Ask the Pastors S5 E15: "How did we get the NT Gospels?"

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Welcome to Ask the Pastors a segment of the West Hills Podcast where you have the opportunity to ask your questions and receive biblically grounded, pastorally sensitive answers from our pastoral staff. My name is Brian, I'm your host and one of the pastors, and I'm joined by Pastor Austin.

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Hello,

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Pastor Thad. Hey everyone. And our lead pastor Will. Hey, thanks for listening to the podcast this year. This will be our last episode for the year. Thank you for the applause. We hear you listener clapping. We have sound effects now we've leveled up something as well. What's that?

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Does it boo as well? If you don't like what somebody else says, I'll

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Wait maybe.

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There you go.

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It's too good. So our question today comes to us from Philana Liang. Ana, thanks for your question. Send to Pastor Will. So yeah, we're going to read it in its entirety and then dive in. Philana writes, the girls and I watched Mary on Netflix this weekend. In the movie we saw that her mother was Anne and her father was Joachim. Initially I told the girls I didn't think that the information about her parents was true since it wasn't in the Bible after the movie I looked it up and saw that St. Anne and maybe Joki too were named in the gospel of St. James, which did not make the canon. I also read that St Anne is mentioned in the Quran. You may have mentioned this before, but why did some books make it into the Bible as we know it and others did not? Are the other books historically accurate and how do we tease out what to take as fact versus fiction? For sure, the movie took some creative liberties, but in general I thought it was an interesting exercise to consider what it might have been like to be viewed by your community as a mother out of wedlock with the additional threat of King Herod looming over your child.

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  Thanks for the question, Philana. I think we all decided we were going to let Austin go first in season seminary now and studying all this stuff

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  And it has to read the dry books that most people don't want to take the time to read and all that.

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  Right? Exactly.

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  And try to boil it down into something cohesive

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  Please.

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  Yeah. So I should make the disclaimer that I have not watched the movie, but I Have

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  Any of us watched it for the record?

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  I don't think so, no. Okay, so that's true of everybody. Okay, good. I'm not alone, but have read the gospels, have studied the gospels have read a lot of non-canonical gospels, gospel of Peter Thomas and so forth, and I think the answer to the question, there's many of them, but one of them is like how did we end up with the gospels that we have is part a historical question and is part of theological question. Do your Christian friends the theological question might be a little easier because the Holy Spirit is the one that inspired scripture. It's the one that preserves scripture and is the one that illuminates scripture. That might not be a very satisfying answer though to your historically non-Christian friends, but even for us Christians, we should do good history as well because the gospel accounts are in fact history. There's a book that we read in school by the name of CE Hill with the aptly titled book, who chose the Gospels prose being the great Gospel Conspiracy.

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  And part of the backdrop for the book is that there has been a growing movement in the past 150, 200 years in so-called Historical Jesus studies and historical Jesus studies basically have this basic premise is that there is a distinction, a difference between what they call the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith, meaning that there's actually a person, Jesus, somewhere behind this text. And if we just properly take out all of the content that's given to us in Matthew, mark, Luke, and John, and if we add in material that we get from non-canonical gospels, we'll be able to rid it of whatever has been polluted by the church for 2000 years and we will arrive at who Jesus really actually is. There's all kinds of problems with that belief system to begin with. One, it actually is based on faith anyways. It's assuming that we have to take a posture of skepticism towards the biblical authors as opposed to a position of trust.

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  One of my favorite books that looks at what the gospels are in terms of a genre and in terms of history comes by Richard Baum. He wrote a book called Jesus in the Eyewitnesses. It's not an easy read, it's not the hardest read, but just be prepared if you're going to do it. You're reading a scholarly book, but any that he think he makes the most compelling argument that the gospels are eyewitness testimony and he uses that language very carefully to basically say that in the time of the first century that if you wanted to do good history, you went to people in her testimony from them. And unlike the modern skeptic that looks at a document and says, I'm going to assume that this is false until there's enough evidence to prove that it's true, the eyewitness and the person going to the eyewitness operate in a kind of human relationship to relationship and assuming that the testimony is true until it can be proven as false.

