11/18/2020 – New Testament Part 2: Composition Gospels & Other Documents

What is the New Testament and who wrote it? Part 2 of a 4-part series. This is TenOnReligion.

Hey peeps, it’s Dr. B. with TenOnReligion. Many people say they believe in the Bible but don’t know the history behind who wrote it or how it was formed. We’re going to look at answering three questions in this four-part series. First, what are these documents and who composed them? Second, how were they transmitted? And third, why these documents – how were they selected?

This episode and the one before focuses on the first question, what are these documents and who composed them? The contents of the New Testament include four gospels, Acts (history with a clear theological agenda), 21 epistles (13 letters with Paul’s name on them and 8 others), and the Apocalypse of John, known by its common trade name of Revelation. The previous episode focused on the epistles. This episode will focus on the gospels and other writings.

Dominic Crossan, retired professor of religious studies at DePaul University in Chicago wrote, “Even if all history is story, not all story is history.”¹

We’re going to first talk about the gospels which are stories with a measure of embedded history. A gospel was simply a story about Jesus and though many people are familiar with the names of the four gospels in the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, many are surprised to learn that there are around 25-30 other gospels, many of them highly fragmentary, meaning historians and archeologists have only found bits and pieces of them. Even though these “other” gospels are quite interesting because they shed light on what early Christian communities were writing about Jesus, we’re going to focus on the four gospels that made it into the New Testament.

We’re going to mention a few things about authorship issues and then unpack a few things about the language. The biggest surprise, at least to a lot of Christians, is that these four documents were all written anonymously. There is no author contained in the text itself and the document titles are later additions. The narratives in Mark and Matthew are given entirely in the third person, even including Matthew’s calling in Matthew chapter 9. The narrative in Luke uses the first person at the beginning, but the pronoun is not used to indicate the author is an eyewitness to what they narrate. John uses the first person at the beginning, but after that, “we” or “us” is used to indicate the community of later followers. John also uses the first person at the end, but he is not the so-called beloved disciple because he differentiates himself from him in the text. All four gospel writers never claim to be personally connected with any of the events they narrate or the persons about whom they tell their stories. This means they are not forgeries, but false author attributions. How did this happen?

The surviving manuscripts do not have titles on them at least until after the year 200 CE. Early Christian leaders who quoted them never called them by name. The “According to” in the titles of the gospels seen today were a later, external designation by someone else, and are not original to the text. An early Christian leader named Justin Martyr who lived in the first half of the second century, between 100-165, quotes gospel passages in his writings but does not refer to them with any titles, only calling them “the gospels” or sometimes “the memoirs of the apostles.” In some instances, it is not even entirely clear which gospel he is quoting. So, it’s evident the gospels we have today were not yet titled by that point.

The titles are first mentioned by Irenaeus in a document called Against Heresies, written sometime between 175-190. The anonymous authors were respected until Irenaeus. In Against Heresies, the “heretics” have gone astray either because they use gospels that are not really gospels, or because they use only one or another of the four that are legitimately Gospels. According to Irenaeus, just as the gospel has been spread by the four winds of heaven over the four corners of the earth, so there must be four and only four gospels, and they are Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. For Irenaeus, legitimate gospels could only be those that had apostolic authority, meaning it was written either by an apostle himself, or a close companion. Because there were so many gospels in circulation by his day, apostolic credentials were needed. Matthew and John were eyewitnesses. He thought Mark was influenced by Peter and Luke was influenced by Paul. These last two represented the perspectives of the two greatest apostles. The gospel narratives needed apostolic authorship to be considered authoritative, and later, to be included into the New Testament canon. In reality, the four gospels were written by Greek-speaking Christian communities somewhere in the Roman Empire between 70-100 CE.

Even though the gospels were written in Greek, as were their sources, some of the surviving traditions were originally spoken in Aramaic, the language of Jews living in Palestine, including Jesus and his early followers. These traditions date at least to the early years of the Christian movement before it expanded into the Greek-speaking lands elsewhere in the Mediterranean. The evidence for this is that in several passages in the gospels a key word or phrase has been left in the original Aramaic, and the author, writing in Greek, has had to translate it for his audience. Two examples are Mark 5:41 with Jairus’ daughter and Mark 15:34 when Jesus is on the cross. Another example is in John 3 when Jesus is having a conversation with Nicodemas and uses the Greek word anothen which has a double-meaning, but only in Greek, not in Aramaic. Thus, the conversation could not have happened as reported in Aramaic, and thus the author of John originally wrote in Greek.

Aramaic Jews in Jesus’ native land were telling stories about him well before Paul wrote his letters in the 50s and this likely began within a few years of the traditional date of his death.

So, when were these four gospels written? Part of this has to do with what scholars refer to as the synoptic problem – basically asking the question concerning the textual relationship between the four accounts. Many books have been written on this subject, so I’ll have to defer the details about the synoptic problem to a later time. But with regard to the general timing, I’ll just mention one thing now. All of the gospels had to be originally composed after the destruction of temple in the year 70 CE, because they mention it. Paul’s description of the End in his seven letters does not include Temple destruction because when he wrote, the Temple had not yet been destroyed by the Romans. This happened after Paul’s death so he could not possibly have known about it as the gospel authors did.

On to the last two documents. The book of Acts, which also did not originally have a title, was also first referred to as the Acts of the Apostles by Irenaeus. The content is a conglomeration of several earlier sources and likely was written by the same author who wrote the gospel of Luke.

The last document, the Apocalypse of John, was one of two well-known apocalypses in early Christianity, the other being the Apocalypse of Peter. The Apocalypse of John is better known by its trade name title, Revelation. It was written by an author named John, but because it was written around 90 CE or later, it was not composed by Jesus’ friend and disciple John because he clearly would have not lived that long, so it was written by a different person also named John.

To better understand this document, I have to mention a few quick thoughts on how the apocalyptic worldview developed. First, ancient Israel began with largely a covenantal worldview. God was on the side of Israel and this was marked by protection. Eventually this didn’t work out as Israel did not appear to be protected, rather it was conquered multiple times. This transitioned into a prophetic worldview. The prophets explained the sufferings of Israel as punishment for sins. The nation must return to God. Eventually this didn’t work out either as after repenting they continued to suffer and the bad actors who oppressed them prospered. Finally, the apocalyptic worldview emerged. Israel’s suffering was not from punishment of sin, but it was due to their view that there were powers of evil who are opposed to God. This was heavily influenced by another religion popular in the area called Zoroastrianism.

Apocalypticism had four main components: dualism – there is a huge divide between the good and evil powers, pessimism – the world is going to get worse, vindication – at the end of the age we’re ultimately going to win with punishment for the evildoers and rewards for the good doers, and lastly, imminence – all of this was going to happen soon.

The apocalyptic worldview was often conveyed through a type of writing called an apocalypse, which was visionary in nature with bizarre imagery. The Apocalypse of John, or Revelation, mostly refers to events surrounding the destruction of the Temple in the year 70. For example, the Antichrist and the number 666 has nothing to do with the future, but was likely a reference to Nero, the letters of whose name adds up to 666.

As I said in the last episode, just because there are authorship issues like misattributions, doesn’t mean that these documents are not important. They are all very important as it gives historians some of the earliest written insights into the formation of the Christian communities during the first century.

In the next episode we’ll talk about how these texts were transmitted and mention some concerns that arise with copying these texts over time. I hope this vlog has helped you better understand this topic. Until next time, stay curious. If you enjoyed this, please like this video and subscribe to the channel. This is TenOnReligion.

¹John Dominic Crossan, The Birth of Christianity, (New York: HarperOne, 1998) 20.