Lectio: The Case for Jesus with Dr. Brant Pitre | Episode 1 | Augustine Institute

[Music] welcome everyone to our lectio bible study on jesus where we will be looking at the biblical and historical evidence for christ my name is dr brant petri i am research professor of sacred scripture here at the augustine institute in denver and i'm very very excited to be with you to begin this bible study looking at the biblical evidence for our lord the biblical evidence for christ one reason i'm excited about this is because what we'll be doing is kind of walking through some of the material in a book that i recently published called the case for jesus the biblical and historical evidence for christ and this lexico bible study is going to kind of summarize some of the main themes in that book so if you want to dive in a little deeper i'd encourage you to go and get the book and read it we're going to be looking at a topic that at least for me as a cradle catholic i'm i'm uh i was born pagan but then baptized catholic shortly thereafter but being catholic my whole life i grew up learning about the catechism i grew up learning about the church and the history of the church and different doctrines but this study of jesus is going to be a little bit different because we're going to be looking at him through the lens of history and asking ourselves the question not just do you believe in jesus i think most catholics you'd ask them christians you know do you believe in jesus their answer is well yes of course i believe in jesus but we want to take the next step and ask this question why do you believe in jesus has anyone ever asked you that have you ever pondered that if someone came up to you and said well why do you believe in jesus what would you say how would you answer right if someone said why do you believe in jesus and not in muhammad or buddha right or some other religious leader what would you say what are the reasons for your faith and again for many of us like myself i received the faith as a gift from my parents and my grandparents and that's a gift which i can never repay but at the same time as we grow into adulthood we also want to ask ourselves well what are the reasons for continuing to believe to hold the faith and i think in our day and time too especially in an increasingly secular world you can no longer assume that well everyone believes in jesus so there's i don't have to explain i don't have to give reasons for my faith right especially if you're engaged in the new evangelization sharing the gospel either with people who haven't heard it or with people who've fallen away from christian faith and from the catholic church so um this this study of jesus and of the evidence for christ is i think very very timely and very crucial for what we're doing right now in the church with the new evangelization in this new millennium so we're going to be looking at a number of questions over the course of this lexio bible study we're going to be taking up issues such as who wrote the gospels right um what about the lost gospels that you hear about on the discovery channel the history channel why do we as christians believe in the four gospels of matthew mark and luke but not these other gospels what kind of books are the gospels are they fact or are they folklore fact or fiction when were they written are they early enough to be reliable accounts of jesus or are they too late to really tell us the truth about what jesus did what jesus did said we'll also be looking at questions such as um was jesus in fact the messiah most catholics again would say well of course he was the messiah but then if you ask him well well how do you know he was the messiah i'll never forget one time i was teaching a seminary course i said how many of you believe that jesus fulfilled the prophecies of the messiah in the old testament and every hand went up and i said good now which prophecies did he fulfill silence you hear the grass cutting outside the you know the building oh i don't know well how do you answer that question so was he the messiah did he claim to be god or was he just a great moral teacher right um and if he did claim to be god why was he crucified and why did he cry out my god my god why have you forsaken me and then last but certainly not not least what about the resurrection why do christians believe in the resurrection what's the evidence for jesus being raised from the dead so these are the kind of things we're going to be looking at and as you'll see step by step i want to lay out the case for jesus the reasons for believing that jesus is in fact who we as christians claim him to be confess him to be not just the messiah the long way to king of israel but god incarnate so that's my goal for for our session i hope you're as excited as i am about diving in so in order to do this though we're going to need to begin first with the gospels themselves we're going to take a couple of sessions to really back up and look at what kind of books the gospels are who wrote them and how reliable they are before we can get into the issue of what they actually say about jesus what they claim about jesus so in this first session i'm going to start in a place might seem a little surprising but it's very important and it's with this issue namely the anonymity of the gospels or you could ask it this way who wrote the four gospels because if you know anything about the new testament you'll know that the bulk of our information about jesus really doesn't come from the letters of paul or peter or james in june it comes from the four gospels