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Who Were the 4 Authors of the Gospels and Why Are They So Important · truthunedited

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  Speaker 1: The year is somewhere near the end of the first century.
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  Speaker 1: In a small house in the Roman province of Asia,
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  Speaker 1: lit by olive oil lamps and the flicker of an
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  Speaker 1: open hearth, a man unrolls a sheet of papyrus. Around
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  Speaker 1: him sit perhaps fifteen people, fisherman, a freedwoman, a leather worker,
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  Speaker 1: two children, too young to understand half of what is said,
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  Speaker 1: but old enough to keep quiet. The man is not
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  Speaker 1: a priest. He has no temple, no altar, no liturgical robes.
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  Speaker 1: He is a reader. The document in his hands is
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  Speaker 1: a copy of a copy brought from somewhere east, and
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  Speaker 1: it tells the story of a Galilean carpenter who was
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  Speaker 1: crucified under Pontia's pilot roughly sixty years earlier, and whom
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  Speaker 1: these gathered believers worship as the son of God. Outside
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  Speaker 1: the empire is doing what empires do. In Rome, the
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  Speaker 1: e per Domitian sits on the imperial throne and demands
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  Speaker 1: to be addressed as Dominus Edaeus, Lord and God. In
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  Speaker 1: every Roman city, including the one just down the road
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  Speaker 1: from this house, official altars burn incense to Caesar. The
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  Speaker 1: man inside the house, holding his fragile sheet of Papyrus
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  Speaker 1: knows that what he is reading is not merely religion.
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  Speaker 1: It is also in the eyes of Rome sedition, because
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  Speaker 1: the document in his hands names a different lord, a
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  Speaker 1: different king, a different god, and it does so with
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  Speaker 1: names that almost no one a generation earlier would have
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  Speaker 1: predicted would still be remembered. Matthew, Mark, Luke John These
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  Speaker 1: are the four men. This video is about four authors
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  Speaker 1: whose books would outlive Domitian, outlive the empire that crucified Jesus,
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  Speaker 1: outlive every dynasty that tried to bury them. Four ordinary
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  Speaker 1: first century men, a tax collector, an interpreter of Peter,
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  Speaker 1: a gentile physician, the last surviving member of Jesus in
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  Speaker 1: a circle whose written accounts became the only narrative biographies
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  Speaker 1: of Jesus of Nazareth that the early Church accepted as authoritative. Today,
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  Speaker 1: two thousand years later, roughly two and a half billion
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  Speaker 1: people on this planet organized their faith around what those
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  Speaker 1: four men wrote down. But why four Why these four?
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  Speaker 1: Dozens of other gospels were circulating in the early centuries,
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  Speaker 1: attributed to other apostles, other followers, other voices. Most of
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  Speaker 1: them are gone or remembered only as curiosities. So the
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  Speaker 1: question is simple, and the un takes us through four decades,
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  Speaker 1: four cities, and four very different men. Who were they?
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  Speaker 1: And what did each of them see or hear or
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  Speaker 1: carry with him that the rest could not match. We
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  Speaker 1: begin where the first written Gospel began in Rome in
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  Speaker 1: the mid sixties, with a young man whose own story
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  Speaker 1: is half buried in the Book of Acts, and whose
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  Speaker 1: voice the second century Church remembered was really the voice
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  Speaker 1: of Peter himself. The story of how the first written
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  Speaker 1: Gospel got on to Papyrus begins not with a writer,
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  Speaker 1: but with a problem. For roughly forty years after the
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  Speaker 1: crucifixion of Jesus, the story of the Galilean carpenter traveled
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  Speaker 1: almost entirely by word of mouth. The earliest disciples were Aramaics,
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  Speaker 1: speaking Jews from Galilee, most of them tradesmen and fishermen,
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  Speaker 1: most of them illiterate by the standards of the urban
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  Speaker 1: Roman world. They preached in synagogues, in market places, in
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  Speaker 1: private homes. They told the stories the way oral cultures
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  Speaker 1: have always told stories, with set phrases, with mnemonic structures,
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  Speaker 1: with parables compact enough to survive translation, almost untouched. The
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  Speaker 1: young Church did not feel an urgent need to write
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  Speaker 1: the stories down because the people who had seen the
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  Speaker 1: events were still alive. Then those people began to die.
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  Speaker 1: Peter and Paul, by the most credible early traditions, were
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  Speaker 1: both executed in Rome under Nero in the mid sixties.
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  Speaker 1: Peter crucified by tradition upside down, and Paul beheaded as
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  Speaker 1: a Roman citizen on the road to Ostia. James, the
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  Speaker 1: brother of Jesus, was killed in Jerusalem around the year
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  Speaker 1: sixty two, accorded by the Jewish historian Josephus in Book
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  Speaker 1: twenty of his Antiquities. James, the son of Zebede had
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  Speaker 1: already been executed by Herod Agrippa decades earlier in the
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  Speaker 1: year forty four. The eyewitness generation was thinning out, and
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  Speaker 1: at the same time the Jewish Roman War was beginning
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  Speaker 1: to consume Judea. In the year sixty six, the revolt
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  Speaker 1: broke out. By seventy the legions of Titus would burn
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  Speaker 1: the Temple of Jerusalem to the ground, scattering the original
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  Speaker 1: Christian community of the Holy City forever. The pressure to
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  Speaker 1: write things down to preserve the testimony before the witnesses
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  Speaker 1: were gone, before another fire took everything was no longer theoretical.
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  Speaker 1: It was in this exact window, somewhere between the year
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  Speaker 1: sixty five and seventy, that the First Gospel was composed
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  Speaker 1: in Rome in Greek by a man whose name almost
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  Speaker 1: no one in that small Christian community would have called famous.
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  Speaker 1: His name was John Mark or simply Mark, and the
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  Speaker 1: earliest external witness we have to who he was is
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  Speaker 1: a bishop named Papias of Hierapolis in what is now
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  Speaker 1: western Turkey, writing around the year one hundred twenty five.
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  Speaker 1: Papius's own work is lost, but the church historian Eusebius
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  Speaker 1: of Caesarea preserved long quotations from him. In the third
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  Speaker 1: book of his Ecclesiastical History, written in the early fourth century,
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  Speaker 1: Pepius wrote that Mark had become the interpreter of Peter
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  Speaker 1: and had written down accurately, though not in order, whatever
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  Speaker 1: he remembered of the thing said and done by the Lord.
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  Speaker 1: The Greek word Papias uses for interpreter is hermanuts, the
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  Speaker 1: same word from which we get the modern English word hermeneutics. Mark,
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  Speaker 1: on this account was the man who who turned Peter's
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  Speaker 1: Aramaic memories into Greek prose for the Roman believers who
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  Speaker 1: could not understand the apostle's mother tongue. Hapiers was not
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  Speaker 1: the only ancient voice making that claim. Around the year
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  Speaker 1: two hundred, Clement of Alexandria, writing in Egypt, told the
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  Speaker 1: same story that Mark composed his Gospel in Rome at
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  Speaker 1: the urging of those who had heard Peter preach The
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  Speaker 1: anti Martian Ight prolog, an early Latin preface attached to
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  Speaker 1: manuscripts of Mark from the late second century, said the
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  Speaker 1: same thing. Three independent ancient witnesses in three different cities,
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  Speaker 1: agreeing on the same basic claim. Mark in Rome writing
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  Speaker 1: what he had heard from Peter, But who was John
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  Speaker 1: Mark before he became Peter's interpreter. The Book of Acts
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  Speaker 1: gives us a handful of glimpses scattered across Luke's narrative.
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  Speaker 1: The earliest is in Acts till twelve, verse twelve, where Peter,
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  Speaker 1: having just escaped from prison by the hand of an angel,
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  Speaker 1: went to the house of Mary, the mother of John,
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  Speaker 1: also called Mark, where many people had gathered and were praying.
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  Speaker 1: That sentence is doing more work than it looks. It
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  Speaker 1: tells us that Mark grew up in Jerusalem in a
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  Speaker 1: house large enough to host a midnight prayer meeting. Of
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  Speaker 1: the Early Church, with a mother named Mary, who was
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  Speaker 1: prosperous enough to own such a house and to have
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  Speaker 1: a servant, a young woman named Rhoda is mentioned a
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  Speaker 1: verse later. It tells us, in other words, that Mark
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  Speaker 1: was not a fisherman, he was not a tradesman. He
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  Speaker 1: was a young man of the Jerusalem churches in a circle,
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  Speaker 1: raised in the kind of household where Peter would naturally
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  Speaker 1: come knocking at midnight when he had nowhere else to go.
