Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible

by Bart D. Ehrman

  FOUR

  Who Wrote the Bible?

  Students taking a college-level Bible course for the first time often find it surprising that we don’t know who wrote most of the books of the New Testament. How could that be? Don’t these books all have the authors’ names attached to them? Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, the letters of Paul, 1 and 2 Peter, and 1, 2 and 3 John? How could the wrong names be attached to books of Scripture? Isn’t this the Word of God? If someone wrote a book claiming to be Paul while knowing full well that he wasn’t Paul—isn’t that lying? Can Scripture contain lies?

  When I arrived at seminary I was fully armed and ready for the onslaught on my faith by liberal biblical scholars who were going to insist on such crazy ideas. Having been trained in conservative circles, I knew that these views were standard fare at places like Princeton Theological Seminary. But what did they know? Bunch of liberals.

  What came as a shock to me over time was just how little actual evidence there is for the traditional ascriptions of authorship that I had always taken for granted, and how much real evidence there was that many of these ascriptions are wrong. It turned out the liberals actually had something to say and had evidence to back it up; they weren’t simply involved in destructive wishful thinking. There were some books, such as the Gospels, that had been written anonymously, only later to be ascribed to certain authors who probably did not write them (apostles and friends of the apostles). Other books were written by authors who flat out claimed to be someone they weren’t.

  In this chapter I’d like to explain what that evidence is.

  WHO WROTE THE GOSPELS?

  Though it is evidently not the sort of thing pastors normally tell their congregations, for over a century there has been a broad consensus among scholars that many of the books of the New Testament were not written by the people whose names are attached to them. So if that is the case, who did write them?

  Preliminary Observations: The Gospels as Eyewitness Accounts

  As we have just seen, the Gospels are filled with discrepancies large and small. Why are there so many differences among the four Gospels? These books are called Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John because they were traditionally thought to have been written by Matthew, a disciple who was a tax collector; John, the “Beloved Disciple” mentioned in the Fourth Gospel; Mark, the secretary of the disciple Peter; and Luke, the traveling companion of Paul. These traditions can be traced back to about a century after the books were written.

  But if Matthew and John were both written by earthly disciples of Jesus, why are they so very different, on all sorts of levels? Why do they contain so many contradictions? Why do they have such fundamentally different views of who Jesus was? In Matthew, Jesus comes into being when he is conceived, or born, of a virgin; in John, Jesus is the incarnate Word of God who was with God in the beginning and through whom the universe was made. In Matthew, there is not a word about Jesus being God; in John, that’s precisely who he is. In Matthew, Jesus teaches about the coming kingdom of God and almost never about himself (and never that he is divine); in John, Jesus teaches almost exclusively about himself, especially his divinity. In Matthew, Jesus refuses to perform miracles in order to prove his identity; in John, that is practically the only reason he does miracles.

  Did two of the earthly followers of Jesus really have such radically different understandings of who he was? It is possible. Two people who served in the administration of George W. Bush may well have radically different views about him (although I doubt anyone would call him divine). This raises an important methodological point that I want to stress before discussing the evidence for the authorship of the Gospels.

  Why did the tradition eventually arise that these books were written by apostles and companions of the apostles? In part it was in order to assure readers that they were written by eyewitnesses and companions of eyewitnesses. An eyewitness could be trusted to relate the truth of what actually happened in Jesus’ life. But the reality is that eyewitnesses cannot be trusted to give historically accurate accounts. They never could be trusted and can’t be trusted still. If eyewitnesses always gave historically accurate accounts, we would have no need for law courts. If we needed to find out what actually happened when a crime was committed, we could just ask someone. Real-life legal cases require multiple eyewitnesses, because eyewitnesses’ testimonies differ. If two eyewitnesses in a court of law were to differ as much as Matthew and John, imagine how hard it would be to reach a judgment.

  A further reality is that all the Gospels were written anonymously, and none of the writers claims to be an eyewitness. Names are attached to the titles of the Gospels (“the Gospel according to Matthew”), but these titles are later additions to the Gospels, provided by editors and scribes to inform readers who the editors thought were the authorities behind the different versions. That the titles are not original to the Gospels themselves should be clear upon some simple reflection. Whoever wrote Matthew did not call it “The Gospel according to Matthew.” The persons who gave it that title are telling you who, in their opinion, wrote it. Authors never title their books “according to.”1

  Moreover, Matthew’s Gospel is written completely in the third person, about what “they”—Jesus and the disciples—were doing, never about what “we”—Jesus and the rest of us—were doing. Even when this Gospel narrates the event of Matthew being called to become a disciple, it talks about “him,” not about “me.” Read the account for yourself (Matthew 9:9). There’s not a thing in it that would make you suspect the author is talking about himself.

  With John it is even more clear. At the end of the Gospel the author says of the “Beloved Disciple”: “This is the disciple who is testifying to these things and has written them, and we know that his testimony is true” (John 21:24). Note how the author differentiates between his source of information, “the disciple who testifies,” and himself: “we know that his testimony is true.” He/we: this author is not the disciple. He claims to have gotten some of his information from the disciple.

