okay welcome back to New Testament one this is lecture two we are getting into it in the last lecture we looked at the general kind of overview what what is this thing that we have called the New Testament and in this particular lecture we're going to ask the question what are the histories remember that in this class we're looking at the histories Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Acts. And so we want to ask ourselves, well, what is it precisely that we are looking at? Now, I would remind you that if you keep an eye on your syllabus and you're working through Pathright correctly, you will have had a lot of extra media to watch.
I've got some Bible project videos for you to watch. I've got some reading, particularly from N.T. Wright and his book. And of course, if you keep up with the Carson and Moo book, they've got a lot on this particular section.
So I'm going to trust you to do a lot of reading. And of course, if you ever have a question, you're welcome to hit me up. with that question and i will do my best to serve you but in this lecture i'm going to cover some of what you read and add my own extra stuff to it so here we go what are the histories the the goal of this particular lecture is for you to understand a bit more about what makes a gospel or a new testament history as i'm calling it um two i want you to understand the kinds of new testament histories and kind of what they are there to do what is their task what is their their job what are they accomplishing and um And so because you have a lot of reading for this lecture, I'll just lightly review.
So let's remind ourselves of the kinds of New Testament histories that we have. The first is the Synoptic Gospels. Now, the Synoptic Gospels we're going to come to, but that's Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and these are the biographical histories. The second kind of history we have is John. John is an interesting and fun and frankly kind of strange book that stands all on its own.
And then we have the book of Acts, which is not its own book. It's the second part. to Luke's gospel, as we'll see, but I'm separating it out simply because it narrates something different than Luke's first book, which narrates the life and ministry and death of Jesus Christ, and the second book is all about the work of the Holy Spirit in the church to build the kingdom of God and advance the gospel. So we'll come to that.
So let's lay a foundation, if we can, for exploring these histories a bit more closely. Now, Histories in general, we have to understand, are histories and not theologies. And so the primary concern is not with theology directly, but the historical events in real space-time that actually took place, which are the foundation of all theology.
Now, this is important for you to understand, because when I was younger in my faith and even new in seminary, I approached this book with a ton of questions. Questions about... humanity, questions about ministry, questions about God's sovereignty, I had all sorts of really interesting questions, which largely were not the point that the New Testament was written to address.
And so this book right here is a book of histories, particularly Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Acts, is telling us historical information from which we will draw theological conclusions, which is of course the job of your systematics classes. We'll come to that in due course. But they're not theologies. They are histories from which we must draw and glean theology. And that is important, of course, to remember.
Now, there's a couple of ways to view history. There's the events themselves. And then there are the writings about the events themselves. You've got to understand what we have are not the events. We have writings about the events.
And that little space has caused some degree of confusion and conflagration. historically. Because we are humans, we cannot have objective observation about almost anything. We all bring our own perspectives. We all bring our own language.
We bring our own internal thoughts and predispositions and all of that stuff. And even if we didn't bring any of those things, these events we're studying happened in the past. And so we have testimony about these events, but we do not have the actual events.
themselves. We cannot actually really ever have brute facts, but if we only view history as simply writings about the events, we're sort of lost in a sea of possibility with no sight of land. And so history, therefore, involves the selection of some bits and the rejection of others.
Or as one New Testament scholar put it, history is just the meaningful narrative. of events and intentions. And so the gospel in that way are histories. They're meaningful narratives of the events and intentions of Jesus Christ. They are not without meaning.
They're not, you're not lost in a sea of hopelessness to try and understand them. They are written with a, with an agenda for you and I to know. what Jesus was like and understand him.
And very clearly, they want you and I, as the reader, to believe the gospel to which they are attesting. So let's think about the gospels specifically, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. As I mentioned in the previous lecture, these are not the gospel of Matthew, the gospel of Luke. There's one gospel, and so this is the one gospel according to Matthew or Mark or Luke or John.
If I see you in your writing, refer to the gospel of so-and-so. I might pop a blood vessel and definitely mark you down. So this is important. Now, in all seriousness, when you and I make disciples and when you and I instruct people, it's important that we're specific and accurate with our language.
Because what we don't want is for folks to understand that we all have our own gospel and our own perspective on it, and that somehow thereby changes the gospel. No, there's the one story of Jesus, and we all get to be part of it, and we have angles on it, and we have these four inerrant. authoritative angles on that one gospel.
So, no books, you should know, before these have been given the title or designation of gospel. Now, in the previous lecture, I told you that there are a lot of scholars who believe that gospel is, in fact, a genre of literature. But there are also a lot of scholars who don't. And because I'm not an historian and I'm not a textual critic, I don't particularly feel I've got the authority to have much of an opinion on that. Because it seems to me that these Gospels themselves are a thing in and of themselves.
