Shaji Karimplanil Capuchin

Gospels: An Eyewitness Account of Jesus’ Life?

Let us consider the two versions of the gruesome end of Judas found in the NT: in Mt 27:3-10 and in Acts 1:15-20. In each account, Judas is presented as the one who betrayed Jesus. In each Judas dies a horrible death, although not the same death. In each a field is bought, known as the Field of Blood. However, in Matthew the chief priests purchase the field and the blood is a reference to Jesus’ blood. In Acts Judas himself purchases
the field and the blood is a reference to Judas’ blood. In each account OT passages are used to show that events fulfilled the words of the prophets. However, in Matthew the prophet quoted is said to be Jeremiah even though it is actually Zechariah (cf. Zech 11:12-13). In Acts the quotations are from the book of Psalms, attributed to David.

We see, then, that around the core story are woven different details and different quotations. What accounts for these similarities and differences? It seems evident that in the years since Judas’ betrayal, a variety of stories had developed about this wicked character. The stories were told not to record historical fact but to use historical fact to illustrate theological truth: terrible deeds result in terrible ends. As the stories are told a variety of details are added. While those details differ from one account to another, the central plot and purpose of the stories remain the same.

In popular imaginations and piety, the Gospels are often understood as eyewitness, historical accounts of Jesus’ activities and teachings written by four of his male followers. The scenario posits that these men accompanied Jesus, recorded what they saw, and passed it along in writing. Whether knowingly or unknowingly, to this day preachers often reinforce this scenario when they talk about Gospel scenes. But just a little investigation shows this view not to be convincing.

(i) First, two of the names associated with the Gospels were not “disciples” of Jesus. Neither the name “Mark” nor the name “Luke” appears in any of the lists of Jesus’ twelve chosen male disciples (see Mt 10:2-4; Mk 3:16-19; Lk 6:13-16).

(ii) Among the disciples who are identified as Jesus’ associates, several seem to form an inner circle of Jesus. In Mark’s Gospel, for example, Peter, James, and John are exclusively associated with several narratives like the transfiguration and Gethsemane (Mk 9:2; 10:35; 13:3; 14:33). But none of the four Gospels claims authorship by either Peter or James! It is surprising that these links are not made if eyewitness authority was paramount for authorship.

(iii) According to scholarly consensus, the canonical Gospels are most probably written in a time period between the years 70 CE and 100 CE. Jesus is crucified around the year 30 CE. The prospect of an eyewitness account of Jesus’ activity appearing some forty to seventy years after Jesus’ ministry is not high, though not impossible. The issue is life span. For example, at a minimum, a reliable eyewitness would need to have been, perhaps, twenty years old during Jesus’ ministry. That would make him between sixty and ninety when the Gospels were written. But average life spans in the first-century Roman world, affected by unhealthy living conditions and poor nutrition for much of the population, do not support such odds. Ann Hanson suggests that “less than 20 percent” reached sixty. So while it is not impossible, it is unlikely that adult eyewitnesses of Jesus’ activity would have still been alive to write Gospels in the period of the 70-100 CE.

From all these we can safely conclude that we cannot approach the Gospels expecting them to give us eyewitness historical accounts of the activity of Jesus.

Telling Stories about Jesus prior to the Written Gospels

How did the Gospels finally come to be written down? How did material about Jesus circulate among Jesus-followers in the time after Jesus’ death up to the time of the writing of the Gospels? In answer we can say that the Gospels are the result of a growth process. The growth process includes four stages, which are briefly given below:

(i) Events: The written Gospels started with events. Jesus was a historical person who was born at a certain point in time, who had a profound influence on his contemporaries, and who was crucified, died, and buried. If the events had ended there, we would obviously not have the Gospels. But they did not. Jesus’ disciples were astounded to find that death was not death, that Jesus was still alive and with them.

