What's the difference between the four gospels?

Hello, hello, and welcome to Biblically Speaking. My name is Cassian Bellino, and I'm your host.

Today I am so excited to have Dr. Daryl Bock on my podcast today to discuss the development and the differences of the

Gospels. You are a senior research professor of New Testament Studies at Dallas Theological Seminary, host and co -founder, or founder and co -host, sorry, of The Table podcast.

And I wanted to jump in and discuss the Gospels with you because I feel like I'm not 100 % clear on how they came to be.

I mean, if we look at my recordings over the last year, I had a moment in this podcast where I said, wait, the

Gospels are the same story told four different ways? And I've been a Christian my whole life and I didn't know that. I mean, maybe I just wasn't paying attention in church, but I do think it is worth the conversation to dive a little bit deeper into, well, if this is the same story told four different ways, why did we need that?

And if that was the approach, why didn't we do that for every book of the Bible? But before we jump into it, I wanted to welcome you,

Dr. Bock. Thank you so much for coming on the show. How are you today? I'm doing great and happy New Year, Cassie, and it's great to be with you.

Thank you so much. Happy New Year to you too. Do you mind jumping into a little bit how you know so much about the

Gospels? Was this a theological study or kind of like God putting you in the right place at the right time? Well, I mean,

I'm in my 43rd year here of teaching at Dallas Seminary. I've been in one place the whole time.

And when I came on the faculty in New Testament, I was a specialist in the

Gospels from my doctoral work and have really never left that space in many ways. I'm very focused on Luke Acts in particular, but I've now written commentaries on all three of the synoptic

Gospels, which are Matthew, Mark and Luke. Those are the Gospels that pretty much overlap with each other. John is about 88 percent unique to him.

So it's seen as a distinct take on Jesus. And you raised the question earlier about why do we have four portraits?

And of course, we don't have anything directly from Jesus himself. We sat down and said, this is my gospel authored by Jesus the

Christ. By the way, Christ isn't the last name for Jesus. It simply means Messiah. Great clarification.

Yeah. So I tell people, yeah, Jesus had turned in a driver's license. Christ wouldn't be the last name.

Anyway, we ended up with four Gospels, I think, because you're seeing four different people's reactions to the same significant figure.

So sometimes when you have a significant figure, you'll get multiple biographies of that person, of course, written by different people with different sets of concerns focused on different things to produce a slightly different angle on things.

And so I my comparison is and I'm going to use an old illustration here to show my age is four

Gospels, a little bit like quadraphonic sound. OK, speaking is sound coming out of four different speakers, not exactly the same sound, but basically the same tune woven together to tell and give a richer awareness of what this piece of music is in the case of quadratic sound or who

Jesus is in the case of Jesus. Really interesting. And did you mention that these are biographies or would these be narratives?

No, they wouldn't be biographies because, well, they are biographies in one sense. They're they're not autobiographies.

They're not obviously written by by the person themselves, but they are studies of life. But they're ancient biographies.

They're not modern biographies. That's important because, for example, if I were to ask you, so what did

Jesus look like? What was his height? What was his build, et cetera? We would have absolutely no clue about that in in what we get from the

Gospels. In a modern biography, I can't imagine a modern biography not telling you some of that.

We actually know very little about his family background. We only have two of the Gospels that delve into his birth directly and his family life of any sort.

And vast years are missing. Whereas in a modern biography, you would probably develop the background of the figure before you get to whatever it is they accomplished.

Ancient biography was basically concerned with with presenting what the person did and why that is an example for us.

And so that's what the Gospels fundamentally are. They're ancient biographies of Jesus told from different angles.

In some cases, the concerns have to do with issues that were very much tied to Israel and Judaism of the first century.

And in other cases, there's a wider concern for what Jesus means for all people of the world.

Luke is written from that broader perspective. Matthew is written from that tighter perspective.

Mark's kind of a mix. And John is looking at things from heaven down. One other feature about the

Gospels that's important is I tell people the synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke are told from the earth up.

You start with categories that you're used to about people, and then you watch it dawn on people who

Jesus is. John is told from heaven down from the very first verse, you know, where John is going in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was

God. This is CNN. I mean, right from the very right from the very first verse, you know what's going on and where he's taking things.

And he's very direct about the total authority of Jesus from the very start. That's where we get deeper.

John and the rest of the gospel before we get too deeper into the differences between each one, I'm still stuck on how this kind of came to be.

Because like you said, this isn't like a typical biography that's like, well, when he was a kid, this is what it looks like. Kind of like what you said, this was tied to political things that were happening.

But I guess like my brain is so logistical that it's thinking like, OK, so did the disciples like hang out and then they would take like five minutes of reading time to start recording this?

Like, how did it even become recorded? Because like walk me through that timeline of like logistically, were they looking at cross -referential text that you usually do when you develop a biography or were they just keeping diaries that we then found to create the gospels?

OK, so I got to tell a new story and it goes like this. In the beginning, we're in an oral culture. Yes. OK, we're not in a written culture.

We're not in a digitized culture. We're not in a culture of books. We're in a culture of oral stories and that kind of thing.

So actually, the timeline is the events happened somewhere in the 30s and they were passed on by word of mouth in the context of an oral culture literally for for several decades, probably two or three decades total.

And then someone got the idea of I'm going to start recording these. Now, why do you do that? You do that because when you had the original oral history, you had the eyewitnesses who people who walked and talked with Jesus, who were alive, who could tell those stories.

