Ep 35: Who ACTUALLY Wrote the New Testament?

00:00The end of one chapter, you have Jesus say,

00:04all right, well, let's get out of here.

00:06And then the next chapter begins

00:08and it's just Jesus sermonizing.

00:09It seems like some sermons were just inserted in there.

00:13And so-- - I don't know, man.

00:14You've never tried to leave a party with my wife.

00:17(laughing)

00:18You can say, let's get out of here

00:20and then have lots and lots of talking before you leave.

00:23- And maybe they were drunk.

00:25Maybe they were like, but then, so no, listen, listen.

00:28Hang on, guys.

00:30Dude, let me just tell you this last thing.

00:32(upbeat music)

00:35- Hey, everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

00:38- And I'm Dan Beecher.

00:40- And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast

00:43where we increase public access

00:44to the academic study of the Bible and religion

00:47and we combat the spread of misinformation about the same.

00:52How are we doing today, Dan?

00:54- Good, good.

00:55We've got mysteries to solve this week.

00:59I'm excited.

00:59It's a whole week of who done it.

01:02- It's a, have you seen this boy episode?

01:05(laughing)

01:07- Yeah, this is gonna be good.

01:09We are going to figure out, once and for all,

01:12sort it out, the answers that we come up with are final

01:16for who wrote what in the New Testament

01:20because there's a lot of questions out there.

01:25- Yeah, this is a controversial topic.

01:26Every time I bring this up,

01:28I know that there are people on YouTube

01:30who are gonna dedicate videos to why I'm a moron.

01:34So we're just gonna lay those reasons out on the table

01:38right now. - Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

01:40- There'll be no doubts regarding why I'm a moron

01:44after this episode.

01:45So, and I'll be the more of a moron

01:48for just believing you.

01:49So this is great.

01:51That is the racket that we're getting away with here.

01:56- Yeah, exactly.

01:57- Yeah, one day we'll even make money on it, too.

01:59- Yeah, we'll see about that.

02:01I'm not counting my horses.

02:03- As the great poet said, today is not that day.

02:06(laughing)

02:08- All right, so we're starting off

02:10with the very opening of the New Testament.

02:13We're going with the Gospels.

02:16- The Gospels.

02:17- And these Gospels are named Matthew, Mark, Luke,

02:21and John, essentially after they're presumed authors,

02:26but we've talked about this a little bit before on the show.

02:32That's probably not right.

02:35- Probably not.

02:36- All right, we'll walk us through.

02:37Why are we saying that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John

02:42are probably not the authors of these texts?

02:45- Well, there are a handful of reasons.

02:47We got some internal and we got some external things

02:50to consider.

02:52First thing, something came in my head is like,

02:58think of people you know named Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

03:01Were these people running around in first century?

03:03(laughing)

03:04I get that question a lot.

03:07Were these people really named Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John?

03:10And two things there.

03:12One is that we borrow those names today from the Bible.

03:18So the fact that it sounds like a 21st century name

03:22is just because you are exposed to it

03:25in the 21st century, but they come from Yonder.

03:29Additionally, they are English transliterations

03:32of usually Greek or Latin transliterations

03:35of what originate as Greek and Latin names.

03:39So, and Hebrew.

03:41So yes, they are perfectly natural first century CE,

03:46zero Palestinian names.

03:49So that is not a reason for rejecting

03:52their authorship of the Gospels.

03:54- The names themselves.

03:56- Yeah, but when we look into the Gospels,

04:00none of them explicitly say so-and-so is the author

04:04of this story that I'm about to tell you.

04:07The closest we get is that the Gospel of John

04:11repeatedly refers to in the third person

04:15to this beloved disciple as the one who,

04:19who's telling the story, the one who wrote these things.

04:23And there are pretty reasonable reasons to say,

04:28well, the beloved disciple sounds an awful lot like John.

04:32But it requires triangulating from the other Gospels lists

04:37of who the disciples were and all this kind of stuff.

04:40- Also, it's already creepy to be writing about yourself

04:43in the third person that's already a little weird.

04:45Don't go referring to yourself as beloved then.

04:48Come on, man.

04:49- Just say, call me Ishmael.

04:51- That's right.

04:52- That's how you do it.

04:53This is, we're gonna be honest.

04:56But there's an interesting thing when we look in John

04:59at the very end, as you have kind of the wrapping up

05:02of the book, you have this statement.

05:04And this is the one who wrote these things.

05:07And we know that his testimony is true.

05:12- Oh, who's we?

05:15- Yeah.

05:16- 'Cause suddenly we are narrating this story.

05:20And so we've got a little complexity here

05:25and they're a handful of different ways to approach this.

05:29Maybe there was somebody who identified themselves

05:32as the beloved disciple who may or may not have been

05:35identified with John, who originally started circulating

05:39this narrative and maybe it got passed

05:42into a Johannine community or to authors,

05:47literally competent writers who decided

05:53I'm gonna take the beloved disciple story

05:55and I'm gonna write it out or a group of such writers.

05:58Said we're gonna do this.

05:59Or the beloved disciple or a scribe

06:03on the beloved disciples part wrote out the gospel of John

06:07and then it was edited by a group,

06:11maybe a community dedicated to this telling

06:15of the gospel story, a Johannine community

06:19or group of authors or something like that.

06:21And they're just providing this little final note

06:24at the end.

06:25We don't have an indication of when the we breaks in

06:29and when the beloved disciple is speaking.

06:33But the long and the short of the claim of the end

06:38of the book is everything was written by the beloved disciple

06:43except this part, this is a part about that part.

06:46- Yes, this is not the greatest story ever told.

06:51- Right.

06:52- This is a tribute.

06:55- This is a tribute, that's right.

06:56And so it gets a little complex

07:00and there are reasons to think

07:02that there are multiple editorial layers

07:04in the gospel of John as well.

07:06In addition to somebody sneaking in

07:09and saying, yeah, that we know that it's true,

07:11we have some narrative incongruities.

