Tag Archives: apostle Peter

Books of the Bible, Church History, Historical Christ

Is Mark’s Gospel Peter’s Eyewitness Account? Part 2

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

In part 1, we looked at evidence for Mark’s use of Peter’s eyewitness accounts for his Gospel. There are 6 pieces of evidence that have been assembled by J. Warner Wallace in his book Cold-Case Christianity. We will look at the final two pieces of evidence below.

Fifth, Mark included details that can be best attributed to Peter. Wallace explains:

Mark alone included a number of seemingly unimportant details that point to Peter’s involvement in the shaping of the text. Mark alone told us that “Simon and his companions” were the ones who went looking for Jesus when He was praying in a solitary place (Mark 1: 35– 37). Mark is also the only gospel to tell us that it was Peter who first drew Jesus’s attention to the withered fig tree (compare Matt. 21: 18– 19 with Mark 11: 20– 21). Mark alone seemed to be able to identify the specific disciples (including Peter) who asked Jesus about the timing of the destruction of the temple (compare Matt. 24: 1– 3 with Mark 13: 1– 4).

While Matthew told us (in Matt. 4: 13– 16) that Jesus returned to Galilee and “came and settled in Capernaum,” Mark said that Jesus entered Capernaum and that the people heard that He had “come home” (see Mark 2: 1). Mark said this in spite of the fact that Jesus wasn’t born or raised there. Why would Mark call it “home,” given that Jesus appears to have stayed there for a very short time and traveled throughout the region far more than He ever stayed in Capernaum? Mark alone told us that Capernaum was actually Peter’s hometown (Mark 1: 21, 29– 31) and that Peter’s mother lived there. Peter could most reasonably refer to Capernaum as “home.”

Sixth and finally, Mark used Peter’s outline of the events of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection.

Many scholars have also noticed that Peter’s preaching style (Acts 1: 21– 22 and Acts 10: 37– 41, for example) consistently seems to omit details of Jesus’s private life. When Peter talked about Jesus, he limited his descriptions to Jesus’s public life, death, resurrection, and ascension. Mark also followed this rough outline, omitting the birth narrative and other details of Jesus’s private life that are found in Luke’s and Matthew’s gospels.

Taken altogether, the six pieces of evidence paint a good circumstantial case that Mark recorded the eyewitness accounts of Peter, the apostle of Jesus. I think we have persuasive reasons to believe that the traditional view on the Gospel of Mark stands up to scrutiny.

Books of the Bible, Church History, Historical Christ

Is Mark’s Gospel Peter’s Eyewitness Account? Part 1

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

This has certainly been the traditional understanding since the beginning of Christianity. What evidence is there that Mark was recording events from Peter’s eyewitness perspective? In his book Cold-Case Christianity, J. Warner Wallace gives us 6 pieces of evidence to consider.

First, Wallace notes that Mark mentions Peter frequently. As an example, Wallace observes that “Mark referred to Peter twenty-six times in his short account, compared to Matthew, who mentioned Peter only three additional times in his much longer gospel.”

Second, Mark uses familiar terms to identify Peter. Wallace states:

Mark is the only writer who refused to use the term “Simon Peter” when describing Peter (he used either “Simon” or “Peter”). This may seem trivial, but it is important. Simon was the most popular male name in Palestine at the time of Mark’s writing, yet Mark made no attempt to distinguish the apostle Simon from the hundreds of other Simons known to his readers (John, by comparison, referred to Peter more formally as “Simon Peter” seventeen times). Mark consistently used the briefest, most familiar versions of Peter’s name.

Third, Mark uses Peter as a “set of bookends.” Wallace explains why this is significant:

Unlike in other gospel accounts, Peter is the first disciple identified in the text (Mark 1: 16) and the last disciple mentioned in the text (Mark 16: 7). Scholars describe this type of “bookending” as “inclusio” and have noticed it in other ancient texts where a piece of history is attributed to a particular eyewitness. In any case, Peter is prominent in Mark’s gospel as the first and last named disciple.