traditionally ascribed to matthew mark luke and john if that's that's the primary they are the primary sources the foundational sources for the life the death the resurrection of jesus and if again you're like me and you grew up christian you grew up catholic most of your life you probably just believed well i open my bible i look in there and it says the gospel of matthew the gospel mark gospel of luke and gospel john and so that must be who wrote the gospels and for about 19 centuries that's what everyone believed almost everyone you'll see about the gospels but in the last hundred years or so there are two well one of them's really a theory but one is more of an opinion or an analogy but there are two theories about the gospel origins that have arisen that have really fundamentally changed the way people are looking at the gospels today and especially what people are hearing about the gospels in the context of university settings and classroom settings and those two theories are number one the theory of the anonymous gospels and then number two the so-called analogy of the telephone game right so the anonymous gospel theory and the telephone game let me just kind of lay these out for you for just a minute in the last hundred years this theory of the gospels originally being anonymous has arisen and according to this theory there are basically four main points to it number one according to theory although your bible has titles on each of the four gospels matthew martin luke and john originally they were not published with any names attached to them originally they were anonymous there was no gospel according to mark or according to john there was just the text of the gospels and these gospels according to this theory number two circulated throughout the ancient roman empire they were copied down by scribes and re-copied and distributed without any titles for about a century before the titles related later added to them in the late second century in order to give them authority right in other words according to this theory the title matthew was added sometime in the 2nd century to make people think that matthew the disciple of jesus wrote it and the title john was added to make people believe that the apostle john had actually written it in order to give these works authority it's what scholars refer to as a false attribution right or pseudopigraffy false writing now according to this theory then uh the upshot of it really is is that none of the four gospels that we have in the new testament matthew mark luke or john was written actually by an eyewitness to jesus we don't know who wrote them they were obviously written by believing christians who may or may not have had access to true or untrue traditions about jesus of nazareth but we don't actually know who wrote them because they are originally anonymous now um just to put this in an autobiographical context this was the theory i learned when i was a young undergraduate student you know taking my first classes in religious studies i still remember when my professor uh came into the room and told us you know i want you to forget everything you think you knew about who wrote the gospels i know you probably grew up thinking that matthew mark luke and john the apostles and their companions wrote them but scholars today know that originally they were anonymous and that they weren't written by eyewitnesses to jesus so of course i was you know i'm a good student you know a student of course right you know writing down diligent oh i didn't know that you know no one said anything about this in catechism class and i just you know took it down and i took it in and i believed it um and then a second thing that uh i was taught kind of flowed out of that because the obvious question that comes from that is well wait if they weren't written by eyewitnesses to jesus then how reliable are the stories about jesus in the gospels i mean if we don't know who wrote them then can we verify them or not and so our my teacher and one of the textbooks i used gave an analogy for helping the students understand what kind of stories were in the gospels and the analogy very sophisticated analogy was of the telephone game has anybody ever heard of the telephone game okay has anyone ever heard of the telephone game analogy all right well this was the analogy i remember it being used in my classroom i'm going to give you a quote here from the most widely used new testament introduction in universities in the united states today it's by a scholar named bart airman he's not catholic in fact he's not a christian anymore he used to be christian but he's now an atheist in his introduction to the new testament which i myself used as a student gives an analogy from the children's telephone game in order to help students understand the kind of stories about jesus and the gospels and i'm going to quote airman's words verbatim here this is what he says listen to this nearly all of the storytellers meaning people telling stories about jesus had no independent knowledge of what really happened to jesus now it takes little imagination to realize what happened to the stories you're probably familiar with the old birthday party game telephone a group of kids sits in a circle the first tells a brief story to the one sitting next to her who tells it to the next and to the next and so on until it comes back full circle to the one who started invariably the story has changed so much in the process of retelling that everyone gets a good laugh now imagine the same activity taking place not in a solitary living room with 10 