07:15Like you have, there's a part,

07:17I forget exactly which chapter,

07:18but they're in Jerusalem and there's sermonizing going on

07:23and then it says, so they crossed over

07:25to the other side of the Sea of Galilee.

07:27That's on the other side of the country.

07:30And so it kind of leaps, there's a big leap,

07:33they did not say Jesus walked all the way back up

07:37to the Galilee and was on one side of the Sea of Galilee.

07:41So either some stories got put together

07:45or some stories got taken out,

07:48leaving this kind of incongruity.

07:51There's another one toward the end of the gospel of John.

07:54I think it's in like chapters 13, 14, 15, 16,

07:57something like that.

07:58The end of one chapter, you have Jesus say,

08:01all right, well, let's get out of here.

08:03And then the next chapter begins

08:05and it's just Jesus sermonizing.

08:06And it's like two to three chapters of Jesus sermonizing.

08:10And then the next chapter after those begins,

08:14so they got out of there.

08:16And like you can take out all those sermons

08:19and it says, Jesus says, let's get out of here.

08:21So they got out of there,

08:22which is a lot more fluid, a narrative flow.

08:27It seems like some sermons were just inserted in there.

08:32And so-- - I don't know, man.

08:33You've never tried to leave a party with my wife.

08:35You can say, let's get out of here

08:38and then have lots and lots of talking before you leave.

08:42That is something that can happen.

08:43- And maybe they were drunk.

08:45Maybe they were like, but then, so no, listen, listen.

08:48- Hang on, guys. - Hang on a minute.

08:50Let me just tell you this last thing.

08:53So there are reasons to think

08:55that the Gospel of John has gone through some editorial work.

08:59It has had work done.

09:01And so who is telling the original story?

09:06If the Beloved Disciple is just responsible

09:08for the original phase of that story,

09:11how many other layers are there?

09:13And can we say for sure that this Beloved Disciple

09:16was the Apostle John?

09:18So John is probably the closest we get to something

09:22where we can make a reasonable triangulation of a name

09:26for an author, but we also have indications

09:29that that author is definitely not responsible

09:33for everything in John, and we don't have a good idea

09:36of how much any such author is responsible for.

09:40Now, when we get to Matthew, Mark, and Luke,

09:44the only one who, the Gospel of Matthew is the only one

09:48that is identified with an actual disciple of Jesus.

09:52So that's the only one that has any kind of claim

09:55to having been eyewitness testimony.

09:58But we don't have any identification of the author

10:01as Matthew, and we'll get in a little bit down the road

10:04into why that authorship may have been assigned.

10:09And then when it comes to Mark and Luke,

10:12Mark was not an Apostle.

10:13Luke was not an Apostle.

10:15Luke explicitly is saying,

10:16I did research, I'd gathered stories,

10:20and so that it is explicitly second to third hand.

10:25But again, no one is saying, this is my name.

10:29- Right.

10:30- The earliest designation of these four Gospels

10:34as having been written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John,

10:37as we know those figures today, comes around 175, 180 CE.

10:42So probably a full century after they were originally written

10:45and we get this, this early Christian author,

10:48one of the most important early Christian authors,

10:51Irenaeus of Lyon.

10:53Don't say lions or everyone will come after you

10:56in the comments section.

10:57That's a lesson I learned the hard way.

11:00(laughing)

11:02'Cause you got a cure right when you're gonna go

11:04with a more authentic pronunciation

11:06of non-English names when you're not.

11:09And between Irenaeus and whenever these texts were composed

11:16we have a few different ways that the Gospels are referred to.

11:19Our earliest attestation of the texts

11:22that we now know as the four Gospels,

11:25don't group them together into individual Gospels

11:27and don't name them.

11:29They don't assign authorship to them.

11:32We have quotations and they're also bleeding into each other.

11:36Like some of the quotations don't exactly match.

11:38They could be from Mark, they could be from Matthew,

11:41or maybe that's probably from Matthew

11:44but there's a little Markish thing over here.

11:46And then other times they fit exactly what we now have.

11:50But no one ever says this is from this Gospel

11:53or no one says this is from a Gospel.

11:57When we get to the second quarter

12:00of the second century CE, so between 125 and 150,

12:04we have references to the memoirs of the apostles.

12:08We have kind of generic references

12:11to the whole group of texts that are sometimes referred to

12:15as Gospels, but we don't have authorship assigned to them.

12:20And one of the things that this is likely indicating

12:24is that there's not a lot of importance

12:27assigned to who authored them.

12:29It's not until an early Christian author named Papius,

12:34who by the way was not an incredibly important

12:37early Christian author.

12:38In fact, folks like Eusebius of Caesarea,

12:42who's responsible for the document called Church History

12:46from the 4th century CE,

12:48describe Papius as kind of a moron.

12:50Like they did not think this dude

12:53was knew what he was talking about,

12:54except for two things that Papius said

12:57and exactly two things that Papius said.

12:59One, he said somebody named Mark wrote a Gospel

13:04and somebody named Matthew wrote a Gospel.

13:06And I'm gonna read you the entirety of what Papius said.

13:10This is the statement about Mark.

13:13This is what the elder, and Papius refers to an elder,

13:17somebody named John, who probably not to be identified

13:21with the beloved disciple,

13:22but some people try to make that argument.

13:24But this is what the elder used to say.

13:27When Mark was the interpreter of Peter,

13:30he wrote down accurately everything that he recalled

13:32of the Lord's words and deeds,

13:35but not in order, for he neither heard the Lord

13:38nor accompanied him, but later, as I indicated,

13:40he accompanied Peter, who used to adapt his teachings

13:44for the needs at hand, not arranging, as it were,

13:47an orderly composition of the Lord's saying.

13:50Saying, and so Mark did nothing wrong

13:52by writing some of the matters as he remembered them,

13:55for he was intent on just one purpose,

13:57not to leave out anything that he heard

14:00or to include any falsehood among them.

