In this episode Trent examines a recent video from Fr. Casey Cole and critiques his claims that the Gospels are “theology, not history.”
Welcome to The Counsel of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey, everyone. In today’s episode, I want to comment on a video I saw featuring Father Casey Cole that said some things I found to be very troubling. I don’t consider today’s video a rebuttal, per se, but more of a reflection on some things Father Casey said about the historicity of the gospels.
Trent Horn:
So it’s possible that Father Casey and I may be closer on the issue than it seems, depending on how one interprets what he’s saying. By the way, if you don’t know Father Casey Cole is a Franciscan friar, has a popular YouTube channel. He reaches a lot of people. So that’s why I don’t want them to get the wrong idea about the historical foundation of our faith from something he said in a recent video.
Trent Horn:
Also, today’s video is a nice follow-up to my dialogue with Godless Engineer last week on the historical reliability of Luke’s gospel. So if you haven’t seen that episode yet, definitely check it out. And of course, check out our premium community at trenthornpodcast.com, where get access to our full 18-hour catechism study series, New Testament study series, if you want to dive deeper into these subjects.
Trent Horn:
All right, now for some context. In his original video, Father Casey was offering a criticism of a television series called The Chosen, which is a dramatization of the life of Christ. I haven’t seen the series myself, so I don’t have any thoughts on it, but Father Casey seems to like it, except for one particular way it portrays the disciples of Jesus. So let’s see what he says.
Father Casey:
The Chosen is a show of meticulous detail, which is why the biggest problem I have with it isn’t a major plot point, but one of the subtle background decisions they’ve included. Throughout the series, the creators of The Chosen are intent on presenting the gospels as if they were eyewitness accounts, written down as they were happening.
Father Casey:
Both Matthew and John are seen periodically pulling out notebooks, jotting things down and interviewing witnesses as if they were newspaper reporters. There’s a sense, even as the mission is beginning and the disciples still have no idea what’s going to happen, that they were aware of their role as evangelists, that they have been entrusted with sharing the good news in written form.
Speaker 4:
What’s tablet for?
Speaker 5:
Grab it without thinking. You can put it back.
Speaker 4:
No, I’ll keep it. For me, it’s fine just for it.
Father Casey:
Folks, this is just wrong on a lot of different levels.
Trent Horn:
Keep in mind that there are two different issues Father Casey is raising here. The first is whether the gospels are eyewitness accounts. The second is whether the gospel authors wrote down details about Jesus’s ministry as they were happening. Something can be an eyewitness account even if the eye witness writes down what he saw some time or a long time after the event took place.
Trent Horn:
In fact, most eye witness accounts of an event are not written down as the event is happening. Now, psychologists have shown that eye witnesses can accurately recall emotionally compelling events years and even decades after they happened. For example, a 2005 study by Benson and Thompson of elderly residents in the country of Denmark showed their memories were very accurate when it came to remembering things like what the weather was like on the day Denmark was liberated from Nazi occupation 60 years earlier.
Trent Horn:
Those who were involved in the Danish resistance movement had even more vivid memories of those same events that, keep in mind, happened 60 years into the past. So this would correspond to the disciples being able to vividly remember emotional moments of Jesus’s ministry and write them down many years after those events took place.
Trent Horn:
So the main point is that even if the gospel authors did not write things down on notepads, as they were happening, it wouldn’t follow the disciples didn’t later compose eye witness accounts of the events that transpired in Jesus’s ministry. Even if they didn’t write them down as it happened, they could write down their eye witness accounts later.
Father Casey:
It is pretty well agreed upon that the gospels were not written until long after the events took place between 80 and 90 AD for Matthew, and 90 and 100 AD for John. That makes it pretty foolish to think that disciples were writing it as they saw it, and nearly impossible that the disciples themselves were the ones actually doing the writing.
Trent Horn:
First, even if the gospels, as we know them, were written many decades after Jesus’s death, it doesn’t follow that nobody else wrote about Jesus before that point. For example, consider the prologue, the first four verses of Luke’s gospel. This is what Luke writes, in as much as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things which have been accomplished among us, just as they were delivered to us by those who from the beginning were eye witnesses and ministers of the word, it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theopolis, that you may know the truth concerning the things of which you have been informed.
Trent Horn:
So, notice that Luke is aware of many others who compiled narratives about Christ. And it seemed good for Luke to also write an orderly account just like these other people had. These other accounts would also have served as sources for the gospel authors when they were composing their works.
Trent Horn:
We also have to remember that the accounts of Jesus’s life, it didn’t exist only in the apostles memories until they wrote them down decades later. The disciples would have preached and told others about these events many, many times. For example, if Peter, consider this, if Peter told a story about Jesus teaching or performing a miracle once a month until he related it to Mark when Mark wrote his gospel in, say the year 55, Peter would have told this story about Jesus over 200 times.
