Raf

It would make much more sense to conclude that Luke interviewed people who got the Nativity story second hand. Such second or even third hand witnesses are far more likely to have made the kinds of actual errors we see in Luke (although why they left out the return from Nazareth to Bethlehem to rendezvous with the Magi, the flight to Egypt, the return from Egypt, the decision not to return to a place where they did not live and instead to settle in their old home in Nazareth for the first time... again... is anybody's guess).

Again with Luke interviewing Mary? If Luke interviewed Mary, he would not have gotten the facts surrounding the Nativity so demonstrably wrong. The internal evidence suggests he did not interview Mary. Mary would have known that Jesus was already in third grade by the time of the census when Luke says he was born. Mary would have known the census did not force her to travel with Joseph from Nazareth to Bethlehem. If you want to ignore the evidence and insist Luke wrote the gospel because someone said so 100 years after the fact, you go right ahead. But insisting as fact that Luke interviewed Mary goes from faith to fantasy.

Raul Julia Tequila Sunrise Mel Gibson

A helpful reminder, but it doesn't get us to the point of asserting that the gospel of Luke, for one example, is God-breathed. Is it useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness? Sure it is. But so are Steve Lortz' posts. Are they God-breathed? How about the God's Reconciliation thread? Is THAT God-breathed? Clearly, in context, God-breathed is a quality that differentiates the Holy Scriptures from other writings. Its usefulness for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness stems from its origin as God-breathed. But that only works one way. When something is God-breathed, it will serve those purposes. BUT it doesn't work the other way around: just because something serves those purposes doesn't mean it's God-breathed! So the central question remains unanswered: "Luke" (whoever he was) explicitly says writing his gospel was his idea. Nothing he says offers the slightest shred of evidence that it is God-breathed (even if one were to concede that it is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness). In fact, assuming Paul wrote II Timothy (spoiler alert: he didn't), you would have to conclude that the "God-breathed" verse preceded the writing of the gospel of Luke by roughly 20 years (exact dates being unavailable, Paul dies in 64, and Luke is written somewhere between 80-90. So we "know" II Timothy is not referring to Luke (or any of the gospels) when it says all scripture is God-breathed. Put these together: 1. The gospels are written after the verse declaring all scripture to be God-breathed. The verse is not talking about the gospels. 2. Luke, the only gospel that talks about how it came into being, does not make a claim to be God-breathed. 3. A work can be useful for doctrine, reproof, correction and instruction in righteousness without being God-breathed. How can one argue that the gospels are God-breathed? And if/when one does make the argument, what does it MEAN? I give fundamentalists credit for attaching a testable meaning to God-breathed (without error or contradiction), but the gospels themselves fail that test (they are neither without error nor without contradiction). So THAT definition is out. This is a matter of faith. If you believe it's God-breathed, more power to you. But I don't see how you get there from the evidence we have.

