Category Archives: Church History

Books of the Bible, Church History

Are the Synoptic Gospels Interdependent? Part 1

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

It seems clear that the first three Gospels – Matthew, Mark, and Luke – are interdependent.  That is, they share common literary and oral sources.  Daniel Wallace, Professor of New Testament Studies, lays out the case for this interdependence in an article called “The Synoptic Problem.”  Most Christians have given this very little thought, but I think that the more we know about the process God used to give us the gospels, the better we can understand them.

Wallace presents four arguments for the interdependence of the synoptic gospels.  First, there is the agreement in wording.  According to Wallace, “The remarkable verbal agreement between the gospels suggests some kind of interdependence.”  Wallace notes that many laypeople reject this idea and argue that the Holy Spirit inspired each of the synoptic authors to write identical words in many cases, that the gospels are all independent of each other.  But does this make sense?  Wallace thinks not.

First, it cannot explain the differences among the writers—unless it is assumed that verbal differences indicate different events.  In that case, one would have to say that Jesus was tempted by the devil twice, that the Lord’s Supper was offered twice, and that Peter denied the Lord six to nine times! In fact, one might have to say that Christ was raised from the dead more than once if this were pressed!

Second, if Jesus spoke and taught in Aramaic (at least sometimes, if not usually), then why are these verbal agreements preserved for us in Greek?  It is doubtful that each writer would have translated Jesus’ sayings in exactly the same way so often.

Third, even if Jesus spoke in Greek exclusively, how is it that not only his words but his deeds are recorded in verbal identity?  There is a material difference between remembering the verbiage of what one heard and recording what one saw in identical verbiage.

Fourth, when one compares the synoptic materials with John’s Gospel, why are there so few verbal similarities?  On an independent hypothesis, either John or the synoptics are wrong, or else John does not record the same events at all in the life of Jesus.

Wallace’s second argument for interdependence is agreement in order.  “Although there is a great deal of disagreement in the order of the pericopae [story units] among the synoptic gospels, there is an even greater amount of agreement.”  In other words, there is a lot of commonality in the way the three synoptic writers ordered the stories about Jesus.

A counter-argument here may be that the reason the order of the stories are the same is because they are in chronological order.  Wallace, however, notes that the gospel pericopae are not all in strictly chronological order.  Why is that?

First, there is occasional disagreement in the order.  For example, many of Matthew’s parables in chapter 13 are found in Luke 8 or Luke 13. The scribe who approached Jesus about the great commandment is placed in the Passion Week in Matthew and Mark, and vaguely arranged elsewhere in Luke.

Second, it is evident that quite a bit of material is grouped topically in the gospels—e.g., after the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew come several miracles by Jesus.  Indeed, “Matthew has furthermore arranged his entire Gospel so that collections of narratives alternate with collections of sayings.”

Third, the early patristic writers (e.g., Papias) recognized that the gospel writers did not follow a strict chronological arrangement.

Fourth, there is a studied reserve in the gospels from pinpointing the dates of the various incidents.  Introductory comments such as, “immediately,” “after this,” “on another occasion,” “one day,” etc. are the norm.  In other words, there seems to be no intent on the part of the evangelists to present a strict chronological sequence of events.

In part 2 of this series, we will look at the final two arguments that Wallace gives for the interdependence of the synoptic gospels.

Church History, Eastern Orthodox, Jesus Christ, Theology

Was Mary the Mother of God?

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I recently had a conversation with a Christian on Facebook regarding some of the passages in the Bible that refer to Mary.  During the conversation, I referred to Mary as The Mother of God (Theotokos).  This brought a rather stern reaction from him.  He stated, “Mary isn’t the Mother of God.  God is not born or created.  That’s heresy. Mary is the mother of Jesus’ flesh of his human body, not of His Divinity, which already existed before Mary was born.”  While I can understand his concerns, I wonder if this gentleman realizes that his position was thoroughly discussed, analyzed, and subsequently rejected by the Church roughly 1600 years ago.

During the first 500 years of Christianity, the Church dealt with the rise of several Christological heresies that necessitated the formulation of a clear theological expression of Christ’s Person and Nature.  In the early fifth century, one of these heresies questioned how Christ’s two natures, that of God and Man, related to one another. Following the teachings of Theodore of Mopsuestia, Nestorius, Patriarch of Constantinople, taught that Christ’s nature as God was utterly separate from His nature as man.  In this understanding, Christ’s early life was that of a human being in contact with God.  God foresaw that Christ would lead a virtuous life and chose Him to be a vessel of divinity.  At Christ’s birth, his contact with divinity was incomplete, becoming so later in His life.  Nestorius preferred the term Christotokos (Mother of Christ) to that already accepted as part of Holy Tradition, Theotokos (Mother of God), for He believed that Mary’s baby was not fully divine.

