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Welcome back everyone to the third session of our Lectio Bible study on Jesus where we examine the biblical and the historical evidence for Christ. In our first two sessions, we looked at the internal and external evidence for the authorship of the Gospels. The authorship of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John by eyewitnesses to Jesus such as Matthew and John, or the companions of apostles like Mark and Luke. And in this session, what I want to do is go a little further into the historical foundations by asking a really important follow up question. Because someone might object, a skeptic might say, okay, maybe the Gospels were actually written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they're true. That doesn't necessarily mean that they're historically reliable. That doesn't necessarily mean that they're historically accurate. How do you know that the Gospels aren't fiction or folklore? What kind of books are the Gospels? That's really what we're asking here. And so this session we're going to be looking at the evidence for seeing the Gospels as biographies. As biographies. And again, in my own life, this is a really important question because when I was studying the New Testament as an undergraduate and a master's student, I was exposed to the idea that the Gospels are not biographies, but rather they're more like folklore. Okay. And so I mentioned earlier, in an earlier session, Professor Bart Ehrman, whose textbook I had used when I was a student, and his analogy about the telephone game. Well, he gives another analogy in that same introduction which is widely read, it's a, a best selling introduction by Oxford Press as to the nature of the stories in the Gospels being akin to folklore. And the example that he gives is the famous story of George Washington and the cherry tree. Everybody remember that story, right? Where George Washington, the boy Washington, cuts down the cherry tree and his father finds it cut down and he says, did you do this? And what does little Georgie say? I cannot tell a, A lie. That's right. And so this is what Ehrman says about the relationship between that piece of folklore and the stories of Jesus in the Gospels. And I'm quoting him here, quote, consider for example, a story every second greater in the country is heard. The story of George Washington and the cherry tree. We tell the story not because it really happened, but because in some sense we think it is true. The stories about Jesus in the early church may have been similar. End quote. That's the quote from Aaron. So what does he mean there? We tell it not because we think it happened, but because in some sense it's True? Well, because as everyone knows, if you've ever read a novel, there are stories that are true but do not involve events that really happen because they're true in some other way. Like they have a particular moral truth that they want to communicate. And of course, that's the story of. That's what the story of George Washington and the cherry tree is about. It's about the moral truth of the importance of always telling the truth and not lying. It's not necessarily meant to claim that this actually happened, but it's a kind of ethical tale. And of course, Aesop's fables or Grimm's fairy tales or Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales often have that kind of truth, right? A moral or an ethical truth or even a mythological truth, like in some of the myths of Ovid or ancient Greek writers like Homer or Virgil, the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid. All those ancient writings are meant to communicate truth, but not necessarily historical truth. So what Ehrman and other scholars will say is that when we go to the Gospels, we shouldn't ascribe to them biographical truth about Jesus or historical truth about Jesus, but that the stories about Jesus and the Gospels are more like theological truth or mythical truth or moral truth or spiritual truth, but not necessarily historical truth. Right. Now, I want to examine that claim because this is a really foundational claim for how you read the Gospels. I. I'll never forget one time I was a professor at Notre Dame Seminary in New Orleans. This is when I had just started, and I had a young man come up to me after mass one day who was discerning seminary or had been, but left discernment. And he came to me to approach me and talk to me about it. And I said, oh, I'm sorry to hear that you left discernment for seminary formation. He said, yeah, I'm sorry, too. He said, but I wanted to ask you about one of the reasons I left. He said, when I was preparing, I went to a local university and took a class on the New Testament. And in that class, I learned that the Gospels weren't biographies, but that they were more like folklore. And ever since I took the class, I can't pray with them anymore. I used to be able to meditate on the Gospels, but when I learned these skeptical ideas about them, now I don't know what's true and what's not. When I read this story, instead of being able to pray with it, I'm wondering, well, did this actually happen? Did Jesus say this? Is this just a myth? Is this part fact and this part fiction. Do you see? Like this has major implications for the way you approach the New Testament. Do you read it with a hermeneutic of trust? Hermeneutic meaning interpretive approach of trust. Or are you reading it as a skeptic? Are