Fourth, Mark paid Peter the most respect of the Gospel writers. Wallace offers several pieces of evidence to prove the point.

[Mark] repeatedly painted Peter in the kindest possible way, even when Peter made a fool of himself. Matthew’s gospel, for example, describes Jesus walking on water and Peter’s failed attempt to do the same (Matt. 14: 22– 33). In Matthew’s account, Peter began to sink into the sea; Jesus described him as a doubter and a man “of little faith.” Interestingly, Mark respectfully omitted Peter’s involvement altogether (Mark 6: 45– 52). In a similar way, Luke’s gospel includes a description of the “miraculous catch” of fish in which Peter was heard to doubt Jesus’s wisdom in trying to catch fish when Peter had been unsuccessful all day. After catching more fish than his nets could hold, Peter said, “Go away from me Lord, for I am a sinful man!” (Luke 5: 1– 11). Mark’s parallel account omits this episode completely (Mark 1: 16– 20).

While other gospels mention Peter directly as the source of some embarrassing statement or question, Mark’s gospel omits Peter’s name specifically and attributes the question or statement to “the disciples” or some other similarly unnamed member of the group. When Peter made a rash statement (like saying that Jesus’s death would never occur in Matthew 16: 21– 23), the most edited and least embarrassing version can be found in Mark’s account (Mark 8: 31– 33). Over and over again, Mark offered a version of the story that is kinder to Peter.

In part 2, we will look at the final two pieces of evidence that Wallace offers.

Historical Christ, Resurrection

How Did the Apostles Die?

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William Hole's interpretation of the Beloved D...
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Post Author: Bill Pratt

One of the most compelling apologetic arguments for the truth of the resurrection of Jesus is the fact that most of his closest followers were martyred for their beliefs.  Since these followers would have had first-hand knowledge of whether he actually did come back from the dead, their willingness to be persecuted and eventually die for this belief is hard to explain if the resurrection never did occur.

One of the challenges with making this argument is that the quality of the historical evidence for these martyr deaths varies greatly.  C. Michael Patton, of the Parchment and Pen blog, attempted to sort out the historical evidence for the deaths of 12 apostles in this blog post.  In his post, he grades the quality of the historical sources based on his own research.  He assigns a grade of “A” to the deaths with the best historical evidence (highest probability) all the way down to a grade of “D” for deaths where he considers the historical evidence to be weak (lowest probability).

For reference, here are each of the disciples along with their alleged year of martyrdom and the grade Patton assigned to their martyrdom accounts:

The Apostle James: year of death – 44-45 A.D.; grade of A

The Apostle Peter: year of death – 64 A.D.; grade of A

The Apostle Andrew: year of death – 70 A.D.; grade of B

The Apostle Thomas: year of death – 70 A.D.; grade of B

The Apostle Philip: year of death – 54 A.D.; grade of C

The Apostle Matthew: year of death – 60-70 A.D.; grade of B

The Apostle Nathaneal: year of death – 70 A.D.; grade of C

James the Brother of Jesus: year of death – 63 A.D.; grade of B

The Apostle Simon the Zealot: year of death – 74 A.D.; grade of B

The Apostle Judas Thaddeus: year of death – 72 A.D.; grade of C

The Apostle Matthias: year of death – 70 A.D.; grade of D

The Apostle Paul: year of death – 67 A.D.; grade of A

Out of the 12 martyrdom accounts he grades, 3 merited an “A,” 5 merited a “B,” 3 merited a “C,” and 1 merited a “D.”  In my opinion, the three accounts that garnered “A”s are enough evidence to uphold the apologetic argument.  What Patton demonstrates is that there is even more evidence than just these three.

Historical research can be very tricky, and these kinds of analyses are somewhat subjective.  I’m sure skeptics of Christianity might grade harder than Patton did, but I commend him for his attempt.  Please read the rest of his blog post if you want to know more of the details surrounding the deaths.

