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Welcome, everyone, to our lectio Bible study on Jesus, where we will be looking at the biblical and historical evidence for Christ. My name is Dr. Brant Petrie. I am research professor of Sacred Scripture here at the Augustine Institute in Denver. And I'm very, very excited to be with you to begin this Bible study looking at the biblical evidence for our Lord, the biblical evidence for Christ. One reason I'm excited about this is because what we'll be doing is kind of walking through some of the material in a book that I recently published called the Case for Biblical and Historical Evidence for Christ. And this lectio Bible study is going to kind of summarize some of the main themes in that book. So if you want to dive in a little deeper, I encourage you to go and get the book and read it. We're going to be looking at a topic that, at least for me as a cradle Catholic, I was born pagan, but then baptized Catholic shortly thereafter. But being Catholic my whole life, I grew up learning about the catechism. I grew up learning about the church and the history of the church and different doctrines. But this study of Jesus is going to be a little bit different because we're going to be looking at him through the lens of history and asking ourselves the question, not just do you believe in Jesus? I think most Catholics, you'd ask them, Christians, you know, do you believe in Jesus? Their answer is, well, yes, of course I believe in Jesus. But we want to take the next step and ask this question, why do you believe in Jesus? Has anyone ever asked you that? Have you ever pondered that? If someone came up to you and said, well, why do you believe in Jesus? What would you say? How would you answer? Right? If someone said, well, why do you believe in Jesus and not in Muhammad or Buddha, right? Or some other religious leader, what would you say? What are the reasons for your faith? And again, for many of us, like myself, I receive the faith as a gift from my parents and my grandparents. And that's a gift which I can never repay. But at the same time, as we grow into adulthood, we also want to ask ourselves, well, what are the reasons for continuing to believe, to hold the faith? And I think in our day and time, too, especially in an increasingly secular world, you can no longer assume that, well, everyone believes in Jesus. So I don't have to explain. I don't have to give reasons for my faith, right? Especially if you're engaged in the new evangelization, sharing the gospel either with people who haven't heard it or with people who've fallen away from the Christian faith and from the Catholic Church. So this study of Jesus and of the evidence for Christ is I think, very, very timely and very cruc for what we're doing right now in the church with the new evangelization in this new millennium. So we're going to be looking at a number of questions over the course of this lectio Bible study. We're going to be taking up issues such as who wrote the Gospels? What about the lost gospels that you hear about on the Discovery Channel, the History Channel? Why do we as Christians believe in the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, but not these other Gospels? Well, what kind of books are the Gospels? Are they fact or are they folklore? Fact or fiction? When were they written? Are they early enough to be reliable accounts of Jesus? Or are they too late to really tell us the truth about what Jesus did, what Jesus said? We'll also be looking at questions such as was Jesus in fact the Messiah? Most Catholics again would say, well, of course he was the Messiah. But then if you ask them, well, how do you know he was the Messiah? I'll never forget one time I was teaching a seminary course. I said, how many of you believe that Jesus fulfilled the prophecies of the Messiah in the Old Testament? And every hand went up and I said, good. Now which prophecies did he fulfill? Silence. You hear the grass cutting outside the building? Oh, I don't know. Well, how do you answer that question? So was he the Messiah? Did he claim to be God? Or was he just a great moral teacher? Right. And if he did claim to be God, why was he crucified? And why did he cry out, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? And then last but certainly not least, what about the resurrection? Why do Christians believe in the resurrection? What's the evidence for Jesus being raised from the dead? So these are the kind of things we're going to be looking at. And as you'll see, step by step, I want to lay out the case for Jesus. The reasons for believing that Jesus is in fact who we as Christians claim him to be, confess him to be not just the Messiah, the long awaited King of Israel, but God incarnate. So that's my goal for our session. I hope you're as excited as I am about diving in. So in order to do this though, we're going to need to begin first with the Gospels themselves. We're going to need to take a couple of sessions to really back up and look at what kind of books The Gospels are who wrote them and how reliable they are. Before we can get into the issue of what they actually say about Jesus, what they claim about Jesus. So in this first session, I'm going to start in a place that might seem a little surprising, but it's very important and it's with this issue, namely the anonymity of the Gospels, or you could ask it this way, who, who wrote the four Gospels? Because if you know anything about the New Testament, you'll know that the bulk of our information about Jesus really doesn't come from the letters of Paul or Peter or James and Jude. It comes from the four Gospels traditionally ascribed to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. That's the primary, they are the primary sources, the foundational sources for the life, the death, the