kids on one afternoon but over the expanse of the roman empire some 2 500 miles across with thousands of participants end quote now if airmen is right here and this is a appropriate analogy for the stories about jesus and the gospels then what does that do to the credibility of the gospels what does the telephone game analogy do to the students who take that in and think oh well this is what it's this is what the stories about jesus and the gospels are like what completely destroys their credibility no because the whole point of the telephone game is that the story what changes and doesn't just change in minor ways but changes dramatically right so you'll frequently find in the 20th century and this is a new idea these two approaches to the gospels that we don't know who wrote them and that they weren't written by eyewitnesses and that the stories in the gospels are like this game of telephone those two approaches to the text are lay the foundation for a very deep skepticism toward what the gospels say about jesus so that in our day and time and i have lots of friends who teach in catholic high schools it has now trickled down from the ivory tower of the academy into popular imaginations that the gospel themselves aren't reliable testimony to jesus so you might say well this gospel says that and someone will say well yeah but how do i know that that actually happened all right what if the gospels are anonymous how do i know all right so so how do we respond to that how what is the case with regard to the anonymity and authorship of the gospels well again just to speak autobiographically um for much of my education from my undergraduate through my master's degree this was the approach that i took because it was it was the majority opinion let me be clear here bart airman's not alone in holding this view of the gospels not being written by eyewitnesses and then being analogous to the telephone game this is a widely held view among scholars and universities this is the majority opinion that the gospels were originally anonymous and i myself accepted it before i went to uh begin my doctoral studies at the university of notre dame but when i was there uh one of the things you have to do if you get a phd in a new testament is you have to learn a number of languages you have to learn hebrew you have to learn greek you also start to begin studying not just what a textbook says but you start to read more scholars and study the text in their original languages and you start to go back and look at what ancient authors themselves have to say about it and one of the things that was fascinating uh for me as a doctoral student was this whole question of the anonymity of the gospels because we began to do as students what is known as textual criticism which is where you don't just study various books about the new testament but you actually go back to the manuscripts themselves and you look at the text of the new testament and i'll never forget asking one of my professors about this when it came to the anonymous gospels i wanted to know well where are the anonymous copies because i wanted to see you know surely if the text were originally anonymous then there would be the oldest manuscripts wouldn't have titles and he said that's a good question why don't you go and research it so i did so i started to look into it in more depth and one of the first you know cracks in this foundation that had been laid for me and having a kind of skeptical attitude toward the gospels was the fact that i discovered that there are no anonymous copies now this is a big problem because history is supposed to work with evidence right it's a very important principle of textual criticism and one of the things i do in my book is i just take you through have a little chart uh going through all the different the earliest manuscripts for each one of the gospels matthew mark luke and john looking at both ancient greek papyri fragments of the gospels as well as ancient greek codexes or codices which are longer copies of the gospel and what i found is all of the earliest copies matthew mark luke and john every single one of them has a title there are precisely zero anonymous copies of the gospel now that's a real problem for the theory because the theory is supposed to be a historical theory and his historical theories are supposed to work with evidence so for example by analogy imagine if i told you that originally the gospel of matthew was published without the sermon on the mount it wasn't there your very first question should be oh really what copies of the gospel of matthew is the sermon of mount missing from and i would say well none of them but trust me originally it wasn't there you would have good grounds for being what skeptical about my theory that their sermon wasn't originally part of the gospel well the same thing's true about the anonymity of the gospels if they were originally anonymous then why don't any cop not one and we have not just hundreds of ancient greek copies of of the gospels we actually have thousands of ancient manuscripts of the gospels and other new testament writings there are more manuscripts of the new testament than any other ancient document okay so first problem greek manuscript evidence no anonymous copies and then as i began to read more other other scholars like richard balcom who's a british scholar and others and martin hengel a german scholar i began to discover that there are other problems with the idea that the gospels were anonymous namely that the anonymous scenario the theory itself is is kind of unbelievable it's