But when they start dying off, if you want to keep the account of those stories, you've got to record them.

Yeah. And so it's like with the Holocaust survivors or survivors of World War Two, you know, in the 90s, all of a sudden people started documenting their stories so that they would have them after the people who experienced these things had died and passed off the scene.

So in one sense, that's why you have the gospels. You have the gospels to preserve the testimony of those who were close to Jesus before they pass away.

And this was done by four different individuals, two of whom were closely connected to Jesus as part of the

Twelve, Matthew and John, and two of whom had connections into that circle.

Mark probably through Peter and then Luke through that his contacts with the apostolic circle as a whole and Paul as well.

So that's why now why we ended up with four and not more or less. Who knows?

Four were the four that the church accepted and received and then passed on.

Yeah. When you say oral, I think that it's kind of hard for me to wrap my head around because when we think of like the oral culture that exists today, it becomes a rumor mill.

It becomes a version of the story that was before. But kind of how how did this look when it came to an oral society?

Would it be like campfire stories? Would it be classrooms or would it be, you know, I, John, experienced

God in this way. I'm going to tell the story every day to my children. And then when John's about to die, they say, whoa, whoa, whoa, we need to start writing this one down, because I think for us, it's that disbelief comes in because we can't fathom how an oral society would work without variations becoming introduced.

So what you have, you mean you do have some variation, but the variation is not a variation of substance. It's just a variation of of the presentation of detail.

The gist is always going to be the same. And the answer to your question can be answered in one word, the apostles.

The apostles were the 12 who walked and talked with Jesus, spent three and a half years with him in his ministry.

That's how long we think the ministry ran for. Wow. And and we're with him on a daily basis and really knew him.

In fact, when Judas had to be replaced in the first three and a half years was how long Jesus's ministry last.

That was it. And it's impacted the whole world for this. Yes, exactly. What? Yeah, yeah.

Why did I think it was just like since day one he was preaching like as a baby? Three and a half years.

So, yeah. What? Yeah. And then the 12 just traveled throughout the world.

They were they were with him throughout that ministry. So that when Judas, who committed suicide because he betrayed the

Lord, was replaced, he was replaced with someone who had been with us, quote, from the beginning.

So the Acts one makes this point. So was he also named Judas? No, he wasn't.

Mattathias ended up being the 12th apostle. And and so so I'm so sorry for another question.

I mean, so the so the so the point is the people who are apostles really knew what

Jesus did, said and taught. They were with him three and a half years, you know, day after day, place after place, teaching after teaching.

They knew what he taught. Actually, I actually love to tell this story. I once was asked to teach a class at the

University of Michigan and then participate in a doctoral seminar on Jesus afterwards that was hosted by a

Jewish professor. And he began by saying, well, we don't have anything directly from Jesus. We don't know very much about him because of because we don't have anything directly from him, et cetera.

And that's how he started out. And so, you know, it became my turn to speak. And I said, well, let me run a little experiment here.

There happen to be 12 students in the room. And so I said, I see you've got 12 students here.

And I imagine as they pursue their doctoral studies and they listen to you to teach week after week, year after year, that they are going to know what you're teaching these are by the time they graduate.

Yeah, I said, that's the apostles. That's what they that's what they that's what they learned.

That's what they passed on. And you're not going to get those stories word for word the same.

They're going to come from 12 different people or from different people. They're going to be told in different ways with different emphases.

Another joke that I like to tell is there are two ways to tell stories, to be a detailed person or to be a brief person, a soundbite call, a soundbite person versus a footnote person.

The soundbite person tells you very briefly what you need to know, answers your questions very directly.

The footnote person gives you all the background before they get to the answer. So my joke is, if I ask my wife if I have to be at dinner tonight, she will go through my daily schedule before she tells me whether my presence is required or not.

But if she asked me if if she has to be at dinner tonight, she will get a yes or a no. And that will be it.

I have a friend who has a German wife. This is not gender related. If you ask Ursula, if Hall has to be at dinner in the evening, you'll get a yeah or a nine.

But if you ask Hall, who I've nicknamed Dr. Google, I've taught classes with him, he knows more about more stuff and trivia than anyone

I know. I say he will start with the history of hospitality in the year of 300

B .C. and bring you up to the present and then tell you whether your presence at dinner is required or not. So people have different styles about the way they tell things and the way in which they go about doing what they do and saying what they say and explaining and telling their stories.

And that's the differences that you see in the Gospels. Yeah. OK, I'm still stuck on the three and a half years.

Oh, my gosh. With the Gospels, I mean, it's just so random, if I'm going to be honest, why we have four, because it argues, well, why didn't we have

Aaron's perspective when it came to Moses and Aaron? Why didn't we have both of those of like, well, Aaron was down at the bottom outside.

And I went to that look like when they started getting the golden calf together versus, do you know what I mean? I'm not trying to start anything, but I get

I tease people that when we get to heaven, there'll be a press conference and God will be able to answer some of these questions.

OK, but the reality is when we get to heaven and that press conference time comes, we probably won't care.

Yeah, we probably won't. OK, so let's get into it. So the differences between the four

Gospels, what was do you think that was like a perfect selection of having people look up towards heaven and down from heaven, someone to be a doctor versus someone to be more of a lay person?

Could you explain like what you found in your logic behind the reasoning of these four different perspectives, especially if there were 12, why these four?

Well, I think, you know, we got four because four were produced and four were produced from the circle and, you know, and why that is.

