Jesus' Biography
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Jesus loved Mary more than all the disciples, and used to kiss her often on her mouth. The rest of the disciples said to him, "Why do you love her more than all of us?" The Saviour answered and said to them, "Why do I not love you like her?" When a blind man and one who sees are both together in darkness, they are no different from one another.

When the light comes, then he who sees will see the light, and he who is blind will remain in darkness. The Gospel according to Philip. That reading from the Gospel of Philip, one of the famed Gnostic Gospels, lifts the lid on an explosive conspiracy. Mary Magdalene was Jesus' girlfriend, maybe even wife.

Philip's Gospel wasn't written until 150, maybe even 200 years after Jesus, but that hasn't stopped the popularity of these ideas. At the front of the New Testament, there are four so-called Gospels with names attached: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. There's no Philip there.

The document in his name is one of over 50 other accounts of Jesus that popped up between the second and fourth centuries. None of these extras got into the biblical collection or what we now call the canon. On that whole process, go and check out the very fun episode 30, Canon Fodder. Anyway, these extra biblical accounts say some pretty weird stuff.

According to the Gospel of James, Jesus worshipped the goddess Sophia, the embodiment of wisdom. Jesus plots his own death in collaboration with Judas in the Gospel of Judas. And in the infancy story of Thomas, the teenager Jesus uses his magical powers to kill kids and blind the parents when they complain. True story.

I mean, it's a completely made-up story, but it's true that this second-century text told that bizarre story.

Christianity caused a massive stir in the ancient world. As the first gospels came to be popular, loads of other people wanted more gospels for different contexts and for different tastes. And yet, when the Bible was finalised, only four of these accounts made the cut. So what was it about Matthew, Mark, Luke and John that set them apart from the rest?

What do we even know about these four authors? Were they even really the authors? And why would anyone rely on their accounts of Jesus rather than the Gospels of Philip, Mary, Judas, and the rest of the gang? I'm John Dixon, and this is Undeceptions. Undeceptions

This season of Undeceptions is sponsored by Zondervan Academic. Get discounts on master lectures, video courses and exclusive samples of their books at zondervanacademic.com forward slash Undeceptions. Don't forget to write Undeceptions. Each episode here at Undeceptions, we explore some aspect of life, faith, philosophy, history, science, culture or ethics that

that's either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. And with the help of people who know what they're talking about, we're trying to undeceive ourselves and let the truth out. So Simon, here's an easy one. Ready? What are the Gospels? What are the Gospels? Well, the Gospels, if you're limiting it to the four canonical Gospels in the New Testament, the four New Testament Gospels are basically lives of Jesus. That would be how...

The earliest readers would have perceived them. There was already an established... That's my guest, Professor Simon Gathercole. Simon is a New Testament scholar, a true scholar's scholar, at Fitzwilliam College at the University of Cambridge in the UK, which is where I visited him for this episode. Simon has written dozens of books and articles on today's subject, including the recently published The Gospel and the Gospels, which I have...

Close at hand, right here on my desk, because it's a treasure trove of information about early Christianity and its founding texts. The book strips back the myths and dogma and answers the question, what can we know with high confidence about the earliest, like the very earliest, core of Christian belief and proclamation? I've been trying to get Simon on the show for years, and I finally pulled it off.

Well, actually, producer Kayleigh pulled it off. For my sceptical listeners, of which we have quite a few in Undeceptions, what do you think is the value of picking up one of these four Gospels? The value intellectually, existentially, or whatever? Yeah.

Well, I think intellectually that they are what give us the closest insight that we have about Jesus. They're all designed to give a fairly, not complete, but a sufficient account of who Jesus was as a figure in ancient history. But I think obviously the more significant thing about them is that Jesus is not just a figure of

antiquarian interest, but as one of his disciples puts it in one of the Gospels, you have the words of eternal life. So the value of picking up one of these Gospels and reading it and inwardly digesting it is not just to get insight into ancient history, but to understand who God is.

"Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. Therefore, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, it seemed good also to me to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught.

Those are the opening four verses of the Gospel of Luke, the longest in terms of word count of the four Gospels. We don't know who Theophilus was, the one Luke dedicates the volume to, but the best guess is that he's some local official who's interested in Christianity, has learned a bit about it already, and is looking for an orderly account of it.

of the facts Luke's intro takes the classic form of an ancient historical writing others have had a go at this and now I want to give you my best attempt at the facts written a couple of decades later here's the opening of one of the historical works of Flavius Josephus friend of the podcast

Those who undertake to write histories do not, I perceive, take that trouble on one and the same account, but for many reasons, and those such as are very different from one another. For since I was myself interested in that war which we Jews had with the Romans, and knew myself its particular actions, and what conclusion it had, I was forced to give the history of it, because I saw that others perverted the truth of those actions in

in their writings. The similarities with Luke and with some other texts like Dionysius of Halicarnassus are pretty obvious to historians today. Luke might have raised some eyebrows for some, but he did so following all of the literary conventions of history in the day. This reads like a fairly standard historical biography. There was already an established

tradition of biography, biographies of emperors, biographies of great figures from the Roman world, biographies of lesser-known people but who were important to the author. So the first readers would have come across these books and seen them as biographies and that's pretty similar to how they were intended to be. So Luke at the beginning of the Acts of the Apostles talks about his first book, the Gospel of Luke, as what Jesus began to do and to teach. So

really encapsulating Jesus' actions and his teachings with a special focus on the crucifixion and resurrection in each case. So they're biographies, but they're biographies with a particular message to them, especially in terms of what? Which

Which was pretty normal for biographies in antiquity. Yeah, so they were often written as exemplary books, you know, either things to imitate in a great figure or things not to imitate in a less great figure. But interestingly, the Gospels as biographies, they don't really end up saying, live like Jesus.