you reading it like it's Grimm's Fairy Tales? Right. Because what we're really talking about here is the genre of the books, right? And we all know that when you go to a library, genre matters. Genre is just the French comes from the French word meaning the kind of book it is, right? So if you go into a library and you wander into the history section thinking you're in the fiction section, and you pull a book off the shelf and you start reading it thinking it's fiction, but it's actually history, are you going to misinterpret it? Yes. Like, likewise, if you go to the fiction section and you think you're in the history section and you pull a novel off the shelf and you assume that it's a factual account, are you going to misinterpret it? Yes. Right. So in order to interpret any document accurately, any human document, whether it's a newspaper or a novel or a biography or anything, you have to know the genre, what kind of book is it? So we don't just have to answer the question of authorship. We also have to answer the question of genre. If we're going to know who is Jesus, we need to know what kind of books we have in front of us that give us accounts, or at least claim to give accounts of what he did and said. So in this session, what I want to show you is the evidence for thinking that Bart Ehrman is completely wrong. And other scholars who say that the Gospels are more like folklore or fairy tales. And he's not the only one, they are completely wrong. And that if you actually look at the Gospels and compare them with other ancient writings from their time period, it is undeniable that they are biographies, but not just any kind of biography. They're ancient biographies with a historical goal. They are historical biographies that intend to tell us the truth about what Jesus did and what Jesus said. So let's walk through some of the reasons for believing that the Gospels are not fiction or folklore, but rather ancient biographies. Now, one of the reasons you can easily pull the wool over the eyes of young, unsuspecting students that the Gospels are more like folklore is because most students, most people have not read any ancient biographies from the Greco Roman world of the time of the New Testament, let's face it. But one of the things scholars are supposed to do is to immerse themselves in ancient sources. And one of the things that you'll discover if you do that is that there were many biographies being written around the time of the rise of Christianity. So in my book, the Case for Jesus, I've got a whole chapter on this and I've got some charts just talking, giving you examples of ancient Greek and Roman biographies from around the time of Christ. For example, Josephus, a very famous 1st century Jewish historian, wrote an autobiography which he aptly titled the Life of Josephus, right, in which he tells about his own life around 100 AD, Plutarch, maybe some of you read Plutarch in school. He wrote a very famous series of books called the Parallel Lives, where he would take famous Greek figures like Alexander the Great and famous Roman figures like Julius Caesar and he would parallel them. He would write biographies of each figure and then he juxtaposed them to kind of show the parallels between Greek culture and Roman culture. We homeschool my kids and my daughter. Last year, she was reading Plutarch's Lives. I went into her bedroom and I saw a copy of Plutarch's Lives on her bed. And I was like, laura, you can now let your servant depart in peace. Right? You know, like this is working really well. She's getting a good education, classical education. Another famous ancient biographer was Suetonius. He wrote the Lives of the Caesars. So most of what we know about people like Julius Caesar or Card Caligula or Caesar Nero, who was a bad guy, we get it from Suetonius, these ancient biographies of the various leaders of the Roman Empire. And then there were also biographies of philosophers like the Life of Demonax, which was written by a man named Lucian, who was a student of Demonax. So if you look at the time of the early Church, there were these ancient books called biographies. The Greek word was abios, just means life. We get the word biology from that, right? The study of life. We get biography, of course, from that as well. And they were usually two kinds of people. You usually wrote biographies, either of philosophers who were famous for their thoughts, or politicians, kings, rulers who were famous for their actions. Okay, so philosophers and kings had biographies written about them, or people like Josephus who were just conceited. But anyway, he is kind of conceited, actually, which, by the way, think about it, who is Jesus? He's both philosopher and king, isn't he? Because he teaches us the wisdom of God, right? And he's the king of Israel. So you can already see why there might be a reason to write a biography about this kind of guy. Okay, so when you look at those ancient biographies, you actually go read them for yourself, and they're all in English translation. You can get them. To this day, if you're familiar with the Gospels, you're going to notice these are really similar to the kinds of books we have in the New Testament about Jesus. Right? So, for example, ancient biographies would basically focus on the life and death of a single individual. That's what made them distinct, say, from a history. So ancient histories would focus on all kinds of leaders and kings, or the events