Episode 337: James Barker - Writing and Rewriting the Gospels
In this week’s episode of The Bible for Normal People, Pete and Jared talk with James about how the Gospels were written, how Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John relate to one another, and what ancient writing practices can teach us about the formation of the New Testament. They explore why the Gospel writers may have intentionally adapted and reshaped earlier accounts, how John builds on the Synoptic Gospels, and how Paul’s theology may have influenced the Gospel writers in surprising ways. Together, they invite listeners to let each Gospel speak in its own distinct voice, reconsider assumptions about how the Bible was written, and appreciate the deeply human process through which these texts took shape.
Mentioned in This Episode
Books: Writing and Rewriting the Gospels: John and the Synoptics by James Barker
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Pete: You're listening to The Bible for Normal People, the only God-ordained podcast on the internet. I'm Pete Enns.
Jared: And I'm Jared Byas.
Pete: On today’s episode, it’s me –Pete. And I’m talking about writing and rewriting the gospels with James Barker. James is the associate professor of New Testament at the Western University of Kentucky and his newest book is Writing and Rewriting the Gospels: John and the Synoptics, which is an amazing book and the basis for our conversation today. So, let’s get into the episode!
James: The more reverence you have for the Bible, the more you should let each text and author speak for themselves and not try to make it all agree the way you've been told it's supposed to when they speak for themselves.
I think we have more reverence for the Bible and frankly, I have a lot more reverence for the human side of things.
Pete: Well, James, welcome to the only God-ordained podcast on the internet, the Bible for Normal People. So it's great to have you.
James: Thank you so much. It's great to be here.
Pete: Yeah, and, uh, you know, you wrote a book fairly recently on the gospels and, as soon as I read that I said I gotta talk to this guy some more.
'cause this is just fascinating stuff. So let's, let's just, um, let's start with. Some basic, uh, issues about the gospels that maybe you can help us understand, but what do we know about when the gospels were written and by whom?
James: I'll say not as much as we would like to and not as much as many scholars would lead you to believe.
So there are a lot of questions there, but for the, when I narrow things roughly to about a window of 70 to 110 in the common era.
Pete: Okay. Okay.
James: I think that everything, all our gospels are written after the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans during the Jewish revolt in the year 70. And I think when we get to this guy named Ignatius, who's a bishop in Antioch around the year 110, we don't have firm dates for him either, but he sure seems to have Matthew, Luke, and John, and as we'll talk about that would entail that Mark had also been written, right? So, uh, a lot of people would say, oh, that's, that's a really wide window. You know, scholars sometimes like to say 70 for this gospel, 85 for that gospel, right? And I say there's no logic to that.
All four of our canonical gospels could have been written in rapid succession in just a couple of years. They could have been written two or three right away, and then a long gap of decades for others. We don't know if we were talking about any other piece of ancient literature, and I gave you a 40 year window for four books, you'd say, that's a pretty narrow window.
Pete: Yes. Are you sure about that day? Are you sure about that?
James: Yeah. Yeah.
Pete: So, right. So, we just don't know. And in terms of the who, right? We, we don't really, we don't really know that. We don't, yeah. They're anonymous.
James: We have names that are attached to them and attached, uh, very early, uh, debate about whether they originally circulated anonymously or not.
But we get these names of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And then the church has to explain who those people are. And the tradition is Matthew and John were apostles. They were right there eyewitnesses with Jesus, Mark and Luke. Well, Mark knew Peter, and Luke knew Paul. And so they're Apostol-ish, if not apostolic.
So they count, but all of that's tradition, right? So we can take it or leave it. And, we're not beholden to it because the texts don't say that. Um, it's just been the tradition that emerged and emerged early, but again, we can't know. And so a lot of this, we just have to be satisfied saying, we can't answer that question with certainty. So let's move to the things we can have more certainty about.
Pete: Yeah. And not to start a food fight here, not with you, but with others. But sometimes apologists, uh, will say that, well, the earliest statements we have, uh, you know, maybe around 110 or so, which implies that this tradition was known for maybe a decade or two before that.
Um, there is a lot of speculation and that kind of a claim because in terms of evidence. You need more evidence of that to make a claim like that. Is that true?
James: Absolutely. Yeah. And, and these 10 year gaps become so convenient for scholars to say things like, well, 74 Mark, sure. Now let's leave 10 years for Matthew.
And I raised my hand and say, why?
Pete: Yeah, why?
James: I can look at a map of the Roman Empire and I can go to ORBIS is one of my favorite sites for people my age who grew up playing Oregon Trail. ORBIS is this wonderful resource where you can say, well, what if you wanted to take a donkey cart all the way from Athens to Rome?
And not even go by now, what if you wanted to take a boat and it lets you time all of this out and so you can figure out that in three weeks you could get from Rome to Jerusalem? You know, in three to four weeks you could get from Rome to Alexandria. Today, you could get on a plane. And so we're like talking hours.
Pete: Yeah.
James: But back then, we're talking weeks. So for one gospel to make its way across the empire in a month, well, how long does it take to write a gospel? Might have taken you 10 years. Like it took me to write this book because I couldn't get it the way I wanted, but I, of course not. Yeah. You know, I studied under AJ Levine and sometimes she can write a book and block off a month and churn out 50,000 words. So we have to take some of what we know from the modern era and actually let ourselves project that back onto the ancient world to say, wow, when I really start to scrutinize some of these claims. They don't hold up. There's no good evidence for them. And I can actually imagine a whole lot of different possibilities.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
And I say, let's let our imaginations run a lot more than previous scholarship has done.
Pete: Yeah, I know. I love that last part, especially because the role of imagination and any intellectual pursuit is, I think, vital. It's central. It's not just you're letting your subjectivity get involved, it's just that you're putting yourself into the place of another and trying to think through different scenarios.