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  And so much of the way that the gospels are constructed are constructed in the form of eyewitness testimony. One of the indications that we get about that is just by their dating. So if you're not aware of the dating of the gospels, there's some of the last books of the New Testament to be written. And that's in part because the authors of the gospels were alive for a period of time and would've been sharing the story of Jesus to Christian communities until they were nearing their death and it was time to write things down. We 2000 years later to think that we need a security cam footage of history whereby we sit there and we record moment to moment helpful reminder that all history is eyewitness testimony and some measure all history involves so-called selection and arrangement, meaning we choose what we're going to tell and then we arrange it in ways that make sense.

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  And the gospels as an example, they aren't necessarily, although at times ordered chronologically, sometimes they're ordered thematically. One of the most far back sources that we get to help date the gospels is a historian by the name of Papist. Unfortunately we don't have many of his, in fact, we have none of his writings. He was born around the year 70 80 and he began doing his history between the years 100 and 180, I'm sorry, 100 and 120 ad. All of Poppy's work that we have access to has been quoted by other historians and Christian fathers in the early centuries of the church. One of the most important of those is a fellow by the name SIUs. So SIUs writes a book called the Ecclesiastical history in which he quotes much of Poppy's work. And in that we see Pops has knowledge of the gospels of Matthew and Mark for sure because he quotes them directly.

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  Baam makes strong argumentation that Pops has knowledge of John's gospel. And the reason is is by listing several of the people in John's gospel in the exact order that they appear in the gospel. So to list these five or six names in a row and it be in the gospel of John and Pao not know the gospel of John is extremely unlikely. He also populous makes allusion to Revelation chapter 12 and then quotes the gospel of Luke where he talks about how Christ talks about seeing Satan fall like lightning from heaven as a result of which Papists seem to have knowledge of the gospels, all four of our canonical ones as far back as the year 100 and potentially earlier both Baum and Hill makes argumentation that it could be John the Elder that dates back even further than the year 100 as far as history goes, preserving some kind of oral tradition that we have into the thousands of manuscripts we have today.

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  There is no document or history from antiquity that as secure as the gospel counts. Now I say all that, then ask the question, well then who chose the gospels who sat down at some point and said, well, these are the ones that we're going to keep and these are the ones that we're going to get rid of. And the short answer is that no one did is that the church received the gospels. There's communities up in Rome all the way over in Antioch, down in Alexandria and Egypt, and I'm trying to think of some other ones that they have listed as well. But the point being is that all throughout portions of the church, the four canonical gospels, what we have in our Bibles today were being recognized. They were the received word of God by Christ through the apostles that the church accepts. I love CE Hill's comment at the end of his book when he's basically summing up all of his argumentation and saying, who chose the gospels?

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  This is Hill speaking the question, why did you choose these gospels would not have made sense to many Christians in the second century. For the question assumes that the church or someone in it had the authority to make the choice. To many, it would be like the question, why did you choose your parents? So my sort of boiled down one word answer. If you want to go spend 12 hours reading all the material, go for it. But the very short version is is that actually no one shows the gospels. We actually weren't chosen the New Testament, we were given to it by God through the apostles and their eyewitness testimony.

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  Skeptics will point out that you don't have the first sort of official list of the canon of scripture, the officially recognized grouping of texts for the New Testament until the fourth century with the various church councils lay Odyssey and Carthage. And you don't have really the first even list of the 27 books of the New Testament in their current form until fourth century church Father Athanasius. And

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  Part of the reason for that I think is to your point, Austin, there wasn't a need for canonicity and to really make this official because it was so, like you said, widely accepted and you don't, contrary to again what skeptics in recent years would like to have folks think that there were all these various gospels floating around and every different community had their favorite gospels that they read and influenced their view of Jesus or something like that. And which version of Christianity is the right one and one had to win out over the other or whatever. I think what the actual history and archeology seems to point to is that you really can't find much evidence for any of those other non-canonical gospels especially, I mean there's dozens.