This teaching, which came to be known as Nestorianism, led to the calling of the Third Ecumenical Council in 431 AD.  In this Council, the Fathers of the Church upheld the teaching that in Christ the dual natures of divinity and humanity do not merely come in contact with one another, but that they are, rather, in union.  At the Incarnation, the Second Person of the Trinity, Christ, took on human nature, adding it to His Person, while at the same time retaining the fullness of His Divinity.  At the birth of Christ, Mary gave birth to a baby who was both God and human, each in the fullest sense of the word.  As a result, to deny that Mary was the Mother of God is to deny the full reality of the Incarnation and its resulting efficacy in our salvation.

In a letter to John of Antioch in 433 AD, Saint Cyril summed up this aspect of Christology very well.

Thus we confess that our Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, is perfect God and perfect man, consisting of a rational soul and body, that he was begotten from the Father before all ages according to the Divinity, and that in these latter times was begotten for us and for our salvation from the Virgin Mary; that he is consubstantial with the Father in his Divinity and consubstantial with us in his humanity, for in him there was accomplished the unity of two natures.  Therefore we acknowledge one Christ, one Son, one Lord.  On the basis of this union without confusion, we confess the Most Holy Virgin to be the Mother of God because God the Word was incarnate and became man and in the conception itself united with himself the temple received from her. . . God the Word came down from heaven and, taking the form of a servant, emptied himself, and was called the Son of man, remaining that which he is – God.

The title Mother of God is a confession about Christ.  As I have heard said in the past, it says more about Him than it does about Mary.

Archaeology, Church History, Historical Christ

Can Historians Use Anonymous Sources?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

A common complaint about the reliability of the letters and books contained in the New Testament is that we don’t know, for sure, who wrote all of these documents.  In particular, the four Gospels are singled out as being anonymous since there is nothing in the text of the four Gospels that says, “So-and-so wrote this Gospel.”

There are many historical scholars who do believe that we can identify the authors of the Gospels and most of the other letters in the New Testament, but what if we could not?  What if the authors of these documents were unknown?  Would we have to throw out the contents?  Are they worthless, in that case, for historical investigation?

Historical scholar Mike Licona, in his book The Resurrection of Jesus, says “no.”  Licona first answers the charge that the Gospels were not written by eyewitnesses:

Bracketing the fact that a number of scholars have taken a contrary position, this challenge is not unique to the New Testament literature.  No surviving account of the life of Alexander the Great was written by an eyewitness.  Tacitus and Suetonius were not eyewitnesses to the majority of the events they reported.  Nevertheless, historians remain confident that they are able to recover the past to varying degrees without ever knowing who their sources were.

Historian C. Fasolt argues that Paul’s letter to the Roman church is helpful as a historical source “only on the assumption that it was written by Saint Paul.”  Is Fasolt right?  Licona notes historian M. S. Cladis’s response to Fasolt:

This is going to be news to countless social historians of the religions of the ancient Mediterranean basin who investigate archaeological and textual work without always knowing the specifics of the exact agents involved.  Indeed, these historians are investigating the society that shaped the agents, even if they do not know most of the agents’ names (and all that this means).

They collect, analyze, and interpret evidence from a variety of sources—monuments and tombs, literary texts and shopping lists—in order to learn something important about the socio-historical circumstances in which people, like Paul, lived, moved, and had their being.  The historian of antiquity, then, can learn much about the past from the ‘Letter to the Romans’ whether or not that text was actually written by Paul.

Here is the takeaway point: even if we grant that the books and letters of the New Testament are anonymous, we can still gather important historical information from those texts.  Anonymity of the sources is not a death knell for historical New Testament studies, and should not be used as some kind of sweeping indictment of the texts.  We can know what happened to Jesus and his disciples two thousand years ago, using the New Testament documents as our sources.

Books of the Bible, Church History, Textual Criticism

Who Wrote the Fourth Gospel? Part 2

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

In part 1 of this series, we looked at a blog post written by Timothy McGrew where he presents external and internal evidence for the authorship of the fourth Gospel.  Part 1 summarized the external evidence, and part 2 will summarize the internal evidence.