kind of incredible if you step back for just a moment think about it ponder this if the gospels had in fact been originally published with no titles and they circulated for a hundred years throughout the roman empire then how did the scribes at the end of the second century writing in egypt and and gaul and italy and asia minor how did they all know to ascribe the exact same titles to the same books why don't we have discrepancies in other words the same book being attributed by some scribes to matthew and some to peter and that kind of thing how do we end up with unanimous descriptions to matthew mark luke and john that's a problem um why is there no trace of this original anonymity in any of these titles and this becomes really clear when you compare for example the manuscripts for the gospels with one book in the new testament that actually is anonymous and that's the letter to the hebrews the letter to the hebrews right unlike the other books in new testament hebrews just has the title says to the hebrews and nowhere in the text or the title does it identify the author now traditionally the book has been believed to be attributed to paul but again as i show in the case for jesus when you look at the manuscripts for hebrews what you'll find is actual anonymous copies and discrepancies as some scribes start to say well paul wrote it and then another scribe will say well paul wrote it through timothy and other church fathers will say no no barnabas wrote it and then some will say paul wrote in hebrew and then luke translated in other words there's what a diversity opinion of opinion because the book is actually anonymous but that's precisely what we don't have with any one of the four gospels as we'll see in our next session the ancient christians are completely unanimous that matthew was written by matthew mark was written by mark luke by luke and john by john one final problem with this theory of the anonymous gospels is okay if you were a scribe in the late 2nd century and you really want to fake it right you want to give your book authority by attributing it falsely to an author why would you pick mark and luke now when i was growing up i thought all four gospel evangelists were members of the twelve apostles because i didn't know any better right but that's not true right only matthew and john are members of the twelve apostles as we'll see in just a second mark and luke are not themselves eyewitnesses or apostles of jesus they're the companions of apostles mark was the scribe of peter and luke was a companion of saint paul right so if you were going to fake it why would you go with second generation christians like mark and luke right if you're gonna if if you have complete freedom to falsely attribute your gospel to somebody why not just attribute it to say peter right or even better if you really want you get to get your amazon numbers up and sell that thing right call your book the gospel of jesus himself if truth isn't a barrier then just say jesus himself wrote it i mean then you'll really get people to read it so why would you attribute those gospels to lesser known figures secondary figures like mark or luke well maybe it's because mark and luke actually wrote them and they're not falsely attributed because they weren't anonymous does that make sense okay so what we want to do now i just want to take you through in this session and the next one i want to look at the evidence for believing that the gospels were not in fact anonymous but actually were written by the traditional authors matthew mark luke and john in order to do that i want to make clear though um the two kinds of evidence that historians deal with when you're assessing the authorship of a book so if you want to tell who wrote a book there's basically two ways to do it you can look at internal evidence from the book itself right or external evidence from outside the book so for example i have a book here i just happen to pick this one up the case for jesus by brant petry now what might make you think that i actually wrote the book is there any internal evidence from the book itself oh yes there is right it's on the cover page it ascribes the book to me no all right so that's internal evidence but if you had some reason to doubt that evidence you could also go outside of the book and you could ask dr barber good friend we've been friends for 10 years here another professor here at the augusta institute did brant write that book on the case for jesus and he could tell you yes he could confirm it for you or he could ask my wife did brant spend many hours up in the office ignoring you and the children right and she could say yes uh no i'm trying to be a good dad but it does take a lot of work to write a book it's right but she would know or you could ask my students you see so that's internal and external evidence so in this session i just want to focus on the internal evidence for a second and look at what we know about these four men to whom these first these four gospels are attributed so if we take seriously the internal evidence of the titles which are in all of the ancient greek manuscripts what we what we discover is that each one of them is explicitly attributed to either an apostle or a companion of one of the apostles so let's just walk through them together the first gospel in the new testament in terms of its internal evidence is attributed to matthew the tax collector and apostle every greek manuscript of matthew we have has this title or either at the beginning of the end the gospel according to matthew in greek eongelian katamathion