resurrection, the, of Jesus. And if again, you're like me and you grew up Christian, you grew up Catholic, most of your life, you probably just believed. Well, I opened my Bible, I look in there and it says the Gospel of Matthew, the Gospel of Mark, Gospel of Luke and the Gospel of John. And so that must be who wrote the Gospels. And for about 19 centuries that's what everyone believed. Well, almost everyone you'll see about the Gospels. But in the last hundred years or so there are, well, one of them is really a theory, but one is more of an opinion or an analogy. But there are two theories about the Gospel origins that have arisen, that have really fundamentally changed the way people are looking at the Gospels today. And especially what people are hearing about the Gospels in the context of university settings and classroom settings. And those two theories are, number one, the theory of the anonymous Gospels and then number two, the so called analogy of the telephone game. Right. So the anonymous Gospel theory and the telephone game. Let me just kind of lay these out for you for just a minute. In the last hundred years, this theory of the Gospels originally being anonymous has arisen. And according to this theory, there are basically four main points to it. Number one, according to this theory, although your Bible has titles on each of the four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, originally they were not published with any names attached to them. Originally they were anonymous. There was no Gospel according to Mark or according to John. There was just the text of the Gospels. And these gospels, according to this theory, number two, circulated throughout the ancient Roman Empire. They were copied down by scribes and recopied and distributed without any titles for about a century before the titles were later added to them in the late second century in order to give them authority. Right. In other words, according to this Theory, the title Matthew was added sometime in the second century to make people think that Matthew, the disciple of Jesus, wrote it. And the title John was added to make people believe that the apostle John had actually written it. In order to give these works authority. It's what scholars refer to as a false attribution, right, or pseudepigraphy, false writing. Now, according to this theory, then, the upshot of it really is that none of the four gospels that we have in the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, was written actually by an eyewitness to Jesus. We don't know who wrote them. They were obviously written by believing Christians who may or may not have had access to true or untrue traditions about Jesus of Nazareth. But we don't actually know who wrote them because they were originally anonymous. Now, just to put this in an autobiographical context, this was the theory I learned when I was a young undergraduate student, you know, taking my first classes in religious studies. I still remember when my professor came into the room and told us, you know, I want you to forget everything you think you knew about who wrote the Gospels. I know you probably grew up thinking that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, the apostles and their companions wrote them. But scholars today know that originally they were anonymous and that they weren't written by eyewitnesses to Jesus. So, of course, I was, you know, I'm a good student. A student, of course. Right. Writing down diligently. Oh, I didn't know that. No one said anything about this in catechism class. And I just took it down and I took it in and I believed it. And then a second thing that I was taught kind of flowed out of that. Because the obvious question that comes from that is, well, wait, if they weren't written by eyewitnesses to Jesus, then how reliable are the stories about Jesus in the Gospels? I mean, if we don't know who wrote them, then can we verify them or not? And so my teacher and one of the textbooks I use gave an analogy for helping the students understand what kind of stories were in the Gospels. And the analogy, very sophisticated analogy, was of the telephone game. Has anybody ever heard of the telephone game? Okay, has anyone ever heard of the telephone game? Analogy. All right, well, this was the analogy. I remember it being used in my classroom. I'm going to give you a quote here from the most widely used New Testament introduction in universities in the United States today. It's by a scholar named Bart Ehrman. He's not a Catholic. In fact, he's not a Christian anymore. He Used to be Christian, but he's now an atheist. And his introduction to the New Testament, which I myself used as a student, gives an analogy from the children's telephone game in order to help students understand the kind of stories about Jesus in the Gospels. And I'm going to quote Ehrman's words verbatim here. This is what he says. Listen to this. Nearly all of the storytellers, meaning people telling stories about Jesus, had no independent knowledge of what really happened to Jesus. Now it takes little imagination to realize what happened to the stories. You're probably familiar with the old birthday party game telephone. A group of kids sits in a circle. The first tells a brief story to the one sitting next to her, who tells it to the next and to the next, and so on, until it comes back full circle to the one who started it. Invariably, the story has changed so much in the process of retelling that everyone gets a good laugh. Now, imagine this same activity taking place not in a solitary living room with 10 kids on one afternoon, but over the expanse of the Roman Empire, some 2,500 miles across with thousands of participants. End quote. Now, if airman's right here, and this is an appropriate analogy for the stories about Jesus in the gospels, then what does