I mean, there wasn't a there wasn't a great public relations meeting beforehand saying, you know, how can we promote our dead

Messiah who's been raised from the dead that people went out and did their ministry and some people committed to writing a gospel.

And when we ended up with four that the church received and recognized had particular value, they recognized their their value and their and their deep belief that they were inspired, that they they served the church well.

And so they became the four Gospels that people utilized and circulated. And they do have different interests between them.

They have an array of concerns that they have. I mean, a simple illustration of just look at the genealogy between Matthew and Luke.

In Matthew, the genealogy goes back to Abraham and it stops. Why? Because Matthew is interested in particular in how

Jesus relates to the nation of Israel and the promises made to her of a Messiah. Why did that matter to Matthew?

That mattered to Matt because he was Jewish. So they were all Jewish. The first generation of believers were all

Jews, you know, and then the gospel went out into the world to the Gentiles. And that's Luke.

So he was bridging the Jewish the Jews to the Gentiles there. He was actually dealing with the inner internal conflict of why it was that some

Jews believed in Jesus and other Jews didn't. So so that's actually what

Matthew, in part, is dealing with. And Luke and Mark tell that story, but alongside of it, particularly

Luke, has a concern for how the gospel went out into all the world. He writes a sequel called

Acts. Hollywood did not invent the sequel. Luke did. And so so he writes it, which is the story of the early church coming off of the ministry of Jesus and how the gospel went from being focused on Israel to how it became something that went out into all the world.

And he tells that story very selectively, but he tells it. And so so Luke's genealogy doesn't stop at Abraham.

It goes past Abraham. It works all the way back to Adam because it works all the way back to how

Jesus is the answer for all humanity. Oh, as that concern from the very beginning in the early part of the gospel, when

Matthew is citing the ministry of John the Baptist and he cites Isaiah 40 to talk about a voice crying in the wilderness, he cites that passage and he's done.

When Luke cites it, he reads on and gets down and all the world will see the salvation of God to show that universal, all nations scope that he's concerned about.

So it's so some of what's going on is related to the concerns that the writer has about what it is they're trying to present about what

Jesus said about particular issues. Oh, my gosh. OK, so this is you've got so much information.

I'm like, I just it's amazing. OK, so Matthew was worried about clarifying that Jesus is for the

Jews. OK, that's why he goes back to Abraham. So he was their Messiah. They should have accepted him and they didn't.

And so he's asking the question, how did that happen and why did it happen? And what do we think about that happened?

And was that the mistake that it happened? All those kinds of questions. And he's answering that issue of Jews not believing in Jesus, whereas Luke was saying, no,

Jesus isn't just for the Jews. He's for everybody in the world. And that's why he has a

Matthew in spots makes clear that Jesus is is for all the world. But the issues that he's concerned about having people understand are the internal Jewish debates that are going on about Jesus at the time that he's writing, because you have some people who believe in Jesus who come out of a

Jewish background and some people who don't. Yeah. OK, so that's Matthew, that's

Luke. And then what were like the roles before we move on to Mark and John, what what was Matthew? What was

Luke? What were their jobs? He was one of the twelve. OK, Matthew was one of the twelve. Luke was a companion of Paul, but he also and he was he mentioned he was a doctor.

But the other issue for Luke circulated in these apostolic circles when he writes acts, it's clear he has contacts and awareness and relationships of the church in Jerusalem, which was the origin, original church in many ways of the early church community.

And he also has contacts in a place called called Antioch and which is in a more Gentile mixed territory.

He's very aware of what that church is doing. In fact, acts as a kind of back and forth, a ping pong game between what's going on in the church in Jerusalem, what's going on in the church in Antioch.

Antioch happens to be the fourth largest city in the Roman Empire at the time. So it's a it's a big deal.

And so bigger than Jerusalem. And so in population in a in a travel, a commercial hub for the for the

Greco -Roman world. So so there's that going on. And Luke has contacts both with Paul and with the apostolic circle.

So that's where he fits. John is an apostle. Mark, according to the early church remarks of Papias, he wrote in the early second century, tells us that Mark was in in conversations with Peter.

And so his tight connection, the apostolic circle was with Peter, who is generally regarded to be the most visible of the twelve.

So let's move on to John. Got it. Got it. OK, so Matthew's for the

Jews. Luke is for everybody to be included. What is Mark doing with his? Mark is Mark is also kind of got a mixed audience in mind.

But Mark is different than the other two gospels. And then if you read Matthew and you read Luke, you'll see a lot of discourse material, a lot of Jesus' speeches.

OK, Mark is interested in what Jesus did. He's less interested in what Jesus said. So you have, for example, you have the

Sermon on the Mount. Jesus is strong, ethical teaching in Matthew. You have a shorter version of that in Luke called the

Sermon on the Plain. But this is basically the same material. Mark doesn't have any of that, even though it's regarded as one of the most important things that Jesus taught.

Mark does. Mark's not interested. Which is insane, because I think some people are like, well, what are these contradictions that one person mentioned this, another didn't?

It clearly didn't happen. But I think it's just an issue of choice is about what's emphasized. What Mark wants to highlight is what

Jesus did and the way in which he visualized his ministry and showed what he was about by the way he interacted with people and who he interacted with and how he interacted with them and how he served them.

You know, one of the key elements of the Gospels, everyone gets discusses, well, there are miracles present, but don't miss what the miracles are designed to show.

They're designed to show how God cares for people. And so so that's that's what

Mark is focused on. I want to tell you what Jesus did and how he showed his care for people by what he did and how he ministered to them.