One of the issues you have to contend with while exploring the issue of who wrote the books and letters of the Bible is preconception: What does the observer consider "on the table" and what is considered "of the table" in terms of consideration. For someone who already considers authorship to be off the table for consideration, no amount of evidence will suffice to dissuade, and flimsy evidence in support of such a person's position will be exalted. Thus, the fact that numerous church fathers cited the gospel of Luke without an identifying author's name until the first mention of his name is made A FULL CENTURY after the gospel was written, somehow becomes incontravertible. This is, of course, ridiculous. The names of the gospels were attached to bestow authority on them, not the other way around. We actually SEE this with other gospels. John, for example, is attributed to an apostle, even though the writer of the gospel flat out tells the reader that he is not providing a first person account (he refers to the disciple-source in the third person and the body of believers in the first person plural). Whoever wrote John, it was not John. Mark? Read it with a map. This gospel was not written by someone who was familiar with Palestinian geography, which Mark would have been. Whoever wrote Mark, it wasn't Mark. An early church father describes the gospel of Mark as containing everything Peter told Mark about Jesus. Everything. EVERYTHING? It barely has anything! It's the shortest and least detailed of the gospels, and the details it does contain are problematic. In one section, Jesus walks from Texas to Florida, stopping on the way in Chicago. I might have the place names mixed up, but the upshot of the story is the same. But don't trust me on Mark's errors. Trust Matthew and Luke: They try desperately to fix them. Go ahead. Do a side-by-side comparison. This demonstrates that whatever the gospel of Mark is, it is not the document described by an early church father as having been written by Peter's companion Mark. This same church father (I want to say Papias, but don't hold me to that) describes the gospel written by Matthew as merely a collection of Jesus' sayings. Oh, and it was written in Hebrew or Aramaic. I'll double check that and get back to you. . Two problems. One: That doesn't describe the gospel of Matthew. It's much more than just sayings. And Matthew was indisputably written in Greek, no matter what Wierwille or Lamsa claim. So Papias refers to a gospel of Matthew and a gospel of Mark, but the gospels we have today with those names are clearly not the documents of which Papias spoke. Horrors! So the gospel of Mark is written in Greek by someone unfamiliar with Palestinian geography. Attributed to Mark to confer authenticity, though the document itself contains no such attribution. Matthew is written in Greek, does not match what the early church father says Matthew wrote, but whatever. The gospel of Matthew also plagiarizes from the gospel of Mark. Relentlessly. Not something you would expect an eyewitness to do, copying the second-hand information of someone who wasn't there. At least he tries to fix some of Mark's geographical errors. Luke is written by someone who really wants you to think he was Paul's companion, but he disagrees with Paul on so many crucial issues that you have to conclude he considered Paul a liar (and the feeling was apparently mutual, considering that Paul implies the Acts writer's account of his history is a blatant lie). So was Luke a companion of Paul? Well, Colossians says he was. Problem is, a lot of scholars don't think Paul wrote Colossians. Or Ephesians. Or II Thesallonians. Or I and II Timothy. But back to Colossians, if Paul did not write this letter, then the identifications of Luke as a physician and a gentile are forgeries. You can't hang history on a forgery. Of course, if you're looking at the evidence, you may or may not reach the same conclusion. But if you've already concluded that the authorship of Colossians is off the table, then shucks, there's nothing to argue, is there? And John TELLS YOU he wasn't an apostle, and therefore could not have been the apostle John. He uses the third person to talk about the beloved disciple, and the first person to differentiate himself from that person. (This, of course, assumes the beloved disciple IS John. If he is someone other than John, then the identification of John as the author of the gospel of John becomes even MORE problematic: An apostle claiming he got his information from a disciple who was not an apostle). None of the gospels were written by the people whose names they bear. Disinterested scholars know this and teach this. Biased scholars know this and hide it.

If Luke contains historical errors (and it does) and the author of Luke does not claim divine inspiration (and he doesn't), by what reckoning is the gospel considered God-breathed? And what does "God-breathed" mean?

A most excellent second gurgitation of that which has only been stated on multiple occasions, though I have to admit the absence of fresh content not already discussed is refreshing. Anyway, so, Luke wrote Luke. What does that have to do with it being god breathed?

Error

What is the significance of bias when it comes to evaluating a scholarly work? One of the first things we need to consider is whether the bias is relevant to the work itself. No one wonders about the intellectual biases of the writers of a math textbook, for example. But when we're dealing with questions of who wrote the various books of the Bible, bias does indeed come into play. An evangelical will be predisposed to accepting traditional claims of authorship, and reluctant to consider evidence to the contrary. This agenda is VERY difficult to overcome, because the consequences for the biased scholar have the potential to be profound. It is not fair to dismiss an evangelical conclusion just because it's an evangelical conclusion, but you really have to at least account for the bias and make sure you're not being too permissive. But what about the reverse? Is an agnostic like Bart Ehrman predisposed to rejecting traditional claims of authorship because he has an anti-Christian agenda? In Ehrman's case, the answer is demonstrably "no." Why? Because, to begin with, Ehrman did not enter the field of textual studies as an agnostic. He entered as an evangelical, determined to REFUTE those who were challenging such concepts as traditional authorship. If anything, his bias went the other way for a significant period of time. Further, and this is crucial, embracing traditional authorship does nothing to undermine agnosticism or atheism. Ehrman (and I) could believe without hesitation that Luke wrote Luke-Acts, and it would not change or affect his (or my) underlying beliefs. Ehrman has no quibble with the authorship of several Pauline epistles, but that doesn't seem to have any effect on his agnosticism (or my atheism). He is (and I am) willing to accept the evidence that Luke is not the author of Luke-Acts because the evidence FOR such a claim is simply not there (in fact, the evidence is the opposite of there, if you're being objective about it). So what's the problem? Well, the problem is that if someone were to reject the traditional authorship models to advance an atheist agenda, there doesn't seem to be a ready way to distinguish such a rejection from an intellectually honest one. So here are some things to look for in evaluating ANYONE. 1. Identify the bias. 2. Consider what's at stake for the scholar if the evidence undermines the scholar's preconceived positions. 3. Consider whether the scholar embraces the evidence EVEN THOUGH it undermines the scholar's preconceived positions. When you have something like that, you can often bank on it. I posted a while back about an evangelical who considers Luke 2 a serious problem because of the Quirinian census issue. He rejects a number of attempts by other evangelicals to reconcile the passage with history, convincingly, even though doing so undermines his position that the gospel of Luke is God-breathed in the sense of being without error. He won't twist the facts to suit his agenda. I remain impressed with his honesty. 4. When the scholar holds a position that confirms his bias, check to see whether he's given the alternative view fair consideration. This is usually where you'll find trouble. 5. Consult peer-review. It's there for a reason. In the case of the authorship of Luke, the first sign we see of someone attributing the gospel to Luke is a full 100 years after the gospel is said to have been written. There are no alternatives, but the fact that it takes 100 years to attach an author to the work is problematic to say the least. Other problems to take into consideration are the historical problems with Luke (that would not have been there had he interviewed people who were eyewitnesses to what took place), his disagreement with Paul about the events of Acts, and the growing body of scholarship questioning the authorship of Colossians and II Timothy. This last bit is crucial. If Paul didn't write Colossians, then the basis for Luke as a Gentile physician is a forgery. Now, will you expect an evangelical to look at the evidence regarding Colossians and conclude that it's forged? Probably not. So if you are an evangelical, you're going to have to check your bias before you look at the evidence. Because everyone else will be. More later.