that do to the credibility of the gospels? What does the telephone game analogy do to the students who take that in and think, oh, well, this is what the stories about Jesus and the gospels are like? Well, it completely destroys their credibility. No, because the whole point of the telephone game is that the story, what changes and doesn't just change in minor ways, but changes dramatically. Right. So you'll frequently find in the 20th century, and this is a new idea, these two approaches to the gospels, that we don't know who wrote them and that they weren't written by eyewitnesses and that the stories in the Gospels are like this game of telephone. Those two approaches to the text lay the foundation for a very deep skepticism toward what the Gospels say about Jesus. So that in our day and time, and I have lots of friends who teach in Catholic high schools, it has now trickled down from the ivory tower of the academy into popular imaginations that the gospel themselves aren't reliable testimony to Jesus. So you might say, well, this Gospel says that, and someone will say, well, yeah, but how do I know that that actually happened? If the Gospels were anonymous, how do I know? All right, so how do we respond to that? What is the case with regard to the anonymity and authorship of the Gospels? Well, again, just to Speak autobiographically. For much of my education, from my undergraduate through my master's degree, this was the approach that I took because it was the majority opinion. Let me be clear here, Bart Ehrman's not alone in holding this view of the Gospels not being written by eyewitnesses and. And them being analogous to the telephone game. This is a widely held view among scholars and universities. This is the majority opinion that the Gospels were originally anonymous. And I myself accepted it before I went to begin my doctoral studies at the University of Notre Dame. But when I was there, one of the things you have to do if you get a PhD in New Testament is you have to learn a number of languages, you have to learn Hebrew, you have to learn Greek, and you also start to begin studying not just what textbook says, but you start to read more scholars and you study the text in their original languages, and you start to go back and look at what ancient authors themselves have to say about it. And one of the things that was fascinating for me as a doctoral student was this whole question of the anonymity of the Gospels, because we began to do as students what is known as textual criticism, which is where you don't just study various books about the New Testament, but you actually go back to the manuscripts themselves and you look at the texts, New Testament. And I'll never forget asking one of my professors about this. When it came to the anonymous Gospels, I wanted to know, well, where are the anonymous copies? Because I wanted to see, you know, surely if the text were originally anonymous, then there would be. The oldest manuscripts wouldn't have titles. And he said, that's a good question. Why don't you go and research it? So I did. So I started to look into it in more depth. And one of the first, you know, cracks in this foundation that had been laid for me and having a kind of skeptical attitude toward the Gospels was the fact that I discovered that there are no anonymous copies. Now, this is a big problem because history is supposed to work with evidence, right? It's a very important principle of textual criticism. And one of the things I do in my book is I just take you through. I have a little chart going through all the different. The earliest manuscripts for each one of the Gospels. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Looking at both ancient Greek papyri, fragments of the Gospels, as well as ancient Greek codexes or codices, which are longer copies of the Gospel. And what I found is all of the earliest copies, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Every single one of them has a title. There are precisely zero Anonymous copies of the Gospel. Now, that's a real problem for the theory because the theory is supposed to be a historical theory, and historical theory is supposed to work with evidence. So, for example, by analogy, imagine if I told you that originally the Gospel of Matthew was published without the Sermon on the Mount. It wasn't there. Your very first question should be, oh, really? What copies of the Gospel of Matthew is the Sermon of Mount missing from? And I would say, well, none of them. But trust me, originally it wasn't there. You would have good grounds for being, what, skeptical about my theory that the sermon wasn't originally part of the Gospel. Well, the same thing's true about the anonymity of the Gospels. If they were originally anonymous, then why don't any copy, not one. And we have not just hundreds of ancient Greek copies of the Gospels. We actually have three thousands of ancient manuscripts of the Gospels and other New Testament writings. There are more manuscripts of the New Testament than any other ancient document. Okay, so first problem, Greek manuscript evidence, no anonymous copies. And then as I began to read more other scholars like Richard Baucom, who's a British scholar, and others, and Martin Hengel, a German scholar, I began to discover that there are other problems with the idea that the Gospels were anonymous. Namely that the anonymous scenario. The theory itself is kind of unbelievable. It's kind of incredible. If you step back for just a moment and think about it, ponder this. If the Gospels had in fact been originally published with no titles and they circulated for 100 years throughout the Roman Empire, then how did the scribes at the end of the second century, writing in Egypt and Gaul and Italy and Asia Minor, how did they all know to ascribe the exact same titles to the same books? Why