That's what he said. And he's highlighting this idea that comes out of Christianity about servant leadership, that even though Jesus was the son of God, he came to seek and to serve the lost.

And he was was a servant in in the most, I'm going to say, elevated sense of that term. That's what Mark is doing.

And was that because why? Why was Mark's version needed? Was it because that people were just looking too hard?

We think that Mark is the first version written. So of the four Gospels, Mark came first.

So the first version came along and basically said, here's what Jesus is doing. Here's what Jesus did.

This is why he got attention, et cetera. Then Matthew and Luke come along and they say, well, you know, we don't have a lot of Jesus teaching here.

We should probably put a little bit of Jesus teaching. Mark, you really left out a lot of the Jews. Yeah. So, well, he's the action guy, you know, he's you know, we like action movies, right?

You go to an action movie. You don't watch an action movie for the discourse that's in the movie. You watch the action movie for the action.

So Mark would fit in wonderfully in the 21st century. And so but Matthew and Luke come along and add substance to what it is that Jesus taught gives us that.

And then John comes along and says, now I'm going to I'm going to pull back the veil. I'm going to show you who

Jesus really is. Everybody sit down. It's John's turn. Yes, exactly right. And he clearly signals this because by the time he writes, the other

Gospels are probably reasonably well known and circulating. And he makes a decision.

I'm going to tell you stuff they didn't tell you. And as I said, about the numbers vary, but 80 or 90 percent of of John is not in the other

Gospels. So and he is discourse heavy. He most of John are these exchanges that Jesus has at various points in which he's teaching theology and revealing who he is.

And so that's the focus in John. OK, OK, my next question is going to be about timelines.

But if I'm summarizing this, you essentially Jesus dies and then Mark comes out with his rendition. He's like, whoa, whoa, whoa.

We got to write this down. This is what happened. And then Luke and Matthew are saying kind of missed out on like some of the core values here.

Let us explain further each with their own intention of either global inclusion or the Jewish lineage.

And then John's like, let me come out with a memoir of my personal experience with Jesus because I'm the beloved.

Is that like the right interpretation? Yeah. And now you got to put dates on it. Yes. So Jesus's ministry is debated.

We have questions about where exactly Jesus fits in Roman history, whether he goes from 27 to 30 or 30 to 33 again on this three and a half year model that we're talking about.

Got it. And so but somewhere in the late 20s or early 30s, Jesus ministers and dies most.

Well, say it this way. Many people will put Mark in the 60s, early to late 60s.

So three decades down the road, you're beginning to lose your major apostles. Because that's just when the text emerged.

There's been oral tradition for the last 30 years. They're passing. Actually, Mark is built around, in part, teaching content, even though he didn't have much teaching.

What he does have are these little pronouncements and things like that. They aren't full discourses. And and then

Mark, sorry, Matthew and Luke share about 200 to 225 verses, somewhere between 20 to 25 percent of each of their gospels that overlap with the teaching.

And what we think existed was a source of Jesus's teaching that was circulating either in a written form or oral written form mix.

Here's Jesus's teaching on various topics. And you take your pick. And this was circulating in the churches.

And both Matthew and Luke utilize that material. We've nicknamed with the scholars nickname,

Acue, I think it stands for Quella or Source. And so so this is a teaching anthology of Jesus.

Yeah, there's it's. And so they drew on that together along with what they themselves knew and had determined and put the gospel.

So there's teaching material circulating through the church. They're telling the stories in their worship services about what

Jesus said and did. And finally, someone says, well, rather than doing this piecemeal from Sunday to Sunday, someone needs to write it all down.

And Mark, we think, was the first one to do that with his action sequence. And then and then

Luke and Matthew come along. Some people put Matthew and Luke also in the 60s, but later in the 60s, others put push them as late as the 80s.

Oh, so they're like a few decades later. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's unlikely. None of the gospels mentioned the destruction of Jerusalem directly as something that has taken place.

What do you mean? Why is that relevant? The destruction of Jerusalem was when Rome overran Jerusalem, destroyed the temple, reasserted their authority in Israel and massive, massive conflict with Judaism, not with Christianity.

And Christianity was barely big enough at that point. And so it was a massive trauma for Judaism.

Think about it. Judaism was a religion that believed in one God and they had one sacred place of worship.

That was the temple in Jerusalem. You destroy the temple. OK, which year?

This is 80, 70. And Jesus is said to have predicted this, this fate for the city.

I'm sorry, you said 80, 70 isn't like 87 years. No, AD 70, so year 70.

OK, and so so it's destroyed in 80, 70. But none of the gospels looks back and says, oh, what

Jesus predicted took place. Interesting. OK, so conservatives tend to draw theological conservatives will tend to date

Matthew, Mark and Luke before AD 70. For that reason, people who are theologically more moderate or liberal tend to push it out into the 80s.

And there's a variety of things going on with those dates, including the idea that Jesus couldn't have predicted the destruction of the temple in AD 70.

So the fact that there's a such prediction predicted means that it's taking place after the fact.

And that's being put in the mouth of Jesus. OK, it's one of the things that distinguishes conservatives from liberals, how they handle the

Bible. And so, of course, the problem with that is, is that you've got to be politically blind to not think that Rome was not capable of overrunning

Israel if Israel had gotten a conflict with Rome, because Rome was so powerful. So and Jesus believed that Israel was in covenantal unfaithfulness for not accepting him as the

Messiah. So if God was going to judge Israel. For unfaithfulness, the way he would have done it, as he had done for centuries, was through other nations overrunning

Israel as Babylon had done and as Assyria had done. And in the way

Rome conquered cities was to put them under siege, which is part of what

Jesus predicted. So all you had to do was be an astute observer of of the political realities in first century

Israel, believe that Israel was at risk of being judged by God. And that would be how the judgment would take place.