(ii) Oral Tradition: None of the Gospels was written by Jesus or by his followers during his life on earth. So the first “good news,” was an oral one. Immediately after Jesus’ death and resurrection, the facts about him that were of most interest to his followers were those which revolved around the very end of his earthly ministry. If I had been alive when Jesus was on earth and I had not known him, I may well have met one of his apostles who wanted to introduce me to Jesus after Jesus’ death. The apostle might have initiated a conversation with me by saying, “Did you hear about Jesus, who rose from the dead?” Naturally the oral tradition did not begin chronologically with Jesus’ birth, but in the order of immediate interest, with Jesus’ resurrection. In other words, Christology developed backward.

(iii) Written Tradition: As new converts entered the church, they would be very hungry for more information about how Jesus was put to death, how he rose from the dead, and what acts of power he had performed during his lifetime. In response to this hunger, the apostles and disciples would tell stories about those events. The earliest units to take form in the oral tradition, as well as in the written tradition that followed, were accounts of Jesus’ passion, death, and resurrection, and accounts of his acts of power. The miracle stories were passed on as isolated episodes. No historical, chronological narrative of Jesus’ acts of power existed. Rather, isolated stories about individual events were told, retold, and eventually collected and written.

As the group of believers grew, so did an interest in Jesus’ sayings. A desire to know what Jesus taught developed only after people had come to belief. The sayings and parables were not used to make converts but to deepen the knowledge and commitment of those who had already been persuaded to faith by accounts of the resurrection and miracles. Believers would gather together to remember Jesus in his word and in the Eucharist. They united themselves to each other and to the risen Lord through repeating Jesus’ teaching and Jesus’ action at the last supper.

(iv) Edited Tradition: By the time the first Gospel reached the form in which we now have it, the church had been in existence for a generation. Paul had already written most of his epistles. The church had spread over a wide geographical area. None of our edited Gospel texts includes the name of its author within the text. The names by which we refer to each Gospel were attributed to those texts by the early church fathers. We should not let such attributions lead us to think of the Gospels as eyewitness accounts rather than as the inherited oral and written traditions of the believing community, edited to meet the needs of specific audiences.

The Canonical Gospels

Two dynamics are at work in the Gospel-writing process. On one hand, the Gospel writers do not regard traditions about Jesus as fixed. They treat them as flexible and malleable. As they demonstrate in their Gospels, they expand, abbreviate, omit, and combine traditions to form new accounts of the story for new situations. Yet on the other hand, the act of writing is an act of fixing the ever moving traditions. It is an attempt to stabilize the traditions and to limit their expansion.

The consequence of these two dynamics – fluid traditions and attempts to fix them in writing – was, interestingly, a proliferation of written Gospels! We know of thirty-four written Gospels in existence by the end of the second century CE. Copies of some of these exist today as complete writings, some exist only in fragments or in citations, and some are known only by name.

But what is especially important for us to observe is that only four of them ended up in the NT canon when it was finalized late in the fourth century. By the end of the second century, the four canonical Gospels seem to have been fairly widely regarded as authoritative among Christian groups. The writing of Irenaeus, the Bishop of Lyons in southern France, dating from near the end of the second century, attests their wider acceptance: “So firm is the ground upon which these Gospels rest, that the very heretics themselves bear witness to them” (Against Heresies 3.11.7). That is, Irenaeus argues that these four Gospels are widely recognized by proponents and opponents of Irenaeus’s orthodoxy alike as authoritative.

The closing of the canon in 397 CE at the Council of Carthage, fixed the number of Gospels to four for the posterity to come. However, it should be emphasized that Gospels became canonical not through legislation but through use. In the early church, the writings that emerged during the life of the church were read at worship services. By the end of the second century some were accepted and loved by all the churches while others fell into disuse. In terms of usage, the Gospel canon was “decided” through consensus by the end of the second century. The Council of Carthage “closed” the New Testament canon in the sense that it legislated what had already been decided through traditional usage. The Gospels were born through the experience and beliefs of the community, and they reached canonicity through the experience and beliefs of the community.

Gospel of Thomas More Authentic?

As some monographs attest, there is a new fad of treating Gospel of Thomas (henceforth Thomas in italics) as more historical than the canonical Gospels. Hence it is in place to have a studied appraisal of the claims made about the non-canonical Thomas. Due to the constraint of space, we shall consider only three points.