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  Ana asked, I guess she said she wasn't aware that there were other books that were somewhere even anywhere around that early church time that were potentially vying to make it into the Bible. And there was lots of gospels in particular, the Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Judas, the gospel of Thomas, gospel of Philip, et cetera, et cetera. But you really don't see any archeological historical evidence of those until the fourth century, which is right around the same time the church started holding these councils to say, no, no, no, there's 27 books, here's what they are. So to me, I think that's no coincidence that people say, well, gosh, they weren't even official for three 50 years or whatever. But the point is they didn't have to be because they weren't really disputed. And that kind of gets to Philana’s first question, why did some books make it into the Bible as we know it and others didn't?

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  And historians, biblical scholars will point out there's really three primary criteria that we can discern that the early church used in determining which books were authoritative. And again, they didn't, as you said, Austin, they didn't make the Bible God's authoritative word. They simply recognized it as such. But those three criteria are apostolic authority. So they had to be widely known and vetted and accepted to be written, produced on the basis of first century eyewitness of Jesus and their testimony, as you said, not hearsay in the telephone game of, well, I heard this about Jesus from this person who heard it from this person, but can we go right back to the source of the folks who literally saw him do it? That's you. Think about what Paul says at the beginning of one Corinthians 15 about he appeared to the 12, the 500 to least of all.

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  To me, I have this direct personal encounter of the risen Christ and appeals to that apostolic authority. The second is orthodoxy. And so very quickly I think you see the church establishing a set of core tenets of the faith that they all commonly agree upon. And again, it seems like there were not lots and lots of disputes about that until you start getting these later sort of forgeries and invented gnostic sex of gospels being produced 300 years later that then the church says, okay, wait a minute, maybe we do need to have some of these councils to make sure everybody's on the same page. Jesus is fully God and fully man. There's one God, three persons, all the basics of the Christian faith that again, we're just taken for granted by anyone who is an insider for 300 years until these other Christianity starts getting influential under Constantine.

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  And people start just like with anything, if you build a great watch Rolex, you're going to have Chinese knockoffs floating around on the streets trying to, they're very cheap. I own one. Yeah, see, there you go. So you have these cheap knockoffs coming around the fourth century and the church says, no, no, no, we got to make sure we have quality control on this. And then the third criteria, so apostolic authority, orthodox doctrine, and then widespread acceptance. And so again, none of the gospels or the books of the Bible that we have today were a minority letter or version of the gospel. Like you said, Austin, they've been circulated all throughout the Roman Empire, the churches far and wide, and yeah, they're all reading the same letters for a reason because they were actually written by the apostle Paul or John or James or Matthew or someone close to Mark who was secretary for Peter or et cetera, et cetera.

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  And so you've Luke who was a traveling companion of Paul. And so you've got these trustworthy books that if you want to know the real historical Jesus, these are the folks to listen to and everybody seems to agree on it. So I think that's the short answer to Ana's question. Why did some make it in? Did they just sort of cast lots and figure out, or was it just the ones who were really persuasive at this council or was it democratic and they just had more supporters because they really liked this version of Jesus or this letter that their church had been sent and so they killed each other and they won or it wasn't any of that. It was, there was criteria, and frankly, there was already widespread unanimous support and acceptance. And the ones that didn't make it in just weren't, it wasn't even a real tight contest of, oh my gosh, if not for a couple more votes, we could be reading a whole different book and have a whole different perception of Jesus. And another thing to keep in mind is even with some of the other letters, the shepherd of Hermes and the epistle of Barnabas, and I mean there's other historical letters that were floating around even in the second century and things like that, that most of them are interesting and you might have to read for seminary.

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  Most

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  People otherwise wouldn't even know about none of 'em until you get to some of the weird ones later on. A lot of those don't really change our perception of Orthodox Christianity or who Jesus was or anything like that. Again, whether or not they're considered now authoritative sources of information, but in a lot of those cases, I would encourage folks to even read just for no other reason, for the sake of just history and curiosity's sake. And so yeah, all of that to say these are not letters and gospels and whatever, that for most of us, it's not like we have to be scared of and worn. It's not like we as pastors are warning people. Don't go read that because maybe you'll go off on this heretical tangent or something. I think that the truth speaks for itself, the internal consistency of the Bible, the internal consistent picture, it paints of Jesus and of Christian, the Christian faith that it paints is compelling.