14:04So the description of whatever text this is

14:08that somebody named Mark wrote is kind of a sayings gospel,

14:12but there are some deeds in there as well,

14:14but it is not written in order,

14:17which has led people who have tried to interpret this text

14:20to indicate that it does not follow

14:23a very rational trajectory, narrative trajectory,

14:27that we would find in most of the accounts of Jesus' life.

14:32Trying to identify this with what we now have

14:36as the gospel of Mark doesn't make sense,

14:39because the gospel of Mark as we have it now is in order,

14:44at least as far as we can tell.

14:47There's nothing that is clearly out of order.

14:50The synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke,

14:55follow a very, very similar order.

14:59This is basically a one-ish year ministry

15:02that starts in the Galilee, ends up in Jerusalem.

15:07Everything is in an order.

15:09John is the one who kind of mixes it up

15:12with a three-year ministry,

15:13and there's going back and forth.

15:15And so John is kind of out of order, but Mark is not.

15:19- Yeah.

15:20- Now here's what papius says about Matthew.

15:23And so Matthew composed the sayings in the Hebrew tongue,

15:28and each one interpreted them to the best of his ability.

15:32That's it.

15:33So according to papius, Matthew one

15:38was originally written in Hebrew,

15:39and two was just sayings.

15:43Now we have examples of sayings' gospels,

15:46like the gospel of Thomas is known as a sayings' gospel

15:51because there's not a narrative framework

15:53around the sayings, it's just a collection of say,

15:55a list of sayings, literally utterance one,

15:58utterance two, utterance three.

16:00And so that's known as a sayings' gospel.

16:02And a lot of scholars believe that there was

16:05some kind of sayings' gospel that functioned as the source

16:08for the gospel authors, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

16:13Matthew is not a sayings' gospel, period.

16:17Additionally, it was not originally written in Hebrew.

16:19It was originally composed in Greek,

16:21and there are a number of different indicators of that.

16:24And so you can't really identify what papius is saying here

16:29with the gospel of Matthew as we have it today.

16:32And so scholars would say as evidence for

16:36Matthew or Mark in authorship of the gospels

16:38of Matthew and Mark as we have them today,

16:41papius is not strong evidence.

16:44- Right, because papius seems to be referring

16:48to two totally different texts.

16:50- Yeah, the description of these texts do not match

16:54the description or do not match what we have today

16:57as the gospels of Matthew and Mark.

17:00- He was just talking about a different Matthew and Mark.

17:03He was just two different guys.

17:04- Or there were a number of different texts in circulation

17:08and somebody was like, "Yeah, yeah, it was the student

17:11"name Mark heard that."

17:13And there are any number of ways

17:16that this tradition could have originated.

17:18But papius, I mentioned UCBias doesn't really take papius

17:22very seriously 'cause papius has entirely different accounts

17:25for how Judas died.

17:27For instance, he says Judas swelled up

17:29to the side of a house.

17:31- Oh yeah, I remember, I remember I was talking about that.

17:33- Yeah, and got stuck in the road

17:36and got run over by a wagon or something like that.

17:39And that's how he died.

17:40And he popped and spewed and stuff everywhere.

17:45And then it stinks down to this very day

17:47over a century later.

17:49And that has nothing to do with either account

17:52from the book of Acts or the book of Matthew.

17:55And then papius makes a bunch of other outlandish claims

17:58as well that have no relationship

18:00to what we have in the New Testament.

18:02And so when you look at the totality

18:07of papius' claims about early Christianity,

18:11all of them are just dismissed

18:14except for these two statements.

18:16And it's very clear why these two statements are accepted

18:19is because they function as evidence

18:21for the methane and the market,

18:23authorship of these two gospels.

18:25If you just overlook the fact that whatever papius

18:28is describing does not match the gospels--

18:31- Other than the fact that it doesn't make any sense,

18:33it's very good evidence.

18:35- And it makes perfect sense, yeah.

18:37And so we don't have,

18:40I don't think that works as evidence of authorship.

18:44Now, there's another interesting thing to consider.

18:46The gospel manuscripts that we have,

18:51the earliest we have are like second, third century.

18:55And we now call them the gospel according

18:58to Matthew and Mark and Luke and John

18:59because those titles are in the manuscripts.

19:02But something interesting happens

19:04as you go back earlier in time

19:05into the third and second century CE.

19:08The titles occur in different parts of the manuscripts.

19:12Sometimes they're at the end,

19:13sometimes they're at the beginning,

19:15it is not consistent.

19:18And you get to a point where you don't have the first page

19:23or a page with a title preserved in the manuscripts.

19:27Like our earliest fragments,

19:29the fragment from the gospel of John,

19:32that is a little credit card sized fragment

19:34that may date to as early as around 125 CE.

19:38We don't have gospel of John written anywhere on there.

19:41So we can't get back any earlier than in time

19:46than Erenaeus's identification of these gospels

19:49in the manuscripts to find if they had authorship

19:53assigned in the manuscripts.

19:55But the fact that the titles are kind of mobile,

20:00they're occurring in different parts of the manuscripts,

20:04is indicative that this is not something

20:06original to the manuscript.

20:08This is something a scribe is adding.

20:11This is supplemental information

20:13because if a scribe inherits a manuscript

20:16that has a clear title,

20:18they're not going to screw around with where that title is.

20:22So the mobility of the title is indicative

20:26that the title is supplementary information

20:28that a scribe is providing rather than something

20:32that is being faithfully copied from pre-existing manuscripts.

20:35- That makes sense to me.

20:37- It does make sense.

20:38No, it's obviously not determinative in and of itself.

20:42But I think from a text critical point of view,

20:45if we're going to be critical about this,

20:48it makes sense that this is something

20:49that seems like it's added in later.

20:51So we don't have direct external evidence

20:55that the earliest manuscripts did not have these titles

21:00with authors attributed.