surrounding a particular nation or people. But a biography focuses on just one individual. It usually has three basic parts. It starts with their birth or childhood, often, but not always. It focuses mostly second, on their public career. What did they do? What did they say? And then almost always they will end with the person's death to tell you how that person died. Okay? Because in the ancient world, the way you measured the virtue of a person was not just how they live, but how they. How they died. Right? And of course, if you've read the Gospels, you know that's exactly how they're set up, right? They tell you about his birth, his public ministry, and then his death. Right? Although they don't. Some of them don't give you that first part, right? Mark and John don't really tell you about the infancy of Jesus. And even Luke and Matthew, who do tell you about his infancy, they don't tell you as much as we might like to know, like what color was his hair, what color was his eyes, how tall was Jesus? You know, the kind of things that modern biographies would give you lots of details on. Ancient biographies don't tend to do that. They tend to be shorter and more focused on the public career of the figure in question. And of course, all those characteristics of these ancient biographies, that's what you find in the Gospels as well. Another aspect of ancient biographies is that they would often begin with someone's ancestry. Now, 10 years ago, I used to tell my students, you know, these days, no one cares about ancestry, right? And I would make jokes about how the Gospel of Matthew, if you've noticed this chapter one, what is it? A long genealogy, right? It's like, who edited this? Right? Do you want anyone to read your Gospel, man? Don't start with a genealogy. Right? But I can't say that anymore because now ancestry.com and all these ancestry websites have risen up and. And people are Getting really fascinated in the United States, at least with their ancestry, with their heritage, with their family. Well, that was always the way it was in antiquity. If you wanted to know who someone was, you needed to know where they came from and who their family was. And by the way, it's still true in certain parts of the world. I'm from South Louisiana and I've been to other parts of the world where people say, well, what do you do? But in south Louisiana, people say, who's your mama? Who's your daddy? Like that's the first question. Not where did you go to school? Or what do you do for a living? They want to know who your parents are. Because if you know someone's family, then you've got to beat on them. You know who they are. Does that make sense? Same thing was true in ancient cultures, right? Who your family was was very important. So you'd often start with someone's ancestry. So, for example, Josephus in his biography says, and I quote him here, my great grandfather's grandfather was Simon, named Celes. He was a contemporary of the high priest Hyrcanus. I cite my pedigree as I find it recorded in the public registers. What he means by that is his priestly pedigree. So he starts his biography by telling you how his ancestors were part of the priesthood and they were tied to these famous priests that would have been known in Jewish circles, right? So in the same way, when you open up the Gospel of Matthew, for example, how does it begin? Chapter one, verse one, the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. Now Abraham was the father of Isaac, and Isaac was the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Judah, and so on and so on and so on and so on, right? If you ever get stuck doing that reading, you're like, whew, this is a mouthful. Priests always apologize to me before this reading at Christmas time. I'm sorry if I get the names wrong, Dr. Petrie, because there's so many names. Why does Matthew begin that way? Is it because he's telling you a fairy tale? He's trying to make a historical point about the identity of Jesus. In other words, the first chapter tells you what kind of book it is. It's a biography, not a modern biography, but an ancient one. Another aspect of ancient biographies has to do with their length. Okay? Ancient biographies were not super long books like Thucydides histories, which is, you know, thousand pages. They were medium length books, usually about 10,000 to 20,000 words. That was the average length of an ancient biography. Well, guess how long the gospels are. Between 10 and 20,000 words, right? So Matthew is about 18,000 words. Mark's gospel, which is the shortest, is about 11,000 words. Luke is about 19,000. He's the longest gospel, even though he has less chapters. Luke's the longest, and then John is about 15,000 words. So you can see these are the kind of books that you can read. And Mark, you can read easily in one sitting, but you can sit down for an afternoon and read through an entire Gospel. It's a medium length book. Well, that's because that's what the genre of ancient biographies was. Okay, Notice that's a difference between then and now, right? I don't know if you've been to Barnes and Noble, you go to the biography section, you pull off these biographies of Abraham Lincoln or Andrew Jackson or Alexander Hamilton. I mean, thousand pages, 1500 pages of footnotes. And footnotes. And footnotes. Because modern biographers have more access to details, detailed information, and so they write longer books. Also can jack the price up. But I digress. Okay, so, but