And if we don't use our imaginations, we are just letting our own assumptions run amuck.
James: Absolutely. And, and so I look at something as simple as saying, could one person have written a gospel from start to finish? And I think that through and I come to the conclusion, yes, that's possible. And then I imagine a small circle of people who are writing later gospels in particular. And I imagine a sort of scholarly circle like we see in Egypt when we dig up papyri and people are really into, uh, epic poetry. And so they're collecting it and they're comparing different works, and they're writing letters of saying, Hey, get a copy of such and such when you visit so and so, because I know he has a good copy.
Make a copy, bring it back. We'll study it. They're clearly engaged in some sort of scholarly project of their own. If I've got three or four people each reading earlier gospels, well maybe that's how we put together our own later gospel.
Pete: One thing I wanna spend most of our time talking about is the relationship between the gospels.
And then where John fits into all of this. 'cause that's the really fascinating stuff. But before we get there, I just, you just mentioned something that made me think of, I've never heard anybody do this, what you did, which is basically work with the material of, of how to even write a gospel.
So, could you just entertain us for a few minutes of what you did to actually sort of almost reproduce a possible way in which the gospels were written mechanically?
James: I would love nothing more and I always love show and tell for people who can view it.
So, uh. I always personally start with a legal pad in, you know, canary yellow. And I use my 0.7 millimeter pentel lead pencil like I've been using since the third grade. 0.7 is important.
Pete: Point seven is important. I agree with that. What else is there? Okay, go ahead.
James: 0.5 is too thin and 0.9 is too thick a line. It's, it's not right.
James: Yeah. And not the color blue. There are rules. So yeah. So this is what a, you know, a Roman era wax tablet is about the size of your hand. And, and so we say a lot of people just say wax tablet. I insist on saying waxed because this is made of wood, not waxed.
Pete: Yeah, yeah.
James: But it's recessed so that I've got about enough space to have what would be a column of a scroll. Or a book roll. Those terms can be used interchangeably.
Pete: Yeah. Okay.
James: And so you write on wax and I made mine with a nice charcoal color just by burning a little bit of papyrus and mixing it into my bees wax.
And I got a tip from a candle maker to throw in just a dab of coconut oil. If it's too hard, it's really hard to erase, but if it's too soft, it's just too mushy. Yeah. And so, uh, you know, you can, I'll write my name much larger than I would, and you just scratch it in and that's all you do.
But if I write small, like I typically do, I can get anywhere from 300 to 400 letters
Pete: Yeah.
James: on each, each of my sheets here, and then I can just turn the page and do that. And what happens with my simple little triptych here? Yeah. I get four pages that could basically give you, um, what, where would we be?
Like a double space page? Yeah. If you typed it out today in 12 point font on an eight and a half by 11.
Pete: So what would they do then?
James: Yeah, so I have a page of the book where I even take two boards, like, uh, a top and bottom sheet. Mm-hmm. Sheet. And so, uh, you know, you could see kind of a rough size of, uh, smaller than it our, our typing paper today.
You, you can take this and get Matthew's story of the healing of paralysis all the way down to the last sentence you'd flip the page.
Pete: Okay. Okay.
James: Mark’s and Luke's are a little longer. When you get the story the way you want it and when, and you probably have a, a little small bookshelf of these.
Mm-hmm. So you've got your triptych, or you could have four panels and ten triptych. Five panels and a pentriptych. And so you have a row of these, okay? When you fill up enough material, you transfer it to a scroll. And, and so this too would initially be a draft, but this is a scale model I made of the Gospel of John.
And you can see what a column looks like. This is our fourth century big codex. The Vatican Bible, Codex Vaticanus. Um, yeah, you, you can make that into a scroll and it looks like a scroll if you lay it out. And I think that's intentional, right? And so you can put the contents of your wax tablets onto papyrus in the form of a scroll.
Pete: And, and so just, uh, to ask a dumb question here, but, uh, some people might be wondering too, the advantage of the wax tablet is that you're not committing yourself to the font. It's a rough draft, right? Absolutely.
James: Absolutely. You can literally erase it. It's not as expensive as we might have thought. Because so much of it gets thrown away. Uh, ah, so we, we look to this place Oxyrhynchus, is its big name, but it's where we've discovered the most papyrus and it's a garbage dump. And, people's entire libraries got thrown out, really. And if papyrus was as precious as we think, somebody would have at least reused those roles because that's the easiest way to make a draft of a new work.
Pete: Right, but there's at least some advantage to using the wax.
James: Oh, absolutely. Because, uh, we have an ancient professor of rhetoric named Quintilian who tells you how to become a great orator. And he talks a lot about the process of cogitation. And all it means is think before you write, think it out.
Imagine that, sound it out. Maybe say it a few ways and then write it down. But the wax allows you just to, to either mark it out or to erase it, to, to write the same sentence three times and pick the one you want and, and mm-hmm. So you can really refine it before it ever gets put down on a scroll. Right.
But that scroll, that first one would still be a draft. Yeah. And it's really easy just to mark out a line, right? If you leave, kinda like you think the difference between single spacing and double spacing. If you space out your draft, you can say, I wanna use a different word here. I wanna use a different phrase there.
I need to add some clarification here and there, and I can already do that in my margins on my scroll.
Pete: Okay.
James: And, I argue that the gospels would have originally been published in scroll format. Mm-hmm. This, uh, uh, the Gospel of John is, uh, you know, a nice handful. You would not have put more than one gospel in more than one scroll.
It would've been too unwieldy. The bigger it gets, one wind, two winds. All of a sudden it does become a little cumbersome. But this is totally manageable to have any of the four gospels in scroll format. Uh, eventually we get the Codex, which is more of a book like we are familiar with, where you get a front cover and a back cover, and you can then take your pages.
