Reading the Gospels, the parables, and Acts

Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming to hear him. But the Pharisees and the experts in the law were complaining, "This man welcomes sinners and eats with them."

Luke 15:1 to 2 (NET)

Most people who know the story of the prodigal son have never read those two verses, and it shows. They know the story as a picture of a sinner coming home to a forgiving father, and that reading isn't wrong. But it stops two-thirds of the way through, at the party, and it never asks who Jesus was talking to. Luke tells you. He was talking to Pharisees and experts in the law who were angry that he ate with the wrong crowd. Read the story with those people in front of you and it turns out the last character to appear, the older brother who won't come in, is the one the story was built to reach.

Worth pausing on who those people were, because the Gospels use them as a foil and centuries of Christian preaching has flattened them into hypocrites. The Pharisees were a renewal movement. They took the holiness the Torah asked of priests at the temple and tried to live it at ordinary tables in ordinary houses, which is why who you ate with mattered so much to them. Their heirs are the rabbis, and so rabbinic Judaism, and so every Jew alive. When this lesson says a parable was aimed at them, it means aimed at serious people with a serious reason for their objection, which is the only way a trap of this kind works at all.

That's the whole lesson in miniature. The Gospels are the part of the Bible most people think they already understand, because the stories are familiar, and familiarity is the problem. Three habits fix most of it: knowing what kind of book a Gospel is, hearing who a parable was aimed at, and telling what Acts reports from what it commands. The last section gives both scholarly positions on who wrote the Gospels and when, in each side's own words, because sooner or later somebody will ask you.

What kind of book a Gospel is

Start with what the writers say about their own work. John ends his Gospel like this:

There are many other things that Jesus did. If every one of them were written down, I suppose the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.

John 21:25 (NET)

That's a writer telling you he selected. He chose some events and left out others, and he gives his reason at 20:31: so that you may believe. Luke is even more explicit, and he says it before he begins:

Now many have undertaken to compile an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, like the accounts passed on to us by those who were eyewitnesses and servants of the word from the beginning. So it seemed good to me as well, because I have followed all things carefully from the beginning, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus.

Luke 1:1 to 3 (NET)

Sources, research, arrangement, a named reader. Mark starts with the words "the beginning of the gospel". None of the four claims to be a transcript.

The best answer to what they are, and the majority view since Richard Burridge's study in 1992, is that they're ancient biographies with a theological aim.¹ Ancient biography (the Greeks called it bios) was a known form. It told the life of a significant person to show his character and commend a way of living, it didn't have to run in strict chronological order, and it was happy to arrange material by topic. That's the genre contract from lesson 3, and it matters, because a reader who brings the contract of a modern documentary to a bios will find "contradictions" the first readers would never have noticed.

The Gospels are also, all four of them, about one thing. The first words Jesus speaks in Mark are these:

"The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the gospel!"

Mark 1:15 (NET)

Nearly every parable is about that kingdom, which is why they can't be read as timeless moral fables. They're announcements, told to a particular crowd, that something has started.

Four portraits, one Jesus

Why four? Fee and Stuart's answer is the one I'd give you: one story, told from four angles, each writer selecting and arranging for his own readers.¹ And each of them shows his hand on the first page.

The first three are called the Synoptics (from a Greek word for "seeing together") because they share so much material, often word for word. Scholars have argued for two centuries about how they relate, and the majority view is that Mark was written first and Matthew and Luke used him.² Matthew and Luke also share a good deal that isn't in Mark at all, which most scholars explain by a lost collection of sayings they call Q, while a minority, following Austin Farrer, think Luke simply used Matthew and Q never existed. You don't need to settle any of that here. You do need to know the relationship exists, because it explains why a story appears three times with small differences.

Topical arrangement is not a mistake

This is where new readers get caught. John puts the cleansing of the Temple at the start of Jesus' ministry (John 2). Matthew, Mark and Luke put it in the last week (Mark 11). A reader with the documentary contract sees an error and has to choose: force the two into one, or decide the Bible has a mistake in it.

The genre contract dissolves the problem. Ancient biography arranged by topic, and John has reasons of his own for opening with the Temple. The evangelical inerrantists who wrote the Chicago Statement in 1978 said so in their own document: inerrancy is not negated by "the topical arrangement of materials" or by "variant selections of material in parallel accounts".³ Reading a Gospel by its genre is not a concession to critics. It's what the inerrantists say they do.

