i'm i'm willing to accept that the gospel authors are accurately writing what they heard or believed
to be true in the same way in the same way that if my mom comes and tells me that she was abducted by
aliens i don't think my mom is lying to me i'm i'm willing to accept that she had an experience
that she is trying to describe in that fashion but that doesn't tell me what actually happened
and so when we have matthew mark luke and john which are anonymous gospels not written by
those names ages ago when we can't investigate and you have an oral tradition dr mike i saw
that face man i saw the face what you got dr bike yeah well let me just say this about matt i did
debate him a few years ago and um i think it's a popular debate that's viewed online
on my channel i think it's been viewed 600 000 times already so um my experience debating him
was a pleasant one we got along well uh treated one another respectfully on stage and um
yeah i've got no problems with him i do have problems with his arguments
to say that the gospels are anonymous is is a card that is way it's overplayed uh big time um when
it is true i i believe it's true that the gospels in in the autographs in the original form were
probably anonymous they probably did not contain the the um the titles the gospel according to
matthew gospel according to mark i think those were probably added later maybe in the second
century but it's overplayed and here's why when you take all the biographies that were written
in that period and over a hundred of them okay in that period if you just look at 150 years
on each side of jesus this 300 year period about any uh biography written about anyone
you have about 90 okay but if you extend it even way past that you've got over a hundred okay
all of them are anonymous with only two exceptions you have the passing of peregrinous
by lucian of san samasada in the middle of the second century and then you have the life of
elias in the historia augusta written at the end of the fourth century that that's about
a half a century after the council of nicaea that's how late that is those are the only two
that contain uh the author's name in it the rest of them are anonymous um biographies aren't the
only thing you you take the writings of livy one of the great roman historians
it's anonymous you can take the writings of salist whom the famous roman rhetorician quintillion said
was a better historian than libby and that you had to be advanced in your studies to appreciate
them properly all of salis writings are uh anonymous plutarch i should say caesar's um
commentary on the civil war um they're not only anonymous caesar wrote them but it's anonymous
and it's written entirely in the third person much like the gospel of john is
plutarch is regarded as the greatest ancient biographer by classicist today
he wrote over 60 biographies of which 48 have survived none of them have plutarch's name in
the preface in the poem or the title the preface the pro-em or anywhere throughout them they're
anonymous in the same sense the gospels are so if you're going to play this card and say we don't
even know who wrote the gospels because they're anonymous you got to say that with a lot of the
major greco-roman writings which classicists are convinced that they know the authors of
these they don't even question it for a lot of them the ones i mentioned they don't question
um and i i would say that the evidence we have for the traditional authorship of the gospels it's not
unimpeachable by any means but the truth the our evidence we have for matthew mark luke and john
being the traditional authors is superior to the evidence we have that plutarch wrote those
lives the biographies attributed to him and yet you'd be hard-pressed to find a classicist today
who questions whether plutarch wrote those so the the bottom line i think there is there was still
reason to think that matthew mark luke and john wrote them even though they're they're anonymous
in in terms of the titles just as we have external evidence that that would suggest
that plutarch wrote the lives that salis wrote the war with jugertha the war with cataline and his
histories of rome and libby's roman histories as well and all of those dr gary you got anything
yeah mike i don't want to put you on the spot do you uh want to address the case for the uh
what critics usually think is the best of all the gospels the gospel of mark i mean is this
totally uh totally totally anonymous and nobody has a clue as to who wrote it well um i have uh
at hbu i've got some really sharp grad students there and one was a guy named joshua pelletier
and um so he did i supervised his m.a thesis and he did it on where critical scholars stand on um
some pro-lagominab related to mark who wrote mark when was it written and um the third one um is it
does it go back to petrine uh tradition does it go back to to the apostle peter that he was the
eyewitness that passed along the information to mark and so he surveyed more than 200
critical new testament scholars writing since 1965 in english okay so he didn't look at
german scholars because he doesn't read german he didn't look at uh french or any other but over 200
critical scholars writing in english since 1965 up to the present and he found that the majority of
them who comment on on this think that mark is the author of the gospel of mark and that his primary
source was the apostle peter and they also think that mark wrote somewhere between the years
50 and 70 and you can narrow that further to between 65 and 70 the years 65 and 70.
but the majority of those critical scholars who are are discussing it in writing in academic
writings or saying uh that mark is the traditional authorship of the gospel of mark is correct
you