it's important for us to notice that difference, right? Because some scholars, like a very famous scholar named Rudolf Bultmann would say, ah, the Gospels can't be biographies because they don't tell us about the psychology of Jesus, they don't tell us about his appearance, they don't tell us about his educational development, right? And these are things that are necessary for it to be a biography. So they must be something else. They must be folklore. And that's an absurd argument to make because those are the features of modern biographies, but they're not standard in ancient writings. And the Gospels weren't written yesterday, they were written 2000 years ago. Another aspect of the Gospels that's really important for us to remember in terms of their genre is that ancient biographies also often unlike some modern biographies, were not necessarily written in chronological order. Okay, so really important, for example, Suetonius is writing a life of Augustus, and he says this, and I quote, having given, as it were, a summary of Augustus life, I shall now take up its various phases one by one, not in chronological order, but by categories to make the count clearer and more intelligible. So notice what Suetonius is saying here. He's writing a life of Caesar, who. But he's not going to do it necessarily in chronological order. He's going to do it thematically according to certain virtues or vices that he wants to highlight for the reader. And this is important because sometimes modern Readers of the Gospels will be struck by the fact that, you know, the events aren't in exactly the same order in the Gospels. There'll be differences in terms of the order. Well, that just has to do with the fact that in the ancient world, it wasn't necessary for you to put the events in the exact same order. Sometimes you could choose a more thematic approach. For example, Matthew has these very thematic speeches. The first you have the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5, 7. Then he has a speech on discipleship in Matthew 10. Then he has a speech on the parables of Jesus in Matthew 13, all the way down the line on the church in Matthew 18. It's thematically organized, not necessarily chronologically organized. And some of the church fathers actually even said that when John writes his gospel at the end, he's more precise about the chronology because he's correcting some of the less clear chronology from the earlier text. Now, there's debate about that, but I just use it as an example. Just because things aren't in exact order doesn't mean it's changed the genre from biography to folklore, you see? Okay. Because that's what ancient readers expected. Another aspect of ancient biographies that's really important to understand the Gospels is that they're not complete. Okay. They don't necessarily tell you everything about that person. Maybe these new biographies that are a thousand pages do. Well, actually, even they can't tell you everything about a person. It's impossible to tell you everything about the subject. Our lives are too complex and filled with too many details. All biographies, by definition, are selective. Well, that's even more true of ancient biographies, which tend to be shorter by definition. They have to be more selective. So, for example, in his life, in his biography of Demonax, this famous philosopher Lucian said this. See if this sounds familiar. These are a very few things out of many that I might have mentioned. But they will suffice to give my readers a notion of the sort of man he Demonax was. Does that sound familiar? Does that any lines of the Gospels strike you as parallel with that? Yeah, the Gospel of John. I have the next quote there, if you remember, in John 21, verse 25, at the end of the book, what does John say? There are also many other things that Jesus did. And were every one of them to be written, I suppose the world itself could not contain the books that would be written. John 21:25. So what does he mean there? He's just letting you know I've had to be selective. There are many things that Jesus did And that Jesus said that aren't in this book. In fact, the whole world couldn't fill up with the books that would be written about all the things Jesus did and said. But these are the ones I'm choosing. For whatever reason he doesn't tell us as reasons to communicate to you. Okay, so biographies are selective, not comprehensive. I bring that up because again, sometimes people will say, well, if Jesus really raised Lazarus from the dead, why doesn't Matthew mention it? And Mark and Luke, why is it missing from the first three Gospels? The answer is, I don't know, maybe they ran out of space. You know, maybe their scroll was only 8ft long and they had to pick which passages they liked. Right? Why am I not giving you all of my books? The case for Jesus? The answer is we don't have the time, right? So by definition, time constraints and space constraints, which by the way, in antiquity you had space constraints. So a scroll, one scroll could usually hold between 10 and 20,000 words. So that might be one of the reasons the length was what it was. You'd have to move into multi volume works if you wanted to do that. So don't get bent out of shape. If there's something missing from one gospel that's present in another or, or vice versa, it just means that they're selective, which is how biographies were. In light of these kind of parallels which are really striking when you