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  Speaker 1: Mark was also family. The apostle Paul, in the Letter
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  Speaker 1: to the Colossians, mentions him in passing as the cousin
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  Speaker 1: of Barnabas, the Cypriot Levite, who had been one of
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  Speaker 1: the early Church's most generous patrons in Jerusalem. That family
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  Speaker 1: connection is what put Mark on his first missionary journey.
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  Speaker 1: When Paul and Barnabas set sail from Antioch around the
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  Speaker 1: year forty six or forty seven, they took young John
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  Speaker 1: Mark with them as their assistant. The journey did not
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  Speaker 1: end well for him. In Acts the thirteen verse thirteen,
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  Speaker 1: Luke records the moment with a single unembellished line from Paphos.
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  Speaker 1: Paul and his companions sailed to Perga in Pamphylia, where
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  Speaker 1: John left them to return to Jerusalem. No reason given,
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  Speaker 1: no explanation, just a young man getting off the boat
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  Speaker 1: at the first hard country and going home. Whatever happened
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  Speaker 1: at Perga, it left a wound. When Paul and Barnabas
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  Speaker 1: planned a second missionary journey a few years later, Barnabas
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  Speaker 1: wanted to take Mark again. Paul refused. Acts Fifteen verses
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  Speaker 1: thirty seven to thirty nine records the rupture. Barnabas wanted
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  Speaker 1: to take John, also called Mark, with them, but Paul
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  Speaker 1: did not think it wise to take him because he
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  Speaker 1: had deserted them in Pamphylia and had not continued with
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  Speaker 1: them in the work. They had such a sharp disagreement
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  Speaker 1: that they parted company. Barnabas took Mark and sailed for Cyprus.
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  Speaker 1: Two of the most important men in the early Gentile
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  Speaker 1: mission split over a young man's reliability. Paul went one
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  Speaker 1: way with Silas, Barnabas went the other way with his cousin.
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  Speaker 1: The text does not tell us who was right, but
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  Speaker 1: the rift did not last. Years later, the end of
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  Speaker 1: his life, Paul writes from a Roman prison to Timothy
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  Speaker 1: and asks in two Timothy the four verse eleven, Get
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  Speaker 1: Mark and bring him with you, because he is helpful
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  Speaker 1: to me in my ministry. The same Mark, the same
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  Speaker 1: man who had abandoned Paul in Pamphylia three decades earlier,
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  Speaker 1: the same one Paul had refused to travel with, restored, useful, trusted.
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  Speaker 1: The reconciliation is one of the quieter triumphs of the
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  Speaker 1: New Testament, told without fanfare in a single sentence at
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  Speaker 1: the end of an old man's last letter. By the
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  Speaker 1: time of that letter, Mark was in Rome, and he
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  Speaker 1: was no longer only Paul's helper. He was Peters, the apostle. Peter,
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  Speaker 1: in his first epistle sends greetings from a place he
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  Speaker 1: calls Babylon early Christian code for Rome, and signs off
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  Speaker 1: in first part. Peter the five verse thirteen with this line,
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  Speaker 1: She who is in Babylon chosen together with you, sends
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  Speaker 1: you her greetings, and so does my son Mark. My
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  Speaker 1: son Mark the Greek does not mean a biological son.
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  Speaker 1: It means a spiritual son, a younger man trained and
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  Speaker 1: trusted by an older one. By the early sixties, Mark
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  Speaker 1: was Peter's right hand in Rome, translator, scribe, traveling companion,
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  Speaker 1: and when Nero's persecution erupted in sixty four after the
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  Speaker 1: Great Fire of Rome, and Peter was eventually arrested and executed.
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  Speaker 1: Mark survived. The voice he had been translating for years
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  Speaker 1: was gone. The memories he had been transposing into Greek
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  Speaker 1: were now the only Greek record of those memories left
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  Speaker 1: in the city. That is the moment sometime between sixty
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  Speaker 1: five and seventy when Mark sat down and wrote. If
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  Speaker 1: you read his gospel, knowing whose voice he was carrying,
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  Speaker 1: the text begins to give itself away. There are vivid
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  Speaker 1: sensory details that read like an eye witness. The green
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  Speaker 1: grass on the hillside before the feeding of the five thousand,
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  Speaker 1: the cushion Jesus was sleeping on in the stern of
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  Speaker 1: the boat during the storm, The look on Jesus face
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  Speaker 1: when he was angry at the hardness of the pharisees hearts,
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  Speaker 1: the specific number of fish, the specific number of baskets,
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  Speaker 1: the specific number of dinarii. Mark preserves Aramaic phrases that
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  Speaker 1: the other gospel writers usually translate or omit tellether coomb,
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  Speaker 1: little girl get up when Jesus raised the daughter of
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  Speaker 1: Jyrus Iphatha be opened when he healed the deaf man
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  Speaker 1: in the decapolis. Eloi eloi lima Sabakhthani, My God, My God,
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  Speaker 1: why have you forsaken me from the cross. Those phrases
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  Speaker 1: sound like the Aramaic Peter himself would have used preserved
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  Speaker 1: as nuggets in the Greek narrative for a Roman audience
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  Speaker 1: that needed the translation. And then there is the matter
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  Speaker 1: of Peter's failures. If you compare Mark's gospel to Matthew's
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  Speaker 1: and Luke's, one pattern is impossible to miss. Mark is
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  Speaker 1: harder on Peter than the other evangelists are. When Peter
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  Speaker 1: rebukes Jesus for predicting the Cross, Mark records Jesus counter
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  Speaker 1: rebuke without softening, get behind me, Satan. When the disciples
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  Speaker 1: fall asleep at Gethsemine, Mark singles Peter out by name.
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  Speaker 1: When Peter denies Jesus three times in the High Priest's courtyard,
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  Speaker 1: Mark gives us every cock crow and every curse. Modern
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  Speaker 1: scholars have argued that the candor about Peter's failures is
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  Speaker 1: itself the evidence that the gospel really does come from Peter,
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  Speaker 1: because no second generation admirer of the apostle would have
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  Speaker 1: been so unflinching about his hero's lowest moments. Only the
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  Speaker 1: man himself, dictating his own memories to a younger interpreter,
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  Speaker 1: would have insisted that those moments be preserved. Mark's gospel
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  Speaker 1: is also the shortest of the four and the fastest.
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  Speaker 1: It opens not with a genialogy or an infancy narrative
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  Speaker 1: or a poetic prologe, but with John the Baptist already
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  Speaker 1: in the wilderness and Jesus already at the Jordan. The
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  Speaker 1: Greek word youthis immediately appears more than forty times. Jesus
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  Speaker 1: does this, and immediately he does that, and immediately the
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  Speaker 1: crowd presses in, and immediately he withdraws to a solitary place.
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  Speaker 1: The narrative pace is breathless. It is the gospel of
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  Speaker 1: a man who knew the story by heart, from a
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  Speaker 1: man who had lived it, and who wrote it down
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  Speaker 1: under the pressure of a Roman persecution that might kill
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  Speaker 1: him before he finished. And then chapter sixteen, verse eight,
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  Speaker 1: the gospel does something strange. The women run from the
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  Speaker 1: empty tomb in fear, and they said nothing to anyone
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  Speaker 1: because they were afraid. That is the last sentence of
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  Speaker 1: Mark's Gospel in the two oldest and most reliable Greek
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  Speaker 1: manuscripts that survive Codex Cineticus and Codex Vaticanus, both copied
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  Speaker 1: in the fourth century. The longer ending you find in
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  Speaker 1: most modern Bibles, with the resurrection appearances and the Great
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  Speaker 1: Commission is bracketed in those modern Bibles for a reason.