And you did so AFTER I stated I was starting another thread to keep this one from getting derailed. So, if you're not going to question the authorship of Luke, I'll gladly let it go here. No, I'm not going to poll Bible scholars. Nor am I going to dismiss them just because they are not evangelical, which is what you're suggesting we do. If you're only going to trust scholars who reached their conclusions prior to their studies, I'm not going to stop you. "Convenience," by the way, is because we all call the gospel "Luke," which is a lot shorter than "the anonymous author later claimed to be Luke without a scrap of evidence in favor and significant evidence to the contrary." Theology is not history. I think it's hilarious that scholarship that supports what I've been saying is so routinely dismissed on these threads without actually being refuted. Regardless, I think my decision to move this thread has been vindicated. By the way, yes, I do believe a student at a Christian University who does not challenge the Lucan authorship of the Gospel of Luke will pass. I would be shocked if you didn't.

You asked me to prove it on THIS thread.

Please do. And when you do, isolate scholars with a theological agenda from those without one. The results will NOT surprise you.

Ok. Done.

But again, we still have no reason to insist, or even conclude tentatively, that interviewing eyewitnesses was a part of this careful investigation. In fact, we have every reason to believe it did NOT include an interview with the eyewitness Mary, who would have known that there was no census that required Joseph to bring her pregnant self from their home in Nazareth to Bethlehem because he had an ancestor who lived there a millenium ago! PURE speculation. Not a scrap of evidence to back it up, and every reason to believe otherwise. This, of course, proves nothing at all, not even a little. Second. Nice. Ehrman was close to Wright, too. It would have been. Had "Luke" (whoever he was) interviewed Mary. But there's no reason whatsoever to believe he did. Absolutely.

Fair enough, but here's the issue: When your goal as a university, or as a student, is to study theology, it is not the same as studying history. You may employ history while studying theology, but what happens when they're in conflict? Easy. Faith wins. If you are a student of theology, there is an inherent conclusion at the beginning of your study: That God (not religion, but God himself) is something that can be studied. Again, I don't know Steve's course of study, nor do I judge it. It simply helps me to understand what field I'm dealing with as I engage in this dialogue. Speaking of which, I need to finish my thought...

Actually, there is. The Luke of Colossians 4:14 is someone who was close to Paul. The writer of Acts is someone who flagrantly contradicts Paul on more than one occasion, crucially. So it's really unlikely that the author of Acts got his information from Paul. If he did, you would expect him to agree with Paul a bit more closely. Hilariously, the portion of what you wrote that I highlighted in bold is the polar opposite of Ehrman's conclusion. Ehrman concludes: "But there’s little reason to think he was Paul’s traveling companion and virtually no reason, in my opinion, to think that he was a physician named Luke." How have you brought yourself to cite Ehrman to reach the exact opposite conclusion of Ehrman? This is true, but by the time Luke is writing, most of the original sources of this information are dead. Now we've gone from speculating to declaring the speculation true by fiat. In the preceding sentence, it is not clear whether the sources are oral, written or both. Suddenly, it's emphatic that he has both. This, of course, assumes "he" is Luke in the first place, so you're now building one piece of speculation on another. This is not scholarship.

