This episode dives deep into the fascinating mysteries of the four gospel accounts—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—and explores why they were written when they were. Speaker Ronald L. Dart leads listeners through a thoughtful analysis of historical documents and scholarly insights, comparing the process to a legal courtroom where evidence is examined and judged. Through this lens, we begin to understand the meticulous process these documents underwent before becoming the bedrock of the Christian faith.
00:00:03 Introducing Ronald L. Dart and Born to Win
The CEM Network is pleased to present Ronald L. Dart and Born to Win.
SPEAKER 03 :
Now, I want to pose yet another mystery about the four gospel accounts, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. But before I can do that, we need to consider some things. We’re allowed in studying the testimony of these men to consider their objectives and their circumstances as far as we can determine them. We’re assisted in this task by the testimony of a legion of expert witnesses. We call them scholars. Now, if you’re sitting on the jury in a murder trial, the prosecuting attorney is going to put the police detective on the stand. And he’s going to show the police detective a revolver. And he’ll say, you know, where did you find this revolver? Or have you seen this revolver before? And he will take it in his hands and examine it. Well, you’ve all watched Perry Mason enough. You know how that’s done. He says, yes, this has my mark on it. I recognize this revolver. Where did you find it? And they go about establishing the chain of evidence. They establish the fact that this gun was found at the scene of the crime. They establish the fact the fingerprints of the defendant are on it. And, well, you know the routine of how it all goes through. But they bring in then witnesses in the course of the trial to testify as to whether the bullet found in the deceased is a bullet that was fired by this gun. Now, the expert witnesses, well, they’re scholars, and they compare very well in our little analogy. Here you are sitting on a jury where we’re talking about the book of Matthew, whether it is true, whether it is right, whether it is valid. And we’re going to bring in an expert witness who’s going to tell you things that we know about the book of Matthew. It’s exactly the same. And so the prosecution brings in its expert witness, and then the defense brings in its expert witness, and we get into enormous conflicts. Now, the beauty and the genius of our legal system is this. Our legal system assumes that ordinary guys and gals like you and me with no special training in forensics or anything of the kind, can listen to all this, decide who’s telling the truth, judge the probabilities in a case, and come to a decision beyond a reasonable doubt as to the guilt or innocence of this fellow sitting over here in the defendant’s chair. We actually have to kind of assume in a way that something just like this goes on in biblical studies. that you and I, ordinary people, are able to read the testimony of expert witnesses, we’re able to hear the testimony by the witness himself, and we’re able to arrive at conclusions about whether it’s true or whether it’s not. Now, there’s something you need to think about about scholars and biblical scholars in particular. It’s imperative that the investigating scholar be objective. That is to say, he must not be biased either for or against what we have in question. If a Christian scholar is going to address a problem of the text of the New Testament, he must lay aside his pro-Christian beliefs and he must study this text as if he had never seen it before and had no idea whether there was a God or not. Now, I know it’s troubling to some people. They pick up a scholarly work, and the scholar proceeds to discuss the New Testament or the text of the New Testament as though there were no God. He discusses it as though he didn’t believe it. He discusses it as though he doesn’t even know whether it’s true or whether it’s not. But you have to understand that’s his job. It’s his job to stay unbiased and independent in his investigation. That’s not your job. And the truth is that while there is such a body of literature in the study, in the scholarly study of the New Testament and the Old Testament for that matter, no other historical documents have ever been subject to this kind of discussion, this kind of analysis, this kind of critique. And you can be sure that when they put this expert witness on the stand and he tells you something about Matthew, There will be another witness along later who will tell you, well, yes, I understand what Dr. So-and-so is saying, but he didn’t take this into consideration. Look at this instead. And you and I, as ordinary people, we can read it, and we can say, no, I don’t think so. Or, yeah, I think he’s right. And we can come to our own conclusion about the truth or the error of some particular expert testimony. But the important thing for us when all is said and done is what about the document that’s before us? Do we believe that or do we not? Expert witnesses commonly disagree. But in