Church History

Did Paul Invent Christianity? Part 2

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

We pick up from part 1 of this post to see why Paul could not have invented a version of Christianity foreign to Jesus’ teachings.

McFarland continues making his case:

The point is this:  the key teachings of the Gospel (Jesus is the sinless Son of God; He died for our sins and rose again; we receive Him as Savior through repentance and faith) pre-date Paul.  Paul taught these things, expounded on these things, and was used by God to write much of the New Testament.  But the core of the Gospel was being widely spread even before Paul was a believer.  In the final words of I Corinthians 15:8, Paul seemed to acknowledge that he was late getting to the party!

Look at Peter’s sermon at Pentecost, found in Acts 2:14-40.  Peter presents the core facts of the Gospel, including Jesus’ Deity, death, and resurrection.  Peter preaches the same truths again in Acts 3:12-18.  In Acts 5:29-33, Peter addressed Jewish leaders, and again gives the key facts of the Christian message.  By Acts 5:42, we read, “Day after day, in the temple courts and from house to house, they never stopped teaching and proclaiming the good news that Jesus is the Christ.”

So what can we conclude?  The core teachings of Christianity predated Paul’s conversion and his later writings.  Paul did not invent Christianity.

But there is one more important point to be made.  If Paul’s teachings contradicted those of the other disciples, the disciples that spent 3 years under Jesus’ tutelage, then surely they would have called him out.  In fact, just the opposite occurred.  The apostle Peter, who was one of Jesus’ closest companions and a recognized leader of the early church, had this to say about Paul in 2 Pet. 3:15-16: “Bear in mind that our Lord’s patience means salvation, just as our dear brother Paul also wrote you with the wisdom that God gave him. He writes the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction.”

Take note of the fact that Paul is a “dear brother” and that his words are compared to “other Scriptures.”  Peter is effectively endorsing Paul’s teachings, so the idea that Paul hijacked Christianity from the true followers of Jesus is refuted.  We can be confident that the entire New Testament, including Paul’s writings, were inspired by one and the same God.

Islam, New Testament Reliability

Did the New Testament Writers Record Fact or Fiction? Part 8

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

In this series of posts, we have shown that the NT writers claimed to be eyewitnesses or associates of eyewitnesses; we have shown that we have multiple witnesses, and we have shown that the eyewitnesses were trustworthy.  How?  They included embarrassing details about themselves  and difficult details about their subject of worship, Jesus; their accounts contain divergent details, just as we would expect from independent witnesses; and they wrote about historical facts that have been thoroughly corroborated by ancient non-Christian writers and modern archaeology.

There is one final piece of evidence that you should consider, though.  I think it is one of the strongest historical evidences we have.

Here it is.  The apostles, some of whom wrote portions of the NT, were all killed for their beliefs, except John.  According to Christian tradition, Paul was beheaded and Peter was crucified upside down – both of them killed in Rome.  James, the brother of Jesus and leader of the Jerusalem church, was thrown off the top of the Jerusalem temple and stoned to death.  The other apostles met similar fates.    Before they died, they were beaten, stoned, imprisoned, mocked, and persecuted, mostly because of their professed beliefs in Christ.

I was having lunch with a couple of bright engineers a few years back, and we started discussing religions, Christianity in particular.  They challenged my belief in the NT documents by saying that many people have created religions in order to gain fame, fortune, and power.  They thought it was quite possible that the NT writers were merely doing the same.  I asked them if they knew what happened to the apostles after Jesus died, and they did not know.  When I shared the facts above, they became silent.  Fame, fortune, and power eluded all of these men while they were alive.  Their lives would have been far easier if they had just kept quiet.

Maybe the apostles weren’t in it for the money, so to speak.  Maybe they had been lied to or deceived.  Maybe they just died for their false religious beliefs like so many other fanatics do.   Many people die for their religious beliefs, don’t they?  The Muslim fanatics on 9/11 certainly died for their beliefs.  Aren’t the apostles just the same?