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  Speaker 1: It is missing from those earliest manuscripts, and the Greek
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  Speaker 1: style is different from the rest of the gospel. Scholars
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  Speaker 1: have debated for centuries whether Mark intended to end his
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  Speaker 1: Gospel that abruptly on a note of fear and silence,
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  Speaker 1: leaving the reader to supply the resurrection from the proclamation
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  Speaker 1: that surrounded the text orchish the hundred Dads, or whether
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  Speaker 1: they pok original ending was lost, perhaps torn off the
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  Speaker 1: back of a scroll that had been read so many
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  Speaker 1: times it disintegrated. We may never know. What we know
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  Speaker 1: for certain is that the man who wrote that gospel
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  Speaker 1: in Greek in Rome sometime in the late sixties, gave
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  Speaker 1: the church its first written life of Jesus and gave
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  Speaker 1: the next two evangelists the model they would follow. Because
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  Speaker 1: when Matthew in Antioch of Syria sat down a few
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  Speaker 1: years later to compose his own Gospel for a Jewish
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  Speaker 1: Christian audience. He had marked scroll on his desk in
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  Speaker 1: front of him, and when he opened it, he made
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  Speaker 1: a series of choices that would change everything. By the
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  Speaker 1: late seventies of the first century, the world that Mark
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  Speaker 1: had ridden in two was no longer the world that
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  Speaker 1: the next evangelist would face. Jerusalem was rubble. The temple,
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  Speaker 1: the altar, the priesthood, the sacrificial system, the whole architecture
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  Speaker 1: of first century Jewish life had been carried off into
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  Speaker 1: smoke and Roman triumphal processions. The Christian movement had spread
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  Speaker 1: far enough by then to absorb the shock, but for
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  Speaker 1: the Jewish believers, the believers who had grown up praying
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  Speaker 1: toward Jerusalem and counting their days by the festivals, the
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  Speaker 1: destruction of the temple was a theological earthquake. If God
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  Speaker 1: had allowed his own house to fall, what had become
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  Speaker 1: of the Covenant? If the sacrifices were ended, where was atonement?
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  Speaker 1: If the priesthood was scattered, who now stood between the
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  Speaker 1: people and God? Those were the questions that the Second
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  Speaker 1: Gospel was written to answer, and the city where it
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  Speaker 1: was answered was by the most credible scholarly reconstruction Antioch
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  Speaker 1: of Syria. Antioch was the third largest city in the
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  Speaker 1: Roman Empire, after Rome and Alexandria. It sat at the
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  Speaker 1: meeting of the Eastern trade routes and the Mediterranean, with
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  Speaker 1: a Jewish quarter so prosperous and so longstanding that the
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  Speaker 1: believers in Christ had first been called CHRISTIANOI in its streets,
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  Speaker 1: as Luke records in the Book of Acts. By the
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  Speaker 1: year seventy, Antioch had become the bridge between the Jewish
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  Speaker 1: Christian heartland of Judea and the Gentile mission spreading outward
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  Speaker 1: through Asia Minor and Greece. It was the natural place
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  Speaker 1: for a gospel addressed primarily to Jewish believers, but written
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  Speaker 1: in Greek, with one eye on the Gentile world that
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: was now flooding into the Church. The man who wrote
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  Speaker 1: that gospel was named Levi, son of Alpheus, though the
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  Speaker 1: Church remembered him by his Greek name Matthew Mattheos, a
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  Speaker 1: Hellenized form of the Hebrew mattera tiahou gift of Yahweh.
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  Speaker 1: Before he was an apostle, he was something almost no
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  Speaker 1: respectable Jewish family would have wanted their son to become.
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  Speaker 1: He was a helenas a tax collector, though the English
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  Speaker 1: word does not capture what the Greek meant. In first
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  Speaker 1: century Galilee, Matthew was not a salaried civil servant working
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  Speaker 1: for a city office. He was the local face of
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: the Roman extraction system, an independent contractor who had bought,
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  Speaker 1: or whose patron had bought, the right to collect tolls
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  Speaker 1: and customs on behalf of Herod Antipas, and through Herod
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  Speaker 1: on beers half of Rome. His station was at Capernaum,
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  Speaker 1: on the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee, where
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  Speaker 1: the Via Maaris, the great caravan road from Damascus down
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  Speaker 1: through Galilee and on toward the coast, crossed the territorial
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  Speaker 1: border between Herod Antipus's tetrarchy and the territory of his
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  Speaker 1: half brother Philip. Every load of fish, every cart of grain,
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  Speaker 1: every traveler crossing that border paid Matthew a toll. He was,
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  Speaker 1: in the eyes of his Jewish neighbours, a collaborator. He
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  Speaker 1: worked for Herod, who worked for Rome, which had been
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  Speaker 1: crushing Israel for almost a century. He was also rich
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  Speaker 1: by the standards of a fishing village. Tax collectors were
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  Speaker 1: classed in the Mishnah with thieves and gentiles. They could
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  Speaker 1: not give testimony in a Jewish court. They were considered
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  Speaker 1: ritually unclean by association. The fisherman who un loaded their
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  Speaker 1: catch at the Copernium docks would have known Matthew's name
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  Speaker 1: with the kind of cold familiarity reserved for the man
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  Speaker 1: who took a percentage of everything they caught. Then, one
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  Speaker 1: ordinary working day, that man got up from his booth
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  Speaker 1: and walked away from it. The call is recorded in
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  Speaker 1: Matthew nine, verse nine, in a single, understated sentence. As
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  Speaker 1: Jesus went on from there, he saw a man named
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  Speaker 1: Matthew sitting at the tax collector's booth. Follow me, he
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  Speaker 1: told him, And Matthew got up and followed him. That
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  Speaker 1: is the entirety of the call. No dialogue, no deliberation,
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  Speaker 1: no internal monologue. A wandering rabbi from Nazareth, already with
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  Speaker 1: a small band of fishermen behind him, walks past the
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  Speaker 1: custom station of the most despised man in the village
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  Speaker 1: and tells him in two words, to come along and
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  Speaker 1: the us. He leaves the table, he leaves the ledgers.
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  Speaker 1: He leaves a job that, by the standards of the day,
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  Speaker 1: was the most lucrative occupation. A Galilean jew could hold
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  Speaker 1: and he never goes back. What he took with him
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  Speaker 1: almost certainly was literacy. A tolones on the Via Maris
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  Speaker 1: had to read and write Greek, the language of commerce
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  Speaker 1: and of Roman administration, and probably some Aramaic and Hebrew
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: as well. He kept ledgers, he filed receipts. He was
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: in a community where the average fisherman could not write
• 23:38
  Speaker 1: his own name, an educated man, and when decades later
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: the Jerusalem Church and the Apostolic circle begin to feel
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: the need for a written record of jesus teachings, the
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: man with the pen and the trained hand was the
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: former tax collector. The earliest external testament to Matthew's authorship
• 24:01
  Speaker 1: comes from the same Papias of Hierapolis whose voice gave
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: us mark. Papius said that Matthew compiled the loggia in
• 24:11
  Speaker 1: the Hebrew dialect and each interpreted them as he was able.
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: That sentence has been argued about for nineteen centuries. The
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: Greek word loggia means sayings or oracles, and the Hebrew
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: dialect most likely refers to Aramaic, the spoken language of
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: first century Palestine. Papius seems to be saying that Matthew's
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: first written work was a collection of Jesus sayings in Aramaic,
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: perhaps the source that modern scholars sometimes hypothesized behind the
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: canonical Greek Gospel origin. The great third century scholar of Alexandria,
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: in his commentary on Matthew, repeated the same tradition that
• 24:58
  Speaker 1: Matthew composed his Gospel for the Jewish believers and wrote
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: it originally in the Hebrew language. Whether the Greek Gospel
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: we have is a translation of that earlier Aramaic work
• 25:11
  Speaker 1: or a fresh composition by the same author building on
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: his earlier collection is a question Scholars still debate. What
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: the ancient witnesses agree on is the name of the author, Matthew,
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: the tax collector the apostle. The gospel that bears his
• 25:29
  Speaker 1: name is Unlike Marx in almost every structural choice. Where
• 25:34
  Speaker 1: Mark begins with John the Baptist already at the Jordan,
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: Matthew begins in chapter one, verses one to seventeen with
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: a genealogy. This is the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah,
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: the son of David, the son of Abraham. From there
• 25:52
  Speaker 1: he traces forty two names, three sets of fourteen generations,
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: from Abraham to David, from David to the exile in Babylon,
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: from the exile to Christ. The number fourteen is not accidental.