The same signatories drew a line, though, and it's fair to give it. Article XII of that statement denies that scientific accounts of earth history may be used to overturn Scripture on creation and the flood, and their 1982 statement on hermeneutics, Article XXII, denies that "generic categories which negate historicity may rightly be imposed on biblical narratives which present themselves as factual".³ So on their own account genre latitude is not a licence to reclassify a narrative as something that never claimed to have happened. Where exactly ancient biography's conventions sit in relation to that line is argued among evangelicals, sometimes sharply.

I should be honest about the edge of this. Some careful readers hold there were two cleansings, one early and one late, and they have reasons, since the accounts differ in details. Others think one event, placed differently. The genre allows both and the choice isn't a test of faith. What the genre doesn't allow is the choice the paragraph before last set up: force the accounts into one, or conclude the book has an error in it. Neither is required.

How a parable works: the trap

Before the mechanism, one thing about the form. A parable is a mashal, a Jewish teaching genre with a long life before Jesus and a longer one after him; the rabbis of the following centuries told hundreds of them, many built on the same king-and-servants shape. Jesus is teaching in a form his hearers already knew, which is part of why the trap works.

The Old Testament has a mashal that shows you how one works in a single scene. King David has taken Bathsheba and had her husband killed. The prophet Nathan comes to him and tells a story about a rich man with many flocks who takes a poor man's only lamb to feed a guest. David is furious; the rich man deserves to die. Then Nathan says:

"You are that man!"

2 Samuel 12:7 (NET)

Look at what happened. David walked into the story agreeing with it. He judged the rich man freely, because the story wasn't about him, until it was. A parable works on the hearer the way a trap works on the foot: you step in willingly and the story closes. Its power depends on the hearer not seeing themselves until the last moment.

That's why Fee and Stuart insist a parable is not a code and not a general lesson, but a story with a point of reference the first hearers recognised and an unexpected turn that caught them.⁴ Most parables make one main point, with a punch aimed at somebody in the room. To read one well you ask two questions. Who was listening? And what would have caught them?

One qualification, because "one point" is a rule with a history. Strict one-point reading starts with Adolf Jülicher in the 1880s and 1890s, as a reaction against centuries of allegory, and modern scholarship has softened it: Craig Blomberg argues for roughly one point per main character, which the prodigal son itself illustrates, since it has a father and two sons and something to say through each. Take "one main point" as a corrective to hunting for a key, not as a law that a story can say only one thing.

The hard verse about parables

There's a passage in the middle of Mark 4 that cuts against everything I've just said, and you should meet it here rather than trip over it in the exercise. Jesus is asked why he teaches this way:

"The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those outside, everything is in parables, so that although they look they may look but not see, and although they hear they may hear but not understand, so they may not repent and be forgiven."

Mark 4:11 to 12 (NET)

So parables conceal as well as reveal, and Mark says the concealing is deliberate. Two readings are held by serious Christians. One takes it as judicial hardening: the concealment falls on people already refusing what they've heard, and Jesus is quoting Isaiah 6, where the same thing is said of Isaiah's own preaching. The other takes it as the trap's own working: a story that hid its aim would look exactly like this from outside, and the ones who "look but do not see" are the ones who walked into the vineyard parable and then wanted to arrest the man who told it. We hold the two together, and the honest thing to say is that revealing and concealing are the same act performed on different hearers. What a parable does to you depends on whether you walk in.

What allegorising does

Now the pious mistake. For much of church history the parables were read as allegories: every detail stands for something, and the reader's job is to find the key. The most famous example is Augustine on the good Samaritan, and I want to give it fairly, because he was one of the greatest teachers the church has had and the reading holds together.

Augustine took the man going down from Jerusalem to Jericho as Adam, fallen from the heavenly city into mortality. The robbers are the devil and his angels, who strip him of immortality and leave him half dead. The priest and Levite are the Old Testament priesthood and ministry, which could not save. The Samaritan is Christ (Augustine notes that "Samaritan" can mean "guardian"). The inn is the church, and the innkeeper the apostle Paul.⁵ It's beautiful. It fits the whole of Christian doctrine into one story.

And it defuses the trap. Luke tells you who Jesus was talking to. An expert in religious law, wanting to justify himself, had asked:

"And who is my neighbor?"