Trent Horn:
Moreover, Jesus’s teachings were designed to be remembered because they have a poetic quality about them. In Matthew 23:24, Jesus tells the Pharisees they’re so legalistically and rigid they strain out a gnat to avoid ritual impurity and swallow a camel. In Aramaic, Jesus said they strain out a gnat and swallow a camel. So Jesus liked puns. He liked making things memorable for people.
Trent Horn:
And so we also have good evidence. The disciples could remember Jesus’s teachings even if they weren’t written down initially. But did the disciples write down events as they transpired as we see in the series The Chosen?
Trent Horn:
Father Casey is overreaching when he says, this is basically impossible. It is quite possible. Ancient notepads did exist. They used beeswax on clay tablets to write down notes. However, there is no record of the disciples taking these kinds of notes. So we could only consider it a possibility.
Trent Horn:
There is also some dispute over whether the apostles could read and write. Since Matthew was a tax collector, he probably was literate. He had to write receipts. But in Acts 4:13, the Sanhedrin are astonished at Peter and John’s preaching because they “perceived that they were uneducated common men.” The Greek word uneducated in this passage literally means unlettered, which could mean that Peter and John didn’t know how to read or write.
Trent Horn:
However, this may have only been the Sanhedrin perception of Peter and John. Or it could have been a statement they never received formal rabbinic education, but they could still read and write at a basic level. The bottom line is we don’t know. But we do know the disciples engaged in an extensive preaching mission work. And they could have easily learned to read and write during that time period, during the decades that followed Pentecost, if they didn’t already possess those skills.
Trent Horn:
Father Casey also said that because the gospels were written so late, this would have made it impossible for the disciples to have written them. But this relies on a lot of assumptions, and ignores other important facts. First, it ignores the eyewitness connection to the earlier gospels of Mark and Luke. For example, Paul tells us about Luke in his own letters, like in Colossians 4:14. And Luke writes in the first-person plural of accompanying Paul on his journeys in the Book of Acts.
Trent Horn:
The fact that Luke also says in his gospel, Mary pondered things in her heart, shows how Luke recorded unique eyewitness testimony. It explains where he got information about Jesus’s birth and childhood. And the 2nd-century church Father Papias, who knew people, who knew the disciples, this is what Papias tells us about Mark and his gospel. Mark, in his capacity as Peter’s interpreter wrote, down accurately as many things as he recalled from memory, though not in an ordered form of the things either said or done by the Lord.
Trent Horn:
Papias’s description is also corroborated by the numerous references to Peter in Mark’s gospel. So even though Mark and Luke warrant eye-witnesses of Jesus themselves, there is good evidence that Mark and Luke preserved eye witness evidence for us in their gospels.
Trent Horn:
Second, Father Casey’s assertion that Matthew and John could not have written their gospels, that’s probably based on the idea, because he talks about the date of composition, that people didn’t live to an advanced age in the first century. They couldn’t live so long to write them at such a late stage in the first century. But people could live to a long time.
Trent Horn:
Now, child mortality was very high. So average life expectancy was low, but it’s not true that everybody just dropped dead at 40 or 50. If you made it into your teen years, you could live a long time. The Roman senate even had a rule allowing flexibility for senators who were older than the age of 65. So Matthew being 65 or 70, or John being in his late-seventies, writing their gospels, that’s not impossible. But this also assumes that Matthew wrote late into the first century. And we should be skeptical of those claims.
Trent Horn:
There are arguments for John writing earlier, but I want to focus here on Matthew. The common view among scholars that Father Casey seems to be assuming is that Matthew wrote after Mark, and Mark had to have written after the year 70, because mark records Jesus predicting the destruction of the Jerusalem temple, which happened in the year 70.
Trent Horn:
Now, critics say mark and Matthew wrote after the temple was destroyed and added these details back into Jesus’s predictions. There’s a lot of problems with this argument. First it assumes mark could not have just recorded Jesus making a genuinely accurate prediction of the Jerusalem Temple’s destruction before it happened. If Jesus is God, he can definitely make that prediction.
Trent Horn:
In fact, a merely human prophet could have predicted the Jews and Romans were going to engage in a filing conflict just by looking at the sociopolitical circumstances. The Jewish historian Josephus even records a prophet, [inaudible 00:11:36], who warned about the city and the temple being destroyed for years before it happened. So this is something even a human being could predict, but certainly something Jesus being the God-man would be able to predict. So it’s not an argument that they had to have had knowledge and written it retrospectively back into their gospels. It’s not a strong argument. The gospels had to be written after the temple was destroyed.