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  And there's a reason we have the Bible we have in to go to where you started too, Austin, like the theological reasons folks will sometimes counter, even if we get in sometimes debates with Catholics, I can think of kind of a debate I did in a former life with a Catholic, and they would critique the fact that we appeal to scripture alone as our source of authority for how to determine who Jesus is and what the major core tenants of the Christian faith are, as opposed to a Catholic would say scripture and church tradition in history. And one of the things they would say is, well, even those councils that determined which books made it into the canon of scripture and et cetera, that is church history, that is church tradition. You don't get scripture without the church. And again, I think our response as evangelicals would be kind of twofold. Again, number one, the church didn't determine scripture. They recognized scripture as such.

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  God gave scripture and the church just read it and accepted it to their credit. But secondly too, I do think that it's not only okay but necessary and good for us to affirm not only the divine inspiration of scripture itself, but divine inspiration in the life of the church really for centuries there leading to the official canonization of scripture as such. And maybe it's not on the same par in the same way that God intervened in Paul's life and Peter's life and Luke's life and whatever to help pen the words that would later become accepted as scripture. But I do think it's important for us to, I don't get shy or embarrassed or bashful about saying, well, yeah, of course God had a really direct intimate hand in the life of the church. I mean, yeah, you look at the way God was inspiring and working in and through the early church all through the Book of Acts.

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  And I think that didn't stop just when those early apostles died. And I think that it's important for us to recognize, yeah, God didn't just step out as soon as scripture was done being written and say, okay, now y'all figure the rest out from here. I mean, God was still leading and directing his people, his community for centuries just like he is still today. But God had a hand in orchestrating even those councils in the fourth century to make sure that the books of the Bible that were his books were the ones that made the cut and that would be therefore read and celebrated, looked to for thousands of years after that by his people.

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  And I think the preservation of it also speaks to the trustworthiness of it. And when we think of these false gospels that they were quickly dismissed due to heretical things that are in them, like you mentioned, it's okay to go read them. It's not the boogeyman. You don't have to be afraid of them that I think anyone listening who goes and reads them will quickly determine, yeah, that's not right, and that doesn't fit within a orthodox view of scripture or of Jesus as well. And that's even when Athanasius, he wrote the 39th festival letters, which he is one of the first recordings of what we know today as the closed canon. And he wrote that at a time just to reject all the heresy that was going on Arianism the Trinitarian heresy of the time that that's part of the reason, like you mentioned all these councils, and that was to reject heresy, which is what you experience in these other gospels that we don't have.

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  But as Christians, we believe in the original words of the New Testament, that the Holy Spirit inspired the writers to write exactly what God said. And even today you'll have others who they won't necessarily go back to what are these other gospels that weren't included. It'll be more of textual criticism about why is this translated a certain way and the gospel mark, you have this extended ending in certain ones, and even then it's not something that we need to be afraid of with the thousands of manuscripts as preservation of it that know their book has as many manuscripts that we can rely on and go back to and see. Yeah, I mean, look, there's a reason why these books exist and why we consider them in the cannon that the churches just recognize them and we can thank church history for the role that it plays in them, but that not some political power or purpose put together the book that we hold precious.

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  And I really like what you said Austin too at the beginning that we need to recognize that it's not like we're Christians. We're the only ones who come to a conversation like this from a position of faith. Everybody, it's subjective bias.

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  Do I want the Bible to be reliable? Yeah. Do skeptics not want the Bible to be reliable in a lot, most cases, certainly the scholars and the ones who are at the leading edge of driving the skepticism and the suspicion, I mean, it's not just that they don't think they come to the table not wanting it for any number of reasons. At an academic and professional level, you need to say something new and exciting to get read and to get listened to and to get a name for yourself and the scholarly community. And so all of these, the Bart Airman's and Elaine pays of the world who come in and just want to cast dispersions on the reliability of scripture, they can make a name for themselves. But I think obviously we have to recognize it goes deeper than that too, that whether they even in some cases, realize it or not, there are spiritual forces at work there. And certainly Satan doesn't want anyone to trust the reliability of scripture, and he's always going to be behind the scenes doing whatever he can to try and provide. But I mean, if you just look at, as y'all both already said, we don't need to belabor it, but if you just look at the actual textual manuscript evidence that we have, it's,