Do they? I mean, he's not an exemplary figure in that sense. No, that's right. So the focus in the gospel biographies, to call them that, is on the good news. So it's really about what Jesus has uniquely done in an inimitable way. So the word gospel in English means good news, and the term that was used in the original

Greek was euangelion, which basically means the same thing. Eu means good, something done well, and angelion means a message. So it's a message about what God has done, which is good news for humanity. So yeah, there's less of an emphasis, although there's a bit of an emphasis on how we should live like Jesus, but the focus is on what Jesus has uniquely done, which is not something we can replicate.

Mark is likely the first of the Gospels to be written. Scholars usually date it to the mid to late 60s AD. Matthew and Luke come in the decades immediately after that, and there's a pretty strong consensus, with some worthy exceptions, that Matthew and Luke used Mark as a source.

Matthew seems clearly written to a Jewish audience mainly, and Luke seems to be written mainly to a non-Jewish or Gentile audience. They're both probably writing around AD 80. Together, Matthew, Mark, and Luke are called the Synoptic Gospels.

Gospels. That word synoptic means view together, and it basically refers to the way all three cover similar material in a vaguely similar order, very probably because Luke and Matthew used Mark as a principal source, along with a couple of other minor sources you don't need to know about today.

John's gospel is pretty different. It's the same basic plot. Jesus began his ministry in Galilee, emerged out of the circle of John the Baptist, then with his disciples traveled to Jerusalem where he was executed and raised to life. But it's the long speeches of Jesus in this gospel that set it apart, as well as the focus on Jesus' identity rather than his actions.

Most scholars date John to about the 90s AD. That's what I've taught for years at Macquarie University and Sydney University and elsewhere. But the work of a few outlier scholars in recent times has left me nowadays thinking this gospel could be as early as Mark's gospel. So the 60s AD. But that's another conversation.

Either way, all of these Gospels, unlike the Gnostic Gospels, are written within about 60 years of Jesus. And for ancient history, that's pretty good. The best account of the emperor of the same time, that's Tiberius, was written 80 years after Tiberius by the great chronicler Cornelius Tacitus.

And so what are our earliest manuscripts of these books we call Gospels, these New Testament Gospels? So the earliest manuscripts come from around AD 200, early 3rd century. So P45 in Dublin, which is a manuscript of the four Gospels, and other manuscripts like P75, which is a manuscript of Luke and John. So there are several...

Oh, I'm so sorry to interrupt again. I promise to get out of Simon's way eventually. P stands for papyrus, and the number is just how these manuscripts are catalogued by modern scholars. So P45 was discovered in Egypt in the 1930s and dates to around the year 250.

The significance of that is that it's a copy of the Gospels before the great Roman persecution of 303 to 312, where the Romans did their best to burn all Christian documents. The late great New Testament scholar Larry Hattato from Edinburgh University said of P45,

Like a flare bursting over a nighttime battlefield, it cast light upon the previously darkened pre-Constantinian centuries of the textual history of the New Testament, forcing revisions of scholarly views on several major matters in one giant step.

P45 brought scholarship on the text of the Gospels from the mid-fourth century practically to the doorstep of the second century. P75, the other one Simon mentioned, is also really cool. It's just Luke and John, but it's even older than P45. It's probably from the year 200, give or take 20 years.

Then there are a lot of little scraps of pages of the Gospels. For example, I got to play with P.O.X.E. 5345 in Oxford a few years ago. It's a bit of the first two pages of Mark's Gospel, and it too is from around the year 200. There's a photo of that in the show notes.

And as you get later on, there are more and more manuscripts and more complete ones. There's a very early, there's an early fragment of John's Gospel as well, P52, which is just a tiny little fragment

credit card sized fragments of John's Gospel and that's usually thought to come from the second century as well. And am I right that there's a little scrap of Mark, the front and back page of Mark, that's probably second century. Yeah, that's been very recently published. And is the reason we don't have more just that papyri, you know, they...

They wear out. Or I've often thought, and this is just a question off the cuff really, that the great persecution of 303 to 312, the first edict was burn all their scriptures. Mm-hmm.

So do you think this is why we don't have so many or is the other explanation the right one? I think probably a bit of both. I mean, there was also a great persecution in the sort of around 250 as well when a lot of manuscripts would have been destroyed. Almost all, well, all the manuscripts that we have of the Gospels that are early come from Egypt as well. So it's only because of the particular climate of Egypt that

that most manuscripts have survived from there. There were no doubt stacks of gospel manuscripts in Syria, in Asia Minor or Turkey,

Italy, especially in Rome, Greece. But because of the particular climate of Europe, we don't have many of them. So yeah, obviously no manuscripts have survived from that period. So, okay, so you're saying roughly 200, maybe some scraps from a little bit earlier. Some might say, ah, well...

the Gospels, there's no evidence the Gospels were written before that, before, say, 150, 160, because our only physical evidence of the Gospels is from that period. Sure. I mean, I think if you applied that argument consistently, you'd end up basically with hardly any literature from the ancient world. So a historian like... Tacitus wrote in the 10th century or something. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So most of our manuscript evidence is at least a century later written.

than the original composition, often a millennium later, like in the case of Tastus. Yeah, I thought of him because he's my favourite Roman historian. But yeah, the same applies. So with Plato, we've got a few fragments of 300 years later, but again, only sort of small fragments later.

So, often with compositions from the ancient world, you have to look for other sorts of evidence for when they're actually originally composed. And we do have references to the Gospels in other literature that's much earlier than the manuscripts. So, Ignatius of Antioch, writing probably in the sort of 110s AD, he alludes to a lot of the content of the Gospels, some peculiar phrases that only come up in the Gospels, like Jesus fulfilling all righteousness,

a quotation from the Gospel of Matthew or reference to the Gospel of Matthew. And other authors like Justin Martyr, writing in the mid-second century, talks about plural Gospels written either by disciples or by the friends of the disciples. So there is Didache, another example from the early second century, where we do have references to the Gospels, even if not sort of physical manuscripts of them.