start actually reading these ancient books for yourself, if you're familiar with the Gospels, you're going to see the parallels. It's really clear that the Gospels are much more like the lives of the Caesars or the parallel lives or Josephus autobiography than ancient myths and ancient folktales. Anyone who's read the Iliad or the Odyssey or Ovid's Metamorphoses, if you've read Greek mythology, it's nothing like Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Whereas the lives of the Caesars or the lives of these philosophers are very similar in style and content and length and tone to the Gospels. And as a result, in the last 20 years or so, scholarship has been changing its perspective on this and, and mainstream scholars are recognizing that this is what the Gospels are. So for about 90 or 100 years, scholars were saying, oh, the Gospels are like folklore. Kind of what Bart Ehrman said there, that's changing now. And I think it's really important that it's changing because Christianity is a historical religion. It makes historical claims like God became a man in a particular time and place. We say in the creed crucified under Pontius Pilate, like this particular Roman procurator in a particular place in a particular time. We're not just talking about moral teachings or abstract ideas. Christianity is a historical religion. And so although it goes beyond history into the realm of God and faith and the mysteries of the Trinity, there is a historical foundation. And so if you pull that rug out from underneath Christianity and reduce it to just folklore and fairy tales, you fundamentally alter the answer to this question. Who is Jesus and what are the Gospels? So a very famous scholar, James Dunn, he's not a Catholic, he's a Protestant scholar from Great Britain. He says this quote, since the 1970s, it has become much clearer that the Gospels are in fact, very similar in type to ancient biographies in the Greek bioi, in Latin vitae. And I would only change what he says there slightly. It's not just since the 1970s, it's since the first century, because the ancient church fathers read the Gospels this way. Justin Martyr, who I mentioned in the last section, says, said, the Gospels are the memoirs of the apostles. That's one of the names that they would use for biographies written by people that were based on their own memories. So what happened was in the 20th century, that idea got lost, okay? And listen, it's affecting real people's lives in the way it shapes either their faith or shakes their faith in the truth of these accounts. So with that said, it is important to make another point here, that the Gospels aren't just any kind of biographies. They're historical biographies. That's really important because, as you know, at least if you've read political biographies, just because something's a biography doesn't mean it necessarily aims to be accurate. Right? You can write an account of someone's life which is more or less true. Right? Okay. So we also want to ask, were the authors of the Gospels trying to be accurate? Were they trying to tell us the history, or were they just making stuff up and attributing it to a historical figure? Okay? So I want to emphasize this because as I said, Christianity is a historical religion. And so sometimes people like Ehrman will say, well, in the modern day, we are interested in historical truth, but in ancient times, people just weren't that concerned about it. They had different views of what truth meant. And I have real problems with that kind of approach. Because if you look at what ancient, even pagan writers said, when it comes to history, history is supposed to tell the truth. Listen to what Lucian, who I mentioned earlier, says, quote, this is an ancient writer. The historian's task is one to tell it as it what? As it happened. This is the one peculiar characteristic of history, that to truth alone must sacrifice be made. So even in ancient times, the goal of history was to tell what happens. And so I want you, if you have your Bible, open up. Let's look at what the Gospel writers say about what they're doing. We'll look at two passages in closing and ask yourself, are the Gospels folklore or fiction? Or are they historical biography? What are they trying to do? What do they see themselves as doing? Look at the beginning of the Gospel of Luke, chapter one. If you want to know what kind of book you're reading. By the way, usually the author will tell you at the beginning or at the end. That's where genre is usually indicated. And so listen to how Luke begins his account of Jesus. The Gospel according to Luke 1:1. Once upon a time. Just joking. Okay. That's what it doesn't say, right? It doesn't say once upon a time. If I tell you once upon a time, I'm cluing you into the kind of book you're about to read and I'm telling you as reader that it's what? A fairy tale. Now contrast that with how Luke begins. Inasmuch 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 eyewitnesses 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, Theophilus, that you may know the truth concerning the things of which you have been informed. And then he goes on, in the days of Herod, King of Judea? Right. Now, does that sound like Luke thinks he's writing folklore? Is this George Washington and the Cherry Tree? Is this Grimm's Fairy Tales? Is it Ovid's myths about the Greek gods and goddesses? No, he's telling you I'm about to give you an orderly, accurate historical