Letter Four: History, Legend, or Propaganda?

Letters to an Honest Skeptic

Dear friend,

At the end of my last letter I asked you to read the Gospel of Luke, as skeptically as you liked. If you took me up on it, then you have already met the author I want to talk about this time. If you did not, this letter may persuade you to, and nothing in it requires that you already have.

The question on the table: the four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, are the documents that carry the record of Jesus. Are they history, legend, or religious propaganda? Everything I will ever ask you to consider depends on the answer, so it deserves a careful one.

How legends begin, and how Luke begins

Notice how a fairy tale opens. “Once upon a time, in a land far away.” No date, no named officials, nothing you could check, because there is nothing to check. The story floats free of the real world on purpose. Now, you might object that some legends do better than that. The legend of King Arthur, in the versions most people meet, is full of named kings and dukes and real British places. Fair enough. Hold that example, because we are going to check the dates on those names in a minute, and Arthur is going to end up being my best witness.

Now here is the opening of Luke’s Gospel, and I quote it in full because it is the author explaining his own method:

“Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile an account of the things accomplished among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, it seemed fitting for me as well, having investigated everything carefully from the beginning, to write it out for you in consecutive order, most excellent Theophilus; so that you may know the exact truth about the things you have been taught.”

Eyewitness sources, named. Careful investigation, claimed. An orderly account, promised. “Exact truth,” stated as the purpose, to a named recipient who could check the work. Luke was a physician, an educated man, and it shows. And when he begins the public story two chapters later, he writes, “Now in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea,” and goes on to name five public officials in two verses. That is a date on a public calendar. A man does not anchor his account to checkable rulers unless he expects it to hold.

Maybe Luke investigated poorly, or lied. Those are fair possibilities and we will test them. But be clear about what kind of document this claims to be. It claims to be testimony about real people, in real places, at a real time. It does not ask to be read as myth, and reading it, I think you will agree it does not feel like one.

The timing problem

Here is a fact about legends that historians take seriously: legends need time. Generations of it. A legend cannot take root while the people who know better are still alive to pull it up.

Now collect on the King Arthur example. Arthur is supposed to have fought his great battle around the year 500. The one British writer working within living memory of that war, a monk named Gildas, describes the very campaign Arthur supposedly won, and never mentions any Arthur. The first surviving text that names him at all was written around three hundred years after the events. Those named kings and dukes, the checkable-sounding parts, arrived more than six hundred years late, in a twelfth-century book whose own contemporaries called it invented. Lancelot, the Grail, and the Round Table came later still, from French romance writers. That is what legend growth looks like on a timeline: silence from the eyewitness generation, a first mention centuries out, and names and detail accumulating with distance. The parts that sound most like history are the newest parts.

Therefore, the decisive question for the Gospels is when this testimony dates from, and the answer runs in the opposite direction.

The Gospels were written within the lifetime of the eyewitness generation, and not only the friendly witnesses. The authorities who arranged the execution were still in office, still in Jerusalem, with every motive and every means to kill the movement with one piece of evidence, a body, a credible counter-witness, anything. No such evidence was ever produced. The movement was announcing a resurrection in the same city where the tomb could be walked to.

But the record runs earlier than the Gospels, and this is the piece most people have never been shown. When Paul wrote his first letter to Corinth, roughly twenty-five years after the execution, he quoted something older than his own letter:

“For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that He appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. After that He appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom remain until now.”

Look at the two verbs, “delivered” and “received.” In Paul’s world that was the formal language for passing on a fixed tradition, the way an apprentice receives a trade. Paul is not composing that summary. He is repeating a creed he was taught, and the historical chain puts his receiving of it within a few years of the events themselves. Scholars across the spectrum, including skeptical ones, date that creed remarkably early, precisely because of that technical language. And notice the sentence Paul attaches: most of the five hundred witnesses “remain until now.” He is telling his readers, in writing, that the witnesses are alive and can be interviewed. A man does not put that sentence in a public letter unless he is confident of what the interviews will produce.

There is a second example. In Paul’s letter to Philippi there is a passage about Christ, who existed in the form of God, emptied Himself, became obedient to the point of death on a cross, and was highly exalted. Many scholars judge from its poetic structure that Paul is quoting an early hymn, words the churches were already singing before his letter arrived. Therefore, the highest claims about Jesus, deity included, are not late decorations added after the witnesses died off. They are the earliest layer we possess.

The objection I hear most runs, “Too much time passed. The story grew in the telling.” The dates themselves answer it. Arthur’s grandest claims are the newest layer of his story, added six centuries out by men who never met a witness. The grandest claims about Jesus are the earliest layer we possess, fixed within a few years and published among living witnesses, hostile ones included. Arthur grew. The gospel was born whole. There was no time for legend, and there were too many living people who knew what had happened, on both sides of the question.

The embarrassment test

One more check, and it is a standard one for any ancient document. When a detail makes the author’s own side look bad, historians count it as almost certainly true, because nobody invents material that embarrasses his own cause.

Run the Gospels through that test. The founding leaders of this movement are recorded as slow, frightened, and quarreling over rank. Peter, the foremost of them, is recorded denying Jesus three times, with curses, on the worst night of his Master’s life. Jesus’ own family is recorded saying He had lost His senses. And the first witnesses of the empty tomb are women, whose testimony carried no legal weight in that world. If you were inventing a resurrection story in the first century and wanted it believed, women are the last witnesses you would choose. An honest reporter, though, would be stuck with whoever was actually there.

Propaganda flatters its founders. These documents embarrass theirs, consistently, page after page. Therefore, they read like what they claim to be: testimony from men reporting what they saw, including what shamed them.

Where this leaves the question

Three findings. The Gospels present themselves as investigated eyewitness testimony, anchored to a public calendar you can check. The core account is demonstrably early, fixed within a few years of the events and published among living witnesses, hostile ones included. And the documents preserve exactly the embarrassing details an inventor would have removed. Legend does not behave this way. Propaganda does not behave this way. Records behave this way.

I am not asking you to conclude tonight that everything in them happened. I am submitting that “the Gospels are just legends” is a sentence the evidence will not carry, and that these documents have earned what any serious testimony deserves, a hearing on the merits.

Which raises the real problem, and I will be honest with you about where this is heading. If the Gospels are sound history, then the Man in them said things no ordinary man is permitted to say. He forgave sins that were not committed against Him. He accepted worship. He put Himself in the place of God, in front of people who stoned men for less. A legend can be admired from a distance. A historical Man who talked like that has to be dealt with.

That is the next letter. If you have not read Luke yet, you still have time to get ahead of me.

Your friend, Mark

Letters to an Honest Skeptic is written alongside a study our church walked through together. You’re welcome any Sunday, questions and all. Walshville Christian Church, Walshville, Illinois.