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  It's a very secure document. It's

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  Incredibly, it's no contest. I mean, we are sure that Jesus of Nazar Nazareth lived and so much about him. I mean, we are as sure of that as we are of just about anything historically. I mean George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, you can just go down the list of even more modern history that

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  Is not as well attested in terms of documentation. And again, there's a reason Jesus is so widely written about and well-known because he was that important and that influential and his followers wanted to make sure that everybody knew about him and had every possible opportunity to believe. So. Yeah, for Alana's other question here about how do we tease out what to take as fact versus fiction? And then she says for sure the movie took some creative liberties. I think so again, in the context of the Bible, we read the Bible as fact. We read the Bible on its own terms. So when this gets to other questions, she's not asking. But when the Bible is speaking clearly poetically, it's not meant to be taken literally, but when it's speaking about historical things, we take it historically as fact. There are certain details that based on our best knowledge of history at this time, I think about the classic famous from the gospel birth story of Jesus itself in the year of Corus.

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  And skeptics will look and say, well, we know Corus actually ruled over that region in these dates. And so this is historically inaccurate. And again, in all of those cases you can find, obviously there's nothing new. I mean, we've been at this for 2000 years now, so you can always find a Christian's sort of response and rebuttal to those kinds of problems or suspicions. So we take the Bible as fact when it's meant to be taken as historical fact. But when it comes to things like watching a movie and you're hearing about Jo Joki or Anne or whoever it might be, I think some Christians get a lot more bent out of shape about that kind of stuff than others. And they'll quote Revelation 2218, and anyone who adds to this book is going to have all the plagues of the book of Revelation heaped on him or whatever.

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  And I just think it's important to recognize that just because someone is taking creative liberties and fleshing out a story in more depth, it doesn't mean that they are inherently trying to put their version of this story on par with the skeleton of the facts that are given to us in scripture. So we don't know really anything about Mary before she was aged probably 16 or whatever around when she had Jesus. And so if a movie wants to make a backstory to Mary with her parenting and how she grew up and this and that, again, as long as it's, I haven't seen the movie either. I don't know anything about it, but as long as it's not lifted up is something that's supposed to be certainly in place of, or even on par with what we know for sure about Mary from scripture, then it's kind of like somehow we haven't had a podcast yet on the chosen.

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  I don't know how no one has asked about should Christians watch the chosen, and we can have different views on that. Maybe somebody will listen to this and ask that and we can talk more about it. But for me, I think people are too quick to get their hair up about some of that stuff, and I think it can actually be helpful for people and be devotional if again you remember and put it in its right place that yeah, a lot of this might not be scriptural and might not be exactly the way it happened or this or that, but this is just somebody trying to put a little bit more skin on the skeleton of this character or this story that we do know. And to the extent to which maybe it is like Ana said in her case, helpful in thinking through, yeah, what would it have been like to be viewed by your community as this mother out of wedlock and whatever. Some of that stuff can be helpful.

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  I think there's a lot about the history and the background of the New Testament that is outside of the canon of scripture that is worth reading to understand better the world of the New Testament. I think it takes a two dimensional text and adds three dimensions to it very quickly. A lot of what goes on in the second temple literature, what were they thinking? Eschatological. So you have books like Fourth Ezra and Second Ezras and second Baruch that you can see they're expecting this line of Judah, what they don't see as the lamb, as an example, if you read verse second Maccabees, you get a good history of the Jewish people in the time of the Maccabee Revolt. You get wisdom of Solomon where you start seeing other kinds of Messianic expectations where if you look at the documents at Kuran and you see, okay, we're kind of expecting one, maybe two Messiahs, one from the lion of the priesthood and one from the Lion of the Kings and so forth.

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  And I think that really helps add texture to what's going on on the ground. The distinction for one like this where Gospel of Judas, gospel of Mary, gospel of Thomas is the primary intent of the literature trying to give a gospel account about the person of Jesus, in which case I'm going to probably lower my expectation of how credible it is as a piece of history, but there's still Josephus and all of history of the Jewish people. There's a lot of history that I think evangelicals would immensely benefit from reading and studying and then return to their New Testaments and see, oh, I can understand better what the world of the New Testament must have really been like and what people were expecting. And frankly, that goes to show why Jesus is such a shock because on the one hand, he's so much more humbler than anybody expects, and on the other hand, he's so much more exalted than anybody expects.

