Dear Reader,

None of the books in the Bible were written by anyone who had ever met Jesus.    While this is the scholarly consensus and not controversial in academia, I posted a video about this online, and conservatives lost their minds.  Unfortunately, this basic fact of biblical scholarship isn’t being taught in churches.

The earliest writings in the New Testament were Paul’s letters, and Paul, by his admission, never met Jesus.  Even the story about his conversion after seeing the risen Christ on the road to Damascus (Acts 9) was a literary invention by the author of Luke/Acts, and Paul never mentions it in his writings.  Surely, he would have at least made a passing mention of something so pivotal!

We also know that the gospels were originally unnamed and weren’t given their names until the 2^nd Century.  None of the authors of these gospels claims to have met Jesus, and they don’t read like eyewitness accounts: they don’t contain the vivid first-person reflection that you would expect from someone who had met Jesus.  For instance, if you had seen a car crash and you wrote about it, you would describe the cars that you saw and what happened from your perspective.  There would be lots of “I” statements, likely even describing how you felt in certain moments.  The gospels don’t read like that.

There’s also the issue of the synoptic gospels containing verbatim prose.  Even if people had witnessed the same event, they wouldn’t have written about it in the same way.  Think back to the example of a car crash.  If there were another witness, they wouldn’t describe what happened in the exact same words as you, even if they agreed generally on what happened.  This is why scholars have settled on the Four-Source Hypothesis for the composition of the gospels.  In short, it goes like this:

1. Jesus’ sayings existed as oral tradition for the first few decades after his crucifixion.
2. The author of Mark wrote his gospel around 70 CE, 40 years after Jesus’ crucifixion.
3. The authors of Matthew and Luke wrote their gospels around 85 CE and used Mark as a source, which is why most of the Gospel of Mark can be found verbatim in those gospels.
4. Matthew and Luke also used a theoretical sayings source called “Q”, which is why some sayings that aren’t in Mark can be found verbatim in Matthew and Luke.
5. Matthew and Luke both had their own independent sources.
6. John was written in the 90s CE and used different sources.

Put simply, there is no indication that anything in the Bible was written by anyone who’d met Jesus.

~ Rev. Dr. Caleb J. Lines