in other words good news according to who matthew now who is this matthew well we learned from the gospel itself in matthew chapter 9 verse 9 and matthew chapter 10 verse 2 to 4 that matthew was a tax collector in matthew 9 we see this quote jesus passed on from there and he saw a man called matthew sitting at the tax office and he said to him follow me and he rose and followed him matthew 9 verse 9. and then again in matthew chapter 10 verse 2 to 4 when jesus chooses the 12 apostles matthew the tax collector that's his subtitle so to speak is named as one of the 12. now why is that important well one reason it's important is because that's what the internal evidence of the gospel says another reason it's important though is because sometimes scholars who will object to the gospel having actually been written by an eyewitness will argue in this way they'll say there's no way any of jesus disciples could have written any of the gospels because his disciples were a bunch of illiterate fishermen right in fact i mentioned bart airman earlier he actually makes this argument in several of his books he says even if jesus disciples had wanted to write a gospel they couldn't do it because they weren't literate they were illiterate fishermen from galilee which is kind of like you know the backwaters of of the holy land well it should be obvious the problem that there's real problem with that argument because while it is true that some of jesus's disciples were fishermen they weren't all fishermen as the list of the twelve tells us in matthew 10 matthew was a tax collector right now think about it for just a minute you're traveling around with jesus put yourself in disciples shoes and uh you're listening to the sermons this guy's given parables you're like this guy's really good right we can imagine that no okay he's he's really good teacher you know maybe one of us should write some of this down right students did in antiquity so let's see who might write it down okay fisherman fisherman fisherman fisherman tax collector what would tax electors have to do they'd have to write documents they had to be scribally literate they had to write not just in the language of the people which might be aramaic or hebrew but also the language of the empire right in greek so who is exhibit a among the apostles in terms of prime candidate for actually writing down some of the sayings and deeds of jesus it's who matthew right at the same time however tax collectors were widely despised and widely hated so you might not want to leave with that person in the sense of trying to publicize it it'd be like saying today like trust me i'm an irs agent oh i don't know if i want to trust you except that tax collectors in the first century were more despised than irs agents in the 20th century well at least almost equally so in any case the point is he's actually a very plausible candidate for being one of the eyewitnesses to jesus who would have not only had the ability but would have been the likely person among the twelve to write down the words and deeds of jesus all right what about the second gospel mark the companion of paul and peter what does the internal evidence say about the gospel of mark well once again all of the copies of mark that we possess have the title ao angelian kata marcon right the good news according to mark and we know from several passages in the new testament like philemon 23 to 24 acts chapter 12 verse 12-14 acts chapter 15 that this figure of mark was a well-known early christian a figure he was a jewish man of jerusalem so he had two names john which is his jewish name yo anes and then marcus which is his latin name um which was very common by the way in bilingual situations for a person to have two names i taught at notre dame seminary in new orleans we have a very large uh vietnamese community in new orleans right and many of my vietnamese students would share their vietnamese names with us as professors but some of the names are very difficult for english speakers to pronounce so they would often just say just call me paul or call me chris like take an english name that's an easier name as a kind of second name because certain languages especially like moving from greek to a semitic language like hebrew can be very difficult for the romans to speak so it's very common for people to have more than one name so john mark was a resident of jerusalem who also happened to be a companion not just of paul but of peter himself and you can see this in the first letter of peter chapter 5 verse 12-13 which says these words by silvanus a faithful brother as i regard him i have written briefly to you exhorting and declaring that this is the true grace of god stand fast in it she who is at babylon who was likewise chosen sends you greetings and so does my son who mark and that's a spiritual sonship that he's referring to there but so first peter provides us some evidence that mark was a companion of peter when peter is in babylon which is a code word for rome and there's other evidence as well which by the way would make sense if peter is an illiterate fisherman but he wants to tell the stories of jesus what jesus did and said what might he do he would use a scribe right and that's the function that as we'll see in the next session the church fathers say mark played all right what about luke the third gospel luke is identified as a physician a companion of paul and the author of acts and i've got several passages from the new testament that provide us evidence for fleshing out who this figure of luke is i'm just going to read one of