Trent Horn:
Second, there are several reasons to believe Matthew and mark are writing in a time period when the temple still exists in Jerusalem. For example, nearly everyone agrees Luke did not write his gospel first. And Luke in his companion volume of Acts, he doesn’t record things like the temple being destroyed, Jerusalem being destroyed, the deaths of Peter and Paul. That’s probably because those events hadn’t happened yet for Luke. Which would place the composition of Luke’s gospel in the early-sixties. And so Matthew and Mark would be around that time or before that time.
Trent Horn:
Matthew and Mark also record Jesus telling his audience, “Pray the destruction of the temple does not occur in winter,” even though the temple was destroyed in August of the year 70. But if they were writing after 70, why would they keep this passage of Jesus telling people to pray about something that had already happened?
Trent Horn:
Also as my friend, Jimmy Akin notes, Matthew keeps a story of Jesus and Peter paying the temple tax in order to not offend people. But you see, after the temple was destroyed in the year 70, the Romans converted the Jewish temple tax and turned it into a tax that supported a pagan temple in Rome.
Trent Horn:
Here’s what Jimmy writes, for Matthew, If he was writing after 80, 70 to portray Jesus as condoning the payment of this tax would have risked confusing, alienating, or outraging members of his audience. Jesus could even be understood as financially supporting idolatry so as not to give offense. The inclusion of the passage in his gospel is far more understandable if Matthew were writing before 70 when Jewish Christians still needed to wrestle with the question of whether to support the temple whose officials had rejected and crucified Jesus and whose destruction Jesus had prophesied.
Trent Horn:
Now, I’m not saying this proves Matthew was written at this earlier date. And there are other arguments for and against this position. My point is just that you shouldn’t take Father Casey’s assertion about Matthew being written between 80 or 90 as the last word on the issue. Thankfully, Father Casey does acknowledge other people might disagree with him on this issue, but I wanted to point out in this video why other people like me would do this.
Trent Horn:
So let’s continue with this presentation. But let’s say we disagree on dating and authorship as someone to argue that the gospels are much older than the evidence suggests. The idea that the disciples were writing as they were going, that they had the foresight to think that a written account would be useful later is really hard to accept.
Trent Horn:
These were men who are portrayed both in scripture and the series as having no idea what’s going on. They don’t understand the mission. They grasp the big picture. And they most certainly don’t know what their lives are going to look like in 10 years. Some still think that Jesus is going to leading military expedition to forcefully institute his new kingdom. If that’s the case, why would anyone have need for specific details of little miracles?
Trent Horn:
First, if I saw a miracle like raising the dead, I wouldn’t brush it off as a little miracle that wasn’t worth recording. The gospels are also clear that Jesus performed miracles that no other prophet had ever done before. Such as John’s description of Jesus healing a man who was born blind. As I said earlier, even if the evangelists didn’t write down notes as these events were happening, such events would have been indelibly stamped into their memories and reinforced as the apostles preached about Jesus’s life before they wrote their accounts.
Trent Horn:
Now, it’s true the gospels portray the disciples as not fully understanding Jesus’s divine mission and how it’s going to result in his crucifixion and resurrection. But the apostles do understand Jesus is the Messiah, that he’s a prophet. James and John wants to rule alongside Jesus. And Peter even recognizes Jesus is the son of the living God.
Trent Horn:
So I just agree that the gospels portray the apostles as being so clueless about the events transpiring around them, that they would not have considered them worth recording, or at least vividly remembering. They knew this was important and passed on those recollections to us through a reliably controlled transmission of their eyewitness testimony through written and unwritten means.
Father Casey:
Most Christians in the early days after the resurrection believed that Jesus was returning shortly. There would have been no reason to write anything down or established structures because the world was about to end as they knew it. Rather, the gospel is written down much later by people who never witnessed Jesus themselves. They realized that the second coming wasn’t as imminent as first thoughts, and they needed a way to preserve the experience and oral tradition of the early witnesses.
Trent Horn:
First, Why should we believe that no one thought it was important to write anything down when Paul and other authors wrote many letters during the middle of the first century, that also include reflections on elements in Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection? Second, I’m not sure what Father Casey means by no reason to establish structures.
Trent Horn:
It’s clear the early Christian communities were founded with leadership structures in place to communicate the Christian message to the ends of the earth. This includes laying hands on people to serve as priests, bishops, and deacons. It also includes preserving accounts of Jesus’s life. 1 Timothy 5:18 quotes the part of Luke’s gospel where Jesus says the laborer deserves his wage.
Trent Horn:
This shows that in these communities, the spreading of the written word was considered just as important as the unwritten tradition. No, that will depend, of course, on how early you think 1 Timothy was written. But in any case, there’s no reason to think the imminent expectation of Jesus’s return by some Christians, though not necessarily all Christians at the time would have changed their desire to preserve what Jesus did, both in the written and the unwritten word.
