Prejudice: An American Reality and an American Tragedy

Column by Bishop John Shelby Spong on 10 November 2016 19 Comments
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Question

I have read in a number of places that the books in the New Testament were not written by the people named. Is this true? Were the actual authors of Matthew, Mark, and the other gospels among the twelve disciples of Jesus?

Answer

Dear Zaheer,

Your letter asked only about the gospels. I have expanded it so that I can respond to your question for all 27 of the books that constitute the New Testament. I begin with Paul. Fourteen of the books of the New Testament claim to have been written by this founding, missionary apostle. Scholars today believe that only seven of those fourteen are legitimately from the hand of St. Paul. They are in the probable historical order of their writing:

I Thessalonians ca. 51

Galatians ca. 52 

I & II Corinthians ca. 54

Romans ca. 58

Philemon ca. 60

Philippians ca. 62

Three other epistles usually attributed to Paul, namely II Thessalonians, Colossians and Ephesians, appear to have been written at least a decade after Paul’s death. Still others, namely, I & II Timothy and Titus (called the Pastoral Epistles), reflect in their content church structures and attitudes that did not come into being until at least a generation after the death of Paul.

The last of the fourteen epistles, Hebrews, is thought of as Pauline only by the translators of the King James Bible. When I hear someone in a Sunday worship service announce the scripture lesson by saying: “A Reading from Paul’s Epistle to the Hebrews,” I want to stand up and shout, “It was not written by Paul, it was not an Epistle and it was not addressed to the Hebrews,” but I try to control myself and not embarrass my profession. The epistle to the Hebrews is a sermon. It was probably written in the 80’s and delivered to a Jewish Christian group seeking to understand Jesus in terms of the concept of Yom Kippur. I am also quite sure that those epistles called “The General Epistles” and identified with such names as Peter, John, James and Jude were not written by the one to whom authorship is ascribed. All of them would be dated well after the deaths of the person to whom each is attributed.

What this analysis means is of the twenty epistles in the New Testament, only the authentic seven written by Paul are in fact the product of the name to which that epistle is attributed.

Turning now to the other books of the New Testament, there are four gospels, the book of Acts and Revelation. I will take the easy ones first. Revelation is not only not written by John the son of Zebedee, it is also not written by the author of the Fourth Gospel, who was also not John the son of Zebedee. Revelation is a product of the tenth decade of the Christian era. The book of Acts appears to have been written by the same author who wrote the gospel of Luke, but neither is the product of Luke, the beloved physician.

The four gospels were written between 72-100, or 42-70 years after the end of Jesus’ earthly life. They were all written in Greek, a language that neither Jesus nor any of his disciples spoke. None of the authors is an eye-witness. None is written by one of the twelve disciples. When the gospels first appeared, no names were attached to any one of them. Names were not added to these works until well into the second century. Only one of these gospels includes a claim of apostolic authorship. That claim is found in the 21st chapter of John, a chapter that is usually believed to have been added to the Fourth Gospel by another person well after its first publication, and it is dismissed as of no great value.

The author of Luke-Acts is simply unknown. Its identification with the Luke, who is mentioned only once in a genuine Pauline letter (Philemon 1:24), and he is not identified there as “a physician.” The idea that Luke was Paul’s traveling companion and interpreter is more of a fantasy than a fact. It is based primarily on certain passages in the book of Acts that start with the word “we.” They are 16: 10-17, 20: 5-15, 21: 1-18 and 28: 1-16. These “we” passages may be nothing more than a conventional aspect of sea travel in that day, or they may be parts of a diary kept by someone that somehow came into the possession of the author. The former is far more probable than the latter.. The fact remains, however, that there is no indication anywhere that these “we” passages are related to Luke.

There is one line in Matthew that some think is a biographical hint (Matt 13:52). If that is so then it appears to identify the author as a scribe. Levi Matthew to whom this gospel was later attributed was supposedly a tax collector. Nothing other than 2nd century speculation attaches this gospel to the disciple named Matthew.

Traditions developed much later that identified the first gospel with John Mark, who is mentioned in four books in the New Testament; first in the book of Acts (12:12, 15:37, 15:39), second in Colossians (4:10), third in II Timothy (4:11) and fourth in I Peter (5:13). I note that neither Colossians nor II Timothy are believed to have been written by Paul and that I Peter is clearly not written by Simon Peter. The idea that Mark was Peter’s interpreter is little more than pious, historical nonsense.

The author of the Fourth Gospel is certainly not John Zebedee, who was a fisherman, described in the book of Acts as an “uneducated, common man” (Acts 4:13). An uneducated fisherman could hardly have written the complicated and profound interpretation of Jesus that the Fourth Gospel reveals, nor could he have mastered the exquisite Greek in which the Fourth Gospel was composed. Most scholars today believe that the Fourth Gospel is the work of more than a single author.

By claiming apostolic authorship, do I think that the real authors were being dishonest or that these are fraudulent works? No, I do not. Professor Bart Ehrman of the department of religion at the University of North Carolina does suggest that, but I think that is to read present day values into the ancient world. I see these unknown authors as trying to translate the thinking of their Christian heroes of the past to make their insights available to a new generation. They also knew that if they reflected or claimed to reflect the mind of one of the disciples, their words would be given a far larger hearing.

The fact is that none of the authors of the New Testament, not even Paul, was an eyewitness to the life of the Jesus of history. Biblical literalism is a fatally weak reed upon which to base a claim of religious authority.

~John Shelby Spong

 

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