Luke 10:29 (NET)

After the story Jesus turns the question round:

"Which of these three do you think became a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?" The expert in religious law said, "The one who showed mercy to him." So Jesus said to him, "Go and do the same."

Luke 10:36 to 37 (NET)

The expert had asked who counted as his neighbour, hoping for a limit. The story makes a Samaritan, the last person a Judean expert in the law would choose, the one who acts as neighbour, and then asks the expert which man he'd rather be. That's the punch. Notice he can't even say the word "Samaritan"; he says "The one who showed mercy to him". In Augustine's reading the expert vanishes, the Samaritan is Christ, and nobody in the room is caught. The story becomes a diagram of salvation instead of a question the hearer has to answer about his own contempt.

One thing has to be said plainly here, because the word "allegorising" can mislead. What Fee and Stuart are naming is the second of the four senses of Scripture that the church has read by since the fathers, and it is not a dead practice. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches the four senses at paragraphs 115 to 118, with Cassian's couplet, and Catholic and Orthodox reading today works with all four; the spiritual senses are ordinary in Orthodox preaching. The Catechism also says the literal sense is the foundation the others rest on, which is where this course starts, and what we're doing here is Protestant grammatical-historical reading, which puts the literal sense first and keeps it there. That's our choice and it's worth knowing it's a choice. Augustine is a Doctor of the Church, and millions of Christians read the good Samaritan roughly as he did this Sunday.

Our own objection isn't to finding Christ in the text. It's narrower: the basic rule from lesson 3 says a text cannot mean what it could not have meant to its author or first hearers,⁶ and nobody on that road could have heard "the inn is the church". The church survived on allegorised parables for over a thousand years and was usually reaching for truths it had learned elsewhere in Scripture. The cost wasn't heresy. The cost was that the parables stopped catching anyone.

One caution the other way. Jesus himself gave points of reference for the sower (Mark 4:13 to 20): the seed is the word, the soils are kinds of hearers. That's not a licence to allegorise every parable; it's Jesus telling his disciples what that story's own referents were. The test is whether the first hearers could have recognised the reference. Seed, soil, a landowner, a father with two sons: yes. Two testaments on a shepherd's shoulders: no.

The prodigal son, read twice

Read Luke 15:11 to 32 now, all of it, with 15:1 to 2 still in mind. Then come back.

The reading most people bring. The younger son demands his inheritance, wastes it, comes to his senses in a pigsty, and goes home rehearsing an apology. The father runs to him, cuts the apology short, and throws a feast. The story is about repentance and a father's forgiveness, and the reader is the younger son. Some readers go further and allegorise the details: the robe is Christ's righteousness, the ring is adoption, the shoes are the freedom of a son, the fattened calf is the sacrifice. That version has been preached for centuries and most of it is true as doctrine.

The reading the genre asks for. Ask the two questions. Who was listening? Luke told you: Pharisees and experts in the law, complaining that Jesus welcomes sinners and eats with them. Jesus answers with three stories, a lost sheep, a lost coin, a lost son, each ending in a party over something found. So far the grumblers can nod along; who objects to a shepherd finding his sheep?

Then the third story keeps going after the party.

The ending:

But the older son became angry and refused to go in. His father came out and appealed to him, but he answered his father, "Look! These many years I have worked like a slave for you, and I never disobeyed your commands. Yet you never gave me even a goat so that I could celebrate with my friends! But when this son of yours came back, who has devoured your assets with prostitutes, you killed the fattened calf for him!" Then the father said to him, "Son, you are always with me, and everything that belongs to me is yours. It was appropriate to celebrate and be glad, for your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost and is found."

Luke 15:28 to 32 (NET)

Notice what the allegorised version lost. The robe and the ring and the calf all sit in the first two-thirds, and a reader busy decoding them arrives at the older brother with no energy left. The story about repentance really is in the text. But Luke set it inside three answers to a complaint, and the complaint is what the last third is answering.

There's a painting of this below, and the thing to look at in it is not the father and son at all.

Reading Acts: history first

Acts is narrative, and everything from lesson 3 applies: it reports what happened rather than what should have happened, and, on the reading we hold, God is the hero of the whole of it. That last part is Fee and Stuart's tenth principle and it's a theological claim about the book, not a rule of the genre. But Acts raises a question the Old Testament stories don't, because Acts is about the church and the reader is in the church. If the first Christians did something, must we?