• 26:10
  Speaker 1: In Hebrew letter numerology, the consonants of David's name Dallette
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: Vave Dalette add up to fourteen. Matthew is opening his
• 26:20
  Speaker 1: gospel by signing Jesus lineage in David's own numerical signature
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: three times over. This is a gospel writing for readers
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: who will catch that it is a gospel for people
• 26:32
  Speaker 1: who count. The genealogy is also the only place in
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: any of the four Gospels where four women are named
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: in the line of Jesus, alongside the men Tama, rehab, Ruth,
• 26:46
  Speaker 1: and Bathsheba. Each of those women carried something irregular in
• 26:50
  Speaker 1: her story of foreign origin, a sexual scandal, a vulnerable position.
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: Matthew is signaling in the opening seventeen verses of his
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: gospel that the Messiah of Israel comes not through a
• 27:05
  Speaker 1: sanitized line, but through a real one, a line with
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: gentiles in it, a line with sinners in it, A
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: line broken open enough to receive the most surprising mother
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: of all. When in verse eighteen, the Angel comes to
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: Joseph about the child of Mary. Then Matthew does something
• 27:24
  Speaker 1: else that no other evangelist does. He organizes the rest
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: of his gospel around five great discourses, five long blocks
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: of Jesus teaching, each ending with the same formula. When
• 27:39
  Speaker 1: Jesus had finished saying these things, there is the Sermon
• 27:44
  Speaker 1: on the House's Mountain chapters five to seven. There is
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: the missionary discourse in chapter ten. There are the Parables
• 27:52
  Speaker 1: of the Kingdom in chapter thirteen. There is the discourse
• 27:56
  Speaker 1: on community life in chapter eighteen, and there is the
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: olive discourse on the end of the Age in chapters
• 28:03
  Speaker 1: twenty three to twenty five. Five discourses, five books, five
• 28:08
  Speaker 1: sermons of the New Moses. For a gospel writing for
• 28:13
  Speaker 1: Jewish believers who carried in their bones the memory of
• 28:17
  Speaker 1: a Pentateuch with five books and a Moses who came
• 28:21
  Speaker 1: down from the mountain with the law. Matthew is structuring
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: his gospel as the New Torah presented to a community
• 28:30
  Speaker 1: that had just lost its temple and its priesthood and
• 28:33
  Speaker 1: needed a place to stand. That is also why his
• 28:36
  Speaker 1: theological signature is the word fulfillment. Roughly a dozen times
• 28:42
  Speaker 1: in his gospel, Matthew breaks into the narrative with a
• 28:46
  Speaker 1: formula that it might be fulfilled what was spoken through
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: the Oshirek prophet. The Messiah is born in Bethlehem to
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: fulfill Micah. The family flees to Egypt to fulfill Hoseiah.
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: The ministry begins in Galilee to fulfill Isaiah. Even the
• 29:05
  Speaker 1: small choreographic details of the passion appinned to specific prophetic texts.
• 29:11
  Speaker 1: Matthew is making an argument line by line that the
• 29:15
  Speaker 1: carpenter from Nazareth is not a break with Israel's story,
• 29:19
  Speaker 1: but its consummation. His most concentrated statement of that argument
• 29:24
  Speaker 1: is in Matthews five verses seventeen to eighteen, where Jesus says,
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: do not think that I have come to abolish the
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: Law or the prophets. I have not come to abolish them,
• 29:35
  Speaker 1: but to fulfill them. For truly, I tell you, until
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the
• 29:44
  Speaker 1: least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear
• 29:48
  Speaker 1: from the Law until everything is accomplished. That is the
• 29:53
  Speaker 1: thesis statement of Matthew's whole gospel. In two verses, the
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: Law is not God. The prophets are not gone. They
• 30:03
  Speaker 1: are fulfilled completed, brought to their true meaning in the
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: man this gospel is about. By the early second century,
• 30:13
  Speaker 1: Matthew's gospel had become the most cited and most read
• 30:17
  Speaker 1: of the four Ignatius of Antioch, writing letters from Chains
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: as he was being marched toward execution in Rome around
• 30:27
  Speaker 1: the year one ten quotes Matthew more than any other gospel,
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: almost certainly because he was writing from the very city
• 30:36
  Speaker 1: where Matthew had been composed. The early Christian manual called
• 30:40
  Speaker 1: the Daidac, dating from the late first or early second century,
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: is so saturated with Matthean phrasing that some scholars have
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: argued it was effectively a catechism written from Matthew's text.
• 30:55
  Speaker 1: For most of the first millennium of Christian worship, Matthew
• 30:59
  Speaker 1: was the gospel that opened the lectionary year, the gospel
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: from which most sermons were preached, the gospel whose Sermon
• 31:08
  Speaker 1: on the Mount was committed to memory by every literate
• 31:12
  Speaker 1: Christian in the empire. But Matthew was not the gospel
• 31:16
  Speaker 1: that the Gentiles would carry to the ends of the earth.
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: For that the Church would need a different kind of writer,
• 31:24
  Speaker 1: not an apostle, not even a Jew, but a Greek
• 31:27
  Speaker 1: speaking physician who had never met Jesus in the flesh,
• 31:31
  Speaker 1: and who set out to do for the story of
• 31:33
  Speaker 1: Jesus what no one before him had attempted to write
• 31:37
  Speaker 1: it down with the methods of a serious historian. The
• 31:41
  Speaker 1: Gospel of Luke opens not with a genealogy, and not
• 31:44
  Speaker 1: with a desert prophet, but with a sentence that no
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: other book of the New Testament begins like in Luke
• 31:52
  Speaker 1: Flut one, verses one to four. The author writes, many
• 31:56
  Speaker 1: have undertaken to draw up an account of the things
• 31:59
  Speaker 1: that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were
• 32:02
  Speaker 1: handed down to us by those who from the first
• 32:05
  Speaker 1: were eye witnesses and servants of the Word. With this
• 32:09
  Speaker 1: in mind, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from
• 32:14
  Speaker 1: the beginning, I too decided to write an orderly account
• 32:17
  Speaker 1: for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know
• 32:21
  Speaker 1: the certainty of the things you have been taught. That
• 32:26
  Speaker 1: four verse prologue is the closest thing the New Testament
• 32:31
  Speaker 1: has to a writer's methodological note. The Greek is polished,
• 32:37
  Speaker 1: almost classical, the kind of opening a serious Hellenistic historian
• 32:42
  Speaker 1: would have written. The vocabulary mirror's prefaces by Thucydides, by Polybius,
• 32:48
  Speaker 1: and by the Jewish historian Josephus. The man behind those
• 32:53
  Speaker 1: four verses is not a fisherman taking dictation from an apostle,
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: and he is not a tax collector a ranging Jesus
• 33:01
  Speaker 1: sayings into a pentateuch shape. He is a writer who
• 33:04
  Speaker 1: has read other historians, who has interviewed witnesses, who has
• 33:09
  Speaker 1: weighed sources, and who is now composing for an identifiable
• 33:14
  Speaker 1: patron named Theophilus what he hopes will be a definitive
• 33:19
  Speaker 1: a count. His name was Luke, and he is the
• 33:23
  Speaker 1: most unusual of the four evangelists in three ways at once.
