Today we’re going to look at some problems with the Gospels. I’m going to apologize already, since there are a lot of them…enough to fill a bookcase, but this is a blog, so it’s more of an outline. Next week I will post links to some resources if this topic interests you.

We don’t know where the Gospel writers got their sources since they don’t identify sources or even authorship, all we have is a tradition that is known for harmonization. The Gospels include many details, while Paul and Peter’s epistles do not. Since many of these details would have supported points the apostles were trying to make, it would suggest that they were not available. We will cover a few possible sources of the Gospels later in this post, and more next time.

The birth and childhood of Jesus is omitted from Mark, the earliest of the Gospels, as well as from John, the latest.

The next earliest, Matthew, places Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem during the reign of Herod, which would be around 5 BCE. Herod is alleged to have killed all the baby boys in Bethlehem, so they fled to Egypt for a few years, then moved to Nazareth, with no evidence in Matthew that they lived there before that.

With the flight to Egypt they would have more than likely gone to Alexandria, which had a large Jewish population. News brought by people recently arrived from Judea would have spread like wildfire through the Jewish community, especially a story that egregious. This would have surely gotten to Philo of Alexandria, who wrote about everything he heard about the goings on in Judea, but somehow he didn’t mention that. Josephus, who was no fan of Herod and his clan and who chronicled the failings of the Jewish people would surely have written about this too. After all, he wrote about a later Herod beheading John the Baptist and blaming that event for a major military defeat.

Luke has John the Baptist being born and Jesus being conceived during the reign of Herod, but Jesus being born while Quririnius was governor of Syria. The reign of Herod and governorship of Quririnius did not overlap, so according to this story Mary was pregnant for eight or nine years, not months. Then at most a few months after Jesus was born they returned to Nazareth.

The Emperor’s decree for a census would have no bearing on a protectorate (Judea under King Herod). Even worse, a census requiring people to go to their ancestral home is completely absurd, because no census ever wants to know where people where born, they are to find out where people live. Rome was fond of censuses so they could know how heavily they could tax the various provinces. If such a census were to have taken place, it would have not served the purpose of a Roman census, so it surely would have made the secular histories of the era.

Comparing the two stories, we have the Magi and flight to Egypt in Matthew and shepherds and the Temple in Luke. Matthew has Jesus born in 5 BCE, Luke either in 5 BCE or 4 CE. Matthew has Joseph and Mary likely living in Bethlehem before Jesus is born, and Nazareth a few years later, while Luke has them living in Nazareth and only making a few month trip to Bethlehem. The traditional Nativity story is a conflation of the two, favoring Luke, but the two are hardly the same story. Even the genealogies, both tracing from Joseph, have no agreement between Joseph and David.

The birth of Jesus is not traceable to history, at all, and the story seems to be completely made up. All we know is that if there was a Jesus, he must have been born, a fact that hardly even needs mentioning.

The happy family resided in Nazareth before and/or after Jesus was born, unfortunately there is no evidence of habitation in Nazareth for a few hundred years prior to the last half of the first century CE. That’s right, the pottery and tombs date to the late first century. Check out Rene Salm’s work on this. The Greek word to describe Nazareth is polis, which very clearly refers to a rather substantial city. Nazareth was possibly a real city by the time the Gospels were written, but surely not 80 years before when Jesus was born.

So where did the idea of Jesus of Nazareth come from?

Well, Paul was known as being the leader of the sect of the Nazarenes, a derogatory term that was later embraced (much how atheists are just fine with being called Godless Heathens). There was a Jewish ascetic sect called the Nazarenes, unfortunately not much is known about them. So the Jesus that Paul the Nazarene preached about must be Jesus the Nazarene. To somebody who doesn’t know what that means and hears about a town called Nazareth, well, Jesus the Nazarene must be from Nazareth. You even see this confusion playing out in the Gospels, with them moving to Nazareth because Jesus was to be called a Nazarene (Matthew 2:23).

Jesus preached at Synagogues, something that you would not have found in Palestine while the Temple was around, and there is no evidence of Synagogues in Galilee prior to the destruction of Jerusalem, except in two places with large populations of Hellenistic Jews. Synagogues were also only found in large cities, not small towns, of course Nazareth at the time was neither.

The teachings of Jesus closely match those of the rabbis from the second and third century CE. The attitudes attributed to the Pharisees are not recorded anywhere outside of the Gospels, and even worse their student’s agree with their nemesis. It’s seems clear that the Gospel writers created straw men for their hero to fight.

We also have the issue that the basic plot outline of Mark follows that of the Iliad, which was a common tool for teaching people Greek in that era. Matthew tells the same story using Midrash. Luke is a jumbled mess of internally conflicting details based on the same story. John shares very little with the others with a focus on Jesus’ humanity, likely to counter Gnosticism.

What about Jesus’s prophecies of the destruction of the Temple and Peter’s death?

Well, that’s simple. Matthew was written after the Temple was destroyed and John was written well after Peter’s execution. Those “prophecies” are written after the fact and are likely the only real history described in the Gospels. As far as not one stone being left on another from the Temple (Matt 24:2), what about the Western Wall? I know those stones are there, I’ve touched them with my own hands.

While the Gospels contain good moral teachings, they very clearly are not history. Anything that could link them to history is completely missing.

It is worth noting that we have a much different concept of history and myth than people did at the turn of the era. For someone in that time and culture, the line between myth and history blurred. Myth and legend served a purpose, it told a story, not a true story in today’s historical sense, but a true story in a moral sense. The Gospels are the teaching of Christian morals through a story.

That’s right, the Gospels are themselves parables.