Fee and Stuart's answer, which we share, is that what Acts narrates or describes does not function as a command unless Scripture elsewhere commands it, or unless it can be shown that Luke meant it as a pattern.⁷ Luke was writing history with a purpose, the gospel going from Jerusalem to Rome with the Spirit driving it and nothing stopping it, and a great deal of what he records is there to tell that story rather than to set up a constitution.

So the working test has two parts. Is this practice commanded elsewhere in Scripture? And is it consistent across the book, or does it change from story to story? A practice commanded elsewhere is binding because of the command, not because Acts reports it. A practice that appears once, or appears in several incompatible forms, is being described.

A note on the second half. Fee and Stuart's own second limb is whether Luke can be shown to have intended a pattern, and consistency is the workable proxy for it, because an author who means something as a pattern usually shows it more than once. It's a proxy and not the thing itself, and it can't settle a case where a practice runs right through Acts and is commanded nowhere else. You'll meet one of those in the exercise.

Goods in common, and a lot cast once

The two descriptions:

The group of those who believed were of one heart and mind, and no one said that any of his possessions was his own, but everything was held in common.

Acts 4:32 (NET)

For there was no one needy among them, because those who were owners of land or houses were selling them and bringing the proceeds from the sales and placing them at the apostles' feet. The proceeds were distributed to each, as anyone had need.

Acts 4:34 to 35 (NET)

And the sentence that shows what it was:

"Before it was sold, did it not belong to you? And when it was sold, was the money not at your disposal?"

Acts 5:4 (NET)

Now the other passage. Before Pentecost the eleven pick a replacement for Judas:

Then they cast lots for them, and the one chosen was Matthias; so he was counted with the eleven apostles.

Acts 1:26 (NET)

Run the test on both. Is holding goods in common commanded elsewhere? Generosity to the poor is commanded everywhere, from Deuteronomy to the letters, so the principle is binding. Selling all property into a common fund is not commanded anywhere, and Peter's words show it was voluntary in Jerusalem itself. Is it consistent across Acts? Paul's churches in the letters own property and are told to give freely and proportionately (2 Corinthians 8 to 9) rather than to pool everything. So the generosity is a rule and the common fund is a description of one church's response.

Is casting lots commanded elsewhere? No. Is it consistent across Acts? It happens once, before the Spirit comes, and never again; from Acts 6 onward the church chooses leaders by discussion, prayer and laying on of hands. So the lot is described, not prescribed. A reader who turned every report into a rule would build a church that pools all its property and chooses its leaders by lot, and would have to explain why Acts itself stops doing both. Fee and Stuart have names for the two ways this goes wrong: misappropriation, taking something the text does mean and applying it where it was never aimed, and false appropriation, finding a rule in a text that never carried one. The common fund is the first mistake waiting to happen and the lot is the second.

On the lot I should be honest that the test settles less than it looks. The Coptic Orthodox Church still chooses its Pope by the altar lot, drawn by a blindfolded child after the liturgy, most recently in 2012, and the Moravians used the lot for calls for two hundred years. Their case isn't that Acts 1:26 commands it. It's that the lot hands a choice to God rather than to a majority, and that Acts shows it isn't forbidden. That's a different argument from the one the test answers, and the test answers "not binding on everyone", not "wrong".

The wrinkle. Now the hard case, and I'm not going to resolve it, because Christians haven't.

In Acts 8 the Samaritans believe and are baptised, and the Spirit comes on them only later when the apostles arrive. In Acts 10 Cornelius and his household receive the Spirit while Peter is still preaching, before baptism. In Acts 19 some disciples at Ephesus are baptised and receive the Spirit when Paul lays hands on them.

Pentecostal and charismatic Christians read these as showing that receiving the Spirit can be a distinct event after conversion, and they have a serious case, since Luke plainly records it happening three times.

Most Reformed, Lutheran, Catholic and Orthodox readers hold that these were unique moments as the gospel crossed each new boundary, to Samaritans, to Gentiles, to disciples of John, and that the letters teach the Spirit is given at conversion. They also have a serious case.

The consistency test tells you Luke isn't laying down a sequence, since he gives three different ones. What he is showing you is argued, at full strength, on both sides. This is a real disagreement between Christians who love the same book, and a lesson on reading Acts should say so rather than pick a side and pretend the test settled it.