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: He is the only one of the four who was
• 33:30
  Speaker 1: not Jewish. He is the only New Testament author of
• 33:34
  Speaker 1: any kind who was a gentile. And he is the
• 33:37
  Speaker 1: only gospel writer who almost certainly never met Jesus during
• 33:42
  Speaker 1: his earthly life. Everything Luke knew about the Galilean carpenter
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: he knew second hand from Paul, with whom he traveled
• 33:50
  Speaker 1: for years, From Mark, whose gospel he used as a source,
• 33:55
  Speaker 1: from his own interviews with eye witnesses, and very probably
• 34:00
  Speaker 1: the early Church believed from Mary herself the mother of Jesus,
• 34:04
  Speaker 1: whose voice can be heard in chapters one and two
• 34:08
  Speaker 1: of his Gospel in a way it cannot be heard
• 34:11
  Speaker 1: anywhere else. The earliest external testimony to Luke's identity comes
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: from a document called the Miratorian Fragment Ces de tell
• 34:24
  Speaker 1: Latin list of the books accepted in the Roman Church,
• 34:27
  Speaker 1: copied around the year one hundred seventy. The fragment names
• 34:31
  Speaker 1: Luke as a physician, identifies him as one of Paul's
• 34:35
  Speaker 1: traveling companions, and credits him with both the Third Gospel
• 34:39
  Speaker 1: and the Book of Acts. The anti Martianite prologue to Luke,
• 34:45
  Speaker 1: composed around the same time, calls him a Syrian from Antioch, unmarried,
• 34:51
  Speaker 1: who lived to the age of eighty four and died
• 34:54
  Speaker 1: in Barotia in central Greece. Whether every detail of that
• 34:58
  Speaker 1: biography is accurate, the basic profile gentile physician, companion of Paul,
• 35:04
  Speaker 1: author of the Third Gospel and Acts, and she Eusigius
• 35:10
  Speaker 1: is corroborated by the New Testament itself. Paul names Luke
• 35:14
  Speaker 1: three times in his surviving letters. In Colossians four, verse fourteen,
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: he writes, our dear friend Luke the doctor and demas
• 35:23
  Speaker 1: send greetings. That is the verse from which the entire
• 35:28
  Speaker 1: later tradition of Lucas physician descends the Greek word I
• 35:34
  Speaker 1: tross doctor. In the short personal letter to Philomon in
• 35:38
  Speaker 1: verse twenty four, Paul lists his fellow workers and includes Mark, Aristarchus, Demas,
• 35:46
  Speaker 1: and Luke. And in the same final letter from a
• 35:50
  Speaker 1: Roman prison cell, where Paul had asked Timothy to bring Mark,
• 35:55
  Speaker 1: Paul also reports that of all the companions who had
• 35:58
  Speaker 1: stood with him through years of god Our mission, the
• 36:01
  Speaker 1: doctor from somewhere in the Greek world was the only
• 36:04
  Speaker 1: one still with him. Luke's presence in Paul's company is
• 36:08
  Speaker 1: also visible in the Book of Acts in a strange
• 36:11
  Speaker 1: and quietly thrilling way. Most of Acts is written in
• 36:15
  Speaker 1: the third person. Paul and Barnabas did this, the apostles
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: did that. But in four sections of the book the
• 36:22
  Speaker 1: pronoun suddenly shifts to the first person plural. We set sail,
• 36:28
  Speaker 1: We came to Philippi, we went down to Caesarea. The
• 36:32
  Speaker 1: first such shift comes in Acts sixteen, verse ten, when
• 36:37
  Speaker 1: Paul receives the vision of the Macedonian man and the
• 36:41
  Speaker 1: narrative changes voice mid paragraph. The wee passages as scholars
• 36:46
  Speaker 1: call them continue intermittently through chapters twenty twenty one and
• 36:51
  Speaker 1: twenty seven, and they include the sea voyage to Rome
• 36:55
  Speaker 1: that almost ended in shipwreck off Malta. The most natural
• 36:59
  Speaker 1: reading of these sudden first person stretches is that the
• 37:03
  Speaker 1: author of Acts was personally present for those legs of
• 37:07
  Speaker 1: Paul's journey. The author of Acts is also the author
• 37:10
  Speaker 1: of the Third Gospel. The two books are explicitly linked,
• 37:15
  Speaker 1: both addressed to the same Theophilus, both written in the
• 37:19
  Speaker 1: same elegant Greek, which means the man who wrote the
• 37:23
  Speaker 1: Third Gospel was on board the ship in the storm
• 37:26
  Speaker 1: and was probably the doctor who kept Paul alive through
• 37:30
  Speaker 1: fourteen days of starvation and nausea before the boat broke
• 37:34
  Speaker 1: apart on the Maltese coast. Where Luke himself came from
• 37:38
  Speaker 1: is the one biographical question the ancient sources cannot fully resolve.
• 37:44
  Speaker 1: The anti Martianite prologue, says Antioch in Syria. A different
• 37:49
  Speaker 1: ancient tradition associates him with Philippi in Macedonia, partly because
• 37:54
  Speaker 1: the first we passage begins as the missionary party arrives
• 37:58
  Speaker 1: in Philippi and ends as they leave, leaving Luke, perhaps
• 38:03
  Speaker 1: behind for several years before the narrative resumes we again
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: on Paul's return journey. Some scholars have argued that Luke
• 38:12
  Speaker 1: was a freedman, a former slave who had been educated
• 38:15
  Speaker 1: as a household physician, an entirely plausible profile for an
• 38:21
  Speaker 1: educated gentile in the Greek speaking Eastern Mediterranean. Whatever his
• 38:27
  Speaker 1: city of origin, his final destination is the same the
• 38:31
  Speaker 1: Roman world. Paul was reaching the Greek speaking world that
• 38:36
  Speaker 1: did not need a five discourse Pentateuke, but needed something
• 38:41
  Speaker 1: they could read alongside through Sydides and Josephus. That is
• 38:46
  Speaker 1: what Luke gave them. His Gospel, paired with the Book
• 38:50
  Speaker 1: of Acts, is the longest single contribution to the New Testament.
• 38:56
  Speaker 1: The two books together account for more than a quarter
• 39:00
  Speaker 1: of its total length. The Greek is the most polished
• 39:04
  Speaker 1: in the New Testament, with a literary range that shifts
• 39:08
  Speaker 1: deliberately as the narrative moves. When Luke is reporting Mary's
• 39:13
  Speaker 1: song or Zechariah's prophecy, or the dialogue of the Bethlehem Shepherds,
• 39:19
  Speaker 1: he writes in a septua gentle Greek thick with hebriisms,
• 39:24
  Speaker 1: because his sources for those scenes spoke Aramaic and thought
• 39:29
  Speaker 1: in the rhythms of the Hebrew Bible. When he is
• 39:33
  Speaker 1: writing the prologue to Theophilus, or describing Paul's hearing before
• 39:37
  Speaker 1: the Roman governor Felix, or narrating the Areopagus speech in Athens,
• 39:43
  Speaker 1: he writes in the polished Greek of a Hellenistic historian.
• 39:48
  Speaker 1: He fits his prose to his material. He also dates
• 39:52
  Speaker 1: his material like a historian. In Luke three verses one
• 39:56
  Speaker 1: to two, when he introduces the ministry of John the Baptism,
• 40:00
  Speaker 1: Luke writes, in the fifteenth year of the reign of
• 40:03
  Speaker 1: Tiberius Caesar, when Pontius Pilot was governor of Judea Herod
• 40:09
  Speaker 1: Tetrarch of Galilee, his brother Philip Tetrarch of Itterea, and Trachonitis,
• 40:15
  Speaker 1: and Asanius Tetrarch of Abilene. During the high priesthood of
• 40:20
  Speaker 1: Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John,
• 40:24
  Speaker 1: son of Zechariah in the wilderness. That is, six independent
• 40:30
  Speaker 1: chronological coordinates in a single sentence. Emperor, prefect, three tetrarchs,
• 40:37
  Speaker 1: two high priests. No other gospel writer pins his story
• 40:41
  Speaker 1: to the secular calendar with that kind of precision. It
• 40:45
  Speaker 1: is the way Polybius dated his histories. It is the
• 40:49
  Speaker 1: way Josephus would later date his. For most of the
• 40:53
  Speaker 1: nineteenth century, the historicity of Luke's geographical and political detail
• 40:58
  Speaker 1: was actively content listed by skeptical European scholars, who treated
• 41:03
  Speaker 1: his references as fabrications. The decisive turn came through the
• 41:08
  Speaker 1: work of the British archaeologist Sir William Ramsay, who set
• 41:12
  Speaker 1: out for Asia Minor in the late eighteen hundreds expecting
• 41:15
  Speaker 1: to disprove Luke and instead spent decades confirming him. Ramsey
• 41:22
  Speaker 1: traced Luke's titles for Roman officials in city after city,
• 41:27
  Speaker 1: politarchs in Thessalonica, proconsul Inchiprus' first man in Malta, and
• 41:34
  Speaker 1: found inscriptions in each location matching exactly the term Luke
• 41:39
  Speaker 1: had used for that exact place at that exact time.
