Thursday, August 07, 2014

Book Review of The Case For Christ by Lee Strobel Part 4: My Rebuttal Argument That Even if Lee Strobel Were Able to Prove that the Church Tradition about the Gospels Was Correct, Most of the Gospel Stories Still Would Not Be Based on Eyewitness Testimony


See Part 1 General Comments

            Something Lee Strobel never addresses even once in his book is that, even if the Church tradition on the Apostolic authorship is correct, he still can’t claim that the majority of the Gospels are based on eyewitness evidence.  (Lee Strobel is just really, really, really hoping you won’t notice this, so he just doesn’t talk about it at all.)

            In fact, even according to the Church tradition Lee Strobel is defending, most of the Gospels are second hand evidence.  I’ll address this in the following points.
I. A Clarification on What the Church Tradition Actually Is
II. Even According to the Church Tradition, 2 out of the 4 Gospels are Not Eyewitness Accounts
III. Parts of the Gospel of Mark and the Gospel of John were Added Later, and We Have No Idea Who Added Them
IV. Even for the Remaining Two Gospels, They Can Only be Called Eyewitness Testimony for the Parts that the Apostles Actually Witnessed
V. A Discussion of What to Make of All the Material in the Gospels that Was Clearly Not Witnessed By Anyone, And Is Attributable to No Clear Source

I. A Clarification on What the Church Tradition Actually Is
According to Church tradition, Matthew’s Gospel was written first in Hebrew (it was the Gospel for the Jews), and then later translated into Greek.  Mark’s Gospel is attributed to John Mark, who was a travelling companion of Peter for many years, and after Peter died, John Mark was encouraged by the Church to write down everything Peter had told him over the years about Jesus, so John Mark did so (although because John Mark wasn’t actually present for any of these things, he didn’t know what order Peter’s stories were supposed to go in, so Church fathers admit he may have fudged up the order of the stories.)  Luke was a travelling companion of Paul who wasn’t an eyewitness to any of the things in his Gospel, but he did some research.  And John, like Matthew, was an apostle of Jesus.

II. Even According to the Church Tradition, 2 out of the 4 Gospels are Not Eye-Witness Accounts
            Now, before we get any further into this, it’s worth noting that even if we accept Church tradition, Lee Strobel can only claim two of the four Gospels as eyewitness testimony.  Mark’s Gospel is second hand, and Luke’s Gospel (by the author’s own admission) is even farther removed.  As Luke himself writes: “Dear Theophilus, many people have done their best to write a report of the things that have taken place among us. They wrote what we have been told by those who saw these things from the beginning, and who proclaimed the message. And so, Your Excellency, because I have carefully studied all these matters from their beginning, I thought it would be good to write an orderly account for you.” (Luke 1:1-3).
            So Luke is basing his account off of written documents, which were themselves written by other people who were reporting what they had been told by the eyewitnesses.  By my count, that means Luke is, at best, 3rd hand testimony.

            Lee Strobel never directly addresses the fact that 2 out of his 4 Gospels are not eyewitness testimony, but he does sneak in the weasel words “indirect eyewitness testimony.”  Here again, it’s worth re-emphasizing that there’s no such thing as “indirect eyewitness testimony.”  It’s either eyewitness testimony or it’s second hand.

III. Parts of the Gospel of Mark and the Gospel of John were Added Later, and We Have No Idea Who Added Them
            Also, even if you assume that the Apostles of Church tradition originally wrote the Gospels, you would still have to account for the parts of the Gospels that were added later by anonymous scribes.
            The earliest and most reliable ancient Greek manuscripts do not contain Mark 16:9-20 (when Jesus appears to his disciples after the resurrection) and John 8:1-11 (the  story of the woman caught in adultery—the one where Jesus says, “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.”).  This is beyond dispute, so much so that even the people who print your Bible have footnoted these passages.  (No one, not even Lee Strobel and his apologist buddies, disputes that these two passages are later additions.)
            So, where do these passages come from?  You can only claim these are eyewitness testimony by more wishful thinking.  We have no idea what the source for these passages are.
            So even assuming the Church tradition Lee Strobel is trying to defend, we would still have a whole half chapter of the Gospel of Mark, and a whole story from the Gospel of John, that we have no idea who wrote them. 

IV. Even for the Remaining Two Gospels, They Can Only be Called Eyewitness Testimony for the Parts that the Apostles Actually Witnessed
            So only Matthew and John can be called eyewitness testimony, and even here it can only be eye-witness testimony for what Matthew and John were physically eyewitnesses to. 


So, all the stories in Matthew in which Jesus takes Peter, James and John aside from the rest of the apostles is not eye-witness testimony—for example the transfiguration, and the Garden of Gethsemane, et cetera.  These events could only be called second hand evidence at best.  Of the four Gospel writers, only John would have been an actual eye-witness to these events.  But strangely enough, John’s Gospel is the only Gospel not to mention these events.  The transfiguration (of which John would have been the only eyewitness out of the 4 Gospellers) is not even mentioned in John’s Gospel.  So even by Lee Strobel’s criteria, we have absolutely no direct eye-witness testimony of one of the most miraculous events of Jesus’s life.  Nor is the story about Jesus taking Peter, James and John into the Garden of Gethsemane mentioned in John. 
            It’s possible the Gospel writers could have gotten these events second hand from Peter, James and John, but this certainly isn’t eye-witness testimony.  (By the way, the fact that John just forgets to write about all these big events he was supposedly an eye-witness to is also problematic for Lee Strobel, but we’ll get to that later in Part 10).

