst through the door, grabbed the money out of the cash machine there, out of the cash register. Yes, thank you.

Yes, ATM machine. No, that's not right. Yeah, grabbed it out of the cash register and shot the clerk, fired another shot into the ceiling, and then ran out the door. Okay, we've heard that testimony. Witness B comes before and takes the stand. He also is standing here, nearby, several feet away. And he again testifies that the defendant burst through the door, same story, shot the cashier, grabbed the money out of the machine there, and then fired another shot at a customer and ran out the door. Some differences there. Order of events is different. The shots are different. One shot and the test flight he shot in the ceiling, another city shot at another customer.

Okay, the third witness comes and takes the stand. All these witnesses are separated from each other, as is required by our legal system today. This lady is part way down one of the aisles near the back of the store. According to her, the defendant was in the store. He starts an argument with a cashier, pulls out his gun, shoots the cashier twice, and walks out the door. Again, differences. Differences in the order, differences in the events that happen, differences in the details. A fourth witness comes in to testify he was outside gassing up his car at the gas pumps. He saw a man, he heard yelling inside the store, heard three gunshots fired, not two as the others had testified, saw a man walk calmly out the door, get in a car, and drive away.

Again, differences. Differences in the detail, the order of events, number of shots fired, and so on. Okay, if you're on the jury, what do you decide? Do you decide because of these discrepancies that the accounts aren't true, and that the defendant there that all of them have identified is innocent? Well, no, you don't. They all testified as to the thrust, the main overall theme of the events, and the guy is guilty, and he's going to be sentenced. He's going to be found guilty and declared himself.

The point I use to illustrate this is all of these people saw the same events, and they remembered it differently, especially if you're talking 20, 30 years after the events have taken place. The details are different, the memories fade somewhat there. Are they all telling the truth, even though they disagree?

Absolutely. We're all telling the truth as they remember it, as they account, as the details, the details that were important to them. Are they all identical? No, they're not. And this is the kind of situation we run into in the Gospels. Now, does that discredit the Gospels, or should that cause us to not believe in the accuracy of the Gospels? No. Because, again, it goes back to eyewitnesses and independence of your witnesses. What the four different Gospels, even though they differ in details, tell us is these are indeed independent witnesses. They didn't collude. They didn't get together and get all their stories straight together. They are all independent, writing independently and telling their story. And, again, they weren't writing a history as we would view it today. They're organizing the material differently to make different points to different audiences. As we talked about last time, Matthew wrote to a Jewish audience. Luke wrote to probably a Greek-Gentile audience. Mark probably wrote to the Roman world and so on. So they emphasize and they arrange their material accordingly. And that, again, is part of the reason why we come across some of those differences here.

So, again, it's important that we have independent witnesses and multiple witnesses. And that is why, again, we have four different Gospels instead of one. So, I'll give you another illustration to help us maybe understand this. Let's say that somebody is writing a biography of your life.

They're going to sit down and write that. The four people who are writing are one of your children, one of your parents, one of your co-workers, there, and a friend. Are they all going to write a biography of your life that is identical? Of course not. Because your child is going to write about you as a parent. Your parent is going to write about you as a son or daughter. Your spouse is going to write about you as a husband and wife, whatever wretch you happen to be, or a wonderful husband or wife you had to be. A co-worker is going to write with a different perspective. Your boss is going to write about a different perspective. So, each of these people, if they were writing a biography of your life, were going to include certain details important to portray the points they want to make. And they're going to leave out other details as well. Again, it's exactly what we see in the Gospels. Different stories, different vignettes, different collections of what was important to them that they wanted to convey to their audiences. So, again, as we talked about last time, the men organized their material differently there. So, with this in mind, we should consider the importance of the biblical word, believe, because at the end of the day, that is what matters. We believe the writers of the Gospels, but we don't believe them there. And they do give enough detail as we're going through to prove that, yes, these men were there, yes, they interviewed eyewitnesses of these events and this sort of thing. We'll get into that more later on, not today. So, let's see. We need to understand that differences do not mean errors.

Critics have sold a lot of books and articles over the years saying, because there are differences in the Gospels, we cannot believe them. The fact is, though, that we have four Gospels that are complementary and not contradictory. To give you one example of that, if you turn in your harmonies to page 126, we'll look at a classic example of this, page 126. And just over halfway down the page, you'll see four columns with all cap lettering there. And this is describing what was written on the sign that Pilate put above the stake when Jesus is crucified. He put a sign up there. But notice what they say. Let's call them. Matthew says, the sign says, this is Jesus, the King of the Jews. Mark says, the King of the Jews. It leads off mention of Jesus. Luke says, this is the King of the Jews. Again, leads off Jesus. John says, the sign read Jesus of Nazareth includes the city of Jesus and Mir, the King of the Jews. So, four different wordings on the sign. Which one is right? Which one is wrong? They can't all be right, or can they? What we see if we read through the rest of this account, which we won't take time to right now, is each of the authors, each of the writers of the Gospels, includes slightly different details, slightly different information. Again, they are complementary, not contradictory here. By that I mean, you know, at first glance, looking at this, it might appear that maybe none of them wrote down what was on the sign correctly there. But when we read the account, we find that each one adds a little bit of information that the others don't include. From John, for instance, we see that Pilate, the Roman governor, is the one who composed the message there, verse 19 of John. Since Pilate wrote it out and put it on there. From Luke, notice Luke's account, verse 38. He looks as the inscription was written in letters of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. It's written in three different languages. Again, getting back to translation. Something is written in three different languages. Is it going to be identical in those three different languages? No, it's not. So I think you can probably conclude that is a major difference for the differences in these. Matthew is probably recording what was written down in Hebrew. Because Matthew's gospel is written to the Hebrews. Matthew was Jewish, was Matthew Levi, was his name. John writes it down differently. Which version is John quoting? We don't know. Probably the inscriptions are slightly different, written in different languages, and as they're translating, they are writing them down slightly differently. Or another version is probably each of them only wrote down what stuck in their minds about the sign. And to find out what the sign really said, we have to add up all four of those accounts. If you add what all four of them say, then you have the reading on the sign probably being, This is Jesus of Nazareth, the king of the Jews. And that reconciles all four accounts. Because again, they're complementary and not contradictory. So these are some of the principles we need to keep in mind as we go through the Gospels and start coming across things that may raise questions or cause us to perhaps reach some wrong understanding about these things. Just keeping in mind that the Gospels do not contradict each other. Instead, they simply complement each other and give us a deeper understanding of these things. And again, we'll see more examples of that as we go through the classes. So any questions about any of these points I've raised here today? Yes, Hunter?

Perfect.

Yes, yes. Yes, very good point there. Just for the benefit of the recording, Arthur's point was that a lot of modern scholars accept and teach progressive revelation, which is that basically God's word changes over time, depending on who the author is and so on. It's not really inspired and consistent. And therefore, they use that as an excuse to pretty much believe whatever they want to believe, including that the law is done away with primarily that sort of thing. So, yes, good observations here. And certainly that does affect a lot of what you see out there in the commentary, study Bibles, and that sort of thing. Yes, yes. Yes, Arthur's second point is when you do see Paul quoting the Old Testament, you'll find differences that there, if you go back and compare it to the Old Testament text, and that's probably because he is quoting from memory. Another aspect I've come across fairly recently in recent years is a fair number of times he's also quoting from the Septuagint, which is a Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures there. And it does word things somewhat differently as well, part of a translation there, too. So, yes, these are interesting points. We'll get into and see quite a bit of this as we go through. Any other questions, comments about this? Appreciate that. Appreciate everyone's attention here. And we'll see next time whether we actually get into it or not. I do have about six or seven more sermons or lectures that we need to get before we get into it. But we'll see. Yes. Oh, yes. Request to clear your belongings off the table so we can set up for the Italian food.