Answers for Doubting Christians

4: The Gospels.

Katherina writes a few initial chapters about the gospels, talking about the teachings in them and a bit about who wrote them. There are a fair number of things I could comment on in those chapters, but overall it’s nothing very important.

So I’m focusing on what she said about the fourth gospel, the gospel of John.

Many scholars have written this chapter off to be a forgery, calling it vastly unreliable. As some of my readers may know, I have studied this a bit and wrote about it in another book which has yet to be completed.

The vast majority of differences between the gospel of John and the synoptic gospels, however, can be boiled down to different stories and focuses.

Now, obviously if you’ve spent three years with someone, you will find that it is impossible to put all the stories into a single book, and it is impossible to recall them all easily.

So instead, what the gospel writers did was record what stories were significant to them individually, and which stories had a lot to do with the overall theme of the ministry.

Every writer had a different take on things, the first focused on Christ as King, the second on Jesus as Servant, the third on Jesus as Man, and John focused on Christ as God.

John’s gospel starts very differently from the others, beginning with the story of creation rather than Christ’s birth, opening up the book as the story of God.

Because of John’s presentation of the gospel, he tells several different stories than the others and focuses on Jesus’ authority as God. In this gospel, it is mentioned that at times He was bold about His identity as Christ, whereas other gospels tell more about the times He chose to keep this to Himself.

As a result, the gospel of John is taken by scholars to be made up, as it does not present the same side of Christ as the others. But this is a very flawed judgement of the gospel.

The gospel of John does not contradict the synoptic gospels in accounts of events, portrayal of Christ, or it’s overall message/s. To toss out one person’s account of an event on the grounds of a different perspective shows a very poor understanding of human beings.

If the four gospels were to be exactly the same in every aspect, that is when suspicions should be aroused. Not when there are different perspectives presented.

In a criminal investigation, a detective expects small differentiations in one person’s account from the next. So long as the main theme of the tale and it’s events remain the same, you can conclude that the witnesses are telling the truth.

But if the stories are exactly the same in every detail, then you know there was careful planning involved in the telling of the story, and it was likely forged.

Final notes;
In her book, Katherina mentions how the Gospel of John was supposedly written last, and that the earliest historical documents are dated as 90-100 A.D.

This is claimed to make it less reliable, however when you take into account that Jesus was crucified in 33 A.D, that leaves a mere 57-67 years between the events and their recordings (based on what evidence we have today, though there may be earlier recordings that were lost).

That’s close enough to the events that most historians, of those who have not dismissed the gospel, conclude that it was likely written by a student of John. Which means that it was not passed very far at all before being written.

This makes it still among the most reliable of historical documents in existence today, and not something that should be dismissed so lightly.