21:04But based on deduction, it seems unlikely that they did.

21:09We don't see anybody referring to authors

21:11until we get to Irenaeus at the end of the second century CE.

21:16Now, another consideration is that we can explain

21:21how someone might come up with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John

21:27as the four names of the gospel authors

21:30because the most prominent disciples of Jesus

21:35were James, John, Peter, and Paul.

21:41So those don't match Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

21:44But here are some reasons that you need to replace some of these.

21:48- And if you want those reasons,

21:49you're going to have to hold on

21:50because I'm going to make then take a break

21:53and we're going to come back with those reasons after this.

21:56(upbeat music)

22:01So when we left before the break we had James, John, Peter,

22:01- All right.

22:06and Paul, the apostles that were toit with Jesus.

22:11- The super apostles, yeah.

22:14- And they are not Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

22:17So get us there, cross that bridge for us.

22:20- One of them is, so we're going to the beloved disciple

22:24is the closest to identifiable with one of those four.

22:29- And that's identifiable with John.

22:31So we're going to make that identification really easily.

22:35So we got John taken care of.

22:37James is an issue because James was martyred quite early

22:40in the history of Christianity.

22:42So James was not around to write a gospel.

22:44So that one's out.

22:46We need something to account for that.

22:48So we're going to put a pin in James.

22:50- Okay.

22:51- Okay.

22:52So then we've got Peter.

22:54Now Peter was like first in command according to Catholic

22:59tradition, Peter was made the head of the church.

23:03This is the apostle.

23:04In the late first, early second century CE,

23:09there was a gospel of Peter in circulation

23:12that was known to be spurious.

23:15This is, well, second century CE was known to be spurious.

23:19So we're not going to call this gospel the gospel of Peter.

23:23We also have no indication that Peter wrote any gospel down

23:28but we have this tradition from papius

23:31about Peter having this interpreter mark.

23:34And so we can represent Peter's gospel

23:38by attributing its authorship to mark.

23:41- Okay.

23:42- And so we tag the petrine base

23:46by assigning this gospel to mark.

23:48So we don't have a gospel of Peter

23:50but we have Peter covered with the gospel of mark

23:53because Peter was not well-educated.

23:55Peter was not that literate.

23:57He had an interpreter.

23:59Mark was very clearly written in Greek.

24:01So we're going to say, mark wrote it

24:02and that tags Peter's base.

24:05So we got Peter and we got John taken care of.

24:08And then we got Paul.

24:10Paul's got a bunch of epistles but never wrote a gospel.

24:13But we have the book of Acts, which talks about Paul.

24:17And in the book of Acts, Paul has a travel companion

24:21who is named Luke.

24:23- Okay.

24:24- And so we can attribute the authorship

24:27of the gospel now known as Luke

24:31and the acts of the apostles

24:34to that traveling companion of Paul.

24:36And in that way, we have tagged the Pauline base as well.

24:41So we have stories that we can say come from

24:47Paul, Peter and John,

24:50even if the authors of the gospels

24:52are different mark and Luke.

24:55So that leaves the gospel of Matthew.

24:57James is the apostle there that is the big time apostle died

25:03so would not have been able to write this gospel

25:05but we have this fourth gospel.

25:07And it is emphasizing Jesus's fulfillment

25:12of all these prophecies from the Hebrew Bible.

25:16It's a very Hebrew oriented gospel.

25:19We've got the story of papius who says somebody named Matthew

25:24wrote a gospel in Hebrew.

25:26Well, it just so happens that the gospel we now call Matthew

25:30has a tax collector who goes by Matthew in there

25:33who figures prominently and does not figure prominently

25:37in any of the other gospels.

25:38And so because that gospel resonates a lot with Hebrew

25:44and since Matthew the tax collector figures prominently,

25:48in fact, it goes by a different name in the other gospels,

25:51we're gonna identify this fourth gospel

25:53with this Matthew who wrote a Hebrew gospel.

25:58- Sorry, the claim here is that this Matthew guy

26:04was a tax collector and wrote himself into,

26:08prominently into his own gospel.

26:12Just wanted to give himself a little bit of fame and fortune.

26:15He didn't want to just be a ghost writer.

26:17He didn't need to wait.

26:18He wanted to get some fame out of it.

26:21- Well, he went anonymously in the gospel.

26:24Yeah, he represented himself.

26:26I mean, he's the one telling the story.

26:27He thought he could get away with it

26:29but we figured out that he was the one who wrote this

26:33precisely because he figured so prominently in the story

26:35but then we have the account of papius.

26:37And so we have Peter, Paul, James, and John

26:42as the four main disciples of Jesus

26:45that start the early church

26:46and our four gospels are not directly from them

26:50but we can get to them, at least for Peter, Paul, and John.

26:55And then James, his account is just replaced

26:58with the account of Matthew.

27:00And so papius' story doesn't really line up

27:04with what we know about these gospels

27:06but probably contributed to how in the decades

27:11between papius who was second quarter

27:13of the second century CE and 175, 180,

27:17it's the fourth quarter of the second century CE.

27:19Somewhere in between there, people took papius' account

27:23and used it to put together this notion that,

27:25oh, well, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John

27:27were the four authors of the gospel.

27:30And here's an interesting thing.

27:32A lot of people suggest that because there are no

27:37alternative authors that are asserted,

27:40we don't see any arguments about this.

27:42We don't see people say, no, it wasn't John,

27:44it was this other prayer.

27:45That's nowhere in early Christianity.

27:48And so people suggest that is evidence

27:50that the traditional authorship is original, is authentic.

27:54Or it's just evidence that the first claim to authorship

27:59became widespread and there was no chance

28:03for anyone to come up with a different claim

28:05because they're being shared anonymously for decades.

28:09And so we don't have a reason to think

28:11that all of a sudden a bunch of different people

28:14suddenly said, oh, we're gonna attribute it to so-and-so.