the course of time, certain things become generally agreed upon by them all. And it’s when you get to this point that teachers like me begin to pull the expert witness together and bring it to people like you so that you can evaluate it and so you can sit and think it through. For example, New Testament scholarship now is nearly unanimous, that of all the Christian documents available from history, there are 27, and only 27, that are unmistakably dated in the first century. What do you think they might be? Well, those are the 27 books we call the New Testament. So you can take to the bank, really, with a great deal of security, the fact that all 27 books of your New Testament were originally written. They have their origins in the first century. Consequently, that gives you awfully good ground for believing them. It’s a remarkable piece of testimony. It has a powerful influence on our ability to believe or not believe those documents. These same scholars have concluded that the earliest date for Matthew would be probably around 60 AD, and the latest would be in the 80s, the early 80s. Most likely, it was written sometime in the 60s. As a matter of passing interest, Matthew was probably about the same age as Jesus when he started his ministry, and that suggests that he was in his 60s when he actually sat down and wrote his gospel account. Now, here is the puzzle I was talking about at the beginning of this program. Why did Matthew wait so long to write down his testimony? Think about it. You know, he’s in his early 30s when Christ ascends into heaven. And as the early church begins to get underway, there would have had to have been a lot of demand for Matthew’s testimony. And he would have remembered it very well. It would all have been fresh in his mind. Why didn’t he write it then? Why would Matthew have waited 30 to 50 years, depending on the scholar, to actually sit down and write this up? We’ll talk about the answer to that when we come back in just a moment.
SPEAKER 02 :
Join us online at borntowin.net. That’s borntowin.net. Read essays by Ronald Dart. Listen to Born to Win radio programs every day, past weekend Bible studies, plus recent sermons, as well as sermons from the CEM Vault. Drop us an email and visit our online store for CDs, DVDs, literature, and books. That’s borntowin.net.
SPEAKER 03 :
Okay, why did Matthew wait so long to write his gospel account? Well, I think there may have been several things at work. One of our problems as we look back is that we have a habit of sort of overlaying our expectations, our society, our community, our culture, maybe is a good word for it, over that first century culture. And things were really very different back then from what they are today. And you’ve got to remember these were real people in a real world, and it’s a world very different from ours. For example, they were not nearly as literate as we are. The numbers or the percentages of people who were able to read and write were much lower. If they had been more literate, or if Matthew had possessed a word processor, the whole story might have been very different. And you also have to remember that in the beginning, there was little time for anything except preaching and teaching. There were throngs of people coming and going in and around Jerusalem. They had managed to baptize 3,000 people on the first day of Pentecost whenever they first preached and advanced the gospel. And then later they baptized thousands more. So with people coming and going from Jerusalem, and every time a holy day would come by, and throngs of Jews would come to Jerusalem from Alexandria, from other places in Egypt, from Rome, from the far-flung stretches of the empire, there was a great call upon Matthew and all the rest of them to tell their story. And so tell their story they did. They had little time to sit down and write stories. There’s reason to believe that also that the disciples thought Jesus’ return was really going to be quite soon. Before he ascended, they said, well, Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel? They were still thinking in terms of a Messiah who would come in and throw the Romans out and restore the old kingdom. And Jesus didn’t really disabuse them of that. He just said, it’s not for you to know the times or the seasons. And so they still went on their way thinking that, well, the Lord may come any time now. The twelve saw their job as bearing witness. They were to testify, and a witness usually testifies in front of the people before him. I don’t think it occurred to them immediately to write down their testimony for posterity because they were telling it again and again and again and again. And I suspect that Matthew and Mark and John and the others had this thing pretty well memorized before very many months had gone by, much less the years that began to pass. I think it was only as they began to age and die off that any of them realize the necessity of writing things down. What’s curious is that the earliest Christian writings that are in existence today are not the gospel accounts. They are Paul’s letters. And they were not written for posterity. They were written for the