Saturday, August 16, 2014

Book Review of The Case For Christ by Lee Strobel Part 13: Lee Strobel’s Arguments for Why the Apostles Wrote the Gospels



See Part 1 General Comments

            Okay having, I hope, established all the reasons why it’s impossible that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John could have written the Gospels assigned to them, I’ll now finally get around to looking at Lee Strobel’s arguments.
            Lee Strobel, and his apologist for this section Craig Blomberg, talk about this for pages 22-28.  During these pages, I’ve divided their arguments into 2 sections, which I’ll address separately.

I. Church Tradition is True Because Church Tradition Says It Is.

            Having thus “proved” the truth of Church tradition on the Gospels, Lee Strobel and Craig Blomberg get around to trying to explain away the central awkwardness of their position: Why Matthew, the eyewitness, is copying from Mark, who is not an eyewitness.  I’ll address this in the third section.


          I’ll start with Lee Strobel’s first point:
I. Church Tradition is True Because Church Tradition Says It Is.
From page 22-23:
            Tell me this,” I said with an edge of challenge in my voice, “is it really possible to be an intelligent, critically thinking person and still believe that the four gospels were written by the people whose name have been attached to them?”
            Blomberg set his cup of coffee on the edge of his desk and looked intently at me.  “The answer is yes,” he said with conviction.
            He sat back and continued.  “It’s important to acknowledge that strictly speaking the gospels are anonymous. But the uniform testimony of the early church was that Matthew, also known as Levi, the tax collector and one of the twelve disciples, was the author of the first gospel in the New Testament; that John Mark, a companion of Peter, was the author of the Gospel we call Mark; and that Luke, known as Paul’s ‘beloved physician’ wrote both the gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles.”
            “How uniform was the belief that they were the authors?” I asked.
            “There are no known competitors for these three Gospels,” he said.  “Apparently, it was just not in dispute.”

            Okay, as I said in part 1, in order to refute Lee Strobel’s book, I’m going to have to point out the ridiculously obvious reasons why his ridiculously stupid arguments don’t work, so just bear with me here as we work through the obvious.
            In a book trying to prove the truth of Christianity, the accuracy of the uniform testimony of the early church is precisely what is in dispute.  You can’t point to Church tradition as a proof of Church tradition in and of itself.  (I can’t believe I just had to say that.)
           
            Secondly, we have absolutely no documents or testimony from before the 2nd Century to indicate that these any of these Gospels were written by these people.  There is nothing that goes back to the lifetime of the apostles to support the authorship.  So when Craig Blomberg cites the “early” church, it’s important to remember this is a relative term.

            The fact that there were no known competitors for the authorship in ancient times is not convincing.  When disproving a legend, you don’t actually need to cite a competing legendary tradition in order to cast doubt on the first one.  For example, no modern historian takes seriously the legendary story about Romulus and Remus and the founding of Rome.  And no one ever has tried to prove the truth of this story by saying, “But in Roman tradition, Romulus and Remus had no other competitors for the founding of Rome.  In fact it doesn’t even seem to have been in dispute among the ancient Romans.”  (You also can’t prove a tradition by just simply saying that it wasn’t in dispute among the people it developed in.) 

            Okay, so exactly what is the early Church tradition these guys are relying on?  They get into that on pages 24-25:

            “Let’s go back to Mark, Matthew, and Luke,” I said.  “What specific evidence do you have that they are the authors of the gospels?”
            Bloomberg leaned forward.  “Again, the oldest and probably most significant testimony comes from Papias, who in about A.D. 125 specifically affirmed that Mark had carefully and accurately recorded Peter’s eyewitness observations.  In fact, he said Mark ‘made no mistakes’ and did not include ‘any false statement.’ And Papias said Matthew had preserved the teachings of Jesus as well.
            “Then Irenaeus, writing about A.D. 180, confirmed the traditional authorship.  In fact, here—,” he said, reaching for a book.  He flipped it open and read Irenaeus’ words.
            Matthew published his own Gospel among the Hebrews in their own tongue, when Peter and Paul were preaching the Gospel in Rome and founding the Church there.  After their departure, Mark the disciple and interpreter of Peter himself, handed down to us in writing the substance of Peter’s preaching.  Luke, the follower of Paul, set down in a book the Gospel preached by his teacher. Then John, the disciple of the Lord, who also leaned on his breast, himself produced his Gospel while he was living at Ephesus in Asia. 
            I looked up from the notes I was taking.  “OK, let me clarify this,” I said. “If we can have confidence that the gospels were written by the disciples Matthew and John, by Mark, the companion of the disciple Peter, and by Luke, the historian, companion of Paul, and sort of a first-century journalist, we can be assured that the events they record are based on either direct or indirect eyewitness testimony.”
            As I was speaking, Blomberg was mentally sifting my words. When I finished, he nodded.
            “Exactly,” he said crisply.

            Right, so there are several points to be made in response to this:

I. First of all, there are a lot of problems with both the testimony of Papias and Ireneaus.  I already went over all this in Part 7, so I’m not going to repeat myself here.
II. This is a minor nitpick, but as I said in Part 7, Papias’s writings may have been as late as 140 A.D.
III. Note carefully all the things they establish here, because in just 2 more pages (on page 27) they’re going to completely contradict almost everything they say here.  In the quote above they’re admitting that by Church tradition Matthew wrote first, Matthew wrote in Hebrew, Mark wrote after Matthew, and Mark wrote after Peter and Paul had departed.  They’re going to completely contradict themselves on all of these points when they try to explain away why Matthew is copying from John Mark on page 27.
IV. Scholars generally date Mark to 70 A.D., Matthew and Luke to 90, and John somewhere between 90-120.  Look how big the gap is between the Ireneaus’s testimony and when the actual material that was produced.
            The problem is bad enough if we go by the secular account, but it gets much worse if we accept the timeline that Craig Blomberg and Lee Strobel propose on page 33-34.  They want to argue that Acts “cannot be dated any later than A.D. 62.  Having established that, we can then work backwards from there.  Since Acts is the second of a two-part work, we know the first part—the gospel of Luke—must have been written earlier than that.  And since Luke incorporates parts of the Gospel of Mark, that means Mark is even earlier. If you allow maybe a year for each of those, you end up with Mark written no later than about A.D. 60, maybe even the late 50s.  (p.33-34)
            Now, no serious scholar takes Lee Strobel’s timeline seriously, but I’m not going to get into that here.  The point for now is that judged by their own timeline that they themselves want to use, there’s a huge gap between when the Gospels were actually written and the testimony of Ireneaus.  It’s over a 120 year gap.  This is like someone now establishing the authorship of a Victorian Era document. 

No comments: