Don't Know Much About the Bible - Kenneth C. Davis [137]
Luke’s author wanted to give his story of Jesus a sense of historical authenticity, and he included Jesus’ age—“about thirty”—when he began preaching as well as specific events—which prove contradictory—for dating Jesus’ birth. Luke’s message was primarily addressed to the non-Jewish, or Gentile, believers, as the church had aggressively begun to reach out to Gentiles by the time Luke was written. It is now generally agreed that Luke also dates from the decades 70-85 CE and that he may have written from the city of Ephesus (in modern Turkey), a leading center of early Christianity.
•John
The fourth book is the Magical Mystery Tour of the Gospels. Complex and profound, it has been attributed to John, one of the disciples closest to Jesus. This Gospel draws a different picture of Jesus’ life and teachings, leading scholars to detect an eyewitnesslike immediately in John. Among the more conspicuous and significant differences between John and the “synoptics” (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) are the absence of descriptions of the birth of Jesus, his childhood, the temptation in the wilderness, the transfiguration, the use of parables in teaching, and the agony in the Garden of Gethsemane. John’s version of the “Last Supper,” in which Jesus eats with his disciples before his arrest and Crucifixion, is presented in an entirely different fashion here than in the other three Gospels. Jesus delivers a long speech to the disciples in John’s “Last Supper,” and the symbolic breaking of bread and drinking of wine are left out of John. Among the other unique elements of John are the only version of Jesus changing water into wine at Cana and his miraculous raising of Lazarus, a follower, four days after his death and entombment.
For most of two thousand years, Christians accepted that John was written by one of the twelve disciples chosen by Jesus. Since the nineteenth century, the identity of John’s author has generated heated controversy. While traditional scholars still believe that John was an apostle and an eyewitness to the events in the book, other biblical historians refute that idea, arguing that a Galilean fisherman could not have written the book’s highly polished and poetic Greek. There are a host of possible “Johns,” and it is now thought that John was written late in the first century, or by 110 CE.
If there are only four Gospels, then what are the “Gnostic Gospels”?
As if these four Gospels haven’t generated enough arguments, somebody had to come up with a few more gospels! In a story combining a little murder mystery with some Indiana Jones intrigue, an Egyptian peasant made an extraordinary find of thirteen leather-bound books in 1945. As recounted by Elaine Pagels in her prizewinning The Gnostic Gospels, a farmer digging near the town of Nag Hammadi, located on the Nile north of Luxor, uncovered these papyrus books in a buried earthen jar. He took them home, where his mother accidentally burned some of the papyrus as kindling. A few weeks later, this man and his brother killed another local man in a blood feud over the death of their father. Fearing that police investigating the murder would discover the books, a schoolteacher sent one to Cairo to check its value on the black market for antiquities. The Egyptian government got wind of the books and confiscated ten and a half of the thirteen books and they were placed in a Cairo museum.
But part of another book was smuggled out of Egypt and offered for sale in