Dethroning Jesus: What Popular Culture Says About Jesus – Part 5

[This material is excerpted from our television series, “The Battle to Dethrone Jesus,” with Dr. Darrell Bock and Dr. Daniel Wallace. The entire series is available in our online store.]

How early were the New Testament books written, and why is that important?

Dr. John Ankerberg: We have been asking the question, how do we meet the challenges that are coming from folks that are talking about a Jesusanity, where Jesus is a special person, He is just not God, doesn’t forgive anybody’s sins, doesn’t do miracles; versus Christianity, where He claims to be God, and He does come and pay for our sins, and He does offer us eternal life, He can transform us and purify us?

We have got these opinions that are out there, or these stories of Jesus, and we are saying that the factual, historical roots go back to Christianity, not Jesusanity.^[1] Now, at the time when the first churches were planted, you had the living apostles walking around, “Peter, come on over for a cup of coffee. I’ve got a question for you.” They could tell you what was orthodox, what was not orthodox, because they had been with Jesus.

And then you have the core elements, the traditional teaching that comes in creedal statements. You have the songs, the hymns, that are just loaded with theology. And you have the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. But then the apostles’ letters start to come out. We said they came out pretty early—in the 40s. If Jesus died in the 30s, that is 10-15 years later. That is a pretty short period of time. And then the apostles start to die off in the 60s-70s, and John probably up there close to 100. But they’re all dead by 100.

The information that they gave to us is what we are centering on now. And that is that they claimed to be communicating the word of God. And then when they wrote their books, these letters, the community believed what they were saying, that these were Scripture.

Now, the apostles had students. And now you come to, say, Clement of Rome, who is around 95 AD; and you’ve got Polycarp, who is the student of John; and you’ve got Ignatius; and you’ve got Papias; and then a little later on you’ve got Irenaeus. And then you start going down this list of the students of the students. But, Darrell, what did some of the students say about the writings of the apostles and who wrote it and how it came down?

Dr. Darrell Bock: Well, very early on, in fact, in the very first writings we have from this outside the apostolic period, we get the recognition that that period was unique, and that there is something going on uniquely in that period that the church is related to, and that builds around.

So, for example, we get Clement of Rome writing in his epistle of First Clement chapter 42, “The apostles received the gospels for us from the Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ was sent forth from God. So then Christ is from God and the apostles are from Christ. Both therefore came from the will of God in the appointed order. Having therefore received a charge, and having been fully assured through the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ and confirmed in the word of God with full assurance of the Holy Spirit, they went forth with the glad tidings that the Kingdom of God should come. So, preaching everywhere in country and town, they appointed their first fruits when they had proved them by the Spirit to be Bishops and Deacons unto them that should believe.”

So, we have got Christ; we have got the apostles who represent the message of Christ; we have got them preaching around the world; we have got them planting and leaving churches, and leaving Bishops and Deacons in charge. That’s what that quote is saying.

But there is a recognition that there is something special happening with the apostles, and that we don’t have more apostles. You know, we don’t have more apostles after the apostles die, in this technical sense of the term. That is a unique group because of their direct exposure to Jesus Christ.

Dr. John Ankerberg: And what is interesting, Dan, is that you have Clement being appointed by Peter to be the Bishop at Rome. So here you have, again, another student of a living apostle making that kind of a statement which is, you know, in terms of historical literature this is pretty solid stuff.

Dr. Daniel Wallace: Exactly. In fact, there has been a good deal of evidence that when Eusebius is beginning to think about the canon, he goes back through the annals of all the records he has got. And he can trace what is called the homologoumena, that is, the books, the core books, that everyone has accepted by the end of the second century. Twenty books at least that they say, “We know these go back to the apostles.” And Eusebius went and traced it through the major churches of the Mediterranean world from bishop, back to bishop, back to bishop, back to bishop, back to the apostles.

Dr. John Ankerberg: All right, give me another quote.

Dr. Darrell Bock: This quote is from Irenaeus, who is a student of Polycarp, who was a student of the apostle John. It is written in Against Heresy, 311. And this gives an outline of the Gospels, of the tradition about where the Gospels come from. “Matthew published his gospel among the Hebrews [that is the Jews], in their own tongue when Peter and Paul were preaching the Gospel in Rome and founding the church there. After their departure [which is an allusion to their death during the Neronian persecution sometime in the 60s], Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter himself, handed down to us in writing the substance of Peter’s preaching. Luke, the follower of Paul, set down in a book the Gospel preached by his teacher. Then John, the disciple of the Lord, who also leaned on his breast, himself produced his Gospel while living at Ephesus in Asia.”

And so there we have the four Gospels. We have two apostolic evangelists, if you will, Matthew and John; we’ve got Mark, who is tied very closely to Peter; and we’ve got Luke, tied very closely to Paul. Of course, sometimes this is challenged. Some people will say, “Well, Luke isn’t really written by Paul. They just picked someone and then associated him with Paul.” But here is the problem with a suggestion like that. Think of all the companions that Paul had that could have been an associate author of a work like Luke/Acts, okay? You have Timothy, you have Titus, you have Barnabas, you have Silas. It’s a long list of potential candidates. If I want to pick a follower of Paul to write this book so we can have apostolic association with it, lots of candidates.

One small problem: in the tradition of the church, the tradition of the church is consistent that it is Luke. And what’s interesting about Luke is that Luke actually is not among the more prominent of those associates of Paul. He is a fringe Pauline figure in comparison to the people I just named. And so, if you were grabbing out of a hat, you would not pick the name of Luke. So the problem is, how does Luke get so closely attached to Paul in tradition unless Luke belongs there? That’s the point.

Dr. John Ankerberg: What is the significance of having the student say, “This is what the apostles told me,” or “This is what we know,” so close to all this material?

Dr. Darrell Bock: Well, what it does is it puts us in line kind of with the oral conversation that is going on in the church about where these materials came from. And there are some interesting features in here. For example, there is the reference to the idea that Matthew originally wrote to the Jews in his own tongue and his own dialect; that there is a Jewish version of Matthew, if you will.

Dr. Daniel Wallace: But the earliest sources don’t say that he wrote a Gospel in Hebrew, it’s just that he wrote something in Hebrew, the “Sayings of Jesus,” or the Logia Jesu.

Dr. Darrell Bock: My point is that whatever that is, we may or may not have it. I mean, we may have the remnants of it, but we may or may not have what they were talking about there. But the point here is that the church is coming along, and they are rooting this material in the apostles or those who follow the apostle.

Now again, let’s assume you get to make the rules. That’s Jesusanity’s take is that the church is making the rules as it’s going along; they are doing theology on the fly, okay? And so, they come along and they say, “Well, we are not just going to have four Gospels that are written by apostles or associates of the apostles, if we are going to have four Gospels, they should be written by apostles.” So it seems to me if you are making up the rules and you are really trying to make it an apologetic, you know, to be untouchable, you would pick four apostles to write the gospels, not two apostles and then two who are associated with the apostles.

Dr. Daniel Wallace: And one of those associates is an associate with an apostle who is not one of the eyewitnesses. In other words, Paul was added later.

Dr. Darrell Bock: Exactly right.

Dr. Daniel Wallace: So, Luke is two steps removed in that respect, plus what you have noted already that he is a minor player.

Next up: Part 6 – Do the Gnostic Gospels give a more accurate account of Christianity?

Endnotes

1. Dr. Bock differentiates Christianity—where the person of Jesus is at the center of the story, it’s His work as well as His message that’s important—from Jesusanity, which refers to Jesus of Nazareth, and there it is His teaching that is important, but His person is not.↑