Pete: Right.
James: And, but this doesn't really emerge until the first century. And if the gospels were published as codices, then they were almost the first ever to use the medium. So I'm a little skeptical of that.
Pete: Unlikely. Yeah. Yeah.
James: And even when they were published in this format, again, one gospel at a time.
Yeah. And you can see how much more portable it is. Right. But you know, back to that scroll again, it's still a draft, and you get that the way you want it, and you need to know the midpoint of it if you want it to be a codex someday. Because you don't have a whole lot of margin for error. In terms of where it folds up for our earliest codices. But to me, I hope one of the biggest contributions of the book is that chapter on, can we talk about how ancient people wrote books? And it's very different from what we do when we write books today, but that's the only way they wrote books for a millennium.
Pete: What does that help us understand? What's the value of knowing something of the process when we approach things like, you know, the gospels and what relationship there might be between Mark and Matthew or whatever?
James: I think it helps us a lot because we clear up some misconceptions that you might find.
Uh, it's always great when scholars are paying attention to ancient writing practices because not enough work has been done on it. But, uh, in my own experimentation, which at this point is, is pretty advanced. Um, much more so than than the average New Testament scholar. Uh, it's pretty clear to me that there are some things that are wrong.
One thing scholars keep saying that they should have known for a hundred years is not true, is the scrolls were difficult to use. That's all that there was. If you had handed someone in the ancient world, a codex, like, we know a book, what's this exactly? What is this thing?
What, how do I, what I can only look at two columns at a time if I, if I keep on rolling my scroll, uh, shoulder width, which we have plenty of statues of people with this long scroll draped open. They probably have four or five columns in view. And scholars would, will, will make claims about how unwieldy that will have been.
And I just chuckle and I say, has that scholar ever used a printed newspaper?
Pete: Right. Yeah.
James: Think about how many columns you have on a single page of a newspaper. And how you have to open it up wider than shoulder width, or are you one of those people who bolds the printed, uh, newspaper over?
Mm-hmm. Or are you anti-folding and you hold it there? We all manipulate these things and, and we learn as children just with the comic strips how they work, and they're not too difficult for us. Mm-hmm. And lo and behold, that's more unwieldy than what an ancient scroll would've been. Uh, and so then people say, oh, but you had to wind it and rewind it.
And so I made my nice copy of John, and I would skim as I would go, and I can get from the beginning to the end in five minutes. And then I can rewind if I'm all the way at the end of the conclusion of the Gospel of John, I wanna go all the way back to the beginning, which the gospel of John begins in the beginning.
It takes me five minutes and I'm back at the beginning. And so there's nothing that difficult about it. And there are classicists who have done this and written about this for a hundred years, but, uh, some of these misconceptions still pervade that, because it's so different from what I know that must have made, meant that it was so difficult for them.
The other thing I always like to point out is, is the time factor. People say, oh, would've taken a lot of time to relocate within a scroll. And I say, no, wouldn't, I'll look at the passage that a scholar's talking about to go from this point in Mark to that point in Mark, if I'm Matthew and somehow I've dislocated or relocated some material to cluster things together or to spread them apart, well, I can get there in a minute or two.
And then what happens when I get there? Okay. Even if all I do is copy it word for word, which our gospels do at times, right? Mm-hmm. I can take those four or five lines and say, now that would've taken me eight to 10 minutes to copy it and then to check it and make sure that it would have been correct.
The writing process, writing by hand takes far more time than repositioning within a scroll. Exponentially more time. Yeah. So when you imagine yourself writing the whole book by hand, I ended up with the book that I published and I say at one point. I could have written this entire thing by hand, but I would prefer not to.
And I use that line. I would prefer not to because Bartleby the Scrivener would always say, I prefer not to back in the days before the typewriter, when legal documents had to be copied by hand. And it would take all day. And so when you think that that's how every book was made before the invention of the printing press, and if you're talking about a legal contract and you only needed four copies of it, you would not commit that to the printing press.
You would just make 4 hand-written copies. That's true in the 19th century. It's true. Uh, and what changes is the invention of the typewriter that makes that go much more quickly. Right. But today we have a word processor that goes so much faster. We edit ourselves at the speed of thought. Stephen King even says this in his book on writing.
I like to write long. I think it out the best when I write longhand, but then I get on a roll and my hand can't keep up. Right. So I like the typewriter. But he talks about writing on a typewriter, and today I have students who have never even used an actual typewriter. So when you think about how much writing technology has changed in my lifetime, so much so that I actually took a typing class as a high student.
Pete: Me too.
James: And, my students today struggle to write a handwritten exam in class because they're only used to typing and texting. And so it's becoming increasingly difficult for a new generation of students, even to imagine writing something, you know, more than a jot. They don't even jot down their phone number to hand to somebody. I will text you my number.
Pete: Right, right.
James: So you think about how much technology has evolved in one lifetime.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
James: We really do circle back to this point about imagination of saying, well, imagine the media that we know for a fact that they used and I don't know, maybe take a year and work with it with your own hands.
Yeah. And see what it's like and you start to figure some things out.
Pete: Right. Instead of placing your own assumptions on that and then making academic decisions about the nature of these gospels and whatnot. So, so, okay. You, you got us into something there a minute or so ago that I want to get to now, and that is, you know, the relationship between the gospels people, you have to be blind to read the gospels and not see boy, they're similar.
James: Oh yeah.
Pete: But they're also different. And even where they're similar, they're different. And Matthew, Mark and Luke are somewhat more similar. And John, you know, this is the very thing that you're against. But John is the outlier. John is the one that is not related to the other three.