  As for the other Gospels, Mark was said to be not a disciple but a companion of Peter, and Luke was a companion of Paul, who also was not a disciple. Even if they had been disciples, it would not guarantee the objectivity or truthfulness of their stories. But in fact none of the writers was an eyewitness, and none of them claims to be.

  Who, then, wrote these books?

  The Authors of the Gospels

  A good place to start is with a basic question: What do we know about the followers of Jesus? Our earliest and best information about them comes from the Gospels themselves, along with the book of Acts. The other books of the New Testament, such as the writings of Paul, make only passing reference to the twelve disciples, and these references tend to confirm what we can ferret out of the Gospels themselves. Outside the New Testament, all we have are legends that were produced many decades and centuries later—for example, the famous Acts of John, which narrates the miraculous missionary endeavors of John after the resurrection. No historian thinks that these Acts are historically reliable.2

  From the Gospels we learn that the disciples of Jesus, like him, were lower-class peasants from rural Galilee. Most of them—certainly Simon Peter, Andrew, James, and John—were day laborers (fishermen and the like); Matthew is said to be a tax collector, but it is not clear how high up he was in the tax collecting organization, whether he was a kind of general contractor who worked directly with the ruling authorities to secure tax revenues or, and possibly more likely, the kind of person who came banging on your door to make you pay up. If the latter, there is nothing to suggest that he would have required much of an education.

  The same can certainly be said of the others. We have some information about what it meant to be a lower-class peasant in rural areas of Palestine in the first century. One thing it meant is that you were almost certainly illiterate. Jesus himself was highly exceptional, in that he could evidently read (Luke 4:16–20), but there is nothing to indicate that he
could write. In antiquity these were two separate skills, and many people who could read were unable to write.

  How many could read? Illiteracy was widespread throughout the Roman Empire. At the best of times maybe 10 percent of the population was roughly literate. And that 10 percent would be the leisured classes—upper-class people who had the time and money to get an education (and their slaves and servants taught to read for the benefit of such services to their masters). Everyone else worked from an early age and was unable to afford the time or expense of an education.3

  Nothing in the Gospels or Acts indicates that Jesus’ followers could read, let alone write. In fact there is an account in Acts in which Peter and John are said to be “unlettered” (Acts 4:13)—the ancient word for illiterate. As Galilean Jews, Jesus’ followers, like Jesus himself, would have been speakers of Aramaic. As rural folk they probably would not have any knowledge of Greek; if they did, it would have been extremely rough, since they spent their time with other illiterate Aramaic-speaking peasants trying to eke out a hand-to-mouth existence.

  In short, who were Jesus’ disciples? Lower-class, illiterate, Aramaic-speaking peasants from Galilee.

  And who were the authors of the Gospels? Even though they all kept their identities anonymous, we can learn a few things about them from the books they wrote. What we learn stands completely at odds with what we know about the disciples of Jesus. The authors of the Gospels were highly educated, Greek-speaking Christians who probably lived outside Palestine.

  That they were highly educated Greek speakers goes virtually without saying. Although there have been scholars from time to time who thought that the Gospels may originally have been written in Aramaic, the overwhelming consensus today, for lots of technical linguistic reasons, is that the Gospels were all written in Greek. As I’ve indicated, only about 10 percent of the people in the Roman Empire, at best, could read, even fewer could write out sentences, far fewer still could actually compose narratives on a rudimentary level, and very few indeed could compose extended literary works like the Gospels. To be sure, the Gospels are not the most refined books to appear in the empire—far from it. Still, they are coherent narratives written by highly trained authors who knew how to construct a story and carry out their literary aims with finesse.

  Whoever these authors were, they were unusually gifted Christians of a later generation. Scholars debate where they lived and worked, but their ignorance of Palestinian geography and Jewish customs suggests they composed their works somewhere else in the empire—presumably in a large urban area where they could have received a decent education and where there would have been a relatively large community of Christians.4

  These authors were not lower-class, illiterate, Aramaic-speaking peasants from Galilee. But isn’t it possible that, say, John wrote the Gospel as an old man? That as a young man he was an illiterate, Aramaic-speaking day laborer—a fisherman from the time he was old enough to help haul in a net—but that as an old man he wrote a Gospel?

  I suppose it’s possible. It would mean that after Jesus’ resurrection John decided to go to school and become literate. He learned the basics of reading, picked up the rudiments of writing, and learned Greek, well enough to become completely fluent. By the time he was an old man he had mastered composition and was able to write a Gospel. Is this likely? It hardly seems so. John and the other followers of Jesus had other things on their minds after experiencing Jesus’ resurrection. For one thing, they thought they had to convert the world and run the church.

  The Witness of Papias

  In spite of the evidence that none of the disciples wrote a Gospel, we need to deal with the early church tradition that indicates that some of them did so. How is one to deal with this tradition?

