I have just finished reading Bart Ehrman’s Jesus Before the Gospels: How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior (HarperOne, 2016), and Brant Pitre’s The Case for Jesus: The Biblical and Historical Evidence for Christ (Image, 2016).
And I can’t imagine two books about Jesus more different from one another.
Not surprisingly, in his new volume (released again right before Easter!) Ehrman continues his life-long campaign to attack the reliability of the canonical gospels and to raise doubts about their authorship and origins. Time and time again he asserts that the gospels were late, anonymous productions, written by authors with no connections to the historical Jesus. I will be offer a full review of Ehrman’s book at a later point.
In contrast to Ehrman, Pitre’s book is a breath of fresh air. The goal of his book is to defend the notion that Jesus claimed to be God. And he accomplishes this goal by laying a strong foundation for the reliability and trustworthiness of the Gospels as eyewitness sources for the life of Jesus.
Pitre tackles the authorship of the canonical gospels by making two simple observations: (a) The Gospel titles support the traditional authorship of the canonical gospels, and (b) the testimony of the church fathers supports the traditional authorship of the canonical gospels.
These are not new observations, but Pitre presents them in a manner that reminds the reader how important (and compelling) they are.
As for the titles, Pitre points out the obvious (but for Ehrman, problematic) fact that “there is a striking absence of any anonymous Gospel manuscripts. That is because they don’t exist. Not even one” (17). On the contrary, our earliest gospel manuscripts contain the titles that attribute these books to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
Moreover, if the Gospels had circulated anonymously for more than a century (as Ehrman argues), then we would expect them to have a variety of different titles. Surely, we couldn’t expect them to circulate anonymously for this length of time and then suddenly all early Christians use precisely the same title.
Pitre comments on Erhman’s suggestion the titles were added later:
This scenario is completely incredible. Even if one anonymous Gospel could have been written and circulated and then somehow miraculously attributed to the same person by Christians living in Rome, Africa, Italy, and Syria, am I really supposed to believe that the same thing happened not once, not twice, but with four different books, over and over again, throughout the world? (19)
And, when it comes to the testimony of the early church fathers, the same type of consistent testimony emerges. Pitre writes:
When the earliest Christian writings outside the New Testament are taken into account, there is not the slightest trace of external evidence to support the now popular claim that the four Gospels were originally anonymous. As far as we know, for almost four hundred years after the lifetime of Jesus, no one–orthodox or heretic, pagan or Christian–seems to have raised any serious doubts about who wrote the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John (53).
In sum, Pitre provides a wonderful contrast to Ehrman and highlights the reasons that Christians for thousands of years have always understood these gospels to have been written by the names attached to them.
I have a few minor quibbles with Pitre here and there (at one point, p.18, he seems to confuse P52 and P66), but he has written a very helpful book that is accessible to a lay audience interested in these critical questions.
I encourage you to read the book and then give it to your skeptical friend.
zoransulc says
Ehrman is a wilful distorter of evidence, deserving of no respect – like the lawyers who are not interested in truth and justice, just in winning their case and collecting a fee. He should be ashamed of himself but I guess his fan club and his bank balance has deadened his conscience
dr. james willingham says
Ehrman’s problem is that he had never looked at the Gospel’s, first, from the perspective of Atheism, and, second, then from the perspective of a believer who has had an encounter with the Jesus of the Bible (as in appearing, knocking at a door, look at the individual, etc). This has been my experience, namely, that at a young age I became an Atheist, saying how could there be a god and let little children experience what I had experienced: the loss of mother and father due to separation and divorce with the result of winding up on a sharecropper’s farm where I was raised by maternal grandparents, working from sunup to sunset just like an adult from age five on. And then Jesus shows up in a vision, hallucination, ?, facing me, hand raised like He was knocking at a door, wearing red and blue robes, sporting a beard, and looking me in the eye. The result was conversion later on that night, Dec.7,1957. Later on I would attend 10 colleges and universities, taking the following degrees, B.S.Ed.; M.A.; M.Div.; D. Min, M.A., and 18 hrs. toward a Ph. D., 12 at an Ivy League University where I wrote a prospectus for a doctoral dissertation in Black History (as it was then called). My love for all things history began in early childhood with my grandmother telling me stories of the family in the past. It also began with early reading in history. I dear all four volumes of Douglas S. Freeman’s R.E. Lee at the age of nine. I read many other volumes in history (Napoleon, etc.).
In any case, I taught in three colleges and seminary extension. With a love for all things historical, my training prepared me to make express something of the same nature as C.S. Lewis did. He stated that as one who had studied fantasy literature of the Middle Ages (and was good enough in the field to teach at Oxford and Cambridge Universities), that the Bible did not present fantasies, but reality. Like Lewis I could say from my studies in history that the Bible is, undoubtedly, the most reliable book in history that I have ever encountered. And this is based on a life time of study in history plus six years of research in church history, accumulating some 3000 5×8 notecards covering more than 250 sources, plus two years of research on I Cors. 13. My field of study for the first M.A. was American Social and Intellectual History, and I have studied the Bible from the perspective of Intellectualism, something that many do not seem inclined to do today. What I found was astounding: the intellectual depths of the Bible are commensurate with the origins of the book in the attributed and ascribed, according to the authors, Omniscience of God. To put it another way: The book’s wisdom and veracity and reliability is commensurate with the postulated origin (scriptural postulation) of Divine inspiration, reflecting a higher level of intelligence than even that of the Bible’s best authors. I should add that when I began my studies as believer, it had been the habit of scholars to say that the Bible was not true, because it mentioned the Hittites. Then the capital city of the Hittite Empire was dug up not far from the modern capital of Turkey, and the scholars became strangely silent. There were other, similar incidents. The scholars of skepticism shifted their ground of skepticism every time. There is more, but time does not permit.
I will add that I preached a sermon against Dr. Ehrman’s views about five years ago. When I did, I chiecked out his works to that date (2012) and went through each one, looking for something persuasive enough to cast a legitimate doubt on the Bible,. I did not find such, and I seriously doubt that I ever will. find anything in his present or future writings that can provide evidence for real doubt of Scripture. Not if his past writings are any indication. Of course, I leave the door open for the dim possibility, and I say dim as the brightly shining facts of the biblical record have yet to be undermined by anything I have read in theological and historical studies.
Robert says
First, thank you Dr. Kruger for bringing this to our attention! I am eagerly awaiting your book on Christianity in the second century AD!
Dr. James Willingham: Fascinating! Reading your comment has made me want to read more. Have you written anything for publication, or anything online, that a layman like me could view? I, too, am interested in history.
John Waller says
Pitre may have set us a valuable example here. Instead of letting the sceptics publish their ritual nonsense in the run-up to Easter every year & then have the orthodox response months or years later after the damage is done, we ought to publish the refutation to coincide with the release of the latest Ehrman epic. This ought to be possible since we already know what it will say before it comes out.