So, uh, just help us understand something of the academic discussion concerning, first of all, the relationship between Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and then where academics are with respect to John's relationship with them.
James: Sure. Uh, with, you're right with Matthew, Mark, and Luke, there is so much overlap, so many retellings of the same stories, and oftentimes in the exact same words at times.
Mm-hmm. Which is rare. It's not unusual to find highly similar literary works that proliferate in antiquity. For the writers of the gospels, I say they've already got it. Read their Jewish scriptures. Deuteronomy literally means in Greek anyway. The second telling of the law, it's a bunch of laws you already know.
If you've read the previous books in the Torah, if you read the story of the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah, first and Second Samuel, first and Second Kings, that's right there in your Jewish scriptures. But what else is there? The works of First and Second Chronicles, which retell the same stories of First and second Samuel and first and second Kings.
Uh, but let's start the beginning a little earlier. Let's start at the end. Let's end a little later in history, and then let's shrink and revise and adapt, uh, in the middle. That's how we should think about Matthew, Mark, and Luke. They have a precedent in their own Jewish scriptures for doing the very thing that they do in retelling the earlier gospels. So scholars know that there's a relationship. The verbatim agreements mean that these are not being written independently today. Today, we would call it plagiarism.
Pete: But not back then. Right? Yeah
James: You can't, and you can't say that the same words, you know, a string of 50 words and not one of them is different, when you see that, somebody is copying from someone else.
The question is chicken and egg. Which one of these came first and gave rise to the others? And that's where there's been a lot of debate over the centuries.
Pete: Let's get into that. Like what are scholars saying over the past hundred or 200 years about this?
James: Yeah. Well, we go all the way back to the earliest times and we, we find, uh, rather simplistic statements.
Like Augustine says at one point, he's reading Matthew, Mark, Luke and John in the order we ended up with in our English bibles. And he says, well, I guess that's the order they were written in. And so, people really didn't question that for a long time. Until they did. And that was in the modern era, just in the last 250 years. Well, what if, uh, Matthew came first? Like a lot of early church traditions say, but you know, this one guy in the early church said that the gospels with birth stories came first. So what if that's right? What if it goes from Matthew to Luke and then Mark just came along and sort of abridged Matthew and Luke, and very few people adhere to that today, but that was an important moment to get the ball rolling, to say, that doesn't quite seem right, but that old idea of Matthew Martin, Luke, John, that doesn't seem right either. And so the long story short is we came out with Mark in priority, which all we mean is Mark is the first gospel that's written.
Mm-hmm. And today that makes perfect sense to people. When you say, okay, well it's the shortest, it doesn't give you the Christmas story, doesn't give you much of an Easter story either. Right. There's an empty tomb and a young man tells some women that Jesus has risen. Uh, go tell his disciples, but they don't the end.
Yeah. Well, that's a rather unfulfilling ending to a gospel. So Matthew and Luke come along and they start earlier with a birth story for Jesus, and they end with Jesus in the flesh appearing to his disciple. So again, we get Matthew, Mark, and Luke related in some way. What has dominated scholarship for a hundred years though is this idea that we gotta keep Matthew and Luke in separate corners and they can't have been using one another.
And so where did they get all that stuff that they have in common that wasn't in Mark? Well, there must have been some other source that they used in addition to Mark, because obviously they've got Mark, because they use so much of Mark's material in their own gospel. But that mysterious second source, what should we call it?
Let's just call it source, but let's use the German word for it, fella, and then let's just give it an abbreviation cue. And so the two source hypothesis says that Mark, and this lost predominantly sayings of Jesus. Those two sources got us Matthew and Luke. We don't need to connect Matthew and Luke, they just each did their own thing independently.
Pete: And that is a hypothetical, right?
James: Absolutely hypothetical.
Pete: I mean that it's a construction of scholars who were trying to explain how Matthew and Luke can be similar.
James: Right. How could they both have the Lord's prayer? Uh, and so much of Matthew's sermon on the Mount, Luke's sermon on the plain, certain parables, they all have this stuff and they cannot have gotten it from Mark 'cause it's not in Mark at all. Yeah. So they must have had a common source. So, a hypothetical source, uh, a construction, or you might just say people made it up. Because we don't have it, it doesn't exist except in the minds of scholars. And I try to work with the texts that I have. And I try to connect them as simply as possible and use Occam's razor.
And even when you find a story that is in Mark, what happens a whole bunch of times is that Matthew and Luke add exactly the same words at exactly the same place. And then sometimes they leave out exactly the same phrase from Mark at exactly the same point. And you start counting up the number of times that they do this, that if we just had Matthew, Mark, and Luke, you might come to the conclusion that there has to be some relationship between Matthew and Luke.
It's perhaps not an accident that they both give you a birth story and they compliment each other so well because Matthew gives you Joseph's perspective. While Luke gives you Mary's.
Pete: Yeah. Yeah.
James: And so, Luke also begins even earlier with a birth story for John the Baptist, because who is this guy anyway, turns out he was somehow related to Jesus.
Everyone will say they're cousins. It just says relatives that Mary and Elizabeth were relatives. Uh, but we should start with him. And so it could just be that Luke is starting a bit earlier, because John the Baptist played such a crucial role in the beginnings of the gospels, let's tell you where he came from.
Yeah. And so I really think it's that simple that we just have a snowballing trajectory from Mark to Matthew, to Luke. And everybody used everybody who came before. Mm-hmm. And that's known as the Farrer hypothesis. Name for Austin Farrer. Who said –
Pete: So, just to be clear, right? I wanna make sure, so what you're saying is that Mark is first, Matthew used Mark and did his thing, Luke came along and he is dependent on both. Is that right? On both Mark and Matthew?