No, they aren’t.  There’s a fundamental difference between the disciples and the 9/11 extremists.  The 9/11 fanatics died for contemporary beliefs that reflected someone’s modern-day interpretation of the Qur’an, a book which was written 1,400 years ago.  They had no way of knowing if the source of that book, Muhammad, was telling the truth or not.  They weren’t there to see it.  They believed based on what they had been taught by their contemporary religious teachers.

Not so with the disciples.  They all went to their deaths claiming that they saw Jesus risen from the dead.  But they knew this, not based on information delivered 1,400 years after the fact, but based on their own two eyes!!  If Jesus did not rise from the dead and the NT is a pack of lies, then the disciples knew it.  They were there.

But if they knew Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, then we must explain why they willingly went to their deaths.  Many people die for a false belief, but nobody dies for a false belief they know is false, especially not 12 different people!  The martyrdom of the apostles is strong evidence for the truth of the historical resurrection of Jesus.  There exists no other theory which can adequately explain their behavior.

I conclude this series with an extended quote from Chuck Colson, who is often asked about why he believes that Jesus rose from the dead, which is the central event and miracle of the NT.  Here is Colson:

Watergate involved a conspiracy to cover up, perpetuated by the closest aides to the President of the United States, the most powerful men in America, who were intensely loyal to their President.  But one of them, John Dean, turned state’s evidence, that is, testified against Nixon, as he put it, “to save his own skin,” and he did so only two weeks after informing the president about what was really going on – two weeks!  The real cover-up, the lie, could only be held together for two weeks, and then everybody else jumped ship in order to save themselves. Now, the fact is that all that those around the President were facing was embarrassment, maybe prison. Nobody’s life was at stake.

But what about the disciples?  Twelve powerless men, peasants really, were facing not just embarrassment or political disgrace, but beatings, stonings, execution.  Every single one of the disciples insisted, to their dying breaths, that they had physically seen Jesus bodily raised from the dead.

Don’t you think that one of those apostles would have cracked before being beheaded or stoned?  That one of them would have made a deal with the authorities?  None did.

You see, men will give their lives for something they believe to be true – they will never give their lives for something they know to be false.

The Watergate cover-up reveals the true nature of humanity.  Even political zealots at the pinnacle of power will, in the crunch, save their own necks, even at the expense of the ones they profess to serve so loyally. But the apostles could not deny Jesus because they had seen Him face to face, and they knew He had risen from the dead.

No, you can take it from an expert in cover-ups – I’ve lived through Watergate – that nothing less than a resurrected Christ could have caused those men to maintain to their dying whispers that Jesus is alive and is Lord.  Two thousand years later, nothing less than the power of the risen Christ could inspire Christians around the world to remain faithful – despite prison, torture, and death.

Jesus is Lord: That’s the thrilling message of Easter.  And it’s an historic fact, one convincingly established by the evidence – and one you can bet your life upon.  Go ahead researchers – dig up all the old graves you want.  You won’t change a thing.  He has risen.

New Testament Reliability

Did the New Testament Writers Record Fact or Fiction? Part 5

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

Continuing from part 4, we will now ask further questions of the writers of the New Testament (NT ) documents.

Question 2:  Do we have multiple witnesses or just one?  The more witnesses, the better, because one person could make a mistake, but if several people are saying the same thing, it’s more convincing.

In the NT, we have 27 books written by 9 eyewitnesses or contemporaries of eyewitnesses.  Five of these books contain eyewitness accounts of the resurrected Jesus: Matthew, Mark, John, 1 Corinthians (written by Paul), and 1 Peter.  Additionally, Luke based his writings (Gospel of Luke and Acts) on eyewitness testimony.

