Eyewitness Accounts
The four Gospels contain eyewitness accounts (and first-hand reports) of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.
Jesus was born of a young virgin in the town of Bethlehem, perhaps in October of 6 or 5 BC.1 After his mother, Mary, and his adoptive father, Joseph, fled to Egypt on account of the murderous designs of Herod the Great, the family relocated to the town of Nazareth in lower Galilee, where Joseph served as a carpenter. Apart from a brief account of Jesus’s interaction with the rulers of Jerusalem when he was twelve years old (probably in AD 7 or 8), we hear no further details about the life of Jesus until the beginning of his public ministry, which likely began in late AD 29 and continued until his death on Friday, April 3, AD 33.2
Jesus’s relatively brief public ministry began with his baptism and wilderness temptations, continued with his authoritative teaching and miracle-working power, and culminated in his atoning death at the hands of the Romans and Jews, followed by his resurrection and ascension.
Scripture gives us eyewitness accounts of what the most important person who ever lived said and did during the most important week of his life. It may be helpful to review some of the basics in order to set the stage and to remember the context of the four Gospels.
Combining a chronological arrangement of the biblical text with insightful commentary, this book serves as a day-by-day guide to Jesus’s final week on earth, complete with a quick-reference glossary and color maps.
Who Wrote the Gospels?
Though the information has been doubted, there is good reason to believe that the Gospels were written by four men who were in the best possible position to recount what Jesus said and did.
Matthew and John, the authors of the first and fourth biblical Gospels, respectively, were members of the Twelve; John was even part of Jesus’s inner circle (together with Peter and James).
Mark, the church fathers tell us, wrote his Gospel in close association with the apostle Peter, also one of the Twelve and a member of Jesus’s inner circle as well as the preeminent spokesman of the Twelve.
Luke, finally, while not himself an eyewitness, sought to conduct a careful investigation of these events and acknowledges his dependence on “those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word” (Luke 1:2). (The word he uses for “eyewitnesses” is autoptēs, a composite of two Greek words meaning “to see for oneself.”)
As John writes in his first epistle,
That which was from the beginning,
which we have heard,
which we have seen with our eyes,
which we looked upon
and have touched with our hands,
concerning the word of life . . .
that which we have seen and heard
we proclaim also to you,
so that you too may have fellowship with us. . . .
And we are writing these things so that our joy may be complete. (1 John 1:1–4)
The result is that those of us today—reading the accounts two thousand years later—share an experience expressed by Peter:
Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory, obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls. (1 Pet. 1:8–9)
Why Were the Gospels Written?
As eyewitness accounts of the events surrounding Jesus’s first coming, the four canonical Gospels demand our utmost attention. Why were they written? John says it most clearly:
Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name. (John 20:30–31)
Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God—he is the promised, longawaited Servant of the Lord who came to save us from our sin so that by believing we may have “life in his name.”
Underneath this united, overarching purpose, we can recognize that the four Gospel authors wrote four complementary accounts designed for four distinct audiences. They used theological and literary selection in order to highlight certain aspects of Jesus’s ministry, each painting a true and faithful portrait of the one Messiah.3
The tax-collector-turned-disciple Matthew (Levi), writing to a Jewish audience in the 50s or 60s, emphasizes Jesus as the Jewish Messiah predicted in the Old Testament, the son of David who comes to establish the kingdom of heaven.4
Peter’s “interpreter” John Mark, writing to Gentiles in Rome in the mid- to late 50s, shows Jesus as the authoritative, suffering son of God who gives his life as a ransom for many.
Luke, a Gentile physician and travel companion to Paul, was writing a two-volume work around 58–60 to give an account of the truth of the faith to a man named Theophilus (who may also have paid for the publication of Luke–Acts), showing that Jesus is the savior of the world who seeks and saves the lost in fulfillment of the Old Testament promises to Israel.5
John, the beloved disciple of Jesus, was probably an old man when he composed his account in the mid- or late 80s or early 90s, written to the church in Ephesus to demonstrate that Jesus is the messiah who demands belief and the lamb of God who dies for the sins of the world and gives those who believe eternal life.