And so that's not such a hard thing to predict. You just had to watch, you know, the ancient forms of CNN and Fox to know that that was coming.

And so, yeah. And so so anyway, so that's that's so the timeline is events in the late 20s or early 30s.

Jesus crucified and raised the churches forming and emerging. It's being passed on orally. This teaching collection is being gathered in the worship services.

They're recalling what Jesus said and did. And Mark comes along and says, I'm going to write it down. We're losing the witnesses.

I'm going to write it down. Around 30 years later, around 30 years later in the 60s.

And then Matthew and Luke follow pretty quickly after that on a lot. If you push into 20 years later, it would be a it has to be what it's either 60s or 80s because if it had been in the 70s in the aftermath of something as traumatic as the destruction of Jerusalem, it surely would have been mentioned.

It's like a my analogy is 9 -11. Right. In the years right after 9 -11, you couldn't talk about Islam and not talk about 9 -11 in the same breath.

OK, now we don't do that anymore. But there was a time when that was a given. If you did one, you did the other.

So it's like within this window of if it was near it, it would have been mentioned. But over time, it would have been moved on from it would have been reduced in significance.

So those who date it later will put it in the 80s. And then John, who I haven't mentioned up to this point, generally speaking, is dated in the 90s.

So a few people put him in the 60s as well, but he's likely to be more likely to be in the 90s.

The suggestion is, is that is that these other gospels that circulated and and had been digested by the community, if I can say it that way.

And John came along and said, now I'm going to tell you the rest of the story. Talk about recent documents.

I mean, that timeline was so helpful. But I guess, again, like I maybe I'm just uninformed, but I truly believe that it was like, oh, around 100 years after it emerged.

But literally 30 years after that, there are people still alive who there were still people who are alive who had experienced

Jesus at the time the gospels were being read. In Saint, but wouldn't it take forever to write them?

I mean, I'm just thinking about I know. I mean, it depends. I've written 45 books in my 43 years of of of work.

So again, I'll be like you, Dr. Bachar. It just depends on how how how focused someone is on getting something out.

So, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, OK, just think, I mean, that was so clarifying. I've never heard it explained that way.

So thank you. But other than Matthew, which one of the gospels do you think is the most relevant to Gentile Christians?

You know, like you and me today, Luke, no doubt. And Luke, Luke, I refer to Luke as the orphan of the gospels.

OK, so, yeah, as the orphan of the gospels, I'll explain. So let me explain this. In the beginning, Matthew and John were the most popular gospels of before because they were directly associated with apostles.

And so people came along and said, these are the people who are closest to Jesus. These are the gospels that really count. In fact, for almost five or six centuries,

Mark was almost totally ignored, OK, because he was the shortest of the gospels. He didn't have all that teaching.

He was short. Yeah, he was short. He was the shortest, not short in height, short in length. OK, all right.

Yeah. Yeah. Mark was only five foot six. I mean, you know, so. Disregard. Yeah. So the shortest in length.

And so so Mark was basically largely ignored until about the fifth or sixth century. And Matthew and John tended to be the gospels the early churches would write about.

And Luke was sitting out there. But except for his involvement and connection to Acts, which refracted back on Luke, Luke was basically sitting there because a lot of it overlapped with Matthew.

So if you did, Matthew, you had Luke. That was the kind of thinking in the 18th century as scholars were thinking about the origins of these gospels.

And Mark became viewed as the most likely to have been the first gospel written.

Mark goes up the steps and takes center stage in the discussion of the gospel.

And he has a prominent place and everything refracts off of how the other gospels utilized this short version of the gospel that Mark had produced.

Matthew had already had center stage as an apostle. John already had center stage as an apostle.

And Mark now joins them. OK, and Luke is still there off to the side doing his own thing over there.

Well, Luke never made it to the central stage, even though. He's the longest gospel.

He's longer than not in chapters, but in but in verses and in words, he's the longest gospel.

In fact, Luke wrote more of the New Testament than anyone else, even more than Paul. You put

Luke and Acts together. You've got about 30 percent of the New Testament. You put the writings of Paul together.

You've got about 29 percent of the New Testament, and then the rest is split up on the rest of the writers.

So Luke wrote more of the New Testament than anybody else. His gospel is the longest, more than his gospel, his gospel longer than John, his gospel, his gospel is.

In fact, he's about 300, 350 verses longer than John. Matthew's closer.

Matthew, Luke is just slightly around 100 verses longer than than Matthew. Anyway. Luke has more ethical teaching of a variety of topics than the other writer, 50 percent of the parables that we have from Jesus come from Luke alone.

OK, so I'm sitting here saying he's an orphan, but he certainly ought not to be.

OK, he ought to be a very important part of the conversation about what the gospels offer when they tell us about Jesus.

And so my career has been spent in Luke Acts. Basically, that's where I started off in zeroing in on the gospels.

This is so interesting. Yeah, I feel like when I was like, hey, I should read my Bible. Where do I start?

My mom was like, John, John's great. You should start in John. But are you arguing Luke and Acts? Oh, I'm.