Trent Horn:
Third, the latter part of the statement, the Father Casey makes, this is just an assertion. There’s good evidence against the view that none of the evangelists were eye witnesses of Jesus. So let’s examine each one of the gospel authors. All right? I’ve already given evidence for the eyewitness connection that we can see in the gospel of Mark and the gospel of Luke.
Trent Horn:
When it comes to Matthew, every manuscript we have is true of the other gospels as well. Agrees Matthew is the author of the text. We wouldn’t expect this if the gospel was truly anonymous and no one knew who wrote it. We’d expect manuscripts to have all kinds of different names on it. Moreover, if someone were just making up an apostle’s name to give their gospel more preeminence, we’d expect them to pick a high-tiered apostle like Peter. In fact, this did happen with the legendary apocryphal gospels of the second and third centuries.
Trent Horn:
John 19:35 even describes eyewitness testimony. It says, he who saw it has borne witness. His testimony is true. And he knows that he tells the truth that you also may believe. But even if Father Casey were correct, that still wouldn’t mean an eyewitness wasn’t involved in the composition of Matthew and John’s gospels.
Trent Horn:
For example, it’s possible that a disciple of Matthew or John wrote these accounts and they would have faithfully recorded the apostles eye witness testimony even if the apostles were not involved in writing the actual words of the gospel. For example, there is an ancient tradition that associates John’s gospel with a figure named John the presbyter, or John the priest, who is different than the apostle John.
Trent Horn:
Pope Benedict the 16th wrote about this hypothesis. This is what he said about the presbyter John or John the priest, “He must have been closely connected with the apostle. Perhaps he had even been acquainted with Jesus himself. After the death of the apostle John, he was identified wholly as the bearer of the ladder’s heritage. And in the collective memory, the two figures were increasingly fused, the presbyter and the apostle become the same person. At any rate, there seems to be grounds for ascribing to presbyter John an essential role in the definitive shaping of the gospel. Though he must always have regarded himself as the trustee of the tradition he had received from the son of Zebedee.”
Trent Horn:
My concern is that when Father Casey says the gospels were written by people who witnessed Jesus, this can make it seem like the gospels were written by people who have little, if any, historical connection to Jesus earthly ministry. But if that’s true, then why trust these accounts at all when it comes to what they say about Jesus?
Trent Horn:
Now, I’m not saying these accounts are our only authority when it comes to the deposit of faith, because Father Casey makes a valid point about Sola Scriptura later in the video. But I do believe it’s dangerous to sever the gospels from their historical foundations, especially based on the assertions made in father cases, video that actually don’t have a lot of evidence going for them.
Father Casey:
The disciples weren’t reporters. They didn’t think with modern conceptions of history and storytelling like we do, concerned with capturing the facts exactly as they happened. The people who wrote the gospels, whoever they were and whenever they did it, were theologians. They were writers. They were people not unlike the creators of The Chosen, writing years after the fact, with the benefits of lived experience and community reflection as a means of capturing the significance of Jesus and salvation.
Father Casey:
John absolutely didn’t go around after the resurrection interviewing others. And Matthew, most certainly, would not have said anything like this.
Speaker 4:
We wouldn’t it need to be precise.
Speaker 5:
Why wouldn’t it need to be precise? Mine will be precise.
Trent Horn:
I agree that the disciples didn’t have our modern sense of history, but they did possess an ancient sense of history. Father Casey’s argument is also inconsistent because the gospel authors weren’t like modern theologians either. They didn’t write systematic theologies about the Trinity or the incarnation. The gospel authors weren’t even theologians like the early-church theologians and church fathers who explored allegories and deep spiritual themes in the life of Jesus.
Trent Horn:
Instead, as the scholar Richard Bird shows, the gospels fall into a genre called [inaudible 00:22:47] or what we would call ancient biography. Now, ancient biographies, they don’t record a person’s life in equal intervals from beginning to end. Instead, ancient biographies only recorded the aspects of someone’s life that were the most edifying for their audience.
Trent Horn:
Father Casey is right. The evangelist focused on the significance of Jesus’s mission, but they did so by recording the historical episodes of Jesus’s life that were the most significant. That’s why the evangelists don’t record nearly 30 years of Jesus’s life between his birth and the beginning of his ministry, except when Jesus was found in the temple when he was about 12 years old.
Trent Horn:
So Father Casey is setting up a false dilemma when he says the gospel authors were theologians and not historians. Because you can be both. I. Howard Marshall, makes this very point in his study of the gospel of Luke when he says this, “Luke can be properly appreciated as a theologian only when it is recognized that he is also an historian.”