Ignatius of Antioch was a Syrian bishop. He was a legend, and I don't mean a myth. I mean, he was very much real. I mean, he was amazing. He was arrested by Roman soldiers in Syria and then dragged across Turkey and Greece before being executed in Rome when Trajan was emperor. So around 115 AD.

Along the way, he was able to sneak off letters to various churches, and we have seven of them. And they sit on my desk every day. I know it sounds like I've got lots of books on my desk. I don't, but this really is on my desk. It's awesome. The cool thing is in those letters, he quotes themes and sayings that are also in the Gospels.

Like in his letter to the Ephesians, he speaks about love being the principal sign of the Christian. He obviously got that from Jesus. But then he actually says a tree is known by its fruit. Boom. That's straight from Jesus. We have that saying in Matthew chapter 7.

Then there's Justin Martyr, whom I don't have on my desk. He comes from about 30 years after Ignatius, and he refers to the Gospels as the Memoirs of the Apostles, which are called Gospels, he says. He says they are already in his day. So we're talking maybe 140, 150, something like that. These texts are being read out as Scripture in church meetings.

So thinking of those Ignatian references, would you lean toward thinking when Ignatius says something that sounds verbally very much like what we have in the Gospel, and he says, "as you have it in the Gospel," do you think he means the book yet? Or as some say, "oh no, no, no, he's not referring to the book, it's the oral tradition of the Gospel." What would be your hunch? I think sometimes in those second century manuscripts,

Sometimes it's probably referring to a sort of broad body of tradition. Some of them may only have had one gospel. And so when they refer to the gospel, that's the gospel that they're most familiar with. Probably Matthew's gospel or John's gospel, which are the two most popular gospels in the second century in terms of kind of references to them. But Justin is an example of someone who probably knows all four gospels. Ignatius, I think, certainly knows more than one, probably John and Matthew. So

They were certainly aware of these gospel texts pretty early on. Once Constantine becomes a Christian in 312 and the persecution of Christians ends, the Bible is copied freely. And so we get an explosion of texts from that point on. And Constantine actually helped.

He commissioned 50 complete copies of the Bible to be produced by the best scribes using the best materials. It cost the equivalent of millions of imperial dollars to produce, about 5,000 cowskins just for the pages.

Constantine must have seen it as a kind of compensation because the emperors just before him had gone out of their way to destroy hundreds, maybe thousands of copies of the New Testament scriptures. Before Constantine, who copied these texts?

That's a good question. I mean, I can imagine that some of them may have been copied by professional scribes who weren't Christians. We just don't know. But I suspect most of the copying was done by Christians entrusted with this important job. The handwriting gets better, though, in the 5th and 6th centuries, no? Yeah, some of them are written in... are copied in pretty similar styles to most other documents from the time. They're often much more legible than...

kind of administrative texts which are often really incomprehensible even to someone who knows Greek pretty well unless you know the

particular system of abbreviations. So the Gospel manuscripts, even the pretty early ones, are very legible, written in nice capital letters. The thing that makes it difficult for people coming across them for the first time is that there are no gaps between the words. Yeah, I thought I knew Greek when I graduated, and then they showed me what the manuscripts actually look like. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So just a series of capital letters with usually no kind of word divisions or even sentence divisions.

The Gospels are historical biographies. They were in circulation within the first century and read as scripture in the church in the early 100s AD. But

What about the authors themselves, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? Are these invented names attached to the manuscripts in the decades or even centuries after they were written? Some think so. It's one of Simon Gathercole's specialties. So I asked him about it after the break.

This episode of Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics' new book, ready for it? Mere Christian Hermeneutics, Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically, by the brilliant Kevin Van Hooser. I'll admit that's a really deep-sounding title, but don't let that put you off. Kevin is one of the most respected theological thinkers in the world today.

And he explores why we consider the Bible the word of God, but also how you make sense of it from start to finish. Hermeneutics is just the fancy word for how you interpret something. So if you want to dip your toe into the world of theology, how we know God, what we can know about God, then this book is a great starting point. Looking at how the church has made sense of the Bible through history, but also how you today can make sense of it.

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You can pre-order your copy of Mere Christian Hermeneutics now at Amazon, or you can head to zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions to find out more. Don't forget, zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions.

As I studied more and more using my intelligence as an evangelical, but also praying about it, I became convinced that the New Testament Gospels were not written by eyewitnesses or by people who knew eyewitnesses. The first point to make is the rather obvious one that the Gospels don't claim to be written by eyewitnesses. They are all anonymous.

The titles in your gospels, the gospel according to Matthew and so forth, were added by later editors. They were not put there by the original authors. That's New Testament scholar and self-described agnostic atheist, Bart Ehrman, making the case that the four gospels in the Bible were originally anonymous documents.

Ehrman reckons Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were names added to these documents at a later time to bolster the credibility of otherwise anonymous texts. Someone in the second century added the name Matthew to the gospel we now call Matthew.

That's because this was a big name, the Apostle Matthew, the tax collector and follower of Jesus. You can read about it in Matthew 9 and 10. Mark was added because he gets a little mention in Acts chapter 12, where his full name turns out to be John Mark. He's also mentioned in one of Paul's letters. He was likely a companion of Peter and composed his gospel based on what he heard Peter say over the years.

Well, someone like Ammon thinks that's probably rubbish. The name Mark was just added to that gospel for effect. Then there's Luke. He gets a passing mention in Paul's letter to the Colossians where he's called the physician. So someone plucked that name out too and added it to the anonymous text we now call Luke's gospel.

That's the view of Ehrman anyway. Same with John. His work was anonymous. And then in the second century, someone added the title Gospel According to John to give the impression it was produced by one of the actual disciples of Jesus. So that's a common view. What does Simon reckon?