Now we're back to the earth up versus heaven down thing. OK, OK, so let me go there. The church loves

John. The reason the church loves John is John does all the heavy lifting about Jesus for people by saying who

Jesus is so very directly, not very subtly. It's John is you're in your face gospel.

OK, I'm going to give you Jesus and I'm giving him I'm going to present him to you like a two by four. OK, I'm going to whack you in the head with Jesus.

All right. Whereas and that's because it's heaven down. You know who Jesus is from the very start.

You know, he's the God man from the very start. Matthew, Mark and Luke all tell the story of Jesus from the earth up.

Now, my next point is that's how everybody experiences Jesus. Everybody who experiences

Jesus experiences Jesus from the earth up. OK, no one is born and comes to Jesus way they're born.

They get the swat of life and they go where, where, where Jesus, the second person, the ontological trinity, where, where, where no one comes to Jesus that way.

The way you come to see who Jesus is. Someone sits down and explains to you the uniqueness of Jesus and who he is.

You get him from the earth up. And what I say to the church is we love the gospel of John because it does all our heavy lifting for us.

But the person that we're talking to needs Jesus from the earth up. And you're saying heavy lifting simply because it does the work for us of making

Jesus God, explicitly presenting Jesus as God, whereas the synoptic gospels show how that understanding emerges.

Yeah. OK, so he likes synoptic gospels are more subtle in how they do it.

And John is saying this is what was really going on. And and like I say, it's

Jesus with the two by four. And so and and then the synoptics over here and you're watching it dawn on people.

You know, Jesus performs a miracle and the disciples ask the question, who's this who's able to command the winds and the waves and they obey him?

OK, and so they're kind of there. Who is this mass marauder? What's going on here?

You know, I mean, yeah, they had an explanation that he was the deliverer and they had the hope that he would be the Messiah.

But they weren't expecting a messiah, you know, so and so it dawns on them who

Jesus is. And and you watch that happen. That's exactly how people come to Jesus.

Someone sits down, explains them his uniqueness. And so the church needs to learn how to tell those stories from that perspective.

And the God and the synoptic gospel tell you how to do that. John is the hard launch of Jesus. Yeah, exactly.

Everybody else is the soft launch. Why John? This is getting more theological. But like, is it because John was given visions that the others were not?

No, I don't think so. I mean, the others had it. The others had very much a sense of of who Jesus was, etc.

But he decided, I think, that that people were missing the subtlety of the way the gospels were retelling the story.

And he wanted to say, this is what's really what's going on. I call John the NFL gospel upon further review.

OK. All right. I've got I've got the events in front of me. Right. And I kind of know the storyline.

But here's what's really going on. And when you get a second or third look at something. All right.

All of a sudden you start to see things that you didn't see when it originally happened. And in spots, John even says that when

Jesus comes in on the donkey and there's the allusion to Zechariah nine about, you know, someone coming in on the back of a donkey,

John says, you know, this was an allusion to Zechariah and the president's presentation of a humble messiah.

But we didn't get it at the time. We only understood it after he was glorified. So it's upon further review.

So put on your zebra stripes, go over to the Microsoft screen, review the play and read the gospel of John.

Yeah, it makes me think of like Steve Irwin, like in the bush being like, this is what's happening. We're experiencing in lifetime.

That's kind of like the synoptics versus like John is more like he's in the confessional for a reality show.

He's like, yeah, that happened. And I reacted like this. This was crazy. You know, it's much more personable. Oh, remember, one of the perspectives that you have is how you tell a story.

I can tell a story by reminding people this is what it was like to be in the middle of the event. OK, and this is what

I now see it means. OK, so and you have that choice, you can tell it as a mix, you can tell it from one perspective or the other.

That's one of the things that produces the differences between us. Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh.

I feel like there are so many guides out there there. It's like, OK, well, what are the differences between the four gospels?

But this this is what I needed. So thank you. Oh, my gosh. I just like it's clear as day now before I was like, which one's the

Messiah? Which one's the Jewish savior? I could not remember it. OK, I'm looking at my notes, but we're just like hitting all of my questions.

We already talked about man. Do you feel like we talked about manuscript? Well, we haven't talked about manuscripts, so let's talk about manuscripts because manuscripts mean that man use wrote the scripts.

Man, use a way of talking about hands. OK, OK. So, you know, I love when it's clear.

That's exactly right. Well, the problem is we don't we've lost the original languages that some of these words come from.

So so manuscripts. Yeah, we have thousands of them. And we have so much evidence for the this is true.

The New Testament is a whole not just. And when you say manuscripts, you mean like ancient? I'm talking about 14th century and earlier before the printing press.

Like there were just like copy and copy the wording of the text.

So his version and then people just copied it and people just copied it. They just passed it on.

They passed the text on and they were written on paper and paper wears out over time.

All right. You know, it doesn't stay around forever. So you got to if you got to I got to make a new copy. You know, they didn't have a

Xerox machine. There wasn't digital space. You couldn't scan. I mean, because it was on papyrus and that just disintegrates.

Yeah. And it eventually disintegrate has a life of about 100 years. And so unless it's preserved in certain kinds of environments and then you can preserve it.

So we have manuscripts from the 15th century and earlier that run in the fifty nine hundred region for Greek and in over 8000 when it comes to Latin, because the

Bible was primarily in Latin for several centuries. That's the number of copies. That's right. Those are handwritten copies.

The reason I have a Bible today is because there were people who sat down and word for word copied the contents of the

Bible on manuscripts so its contents would be preserved. And we're talking about thousands of people over thousands of years.

That is amazing. This might be a dumb question, but do we have Mark's original copy? We don't have any originals.