            And then there were all the events during which none of the apostle could have been eye-witnesses.  The birth narrative in Matthew, for example, can not be based on eyewitness testimony.  Nor the section on the death of John the Baptist and Herod’s dancing daughter in Matthew 14.  Nor could Matthew have been an eyewitness to the secret meeting of the high priests to plot against Jesus in Matthew 26.  Or Judas meeting the high priests to plan Jesus’s betrayal.  Or the story about the guards at the tomb and Pilate and the chief priests plotting to bribe the guards.  Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

            So where does this information come from?  Well, we have no idea.  It’s theoretically possible that some of this could have come down to Matthew second hand from other sources, but we don’t know.  Matthew doesn’t state his sources.  We don’t know how accurate his sources were, or how reliably the material was preserved, or anything.  To assume that this is all accurate material is either just wishful thinking, or pure faith.  There’s no indication of the source, and there’s certainly no proof.

            And then there’s plenty of material in the Gospels for which there were no eyewitnesses at all.  In the Gospel of Matthew, the wise-men are warned in a dream not to return to King Herod, and so returned to their country by another road.  Now, notice that not only could Matthew not have been an eyewitness to this, it's hard to imagine anyone being a source of this information.  Unless someone went all the way into the East and tracked these men down, what source could this information possibly have come from?  It's not just a matter of this being 1st versus 2nd hand--it's a matter of the source being completely inexplicable.
            And there are many stories in the Gospel like this which don't seem possible to attribute to any eyewitness source.  When Jesus goes into the desert to be tempted by Satan, no one else was there—it was just Jesus and the Devil. Unless Jesus told his disciples specifically what had happened ("Now, when you write your Gospels, don't forget to include the part about how Satan said to me..."), then this information is not coming from anywhere.
            In John’s Gospel, there is a lengthy conversation between Jesus and Pilate that took place away from eyes of the crowds.  As the incident is described in John’s Gospel, there don’t appear to have been any other eyewitnesses. 
            And then there’s Jesus praying to God in the garden of Gethsemane after all the other disciples have fallen asleep.  Again, no eyewitnesses to this except Jesus and God.  Unless Jesus specifically told his disciples about this afterwards, then this information is not coming from any source.  ("Now, when you write the Gospels, don't forget to include the part about how I pleaded with God to spare me from my fate.  And make sure you write that I was sweating blood, and that an Angel came down to comfort me.")
           
V. A Discussion of What to Make of All the Material in the Gospels that Was Clearly Not Witnessed By Anyone, And Is Attributable to No Clear Source

            So how does Lee Strobel get around the fact that much of the Gospels just physically can’t be based on eyewitness testimony?  Well he doesn’t.  He doesn’t even acknowledge the issue.  Once again, he’s just really hoping the reader won’t notice all these huge holes in his theories as he steamrolls on.

            It’s an interesting difficulty for him though. 
            It is an assumption of The Case for Christ that the truth of the Gospels can be proved in a court of law just like any other court case could be proved, so Lee Strobel is understandably reluctant to just fall back on articles of faith like divine revelation.  But then how else to explain where all this material is coming from?
           
            Many Christians just rely on the idea of divine revelation—the idea that God was telling the Gospellers exactly what to write, so that anything that the Gospellers weren’t personally eyewitnesses to can be explained by God just zapping their minds.  This of course can neither be proved nor disproved—you just have to take it or leave it on faith the same way you’d have to take the Koran on faith or the book of Mormon on faith.  And Lee Strobel doesn’t bring it up because his whole book is about how you can “prove” the case for Christ.  (Well, actually, you can’t prove any of this stuff, which is the problem with the whole premise of the book.)

            The problem with the divine revelation argument, however, is that it means that the Gospels are a divine document rather than a human document.  Which is going to make things sticky when we get around to discussing the mistakes and the contradictions.
            As I mentioned in part 1, one popular way conservative Christians have come up with to explain the contradictions in the resurrection account is to attribute this to the human frailty of the eyewitness testimony.  But if the Gospels are based on divine revelation, then how to explain the contradictions?

            (As I mentioned in part 1, Lee Strobel plays both sides of the fence on this one.  He argues for both the inerrancy and the errancy of the Bible, but he does at least at times invoke the conservative Christian argument that the contradictions in the Bible prove the disciples were independent eyewitnesses.  For example, he quotes a Christian apologist who says of the Gospels: “There is enough of a discrepancy to show that there could have been no previous concert among them; and at the same time such substantial agreement as to show that they all were independent narrators of the same great transaction” (Simon Greenleaf, as quoted in Lee Strobel page 46).)
           
            Assuming human authors of the Gospels, you can get away with some discrepancies.  Assuming this is divine inspiration, it’s not clear why God is always contradicting himself from one Gospel to another.

            So, to sum-up, even assuming Church tradition, Lee Strobel has a very weak case when he argues that the Gospels are based on eyewitness testimony.  It gets even worse for Lee Strobel, however, because we now know that Church tradition about the Gospels are completely wrong.

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