right here and now. Paul was writing from where he was to where some people were about very specific questions that they had, about problems that they were facing. It was all just first century communication between people. We are blessed to have it. I suspect there was a great deal more of it that has perished and that we don’t have. Now, there may be a fringe benefit, though, in the fact that Matthew and John and the rest of them did not write early. It’s apparent, actually, in John’s gospel, I think, more than in Matthew. But the apostles came to understand Jesus better with time. You know, if you’re familiar with Matthew and Mark and Luke and John, you’ll remember the fact that so often Jesus would kind of upbraid his disciples by the fact that they didn’t understand what he was saying or they didn’t believe or they seemed to lack faith in things that were so obvious. And it’s very clear that he had to explain parables to them because they didn’t get it. And even when he has told them what he was going to do, he died, he was buried, he was resurrected, and then he ascended to the Father. He did all these things, and he told them he was going to do it. And yet they still seem to be wandering around in a fog on it. Now, we can look back with a certain amount of condescension on the disciples saying, well, I wonder why those poor jerks didn’t understand that. But, you know, you’ve got to understand, we’ve had 2,000 years to look at this stuff. We’ve had all kinds of people to explain it to us. They didn’t get it right off because they needed time to assimilate the things that Jesus had told them. They needed time to study the Old Testament scriptures and to be able to compare things that Jesus said to the things the Old Testament had said and prophesied. And they in time came to understand things that they did not understand the day that Jesus ascended into the heavens. I think in some cases they needed events in their own lives to lock in with things that they had been told so that they could somehow be able to understand. So we have the benefit then, because they waited, of a mature understanding of what Jesus taught rather than the green understanding of what Jesus taught that all of them had the day or two after Jesus ascended into the heavens. You know, if there had been an Internet in those days, we would have a staggering archive of Christian material to study. There would be letters and accounts and discussions and arguments galore for us to analyze. You know, I rather suspect that there was a paper Internet at the time, and all that documentation was there in the forms of letters and comments going back and forth. But it’s perished. So much time has passed. It was written on perishable materials, and the ordinary letters of people back and forth on papyrus was not preserved. Nobody thought it was important enough. Who knows, maybe someday, with all of the research going on, with people wandering around the Middle East with grounds, you know, radar. They have radar now that can look underground and find caves and caverns. Who knows what they’re going to find? They may yet find new gospel accounts or even older manuscripts of gospels that we never have seen before. And we’ll study them, and we’ll work with them. But most of it is gone, and we have got, well, we have really got enough. It’s really amazing, in a way, when you look back through time, how any of it survived at all. And that brings up the question, how did the book of Matthew get from Matthew’s hands to yours? Because I expect nearly everybody listening to me right now has got somewhere in their house and have held in their hands a Bible. And in that Bible, there is the book of Matthew. So it’s been in your hands and it started in Matthew’s hands. Was it a miracle? Oh, I think it was. But it didn’t have to be. You know, we need to be able to explain to the skeptics, let’s do it right now, let’s explain to the skeptics how easy it was to arrange for the preservation of the New Testament without God so much as lifting a little finger. Now remember, all these people, the skeptics and everyone else out there, are acting and serving as their own jury. And they need not only evidence, but they need a theory of the case that makes sense to them. They do not now believe. How can they come to believe? All right, the issue on the table then is the authenticity of these documents and testimony from experts as to how we came by them. If a piece of evidence is going to be presented in court, then the prosecution must account for every step in the handling of the evidence from the time it was found until the time it is presented to the jury. We’ve already talked about that. Okay, how did Matthew get here? Let’s start with a theory of the case. We know that sometime in the first century, Matthew sat down and wrote this document. How many people do you suppose knew of its existence at the time? Well, let me be more specific. From the time that Matthew put the last scratches of ink on paper, within, let’s say, a week after that, how many people would have known about the existence of the Gospel of Matthew? Well, to some extent, that depends on