Why Are There Four Gospels?

Five books, nearly a fifth of the New Testament, have the name John attached to them. Many Christians might think this is John the fisherman, the son of Zebedee, and that perhaps he was the "Disciple who Jesus loved." But the evidence is surprisingly murky. The Gospel never names its author. The letters are signed by someone calling himself only "the Elder." And the author of Revelation says he's John without once claiming to be an apostle. In fact, early Christian writers couldn't agree on who this John or the Johns were either. And they might have even invented a John or two along the way.  Bart joins host Megan Lewis to work out how many people named John we're actually dealing with. Why more Johns may have been invented to solve the problem. Why the claim that the Beloved Disciple wrote the Gospel rests on an appendix somebody else appears to have added. And how can we even discover an author when that author may have held one of the most common Jewish names from the period.

In the summer of 70 CE, Roman legions broke into Jerusalem and burned the temple. The sacrifices that had organized Jewish worship for centuries stopped, and never started again. Everyone in the early Jesus movement lived through it or grew up in its shadow, and every Gospel in the New Testament was almost certainly written afterward. Bart joins host Megan Lewis to look at what the temple's fall did to a movement that was still a small Jewish sect: how the Gospel writers wrote about a world that no longer existed, why Judaism and Christianity both reorganized around texts once the sacrifices ended, and what it means that Christianity's founding documents were all written on the far side of a catastrophe.

As early christians wrestled with their beliefs and theologies surrounding Jesus, they both produced new texts and gospels, and edited existing ones to better fit with specific theological views. What were some of these early heretical beliefs? How did the Church Fathers fight against them? And can we see traces of that battle in the manuscripts of the New Testament? Today on Misquoting Jesus, we're talking about how the New Testament was shaped by theological fights between early Christian groups.

The Bible's world is crowded and unsystematic: ghosts, familiar spirits, demons that cause illness, and the dead who can be summoned. And at times, this world breaks through in ways modern readers don't always appreciate. When the disciples see Jesus walking on the water, their first thought is that he's a ghost. After the resurrection, Jesus has to reassure them he isn't one. King Saul has a medium call the prophet Samuel up from the dead, and it works. So what happened to all those ghosts? Bart joins host Megan Lewis to explore the haunted world the Bible was written in, and how later Christians tidied it into a neater system of angels and demons, heaven and hell. Along the way: why demons were blamed for illness, why Jesus was accused of sorcery, and why believing in angels but not ghosts turns out to be a choice Christians made, not one the Bible made for them.

Most Christians grow up believing that everyone is born a sinner, that when Adam and Eve ate the fruit, humanity inherited a broken nature and a guilt we can't escape. It's one of the most influential ideas in Western Christianity. But it isn't in Genesis, Jesus never taught it, and it didn't take its familiar form until four centuries after him. Bart joins host Megan Lewis to trace where original sin actually came from: what the Garden of Eden story says and doesn't say, what Paul meant when he wrote that sin came into the world through one man, and how Augustine turned that line into a doctrine about every human being from the moment of conception. Along the way, why Eastern Orthodox Christians never fully accepted it, and what changes when you realize this belief has a history.

Do manuscripts prove the Bible never changed? Some Christian apologists have argued that the Great Isaiah scroll (1QIsaa) is proof of an unchanging Bible, that it's "Word for Word" identical to the later Masoretic Text. Some have argued that P52 – a small fragment of John's gospel – shows that eyewitnesses quickly wrote down gospels. In a debate with Bart a decade back, Daniel Wallace even referenced a first century Gospel of Mark, that turned out to be a stolen manuscript that was eventually dated much later. For some modern Christians and apologists, manuscripts are "proof" of something... that the Bible is unchanging or perhaps inerrant. But can that claim hold up? In this episode, Bart unpacks what manuscripts do and don't prove, and the challenges they raise for people who want to argue for an unchanging Bible.

The Book of Daniel is set in the sixth century BCE, during the Babylonian exile. It describes visions of empires rising and falling — and for a long stretch, the sequence tracks real history with remarkable precision. Kingdom after kingdom, exactly as it happened. Then, at a certain point, it stops being right. That break is one of the most important pieces of evidence. Bart joins host Megan Lewis to explain what Daniel gets right, where it goes wrong, and why the exact point of failure tells us when the book was really written. And Bart will talk about how this book and its ideas may have shaped Jesus' thinking. 

The King James Bible is arguably the most influential book in the English language, and Bart thinks it's a literary masterpiece. He also thinks it's one of the worst Bibles you can study from. In this episode of Misquoting Jesus, Bart and host Megan Lewis trace where the KJV came from, starting with William Tyndale, whose translation it largely reuses and who was burned at the stake for making it. They look at why its unicorns and cockatrices trip up modern readers, and why the words you think you understand, like "conversation," "strange," and "admiration," are more misleading than the ones you don't. They cover the theological choices its translators made, the late Greek manuscripts behind its New Testament, and a 1631 printing that told readers "thou shalt commit adultery." Bart also shares which modern translations he recommends instead. In the listener Q&A: where the doctrine of original sin came from, whether early Christians evangelized door to door, and what Jesus meant about eunuchs in Matthew 19:12.

Around 170 CE, a Syrian Christian named Tatian noticed what a lot of readers have noticed since: the four Gospels don't always agree. So he fixed it. Tatian wove all four into a single, seamless account of Jesus' life. And for roughly two hundred years, in the Syriac-speaking churches of the East, that harmony was the Gospel.  Then the church came for it. Bishops collected copies and destroyed them. Tatian was condemned as a heretic. Today not a single copy survives in its original language — we know the text only through a commentary, some translations, and a sixth-century Latin Bible that still carries its shape. Bart unpacks what Tatian actually did to the Gospels, why the church found it so threatening, and what it means that an entire branch of Christianity once read a Bible we can no longer read.

Most Christians are used to reading four Gospels. But why are there four? Why not one? Or twelve? The early Church thinker Irenaeus fought hard to keep Christians reading all four gospels, but it wasn't a foregone conclusion.  In this episode, Bart unpacks how a four gospel new testament came to be, and what could have been the alternative.