Of the three people you cite, only Ehrman walks away unscathed in the bias department. Alone among the three, Ehrman went into his research intending to prove tradition and changing his mind because the evidence led him elsewhere. ----- No, it's a statement of objective content (note, I left out "doctrinal," because "doctrinal" is not relevant to bias in this context). A serious, unbiased scholar goes where the evidence leads. He does not lead the evidence to where he wants to go. Yes, everyone has biases, but you can check those as you write, and most scholars are very, very good at that. Not at all. I am saying I have examined enough scholarship concerning the authorship of the gospels to the point that I am confident in declaring that anyone who believes Matthew wrote Matthew, Mark wrote Mark, Luke wrote Luke-Acts and John wrote John cannot be taken seriously. I absolutely stand by that, and modern scholarship agrees with me overwhelmingly (remove the "preachers" from the ranks of "scholars" and "overwhelmingly" approaches "unanimously"). How about the scholar who concludes without hesitation that Luke did not write Luke, and that whoever did write it was not a companion of Paul? How about him? He agrees with me. Which strongly implies what he explicitly states elsewhere: The author of Luke is not "Luke." BAM! Stop right there. That's where scholarship stops and speculation begins. Well, there you go. "Tradition" is not "scholarship." There is no "scholarship" from patristic times holding that author to be an apostolic companion named Luke. That is tradition, and it is a tradition that post-dates the writing of the gospel by, oh, about a century. As already mentioned, there's no evidence anyone taught from earliest times that the author WAS Luke. Or anyone else. The author of Luke was anonymous. You cannot conclude that it was a man named "Luke" just because no one said otherwise! That's not scholarship. That's embracing tradition for tradition's sake.

If you're asking me to produce a list of scholars who agree with Ehrman on this, it will take me some time to compile it. You can start with Gerd Theissen and Annette Merz. Then there's Eugene Boring, who, not surprisingly, uses Ehrman's language in referring to the author as "Luke" as a matter of convenience. He writes: "The problematic historical value of patristic data regarding authorship of New Testament documents means the burden of proof is on advocates of its reliability." In other words, "there's no evidence to suggest it wasn't Luke" is insufficient to conclude that it WAS. But that's just one author of "An Introduction to the New Testament: History, Literature, Theology." You can look these folks up on Amazon. Let me know if you need more. I'm really just stalling for time while trying to post on the other thread.

From the God-breathed thread: I'll agree with that. Not that I missed the mark, but everything else you wrote. SNIP I need to stop to ask you here, with an apology, where you are receiving this scholarly training. I apologize because I know you have mentioned it, but I have not committed that to memory. I'd like to know the name of the school and the particular degree program. True. However, two things need to be said: First, when a source is concealed, the information provided by that source needs to be corroborated elsewhere. Otherwise, in ethical journalism, the information cannot be used without jeopardizing the reputation of the reporter. Now, sometimes a reporter will be willing to take that risk. But when he does so, he knows it is HIS integrity on the line. For example, we once obtained the blood alcohol content of someone who had been involved in an accident. The source could not be exposed publicly, or he would lose his job. But ANY source that divulged the information would have lost his job, so there was no way to verify it. What we did was, we reported it anyway, indicating we had a source but refusing to divulge it. Then we waited. And when we weren't sued for libel, we knew that the risk we took in reporting unverified information paid off. This does not happen in historical scholarship because the need to protect sources is generally not there. Darrell Bock is a scholar, but he is far from unbiased. This is not to say that what he writes can't be trusted. It's just biased. The man's an evangelical. He's not going to say "Luke didn't write Luke." He's not going to say Paul didn't write all the letters attributed to him in the New Testament. He's going to defend tradition. The fact that he's writing an exegetical commentary tells you all you need to know. Historians don't write exegetical commentaries. That is the work of a preacher, not a historian. AND THAT'S FINE. You just need to know that going in, and treat his conclusions accordingly. To take another example, Walter Cummins. Walter Cummins was a sharp cookie (still is, I assume). And we could learn a lot from him when he writes about textual variants and such. But I will never expect him to conclude that Jesus is God. Just won't happen. Just like I won't expect Darrell Bock to conclude Jesus is not God. Not gonna happen. So I'm not trying to insult Bock. I just take his traditional conclusions with a grain of salt if/when the evidence is contrary to the conclusion, as it is in the case of the authorship and research of Luke. The man is writing as a preacher, and probably a very good one, but not a historian. To be clear here, Ehrman agrees with me. "Luke" did not write Luke, nor was the author of Luke a companion of Paul. That you cite him only bolsters my position. Associate professor of Biblical Studies at Anderson University, a Christian college, described in her online bio as a scholar, preacher and author. Again, not unbiased.