Can we talk about the authors of the Gospels or the titles of the Gospels? How early do we find these author mentions? Gospel according to Matthew, Gospel according to Luke, etc. Well, we first come across those in those early third century manuscripts from around 200 or a bit later, so p45 and p75. The

The reason we come across them in those manuscripts and not in the earlier fragments is because the titles of the Gospels, as is the case with lots of ancient documents, come either at the beginning of a text or at the end.

or both. So I've got a copy, I'm looking at a picture here of P75. It's the break between the end of Luke's gospel and the beginning of John's gospel. And at the end of Luke's gospel. Yeah, so you have it in this case, both at the end and the beginning. The last sentence of Luke, then the gospel according to Luke. Break

Break of a line, then gospel according to John. In the beginning was the Word, and when the Word was with God, it was God. So we tend to find titles of gospels at the end and the beginning, especially in those early papyrus texts. When we get onto the later manuscripts, we find them in various other places as well. So I've got a big facsimile here of Codex Sinaiticus, and in Codex Sinaiticus you have them also –

like a running header at the top of the page as well. Codex Sinaiticus is an awesome, complete copy of the Bible, maybe even one of the ones that Constantine commissioned from the early to mid-300s.

And then often in other manuscripts, you might have a title page at the beginning of the codex, at the beginning of a bound book. We've got some examples of title pages. There are lots of ways in which you can represent a title in a manuscript. So those are a couple. All right. So they appear wherever we have a front page or an end page, like in the case of P75. You have these titles. Are the titles consistent?

Or as sometimes what we know as Luke's gospel, it's called the gospel of, I don't know, you

called the Gospel of John instead of Luke or some other name attached to it. In manuscripts, we don't have that variation. Sometimes in the early church fathers, they kind of misremember where a passage comes from. So, you know, Origen might refer to a passage in Mark that comes in Matthew or vice versa. But in the manuscripts, they are very consistent. So we only have the Gospel of Luke at the end of the Gospel of Luke and we only have the

Gospel according to John at the beginning of the Gospel of John. So the titles are amazingly consistent, really. The only variation that we sometimes find is that instead of the full title, the Gospel according to Luke, say, sometimes you have the abbreviated form just according to Luke.

where the gospel is assumed you know it's the gospel and this is marked. And you never get the abbreviation "the gospel"? No, no. So these named titles, the namings in the titles,

sort of primary. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I've looked at the manuscripts, we're up to about 8,500. I can't vouch for every single manuscript after that. Shame on you, Simon. But those are the ones I've looked at, at least. Were these not just added to lend credibility to these documents? You know, so Matthew was a big figure in the ancient church. So they said, ah,

Let's call it Gospel According to Matthew. Here's the big question I was talking about. Bart Ehrman and others reckon the titles were added for effect. But no one, not even Ehrman, has studied this question and published about it in the depth Simon Gathercole has. Yeah, I think that argument might work if we just had Matthew and John. Matthew and John were...

the two gospels that were particularly prized in the early church because they were written by apostles, Matthew and John being apostles. But it makes Mark and Luke very odd choices. If you were kind of trying to lend authority to a work,

Mark would be a very peculiar one to go for because he was a pretty minor figure in the early church. He's known to have fallen out with some of the apostles in Acts. And so he was an unusual choice. Luke would also be a very unusual choice because he's just referred to almost in footnotes at the end of some of Paul's letters, but is certainly not a key authority figure in the early church. So taken as a block,

Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John would be a surprising way to invent an attributing false authority. Because it'd be better to say gospel according to Peter instead of Mark. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it makes sense. Okay, but it's almost standard in scholarship. Half those books up there maybe would say the gospels were originally anonymous. So why do so many people say that? How did the idea become so popular? Well,

Well, I think there are two main reasons. First, that the Gospels themselves don't contain the author's names. So you don't have at the beginning of Luke's Gospel, say, Luke to Theophilus writing in order to assure you of the things that have been passed down to us. So Luke's name doesn't come embedded in the text of the Gospel itself.

And that's the case with all of the Gospels. And the second reason that people think that the Gospel titles come later is that when we first get that evidence in the second century for those titles, we have it in that standardized form, euangelion, cata, mathion, and gospel according to Matthew, and so on. And they're all called by that formulaic title. And the argument, which in many ways is quite reasonable, is that you wouldn't have

a gospel called the gospel according to Matthew unless you also had other

gospel writers with names in their titles as well. So, according to is a very unusual form of a title in the ancient world. We would expect, as we often actually find in our own Bibles, the Gospel of Matthew or the words and deeds of Jesus, Matthew's words and deeds in the genitive or using the English equivalent, the word of. But we only very, very occasionally have that sort of title.

with just "of". Normally we have that "according to". And so the reason for that in the early church was that there was assumed to be one gospel, the saving message of Jesus, and that one gospel comes in four forms. The one gospel, you know, it can be according to Matthew, it can be according to Mark, it can be according to Luke, it can be according to John.

So that 'according to', which we're sort of used to as just an empty phrase, is very significant in the early church. It means Matthew's version of the gospel, Mark's version of the gospel. So one other place where we find it is that the Greek translation of the Old Testament is the Old Testament 'according to the seventy'.

the 70 Greek translators. So, you know, it's not the Old Testament of the 70. They didn't write the Old Testament, but it's their version in Greek translation of the Old Testament. And so when you get the gospel title, the gospel according to Matthew, it's that same kind of language of

his version of the text. You probably wouldn't get that title unless there were other versions known. You don't talk about a version of something if there's only one. So there's some justification for thinking that

the title in that form is later. You've written, and so I'm going to quote you, back to you, anonymity cannot be inferred from an absence of authorial self-reference in the body of the work. The sort of, I, Luke, write to you, Theophilus. And therefore, the argument that the Gospels are anonymous because they do not contain the author's names is

is invalid. Stop. Okay, them's fighting words for a scholar anyway. For a British scholar, that's feisty. Is there any evidence that the Gospels were originally nameless? Well, I don't think so. I think we can be partly misled, I think, by the rest of the New Testament. When we come, as we often do, first to Paul, we find Paul's letter to the Romans, the first letter. Paul

To those in Christ in Rome or to those in Christ in Ephesus or whatever. Paul has his name at the beginning of every letter. Book of Revelation, John identifies himself as the author. Why don't we have the same thing in the Gospels? Well, the reason why we don't have the same thing in the Gospels is because the Gospels are a very different sort of document. They're not letters in which you need to identify yourself.