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  It's very hard to take together what we see of the new covenant promise in Jeremiah 31 and the scepter of Judah and Genesis 49 and the ancient of days in Daniel seven and all these and weave them together. And we get this guy from Nazareth who turns out to actually fit all of them, but we kind of assume he's Lord in advance when we come to the text. But if you don't have that, it's not surprising that people had all kinds of views and which is then what I would want to use to critique, and I haven't seen the show, probably won't take the time to do it, but this movie on Netflix of like, are they trying to do good history in that kind of way of painting first century Palestine according to what we know from some of the sources that we've just listed? Or are they trying to do kind of a modern theme? Are they looking through it through a postmodern lens or something else? And I don't know that for sure. Again, I'm not seeing the movie.

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  Yeah, I think they're just trying to get views.

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  I mean, the Bible's the bestselling book of all time, so

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  That's why people are, it's pretty good going

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  Back to it

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  Far. Yeah, spinoff potential. If you got a lot of people who, and especially that one, it sounded like there was a pretty Catholic, which you would expect, I mean,

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  Which is the thing, make

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  A much bigger deal out of Mary. And so yeah, everyone's working at angle. There's potential, you got a billion of them or whatever, half a billion.

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  But one thing that can be said for all the characters in the New Testament is that it can be interesting, but we have to, I think, guard ourselves between that would be interesting to know more about on the one hand versus unhelpful speculation on the other because the Holy Spirit superintendent over the work of the human authors of the Bible has decided this is the text that we need to know about the person and work of Christ and that they are by our modern standards, very strange forms of literature. I forget who it was, I can't remember who it was that said it, that the gospel accounts are passion narratives with extended introductions. In other words, they're about primarily the sacrificial death and victorious resurrection of Jesus with long intros as biographies go. In our modern sense as an example, they're not that great. We don't get much about his childhood. We don't get his teenage years. We don't get this and that and the other. Instead, we get a very different kind of document. So when we come to it wanting it to answer questions that it won't answer us. Sometimes I worry that we're asking, do we get a wrong kind of book? And of course we didn't. We got a right kind of book.

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  To your point, Austin, I think it's another good point that it'd be one thing is this a book, a movie, whatever that is speculating about Mary and kind her backstory and heard that's okay one thing, but if it's about Jesus. Yeah, I just had the thought as you were talking. It's interesting, almost surprising to me that we haven't seen someone because there are the infancy gospel of Thomas or whatever. There are some gospels, the weird ones floating around out there that have some stories of when Jesus was preteen Jesus kid Jesus. And whether it's picking up on that or whether it's just, again, the creative liberties and just, man, what would it have been like to have parented five-year-old Jesus or to have been his younger brothers and sisters or whatever. It's surprising to me that you haven't seen that movie be made the childhood of Jesus or something because so many people, again, right, wrong or indifferent, I mean, they'd watch it. They'd watch it, even if it just out of curiosity. Yeah, I'd be curious to see how someone else kind of imagines what that would've been like and was he doing miracles yet or this, so anyway, I am just saying things I'm not saying somebody should make.

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  If someone

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  Wants to pick up the script

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  For us, if they made it, would it be bad for a Christian to watch? I mean, it's all interesting, interesting questions. So anyway, thank you Philana for asking. I don't know

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  If anybody

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  Has anything else on

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  That.

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  Yeah, any final

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  Words? I would just add one more. Austin gave to really good resources. One other Michael Krueger from Reform Theological Seminar in Charlotte. He's done a lot on Canon. And Canon Revisited how we got the Scriptures and that if someone wants to go deeper, he's a accessible resource on that.

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  And that's it for this week's episode of Ask the Pastors. Remember that you can submit your questions by visiting the info bar at West Hills or by asking them online through our website at www.westhillsstl.org. If you enjoyed this week's episode, hit that like button, subscribe and share it with a friend. That's the sound the like button. Makes sure and join us next year for season six of the Ask the Pastors podcast. Thanks so much for listening and for the applause, and we'll catch you next year.