Now, the study of what I've just described to you there, like what exactly are the Gospels, this refers to a discipline called literary criticism. Now, literary criticism is sort of a catch-all designation for contemporary approaches to the Gospels that focus on the careful study. of the way the Gospels function as pieces of literature, thus the name literary criticism.
Literary criticism tries to view these texts as they are, rather than wander down the paths of other forms of criticism. So many scholars, as I mentioned, don't believe that there is such a literary genre as Gospels. Many do. There's an argument amongst New Testament scholars about that.
We will be approaching these as if... they were their own kind of thing, as if they were their own genre of literature. And so that's how we're going to be approaching it.
And that is a decision made at kind of a literary critical level, you should know. So let's think about the synoptics. Now, the name synoptic was actually originated by a theologian. His name is J.J. Griesbach.
He's a German from the 18th century, and he coined the term for the synoptic gospels from the Greek word synopsis, which you don't really even have to have studied Greek to know. Syn means like S-Y-N is the prefix that means together and opsis or opto eyes, optometry, optometrist. So the synoptics simply are three gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke that see together the events in life of Jesus. That is, they share a lot of material.
They follow a very similar order. They have a common kind of perspective on Jesus. And that's because they share a lot of the same information. material, which is something we'll get into in just a moment.
The pattern of these Gospels is they tend to move the story of Jesus along the lines of geography or of interest. They all have an interest in geography. Not all three of them have the same level of interest. Mark, for instance, has a deeper level of interest in geography than, say, Matthew, and uses the geography of the story as kind of approaching closer and closer to Jerusalem and finally Golgotha.
But that's one way that they see things together. Now, as I've mentioned, the Synoptic Gospels tend to move the story along of Jesus through an interest in geography. Matthew, Mark, and Luke tend to structure the ministry of Jesus according to a similar geographical sequence, for example.
Ministry in Galilee, withdrawal to the north, with Peter's confession of Jesus as the Christ as kind of a climax and point of transition. That's particularly clear in the Gospel of Matthew. for instance, ministry in Judea, on the way to Jerusalem, and final ministry in Jerusalem. The authors are kind of noting the geography as part of the pattern and part of the story of the ministry of Jesus and how it moves along.
They also share a lot of content. They focus on many of the same events. They focus on the same healings or similar or the same exorcisms, many of the same teachings or parables. They contain many of the events. that we think of as characteristic of the Gospels themselves, like sending out the Twelve or the Transfiguration, the Olivet Discourse.
These things are in there, and those kinds of things are absent from John. They're not there. John is focused on something very different, and so that's why John...
doesn't get counted as part of the synoptics. So another feature is that Jesus is kind of on the move. John has Jesus with these long discourses and not a lot of action verbs, if you like, but Mark, on the other hand, it's the shortest gospel and it's boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. He's moving a lot.
And Mark uses the word immediately all of the time to get the action going. So that's the way, or some of the ways, the synoptics are seeing the life and ministry of Jesus from the same or similar. angles.
So let's ask the question, how did we get the synoptics? Over the years, a ton of scrutiny has been given to these books. As you can imagine, it could be proven somehow that we got these through some sort of false means.
That would be a very, very huge development. On the other hand, if we study them and we find that they have a really good pedigree, that's also a huge development. And the good news for you is, when we look at the textual history and the transmission of these texts down through the centuries to come to us, the text history is strong. Now, over the last couple of centuries, you should know about two approaches that have kind of become quite popular.
They both started with German scholars, you know, mid-19th century. The first is something called form criticism. Now, form criticism tends to focus on the period of... oral transmission that may have led to the writings of the Gospels. It's a well-known fact that, for instance, Mark wrote down what Peter said, and a lot of what Peter said was probably stories that he kept on saying.
There's a theory that there's another source of spoken stories that also became part of the Gospels as well. So form criticism focuses on the period of oral transmission. That's what you need to know about that.
Now, source criticism, on the other hand, focuses on the way different chunks of literature fit together, like in literary units, and were arranged to construct the gospel. Sometimes it's interested in asking the question, okay, well, did this chunk of literature come from a different mouth or a different source than, say, this chunk of literature? And why would, you know, someone like Matthew have arranged it thusly? It asks and seeks to answer the question, what written sources, if any, did the evangelists use in compiling their gospels?
Other forms of criticism would be like redaction criticism, which focus on the literary and theological contribution of the author. So a redaction critic would say, you know, Matthew had his own axe to grind and therefore included certain stories, took out other stories, and was trying to teach his own theology. Some such critics say that Matthew or another gospel writer or New Testament author was more motivated by that than actually reporting. the events that they saw.