They're not an apocalypse like John's apocalypses where you usually have the person who's the recipient of revelation named.

They're basically, as we've been saying already, biographies. And in biographies, it's very, very unusual to have the author's name embedded in the text itself. So we've got stacks of biographies from antiquity. The person who I think probably wrote most was Plutarch.

He never includes his name in any of those biographies of all the people he covers in his parallel lives. So they're anonymous too? So they're anonymous too, although Plutarch might be a bit miffed if you said he didn't write them. Similarly, Tacitus writes a biography of his father-in-law, but he doesn't mention his name in the text itself.

So for biographies it's very common and biographies there just sort of mirror what's happening in history writing more generally as well. So when we come to the Gospels, it should be absolutely unsurprising that Luke and Matthew and John and Mark don't include their names in the work itself. So that's why I think it's totally insignificant as any sort of evidence for anonymous composition.

The claim that the Gospels are anonymous is no more accurate than insisting that a modern biography is anonymous on the grounds that the biographer's name appears only on the front and back cover of the book and not in the body of the work. Of course the Gospel writers didn't begin by writing, "I, Mark, now want to write about Jesus of Nazareth." That's not how this kind of literature worked.

But here's the thing. Wherever we find a surviving front and back page of a gospel manuscript, remember these titles appeared either at the front or at the back or both, we find a title indicating the biographer's name. And there is absolute uniformity in the names attached to the works. Euangelion Catamacon, Euangelion Catalucan, and so on. But we can go one better than that.

And you write, attribution of the second gospel to Mark goes back to John the Elder in the first century. This cannot be more than about 20 years after the composition of the gospel. In light of this, it seems extremely unlikely that there was a time when Mark was not associated

with the gospel. Talk me through this. Well, yeah, so we've got three time frames really to take into account here, starting with the latest one and working backwards. We've got the time frame of the person called Papias, who wrote a five-volume work about the oracles of the Lord.

And we don't have this whole work, but we have quotations from it. And so we have some really important quotations of it from the time of, which go back obviously to Papias' own time. He was writing probably in the 110s, 120s, 130s. So pretty early as a sort of testimony to the origins of the Gospels, which he touches on at several points.

So, around, let's say, 125, Papias has written this passage in which he talks about how Mark first wrote his gospel, but it was a bit higgledy-piggledy, so Matthew came along and tidied it up and put it in order. Papias is referring there not to his own opinion of these gospels, but to what he heard from someone called John the Elder.

And this John the Elder probably passed this on to Papias in the latter stages of the first century, going back, say, 30 years. And so John, in, say, the 80s or 90s, has this information about Matthew and Mark and passes it on to Papias, who then writes it down later. The Elder used to say this.

Mark, having become Peter's interpreter, wrote down accurately everything he remembered, though not in order of the things either said or done by Christ. For he neither heard the Lord nor followed him, but afterward, as I said, followed Peter, who adapted his teachings as needed but had no intention of giving an ordered account of the Lord's sayings.

Consequently, Mark did nothing wrong in writing down some things as he remembered them, for he made it his one concern not to admit anything that he heard or to make any false statement in them. Fragments of Papias, number 15.

So if we're looking at John the Elder there, if he has this opinion sort of in the 80s or 90s, then that's very close to where we have the composition, you know, to the composition of Mark, which was, I don't know, 60s, 70s. So with John the Elder, we're getting back very close to the original composition of Mark. It's hard to imagine that

the attribution to Mark would have sprung up between the composition of Mark in, say, the 60s and 70s and John the Elder in the 80s or 90s. Simon had similar compelling historical arguments along these lines for the composition of Luke's gospel, why Luke's name had to have been attached to his gospel from the beginning.

But for the sake of time, we've thrown that material into the Plus feed. Consider becoming a Plus subscriber and you'll get it all. Sorry, I don't mean to be a tease. Well, I do a little bit. Well, that's the four Gospels, all from the first century, all now in the New Testament. But what about the nearly 50 other Gospels and Gospel-like works from the second to the fourth centuries?

Simon's an expert in that stuff too. In fact, he recently published a major new translation and study of these texts for the Penguin Classics series. It's called The Apocryphal Gospels, published 2021. So that's where we're heading after this short break.

68-year-old Tirat was working as a farmer near his small village on the Punjab-Sindh border in Pakistan when his vision began to fail. Cataracts were causing debilitating pain and his vision impairment meant he couldn't sow crops.

It pushed his family into financial crisis. But thanks to support from Anglican Aid, Tirat was seen by an eye care team sent to his village by the Victoria Memorial Medical Centre. He was referred for crucial surgery. With his vision successfully restored, Tirat is able to work again and provide for his family.

There are dozens of success stories like Tarat's emerging from the outskirts of Pakistan, but Anglican Aid needs your help for this work to continue. Please head to anglicanaid.org.au forward slash Anglican.

This is the story of a battle of words that spread across continents that led to intrigue, forgery, condemnation. A battle in which texts fought against each other for acceptance in a fledgling faith.

And what was at stake was the kind of faith that Christianity would turn out to be. If the Gospel of Peter had won out, Christians today might believe that Jesus never died.

If the Gospel of Philip had won, Mary Magdalene might have been hailed as the first pope. If the infancy narrative of James had been accepted, I would have learned in Sunday school that a child called Jesus caused his teacher to wither on the spot just for reprimanding him and class.

In fact, if any of the different texts had ended up in the New Testament, Christianity today would look very different. Or perhaps it wouldn't have survived at all.

