The Gospels

The typical evangelical church presents the Gospels more or less as is. The events in them all really happened and that the authors are retelling historical events as told by either themselves or by close eyewitnesses of the events.

# Authorship

The 'usual' consensus on the four canonical Gospels is that Mark was written around 70, Matthew around 80, Luke around 90, and John around 100.

We don't actually know who wrote the gospels. Any of them. The Gospels themselves never actually state who is writing them. The names that we have for the Gospels today were added sometime around 150 AD, several decades after they are assumed to have been written. So we know that the authors of the gospels were not eyewitnesses to the events described in the Gospels.

We also know just contextually that the authors were not writing down events that they witnessed. For example the story of the Temptation of Jesus in Matthew 4, we have a private dialogue between Jesus and Satan. There was no one present to record that interaction, and the person who wrote Matthew was writing nearly 100 years after the story was said to have taken place. Where did the author of Matthew get the dialogue for this section of the book? Where did any of the Gospel writers get their dialogue, stories, and events? They never claim to be retelling the story of any witnesses to the actual events.

We don't actually know when these gospels were written either. The earliest gospel, Mark, is assumed to have been written around 70 AD, but that's really just a guess based on the author's apparent knowledge of The Jewish Wars in Mark 13. The oldest fragment of Mark we have is from late 2nd Century.

This is the central story to Christianity, so I would expect that there is a large amount of strong evidence to back up the claims being made in the Gospels. However, if we don't know who wrote the Gospels; the authors of the Gospels never claim to be witnesses; and the authors were writing, at the earliest, decades after Jesus's execution, then how much confidence can we have that the Gospels are accurate accounts of the events? Why do the Gospel writers not cite a single source of where they were getting their information?

# Luke - Josephus

It's common knowledge that about 40% of Luke's material is copied from Mark. However, many historical details that Luke mentions also overlaps with Josephus.

More than any other Gospel writer, Luke includes references to the non-Christian world of affairs. Almost every incident of this kind that he mentions turns up somewhere in Josephus' narratives.

For example, Luke mentions a "Census of Quirinius" in Luke 2. No other Gospel mentions this particular detail, so where does Luke get this information? Josephus likewise uses the "Census of Quirinius" near the beginning of the story he was telling. If this were the only incidence, perhaps we could put this up to chance, but Luke and Josephus seem to both use the same details in their stories. They both:

1. Mention 3 rebel leaders: Judas the Galilean, Theudas, and "The Egyptian" (Acts 5 and 21; Jewish Antiquities 18 and 20)
2. Mention the death of Agrippa I (and both mention him putting on a robe) (Acts 12; JA 19)
3. Use Drusilla and Felix together as a couple (Acts 24; JA 20)
4. Similarities in Seige of Jerusalem description (Acts 19; JW 6)
5. Mention a famine during Claudius (Acts 11; JA 3)

The similarities don't end there. Josephus is the only author known to have used the term haireseis to refer to different Jewish sects. This word seems to be unique to Josephus compared to other writers of the time. Luke also ends up using this word to mean the same thing in Acts 5, 15, and 26. There is also the idiom that Josephus used "most precise school" that Luke also uses in Acts 26. Again this idiom is only known to have been used by Josephus.

There are several more examples of overlapping details between Luke and Acts and Josephus' work that I think are worth looking into such as the similarities between the Emmaus narrative of Luke and the Testimonium of Josephus.

Josephus' Jewish Antiquities was written around 94 AD. If Luke did indeed borrow these details from Josephus, then this Gospel was almost certainly written (or at least heavily added to) in the early second century. How do we explain the similarities between Josephus and Luke?

Writing almost 60 years after Paul, there were certainly no living primary sources still alive at the time of writing. With Luke being written so long after the events themselves in both Luke and Acts, how much confidence can we put in their veracity?