James: That is exactly what I think. And then, this is becoming a nice rival to the two source hypothesis. The two source hypothesis that kept Matthew and Luke separate has really dominated for about a hundred years. But an increasing number of scholars say there has to be a relationship between Matthew and Luke.
Uh, but Mark was written first. And so what if we just go simply from Matthew to Mark, uh, from Mark to Matthew, to Luke, each one using what came before. And we call that today the Farrer hypothesis for the scholar who kind of first put that on the map. Not the first person who ever thought of it, but for simplicity's sake, we give him credit and, a lot of scholars have come over to that side to where, uh, it's a nice rival and interesting to say where we might be in 10 years. If you say, what is the consensus of scholars? It sure does seem to be shifting. Or at least those of us who think as I do and Mark Goodacre's work can't be stressed strongly enough. He was kind enough to write the forward to my book. He has been championing this theory for so quite some time and has persuaded a lot of people because it really does have a lot of explanatory power when you say, oh, well, what you just said about the birth stories, let's get Mary's perspective in there.
And let's add John the Baptist. That sure looks like Luke knows Matthew. And that Luke knows Mark starts with an adult Jesus. You don't even know how old he is. Yeah. There is no way to know from Mark's narrative. So Luke says he was about 30 years old.
Mm-hmm.
James: Well, you can deduce from Matthew's gospel that he’s somewhere, you know, between 30 and 40, can't know exactly.
And so you can see Luke doing little things here and there with Matthew and Mark. Mm-hmm. And I think that makes the most sense.
Pete: Yeah. And it, it's actually, you know, for people listening at home, it makes sense if you ever have the chance to do it, to, to look at passages that are maybe repeated in all three of those gospels and start with Mark and say, how is Matthew different and how is Luke different from that?
And what you're saying, James, is that there seems to be, not just they're different and they relate to each other somehow, but you're detecting and other scholars too. You're not, this is not idiosyncrasy. Right? This is the field, uh, saying, you know, you can see a line of dependence here between these three gospels.
So you, you've given us, um, a couple of very brief examples, and I shudder to ask this. 'cause I know to do this properly would take an hour. But could you just off the top of your head, give an example, you know, of this sort of pattern happening, of dependence from Mark to Matthew to Luke?
Just maybe, maybe something that people could look up on their own. Right. And just compare that.
James: Absolutely. Go to the last page or two of each gospel, but start with Mark, and then go to Matthew and then go to Luke. I mentioned before, the original ending to the gospel of Mark is chapter 16, verse eight.
The women said nothing to no one because they were afraid. The end.
Pete: See you later. Yep. Have fun. Yeah.
James: And Matthew has Jesus show up as promised, and he meets his disciples in Galilee and he appears to them. And if we're making a movie, that's a much more satisfying ending, is it not?
Pete: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
James: The last line of the gospel of Matthew has Jesus say, and I'll be with you forever until the end of the world.
The end. Awesome, Jesus, where are you? 'cause you promised to be here and Matthew thinks he's cleaning up something from Mark. Hey, I gave you a resurrection appearance. You are welcome. Mark's saying, Hey, I wrote you a gospel. You're welcome. But Luke comes along and he sees the problem and he says, Jesus will be with you in spirit.
So Jesus meets his disciples. He appears to them in the flesh, but then he gets into a cloud and he floats up into the heavens and he has to stay there. If you skip ahead to Luke's sequel, the Book of Acts. He has to stay gone until final judgment. Yeah. If Professor Barker wants to ask where Jesus is, you better hope you don't see him because your time has run out.
If you see him, it's final judgment and you're not gonna miss that. So he gets Jesus up into the heavens to explain, well, Jesus is with you, but it is because Jesus has sent the spirit back to you to be with you there. So that snowball works so neatly when we look at the endings of the gospels, I don't think any of that is by accident.
I see these authors in conversation with each other, at least on a literary level. I don't know that any of the gospel writers knew one another personally, but they knew their predecessors' works. And everyone who comes along later knows all the stuff that came before.
Pete: Which, as you said before, is not unusual in antiquity to be aware of other writings, and that's just what you do. You look at them and you do your own thing.
James: Absolutely. Book collection and comparison and study before you write your own. That's how you and I write books today, right? Called research. Exactly.
Pete: I don't wanna put words in your mouth here, but it, it seems like what you're saying, or at least implying is that with the resurrection accounts, right? Uh, Matthew's saying this isn't good enough, what Mark did, I have to augment it or correct it. And Luke says, well, you're missing something too. So I'm gonna say it differently there.
Their intent. This is the thing that I want people who are listening to really wrap their heads around this. This is intentionally altering. It's not what I hear, you know, when I was younger in church or something like, well, they're giving you three perspectives. Imagine if people were watching a car accident.
They're just giving you three different perspectives. No, no, no. They're intentionally changing, right? So, we're watching Theology at Work. Really. These are theologians trying to talk about Jesus in ways that make sense to them. And so you have different ways of talking about the resurrection.
And of course, you know, later on, Mark itself got changed. But you have these endings that look an awful lot like Matthew and Luke, if you ask me some. Just you, you do. Yeah. Put stuff in there.
James: You can have a nice synopsis. And see bits of Matthew, Luke, John, and even I think the snake handling thing, I think comes from that story in Acts where Paul gets bit by a snake and he doesn't die.
So, uh, sure. Yeah. Somebody needed to clean up Mark and make Mark adequate and satisfying by ending right.
Pete: In the view of people who were, let's say, editing what would become sacred scripture for the church. They were saying, this isn't good enough. We have to say it differently. And so Mark was changed. I just think that's a fascinating thing to just keep in mind.
James: I agree.
Pete: Yeah, it's wonderful.
James: I think you can't emphasize it enough. Yeah. And I then go back though to the point about book collection and comparison because a lot of people see these improvements.