(i) Chronological Distance: Let us consider logion 71 in Thomas: “Jesus said, ‘I will destroy this house, and no-one will be able to build it […].’”

As we know, in all the synoptic Gospels there are references about Jerusalem Temple’s destruction that happened in CE 70; however, none of these Gospels affirm that the Temple would not be re-built. Until the end of the first century no one really thought that the razing of the Temple would be permanent. The Roman-Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (ca. 37-100 CE) remarked that Moses foretold numerous destructions, “but the God who made you will give back to your citizens both cities and the temple….”

Quite in contrast, Thomas seems to have lost all hope of the Temple being re-built. Such a pessimism was widespread only after the Bar Kochba revolt (i.e., post 135 CE), when Jerusalem city was denuded of all Jews. The 4th century Church Historian Eusebius of Caesarea provides very clear evidence for the view that the destruction of the temple is final: “Now let no one imagine that, after the besieging of the place and the desolation that would be in it, another renewal of it shall take place, as there was in the times of Cyrus, … and Antiochus Epiphanes … and Pompey.” The confidence reflected in logion 71 about the perpetuity of the destruction means that Thomas betrays a post-Bar Kochba situation, thus rendering the gospel farther from historical Jesus than the canonical Gospels are.

(ii) Cultural Distance: Few of the social and cultural phenomena which add plausibility to the canonical Gospels are present in Thomas. Absent, for example, are detailed geographical references to villages, rivers and mountains: the only places referred to by Thomas are “the world” and “Judaea”. Similarly, there are no festivals. These absences certainly show a lack of interest in such things, but can also lead one to wonder whether the author knew of them at all.

In the “Render unto Caesar” pericope in logion 100, it is clearly an exaggeration to suppose that a bystander in the temple would produce an aureus, a gold coin worth 25 times the Synoptics’ denarius. This perhaps clearly gives an impression of cultural distance.

After having analyzed various such points Bruce opines regarding Thomas, “we feel that we are no longer in touch, even remotely, with the evidence of eyewitnesses.” Elsewhere he adds, “the historical and geographical setting – Palestine under the Romans and the Herods around A.D. 30 – has been almost entirely forgotten.” Hence, overall, the prospects for the use of Thomas in the reconstruction of a historical Jesus are quite slim.

(iii) Separatist Teachings: Consider logion 13: “Jesus said to his disciples, ‘Compare me and tell me whom I resemble.’ Simon Peter said to him, ‘You are like a righteous angel.’ Matthew said to him, ‘You are like a wise philosopher.’ Thomas said to him, ‘Master, my mouth is completely unable to say whom you are like.’ Jesus said, ‘I am not your master. When you drank, you became drunk with the bubbling spring which I have dug.’ And he took him and withdrew, and spoke three words to him. When Thomas returned to his companions, they asked him, ‘What did Jesus say to you?’ Thomas said to them, ‘If I told you one of the words which he spoke to me, you would pick up stones and throw them at me. But fire would come forth from the stones, and burn you.’”

It is very evident from this passage that the author of Thomas is trying to paint Peter’s view and Matthew’s opinion as wrong answers. The important thing in the narrative here seems to be that Jesus reveals the truth to Thomas, and that this is the same mysterious truth which is on offer in his Gospel. There is almost certainly a polemic, probably aimed at a wider church group for whom Peter was a foundational figure, and Matthew’s Gospel an authoritative portrait of Jesus. As Glenn Most has put it: “By acknowledging his ignorance, Thomas demonstrates that he has attained a higher level of understanding than either Simon Peter or Matthew (and thereby calls implicitly into question both the authority of the church that traces its legitimacy to the former and that of the synoptic Gospel attributed to the latter).” The stance of Thomas here is more separatist.

Conclusion

For any faithful reconstruction of the historical person of Jesus the best bet so far continues to be the four canonical Gospels. All other gospels and writings could certainly be pressed into service to connect some loose ends or to fill some gaps. However, no historically sensitive person can afford to use any writing in such a manner that that writing trumps the portrait of Jesus presented in the canonical Gospels.