opinions and musings

  Welcome to my 8 th post on the gospels.   In this post I want to wrap up the study of the synoptic gospels and in my 9 th post I will look at the gospel of John.           There are two areas I haven’t mentioned yet where Matthew and Luke diverge:     -The birth stories       -The resurrection appearance stories Remember, the gospel of Mark, which was probably written first, has neither birth stories nor resurrection appearance stories.  Mark does contain the story of an empty tomb and a call to meet the resurrected Jesus in Galilee, but it ends there. In Matthew, the birth stories center around Joseph.   Matthew tells us that before marriage Mary was pregnant. Joseph was told in a dream to marry her because this pregnancy was from the Holy Spirit, and she will bear a son named Jesus who will save his people from their sins (Matthew 1:18-21). When the wise men from the East come to visit, Joseph,...

  Welcome to the seventh post in my series on the gospels. I realized in preparing this post that I haven’t yet included the testimony of early church leaders about the gospels. That’s important to consider, so let’s look at that. As I stated before, each of the four gospels was originally an anonymous document and in the 2 nd century the names Matthew, Mark, Luke and John began to be associated with them.   Our earliest testimony about gospel authors comes from a church leader named Papias writing around 140 CE.   Papias wrote a five-volume collection called Exposition of the Sayings of the Lord . We don’t have any surviving copies, but we have quotations of that work from the 4 th century church historian Eusebius.   Papias was the bishop of the church at Hieropolis, which was a city in modern-day Turkey. According to Eusebius, Papias wrote, “Matthew compiled the sayings [logia of Christ] in the Hebrew language, and each interpreted them as best he cou...