where he was. If he was still in Jerusalem, the number within a week would probably be several thousand. because of the number of people who were Christians who were there. There were Christian synagogues there. There were Christians coming and going there. And you have to understand that in this day and time, these 12 men, these apostles, were very important men to the early church. These were the men who were authorized to carry the testimony of Jesus Christ. They got a fever, were sick in bed for a couple of days. The church all over the whole area knew about it. And, of course, the completion of a written version of Matthew’s gospel would have been important news to everybody, so thousands. Or maybe if he was in Antioch at the time, several hundred, or maybe if he was in Pella across the Jordan River, if it was after the fall of Jerusalem, maybe several dozen would have known about it. within a week. But really, by the time many months had passed, news of this gospel of Matthew would have gone all over the empire. Now, by the time Matthew wrote his gospel account, going back from it, you know, before he started to sit down to write, how many people do you suppose had heard him tell his story in person? Oh, my. We understand how many thousands of Christians had been baptized in Jerusalem, but And I have little doubt that every Sabbath day he would have been up somewhere telling his story. There would be a group of pilgrims that had come to Jerusalem from Alexandria, and they wanted to hear the story. So somebody went and got Matthew, and Matthew stood before them, and he recounted the story for them. Another group came in from Greece, and Matthew stood before them and recounted the story before them. He told the story time after time after time after time. Thousands of people had heard Matthew personally tell his story. Now, how many times do you suppose he had told it? And do you suppose by the time he got through all those times that he had it pretty well memorized? Well, of course he did. Now, if you start thinking about this question, how many people who heard him tell it had heard him tell it so many times that they had it memorized? Because, you know, in a time where people value memorization, when their memories are better than ours and very strong and they work at it, well then the people who heard Matthew again and again and again also had Matthew’s message memorized. Now, think about this. By the time any of the four gospel writers actually put their story on paper, the memorized account of the life and ministry of Jesus was well known throughout the Christian community in all parts of the Roman Empire. you would have had people everywhere who could have sat down and told the story. And they would have told it almost verbatim to what any number of other people would have done. There is an interesting occasion in the book of Acts, as a matter of fact, where a man named Philip would get up and get himself down to a road that ran south and west out of Jerusalem. And when he got there, he encountered an Ethiopian from the court of Candace, the queen of Ethiopia, who was on his way home. And as he went on his way home in his chariot, he was sitting there reading, and it was customary for people in those times to read aloud. They didn’t really read silently like we do today. He was reading from the book of Isaiah. And as Philip was walking along beside his chariot, he heard this, and he looked up at the man, and he said, Do you understand what you’re reading? And the guy said, well, no, how can I unless somebody explains this thing to me? And so Philip got up into the chariot with him, and starting right where he was reading in the book of Isaiah, we are told, began to preach to him Jesus. Now, here’s the interesting question. Exactly how much of Jesus did Philip preach? Well, nowadays an oral recitation of the events of the life of Jesus would be little more than rumor. Well, I heard he did this, and I heard he did that. How well could you expect to do in explaining the message and the life of Jesus to somebody who had never heard of him, mind you, without a Bible? You have no Bible. You have no New Testament. You may have the book of Isaiah in this guy’s hands. And here you are, not Philip, you, with your knowledge, your awareness, and so forth. And this guy says, look, I’m reading about this, and I don’t understand it. How does this connect to this fellow I heard of called Jesus of Nazareth? I don’t know anything about him. What can you tell me? Well, I don’t think you’d do very well. I wouldn’t. I would get bits and pieces of it right. I’d have, you know, snatches of it. But I would not be accurate in my wording in many cases, and I would be guessing about the sequence of events. I want you to realize Philip had a memorized testimony to give to this man. He told the same story everywhere he went, and the story was comprehensive and complete. Now, I have told you all this to ask you a question. By the time Matthew got around to writing his gospel, 30 years after the fact, how much chance do you think he would have had of foisting off a revised message on the people who were going to hear it?