Father Casey:
For some, this might seem like a small detail. Why does it matter? Well, because it fundamentally affects the way we interpret scripture and approach the authority of the church. If we accept the idea that the disciples were charged with this mission from the beginning, and that they wrote down exactly what happened, scripture comes to be treated as nothing more than a literal, entirely straightforward account of events.
Trent Horn:
Once again, this is a false dilemma. A piece of human writing can be a straightforward account of an event and still be the inspired Word of God that possesses a spiritual meaning for us to consider. After all, the beginning of the Book of Numbers is literally just a census, a bunch of numbers. The beginning of Matthew and Luke, those are genealogies. And many of Paul’s writings or the narratives in the Book of Acts, they simply say where people went and what they did.
Trent Horn:
If we treat them as mere descriptions and not as the Word of God, then that’s our problem. But it doesn’t mean that the word of God can’t also include reliably transmitted, relatively straightforward historical accounts that are rooted in eyewitness testimony.
Father Casey:
And so if what we’re reading is just a retelling of the facts, all we’re concerned with is memorizing and then recreating exactly what we read. But what about the numerous contradictions in the gospels, the minor discrepancies over details and the major structural differences between the Synoptics and John? What about taking the time to ask the question, who was this written for? Why was this story told differently in Luke, as opposed to Matthew? Why are certain stories omitted while others seem completely unbelievable and out of character?
Trent Horn:
I agree with Father Casey that we should not treat the gospels as if they were simply transcripts of what happened in Jesus’s life. That’s not how ancient historians and ancient biographers operated. Specifically, They recorded the gist of what a person said without necessarily preserving every single exact word he said.
Trent Horn:
The ancient Greek historian, Thucydides, said he practiced history in this way. This is what he writes. “With reference to the speeches in this history, some were delivered before the war begun. Others while it was going on. Some, I heard myself. Others, I got from various quarters. It was in all cases difficult to carry them word for word in one’s memory. So my habit has been to make the speakers say what was, in my opinion, demanded of them by the various occasions. Of course, adhering as closely as possible to the general sense of what they really said.”
Trent Horn:
For example, consider what the father says at Jesus’s baptism. In Mark 1:11 and Luke 3:22. The Father says, “You are my beloved son. With you, I am well pleased.” But in Matthew 3:17, the Father says, “This is my beloved son with whom I am well-pleased.” All three evangelists agree that at this event, God, the Father publicly revealed himself in his relationship to Jesus, who is his son. Matthew, Mark, and Luke only differ in the words they use to describe this revelation.
Trent Horn:
Matthew emphasized how the message affected the crowd, “This is my beloved son.” Whereas mark and Luke emphasize how it affected Jesus, “You are my beloved son.” There’s no contradiction because all three writers are asserting the same truth. Jesus is God’s son. They just do so in different ways. But while the gospel authors might use different words to communicate the same truth, the gospel authors didn’t just fabricate this event or treat the story of Jesus being baptized as merely a theological allegory. The story has theological significance precisely because it is historical in nature, or it really happened. Even if the author is vary the smaller secondary details associated with the event.
Trent Horn:
The catechism puts it this way. The sacred authors in writing the four gospels selected certain of the many elements which had been handed on, either orally or already in written form. Others, they synthesized or explained with an eye to the situation of the churches, while sustaining the form of preaching, but always in such a fashion that they have told us the honest truth about Jesus.
Father Casey:
When we read the gospels properly, we recognize that we’re not reading literal eyewitness accounts of people who were there, we’re reading the reflections of faith communities years after the fact trying to convince others of the good news. We must remind ourselves over and over that these are not works of history as we would find in textbooks today, but highly symbolic, artfully crafted works of theology and literature.
Trent Horn:
This kind of argument really concerns me. The idea here is that if we’re puzzled by apparent contradictions in the gospels, we shouldn’t worry about it, because the authors of the gospels weren’t trying to do history in the first place. Well, if that’s true, then why believe the events in Jesus’s ministry even happened at all.
Trent Horn:
Using phrases like “trying to convince others of the good news,” it makes it seem like the gospel authors would just make up stories or episodes if it helped their overall account sound better. But here’s what’s interesting. The gospel authors don’t do this. For example, the authors of the gospels don’t invent a story where Jesus gives a clear teaching on circumcision or a clear teaching on whether you can eat meat offered to idols.
Trent Horn:
Even though these controversies were dividing the church when they were writing their gospels, it would have been really tempting for them to say, well, here’s what Jesus would have said about these issues and they’ll write it as if you really did say that. But the gospel authors don’t treat Jesus as a theological ventriloquist dummy to settle disputes in their time. Instead, they show tremendous restraint in only portraying what Jesus really said and did.