McGrew starts off the presentation of the internal evidence with the following:

Here, we can close in on the question with a series of concentric arguments, starting further out (with facts that limit the authorship somewhat, but not too specifically) and then tightening the description until only John is left.  This method of solving the problem was made famous by B. F. Westcott, and I will make use both of his outline and of many of his examples as we zero in on John the son of Zebedee.

McGrew’s outline consists of 5 steps (he provides a lot of evidence to back each of these up in the blog post):

  1. The author was a Jew.  He is intimately familiar with Jewish opinions and customs.
  2. He was a native of Palestine.  He give us an unerring portrait of the distinct role that the hierarchical class (the Sadducees, whom he never calls by their name) played in the religious life and legal deliberations of Judaism. He also shows effortless precision in his knowledge of places and topography.
  3. He was an eyewitness of many episodes that he records.
  4. He was one of the “inner circle” among Jesus’ disciples.
  5. He was John, the son of Zebedee.

Here are some of the details McGrew presents in support of outline item 5:

Throughout the Gospel, we read of one disciple who goes unnamed (e.g. 1:35, 37, 40) but is later described simply as “the beloved disciple.”  At the very end (21:24), we are told outright that he was the author.  And going back over the places where he is recorded as being present, we find that they are the particular places where the scenes are recorded with particular vividness and detail—the conversation at the last supper, for example, or the scene by the fire at night in the hall at Caiaphas’s house.  There is no reason to doubt that this identification of the beloved disciple with the author of the fourth Gospel is correct.  But who was the beloved disciple?

From the lists of those present in some of the scenes (1:35 ff; 21:2), including cross references with the Synoptic Gospels, he must have been either Andrew, Peter, James, or John.  He cannot be Andrew, since Andrew appears with him in the opening chapter.  He cannot be Peter, since he appears with Peter in the closing chapter.  James was martyred too early to have written the Gospel (Acts 12:1).  By process of elimination, we arrive at the conclusion that he was John.

Again, remember that all of the internal evidence is gathered from the text of the fourth Gospel.  We are looking for clues from the text that would indicate who the author is, and McGrew has done a nice job compiling some of the highlights.  He ends the blog post by reiterating,

The evidence, internal and external, is really quite overwhelming. To use a phrase of Paul’s from the book of Acts, “God has not left Himself without witness”—he has provided plenty of evidence!

And with him, I wholeheartedly agree.

Books of the Bible, Church History, Textual Criticism

Who Wrote the Fourth Gospel? Part 1

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

There is much hay made in skeptical circles of the fact that none of the four Gospels were signed by an author, that if we reconstruct the original texts from the copies we have, there are no sentences in the texts that explicitly say something like, “This Gospel was written by John, son of Zebedee.” 

Yet church tradition does claim that the four authors were Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John – all of them apostles or companions of apostles of Jesus.  I have written previously on the authorship of the first Gospel, but today I want to quote from an outstanding blog post written by Timothy McGrew which makes a compelling case that the author of the fourth Gospel is indeed the disciple John.

If you want the full treatment, go to McGrew’s post.  What I will do is summarize some key points from his post below.  McGrew starts with the following:

I am persuaded that the fourth Gospel was written by John, the brother of James and son of Zebedee. There are quite a number of reasons for thinking this, and that means that this is going to be a rather long note.

So here’s the short answer:

1. Every scrap of evidence we have from the writings of the early church indicates that the fourth Gospel had always been known to be written by John. And we have lots.

2. A careful examination of the Gospel itself shows that it must have been written by a Jew who was a native of Palestine and an eyewitness of numerous events, including many where only Jesus and the disciples were present. From internal clues, we can pretty safely narrow it down to John.

The first group of evidence is called the external evidence, as it consists of evidence external to the Gospel text itself.  McGrew lists several early, ancient authors and documents that mention John as the author of the fourth Gospel and/or quote passages only found in the fourth Gospel (this second line of evidence is important because it establishes that the fourth Gospel was considered apostolic very early, and thus more likely to be written by an apostle such as John).  In his post, McGrew provides background information on each of these sources, but I will only list the sources themselves.

  1. Eusebius (~AD 325)
  2. Origen (~AD 220)
  3. Tertullian (~AD 200)
  4. The Muratorian fragment (~AD 180)
  5. Irenaeus (~AD 180)
  6. Tatian (~AD 160)
  7. Justin Martyr (~AD 145)
  8. Anti-Marcionite Prologue quoting from a work of Papias (~AD 125)
  9. The Apology of Aristides (AD 117 – 138)
  10. Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies, book 7, quoting early second century heretic Basilides
  11. Ignatius (~AD 107)

McGrew finishes up this section of external evidence with the following summary:

These are the primary pieces of early external testimony to the authorship of John, though I could easily double the size of the list by pulling out more obscure quotations from the so-called Second Epistle of Clement, Hermas, Hegisippus, Athenagoras, Polycrates, etc.  But they make the point sufficiently clear.

