DAY 142
CHALLENGE
“The Gospels don’t reliably convey the teachings of Jesus. The evangelists invented material based on their own views and the needs of their communities.”
DEFENSE
The evidence shows the Gospels are reliable.
Perhaps the greatest controversy in the early Church was whether Gentiles had to be circumcized and become Jews to be saved. This controversy is mentioned multiple times in Acts (10:1–11:18, 15:1–31, 21:25), and it dominates Paul’s epistles of Romans and Galatians. If there was ever a controversy to tempt people to make up a saying of Jesus to settle the matter, it would be this. Yet the circumcision controversy isn’t mentioned anywhere in the Gospels. That is a sign the evangelists did not feel free to make up teachings and put them on Jesus’ lips.
This is also indicated by the way Mark handles the related question of whether kosher laws were still binding. In his account of a controversy in Jesus’ day about why the disciples did not ritually wash their hands before eating, we read of Jesus saying: “‘Do you not see that whatever goes into a man from outside cannot defile him, since it enters, not his heart but his stomach, and so passes on?’ (Thus he declared all foods clean.) And he said, ‘What comes out of a man is what defiles a man. For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, fornication, theft, murder, adultery’” (Mark 7:18–21).
In a traditional Jewish view, unclean hands would defile food and make the eater ceremonially unclean. Jesus indicates this isn’t true, for any dirt contaminating the food would pass out of the body without bringing about true, spiritual uncleanliness. The comment “thus he declared all foods clean” is Mark’s application of Jesus’ teaching to the different question of kosher foods. This shows Mark did not feel free to invent a teaching of Jesus.
A final point is the fact that Paul’s teachings are nowhere quoted in the Gospels. Besides Peter, Paul was the most influential apostle. His letters were among the earliest New Testament writings, and if the evangelists felt free to simply attribute things to Jesus, we would expect some of the things Paul wrote to end up on Jesus’ lips. Yet we don’t, not even in Luke, which was written by one of Paul’s traveling companions.