No, we don't have any originals. The oldest sliver of a manuscript that we have dates from around 125

A .D. It's a it's a portion about the size of a quarter. Oh, it has portions of John 19.

But so that means maybe like a manuscript of John's. But again, if my copying is good, doesn't matter how manuscript is.

Question is the character of the copy. Right. And so and we have so many of them, we can compare that.

We have a we have a pretty good idea of what 90. I would say we have a pretty good idea of what 99 percent of the

Bible is. And we can say that without any question. There's another 1 percent that gets discussed, but we know what the options are.

So, in other words, we know what the options for the wording are. One of the things that's interesting about Greek, Greek is what's called an inflected language.

Its words have endings that tell you how that word functions in the sentence. I can put words in any order

I want in Greek and make sense out of the sentence. I can put the subject first. I can put the subject last.

I can put the object first. I can put the object last. I can put the verb first. I can put the verb last because of the way

Greek is constructed. And so this so many of the variations are variations in word order.

They're actually saying the same thing. It's just that the Greek words are in different order. There's not new characters being introduced or like new events that are suddenly happening.

Well, no, I mean, there are some substantive differences that exist between the manuscripts that get discussed.

But when we're asking the question, do we know what the wording of the Bible is?

This is not true of just the Gospels. We know what the word of the Bible is. The answer is basically yes. It's the most well -attested ancient document by miles over any other ancient document we have.

And we have a lot of ancient history that we talk about. Not just because like the number of copies, but because it was written so soon after the event itself.

Well, that helps too. I mean, because if you look at some of the ancient history works that we have, sometimes the manuscripts that we have are centuries removed from the time when the work was written.

Right. So, oh yeah. So the timescale between the manuscript tradition and the number of manuscripts that are early is significant.

And then just the vast number of them that we have that have circulated help us to work back to what the original wording was, even though we don't have the original.

Again, another dumb question. Is the Dead Sea Scrolls part of the manuscripts of the Gospels? Nope, completely different discussion.

Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of a Jewish community living in the desert that has basically said

Jerusalem got it wrong. The Jewish leadership in Jerusalem has this wrong. We're waiting out in the desert for God to come and redeem our nation.

And we are the righteous who are waiting for God to vindicate us. And so they went out in the desert to do it.

They separated out from the society. And this is their library. The Dead Sea Scrolls are their

Jewish library, basically of Jewish resources. There isn't any New Testament stuff there that deals with either copies of the

Old Testament, what we call the Old Testament now, the Hebrew scriptures, or other Jewish writings that have been written up to that time.

Got it. So where did we find the New Testament Gospel manuscripts? Everywhere.

They were just like preserved in libraries. Yeah, they were circulating. They weren't in a cave. They were in libraries and that kind of thing.

So they were there in churches, they were in a variety of places and people preserved them and we had them.

And until we got to the printing press, or not to the printing press until the 1500s, until we got to the printing press, that was how the

Bible was produced. It was produced by manuscripts. Wow. That was so clarifying.

And you read your Bible today, I can't say this enough, you're able to read your Bible today because thousands of people sat down and at one time word for word copied certain portions of the

Bible so it could get passed on. And that would take their whole life to do one copy of the Bible? Well, I don't know if it'd take their whole, again, we're back to how fast does someone produce something, but they would dedicate their lives to making those copies.

There were certain people who were scribes, professional scribes whose life was dedicated to making those copies.

That's what, what do you do for, what do you do for a living? Oh, I'm a scribe. Okay. All right. I get paid by the letter.

No, I don't know. I would imagine with my handwriting, like they have to be perfect because you screw up page 58.

Don't you have to start back over? Well, some of the, you know, we have these copies. We can look at them. Some of them are beautifully done and some of them are beautifully done.

And then some of them you go, that person need to go to calligraphy school. So yeah, there's no backspace back then.

Exactly right. No, no. And there's no, and then there, there, I don't think there was anything like a whiteout that you could do.

Remember when you used to have the type, this is probably before your time, typewriter, when you mistype something and you put white out and you typed over it.

That would be my arts and crafts. I would just like not know how to spell. So I would just white out. Man, we are hitting so many things.

The next thing I want to talk about was the gap, but we already talked about the gap. What was happening between when it happened and when it was written. But yeah, that was the world.

You have this apostolic oversight of that tradition, which is controlling, you know, there's one scholar who likes to tell the story of, well, things got made up.

I mean, you walk down the street, it's like, it's like the telephone game, you know, the, the game and you tell a story at the beginning and you pass it on and you see what the story is at the end.

And so all kinds of things, all kinds of mess happens along the way. No, that it wasn't that open.

And it wasn't that random. It was being controlled in this apostolic circle. Okay. Who knew what

Jesus was doing and saying, and that group was also trying to keep an eye on, you know, what made it into the churches.

So I tell people when Mark's in his gospel by FedEx to a church and said, Hey, I'm introducing this gospel.

They knew it came from Mark, you know, they, they, he had a return label in case it didn't get delivered.

No, I don't know. Wow. Wow. I feel like just from an entry level position, this was such a good clarification on the gospels.

Are there any other like pockets of discussions writing the gospels that you wish people were talking about? Oh, there's all kinds of stuff.

I mean, it's in, it's endless, but I mean, because, because all we've done is we've taken a 30 ,000 foot flight, you know, over the gospels as a group, but within each gospel, there's its own story, you know?