We, of course, don't believe that. And so I can't go into a ton of that, but if you look in your Carson and Moo book, the Intro to the New Testament in chapter two, they do a very good job of sort of giving you the lay of the land. There's a ton of footnotes, so if you're interested in that sort of thing, you can see more of it there. And I would very much encourage you to do that, because even though we are, you know, theologically orthodox, we are evangelical, we are charismatic, we believe the Gospels as God's Word, it's important that you and I are at least somewhat conversant with those critics who don't believe that about the New Testament and why they don't believe that so that we can become more faithful missionaries and disciple makers when we interact with some of them. Now, now it's time to talk about a little bit more of that source criticism kind of question.
Where did the materials of the gospel come from? By introducing you to a problem. That's right, friends, I get to give you a problem.
It's called the synoptic problem. The synoptic problem is trying to figure out how did it happen that these three gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, were written with so much agreement in material, order, and wording, and yet with such differences that each writer remains an author and not just like a copyist of the other gospel, right? So they're similar enough to know that they dug up their material from the same places, but they're different enough.
that they're not copies of one another. How did that happen? And so that's the question we're going to think about very, very quickly. Now, again, in your Intro to New Testament book, they will talk a little bit about this, but let me give you sort of an overview. The majority view to answer this question is a view called the two-source hypothesis, that there's some sort of interdependence or linkage between Matthew, Mark, and Luke, that they depended on each other when they were writing their own works.
And so then the question becomes, well, who wrote their work first? And what was the nature of the dependence? And so let's talk about this theory of interdependence, the majority view called the two-source hypothesis, or sometimes called Marken priority, that Mark came first.
Most New Testament scholars, and I agree with this, believe that Mark is the earliest gospel. And one of the reasons that we believe that is that Mark is short. It's grammatically simple. The order of the events in the gospel of Mark tend to be followed by Matthew and Luke.
Not exactly, but pretty well closely. And it seems to offer... a solution to the question that fits quite neatly some of the contours of the Gospels themselves.
For instance, when certain passages in Mark portray Jesus in strange or problematic ways, Matthew and Luke appear to revise Mark just a little bit to remove maybe some ambiguity. An instance of that would be Mark's puzzling remark in his Gospel that Jesus could not do any miracles in Nazareth. That's in Mark chapter 6. In Matthew and in Luke, the scriptures say that Jesus did not do miracles. Or, well, in Luke, that the heart is absent altogether. And so, whatever you think about that, it seems to suggest that they had read that piece in Mark and that they wanted to do something with it, either to maybe say it in their own way or to leave it out altogether based on their own agenda as they were writing their own autobiographical or biographical account of Jesus.
So... The first part of the two-source priority that you basically need to understand is that Mark came first. But that forces us to ask another question. Well, was there some other source that Mark depended on? Like, where did Mark get his material?
Now, we'll talk more about that particular question when we get to the Gospel of Mark in that particular lecture, which is coming up next. But I must also introduce you to a theoretical source that many New Testament scholars posit as existing that might answer the question of where Mark and Mark came from. other gospel writers may have gotten some of their material, and it is represented by the letter Q.
Q comes from the word quela, which just means source, and this is a hypothetical written source which only has the double tradition. So the stuff in Matthew and Luke that's not in Mark is supposedly thought to come from this other source called Q. It's mostly considered to consist of like Jesus'sayings. and some consider it to have included narratives. Now, maybe you're sitting there thinking like, oh gosh, this blows apart my whole understanding of how the scriptures were coming together, and can I still trust?
Yes, yes, you can still trust them, because the gospels themselves say that they contain sources of materials from eyewitness accounts. Luke, for example, says up front that his whole gospel is the result of research and reporting, and it was funded by this dude named Theophilus. And so... So we understand that the gospel writers didn't sit down in a cave and get a loud voice from heaven and start writing.
That's not how we get our Bible. We understand that they did the work that they did, inspired and empowered by the Holy Spirit in such a way that they retained their own individuality. Mark sounds like Mark. Matthew sounds like Matthew.
And yet came to exactly the place where the Holy Spirit desired them to arrive. Okay, so let's talk a little bit more about Q. Why would we posit?
such an idea? Like, who came up with this, and why would they have come up with such a thing called Q? What's the problem that it's meant to solve?
The reason for positing the existence of the source called Q is to explain the existence of about 250 verses or so that are common to Matthew and Luke that are not found in Mark. Where did they come from? They didn't come from each other. They didn't come from Mark. So we're trying to figure out, well, from whence came they?
Where did they come from? And so it presents a problem because they must have come from somewhere, and so the somewhere is sometimes called Q. Now I have to say, we've never dug up Q, there's no letter called Q, there's no the gospel according to Saint Q, and so there's no actual historical evidence that something like Q exists.