28:17And on the other side of town or on the other side

28:21of the country, somebody else was like,

28:23I'm gonna attribute to somebody.

28:25I think Bart Erman makes a good case that most likely

28:30what happened is someone in Rome

28:32produced a manuscript of all four gospels

28:35and attributed this authorship based on this idea.

28:39We got John covered, we got Peter covered,

28:41we got Paul covered, we got Matthew in place of James.

28:45And this manuscript probably became a very popular manuscript.

28:49And so it spread widely.

28:52And so nobody else was in the,

28:55let's come up with authors for the gospel business

28:58until suddenly a manuscript showed up

29:00and they don't, nobody's like, well,

29:03I wanna challenge this.

29:05Everybody's shrugged him and okay.

29:07Yeah, that's the most popular manuscript tradition.

29:11We're just gonna follow that.

29:13Now this is speculative,

29:15but I do think it makes the best sense of the data

29:18when we look at what's going on in early Christianity

29:22when we look at how people are referring to the gospels.

29:24When we consider how manuscripts are transmitted

29:28and disseminated throughout the world,

29:31when we consider all these things,

29:32I think that makes the best sense of the data.

29:35The notion that the traditional authors were known

29:40from the very start and that the gospels

29:43all circulated with those names on them,

29:46that's not really supported by the data.

29:49It doesn't, there's no reason to think

29:52that people were just like, oh, I see the author's name.

29:55I'm just gonna refer to this as the memoirs of the apostles.

29:58I'm not gonna distinguish one gospel from another.

30:01I'm not gonna sign authorship until one day.

30:03They were just like, you know what?

30:04We need to just start referring to these

30:06by the authors that have been, you know,

30:09on the front page ever since the beginning.

30:11That doesn't really make much sense.

30:13So I think a critical, careful consideration

30:17of the data would suggest that they were written anonymously.

30:22No authorship was assigned to them

30:24in the earliest decades of their transmission.

30:27And then in the mid-second century CE,

30:30you begin to have Matthew, Mark, and by 180,

30:35by the time of Uranius, someone has decided

30:38we're just gonna put these authors' names down

30:41in a manuscript that became very influential

30:44in the spread of the gospels.

30:46And so that's the tradition that Uranius has.

30:49That's the tradition that Uranius publishes.

30:51And by that time, it's too late for anybody

30:53to try to come up with an alternative tradition.

30:56- Right.

30:57You know, can I admit something silly?

30:59- I'll think about it.

31:00- Look, I am not someone who has,

31:06I have never read the Bible cover to cover.

31:09And I intend to at some point,

31:12I probably should have done it before the show,

31:14but I haven't.

31:16- It's a big commitment.

31:18- Yeah, it's a big book.

31:20It's a big and difficult book.

31:23But I also, it just hadn't occurred to me

31:27that Matthew, Mark, and Luke

31:30are not beloved characters from,

31:33like they're not disciples,

31:35they're not, there's no stories about them in these books.

31:39Like it just, that hadn't occurred to me.

31:43That they're just authors or attributed authors.

31:47- Yeah, we don't really have.

31:49So Luke is a traveling companion of Paul in the Acts.

31:54And then Matthew is the tax collector.

31:56That's the name given to the tax collector

31:58in the gospel of Matthew.

31:59But yeah, Mark is not a character who says

32:03or does anything anywhere.

32:05And so yeah, their authorship of the gospels

32:09is their entire claim to fame, really.

32:13- Interesting, that's nuts.

32:15Okay, so there we go.

32:18That's the first four books of the Bible.

32:21And then one dude claims to have written

32:24a lot of the New Testament.

32:27- Yeah.

32:28- So let's jump to Paul

32:31and further are who done it with the epistles.

32:37- Yes, the plot thickens with the Pauline epistles.

32:43- Now, as most people find them in contemporary Christian

32:47Bibles, if you look in the King James version,

32:49if you look in any modern Bible,

32:51you're gonna find them in a specific order.

32:54And it's not when we think they were written.

32:56It is the length of the epistle.

32:59- Oh, really?

33:00- Yeah, so Romans is first 'cause it's the longest.

33:03And then the ones that have more than one edition.

33:08So you've got first Corinthian second Corinthians,

33:11first Thessalonians, 2 Timothy, 2 Timothy.

33:14Those, it is the length of the first one

33:16that is determinative on where,

33:17but they, where it falls, but they stay together.

33:21- Sure, sure.

33:21- So you've got Romans is the longest,

33:23first Corinthians is the second longest,

33:25Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians,

33:27Colossians, 1 Thessalonians, 2 Thessalonians,

33:31Timothy, Timothy, Titus, Philemon.

33:33And then at the very end, it's actually longer

33:35than most of the epistles that comes before it,

33:37but we have Hebrews, which is definitely not written

33:41by Paul, there are some very traditional folks

33:44who might try to make the argument that Paul wrote it,

33:46but no scholars really accept that.

33:48But it is tacked on at the end because it's authentic,

33:51it is kind of grouped with the Pauline epistles,

33:53but it's authenticity was doubted

33:56even when they were putting this together.

33:57And so they were like, we're just gonna put it at the end.

34:00- That one's at the back, Pauline.

34:04- Bringing up the rear, but it was still,

34:06there were still important things in the epistle

34:08to the Hebrews according to the early Christians,

34:11and so they didn't want to get rid of it.

34:13So they were just like, just put it in the back

34:16and we'll pretend that Paul wrote it.

34:19- And I assume we're gonna get into why we think

34:21that it's not written by Paul.

34:24- We can.

34:25It is completely different in literary style,

34:32in genre, in content, in how it conceptualizes

34:37Jesus' relationship to God,

34:40Jesus' relationship to angels,

34:42Jesus' mission and identity,

34:44like everything is different.

34:47But it does say some things that were critical

34:51for the formation of early Christology

34:53in the early church,

34:54and so they just didn't wanna let it go.

34:57- Right.