Pete: Mm-hmm.
James: And I think it is correct to say Matthew thinks he has improved Mark.
Right. Then sometimes scholars make the leap. To say therefore Matthew didn't think you needed to read Mark anymore.
James: And if you read the preface to Luke, well you've read the rest now read the best, right? Yeah, exactly.
Pete: I did my research. I don't know what these other guys are doing. Right?
James: But, but if we keep in mind what we know for a fact of reading and writing practices in the Greco-Roman world. People did not throw out their other books no differently than the Tanakh kept the chronicler telling retelling of the kings of Israel and Judah right there in the same collection.
Yeah. Same library as Samuel and King's. So nobody has to be replacing anyone else. There is a one upmanship there. Right? Uh, and that is where, uh, you've had Robin Walsh on your show. She and I are very like-minded. That writers write for other writers, we write to impress each other.
And so you can only impress someone who is fluent in the Jesus book culture, right? And so you have to have them to say, I see what you did there, Luke. You wondered where the swords came from. A guy gets his ear cut off when Jesus gets arrested, and the swords literally come out of nowhere. So Luke adds two lines to tell you that the disciples were carrying swords.
Now that is a smart move, and that was intended to impress a readership who knew what he had done in comparison to the others.
Pete: This explains something that, again, I've heard my whole life, people saying that, well, you know, how could you expect common people to understand some of these subtleties in these texts? And maybe the answer is, well, you don't, it's not written. It's not really for them, it's for other people who understand it. And that makes sense. Don't we write to impress people who really know something about the field? I've been trying to get away from that for 20 years, you know?
James: And I'm the same way. But I actually think that's helpful because I always put it this way, how many movies have you made in your life? Right? But how many movies have you watched?
Mm-hmm.
James: So if you think about somebody who is literate and can read a Jesus book to you, you can know the gospels really well, even if you are illiterate, which about 90% of the ancient people were.
So, uh, I don't think that there's a problem there. If you take something like the Wizard of Oz, you and I can read the book and then we can watch the original film and then we can go see Wicked on Broadway. And now we can see Wicked on the screen, right? And we can see how these stories are related and dependent no matter how differently they're being told.
Right? We can see what's added, we can see what's left out. We can see what's completely inverted, right? But we know that they are related that way, but I don't have to be able to write a musical and perform one to be very familiar with that.
Pete: So that's true. Yeah, that's true.
James: I do think the authors have to be part of a very small elite circle, like today's terms filmmakers.
Not everybody's got the skills, uh, required to do that, but most of us have access to be able to view and even listen to a film. If we don't have sight, we can still enjoy films because we're just listening to it like radio, right?
James: Uh, and, and if we're not able to hear, we can still, you can do this, uh, with classic filmmaking.
Just press mute. The way the characters interact, and how they respond to one another can tell you the story if it acted out well. So people can have a very sophisticated knowledge of film without having any ability to make one for themselves. And I think the hearers of the gospels could, could do the same and still say that, Hey, I like what Luke did there by adding a description of where the swords came from.
Right? But for Luke to have done that puts him relatively speaking in that literary elite circle as an expert.
Pete: Yeah. Well, we have a few minutes left. Uh, there are about 40 things I want to talk to you about, but here's something we need to get to. That is your understanding. Maybe use an example if you can, your understanding of John's gospel because first of all, tell us a little bit how, in what ways is John's Gospel different than the others? Just a few points that people can find on their own. Sure. And then you do make the claim as others do that, you know, you can't just put John on a different shelf entirely. He's also part of this gospel writing elite.
Right, right. Where he's also looking at earlier things and maybe, making some very interesting changes or adaptations or something like that. So just if you mind riffing on that would be great.
James: Sure. John has always stood out and since the ancient world, the earliest Christians knew that John was different.
About 80% of John does not overlap with the synoptic gospels. So we've always sort of set him off to the side. Mm-hmm. But he's not as different as, uh, as we might always claim. He does have stories in common, not just crucifixion, resurrection, although there are notable differences there. There's feeding of the 5,000, there's the anointing story.
There's when John does overlap with Matthew, Mark, and Luke, it sure seems to me and to others that John knows what Matthew, Mark and Luke have done. Uh, Steve Hunt wrote his dissertation, on John on just feeding 5,000. And he said, if you read closely enough, John's got Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
He's not just. That John, that Jesus fed 5,000 people with five loaves of bread and two fish. He knows very specific details that okay, he can only be drawing on from each gospel. Right. And if you read carefully enough, you can start to see that. So we have tended in scholarship to say, well, John, just, it's different.
He is just heard these stories. It's all oral tradition. An oral tradition then turns into everything and nothing all at once. Mm-hmm. And I want to say, let's use the texts that we have and let's explain them and see if we can, and lo and behold, you can connect the dots from Mark to Matthew, to Luke, to John. And John comes along last and does know what, what he's doing, and is indebted to all three in published form for him to write some gospel.
Pete: Okay. So how it, um, and by the way, I wanna point people to, if you know, you'll know the book by the time we're done with this episode. 'cause I'll tell you what, it's, but, and he's even shown it to you.
But, there are examples there to look at, which are fascinating. Um, the question though is 80% of John is not part of the synoptic.
Pete: Those three, the tradition. And I guess the question is if he's using it, and I I, I don't doubt that he is using that tradition, but why is it so very, very different?
James: I think one reason is that it is, when we think like, why didn't he use more of Matthew, Mark and Luke? I think it's starting to get played out a little frankly. Okay. And I think if you, if you wanna break into the Jesus book market and there is clearly a market for Jesus books, you gotta have something new to say because we can see Matthew has more material than Mark did.
