To access the authenticity of events or the existence of historical figures, it is best to have as many independent sources that date as close to the fact as possible. When it comes to the existence of the historical Jesus, we have multiple independent sources, from the New Testament, Jewish sources (e.g., Josephus), and pagan Roman historians. However, this article will focus on the sources for the four canonical Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
Jack Wilkin explains.
St. Mark as painted by Andrea Mantegna in 1448.
Authors
Firstly, it is worth noting the Gospels were not written by who they say they were written by. For example, for several reasons the Gospel of John was not written by John the Apostle. Firstly, the literacy rate in first-century Palestine was incredibly low, with only about 3% of Jews being literate at the time (Hezser, 2001) and far further than that would have been able to write a book as well-crafted as the Gospels in excellent Greek, especially given that the disciples were lower-class Aramaic-speaking rural peasants from Galilee, not upper-class Greek-speaking urban elites.
Furthermore, the Gospel accounts are written anonymously, and all the disciples are mentioned in the third person. If John indeed wrote John, do you think he would mention himself in the third person? John is considered to have been written around 90-110 CE (Lincoln, 2005, p. 18), so if we say that John was 18 at his youngest when he meets Jesus in 30 CE, he would have been between 78 to 98 when the Gospel was written which is possible but highly unlikely. Finally, the text was only identified as John by Bishop Irenaeus in the later second century (Lindars et al., 2000, p. 41). All the Gospels were anonymous and were later assigned their authors by Christian theologians (see the works of Bart Ehrman).
Similarities
The Synoptic Gospels of Mathew, Mark and Luke share many of the same stories and, in some cases, even the same word choices. This has led scholars to conclude that Matthew and Luke almost certainly used Mark as a source. Mark is the oldest of the Gospels being written down around 70 CE, so within around 40 years of Jesus' alleged death in 33 CE. Both Matthew and Luke were written by 80-85 CE, by which point Mark had been circulating for over a decade, so the timeline adds up.
Even though Matthew and Luke used Mark, both accounts also contain stories not found in Mark, such as the Lord's Prayer (Mat. 6:9-13 = Luke 11:2-4) and the Beatitudes (Matt. 5:3-12 = Luke 6:20-22). The simplest explanation for this is that these stories come from another, yet unfortunately now lost, theoretic sayings Gospel, like the Gospel of Thomas, called Q (from the German Quelle meaning source). Furthermore, some lines of text also share the same wording (Mat. 6:24 = Luke 16:13 and Mat. 7:7-8 = Luke 11:9-10), which cannot be a mere coincidence, so it must have come from a shared source.
Comparing the Synoptic Gospels, Matthew burrowed more heavily from Mark than Luke, with Luke being more reliant on Q. However, both Luke and Matthew also contain stories that are unique to that Gospel. For example, Luke has the Parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32) and the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37), while Matthew has the Magi at the Nativity (Mat. 2:1-12) and the Parable of the Sheep and Goats at Judgment Day (Mat. 25:31-46). As an example of this, it is believed that both source accounts relied on older traditions (Luke's is called L and Matthews is creatively called M). It is unknown if L and M were made of a single written/oral account, multiple written /oral accounts made up by the authors or a combination of them. Even Mark is thought to have been a combination of oral and even older written traditions with the Passions of Christ predating Mark perhaps back to 50 CE or even earlier. The idea that the Synoptics share four sources was first theorized by English Anglican theologian Burnett Hillman Streeter in his acclaimed book The Four Gospels: a Study of Origins published in 1924.
Even the Gospels' themselves freely admit that they are dependent on earlier sources. The introduction to Luke (1:1-4) states:
"Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. With this in mind, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I too decided to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught."
John
The final Gospel is John. John is the outsider of the Gospels as it does not seem to burrow from the Synoptics, and when they depict the same events, they are radically different and, at times, contradictory. But even John is not considered by New Testament scholars to be a single source, with Bart Ehrman (2012, p.82) commenting:
"… scholars have long suspected that John had at his dispersal an earlier written account of Jesus' miracles (the so-called Signs Source), at least two accounts of Jesus' long speeches (the Discourse Sources), and possibly another Passion source as well."
So how many independent sources are represented by the four Gospels? The answer, or at least the one presented in this article, is at least eight. That on its own is a considerable number of sources, especially given that Mark, M, L, and possibly the earlier accounts Luke is based on may have derived from multiple oral and now-lost written accounts. That is eight-plus sources for the existence of a historical Jesus dating from within a hundred years of his death. This article does not include the Gospel of Thomas, which is sometimes viewed as independent of the canonical Gospels, the letters of Paul (58 CE) that predate Mark's writing and is also independent, and the other books in the New Testament (Acts, etc.) as these are also independent of the Gospels.
Do you agree with the article? Let us know below.
Bibliography
Casey, M. 2002. An Aramaic Approach to Q: Sources for the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Ehrman, B.D. 2005. Misquoting Jesus: the story behind who changed the Bible and why. Harper One, New York.
Ehrman, B.D. 2012. Did Jesus exist: the historical argument for Jesus of Nazareth. Harper One, New York.
Hezser, C. 2001. Jewish literacy in Roman Palestine. Mohr Siebeck, Tüblingen.
Lincoln, A. 2005. Gospel according to St John: Black's New Testament commentaries. Bloomsbury Publishing, London.
Lindars, B., Edwards, R. and Court, J. M. 2000. The Johannine literature. A&C Black, London
Steeter, B.H. 1928. The Four Gospels: a study of origins. Macmillan, London