There is no other tradition of authorship for the fourth gospel.  There is no record of any uncertainty about it at any time; we have one brief mention of some gnostics (not even named) who claimed it was written by Cerinthus, the founder of their heretical sect—but they are mentioned only to be dismissed.  It does not appear that any Christian group ever had the slightest doubt about this work.

 In part 2 of this series, we will look at the internal evidence that McGrew presents.

Baptism, Church History, Faith and Works, Polls, Salvation, Theology, Top Ten Posts of 2010

What Were the Reformers’ Views on Infant Baptism? – #6 Post of 2010

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

According to church historian John Hannah, there were four major Protestant streams that developed during the Reformation in the 16th century: Anglicanism, Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Anabaptism.  Each of these streams placed great stress on the idea of salvation by faith alone, yet they did not all agree on what infant baptism means or whether it should even be done.

To my knowledge, all the reformers rejected baptism as the cause of a believer’s salvation; again, salvation is by faith.  An infant obviously cannot believe on her own, so if baptism is only a sign of the faith a person possesses, then why are infants baptized?

First, let’s look briefly at Calvinism.  According to Hannah, “Calvin defended the baptism of infants, believing that children of the godly are born members of the church by virtue of the hereditary nature of the Abrahamic covenant, circumcision having been replaced in the New Covenant with baptism as a sign.”

For Calvin, since infants were circumcised under the Old Covenant, infants should be baptized under the New Covenant.  Infant baptism does not cause regeneration, but it ensures that the child will be taught what she needs to know about Christ when she gets older, so that she can then exercise her own faith.  If she dies before she can exercise her own faith, Calvin believed that God could still save her, as He is not limited to save only those who exercise faith (although that is the normal way).

The Anglicans closely followed Calvin on the issue of infant baptism.

Luther also held very similar views to Calvin.  He believed that infants, who cannot exercise faith, should be baptized because of the faith of their parents and church family.  The faith of the church family could not directly save the infant, but their faith would later help the child to grow in knowledge and receive her own faith from God.  Again, infant baptism signifies the entrance of the child into the church where she can be instructed.

The last group, the Anabaptists, differ greatly from the other three streams.  The Anabaptists believed that a sign should always follow the thing it signifies, not anticipate it.  Hannah explains further Anabaptist views: “People are born into the world lost and need to be regenerated.  One does not enter the church as a citizen as one enters the state.  In the latter one is naturally born into it; in the former one is spiritually born into it.  The state is not the church; the church is not the state.”

The earliest confession of the Anabaptists states: “Baptism shall be given to all those who have learned repentance and amendment of life, and to all those who walk in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and wish to be buried with him in death. . . . This excludes all infant baptism . . . .”

So what do you think?  Should infants be baptized?  Please vote in the poll below.

Bible Interpretation, Books of the Bible, Church History, Eschatology, Polls, Theology, Top Ten Posts of 2010

Did the Early Church Believe in a Literal Thousand-Year Reign of Christ on Earth? – #10 Post of 2010

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

The Book of Revelation, according to some Christians, teaches a literal thousand-year reign of Christ on earth after his second coming (see Rev. 20).  This will then be followed by the creation of a new heaven and new earth. This view is known today as premillenialism.

But there are other Christians, in fact, the majority, who interpret the thousand years in Rev. 20 as a spiritual reign of the church which started at Christ’s first coming and ends at his second coming.  This view is known today as amillenialism.

The proponents of both of these views have an array of arguments to support their positions, but what was the view of the early church?

It seems that up until the third century, the early church was primarily premillenialist.  Writers like Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, and Tertullian all thought the second advent of Christ was imminent and that he would inaugurate his thousand-year reign on earth.

The tide, however, started to turn with the writings of Origen in the early third century, who adopted an allegorical method of interpreting Revelation.  Origen believed that the thousand years represented a spiritual reign of the church.  His disciple, Dionysius of Alexandria, continued the attack against premillenialism and turned the eastern church away from it.

In the western church, Augustine, in the late fourth century, began to teach amillenialism, siding with the Alexandrians in the east.  His views of eschatology (the end times) were detailed in his most famous work, The City of God.

