NT Reliability: Class 3 Recap

For our third class we studied the chapter on "The Gospels" to find out who wrote the gospels, when they were written, and what the original sources were. Before we dove into the topic du jour we first took a quiz on last week's topic of "The Canon", reviewed results of the first quiz, and then discussed some lingering questions from our last meeting. We're doing a little competition with our quizzes such that scores will be compiled week-by-week and the two people with the highest cumulative scores will get a prize! To do this anonymously everyone was given a secret name based on an NFL team. After the first quiz the Panthers and Saints hold the top spots with a score of 5/5. Keep studying for the upcoming quizzes, it's still anyone's game! One question from last week was about the differences in the Catholic and Protestant canon and when they diverged. The differences are in the OT, the NT books are identical. The early Christian church used a Greek translation of the OT called the Septuagint. When this was translated, books written after the traditional OT were then translated and added to the Septuagint (these are called deuterocanonical books).  At the time of the Reformation, Protestants decided that these books weren't in the original OT and rejected them, the Catholic Church kept them. A second question was asking why there was such urgency with all the councils or synods leading up to the codification of the NT. I couldn't find any clear answer but it seems that Constantine helped push this along in order to reconcile the disagreements between the Christian church and the Arians (a Christian heresy). Though it's imoprtant to note that at the Council of Nicea the books of the NT weren't even discussed, it was all about the Arian heresy. After this Jim Carr and Bill Martino provided some information on the apocryphal Gospel of Mary and Gospel of Barnabas in order to see how they are different than our NT books. The Gospel of Mary was written no earlier than the late second century and is an obvious forgery. There is debate over who the supposed author is (Mary the mother of Jesus or Mary Magdelene) but in either case it is filled with gnostic claims showing it is certainly an inauthentic forgery. The Gospel of Barnabas is dated no earlier than the 16th century, is written in Spanish and Italian, and is filled with Islamic teachings about Jesus. It is likely an Islamic attempt to fit it's teachings in with the Bible and is certainly an unreliable historical text. The chapter on "The Gospels" is the longest in the book and admittedly a bit dry add to that the fact that we were short on time and we had ourselves a really quick overview of the topic. F.F. Bruce goes into source criticism - the study of the sources of the gospels. Of course it should be stated that we don't have the originals. So the study of them is speculative at best. Nonetheless we it is useful to study the first three gospels together because of their similarity. These are called the Synoptic Gospels. There we see that 95% of Mark's gospel is shared in Luke and/or Matthew's gospels. Luke and Matthew also have other shared content that is called the "Q". It is hypothesized that the Q was actually and earlier source. The unique content in Luke's gospel is denoted by "L" and the unique content in Matthew by "M". Because "Q" is estimated to have been early, a document called "Proto-Luke" is hypothesized as a combination of Q and L before Mark's material was added.  Johns's gospel is treated separately because of the uniqueness of it compared to the Synoptic Gospels. It has four main areas of divergence from them: geography of Jesus' ministry, chronology of Jesus' ministry, diction/style of Jesus, and self-disclosure of Jesus. F.F. Bruce goes through and shows how these divergences can easily be reconciled with the Synoptics. And in any case, John presents the same Jesus as the Synoptics, the miracle-working Messiah and Son of God!

For next time (Thursday October 15th, 7pm in rooms 13, 14, & 15 at Mt. Zion UMC): Read Chapters 5 and 6. Study the content from Chapters 4 for a quiz. P.S. We talked about the information Steve Schrader shared with us when he came to talk about the "The Bible: Fact or Fiction?". His slides are available on the website, here.