34:58- But when we look at the rest of the Pauline epistles,

35:02and this is where sometimes apologists

35:05and conservative Christians, they will frequently insist

35:09that critical scholarship just presupposes

35:12that any claims to authorship are false,

35:16and that's simply not true.

35:17Because critical scholarship agrees that at least seven

35:22of the Pauline epistles were written by Paul,

35:26or were dictated to a scribe by Paul.

35:29- Okay.

35:30- And so according to a critical approach,

35:33we confirm, or at least to the degree that we are able to,

35:37we confirm and agree that Paul was the author

35:40of these things.

35:41So the notion that critical scholars approach a text

35:44convinced or presupposing that the claimed author

35:47was not the author is simply false.

35:51Now, the seven Pauline epistles that are considered

35:56authentic or genuine are, first Thessalonians,

36:01first Corinthians and second Corinthians, Galatians,

36:04Romans, Philippians and Philemon.

36:06Now we have two other types of Pauline epistles.

36:10We have Pauline epistles that are called disputed,

36:12and then we have Pauline epistles that are called spurious.

36:16The disputed ones are where scholars

36:19are kind of in disagreement.

36:20There's not a clear consensus.

36:22On the more critical side, you will have scholars

36:24who reject Pauline authorship.

36:26On the less critical side, you will have a lot of scholars

36:30who assert Pauline authorship.

36:32And those are second Thessalonians, Colossians and Ephesians.

36:37And so for those three, it's a mixed bag.

36:41Maybe they're written by Paul, maybe they're not.

36:44The last three are first Timothy, second Timothy and Titus.

36:47These are known as the pastoral epistles.

36:49And these are ones that most scholars consider spurious.

36:54The scholars that assert Pauline authorship

36:58of these epistles are in the minority.

37:01In fact, there was a, I think it was 2008 or 2009,

37:05there was a poll, an informal poll that was conducted

37:09at the British New Testament Society Conference.

37:12And they had, I think they had like 107 or 108 respondents

37:17to this poll.

37:19And the poll was basically, did Paul author this epistle?

37:24And it went through every epistle.

37:27And for the genuine Pauline epistles,

37:30like nobody said no or I don't know.

37:32The three answers were yes, no or I don't know.

37:35When you get to Hebrews, I think only one person said yes.

37:40Like the other 107 said no.

37:42And by the way, this is not a very liberal conference.

37:46This I would characterize as a more conservative group

37:49of New Testament scholars.

37:51When you get to the disputed, it's,

37:54because it's conservative, not as many said no as said yes.

37:59But then on the, for the spurious Pauline epistles,

38:03the pastoral epistles, I think you had like 55% said no.

38:08Another 20% said I don't know.

38:11And then about a quarter of the scholars said Paul wrote him.

38:15And so that's not an overwhelming consensus,

38:18but that's a good majority.

38:21- It's a pretty strong, yeah.

38:23It's a strong consensus that we cannot confidently say

38:27Paul wrote these.

38:28And I'm hoping to work, my sister who is the director

38:33of data and analytics for a university

38:39is going in with me on a survey of biblical scholars

38:44to try to produce an actual state of the field thing.

38:49And this is one of the big questions we're gonna try

38:50to get a lot more respondents for be a lot more robust about.

38:55- Love it.

38:56- But I wanna talk about the pastoral epistles.

38:59That's what I wanna focus on.

39:00- Okay.

39:01- We can talk a little bit about the others,

39:04but the pastorals I think are the most fascinating.

39:07- Yeah.

39:08- Those spurious little epistles.

39:10- The little dickenses.

39:12- Yes.

39:12(laughing)

39:14- And we'll learn about those dickenses

39:17coming up after this break.

39:18(upbeat music)

39:21- All right, let's get into it.

39:25These pastoral epistles have been languishing long enough.

39:29We need to figure out what the heck's going on

39:31with these guys.

39:32- So these are called the pastoral epistles

39:35because rather than being like instructions and counsel

39:38and responses to questions being written to a whole community,

39:41a whole congregation in a specific city,

39:44they're being written to specific disciples.

39:47First and second Timothy, two Timothy,

39:49and then Titus two Titus.

39:51And they have more of a pastoral tone.

39:54It's not so much, you know, hey everybody,

39:57thanks for doing this.

39:58You're still not doing this well enough.

40:01Keep on keeping on.

40:02It's more like, hey man,

40:04I know you're going through a rough time.

40:06And it's kind of trying to help these folks out.

40:11Now there are a number of issues

40:14with assigning Pauline authorship to this.

40:17The first is that when you look at the places

40:19that are mentioned in these epistles

40:22and what like historically is going on,

40:25it's not easy to fit those places

40:28and those circumstances

40:29into kind of the reconstruction of Paul's life,

40:33particularly if you use the account from the book of Acts

40:36which describes Paul's journeys and things like that.

40:39They are kind of outside of the clearest journeys

40:43and stops and places that Paul was staying.

40:48So internally like that, it's a little unclear.

40:53Next, the language is very, very different.

40:55In fact, there've been some word studies done.

40:58If you ignore names and place names,

41:01there are about 850 words

41:03that occur in the pastoral epistles.

41:07And a full third of those 850 words

41:12are not used a single time

41:14in any of the other Pauline epistles.

41:17A third?

41:18A third and that's huge.

41:20And that's not just the genuine,

41:22that's the genuine and the disputed,

41:24a third of the words in the pastoral epistles.

41:27And they're concentrated in different books.

41:29Like second Timothy has the fewest unique words,

41:32but a lot of the language in the pastoral epistles

41:36is very unique to the pastoral epistles.

41:38Now, so we've got a different genre,

41:40we've got some different language

41:42and folks will say, "Yeah, well,

41:44Paul's writing to different people."

41:46It's not surprising that he would change his tone,

41:49that he would use different language.

41:51He has different rhetorical goals, so that's natural.

41:53Granted, that is not determinative in and of itself.