One of the more interesting differences between the Gospels is the strategy used to begin their biographies of Jesus’s life and work. The Synoptics (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) begin in history, first recounting either the announcement of the birth of Jesus or the announcement of his prophetic forerunner John the Baptist. John, on the other hand, begins before history, in heaven, emphasizing the eternal relationship between God the Father and God the Son before the Son took on human nature. This is one of the reasons that the Synoptics are marked by greater similarity and overlap, whereas John often highlights other aspects of Jesus’s ministry as part of his overall strategy.
But the question still remains: Would it not have been easier simply to provide one authoritative account of Jesus’s life rather than four versions that at times don’t harmonize very easily?
The answer is, first of all, that the early church did not consider our four Gospels as four separate Gospels but as one Gospel according to four different witnesses—the Gospel (singular) according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The early church had it right: there is only one gospel message (not four!), but for reasons of his own God chose to provide us with four (rather than just one) eyewitness accounts of this one gospel.
Second, remember what we said earlier about the nature of the Gospels as eyewitness testimony. Like witnesses in the courtroom each recounting what they saw, using their own words and recalling events and statements from their unique perspective, the Gospel writers each tell us how they witnessed the unfolding story of Jesus (or in Mark’s and Luke’s case, how their firsthand sources did). This should in fact enhance our appreciation for the four biblical Gospels, not diminish it! Demonstrably, the four evangelists did not sanitize their accounts or somehow streamline them so as to make them artificially cohere; they were unafraid to tell the story of Jesus each in his own way, without fear of contradiction— because they were all witnessing to the one story of Jesus, the one gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. Remember also that when the Gospels were written and published, there were still plenty of eyewitnesses around who could easily have disputed the veracity of the Gospel accounts—but we are not aware of any such challenges. For this reason we have every confidence that the one Gospel according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John is reliable.
As eyewitness accounts of the events surrounding Jesus’s first coming, the four canonical Gospels demand our utmost attention.
Did It Really Happen?
Our primary response to the Gospels is not to criticize or to find fault but to believe. As we celebrate Easter, we can do so with a grateful heart and with the assurance that the Easter story is true— historically and theologically. Even though the primary design of the Gospels is for us to believe in this Messiah and to become his disciples, this does not mean it is illegitimate to explore the Gospel accounts intelligently. As Augustine and others after him have rightly asserted, faith of necessity seeks greater understanding. Our faith and our intellect should never be separated, as if (as some detractors allege) we were called to throw away our minds at conversion and blindly believe contrary to the evidence.
Critical scholars, with limited success, have sought to establish criteria for assessing the historicity of various teachings and events in the Gospels. One such criterion is the criterion of multiple attestation, according to which Gospel material is likely authentic if it is found in two or more Gospels or other ancient sources that are not dependent on each other. While it is widely held that Matthew, Mark, and Luke are in some way interrelated, John’s account may classify as an independent witness to many of the same events as those recorded in the so-called Synoptic Gospels (i.e., Matthew, Mark, and Luke). This would underscore the likely historicity of these events using the criterion of multiple attestation.
Another criterion is the criterion of dissimilarity, according to which Gospel material is likely authentic if Jesus’s teachings or actions differed from first-century Judaism or the practice of the early church. The early church, so the argument goes, would hardly have fabricated material that embarrassed the first Christians or weakened their stance in interaction with Christianity’s detractors. Instead, embarrassing facts would likely have been omitted from the Gospel accounts. The fact, however, is that the Gospels include many such data that did not present Christianity in a favorable light—the apostles’ rivalry and jockeying for position in Jesus’s kingdom, their desertion of Jesus at his arrest, Peter’s denials, and particularly the crucifixion itself, all at first glance seem to constitute embarrassing information that the church would likely have suppressed—unless these data are historical and the evangelists were honest enough to preserve them despite the fact that they were less than complimentary and do not present their own actions or people’s response to Jesus in a positive light.