Trent Horn:
Also, this entire way of approaching alleged contradictions in the gospels and scripture as a whole< it’s overly broad. And so it’s just not very helpful. Father Casey tosses out assertions like major structural differences or unbelievable stories without giving us any examples to see if they can be harmonized or explained.
Trent Horn:
In many cases, the differences between the gospel accounts are easy to explain. For example, the gospels appear to contradict each other on which women or women went to Jesus’s tomb on Easter Sunday. Matthew, Mark, and Luke say it was a group of women, but John says it was only Mary Magdalen, or it seems like he says that. But when John says Mary Magdalene came to the tomb early, he wasn’t saying that Mary Magdalen was the only woman who went to the tomb. The gospels agree Mary Magdalene was among the several women who went to Jesus’s tomb. John simply focused on Mary Magdalene in his gospel because he also wrote about her later response to the disciples in his narrative.
Trent Horn:
There are many other examples like this I could share, but I just want to emphasize that I’ve often seen allegations of contradictions between the gospels, but they only involve differing descriptions, differing emphases, or changes in smaller secondary details that were common in the style of ancient biography. And so they’re not ultimately problematic.
Trent Horn:
And finally, this is all very misleading, because Father Casey makes it seem like you can do theology or you can do history, but you can’t do both in a piece of writing. But that’s just not true. In fact, the central element of the Christian faith is that theology became history in the incarnation. Our faith is not about once upon a time. It’s about God becoming man in a discernible point in human history.
Trent Horn:
That’s why the catechism, quoting the second Vatican Council, says in paragraph 126, “The church holds firmly that the four gospels whose historicity, she unhesitatingly affirms, faithfully hand on what Jesus, the Son of God, while he lived among men, really did and taught for their eternal salvation until the day when he was taken up.”
Father Casey:
Not everything has to make factual sense. Not every story needs to fit neatly together in some large narrative. Some things may have happened exactly as they’re written, but some things may be the work of the evangelist, including insights after the fact, making connections that weren’t explicit at the time, fashioning stories together in a particular way to present the truth of the good news and the way their particular readers needed to hear it. What the evangelists created were beautiful tapestries. We mustn’t get lost in the individual thread.
Trent Horn:
Except sometimes people lose their faith because they pull one thread and then the whole sweater starts to unravel. Such as the thread that claims the gospel authors weren’t trying to record history or that they had no proximate connection in any way to the eyewitnesses of Jesus’s ministry.
Trent Horn:
Now, I agree that not every story in the Bible has to line up perfectly. And we might disagree about how to line up the different sources that we do have, but that is way different than saying, well, things just don’t have to make sense. That’s getting dangerously close to fideism, or the idea that faith doesn’t need rational support. Faith and faith is good enough.
Trent Horn:
Now, I’m not saying that’s what Father Casey’s position is or what he’s arguing for, but what he is saying kind of treads dangerously close to that. And I agree that the evangelists sometimes emphasize certain elements after the fact. And we should be aware of this when we read the gospels. Father Casey’s right about that. But understand this does not count against their accuracy. It just shows their true humanity when they were writing.
Trent Horn:
Let me give you an example. Okay? Think about how Mark describes the bleeding woman who Jesus healed. Mark says she suffered much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had and was no better, but rather grew worse. Luke, who Paul calls the beloved physician, on the other hand, he might’ve been more understanding of his peers in the medical community. So him, he simply said that the woman spent all her living upon physicians and could not be healed by anyone.
Trent Horn:
So both the statements and Mark and Luke assert the same thing, the best human medicine could not help this woman. They just describe this particular circumstance in history in different ways. Finally, in some cases, the differences between the gospels, they’re actually evidence for the eyewitness credentials of the people who wrote the gospels, because the differences are subtle and they unintentionally fill in the gaps of our knowledge that could have only come with someone who had intimate knowledge of what originally happened.
Trent Horn:
Here’s an example. Before Jesus miraculously fed 5,000 people, he said, in John 6:5, to Phillip, “How are we to buy bread so that these people may eat?” But why would Jesus asked Philip, a fairly minor apostle, such an important question? Why wouldn’t he have asked someone else like Peter or Andrew, where are we going to buy bread for all of these people? Why does he single out Phillip? The answer can be found in Luke’s account of the feeding of the 5,000.
Trent Horn:
In Luke, he says that this miracle took place outside the town of Bethsaida. Peter, Andrew, and Phillip were all from Bethsaida. So Peter and Andrew could have known the answer. But Mark tells us that Peter and Andrew were currently living in Capernaum at this time. This means that Philip would have been the one who is most likely to know who in Bethsaida was selling things like bread that they needed, because he was the one of the three who most recently lived there.