Luke has more than even Matthew had. And John has even more than any of those have. But how is he different? Well, one key difference is there are no exorcisms in the Gospel of John, right?
James: And there are a lot of exorcisms in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Mm-hmm. But those demons who come out of those people in Matthew, Mark and Luke know Jesus to be the son of God.
Right.
Pete: Right.
James: I do not think is, it is an accident that there are no exorcisms in the gospel of John, but boy are there a lot of humans, not demons, humans who recognize Jesus from the get go as Son of God. Mm-hmm. And so, uh, if you read the Old Testament, angels are called literally sons of God.
Pete: Right.
James: And John does not want you to confuse Jesus as some angel pretending to be human.
Mm-hmm. And the demons calling Jesus son of God. All you gotta do is read your Old Testament and say, oh, okay. Takes one to no one. Jesus is one of these somehow divine beings like them. Mm-hmm. He's superior to them because they have to obey him. They even know that he's going to torment them at final judgment.
But John wants to leave all of that out and say, Jesus has created all things, all things aren't created by him.
Pete: Yeah.
James: That includes all those angels and all those demons. If you read the other gospels, the ones who most frequently know Jesus to be son of God, they came into being through him. He is so vastly superior to them that he can't be confused.
I think that John knows what he's doing there. Yeah, sure. And if he comes out on top, you can then say, oh, okay. Where did those angels even come from in the first place? From Jesus. What? You didn't know that? No. You didn't know that if all you read was Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Mm-hmm. John tells you that, and John wants to become the lens through which you read the other gospels complimentary and supplementary to them.
Pete: Okay. So, maybe another way of putting this is the scholars say this is an exalted christology Yes. In John part. And that's, that is in part what might drive him to write it the way that he does. Of course that begs the question, why have that exalted Christology at all? Right? When, when you don't have it in the other?
Well, not to the same extent, at least in the other gospels. Um, not that we need to answer that question, but I just find that fascinating and people have said it's, I don't know how you feel about this, but after, you know, two or three generations of reflection, people came to appreciate what they believe to be the significance of Jesus differently in ways that you maybe couldn't at the earlier stages of this Jesus tradition.
But that's a speculative comment too, isn't it? That I just made this movie?
James: No, but I think it works. I think it holds up because you have to start somewhere. And Larry Hurtado, may he rest in peace. He would talk about this as an eruption that there is very early, very high Christology, but not as high as what we see in John originally.
Mm-hmm. Because first you have to establish that the God of the Jews even had a son to begin with.
Yeah.
James: Well, why didn't, uh, Jews believe in mass that Jesus was the son of God because their God doesn't have a son? Next question. Right. So you first have to say, but what if he did? And if you start with Mark's gospel, as I've argued, it comes first. Well, at Jesus' baptism, a voice says to Jesus, you are my son. So, you could start Jesus's sonship there. Well, what Matthew and Luke are doing with the nativity stories are saying, well, don't start at the baptism. At least start with his conception.
Pete: Yeah.
James: But we're still left with that lingering thing I mentioned about, but how do the angels of the demons know that Jesus is there?
Did the Son have to be there with God to be sent into the world? And John climbs the ladder and says, yes. He was there in the beginning with God and all things were created through him. Right. I think that simple staircase from Mark to Matthew, to Luke, to John works for our Christology. And we don't need to overcomplicate it.
Pete: Yeah. That's, that's fascinating. Boy, there's so much here that I shudder to even begin to ask more questions 'cause we could be here for another hour. Um, one last thing that I gotta get to this, this is so fascinating too. In a snapshot maybe just a couple of minutes the relationship that the gospels have to Paul.
James: Yes.
Pete: Because, 'cause you don't leave Paul out of the question here when you talk about the gospels and I found that to be one of the more helpful things. I mean, I thought your book was wonderful, but that to me, I said Yeah, that's, that's sort of been missing in my own education that you sort of keep these guys in silos.
But you know, Paul was dead before the first gospel was written. I mean, sure there were traditions, right. And he probably had an influence on how people thought about stuff. It was a topic of debate and whatnot. So could just give us a quick summary of how the four gospels might relate to Paul positively or negative.
James: I think that they absolutely do. I think that Paul wrote us our first, uh, Christian literature. I think everyone who wrote a gospel had read some of Paul and some really good work is being done on this. And it really is the frontier I think of how much of what we know to be the collection of Paul's letters is in play for each of the authors.
Pete: And that's a big shift. Yeah.
James: It’s because like you say, we've siloed ourselves off. Are you gospels or are you Paul, are you Synoptics or are you John? Oh. Literally for Christ's sake, can we put all of this back together again? Yeah. And talk to each other and see how they're interrelated.
Pete: It's so cavalier. I hear this very often. It's like, well, Paul didn't even read the gospels 'cause they weren't written yet. So what is Paul even talking about? But Right. Maybe the gospel writers read Paul. Exactly. And, what can we show that? And, you know, that's a much longer discussion. But anyway, back to the synopsis. Tell, tell us what's going on here.
James: Well, what, well, I think Mark is the most Paul-y and I think that this was important. When you look back to 19th century scholarship, we gotta figure out, when we established that, that Mark was written first part of how we did that was to kind of get rid of the idea that Mark was with Peter at Rome, that very early church tradition, because everybody always tried to bake Mark into, into a Peter ish gospel.
And Mark's gospel really sounds much more Paul-y. Mm-hmm. Jesus is, he's fully Jewish, don't get me wrong. And he's debating with Pharisees right. About the things that Pharisees and I studied under AJ Levine. You've had her on the podcast. Everybody should know her work and put Jesus in his Jewish context.