Who wrote the Gospels, and when

You'll be asked this, usually as "weren't they written hundreds of years later?" The honest answer has three parts: what the earliest witnesses said, what the two scholarly camps hold, and what both agree on.

The earliest testimony

The Gospels don't name their authors in the text. The names come from the titles in the manuscripts and from early Christian writers. The earliest is Papias, a bishop in Asia Minor writing around 110 to 130, whose words survive because Eusebius quoted them two centuries later:

Mark, having become the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately, though not in order, whatsoever he remembered of the things said or done by Christ.⁸

And on Matthew: "Matthew wrote the oracles in the Hebrew language, and every one interpreted them as he was able."⁸

Around 180 Irenaeus, bishop of Lyon, names all four: Matthew "issued a written Gospel among the Hebrews in their own dialect"; Mark, "the disciple and interpreter of Peter", wrote down what Peter preached; Luke, "the companion of Paul", recorded the Gospel Paul preached; and John, "the disciple of the Lord", published his Gospel at Ephesus.⁹ By 180 the four were fixed in the mainstream church, and Irenaeus argues elsewhere that there could be neither more nor fewer, as there are four winds.⁹

History establishes that this testimony exists, and dates it to within a century of the events, though Papias's own date is argued within a range of about thirty years. What each side makes of it is where the argument starts.

The critical mainstream, in its own terms

Bart Ehrman, whose Historical Introduction was the set text for Dale Martin's New Testament survey at Yale, puts the dating this way: "Critical scholars are widely agreed that the earliest Gospel was Mark, written around 70 c.e.; that Matthew and Luke were written some years later, say, around 80-85 c.e.; and that John was the last Gospel, written around 90-95 c.e."¹⁰

The main lever is Mark 13. Jesus says of the Temple:

"Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left on another. All will be torn down!"

Mark 13:2 (NET)

The Romans destroyed the Temple in AD 70. Critical scholars argue that a prediction this specific, given this much weight, is most likely recorded by someone who knows it has happened, so Mark is written around or after 70, and Matthew and Luke, who used Mark, later still.¹⁰

Luke is where the argument bites hardest. Where Mark 13:14 has an "abomination of desolation", Luke 21:20 has "Jerusalem surrounded by armies", and Luke 19:43 has an enemy throwing up siege-works around the city. Critical scholars read that as Mark's apocalyptic language rewritten by someone who knows how the siege actually went.

On authorship, the critical case runs like this. The texts themselves are anonymous; none of the four names its writer in the body. The titles ("according to Matthew") are the form a collection needs once several Gospels circulate together and have to be told apart, which points to the second century rather than the first. And Papias is late, second-hand, and doesn't obviously describe the books we have, since our Matthew is a Greek composition rather than a translation from Hebrew.

The conservative case, in its own terms

Carson and Moo's Introduction to the New Testament is the reference point. Their dates: Mark "sometime in the late 50s or the 60s"; Acts in the "mid-60s"; Luke in the "mid or late 60s"; Matthew "not long before 70"; John "tentatively 80 to 85".¹¹ (One flag for honesty: I've taken those ranges from a published transcription of their table, not from the book itself, and the fact-check should confirm them against the pages.)

Their arguments run like this, and there are three.

The ending of Acts. Acts finishes with Paul alive and under house arrest in Rome, and never mentions his death (c. 64 to 67), the persecution under Nero (64), or the fall of Jerusalem (70). If Luke wrote after all three, the silence is strange. Since Luke's Gospel precedes Acts as volume one precedes volume two, and Mark precedes Luke, the whole sequence pulls earlier. Note that the strict form of this argument, that Acts must predate Paul's death, would put Acts before 64, which is earlier than Carson and Moo themselves go; their mid-60s is the softer version. The obvious reply is that Acts ends where its stated theme ends, with the gospel reaching Rome, so the silence may be design rather than ignorance.

The names. No manuscript and no early writer ever attributes a Gospel to anyone else. Mark and Luke are odd choices to invent, since neither was an apostle, and an invented attribution would more likely reach for a bigger name. Richard Bauckham's Jesus and the Eyewitnesses is the strongest recent statement of the case that the Gospels stayed close to named eyewitness testimony.¹⁴

Mark 13 as prophecy. On this reading Jesus predicted the Temple's fall, and the Gospels never say "as has now happened", which they easily could have.