41:59But if you look at the occurrence of these words,

42:03you take that third of those 850 words,

42:07the majority of them are concentrated

42:10at the end of the first century CE

42:12and the beginning of the second century CE,

42:14within Hellenistic philosophical writings

42:17and within the writings of early Christians.

42:20And so Paul is living in the 50s and 60s CE.

42:25These words that are unique to the pastoral epistles

42:30are also far more common after Paul's death

42:34than during Paul's life.

42:36They also are focused on the administration

42:41of a church institutional structure.

42:47So we're talking about the office of a bishop

42:49and the office of a deacon.

42:51And we're talking about the long-term life

42:53of the church as an institution,

42:57which is odd for Paul who never talked about these things

43:01and always talked about how the time is short,

43:04Jesus is coming back, stay in the circumstances

43:07in which you were found when you were called by God

43:10because again, time is short.

43:13And the genuine Pauline epistles, Paul's like,

43:15hey, we gotta do this now, Jesus is coming.

43:17We don't got time for kids.

43:18We don't got time for this, that and the other.

43:20We don't got time to get married.

43:21Only get married if you can't hack celibacy.

43:23Otherwise we gotta go, go, go.

43:25And then suddenly we get to first and second Timothy

43:27and Titus and it's like, hey,

43:30if you want to become a bishop,

43:34here are the things that you're gonna have to think about.

43:37And here's how you're gonna have to behave in the long-term.

43:40- Yeah, let's talk about long-term goals.

43:42- Yeah.

43:43- Let's talk about.

43:44- This is an HR meeting that we are sitting down in

43:48with the pastoral epistles, which is completely alien

43:52to the rushed state of Paul in the genuine position

44:00of Pauline epistles.

44:01Now again, people say, well, later in life,

44:04he could have been like,

44:06doesn't look like Jesus is coming back.

44:08Maybe I should have get that thousand yard stare.

44:13I need to have a more long-term perspective.

44:15Sure, that's possible.

44:17But I don't think that makes best sense of the data.

44:22We have a number of other indications

44:24that what's going on in the pastoral epistles

44:26was not written by Paul.

44:28Not only do we have this unique language

44:30that is concentrated on the historical timeline

44:34after Paul's death, not only do we have this language

44:37and these concerns for the long-term

44:40institutional life of the church.

44:42A lot of the things that Paul talks about

44:45and considers important are not in the pastoral epistles.

44:49Paul is very concerned about the body, the soma,

44:52totally absent from the pastoral epistles.

44:55Paul talks about the time being short,

44:57totally absent from the pastoral epistles.

45:00Where there is overlap in these thematic discussions,

45:04the pastoral epistles,

45:06discuss these ideas differently

45:08and in a less sophisticated way.

45:11For instance, the idea of righteousness

45:14is very different in the pastoral epistles

45:16than it is in the genuine Pauline epistles.

45:18Paul talks about being in Christ

45:20and in the pastoral epistles,

45:21the concept of being in Christ is entirely different.

45:24Paul's concept of the relationship of faith

45:28to works in the genuine appalling epistles.

45:32Genuine Pauline, not genuine appalling.

45:35The appalling epistles, that's a different category.

45:40Paul talks about being in Christ, faith in works.

45:43The Pauline, oh gosh.

45:45The fact that both of these words start with P

45:47is starting to get under my skin.

45:50Pastoral epistles are a lot more misogynistic

45:55than the genuine Pauline epistles.

45:57So we have these statements about,

45:59I will not allow a woman to speak in church.

46:01Woman must remain silent.

46:03If they got a question,

46:04let him ask their husbands at home.

46:06Ouch.

46:07And then people will point to,

46:11well, you got first Corinthians 14.

46:13In first Corinthians 14,

46:15we have these statements about women being silent in church.

46:19However, scholars have noted for a long time,

46:21this seems an odd thing for Paul to say,

46:25just a few chapters after saying,

46:26hey, women, if you're going to prophesy in church,

46:30just make sure your hair's covered.

46:32Right.

46:32So it seems like an odd thing to say,

46:34and it also seems to disrupt

46:38the logical continuity of the rest of chapter 14.

46:43And so a lot of critical scholars will say,

46:45this seems an awful lot like an interpolation,

46:48probably from somebody writing at a later time period

46:53where we have the more misogynistic pastoral approach

46:57to women speaking in church.

46:59So all of these things combine

47:03to convince the majority of scholars,

47:05not all scholars, but the majority of scholars,

47:08and an even stronger majority of critical scholars,

47:11that the pastoral epistles were not written by Paul,

47:15but were written decades after his death

47:18by someone writing in Paul's name

47:20in an effort to irrigate to their epistles,

47:23that kind of authority over the church.

47:27And when we look at the early church,

47:31there's not a ton of external evidence,

47:33but we do have some evidence that there were early Christians

47:37who raised doubts about the authenticity

47:40of the pastoral epistles.

47:41For instance, there's a very early,

47:45I think it's P-46, I may be mistaken,

47:48but there's a Chester Beatty papyrus manuscript

47:53that contains all of the Pauline epistles.

47:55It is the earliest witness to the Pauline corpus.

48:00Pastoral epistles are not in there.

48:02Codex Vaticanus, one of our most important

48:06unseal manuscripts from the mid to late fourth century CE.

48:10Sinaiticus and Vaticanus are probably

48:12our two best unseal manuscripts

48:14which contain the entire Bible,

48:16the Septuagint as well as the New Testament,

48:19pastoral epistles omitted from there.

48:22According to some writer's tation,

48:26it was an early Christian who put together

48:27a harmony of the gospels known as the Deatesseron,

48:31rejected the authenticity of First and Second Timothy,

48:34but accepted the authenticity of Titus.

48:37And then we've got a dude named Marcian,

48:39who is widely condemned as a heretic

48:42from the second century CE, Marcian was making a case

48:47that the Old Testament needs to be abandoned entirely

48:51and we should really just stick with Luke

48:53and the Pauline epistles.