But Mark's Jesus really is kind of making these Pauline moves away from Torah practice. And I see Matthew as a corrective to that, because Paul doesn't even think
Pete: So when Mark says that, um, it's not what goes into your mouth, all comes out and makes you unclean. Um, and by saying that he was designated that all foods are clean, which is a very Paul move.
James: Yeah. But you don't have,
Pete: you don't have that to Matthew?
James: No. Matthew or Luke, they intentionally leave that out. Like, let's not give the impression. That everything that goes into your mouth is clean, because Torah very clearly makes some things unclean. Uh, so Matthew takes that out and he says, keep the commandments.
Don't break any commandments, Paul. Don't teach anyone to break any command commandments, Paul.
Pete: Paul.
James: because Paul has made Sabbath Day optional to you.
Pete: Yeah, yeah.
James: Now saying that non-Jewish people, the men needed to be circumcised. Nobody's making that argument. Like, arguing with, there were no Jews to argue with, to say, but we should forcefully circumcise all the non-Jewish men.
That was not an issue. Right? So there are limits, but saying that you can't even keep 10 commandments. Right. Forget about the 613. Let's start with 10. Yeah. Could we maybe just keep 10? And so I do think Matthew has an issue with the way that Mark's tradition is carrying Paul's torch to where we have less Torah observance.
And Matthew wants to give you a little more of that. And then Luke sees himself as the mediator. Well, Peter and Paul are both dead at this point. Uh, Matthew's gospel turns out to be much more Peter's gospel because Peter becomes the rock upon whom the whole church is built, right?
Pete: Mm-hmm.
James: And so once Peter and Paul are dead, it's quite silly to be arguing about whether you follow Peter or whether you follow Paul, which is something Paul tells you was happening in the early church in Corinth. And so Luke is saying, guys, they're both dead. Stop fighting already. Uh, Peter and Paul didn't disagree quite so much here and there, and Luke's gospel is intentionally trying to smooth it out.
James: But, if you look the latest letters that are associated with Paul, something like Colossians and then even Hebrews, that doesn't claim to be written by Paul, but it's Paul ish. And so it gets incorporated in our earliest collection of Paul's letters that we have in book form. Hebrews is right there.
But what do Colossians, Hebrews, and John have in common that Jesus created the world, right? Mm-hmm. That he was God's agent through whom? So we have yet again ascended this staircase. When we get to John, boy does he end up in this corner where in some way he's got the same theology of Jesus as the Creator, and that's serving a really important function to make him not just another angel.
And so I think. As much as I try to simplify so much of how the gospels were written from Mark to Matthew, Luke to John, I then end with Paul reluctantly, but only because I kept seeing him pop up here and there, and I say now we actually have to entertain some very complicated notions of the gospels are interacting with Paul in some surprising and, uh, startling creative ways.
Mm-hmm. And I see that as the way forward for, uh, a lot of New Testament scholarship.
Pete: And that's fascinating that Paul influenced the gospel writers. And we have this matrix of, uh, competing theologies. Right. And the gospels and, and the use of Paul and or, or the later letters that are probably not written by Paul.
They another level of meaning that they introduce and I think that's a great point to close on, frankly to remind our listeners in a positive sense how interesting it is to study this stuff and to really dig into it and try to understand the world of the first century, right?
And these right people living and they're following Jesus and, and they're writing about him and they disagree. You know, the earliest writings we have, they disagree about Jesus –
James: And that’s okay. Yeah, 'cause the more reverence you have for the Bible, the more you should let each text and author speak for themselves and not try to make it all agree the way you've been told it's supposed to.
Right. It becomes so much more fascinating when Peter and Paul don't agree with each other. Paul tells us as much, Paul's banging his fists saying, am I not an apostle? Who's he talking about? Yeah. Peter saying, no, Paul, you are not an apostle. Right. That's our earliest fight. And Paul's writing his first letter.
That's right. And then we get to the gospels that are carrying on this Peter and Paul battle and this tug of war. But they're also trying to moderate it and say, well, depending on which gospel comes out on top, you can make sense of the earlier ones, but they still get to have their distinct voices. So don't let my one voice say something like, whoa, what Mark meant to say was what Matthew said. Let's just take note of where they say different things and appreciate that they say it different ways, right? When they speak for themselves. I think we have more reverence for the Bible. And frankly, when I do all of my experimentation of how you write a Bible, uh, in a first place. I have a lot more reverence for the human side of things.
It certainly doesn't say that God can't be involved in some way with inspiration. Mm-hmm. If that's important, uh, to, to folks. But boy, when you spend the time I have and you're reenacting the process of writing any piece of ancient literature. There's a lot of appreciation for how those books came to be and all the people who copied them by hand through the centuries.
And I feel connected to those people. And that's a reverence for the Bible too, on that human level that shouldn't be left out.
Pete: Well James, thank you for being on this podcast. This was a fascinating discussion. Uh, the rough and tumble world of the early Christian tradition and the writings of the letters and the gospels, and it's an education, you know, to understand these things a little bit.
And I think at the end of the day. It actually adds a vibrancy to our theology. It's not just simply set in stone, but it's already a moving product from the very beginning. So thank you for being here very much. It was a pleasure to have you.
James: Thank you for having me. The pleasure is all mine.
Pete: Hey, before you go, we hear from a lot of listeners that sitting with questions that you can’t take to your pastor, family or friends can be a lonely experience.
Jared: And, if that’s you, we built a place for that, it’s called the Society of Normal People. It’s a community of people who are in exactly that spot –curious, maybe a little displaced but definitely not done thinking about God and the Bible.
Pete: We’re not promising it’ll answer your questions, alas even we can’t answer all the questions, but it’s a lot less lonely when you’re asking them with people who get it.
Jared: Head to thebiblefornormalpeople.com/join to learn more or just head to the link in the show notes. We’d love to see you there!