So, we have at least 6 individuals all telling the same story about Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection.  As Dr. Norman Geisler and Dr. Frank Turek state in their book, I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist, “Six sane, sober eyewitnesses, who refuse to recant their testimony even under threat of death, would convict anyone of anything in a court of law. . . . Such eyewitness testimony yields a verdict that is beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Question 3: Are the eyewitnesses trustworthy?  Can we believe what they are reporting?  There are several ways to check this out.  First, did the witnesses include embarrassing details about themselves in their accounts?

If I was making a story up about myself and my friends, I certainly wouldn’t include embarrassing details about us.  Remember, the alleged goal of the apostles was to gain power and wealth by starting a new religion.  Making themselves look bad in their written documents would not have been an effective way to get this done, but that is exactly what happened.

The apostles provide plenty of embarrassment.  They often seem dimwitted  or ignorant (Mark 9:32, Luke 18:34, John 12:16).

They are uncaring when they fall asleep while Jesus is praying in the garden of Gethsemane.

Peter is rebuked by Jesus and even called “Satan” in Mark 8:33.

They are cowards who hide during Jesus’ crucifixion; Peter even denies him three times right after saying he wouldn’t!

They are doubters who, after being taught many times that Jesus would be resurrected, still didn’t believe it when it occurred.

They allowed Joseph of Arimathea, a member of the Sanhedrin (the very group that sent Jesus to his death), to bury him instead of burying him themselves.  This list could go on and on.  Needless to say, the writers of the NT pass this test with flying colors.  There are several more points on which we can test the trustworthiness of the NT writers.  We will discuss those next!

New Testament Reliability

Did the New Testament Writers Record Fact or Fiction? Part 4

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

Based on the previous post, we know that the NT documents were written soon enough after the events of Jesus’ life to prevent anyone claiming that they are largely tainted by myth or legend.  This fact was very important to establish, but we are still left with a nagging question.  Just because it was written soon after the events doesn’t mean that the writers didn’t make it all up.

Maybe the followers of Jesus fabricated this story about him dying and rising from the dead right after Jesus died, so that Jesus couldn’t correct them.  How can we trust them?  After all, don’t people start religions to gain power and wealth?  We certainly see many modern-day religious figures becoming quite wealthy.

One newspaper story from several years ago featured a man in Miami, Jose Luis de Jesus Miranda, who claimed to be the reincarnated Jesus himself!  He owns armored Lexus’ and BMW’s as well as several diamond-encrusted Rolex watches; he wields tremendous influence over his thousands of followers – everything a charlatan could dream of.  Maybe the disciples, the writers of the NT, were just like de Jesus Miranda.  Let’s find out.

We are going to ask questions of the NT writers that any court of law would ask of witness testimony.  It’s interesting to note that many famous attorneys who have studied the evidence of the NT became Christians because they understood how compelling the evidence is.  So let’s pose some of the questions that would be asked of a witness.

Question 1: Do the witnesses claim to be eyewitnesses or claim to have received their information directly from eyewitnesses?  This question is obvious since eyewitness testimony will always be more accurate.  With respect to the NT writers, all of them implicitly claim to be eyewitnesses of the events surrounding Jesus’ life.  They write as if they were there and they heard Jesus’ words themselves.

However, we have several instances in the NT where the writers explicitly claim to have eyewitness testimony.  They go out of their way to prove this point.  For example, Luke claims to have “carefully investigated” the accounts “handed down . . . [by] eyewitnesses” (Luke 1:1-4).  In 1 John 1:1-3, the apostle John makes it clear that he is writing about what he himself heard, saw, and touched.

In fact, in the span of three verses, he claims eyewitness credentials 8 times!  Here is a person that wants you to know he was there.  Not to be outdone by John or Luke, Peter reminds his readers in 2 Pet. 1:16-18 that “we were eyewitnesses of [Jesus’] majesty.”  Time and again, the writers of the NT claim to be presenting eyewitness testimony, so question 1 is answered with a resounding “yes.”

We will continue with additional questions in the next post.