• 41:43
  Speaker 1: The most famous case was the tetrarch Lisanius of Abilene,
• 41:49
  Speaker 1: who appears in the verses just quoted. Critics had long
• 41:52
  Speaker 1: argued that no such man existed in the period Luke
• 41:56
  Speaker 1: described that Luke had confused his rulers. Then an inscription
• 42:02
  Speaker 1: was found at Abelah, north of Damascus, dating to the
• 42:05
  Speaker 1: reign of Tiberius, naming Lysanius as Tetrarch, exactly where and
• 42:11
  Speaker 1: when Luke had placed him. By the end of his career,
• 42:15
  Speaker 1: Ramsay was writing that Luke was, in his judgment, a
• 42:18
  Speaker 1: historian of the first rank. That historian's eye also gave
• 42:23
  Speaker 1: the Third Gospel its distinctive theological coloring. Luke notices the
• 42:29
  Speaker 1: people the other evangelists do not always foreground. He gives
• 42:33
  Speaker 1: more space to women than any other gospel writer. Mary Elizabeth, Anna,
• 42:39
  Speaker 1: the Prophetess, the widow of Nane, Mary Magdalene, Joanna, the
• 42:43
  Speaker 1: wife of Herod Stewart, Susanna, the woman who anointed Jesus
• 42:48
  Speaker 1: in the Pharisees house, the widow who put her two
• 42:51
  Speaker 1: small coins into the treasury, Mary, and Martha. He gives
• 42:56
  Speaker 1: more space to the poor, to the despised, to the foreigner.
• 43:01
  Speaker 1: The parable of the good Samaritan is unique to Luke.
• 43:05
  Speaker 1: The parable of the prodigal Sun is unique to Luke.
• 43:09
  Speaker 1: The story of Zychaeus, another tax collector who climbed a
• 43:13
  Speaker 1: sycamore tree is unique to Luke. The thief on the
• 43:18
  Speaker 1: cross who is welcomed into Paradise is unique to Luke.
• 43:22
  Speaker 1: Where Matthew is writing for a Jewish Christian community defending
• 43:26
  Speaker 1: the New Covenant against Rabbinic alternatives. Luke is writing for
• 43:31
  Speaker 1: a gentile world that needs to know that the carpenter
• 43:35
  Speaker 1: from Nazareth is the savior of all flesh, Roman centurions,
• 43:42
  Speaker 1: Samaritan villagers, Ethiopian eunuchs, women, children, the prisoners, and the dying.
• 43:49
  Speaker 1: Luke's Gospel ends as the others do, with the Resurrection,
• 43:54
  Speaker 1: but it does not end there. Luke, alone among the
• 43:58
  Speaker 1: four evangelists, writes a seak. The Book of Acts, dedicated
• 44:03
  Speaker 1: again to Theophilus, picks up where the Gospel leaves off
• 44:07
  Speaker 1: and traces the spread of the Christian message from Jerusalem
• 44:11
  Speaker 1: to Rome itself. Luke's two volume work is the only
• 44:16
  Speaker 1: narrative the early Church possessed of how the movement that
• 44:20
  Speaker 1: began in a Galilean carpenter's shop reached the capital of
• 44:24
  Speaker 1: the Empire. Without Luke, the historical bridge between the Gospel
• 44:30
  Speaker 1: and the rest of the New Testament would not exist.
• 44:33
  Speaker 1: By the time Luke laid down his pen sometime in
• 44:37
  Speaker 1: the eighties of the first century, three of the four
• 44:40
  Speaker 1: Gospels were in circulation. Mark, Matthew, and now his own
• 44:46
  Speaker 1: long careful classical prose history aimed at the gentile world.
• 44:52
  Speaker 1: The story might have ended there. The Church might have
• 44:55
  Speaker 1: been content with three. But there was still one disciple live,
• 45:00
  Speaker 1: an old man on the western coast of Asia Minor,
• 45:04
  Speaker 1: who had read what the others had written, and who
• 45:07
  Speaker 1: looked at it and decided that the most important thing
• 45:10
  Speaker 1: of all had not yet been said. The man's name
• 45:14
  Speaker 1: was John, son of Zebede. He had been a fisherman
• 45:18
  Speaker 1: on the Sea of Galilee, working with his father and
• 45:21
  Speaker 1: his older brother James, out of the village of Bethsada,
• 45:26
  Speaker 1: mending nets and running boats, long before he ever saw
• 45:29
  Speaker 1: the carpenter from Nazareth. The Gospel of Mark introduces him
• 45:33
  Speaker 1: in a single line, Jesus walking by the lake, calling
• 45:38
  Speaker 1: Zebedee's two sons in the middle of their work day.
• 45:41
  Speaker 1: They left their father in the boat with the hired men,
• 45:44
  Speaker 1: and they followed. What Mark does not say, and what
• 45:48
  Speaker 1: would only become clear in the years after, is that
• 45:52
  Speaker 1: John was, by some measure the youngest of the twelve.
• 45:56
  Speaker 1: By the time he wrote his gospel, sometime in the
• 46:00
  Speaker 1: nineties of the first century, every other apostle was dead. James,
• 46:05
  Speaker 1: his brother had been beheaded by Herod Agrippa in the
• 46:08
  Speaker 1: year forty four. The first of the Twelve to die,
• 46:12
  Speaker 1: Peter had been crucified in Rome under Nero. Paul had
• 46:17
  Speaker 1: been beheaded outside the city of the original inner circle,
• 46:21
  Speaker 1: that had walked with Jesus up the mountain, of the Transfiguration,
• 46:26
  Speaker 1: that had been with him in the upper room, that
• 46:29
  Speaker 1: had watched him agonize in gethsemone Peter James John, only
• 46:36
  Speaker 1: John was left. He was also unique among the twelve.
• 46:41
  Speaker 1: In another way, the Fourth Gospel never names its author directly. Instead,
• 46:47
  Speaker 1: in seven different scenes, it refers to a figure called
• 46:51
  Speaker 1: the Disciple, whom Jesus loved, The Disciple who reclined next
• 46:56
  Speaker 1: to Jesus at the Last Supper, who stood at the
• 47:00
  Speaker 1: foot of the cross while most of the others fled,
• 47:03
  Speaker 1: who outran Peter to the empty tomb on Easter morning,
• 47:07
  Speaker 1: who was the first to recognize the risen Christ on
• 47:10
  Speaker 1: the shore of Galilee. The earliest external tradition, going back
• 47:15
  Speaker 1: to the second century, identifies the Disciple with John Son
• 47:20
  Speaker 1: of Zebedein the internal evidence of the gospel, the geographical detail,
• 47:25
  Speaker 1: the eyewitness texture of certain scenes, and the gospel's own
• 47:30
  Speaker 1: closing testimony all point in the same direction. The most
• 47:34
  Speaker 1: personal of those scenes is at the cross in John
• 47:38
  Speaker 1: the nineteen verses twenty six to twenty seven. The Gospel
• 47:41
  Speaker 1: records when Jesus saw his mother there and the disciple,
• 47:45
  Speaker 1: whom he loved, standing nearby, He said to her, woman,
• 47:50
  Speaker 1: here is your son, and to the disciple, here is
• 47:54
  Speaker 1: your mother. From that time on, this disciple took her
• 47:59
  Speaker 1: into his head home. That single moment Jesus, in the
• 48:04
  Speaker 1: last minutes of his earthly life, entrusting his mother to
• 48:08
  Speaker 1: a young man in his early twenties, is the seed
• 48:12
  Speaker 1: of one of the strongest early traditions about John's later years. Mary,
• 48:18
  Speaker 1: the mother of Jesus, lived in John's household, and John,
• 48:24
  Speaker 1: by every credible early source, eventually traveled with her to
• 48:28
  Speaker 1: Ephesus in what is now western Turkey. Ephesus was in
• 48:33
  Speaker 1: the late first century the fourth largest city in the
• 48:37
  Speaker 1: Roman Empire, a port and a cult center where the
• 48:40
  Speaker 1: Great Temple of Artemis stood as one of the seven
• 48:44
  Speaker 1: Wonders of the ancient world. By the seventies, Ephesus had
• 48:50
  Speaker 1: become the capital of the Pauline mission churches in Asia Minor.
• 48:56
  Speaker 1: Paul had ministered there for two years Timothy had been
• 49:00
  Speaker 1: left there as overseer, and by the time John arrived
• 49:04
  Speaker 1: some time after the destruction of Jerusalem in seventy the
• 49:08
  Speaker 1: Christian community, indeed to Ephesus was the largest and best
• 49:12
  Speaker 1: organized in the Eastern Empire. John lived there, by the
• 49:17
  Speaker 1: most reliable second century traditions, for the rest of his life.