From the time of Augustine until the Reformation in the sixteenth century (~1,100 years), amillenialism was the dominant view in the church.

The story obviously doesn’t end there, but you now have a brief introduction of what happened in the first fifteen hundred years of Christianity with respect to the millennium scribed in Rev. 20.

What about you?  Which view do you think is more likely correct?  Do you think there will be a literal thousand-year reign of Christ on earth (i.e., premillenialism) or do you think the thousand years mentioned in Rev. 20 is a spiritual reign of the church which ends at Christ’s second coming (i.e., amillenialism)?

Church History, Difficult Bible Passages

Was the Early Church Communist?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

In the most recent edition of the Christian Research Journal, Jay W. Richards addressed this topic.  The verses that have led some to make the claim that the early church was communist are Acts 4:32-35.  But is that the correct interpretation of these verses?  If so, is communism the ideal for the church?

Richards argues against this view, giving several reasons.  First, Richards notes that modern communism, based on the writings of Marx, is about class warfare and the evil of private property.  According to Richards, “There’s none of this class warfare stuff in the early church in Jerusalem, nor is private property treated as immoral.  These Christians are selling their possessions and sharing freely and spontaneously.”

Second, communism is associated with state control of resources, but the state is not involved in the early church.  “No Roman centurions are showing up with soldiers.  No government is confiscating property and collectivizing industry.  No one is being coerced.”  Again, the early church was sharing their property voluntarily, with no state involvement at all.

Third, the communal life described in Acts 4:32-35 is never prescribed for all churches everywhere.  Richards explains, “What Acts is describing is an unusual moment in the life of the early church, when the church was still very small.  Remember this is the beginning of the church in Jerusalem.”  In addition, we know that other early churches had different arrangements.  Take, for example, the Thessalonians.  Paul addresses the situation in their local church when he warns them, “If a man will not work, he shall not eat.”  Paul’s words hardly exemplify the ideals of communism.

Richards concludes, “The take-home lesson should be clear: neither the book of Acts nor historical experience commends communism.  In fact, full-bodied communism is alien to the Christian worldview and had little to do with the arrangement of early Christians in Jerusalem.”

To read the complete article, you need to be a subscriber to the Christian Research Journal, which happens to be one of my favorite magazines.  If you are interested at all in Christian apologetics, it is a must-read.

Church History, Polls

How Did Early Christians Know What to Believe?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

In the early centuries of Christianity, believers were mostly without complete written copies of the New Testament as we know it today.  They may have possessed portions of it, but most Christians were taught doctrine orally.  In order to focus on and remember what was important, the early church composed several creeds.

Creeds are simple summaries of central doctrines that are easy to memorize.  According to Benjamin Galan in Creeds and Heresies Then and Now , the early Christian creeds served three purposes:

Explanation of the faith. Creeds are basic, memorable statements of belief.

Training of believers. Creeds help believers understand who they are, what they believe, and how they should act as Christians.  They are like posts that delimit the boundaries of what it means to be , to believe, and live as Christians.

Identification and correction of false teachings. Even in the first century A.D., false teachers abounded – teachers who claimed to follow Jesus but who promoted a message about Jesus that differed radically from the historical accounts proclaimed by apostolic eyewitnesses.  Early Christian creeds helped believers to distinguish the truth about Jesus from the alternative perspectives presented by false teachers.

Many Christian churches today still recite creeds composed by the early church, although churches in denominations such as the Southern Baptist Convention do not.  Whether creeds are recited during church services or not, it is important for all Christians to understand what the early creeds said, because we are inheritors of the contents of those creeds.  If we fail to know what the creeds said, we fail to understand our history as a church.

What does your church do?  Do you recite any creeds during your services?

Archaeology, Church History

Oldest Known Images of the Apostles Andrew and John Found

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

Archaeologists reported on June 22, 2010 that they found images of the apostles Andrew and John that date to the 4th century.  Here is an excerpt from the article at CNN.com.

The oldest known image of the apostles Andrew and John have been discovered in catacombs under the city of Rome, dating back to the 4th century AD, archaeologists announced Tuesday.

The paintings were found in the same location where the oldest known painting of St. Paul was discovered last year, the Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archeology said Tuesday.

They are part of a group of paintings around an image of Jesus as the Good Shepherd on the ceiling of what is thought to have been a Roman noblewoman’s tomb, experts said.

A painting of St. Peter makes up the fourth member of the group, but older images of him are thought to exist, Vatican experts said.

Be sure you read the brief article to see the images themselves.  They are remarkably well preserved.