Trent Horn:
Mark’s account also tells us that before the feeding of the 5,000, Jesus told the disciples to come with him to a quiet place because many were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat. But mark never tells us why so many people were coming and going. The answer to that detail is in John’s gospel. John tells us it was Passover at that time. That explains all the coming and going because historians have estimated that 300 to 500,000 Jews would visit Jerusalem during the Passover.
Trent Horn:
So the point of this example is that all of these undesigned coincidences in the gospels, all of these details, it’s not what we would expect if a forger had fabricated the events, or even if an overzealous Christian community wrote down a theologized version of Jesus’s life that was mostly fictional. But it’s what we would expect if the gospel authors were or had connections to eyewitnesses. And in doing so in writing their accounts, the different accounts casually interlock with each other and explain all the different details of a single past historical event.
Trent Horn:
So if you’re really interested in more of these undesigned coincidences, check out Lydia McGrew’s book, Hidden in Plain View: Undesigned Coincidences in the Gospels and Acts.
Father Casey:
Show so free with its details and imaginative with its narratives, comfortable making up entire scenes and characters. It seems so odd, even contradictory to also have this insistence on assuring us modern people that the stories are exactly as they appear. There seems to be a fear among the creators that people won’t believe the story, that they’ll begin to question the gospels themselves, unless it can be proven that everything in scripture is a fact-checked eyewitness accounts of the things that actually happened.
Father Casey:
I fear that in order to maintain this idea, the show is going to have to engage in some major mental gymnastics to make it all work. This is unnecessary and can be damaging to faith, not only in its interpretation of individual passages of scripture, but in the way that it exalts scripture as the primary foundational source of the Christian faith.
Trent Horn:
There is a difference between saying we can’t believe in the gospels unless we know someone was taking notes, which is false. And we can believe in the gospels even if they aren’t really eyewitness accounts but merely represent faith communities doing theology 50 to 60 years later. It’s a big difference between the two. We should emphasize what lies in the middle that would include controlled oral tradition and approximate connection to the eyewitnesses of Jesus’s ministry.
Father Casey:
And choosing to present the inception of scripture as fundamentally connected to the mission of Christ, existing from the beginning and taking shape even before the community of believers is established with the creators of The Chosen are doing is subtly or not so subtly making an argument for Sola Scriptura, the Protestant idea that scripture is the supreme and only authority for divine revelation, that the community of faith flows from the authority of scripture.
Father Casey:
With this belief, scripture becomes nothing more than a charter, a constitution, a text that existed before the community meant to guide the community. Christian life becomes governed by its adherence to that text. And thus is always looking backwards to its inception. Authority is fixed and the goal of the community itself is to remain static. But this forgets how things actually happened.
Trent Horn:
I see where Father Casey is coming from here. And I agree that if the creators of The Chosen are trying to turn the Bible into our only authority, that’s problematic. If depictions of the gospel authors taking notes is meant to imply that their writings are the only authority we need to understand the life of Jesus, then that’s false. But I mean, Father Casey could have just said that without dragging down the historicity of the gospels in the process.
Father Casey:
Look to Matthew 16:18 and John 20:21-23 for what I mean. In both cases, Jesus gives authority to the disciples to govern themselves. He says that whatever they bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever they loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. Look at the Pentecost event in Luke, the commissioning at the end of Matthew. In all of these cases, Jesus doesn’t say, “And now be sure to read your Bibles and do exactly as it’s written.” No. He leaves the faith community in charge, anointed with the Holy Spirit and reminded that Jesus will always be with them. The community is sent off with the authority to make its own decisions.
Trent Horn:
Prior to his ascension into heaven, Jesus never commanded anyone to write anything down. The idea that a written text would become the Christian community sole rule of faith would have made no sense, especially given that most people could not read or write. And if they could read, books were expensive to create and reproduce.
Trent Horn:
But where I disagree with Father Casey is his vague reference to the faith community, being that to which the deposit of faith was entrusted. Now, in one sense, that’s true since the body of the entire faithful possesses what is called the sensus fidelium or the sensus fidei, the sense of the faithful that keeps the church as a whole united to God’s truth.
Trent Horn:
Sociologists have even shown that in cultures that rely on oral tradition, there is a process where stories are retold communally. The storyteller is allowed to vary the details and use different expressions, but the community corrects him if he gets a major element of the story wrong. This would have been similar in Christian communities that included apostles, priests, and teachers whose role was to communicate these stories, especially in the liturgy.
Trent Horn:
Indeed, an essential element that allows for this controlled process of oral transmission, a controlled process of oral transmission in ancient cultures are these kind of designated storytellers. And in Catholicism, well, we have the magisterium, we have a sacred teaching office Christ gave to the church. The faith community is not an egalitarian democracy. And as a priest, I know Father Casey, he agrees with this. It’s a community that’s led by bishops, priests, and deacons. They make decisions based on the guidance of the Holy Spirit. But they also appeal faithfully to what Jesus had previously taught.