• 49:22
  Speaker 1: The man who is our most direct human link back
• 49:25
  Speaker 1: to John in Ephesus is named Polycarp, the bishop of
• 49:30
  Speaker 1: nearby Smyrna. Polycarp, born around the year sixty nine or seventy,
• 49:36
  Speaker 1: would have been a young man when John was an
• 49:38
  Speaker 1: old man, and the early sources are unanimous that Polycarp
• 49:42
  Speaker 1: was John's personal disciple. Polycarp himself was eventually martyred in
• 49:47
  Speaker 1: Smyrna in the middle of the second century, burned at
• 49:51
  Speaker 1: the stake at the age of eighty six, but before
• 49:55
  Speaker 1: he died he taught a generation of bishops who carried
• 49:58
  Speaker 1: his testimony forward. The claim that the John who wrote
• 50:02
  Speaker 1: the Fourth Gospel was that John, who had walked with Jesus,
• 50:06
  Speaker 1: comes through a chain of human memory only one link long.
• 50:12
  Speaker 1: Polycarp had heard it from John himself. Then around the
• 50:17
  Speaker 1: year ninety five, John's life took its final turn. Domitian
• 50:22
  Speaker 1: in Rome had begun a persecution of Christians in the
• 50:25
  Speaker 1: eastern provinces. Hundreds were arrested, some were executed. John, by
• 50:32
  Speaker 1: the testimony of every ancient source, was banished, sent into
• 50:36
  Speaker 1: exile on a small rocky island in the Aegean Sea
• 50:40
  Speaker 1: called Patmos. The Book of Revelation opens with John's own
• 50:44
  Speaker 1: description of the moment in chapter one, verse nine, I John,
• 50:50
  Speaker 1: your brother and companion in the suffering and kingdom and
• 50:54
  Speaker 1: patient endurance that are ours in Jesus, was on the
• 50:58
  Speaker 1: island of Patmoss be bug because of the word of
• 51:00
  Speaker 1: God and the testimony of Jesus. It was on that island,
• 51:06
  Speaker 1: in something close to solitary confinement, that the apocalyptic vision
• 51:11
  Speaker 1: of Revelation came to him. The mission was assassinated in
• 51:15
  Speaker 1: ninety six. His successor, Nerva, reversed many of his persecutions,
• 51:21
  Speaker 1: and the early sources record that the elderly John was
• 51:24
  Speaker 1: released from Patmos and allowed to return to Ephesus. He
• 51:29
  Speaker 1: was by this point well into his nineties, possibly older.
• 51:33
  Speaker 1: The disciple, who had once been the youngest in the
• 51:36
  Speaker 1: Upper Room, was now older than any of his companions
• 51:40
  Speaker 1: had ever lived to be, and it was in those
• 51:44
  Speaker 1: last years, back in Ephesus, that he sat down and
• 51:48
  Speaker 1: wrote the Fourth Gospel. He wrote it by the consensus
• 51:53
  Speaker 1: of the ancient sources, knowing exactly what the other three
• 51:57
  Speaker 1: gospels had said. That is why the four Gospel is
• 52:01
  Speaker 1: so unlike the first three. The first three Mark Matthew
• 52:07
  Speaker 1: Luke are called the synoptic Gospels because they can be
• 52:11
  Speaker 1: set side by side and read together. Their narrative, shape,
• 52:15
  Speaker 1: their selection of episodes, and much of their wording overlap.
• 52:20
  Speaker 1: John's Gospel does not. There is no birth narrative. There
• 52:25
  Speaker 1: is no genealogy. There is no temptation in the wilderness.
• 52:29
  Speaker 1: There are no exorcisms none in any of John's twenty
• 52:34
  Speaker 1: one chapters. There are no parables in the synoptic sense,
• 52:38
  Speaker 1: no stories of sewers or prodigal sons or workers in
• 52:42
  Speaker 1: the vineyard. The Sermon on the Mount is not there.
• 52:46
  Speaker 1: The Lord's prayer is not there. The institution of the
• 52:51
  Speaker 1: Eucharist at the Last Supper is not there. What is
• 52:54
  Speaker 1: there instead is something the synoptics do not give. John
• 52:59
  Speaker 1: structures his gods around seven signs, seven miracles, beginning with
• 53:04
  Speaker 1: the changing of water into wine at cana and ending
• 53:08
  Speaker 1: with the raising of Lazarus from the dead. Each sign
• 53:12
  Speaker 1: is more than a wonder. Each is paired with a
• 53:14
  Speaker 1: long discourse in which Jesus interprets what the sign means.
• 53:19
  Speaker 1: After the Feeding of the five Thousand, Jesus tells the crowd,
• 53:23
  Speaker 1: I am the Bread of life. After the healing of
• 53:27
  Speaker 1: the man born blind, he says, I am the Light
• 53:30
  Speaker 1: of the world. After the raising of Lazarus, he says,
• 53:34
  Speaker 1: I am the Resurrection and the Life. Seven I am
• 53:39
  Speaker 1: sayings echoing the divine name God revealed to Moses at
• 53:43
  Speaker 1: the Burning Bush, woven through long teaching dialogues that have
• 53:47
  Speaker 1: no parallel in the other Gospels. The night conversation with
• 53:52
  Speaker 1: Nicodemus in chapter three, the Samaritan Woman at the Well
• 53:57
  Speaker 1: in chapter four, the Upper Room discre courses across chapters
• 54:01
  Speaker 1: thirteen to seventeen, the high priestly prayer that ends them.
• 54:06
  Speaker 1: John also tells time differently. The Synoptic Gospels collapse jesus
• 54:11
  Speaker 1: ministry into what could be read at a single year,
• 54:15
  Speaker 1: with a single climactic visit to Jerusalem. At the end,
• 54:19
  Speaker 1: John records three passovers, stretching the ministry across at least
• 54:23
  Speaker 1: three years and bringing Jesus to the temple multiple times.
• 54:29
  Speaker 1: The Synoptics placed the Last Supper on the night of Passover.
• 54:33
  Speaker 1: John places the crucifixion itself on the day of preparation,
• 54:37
  Speaker 1: when the Passover Lambs were being slaughtered in the temple courts.
• 54:41
  Speaker 1: A theological claim made through chronology that Jesus is the
• 54:47
  Speaker 1: true passover Lamb whose blood is poured out at the
• 54:51
  Speaker 1: same hour. Generations of scholars have argued over how to
• 54:55
  Speaker 1: reconcile the two timelines. What the early Church understood was
• 55:00
  Speaker 1: that John was not contradicting the others. He was deepening them,
• 55:05
  Speaker 1: telling the same story from advantage point ninety years on,
• 55:08
  Speaker 1: with the freedom of a writer who had read the
• 55:11
  Speaker 1: existing accounts and was now adding what only he could add.
• 55:16
  Speaker 1: He says as much in the closing of his gospel
• 55:20
  Speaker 1: in John twenty one, verse twenty four. The gospel concludes
• 55:23
  Speaker 1: with this sentence, this is the disciple who testifies to
• 55:27
  Speaker 1: these things and who wrote them down. We know that
• 55:31
  Speaker 1: his testimony is true. That is the disciple whom Jesus loved,
• 55:37
  Speaker 1: identifying himself as the writer with a community around him.