Are you saying the scholarly consensus is not behind Ehrman on the issues I raised? Not even up for debate. Sorry. I only argue matters that are up for debate. You can say he's wrong, but you can't say the scholarly consensus on the authorship of the gospels disagrees with Ehrman.

Did Matthew write Matthew? Did Mark write Mark? Did Luke write Luke? Did John write John? Did Moses write Genesis (spoiler alert: probably not)? While we were discussing Steve Lortz' excellent question about the impact of the presence of errors and contradictions in the Bible on the status of those books as "God-breathed," Steve and I became engaged in a side discussion about whether Luke wrote the gospel of Luke and Acts. Steve says yes (or would it be more fair to say "probably?") and I say no (or, more accurately, "probably not"). Different scholars approach the material in different ways. There is a right answer, but no one can lay claim to it with 100.0000% certainty. The Floor is Open.

In order to maintain the integrity of this thread, which is concerned with how the Bible can still be God-breathed even if (or, as I would claim, even THOUGH) it contains errors and contradictions, I will be starting a thread in Questioning Faith to explore the state of scholarship regarding Who Wrote the Bible. We can there go into any area you would like (gospels, epistles, Old Testament) without derailing the conversation about what it means for a work to be God-breathed.

As you probably well know, that is NOT all Bart Ehrman says about Luke in terms of authorship of the gospel and Acts. Ehrman reached the conclusion, with scholarly consensus behind him, that the author of Luke and Acts was 1. Not Luke and 2. Not a traveling companion of Paul. In Ehrman's own words: "But there’s little reason to think he was Paul’s traveling companion and virtually no reason, in my opinion, to think that he was a physician named Luke." http://ehrmanblog.org/summing-luke-luke-2/ Unfortunately, Ehrman's blog posts are behind a pay wall, so I can't easily link to most of his argument online. Nonetheless, it is hard to conclude that Ehrman has nothing further to say about the authorship of Luke-Acts just because he had nothing further to say about it in the single chapter you cite. More to the point, the fact that he is calling the author "Luke" for "convenience" implies that he does NOT believe Luke to be the author of those books, which he documents in detail elsewhere (maybe not in that chapter, but certainly in other works and, for a lay audience, in his book "Forged: Writing in the Name of God: Why the Bible's Authors are Not Who We Think They Are"). Luke did not write the gospel. If you believe he did on the basis that no one has demonstrated otherwise, that's not scholarship. That's faith. And there's nothing wrong with that. But that's one of the reasons that I moved this thread from Questioning Faith. Because you're not. Which is fine. Regarding the gospel of Luke, you arrived at the conclusion that Luke interviewed Mary through pure, unadulterated speculation. There is not a scrap of evidence that he did so. In fact, there is good reason to believe otherwise (the anachronism of Jesus being born during the Quirinian census AND during the reign of Herod, historical events that were separated by as much as a decade, demonstrates that "Luke's" source was someone who would not have been aware of the conflict. Someone who was there would have been aware of the conflict. Mary was there. So either she did not know the circumstances of her son's birth, or she was not his source). This doesn't even take into account the absurdity of the Quirinian census as a plot device to move Joseph and Mary from Nazareth to Bethlehem for the birth of Christ (there was no requirement to go to where your ancestors lived for the census. What census does that? The whole point of a census is to determine where you are now, not where your great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather lived a thousand years ago. I know, I'm short a few greats). As for the first few verses of Luke, I'll repeat what I said: "Luke" never claims to have interviewed witnesses. Read what YOU quoted: What is he saying? Other people have been writing things down that were handed to us by still other people. That, of course, is the definition of hearsay. But let's look at the rest of what he wrote as well: There is a claim to have investigated carefully, but there is no claim to have interviewed eyewitnesses. The only thing he is claiming is to have investigated what others have written, people who came before him. This makes sense when you think of WHEN Luke was writing. 80 AD. Decades after the events they portray. The vast majority of people discussed in the gospel are dead by then, and Mary would be among the OLDEST, at least in her 90s. That would have been an unusually long life at that time and place. Not saying it's impossible, but what IS impossible is to say with ANY degree of certainty that she absolutely was one of his sources. Peter? Dead. Paul? Dead. Most of the apostles by then, in fact, were dead (I'd venture to say "all" as a matter of probablity, but it's certainly possible some were alive. Regardless, Luke never claims to have interviewed them. His claim is to have reviewed the earlier accounts and composed a coherent story. So, in short, yes, I stand by both statements: Luke, the figure mentioned in Acts and the New Testament letters, did not write this gospel. And whoever did write it was not working off eyewitness testimony, except as it was allegedly passed down second and third hand from earlier writers.

Yes

yes