However, while these and other criteria are of some value in establishing positively the historicity of certain events recounted in the Gospels, they fall short in many ways, especially when critical scholars are trying to use these criteria negatively in order to disprove the authenticity of these accounts.
Two Ways to Read the Gospels
This, of course, does not remove the need for careful harmonization, that is, reading the four Gospels in tandem and trying to explain any apparent differences in detail of their presentation of individual statements or events. There are two—complementary and equally legitimate—ways of reading the Gospels.
The first is to read the Gospels vertically, that is, to read each account from beginning to end as a self-contained story in its own right. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John each told their own story, and we must respect the literary and theological integrity of their work. This has been increasingly realized in recent years and underscores the importance of using (initially) Matthew to explain Matthew, Mark to explain Mark, and so forth.
The other way to read the Gospels is horizontally, that is, how each relates to the others, as complementary accounts and witnesses to the same historical reality and set of statements and events. Refusing to supplement our vertical reading of the individual Gospels with a horizontal reading is tantamount to the ostrich policy of refusing to acknowledge that while the Gospels tell the same story, they don’t do so in exactly the same way.
As John writes at the conclusion of his Gospel, “Now there are also many other things that Jesus did. Were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written” (John 21:25). This speaks to the inevitable selectivity at work in the Gospels. For this reason we must not assume that just because an evangelist does not mention a given detail, he was necessarily unaware of it or would have disputed its accuracy. Furthermore, we must be careful not to read these accounts anachronistically, imposing artificial limitations or requiring unreasonable precision upon eyewitness testimony and the genre of ancient theological biography.
A charitable rather than critical reading clearly demonstrates that the evangelists are each accurately referring to the same thing rather than contradicting one another. This is consistent with the way that true (rather than artificial or deceptive) eyewitness testimony takes place: different observers remember and choose to highlight different aspects of the one event.
So we ought to read the Gospels sympathetically, giving them the benefit of the doubt, rather than reading between the lines critically, looking for problems. The burden of proof lies on those who would convict the Gospels of incoherence, not on the Gospels to prove their integrity!
Notes:
- Scholars usually suggest a date of 7–5 BC for Jesus’s birth.
- Most scholars believe that Jesus was crucified in AD 30. We are persuaded that the evidence strongly points to a date of AD 33. For an introductory discussion of the issues, see Andreas J. Köstenberger, “The Date of Jesus’ Crucifixion,” ESV Study Bible, ed. Wayne Grudem (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2008), 1809–10. See also Colin J. Humphreys and W. G. Waddington, “The Jewish Calendar, A Lunar Eclipse and the Date of Christ’s Crucifixion,” Tyndale Bulletin 43.2 (1992): 331–51.
- The following dates are approximations, and other scholars may date Matthew, Mark, and Luke later than is proposed here. Very few would date John earlier.
- The date for Matthew depends in part on whether one takes the position that Matthew wrote his Gospel first (Matthean priority) or that Mark was the first Gospel to be written (Markan priority).
- The New Testament writers refer to the Old Testament in a variety of ways. Most widely known is the pattern of fulfillment-prediction, which highlights the fulfillment of messianic prophecy in Christ (e.g., Matt. 1:22–23 citing Isa. 7:14). But there are other ways the New Testament refers to the Old Testament as well, most notably typology. Typology involves an escalating salvationhistorical pattern culminating in Christ (e.g., the serpent in the wilderness: John 3:14 citing Num. 21:9). In addition, the New Testament authors refer to the Old Testament by way of analogy, illustration, and commentary (midrash or pesher).
This article is adapted from The Final Days of Jesus: The Most Important Week of the Most Important Person Who Ever Lived by Andreas J. Köstenberger and Justin Taylor.