A critical scholar would object to any suggestion that their dating rests on ruling prediction out, and the objection is fair. Ehrman grants that an apocalyptic prophet would predict the Temple's fall; his argument is about how the material is shaped, especially in Luke, and that's a historical judgement to be answered by another historical judgement rather than by a charge of naturalism.

One more witness, because it matters that he's not a conservative. John A. T. Robinson, a former Bishop of Woolwich then Dean of Chapel at Trinity College, Cambridge, argued in Redating the New Testament (1976) that the entire New Testament was written before 70, on the ground that no book treats the Temple's destruction as past.¹² Most scholars didn't follow him, but his book is proof that the early dates aren't only held by people with a doctrinal reason to hold them.

What both sides agree on

This is the ground under both camps, and it's the answer to the person at work.

• Every Gospel was written within about seventy years of the crucifixion, on either of the two datings above.¹³
• Paul's undisputed letters were written in the 50s, within about twenty-five years of the crucifixion, and are earlier than any Gospel.¹³
• Nothing in the New Testament was composed in the fourth century, or the third, or the second. "Hundreds of years later" is nobody's position.¹³

Scholars argue about the decade and about whether the traditional authors wrote them. The course holds the conservative view, and I'll say plainly that its case for the Gospels' reliability doesn't depend on winning the dating argument. A Gospel written in 80 by a second-generation Christian drawing on eyewitness tradition is still a first-century source about a first-century man, and the rest of that case belongs to The Case for Christianity, not here.

The chart below puts both datings on one axis. The distance between the two camps is the thing to look at, and it's about a decade per Gospel.

When the Gospels were written, on the two datings, with the year AD along the bottom. The critical dates are Ehrman's; the conservative dates are Carson and Moo's; Paul's undisputed letters are on the top row for scale. Every row carries its own dates, so nothing here depends on telling the colours apart. The two camps differ by about a decade per Gospel, and the whole argument happens inside sixty-five years.

What people get wrong

"The Gospels were written hundreds of years after Jesus." You've now seen both scholarly positions, and the latest date in either of them is the mid-90s. (Some scholars outside those two positions put John's final form nearer 110; nobody puts anything in the second century.) The four-century claim usually comes from confusing the date of composition with the date of our oldest complete manuscripts, which are fourth century and which lesson 9 will show you, or from the Nicaea story, which lesson 8 takes apart.

"The four Gospels are four independent witnesses." This is the one most likely to be doing quiet damage, because it's what makes the differences feel threatening. On the majority view Matthew and Luke used Mark, so where the three agree you're hearing Mark once rather than three times. What survives is still a good case: John is largely independent, Paul is earlier than all four, and Luke names his sources. But "four independent witnesses" isn't it.

"The parables are allegories with a key." They're stories with a point and a target. When you find yourself assigning a meaning to the robe, stop and ask who was listening. The test for a detail is whether the first hearers could have recognised the reference without a key.

"The parables were simple stories to make hard truths easy." Mark 4:11 to 12 says the opposite in Jesus' own mouth. A parable is a story that hides its aim until it springs, which is why it can reveal and conceal at once.

"If the early church did it, we must." Acts describes; the letters and the Gospels command. Run the test. And its mirror: "Acts is only history, so it can't teach anything." Luke wrote history with a purpose, and the purpose is a lesson in itself; what Acts can't do on its own is turn a report into a rule.

"The differences between the Gospels are errors." Most are what ancient biography did on purpose: topical arrangement, compression, selection, paraphrase. The Chicago Statement lists several of these as compatible with inerrancy.³ And its mirror: "Every difference is easily harmonised." Some aren't. The day of the Last Supper in John against the Synoptics, and the details of the resurrection morning, have exercised careful readers for eighteen centuries. We hold by faith that the accounts are true; we don't pretend every seam is invisible, and the strained harmonisations do the text no favours. Harold Lindsell's suggestion that Peter denied Jesus six times, three before each cock crowing, is the standing example of a reconciliation that costs more than the problem.