We're listening to the British Anglican priest and TV presenter Peter Owen Jones in the 2008 BBC documentary The Lost Gospels. It's fairly click-baity at points, but it does a great job of laying out the stakes of what was considered a gospel in the ancient world. Contrast between the New Testament Gospels and the Apocryphal and Gnostic Gospels is not just the time gap of a century or more,

It's the view of reality. It's fundamentally different in these different kinds of literature. It's a theme explored in one of Simon's other recent books, the one I mentioned at the top of the show, the 2022 volume, The Gospel and the Gospels, Christian Proclamation and Early Jesus Books. The powerful thing about your new book is you just ask the very simple question, what about all those other gospels?

How do they compare to this pattern of reflecting the earliest Christian preaching? So my two questions here are, one, for readers who don't have any clue about those other gospels, what are they? And two...

In what way do those other Gospels depart from this early pattern that you've detected? Yeah, so we can't dispute that there are other Gospels, right? There is mostly just taking examples from the second century. There's the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Judas, the Gospel of Truth, the Gospel of Philip.

the Gospel of the Egyptians, Marcion's Gospel, and the Gospel of Peter. Those are the seven that I refer to in the book. They certainly existed in the second century. So Irenaeus, for example, the church father, writing in 180 or so, refers to the Gospel of Judas and the Gospel of Truth. Hippolytus, writing at the beginning, or Pseudo-Hippolytus, writing at the beginning of the third century, refers to the Gospel of Thomas. There certainly were these other things called Gospels.

And so the question is, people are asking, are they as early as the other Gospels? Are they as historically reliable as the canonical Gospels? I don't really get into that, but I get into this question of whether they reflect that same early Christian preaching.

If you want more info about the Gnostic Gospels compared historically to the earlier New Testament Gospels, check out episode 30 I mentioned before, Canon Fodder, with New Testament scholar Mike Bird and ancient historian Chris Forbes. We'll put a link to the full thing in the show notes. But for now, here's a little throwback to season, what, I guess that's season three, to a particular bit in that episode. Whoa!

In 1945, a collection of manuscripts was uncovered in the Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi, 500 kilometres south of Cairo. The 13 codices, books, were found in a storage jar buried underneath a boulder.

Bizarrely, the man who made the discovery, whose name was Muhammad Ali, I kid you not, took the priceless documents back to his home where his mother burned some of the pages as fuel for her bread oven. Fortunately, they were soon viewed by an antiquities dealer and then eventually made available for scholarly assessment.

We have no firm information about who originally owned the books or about why they were hidden in this way sometime in the 4th century. Some have speculated that the collection was being protected from an inquisitorial church eager to stamp out alternative gospels. There's zero evidence for that. It's more likely that these leather-bound books

a precious commodity in antiquity, were just being hidden from thieves or invaders or the elements. After years of wrangling between collectors and museums, the codices are now kept safe in the beautiful little Coptic Museum of Cairo. They are classified by scholars as Gnostic Gospels,

because they all seem to follow a similar pattern of Jesus whispering some secret knowledge, gnosis is the Greek word for knowledge, to one of the apostles while the others weren't listening. So it's whispering to Judas or whispering to Philip or whispering to Thomas or whatever. The main part of the secret knowledge is that the God of the Jews, that is the God of creation,

sucks. And by listening to these secret teachings contained in the document, your spirit can escape this material world, this physical body, and rejoin the highest spirit, the true God of the universe.

It's got more in common with Hinduism than Judaism, which is why most scholars think they're not very good sources for understanding the historical Jesus centuries earlier. Generally, the reason books were included or excluded from the canon was whether they could be tied to an apostolic author or an apostolic associate. So someone like Paul, Peter, or John Mark, like that, you know, John Mark being an associate of Peter and Paul, whether

whether they were Orthodox, whether they kind of, you know, could be aligned with the rule of faith, you know, the basic summary of the Christian story of, you know, of God, Jesus, the church, that type of a thing.

And whether they were actually used universally, you know, and were they used and read in worship around the church Catholic? You know, could you take a copy of the Gospel of Matthew and go from North Africa all the way to Dalmatia, you know, from Spain all the way to Mesopotamia? And would people know the book you were referring to? Would they have the same sense of belief and the authoritative status attributed to that book?

that was largely the basis in which certain books were decided to be in and certain books were to be decided to be out of bounds. It was more about a developing consensus than a kind of top-down imposition.

Check out the rest of Cannon Fodder. It's a really fun episode. Anything with Mike Bird is fun. But Simon's interest is different and no less revealing. He's exploring whether these later Gospels make any attempt at all to preserve the earliest Christian proclamation or whether they are in fact a conscious departure from that foundation.

A lot of these gospels are actually coming up with a new definition really of who Jesus is.

especially in trying to sort of distance him from Judaism. The four canonical gospels are really sort of embedded in the world of first century Judaism and describe Jesus in those terms, fulfillment of scripture, Jewish Messiah. There seems to be among these other gospel writers a sort of distaste for associating Jesus too much with Judaism. And so perhaps surprisingly, we have in a number of them

a sort of refusal to call Jesus Christ. The Gospel of Thomas doesn't mention the title Christ at all. In the Gospel of Judas, the title Christ is the title of a demon, not a title of Jesus at all. In the Gospel of the Egyptians, there are a number of different figures called Christ. There's not a reluctance to call Jesus Christ, but there are lots of Christ figures.

Marcion has two Christs. The one forecast by Scripture is the sort of bad Christ of the Creator. So Marcion has this surprising system in which there are two gods. There's the supreme God, and there's the God who made the world, and they're not the same God. And Jesus is the Christ of that superior God, nothing to do with the Old Testament God. So in a number of these texts,

already the idea of Jesus being Christ is very problematic. And so, none of them have the same understanding of Jesus as Messiah as the early Christian preachers would have assumed. And the death and the resurrection, how do they feature in that? Well, there's more variation there actually. So, in the Gospel of Peter, you have a clear statement of the resurrection on the third day. In some of the texts, especially the Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of Truth,

you have a very strong, and Marcion's gospel actually, you have a clear idea that Jesus' death was saving, had a saving effect. And whereas in others like the gospel of Judas and the gospel of the Egyptians, Jesus wasn't really a physical human being and so he couldn't have died so much. So my point in the book is not that

The other Gospels have none of the early Christian kerygma, but they're just much more selective in how they draw on it. Again, some of them draw on the title Christ, but not in the traditional sense of Messiah. So how do you value the Gnostic Gospels as testimony to the earliest Christian preaching that we can historically verify? Well, they don't offer much insight into what the earliest Christian preaching was.