account of the truth. And just so you know, it's based on the testimony of who? Eyewitness. Eyewitnesses. The Greek word there is autopti. We get the word autopsy from that. An autopsy is when a doctor examines a corpse for himself, he sees for himself. Autop means self optic. Like to see, so you see for yourself. So he's basing this account on testimony of those who see for themselves. Why? Because Luke himself was not an eyewitness. Let me make one last point about John here. Just look at John 19:25, we've already looked at how John says that the beloved disciple wrote these things. We saw that in an earlier session. But in John 19:35, this is right after Jesus dies on the cross. We see one more example of the kind of book that's being written here. After the soldier pierces Jesus side with the spear, John steps into the Gospel. And what does he say? He who saw it has borne witness and his what is true testimony and he knows he tells the truth that you may also believe. So why does he do that? Why does he step into the Gospel and say, I saw it and my testimony is true? Well, because he's describing something really extraordinary. But it's also because the kind of book he's writing is historical biography. He's telling you the truth about what actually happened. This isn't fiction. It's not a fairy tale. In closing them, sometimes modern readers will make one mistake, though, that's important to note. Sometimes they'll say, well, if it's historical and it's true, the then it must be verbatim. It must be a verbatim transcript of what Jesus said. Right. And it is important to point out that that's not how ancient biographies worked for lots of different reasons. Today we have all kinds of recording equipment. You have courtroom stenographers where we can get a verbatim account of exactly what words someone used. Right. Video cameras or whatever, phones. Right. We can record everything that wasn't the case in antiquity. So it's really important to realize that ancient historians like Thucydides and others will say that when they would give the speeches of someone, they would strive to be as accurate as possible, but in order to give the substance and not necessarily a verbatim account of exactly what was said. Why does that matter? Well, because if you look at the Gospels and you compare them, you'll notice that there are differences in the words. And sometimes people get bent out of shape about this. And the best example of this that I can bring up in closing is the words of institution at the Last Supper. Because it is true the parables of Jesus will differ in different gospels. But of course, he was going around traveling. So you can explain that in lots of ways. Right. If you're going to tell one story over and over again in different towns, is it going to be the exact same every time? Well, no. Will it be substantially the same? Yeah, probably. So I could give you the lecture that I've done, Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist. I've done it like 300 times. I could give it to you right now, no prep, in 55 minutes, and it would probably be 90% or 80% verbatim. But it's not going to be exactly the same as the other 200 times I've done it. Because you rehearse it. Right. But the substance is the same. The same thing is true with the Gospels. No one expects in our human discourse with one another. Like, if we're going to talk about this class to our spouse and then tell our children about it, that the accounts of it are going to be identical. Right. We differ. We use different words and we give different accounts, but the substance is the same. And the best example of this is from the Last Supper. So if you look at the bottom of the page there, if you examine the words of institution, you'll see that they are not verbatim, they're not identical, but they are saying the same thing. In Matthew 26:28, Jesus says, Drink of it, all of you. This is my blood of the covenant poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. In Mark, he just says, this is my blood of the covenant poured out for many. In Luke, he says, this cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood. And then in First Corinthians, Paul says, he says, this cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me. Now, are those identical? No. But are they saying the same thing? Jesus takes bread, identifies it as body, a cup, and identifies it as his blood, and commands the disciples to drink it in memory of him. Yeah. So the substance is the same. And Pope Benedict has said this, actually in his books on Jesus of Nazareth, that when we come to the Gospels, we need to remember that they're not a transcript of what Jesus said, but they are faithfully giving us the substance of his words and his actions. Because that's what ancient biographers did. That's how they did it. Okay. And so in closing, then, it's so important for us to realize as we're asking the question, who is Jesus? That these four books that we have about him are not just written by eyewitnesses, but they're written by eyewitnesses and the companions of apostles who want to tell us the truth about what Jesus did and what Jesus said. When we come back next time, we're going to ask one last question about the Gospels before we turn to Jesus himself. And it's this. Well, even if they wanted to tell us the truth, could they or had too much time elapsed for them to remember it accurately. So we'll come back, we'll look at the date of the Gospels.