  The earliest source of this tradition, an early Christian church father named Papias, deals with only two early Christian Gospels, Mark and Matthew. Papias is an enigmatic figure who wrote a five-volume work called Expositions of the Sayings of the Lord. Scholars have plausibly dated the work to a point somewhere between 110 and 140 CE, forty to seventy years after the first Gospel was written.5 Papias’s work no longer survives: a number of later Christian authorities found Papias’s views either offensive or insufficiently sophisticated, and so the work was not copied extensively for posterity.6 Everything we know about the work comes from quotations of it by later church fathers.

  Papias has nonetheless often been portrayed as a useful source for establishing early church tradition, in part because of how he indicates he received his information. In some of the quotations of the Expositions that survive, he states that he personally talked with Christians who had known a group of people he calls “the elders,” that they had known some of the disciples, and that he has passed along information that he received from them. So in reading Papias we have access to third-or fourth-hand information from people who knew companions of the disciples.

  A much-quoted passage by Papias (recorded by Eusebius) describes this kind of third-or fourth-hand information, concerning Mark and Matthew as authors of Gospels.

  This is what the elder used to say, “when Mark was the interpreter [translator?] of Peter he wrote down accurately everything that he recalled of the Lord’s words and deeds—but not in order. For he neither heard the Lord nor accompanied him; but later, as I indicated, he accompanied Peter, who used to adapt his teachings for the needs at hand, not arranging, as it were, an orderly composition of the Lord’s sayings. And so Mark did nothing wrong by writing some of the matters as he remembered them. For he was intent on just one purpose: not to leave out anything that he heard or to include any falsehood among them.”

  He goes on to say about Matthew:

  And so Matthew composed the sayings in the Hebrew tongue, and each one interpreted [translated?] them to the best of his ability. (Eusebius, Church History 3. 39)

  Isn’t this evidence that Matthew really wrote Matthew, and Mark really wrote Mark?

  There are some very serious complications in trying to assess the historical value of Papias’s remarks. Let’s begin with Matthew. For one thing, with Matthew—unlike with Mark—we don’t learn what the source of Papias’s information is, or if he even has a source. Is it third-hand? Fourth-hand? Fifth-hand? If Papias was writing, say, in 120 or 130, it was something like forty or fifty years after Matthew was anonymously written. The Gospel had been in anonymous circulation for decades. Isn’t it possible that the tradition that Papias relates had been made up in the meantime?

  In this connection it is worth noting that the two pieces of solid information that Papias gives us about Matthew are not true of “our” Matthew. Our Matthew is not just a collection of Jesus’ sayings, and the Gospel was certainly written in Greek, not Hebrew.7 Has Papias simply gotten his information wrong? Or is he talking about some other book written by Matthew—for example, a collection of Jesus’ sayings—that we no longer possess?

  If Papias is not reliable about Matthew, is he reliable about Mark? In this instance he indicates that we are receiving third-or fourth-hand information.8 And again, one of the points that he emphatically makes is certainly wrong: he claims that one of Mark’s two primary goals was to tell everything that he had heard from Peter about Jesus. There is simply no way that can be true. The Gospel of Mark takes about two hours to read out loud. After Peter had spent all those months, or years, with Jesus, and after Mark listened to Peter preach about Jesus day and night, are we to imagine that all Mark heard was two hours’ worth of information?

  In any event, Papias does not seem to provide us with the kind of information we can place a lot of confidence in. I should point out, in this connection, that scholars have almost uniformly rejected just about everything else that Papias is recorded to have said in the surviving references to his work. Consider another piece of fourth-hand information:

  Thus the elders who saw John, the disciple of the Lord, remembered hearing him say how the Lord used to teach about those times, saying:

  “T
he days are coming when vines will come forth, each with ten thousand boughs; and on a single bough will be ten thousand branches. And indeed, on a single branch will be ten thousand shoots and on every shoot ten thousand clusters; and in every cluster will be ten thousand grapes, and every grape, when pressed, will yield twenty-five measures of wine. And when any of the saints grabs hold of a cluster, another will cry out, ‘I am better, take me, bless the lord through me.’” (Eusebius, Church History 3.39.1)

  No one thinks that Jesus really said this. Or that John the disciple of Jesus said that Jesus said this. Did the elders who knew John really say this?9

  If scholars are inclined to discount what Papias says in virtually every other instance, why is it that they sometimes appeal to his witness in order to show that we have an early tradition that links Matthew to one of our Gospels, and Mark to another? Why do these scholars accept some of what Papias said but not all of what he said? I suspect it is because they want to have support for their own points of view (Matthew really wrote Matthew) and have decided to trust Papias when he confirms their views, and not trust him when he does not.

  The result of this quick examination of Papias is, I think, that he passes on stories that he has heard, and he attributes them to people who knew other people who said so. But when he can be checked, he appears to be wrong. Can he be trusted in the places that he cannot be checked? If you have a friend who is consistently wrong when he gives directions to places you are familiar with, do you trust him when he gives directions for someplace you’ve never been?