them to you it's from colossians this is at the end of one of the letters of paul and it's important passage it says this aristarchus my fellow prisoner greets you and oh look here mark the cousin of barnabas so notice again paul and peter both know mark it's a very small world in the early church actually still today i'll go to another country and i'll meet catholics oh you know this person you know that person i always say the catholic church is 1 billion small it's really it's really a rather small club when you get to it it's really easy to meet people who know other people so paul knows mark the cousin of barnabas and then he goes on to say and jesus who is called justice these are the only men of circumcision among my fellow workers for the kingdom of god and they've been a comfort to me luke the beloved physician and demas greet you so notice here it's from this passage in colossians that we derive the information that luke is first not among those of the circumcision in other words he's not a jew he's the only gentile to whom any of the books of the new testament is attributed although he does write a fourth of the new testament so that's pretty good and then second he's a beloved physician right so he's he's a friend of paul and his profession is that of a physician and we look at other passages like in the acts of the apostles what we'll find out is that the same person who writes the gospel of luke in terms of internal evidence is also a sometimes companion of paul right so there's our third gospel and then fourth and final we'll wrap up with this what about the fourth gospel what's the internal evidence for the fourth gospel well it's traditionally once again the title of every copy of john that we have says this good news according to johannes good news according to john but in john's case we have something unique it's not just the title that provides us with internal evidence for who wrote it the gospel itself tells us at the very end by whom it was composed and so i want to read this passage to you this from john chapter 21 verse 20 24 and 25. this is after jesus has told peter very famously three times do you love me do you love me do you love me right and then he goes on to predict peter's death and peter in classic peter form says well what's going to happen to this guy and he points to john and jesus don't worry about him just worry about yourself and then this is what the gospel says peter turned and saw following them the disciple whom jesus loved who had laid close to his breast at supper and said lord who is it that's going to betray you this is the disciple who is bearing witness to these things and who has done what written these things and we know that his testimony is what true so john's gospel ends by telling you that the beloved disciple the one who laid on the breast of jesus the last supper is the one who has written the text that's internal evidence for john the beloved disciple as author all right then in closing some people might say once again well wait a second the new testament also says that john was an illiterate fisherman and it's true in the acts in the book of acts chapter 4 remember when peter and john go before the jewish council and they start to preach and teach the jewish leaders are stunned because they said these men are agramatos they're illiterate they haven't studied where did they get all this right and so some skeptics will say aha look this shows john could not have written the fourth gospel because he's illiterate but once again just like in modern times so too in ancient times if for some reason you aren't able to write either because you're illiterate or because you're pressed for time right what can you do you can hire a secretary right dictate actually you don't even need that all you need is a phone now you just put voice detects and you put it on and you can write whole documents just by what dictation the interesting thing about john is if you read it out loud try it sometime it reads like somebody is talking aloud kind of wanders kind of rambles sometime but there's a distinct voice throughout the whole text so in closing what have we seen what i hope to have shown you here is that the widespread idea that the gospels were originally anonymous that they can't be trusted that they weren't written by eyewitnesses is actually just from the perspective of history not faith you don't have to be a catholic you just have to look at the historical evidence is a bad theory it doesn't have historical grounding to back it up in fact all of the historical evidence that we do possess from the internal documents themselves points to the four gospels actually having been written wait for this it's radical by matthew mark luke and john all right now you might be thinking as soon as i say that though is well wait what about those other gospels what about the lost gospels what about the gospel thomas or the gospel of mary magdalene right when we return we're going to look at that evidence and say and show why on the basis not just of internal evidence but external evidence we as christians accept these four gospels but not those other gospels as actually having been written by eyewitnesses to jesus all right so to see you there [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Augustine Institute

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Keywords: lectio divina, catholic church, brant pitre, case for jesus, case for christ, Jesus christ, history of jesus

Id: JboIg6ezWrs

Length: 36min 24sec (2184 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 04 2021