They offer insight into what particular groups valued theologically. So the Gospel of Truth and the Gospel of Philip, for example, are

Valentinian documents go back to a movement started by a figure called Valentinus in the second century, and they have his particular theological emphases in them. The Gospel of Judas and the Gospel of...

or gnosis, is that your soul has come from the infinite soul of the universe and is now, unfortunately, trapped inside a physical body in this horrible physical world. The goal is to escape the world, escape the body, and return to the light. And that light, by the way, is not the God of the Jews, the God of creation. Gnostics hated creation and its God.

No, the true light is more like Hinduism's Brahman. And indeed, there are probably Eastern connections in the Gnostic system of belief.

The point is, you find nothing like this in the earlier New Testament Gospels. Jesus, the Jew, loved creation, loved the creator God, and promised bodily resurrection in a renewed creation to anyone who turned to God for mercy. The Gospel of Judas and the Gospel of the Egyptians are sometimes called classic Gnostic Gospels.

in their theology. So they have those particular emphases, similarly with Marcion's gospel. And so what we get an insight into from these gospels, I think, is the kind of things that people argued about in terms of who Jesus was in the second century. So they're interesting documents of church history, but they're not really authoritative statements about who the historical Jesus was and what the apostles actually preached. Let's press pause. I've got a five-minute Jesus for you.

What is the earliest account of Christian belief and proclamation, in the opinion of all experts?

Well, it's actually not the one in the Gospels. It's in a letter of Paul. Paul's letters were written in the middle of the first century, approximately 20 to 40 years after Jesus. That is a relatively small time gap by ancient standards. Remember I said earlier that Tacitus wrote his account of Tiberius almost 80 years after the emperor.

Yet one passage from Paul takes us much closer to within just a few years of the crucifixion itself. In his letter to the Corinthians, which we know was penned around A.D. 55, Paul stops to remind his readers of the core message he had already preached to them when he was with them in Corinth five years earlier, so A.D. 50.

He does this in the common ancient style of a pithy, memorable summary, what scholars call a creed, which the Corinthians had learnt by heart when Paul was with them. This is part of the ancient world that we know quite well. Primary schools in Paul's day used these same mnemonic devices to remember and learn the basics of, say, speech writing.

The philosophical schools for adults used the same techniques. The school of the Epicureans, for example, employed memorable summaries to lock into the minds of his disciples the central arguments of Epicurus. I happen to be writing an academic book on that very topic. I won't bore you with the details. Jewish rabbis did the same thing.

They made their disciples learn key summary statements by rote. It was a way of safeguarding the most important ideas. Josephus, for example, in the first century tells us, quote, This is technical language.

to the people certain regulations handed down by former generations and not recorded in the laws of Moses. He's talking about oral tradition memorized. The key terminology here, which was also used in philosophical schools, was pass on, paradidomi, and receive, paralambano. One was the duty of the teacher to pass on, the other was the duty of the student to receive.

Now, why am I telling you all of this? Paul was himself a former Pharisee. He employed the same practice to good effect among his non-Jewish hearers. And what's fascinating in the paragraph I'm about to quote to you, promise, is that Paul admits he's not the source of the oral summary or creed that he passed on to his converts.

Just as Paul Paradidomi passed on this creed to the Corinthians when he was with them in AD 50, so Paul says he, Paralambano, received it from others when he first learnt about Christ. Given we know when Paul became a disciple, this statement must date to the early 30s AD. And with that ridiculous build-up,

Here is the Creed, exactly as Paul taught it and exactly as the Corinthians received it.

That Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures. That he was buried. That he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures. And that he appeared to Kephas, or Peter, and then to the Twelve. That's 1 Corinthians 15, verses 3 to 5.

Scholars debate exactly when Paul received this pithy creed. Some date it to the year of his conversion, 3132, when he was in Damascus, and others date it to AD 3334, when he spent 15 days in Jerusalem in conversation with the Apostle Peter and Jesus' brother James, an event we know of from Galatians 1. But we

But whichever date you accept, 31, 32, 33, 34, I don't care. James Dunn of the University of Durham speaks for many when he says, and I quote, "This tradition," 1 Corinthians 15:3-5, "we can be entirely confident was formulated as tradition within months of Jesus' death." This is as close to the events as a historian could ever hope for. The significance of it is obvious.

It establishes beyond reasonable doubt that at least six elements of the narrative of Jesus arose immediately after his death and can't have been part of some developing legend.

Already by, let's say, A.D. 35 at the latest, the following was part of formal Christian education and proclamation: 1. Jesus' status as Hocristos, the Messiah. 2. His death for sins.

3. His burial in a tomb. 4. His resurrection after three days. 5. His multiple appearances. And 6. His appointment of a special 12 apostles, a key leader of which was Kephas, or Peter.

All of this was sufficiently well known to have become part of a formal summary of Christianity which was passed on to converts far and wide. This proves in the historian's sense of the word prove.

that what was later written down in detail in the gospels and hinted at throughout paul's letters was already being proclaimed by missionaries and committed to memory by disciples within months of the events themselves you can press play now you've made the case that the gospels these four gospels that we're talking about correspond in broad terms to the earliest christian preaching

Yeah, so I take as an example of the earliest Christian preaching what Paul reports in 1 Corinthians 15. Here's the full passage I reflected on a moment ago. Thanks, Dakota. Now, brothers and sisters, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. By this gospel you are saved if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you.

Otherwise, you have believed in vain. For what I received, I passed on to you as of first importance, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas and then to the Twelve.

After that, he appeared to more than 500 of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one of normally born. For I am the least of the apostles, and do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.