SPEAKER 02 :
I’ll let you think about that for a moment, and I’ll be right back. 1-888-BIBLE-44 and tell us the call letters of this radio station.
SPEAKER 03 :
It’s pretty clear that by the time Matthew actually got around to writing this thing down, the message itself had gone far and wide and there would be very little chance of having a revised message come out there and say, now wait a minute, this is totally different from everything we have heard that Matthew has had to say. And, of course, Matthew was still alive for some time after he wrote his gospel to affirm it and to say, oh, yeah, I wrote it. That’s it. That’s what I wrote. I didn’t write something else. So that this gospel was very much established by witnesses. And, of course, there were also many witnesses to Jesus’ story who were alive at this time and for some little time thereafter. Okay, but now what about the transmission of the gospel? How did we get it, and how do we know that it hadn’t been tampered with since the first century somewhere along the line? Well, that’s a useful question. Imagine yourself in the congregation where Matthew’s gospel was first read. Let’s assume it was Jerusalem, and there’s a Christian synagogue there where you normally are in attendance, and Matthew is there on this Sabbath day, and he shows us the documentation of a new gospel that he has written, and he himself in his own voice stands up and begins to read it for us. Now, would you, if you were a literate person, perhaps a Greek-speaking person, and you were an enthusiastic believer, and you were personally fond of Matthew, as nearly everybody would have been, would you have wanted a copy of this manuscript for your own? You want one? Take it to your house, have it on a shelf somewhere where you can pull it down and read it from time to time, and do your own memory work on it? Or suppose you were about to take ship for Alexandria, where we know a strong Christian community is taking root. Would you want to take a copy with you down there? Well, if you showed up in Alexandria and told them that there was a gospel according to Matthew and you hadn’t brought one, well, I think you would have found your welcome got a little chilly. Well, sure they would want a copy, and sure you would want to take one down there to them. Now, how many copies of Matthew do you suppose would have been made in the first week of the time that he finished it? What shall we say? Seven? Is that reasonable? Well, I think so. You know, the custom was that one person would stand and read from the document slowly while the scribes would sit at their little benches and listen to the reading and write it down. And they had little methods for checking for accuracy and to be sure that they got everything right as they copied them off. This was the way things were customarily done. And you didn’t have Xerox machines back in that time. You had people with their – well, I guess it’s kind of like their own manual Xerox. You read the thing off and people would write it down. Well, seven copies in one week is reasonable. Now, within the next year, how many copies do you think might be made of each of the seven original copies? Do yourself a little math. Make some assumptions. Get your calculator out. Start punching the numbers in there to see how many different versions of Matthew or how many copies there might be in circulation within, what shall we say, ten years. while there are still lots of witnesses alive to attest to the manuscript, to its accuracy, to the copy, and so forth. Is there any evidence to suggest that something like this actually happened? Well, yes, there is. There are literally thousands of fragments of New Testament manuscripts that have been found all over the Middle East. And they show the little telltale signs that, well, for example, if seven of them were originally copied, and each one of those seven had its own peculiar little error, then those little errors would show up in families of manuscripts that were copied out of those original seven. That’s an arbitrary number, by the way. But in fact, there are families of manuscripts that have been identified and put together by scholars. It’s been the work of scholars to pull them all together and to reconstruct what they hope will be the original Matthew. You know, you can have a very high level of confidence in the text that underlies the New Testament that you are reading. Oh, there will be translators’ problems and little things here and there. But the variants are not serious. They are minor. What you have is the accurate testimony of a man named Matthew, a man who spent three and a half years walking up and down the roads of Palestine with Jesus Christ. Next time, we want to begin to take a look at his testimony. Until then, this is Ronald Dart reminding you, read the book.
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SPEAKER 01 :
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