Trent Horn:
That’s why Paul makes distinctions in his own teaching between what the Lord taught and what was his opinion on a certain matter. And in order to make these distinctions, they had to have a reliable record of what the Lord taught. And they did have that. It existed in an unwritten tradition and in written documents. Or as Paul tells us in his letter to the Thessalonians, brethren stand firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by letter.
Father Casey:
The community of faith existed for generations before any gospel or letter was written. It was the community of faith, instituted by Jesus, rounded in prayer and table fellowship, and anointed with the Holy Spirit, that wrote scripture as a means of preserving what already existed, that decided what was authentically revealed, that continues to interpret the proper meaning of scripture.
Father Casey:
Rather than a community looking backwards then, statically bound to live as a people did in a particular time and place, what we see here is a far more dynamic sense of authority. One that moves forward, that engages with the world, that responds to the signs of the times and adapts to be more effective in it. Scripture being the inspired Word of God remains a fundamental guide and living as a Christian and cannot be contradicted. But we must remember that it flows from a more primary sense of authority. One in which the living and true God continues to exist in an inspiring the worshiping community that Jesus established.
Father Casey:
In this sense, the church is not just a group of individuals, each seeking to live the gospels by themselves, the church is the manifestation of and the inspiration for the written word. That is a fundamentally different approach to scripture and church.
Trent Horn:
The Bible did not create the church. The church essentially gave us the Bible. 1 Timothy 3:15 calls the household of God, the church of the living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth. But the church didn’t create the Bible as an ambiguous reflection of later faith communities. The gospels might’ve been tailored to meet the needs of various communities such as Jewish ones versus Gentile ones. But the church gave us these gospels through a controlled process of transmission that preserve the historical aspects of our faith.
Trent Horn:
The first Christians saw their prerogative as one of handing on what they had faithfully received, so looking backward, but also listening to the teachings of their leaders, which would involve moving forward. So Jude can tell his audience to contend for the faith, which was once for all delivered to the saints. While the author of Hebrews will admonish his listeners to obey your leaders and submit to them. Saint Ignatius of Antioch, in the second century, he quotes the gospel of Luke in order to underscore the historical reality of the resurrection. But Saint Ignatius also tells his audience to follow the bishop as Jesus Christ follows the Father.
Trent Horn:
So I agree with what Father Casey is saying here if what he means is that the Christian community didn’t naively practice Sola Scriptura as their sole authority, but I would be concerned if his description could be interpreted to mean that a community of faith with a very loose connection to the historical Jesus compose the gospels only to meet their theological needs instead of the gospels being composed by those who had a close connection to those who witnessed Jesus’s ministry, or even witnessed it for themselves.
Father Casey:
Now, does this ruin the show? Is this a fatal flaw that leaves me saying don’t watch The Chosen? No, not at all. The very genius of the show is that it is not a mere recreation of scripture. It is more than just a dramatic retelling. One of its guiding principles seems to be the power of imagination in Christian life. And I’m okay with it not being 100% factual all the time. Just remember that it is a work of fiction. Just to remember that it was created by men and women with their own particular theology, their own particular lens on the gospels, their own agendas, conscious or unconscious. There are definitely moments where their evangelical theology sneaks in and it can subtly affect us if we’re not careful.
Trent Horn:
This is an important point to remember with any artistic depiction of Jesus. For example, many paintings of Jesus show him with European features, even though Jesus would have looked more like a modern Middle Eastern person. Even the first-century Christians, their depictions of Jesus in the early church, they took artistic license, because they showed Jesus looking like a typical Roman who didn’t have a beard, which was not the style among first-century Jews. Now, I enjoy movies about the faith that might take artistic license with the source material. I like The Prince of Egypt, for example. But it’s always important to remember the historical foundations for what we believe.
Trent Horn:
So to close this out, I want to make it clear I do not intend this video to be an attack on Father Casey. I appreciate many of the things that he does, but I do think it’s important not to go so far away from an untenable fundamentalism about the gospels that we creep into a jelly-like modernism, that it can’t contradict itself because it doesn’t say anything of substance.
Trent Horn:
Once again, I’m not saying Father Casey is saying this, I just want to offer my thoughts to keep the pendulum from swinging too far in that direction based on what he did say in this video. But in any case, thank you guys so much for watching. And if you’d like more resources on this topic, I would definitely recommend my books, Counterfeit Christ, Hard Sayings: A Catholic Approach to Answering Bible Difficulties, Craig Blomberg’s work on the gospels. Mike Licona also has a work on why the gospels disagree with one another.
Trent Horn:
So I would just recommend that you check out a lot of those resources. And I just hope that you have a very pleasant day.
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