1 Corinthians 15:1-11

So in that passage, the first 11 verses or so of 1 Corinthians 15, seem to me to be a real piece of gold, a sort of key to understanding what

early Christians preached. So there he talks about the gospel which he preached to them, by which they're saved, which they need to hold on to, and which he passed on to them as of first importance. So he really stacks up the status of this message that he's describing. And then at the end afterwards, he goes on to say that this is what all of us apostles preach, and this is what you Corinthians have believed. So

So he really lays on thick the sort of status that this message that he's summarizing has. And the way he summarizes it is,

that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he rose again on the third day according to the Scriptures and appeared to Peter and the others. So those two central planks there, that Christ died for our sins and rose again, are two of the key components of the Gospel. The other major components that I see in that passage are

the person who did this, Christ, that's who Jesus is. He's not just anyone who did this. It's a particular person with a particular biography. And that these two great events of Christ's death, the sins, and resurrection on the third day are according to the Scriptures. You have that repeated in that passage. Both of them are according to the Scriptures. So

So there's Christ, his death for our sins, his resurrection on the third day, and his fulfillment of scripture. So those are the four key components of the earliest Christian preaching that that passage gives us. And all those four components come very prominently in the four New Testament gospels.

There's no doubt there. If you just take Christ, Jesus' identity as the Christ, for example. Well, the first half of each gospel seems to be building up his credentials as the Christ. Yeah, so halfway through the synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, you have Jesus'

being declared as the Christ. In John, it doesn't quite work in the same sequence, but John says at the end, he's written this gospel so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God. So in all four gospels, that's pretty clear. His death for our sins comes very clearly in the synoptic gospels, in the ransom saying, the Son of Man came not to be served, but to give his life as a ransom for many. The Last Supper saying. Yeah, the Last Supper sayings.

And in John, in lots of different places in different imagery, like the Good Shepherd laying down his life for the sheep and lots of other things. The Lamb of God. Yeah, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. And similarly with the resurrection, they all refer to the resurrection. Mark doesn't have actual resurrection appearances, but he's just as clear as the others that resurrection takes place on the third day. Am I right though that even though Mark doesn't record resurrection appearances,

There are those little references in, is it 14 and 15, where appearances are mentioned that they will happen? Yeah, 14 and then 16, the penultimate verse, 16, 7, go and you'll see Jesus in Galilee. Yeah, so there are forecasts of resurrection appearances. Yeah, and of course, fulfillment of the scriptures is kind of shot through all four gospels. So I think Matthew, Mark, and Luke...

really follow that existing kerygma, or as I call it, the preached message of the apostles. Not that they sort of have that kerygma in mind and that preached message in mind and think, right, chapter one, I've got to work in something from that. I think it's more that they naturally think of the gospel in those terms, that when they are writing gospels, they are preaching the gospel at the same time. ♪

The earliest Christian proclamation, what Christians call their gospel, is basically what's found in the books called the Gospels. Unlike the later Gnostic books, the New Testament Gospels are our clearest window into what the first Christians were saying about what's important to know about Christianity.

And it's basically Jesus' life and teaching showing him to be the Messiah, his death by crucifixion, which from the beginning was interpreted as a sacrifice for our wrongdoing, his burial in a tomb, something all four gospels give quite a bit of information about, and his resurrection and appearances to eyewitnesses who started proclaiming the stuff pretty much instantly.

You may not believe all of that, but the historical point is that's the original form of Christianity. There is no earlier form of the faith. There are just later additions, variations, and even perversions of that faith in the coming centuries. But the core is the core, and it's in the Gospels. And so for me, the punchline of talking to Simon is very simple. Whether you believe or doubt,

There is no more effective and intellectually responsible way to get back to original Christianity, to understand the faith that has shaped our world, than to read one of the New Testament Gospels. Now to be clear, I don't think history can prove the details of all of this. History isn't like that. History is only good at establishing what you might call the general plausibility of sources or an event or a person from the past.

Historical analysis can lead us to the broad conclusion that the New Testament Gospels are our best, earliest window into the life of Jesus of Nazareth, and therefore into the earliest Christian message. And I would be thrilled if this episode of our 11th season managed to help us navigate out of the nonsense so often said about the Gospels and Jesus today.

and inspired us, especially if you're not sure what to make of Christianity, to just pick up a gospel and read it for yourself. Pick up Mark, maybe. That's the briefest of the gospels. Or Luke, the longest in word count. Neither is anonymous. They were written by people in direct contact with eyewitnesses.

Or you could try Matthew, which contains all of Jesus' greatest hits, Love Your Enemy, Our Father in Heaven, A Tree is Known by Its Fruit, and so on. Or John, the most philosophically profound of the Gospels, written by someone who knew Jesus personally. I don't think it matters which one you read. These four, the earliest. These four inspired the Gospel writing industry that went nuts in the next two centuries, after they were written.

But these four provide the window into original Christianity. They give us front row seats to what we at Undeceptions reckon is the greatest show on earth. Music

If you have questions about this episode or any of our other episodes, just ask. You'll see the options in the show notes at underceptions.com to send us an audio or text message. I'll be answering a bunch of them in this season's Q&A episode. And if you want to support us, click the large donate button on our main page, underceptions.com.

For our US listeners who'd like to give a tax-deductible donation, there's a link there specially for you. We really appreciate it. See ya. Music

Undeceptions is hosted by me, John Dixon, produced by Kayleigh Payne and directed by Mark Valentinian Hadley. Sophie Hawkshaw is on socials and membership. Alistair Belling is writer and researcher. Siobhan McGuinness is our online librarian. Lindy Leveson remains my wonderful assistant. Santino DiMarco is chief finance and operations consultant, editing by Richard Humwee. Our voice actor today was, of course, Dakota Love.

Special thanks to our series sponsor, Zondervan, for making this Undeception possible. Undeceptions is the flagship podcast of Undeceptions.com, letting the truth out. An Undeceptions podcast.