"The lost gospels were suppressed." There are other ancient texts called gospels: Thomas, Peter, Judas, Mary, and more. They're real, and you can read them; the Gospel of Thomas is a few minutes' reading. Most scholars put all of them in the second century or later. Thomas is the one real argument: a minority date a core of its sayings to the 50s or 60s, which is why Dale Martin's Yale lecture on it is worth your time.¹⁵ What's clear is that they weren't hidden. Irenaeus knew some of them, and names a Gospel of Judas in the same work in which he argues for four,⁹ so this was an argument conducted in the open, and lesson 8 goes into the reasons of date, content and use.

Now do it yourself, on Mark 4, three storms, and five references

Connections

Lesson 3 gave you the narrative rules; this lesson applied them to the Gospels and Acts, where the temptation to turn description into prescription is strongest because the reader is in the story. Lesson 4's covenant and prophets are what "the kingdom of God is near" means. Lesson 2's timeline puts the Gospels at act four of six; a parable of the kingdom announces that the story has turned.

Ahead: lesson 7 does the letters, where the basic rule does its heaviest work and where Paul's own commands supply the "commanded elsewhere" half of today's Acts test. Lesson 8 returns to Irenaeus and the four Gospels when it explains how the canon formed. Lesson 9 shows you the manuscripts, which is the other half of the "hundreds of years later" answer. The Case for Christianity and The Life and Teachings of Jesus take the historical and theological questions from here.

Go deeper

• Fee and Stuart, How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, chapters 6, 7 and 8 (Acts, the Gospels, the parables): the method this lesson teaches, in the authors' own words, with more examples.
• Dale Martin, Open Yale Courses RLST 152, lectures 5, 6, 8, 9 and 10 (the New Testament as history; Mark; the Gospel of Thomas; Luke; Acts): the critical position at full strength from one of its own teachers, free, with transcripts. Lectures 9 and 10 are the critical-side reading of the second half of this lesson.
• Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (2nd ed., Eerdmans, 2017): the strongest recent scholarly case that the Gospels stay close to named eyewitness testimony. Read it against Ehrman rather than instead of him.
• Bart Ehrman, "Why Date the Gospels after 70 CE?": the Mark 13 argument in the words of its best-known advocate, short enough to read in five minutes.