So yeah, there's all kinds of stuff. I mean, that's, you know, like I said, I've been in this space for 43 years and I'm still learning.

I love that. Yeah. His word is so inexhaustible, inexhaustible. I love that. Okay. Well maybe you'll come back on and we can dive into one of those pockets.

Sure. This has been an amazing conversation. Oh my gosh. Thank you so much for outlining that.

Okay. We can, you know, before we do any plugs or anything, what would you want to leave any listeners with when it comes to the gospels as far as either approaching it, something just to give encouragement?

Well, I think, you know, you hear a lot of skepticism about the gospels and the way the gospels work and this time gap thing is one of the things that comes in, et cetera.

I hope that what we've done and talked about helps you to see that the way in which that tends to be characterized and portrayed is not a reflection of what likely was going on.

And, and as a result, because coming out of a Jewish background and Jewish tradition where they were used to dealing with important ideas in an oral context and passing them on from generation to generation, that's the context out of which the gospels emerge.

Yes. Wow. Wow. Okay. That was amazing. Well people are probably amazed.

They probably want to know more. How can they get in contact with you either through your classes, through your podcast, through any works or books?

Well, the main thing that we, I mean, the main way to get to a lot of this information is just to look at some of the books that I've written on because I've written on,

I've written on all the gospels in one way or another. I've done detailed commentaries on three of the, well, on two of the gospels and then one's getting ready to come out.

And then the only gospel I haven't written a detailed piece on is John, but I did a book called

Jesus According to Scripture. And that book works through every passage in the gospels and tries to discuss where it fits in that particular gospel and how it relates to how other gospels handle this material.

And as well as tell and tell a story about what Jesus was doing when you put it all together. So, so that's probably the easiest way to get information about gospel content for me.

I'll link that in the show notes for anybody that wants to buy it. But any other speaking events, any courses that we can take?

I'm out and about all the time and I'm away from Dallas as much as I'm here. So, but the main, the major way is the table podcast.

I mean, then you're going to have links to the table podcast and to the Hendricks Center, which is a part of Dallas Seminary. It's a

Christian leadership center. And we do Christian leadership and cultural engagement. My major role now at the seminary is not teaching

New Testament, but talking about cultural engagement, talking about how theology speaks into life in where we are.

And so, and how Christians should think about that space, which is challenging. So, so that's, that's where the bulk of my stuff and the table podcast is a reflection of those conversations.

Got it. Got it. What are some of the topics you guys have covered recently? We cover everything. I mean, welcome to the table.

We discuss issues of God and culture and I'm thinking while I'm saying that means we discuss anything and everything. Okay. So you'll take like cultural news and apply it to the

Bible. It's not so much cultural news as, as cultural issues in a general kind of way.

In other words, we, we aren't, we aren't event specific, but we do talk about areas. So, you know, so we'll, we'll talk about, we'll talk about legal issues.

We'll talk about, we'll talk about vocational life, how you think about your work.

We'll talk about raising your family. We'll talk about the controversial issues, sexuality, pornography, et cetera.

I mean, it covers a whole range of things that people are coping with today.

It talked in some cases we'll do shows like this that are about, you know, where'd the Bible come from, what's going on there.

We also do focus on what's going on in different parts of the world with Christianity.

That's another thing we've gone through. We did a presentation on Eastern religions and their relationship to how to think about them as Christians, that kind of thing.

So, so it's a whole array of stuff. I'm, I co -host it with five others.

We rotate, comes out every Tuesday. There's a new episode. We never do a series in sequence.

It's always a new topic. Staying alone, we're building the series in the archive that we create behind it.

Yep. So that, so that as we do episodes in different areas, they're grouped together by the area that they're connected in the archive.

But we never, if I do 12 weeks on a topic, someone's not interested in, I got to get them back after 12 weeks.

So we don't do it that way. I love that. I love that. Yes. This is so relevant.

And even how Christians should approach Eastern religions, you're talking about like Buddhism, Hinduism, that kind of stuff. We have, we interviewed people, but we didn't do it.

We didn't do it the way it traditionally gets done, which here's what Buddhism teaches and here's what Christian teaches. And here's what

Christian has to say is wrong about Buddhism. We didn't do that. What we did was we said, what is the core belief of this faith?

And what, what makes it, what is its real, what is, what makes Buddhism, Buddhism? What makes Hinduism, Hinduism?

What do they believe? What's their core belief? And then we ask, what are the, what I call the

Velcro factors. What would attract someone to being a follower of this faith?

What is it that makes it stick? That is a good question. Okay. What is it that makes it stick? Okay. And then the last question that we ask is how does the gospel speak to that Velcro?

Oh, what's the name of that episode? I'll link it below. It's a series on Eastern religions. It's a series on religions of the world.

Okay. Okay. I'll check that one out. That's a great place to start. Yeah. And we interview people who either have come out of that background or have ministered into that background as part of the way they either grew up or have lived.

And we're asking them those questions and asking them to explain faith to us. When we did, when we did some religions that come out of Japan, we interviewed someone who had been a missionary, had grown up in Japan and had been a missionary to Japan for years about, about what that experience is like, what they believe, et cetera.

Wow. Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Gerald Bach, thank you so much for coming on the show. This was so needed.

And I, I don't think I could have Googled this YouTube this or found this anywhere. So thanks for saving me thousands of dollars on seminary.

No, no, no. You need to spend a little bit of shekels, come to seminary. But anyway, I appreciate you.

I'll link everything we discussed in the show notes below. You and I will connect offline for the next episode because I would love to have you back.