• 55:42
  Speaker 1: The we of that closing, vouching for his testimony, the
• 55:46
  Speaker 1: Fourth Gospel is signed. The earliest physical evidence we have
• 55:51
  Speaker 1: of any New Testament book at all is remarkably a
• 55:55
  Speaker 1: tiny scrap of John's Gospel. The fragment is called Pirrus
• 56:00
  Speaker 1: fifty two or P. Fifty two, and it is housed
• 56:04
  Speaker 1: today in the John Ryland's Library in Manchester. It is
• 56:09
  Speaker 1: roughly the size of a credit card, with writing on
• 56:12
  Speaker 1: both sides. On one side, it preserves part of John
• 56:16
  Speaker 1: eighteen verses thirty one to thirty three. On the other,
• 56:20
  Speaker 1: part of John eighteen verses thirty seven and thirty eight,
• 56:24
  Speaker 1: the words of Jesus before pilot. Paleographers date the handwriting
• 56:28
  Speaker 1: to somewhere between the years one hundred and twenty five
• 56:31
  Speaker 1: and one hundred seventy five, that a copy of John's
• 56:34
  Speaker 1: Gospel was already circulating in Egypt within roughly a generation
• 56:40
  Speaker 1: of the original being written in Ephesus. Is one of
• 56:44
  Speaker 1: the most striking pieces of manuscript evidence in the entire
• 56:48
  Speaker 1: ancient world. Whatever doubts later scholars might have raised about
• 56:54
  Speaker 1: when the Fourth Gospel was composed, P. Fifty two closes
• 56:58
  Speaker 1: the window. The text was already in motion by the
• 57:02
  Speaker 1: early second century, copied and carried far from where it
• 57:06
  Speaker 1: had begun. By the time John finally died sometime around
• 57:11
  Speaker 1: the end of the first century in Ephesus of natural
• 57:14
  Speaker 1: old age, the only one of the twelve Apostles to
• 57:18
  Speaker 1: die that way, four written gospels were in circulation across
• 57:24
  Speaker 1: the Mediterranean Mark from Rome, Matthew from Antioch, Luke from
• 57:30
  Speaker 1: somewhere in the Greek world, John from Ephesus. The men
• 57:35
  Speaker 1: who wrote them were all dead, The communities they had
• 57:38
  Speaker 1: written for were under pressure from a hostile empire, and
• 57:43
  Speaker 1: the question of which of these gospels and which of
• 57:46
  Speaker 1: the dozens of others now circulating under apostolic names, would
• 57:52
  Speaker 1: become the Church's authoritative record was about to be settled slowly,
• 57:58
  Speaker 1: painfully across the next three centuries. The earliest argument that
• 58:04
  Speaker 1: there should be four Gospels, no more, no fewer, was
• 58:08
  Speaker 1: written by a bishop named Irenaeus of Leon around the
• 58:12
  Speaker 1: year one hundred eighty. In the third book of his
• 58:15
  Speaker 1: work against Heresies, Ironaeus argued that just as there are
• 58:20
  Speaker 1: four winds, four corners of the earth, and four faces
• 58:25
  Speaker 1: of the Cherubim in the Visions of Ezekiel and the
• 58:28
  Speaker 1: Book of Revelation, so the Church has four gospels. A
• 58:33
  Speaker 1: fourfold witness binding the world together. The argument feels almost
• 58:37
  Speaker 1: mystical to modern ears, but Irenaeus was not inventing the
• 58:42
  Speaker 1: fourfold canon. He was justifying a settlement that had already
• 58:47
  Speaker 1: happened in practice by the late second century. In churches
• 58:52
  Speaker 1: from Lyon to Alexandria to Antioch, those four scrolls and
• 58:57
  Speaker 1: no others were the ones being read in worship. The
• 59:00
  Speaker 1: criteria the early Church applied were not arbitrary. Three things mattered. First,
• 59:06
  Speaker 1: apostolic origin. The gospel had to come from an apostle
• 59:11
  Speaker 1: or from someone in direct contact with one. Mark had
• 59:15
  Speaker 1: Peter Matthew was an apostle himself. Luke was Paul's traveling companion,
• 59:22
  Speaker 1: John was an apostle. Second, doctrinal consistency. The gospel had
• 59:28
  Speaker 1: to align with the rule of faith already preserved by
• 59:32
  Speaker 1: the Apostolic churches. Third, widespread use. The Gospel had to
• 59:39
  Speaker 1: be read and trusted across many congregations, not just one
• 59:43
  Speaker 1: regional sect. By those criteria, the gospels that did not
• 59:48
  Speaker 1: make it failed for visible reasons. The Gospel of Thomas,
• 59:52
  Speaker 1: recovered in Egypt at Naghamadi in December of nineteen forty five,
• 59:57
  Speaker 1: is one hundred and fourteen sayings of with no narrative,
• 1:00:01
  Speaker 1: no baptism, no crucifixion, no resurrection. Its theology bends toward Gnosticism,
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 1: an esoteric movement that rejected the goodness of creation. The
• 1:00:13
  Speaker 1: Gospel of Peter, recovered in a monkst tomb at a
• 1:00:16
  Speaker 1: Kmeme in eighteen eighty six, contains a fantastical resurrection scene
• 1:00:22
  Speaker 1: with a giant cross walking out of the tomb on
• 1:00:25
  Speaker 1: its own and answering questions. These were not gospels, the
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 1: Church suppressed. They were gospels the Church had read, weighed,
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 1: and declined. The four canonical Gospels, by contrast, kept showing
• 1:00:42
  Speaker 1: up together. The chester Batey papyri, recovered in Egypt and
• 1:00:48
  Speaker 1: dated to around the year two hundred and fifty, include
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 1: a single codex called Papyrus forty five that contains all
• 1:00:55
  Speaker 1: four Gospels and the Book of Acts bound together as
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 1: one book in that order. More than a century before
• 1:01:04
  Speaker 1: any official council confirmed them, the settlement Irenaeus articulated had
• 1:01:09
  Speaker 1: already become the practice of ordinary congregations. The official confirmations followed.
• 1:01:16
  Speaker 1: In three hundred sixty seven, Athanasius of Alexandria, in his
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 1: thirty ninth Easter letter listed the twenty seven books of
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 1: the New Testament we now use, with the Four Gospels
• 1:01:28
  Speaker 1: at the head. The first complete canonical list in surviving
• 1:01:33
  Speaker 1: Christian writing in three in Sittam. The Council of Carthage
• 1:01:38
  Speaker 1: formerly ratified that list for the Western Church. By the
• 1:01:42
  Speaker 1: close of the fourth century, the Four Gospels were no
• 1:01:46
  Speaker 1: longer one possibility among many. They were the Gospels. Christian
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 1: tradition eventually gave each of the four a face, drawing
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 1: on the four living creatures of Ezekiel Chapter one and
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 1: rev Relation Chapter four. Augustine and Jerome assigned the symbols
• 1:02:04
  Speaker 1: that are still carved into pulpits and cathedral doors today.
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 1: Matthew the man who began with a human geniality, Mark
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 1: the Lion, who roared his Gospel out of the wilderness.
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 1: Luke the Ox, the patient sacrificial beast for the Gospel
• 1:02:22
  Speaker 1: of compassion and wider mercy. John the Eagle, who soared
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 1: from his first verse to the eternal Word. Four creatures,
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 1: four Gospels, one face of Christ turned in four directions.
• 1:02:37
  Speaker 1: That is the answer to the question. This video began
• 1:02:40
  Speaker 1: with why these four because four men a tax collector
• 1:02:46
  Speaker 1: an interpreter of Peter, a gentile physician and the last
• 1:02:51
  Speaker 1: surviving member of Jesus's inner three left behind, accounts that
• 1:02:56
  Speaker 1: the church, working through three centuries of testing, recognized as
• 1:03:01
  Speaker 1: the true voices of the Apostolic generation. Today, roughly two
• 1:03:07
  Speaker 1: and a half billion people on this planet read those
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 1: four books in over two thousand languages. They read them
• 1:03:14
  Speaker 1: in stone cathedrals and in plastered village chapels and imprison cells,
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 1: and on telephone screens. The Gospel of Mark written by
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 1: a young man on the run from a Roman persecution.
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 1: The Gospel of Matthew, written by a former tax collector
• 1:03:32
  Speaker 1: for a community that had lost its temple. The Gospel
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 1: of Luke, written by a Greek physician for a Roman patron.
• 1:03:41
  Speaker 1: The Gospel of John, written by a ninety year old
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 1: fisherman who had outlived almost everyone he had ever loved.
• 1:03:49
  Speaker 1: John himself ends his gospel with a sentence that, in
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 1: a sense, ends the entire fourfold witness. In John twenty
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 1: verses thirty to three thirty one, he writes, Jesus performed
• 1:04:03
  Speaker 1: many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which
• 1:04:07
  Speaker 1: are not recorded in this book. But these are written
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 1: that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 1: son of God, and that by believing you may have
• 1:04:18
  Speaker 1: life in his name. Four men in four cities across
• 1:04:23
  Speaker 1: four decades wrote down what they wrote, so that the
• 1:04:26
  Speaker 1: people who came after them, including the people listening to this,
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 1: would have something to believe and somewhere to stand