48:54That's really the core of Marcian's gospel.

48:57And it's likely that Marcian's argument

49:00is what ginned up concern for preserving the Hebrew Bible.

49:05And Marcian omits the pastoral epistles.

49:11Paul is like his man, all that matters is Luke and Paul

49:16and even he doesn't think the pastoral epistles are genuine.

49:20Now most people are gonna say,

49:21well, he's a heretic, doesn't matter what he said.

49:24Great, that's fair.

49:26But somebody who loved Paul that much still,

49:30like many other folks around this time period,

49:33rejected the authenticity of the Pauline epistles.

49:35So even the external evidence, it's not determinative,

49:39but it represents more data

49:42that there were doubts about this in the early church.

49:45And most of the scholars that you see arguing

49:47that we should accept the authenticity

49:50of the pastoral epistles are going to say

49:53we need to consider the external evidence

49:56more strongly than the internal evidence

49:58because despite these few exceptions,

50:02the pastoral epistles were accepted as authentic

50:05by the church, by the overwhelming majority of the church,

50:08by the third, fourth century CE.

50:10And so they're gonna say that's what should be determinative,

50:14not these arguments about language,

50:17not all these other things.

50:18And there are scholars who have done linguistic analysis

50:22to say, well, if we look at these features of language,

50:25the differences between the pastoral epistles

50:27and the genuine Pauline epistles are not as big

50:30as people have made them out to be,

50:32which I mean, we still have a lot of research to do

50:34in that field, but there are limits to that kind of research.

50:39And so overwhelmingly, if you approach this

50:41from a critical point of view,

50:43it seems very likely that these epistles were not written

50:47until well after Paul was dead.

50:49- I'm explaining this to me or talk me through this

50:53'cause I think that what I'm about to ask,

50:56there's probably no way for us to know this,

50:58but one of my thoughts is the epistle means letter, right?

51:02It means the emissive that has been sent out

51:05to a group of people, to a person or a group of people.

51:08These pastoral epistles, I guess there's probably no way

51:12to know, but what I'm wondering is,

51:17were they just written as fake epistles

51:21that could just be tacked onto the sort of regular collection

51:25of Pauline epistles, or were they written as letters

51:28to somebody sent in Paul's name and then sort of tacked on?

51:33Do you understand the question that I'm asking?

51:37- Yeah, I don't think these were private correspondences.

51:41I think they're clearly intended to curate power

51:45within early Christianity.

51:47And so if there ever was a Timothy or a Titus,

51:51they were a McGuffin here.

51:53The real point here was to assert all these values

51:58and structure power in a way that served the interests

52:01of the people or the people who were writing the texts.

52:06- Specifically the men who were writing the text.

52:09- 100%.

52:10- All right, well, that's crazy to me.

52:16I love that we have been able to look at this

52:19through a number of lenses and come up with some,

52:24I find them very compelling cases

52:26that these are not Paul.

52:30Like that, that one third thing is blowing my mind, man.

52:34That is crazy.

52:35And as anyone who's written quite a bit knows,

52:40you know your words, you know what I mean?

52:44You don't change up your whole vocabulary

52:47because you're writing to a different audience.

52:48You can change up how you write and when you're writing,

52:51but a third of your words change?

52:54- Yeah, you can count on me saying data,

52:59you can count on me saying pure and utter nonsense.

53:04There are a lot of ways you could tell

53:06if something is not my voice.

53:09And yeah, I don't change it up too much

53:12depending on who I'm talking to.

53:14So yeah.

53:15- Well, there you go.

53:17Who done it is, we don't know.

53:19- Who done it, at least in this case, Paul didn't done it.

53:23- Who ain't done it is the better question in this case.

53:26And it does seem to be that the answer is Paul

53:30and Matthew and Mark and Luke and maybe.

53:32- All right, well, there you go.

53:36Have fun with that.

53:37It doesn't change, you know,

53:38what the text means and whatever.

53:43And it doesn't have to call into question

53:46the sacredness of it.

53:49But it is interesting to note that, you know,

53:52it may not be what it purports to be.

53:54And that's of interest anyway.

53:59- Yeah.

54:00And I think there are passages in like Timothy,

54:03for instance, 2nd Timothy, 3.16,

54:06ye old, all scripture is God breathed

54:09and is useful for instruction and for reproof

54:11and all this kind of stuff.

54:13I think the fact that this doesn't seem

54:15to have been written by Paul is important.

54:18The kind of women know your place kind of misogyny

54:22also doesn't come from Paul.

54:25That's not to say Paul was an ally.

54:28He was not a yes queen kind of guy,

54:31but does seem to approach things

54:35from a less misogynistic point of view,

54:39at least when it comes to who had the right

54:43to speak in church.

54:44So I think there are ways that this makes the Bible

54:49a little less problematic.

54:52Not unproblematic by any stretch of the imagination,

54:55but at least suggest that folks like Paul

54:58were not as problematic as sometimes they are made out to be.

55:03- Well, and maybe it will give permission to, you know,

55:06a pastor now to say, I think I'm okay ignoring the women

55:13shut up in church, but I think I'm okay with that.

55:15- Yeah, I think if that makes some folks feel better

55:19about ignoring that, great.

55:21I think that since we're already ignoring the slavery

55:25and we're already ignoring the ethnocentrism, hopefully,

55:29and we're already ignoring ideas

55:31about where illnesses come from and disability

55:34and the shape of the earth,

55:36we're probably okay to be ignoring their misogyny as well.

55:39- Yeah, indeed.

55:40All right, well, if you would like to become a part

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56:06and we'll see you again next week.

56:09- Bye, everybody.

56:10(upbeat music)

56:14- Data Over Dogma is a member

56:15of the Airwave Media Podcast Network.

56:18It is a production of Data Over Dogma Media LLC,

56:21copyright 2023, All Rights Preserved.