Sources

1. Fee, G. D. and Stuart, D., How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, 4th ed. (Zondervan, 2014), ch. 7, "The Gospels: One Story, Many Dimensions". The Gospels as a genre of their own; four portraits of one Jesus; the kingdom of God as the centre of Jesus' preaching; selection and arrangement by each evangelist. The characterisation of the Gospels as ancient biography (bios) follows Richard Burridge, What Are the Gospels? (1992), which is the majority view in New Testament studies. Burridge's book was not consulted for this course and is not in SOURCES.md; the characterisation is reported here at second hand from the standard introductions, and a reader who wants it argued should go to Burridge directly.
2. Markan priority is the majority view and is common ground between Ehrman's Historical Introduction and Carson and Moo's Introduction to the New Testament, which is why the lesson states it without arguing it. Neither book was opened for this course; see note 11.
3. The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (1978), Article XIII: inerrancy is not negated by "the topical arrangement of materials" or "variant selections of material in parallel accounts", among the phenomena the article lists. Article XII denies that scientific hypotheses about earth history may overturn Scripture on creation and the flood. The 1982 Chicago Statement on Biblical Hermeneutics, Article XXII, denies that "generic categories which negate historicity may rightly be imposed on biblical narratives which present themselves as factual". Both statements are reproduced at defendinginerrancy.com; the Evangelical Theological Society archive URL formerly cited returns 404.
4. Fee and Stuart 2014, ch. 8, "The Parables: Do You Get the Point?". Parables as stories with points of reference the original hearers recognised and an unexpected turn; most make one main point; the reader's task is to hear them as the first audience did. The "trap" comparison and the Nathan example are this lesson's framing of their argument. Adolf Jülicher's Die Gleichnisreden Jesu (1888 to 1899) is where strict one-point reading begins, and Craig Blomberg's Interpreting the Parables is the standard modern qualification of it (roughly one point per main character); neither was opened, and both are named here as positions rather than quoted.
5. Augustine, Quaestiones Evangeliorum 2.19, on Luke 10:30 to 37: the traveller as Adam, Jerusalem the heavenly city, Jericho mortality, the robbers the devil and his angels, the priest and Levite the Old Testament priesthood and ministry, the Samaritan as Christ ("guardian"), the inn the church. As quoted in C. H. Dodd, The Parables of the Kingdom (1935), and reproduced in "Revisiting the Parable of the Good Samaritan", Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations 16 (2021). The Latin original was not consulted; wording checked against the SCJR reproduction, and Dodd's book was not opened either.
6. Fee and Stuart 2014, chs. 1 and 4: "a text cannot mean what it never could have meant to its author or readers" (the basic rule, from lesson 3). On the four senses of Scripture and the standing of the allegorical sense in Catholic teaching, Catechism of the Catholic Church 115 to 118, linked in the text.
7. Fee and Stuart 2014, ch. 6, "Acts: The Question of Historical Precedent". Their principle that what is only narrated or described does not function normatively unless Scripture elsewhere commands it or the author can be shown to intend it as a pattern; paraphrased here, not quoted, because the chapter was read at Stage 1 and the exact wording was not recorded in SOURCES.md. The observation that consistency across the book is a proxy for authorial intent, and its limits, is this lesson's own.
8. Papias, as quoted in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.39, NPNF translation (Schaff), read at CCEL. Papias's date (c. 110 to 130) per SOURCES.md; the range is itself argued.
9. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.1.1 (ANF translation, read at New Advent): Matthew "issued a written Gospel among the Hebrews in their own dialect"; "Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter"; "Luke also, the companion of Paul"; "John, the disciple of the Lord... during his residence at Ephesus". Against Heresies 3.11.8 for the four winds argument. Date c. 180. Irenaeus names a Gospel of Judas at Against Heresies 1.31.1, where the Cainites "produce a fictitious history of this kind, which they style the Gospel of Judas", which is the earliest surviving reference to that text.
10. Ehrman, B., "Why Date the Gospels after 70 CE?", The Bart Ehrman Blog, quoted in the text. Mark 13 as the lever; the same dates appear in his Historical Introduction, which was the set text for Dale Martin's Yale survey (RLST 152, 2009). The claim that the names were attached in the second century is his standard position. The Luke 21:20 and 19:43 point is the standard form of the argument and is not from this post.
11. Carson, D. A. and Moo, D. J., An Introduction to the New Testament, 2nd ed. (Zondervan, 2005), dates as transcribed by Andrew Naselli, "Carson and Moo's Dates for the NT Books": Mark "sometime in the late 50s or the 60s"; Acts "mid-60s"; Luke "mid or late 60s"; Matthew "not long before 70"; John "tentatively 80 to 85". Not verified against the book's own pages; SOURCES.md flags this and the fact-check must confirm it. Of the five, Mark, Luke and John have been independently corroborated from other reports of the same table; Acts and Matthew have not.
12. Robinson, J. A. T., Redating the New Testament (SCM, 1976): the whole New Testament dated before 70 on the silence about the Temple's destruction. Per SOURCES.md; the book itself was not opened.
13. SOURCES.md, Contested question 3, "What is established": every Gospel within about seventy years of the crucifixion; Paul's undisputed letters in the 50s; no fourth-century composition. Shared ground between the two positions cited above, and it follows from their dates.
14. Bauckham, R., Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony, 2nd ed. (Eerdmans, 2017). Named here as the strongest recent statement of the conservative case on authorship and transmission; the book was not opened for this course.
15. Dale Martin, Open Yale Courses RLST 152, lecture 8, "The Gospel of Thomas", linked in Go deeper. Martin's own summary notes that some sayings in Thomas may be more primitive than their canonical parallels, which is the minority case for an early core.
16. NET Bible, 2nd ed. (Biblical Studies Press, 2019), netbible.org. Quoted as printed: Luke 15:1 to 2, 15:28 to 32; Luke 1:1 to 3; John 21:25; Mark 1:15, 4:11 to 12, 12:12 (quiz 5), 13:2; 2 Samuel 12:7; Luke 10:29, 10:36 to 37, 18:2; Acts 1:26, 2:44 to 45, 4:32, 4:34 to 35, 5:4, 6:2 to 3; Matthew 25:1, 25:13 (quiz 1); Acts 20:7, 2:46 (quiz 2); Mark 4:38, 4:40, Matthew 8:25 to 26, Luke 8:24 to 25 (exercise 2 and its model answer). Scripture quoted by permission. Quotations designated (NET) are from the NET Bible® copyright ©1996, 2019 by Biblical Studies Press, L.L.C. All rights reserved. See Editorial Standards 4.7.