There seems to be, however, some textual evidence that something like Q had to exist in order to explain where these verses and materials came from. Now, On your screen will be a graphic that kind of describes what, in graphic form, what it would look like if Q were in fact the answer. And you'll see that, you know, a line going from Mark to Matthew and Luke that explains where a lot of their material came from, and a line from Q going to Matthew and Luke.
And then you'll see two other boxes, M and L, which is stuff that like Mark, or I'm sorry, Matthew added to Matthew and Luke added to... Luke, perhaps. There's lots more discussion about that. But this is one way of visually representing a solution to the problem that I'm telling you about.
the synoptic problem. And remember, the problem is just trying to figure out where did this material actually come from? Now, my view is that the majority view may in fact be correct.
But I got to tell you, this is super interesting and a little bit confusing as a literary and historical dilemma. But it does not at all invalidate the trustworthiness of any of these texts. If anything, it demonstrates the ways that God in his wisdom and in his providence bring the text of scripture about. That is quite a miracle that we have to keep in mind, that this book of books that we have is a fascinating collection of the life and the teachings and the ministry of Jesus that were brought to us in such a synonymous way, in such a synoptic way, and yet with three different perspectives.
It's fascinating, and there's nothing else like it in the history of literature, which can help us really, really have confidence that this, in fact, was brought about by God. So here are some conclusions. They share a lot, the synoptics, and so it's perfectly reasonable that they should, you know, theoretically hang together.
But they also have some important differences. Matthew, Mark, and Luke clearly intend their books to be read as records of what Jesus said and did, and that record is essentially the basis of all New Testament theology. But modern studies of the Gospels increasingly recognize that without, in the least, distracting from the centrality of the teachings of Jesus, It is possible, at the same time, to identify some pastoral and theological concerns that caused each writer to present his record in distinctive ways, which we'll unpack when we talk about some of the motivations or problems that Matthew seems to be trying to solve versus John, etc. And we'll unpack that more as we study the books individually.
Now, another book that kind of stands on its own is the book of John. Like the other Gospels, he wants to narrate the life and ministry of Jesus. But he has an agenda in John chapter 20 verses 30 and 31. He wrote this, quote, that you may believe. He's very clear and one might even call him an apologist because John wants you and me to trust that Jesus is in fact who he said he was on the basis of his writings. And so some of the similarities and differences of John versus the synoptics.
John leaves out a lot of material that is present in the synoptics. There are no narrative. parables in John. There's no account of the Transfiguration, no record of the institution of the Lord's Supper, no report of Jesus casting out a demon, no mention of Jesus'temptations.
But it also includes a lot of stuff that's not in the synoptics. All the material of John 2, 3, and 4, for instance, including his miraculous transformation of water into wine, that's the first miracle that John records, his dialogue with Nicodemus, his ministry in Samaria, a lot of these have no synoptic. counterparts.
Furthermore, like the resurrection of Lazarus, Jesus'frequent visits to Jerusalem, his extended dialogues in the temple. These are unique to John, and so you get a lot more discourse, a lot more words from Jesus as he's talking to other people or as he's teaching himself. Then you get narratives of things that have happened.
So we'll talk about that more when we get to the Gospel of John, of course. And then we get the Book of Acts, which will be the final book that we study in this particular class. Now, as I mentioned, The book of Acts is not its own book, as it were, but it's the part two to the book that Luke began. So scholars will often refer to it as Luke Acts. Sometimes even when it's preached, it's preached as Luke Acts.
This would be important for you to think about as you're teaching your own people to read the Bible. And as you are maybe even constructing sermon series, to do a series on Luke Acts, you know, could be really fun. I haven't done it yet, but I'm really excited to do it.
You could even do... a series on perhaps some of the things that he's interested in, but I digress. We can talk about that more. You can email me and I'll give you some ideas. But the book of Luke is, I'm sorry, the book of Acts is often called Luke part two.
It's not a gospel, but it is a history. It's a narrative history of the early church and the works of the Holy Spirit in the early church to the effect that people... would trust in the gospel of Jesus, that they would be baptized, and that the church would grow, and the word of God would advance. And so that's where that book heads.
So concluding this lecture, let's think about what we've said. As we move forward and we study the histories, just to remind you, there are three kinds, broadly speaking. There are the synoptics, Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
There's the gospel of John, which is its own thing. And then there's the book of Acts, which is part of Luke, but narrates a different thing altogether. The second thing I want you to remember is that history isn't just bare facts, but the Gospels are meaningfully narrating the events of those facts and the intentions of the subjects in those stories.
These are meaningful narratives of the events and intentions of the particular authors. And these histories were written by humans. by men but as the book of first peter says they were carried along by the holy spirit so that the books sound like they wrote them matthew reads different than john and yet we have exactly what the holy spirit wanted us to have so that's a little bit about the histories that we'll be studying in this class