don't we have discrepancies? In other words, the same book being attributed by some scribes to Matthew and some to Peter and that kind of thing, how do we end up with unanimous ascriptions to Mark, Luke and John? That's a problem. Why is there no trace of this original anonymity in any of these titles? And this becomes really important, clear when you compare, for example, the manuscripts for the Gospels with one book in the New Testament that actually is anonymous, and that's the Letter to the Hebrews. The Letter to the Hebrews. Right. Unlike the other books in the New Testament, Hebrews just has a title says to the Hebrews, and nowhere in the text or the title does it identify the author. Now, traditionally, the book has been believed to be attributed to Paul, but. But again, as I Show in the case for Jesus. When you look at the manuscripts for Hebrews, what you'll find is actual anonymous copies and discrepancies. As some scribes start to say, well, Paul wrote it, and then another scribe will say, well, Paul wrote it through Timothy, and other church fathers will say, no, no, no, Barnabas wrote it. And then some will say Paul wrote it in Hebrew and then Luke translated. In other words, there's what looks like a diversity of opinion because the book is actually anonymous. But that's precisely what we don't have with any one of the four Gospels. As we'll see in our next session, the ancient Christians are completely unanimous that Matthew was written by Matthew, Mark was written by Mark, Luke by Luke, and John by John. One final problem with this theory of the anonymous Gospels is, okay, if you were a scribe in the late second century and you really want to fake it, right? You want to give your book authority by attributing it falsely to an author, why would you pick Mark and Luke? Now, when I was growing up, I thought all four gospel evangelists were members of the twelve Apostles because I didn't know any better, right? But that's not true, right? Only Matthew and John are members of the twelve apostles, as we'll see in just a second. Mark and Luke are not themselves eyewitnesses or apostles of Jesus. They're the companions of apostles. Mark was the scribe of Peter and Luke was a companion of St. Paul. Right? So if you were going to fake it, why would you go with second generation Christians like Mark and Luke, Right? If you have complete freedom to falsely attribute your gospel to somebody, why not just attribute it to, say, Peter? Right? Or even better, if you really want to get your Amazon numbers up and sell that thing, right? Call your book the Gospel of Jesus himself. If truth isn't a barrier, then just say Jesus himself wrote it. I mean, then you'll really get people to read it. So why would you attribute those gospels to lesser known figures, secondary figures like Mark or Luke? Well, maybe it's because Mark and Luke actually wrote them and they're not falsely attributed because they weren't anonymous. Does that make sense? Okay, so what we want to do now, I just want to take you through in this session and the next one, Want to look at the evidence for believing that the Gospels were not in fact anonymous, but actually were written by the traditional authors, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. In order to do that, I want to make clear though, the two kinds of evidence that historians deal with when you're assessing the Authorship of a book. So if you want to tell who wrote a book, there's basically two ways to do it. You can look at internal evidence from the book itself or external evidence from outside the book. So for example, I have a book here, I just happened to pick this one up, the Case for Jesus by Brant Petrie. Now what might make you think that I actually wrote the book? Is there any internal evidence from the book itself? Well, yes, there is. Right? It's on the COVID page. It ascribes the book to me. No. Alright, so that's internal evidence. But if you had some reason to doubt that evidence, you could also go outside of the book and you could ask Dr. Barber, good friend, we've been friends for 10 years here, another professor here at the Augusta Institute. Did Brandt write that book on the case for Jesus and he could tell you? Yes, he could confirm it for you. Or he could ask my wife, did Brant spend many hours up in the office ignoring you and the children? Right. And she could say, yes, I'm trying to be a good dad, but it does take a lot of work to write a book. Right, but she would know. Or you could ask my students. You see, so that's internal and external evidence. So in this session I just want to focus on the internal evidence for a second and look at what we know about these four men to whom these four gospels are attributed. So if we take seriously the internal evidence of the titles which are in all of the ancient Greek manuscripts, what we discover is that each one of them is explicitly attributed to either an apostle or a companion of one of the apostles. So let's just walk through them together. The first gospel in the New Testament, in terms of its internal evidence, is attributed to Matthew, the tax collector and apostle. Every Greek manuscript of Matthew we have has this title, or either at the beginning or the end, the Gospel according to Matthew, in Greek, euangelion, katamathaion. In other words, good news according to who? Matthew. Now who is this Matthew? Well, we learn from the gospel itself in Matthew 9, 9 and Matthew 10:2, 4, that Matthew was a tax collector. In Matthew 9 we see this. Jesus passed on from there. And he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax office. And he said to him, follow me. And he rose and followed him. Matthew 9, 9. And then again in Matthew 10:2, 4, when Jesus chooses the 12 apostles, Matthew the tax collector, that's his subtitle, so to speak, is named as one of the 12. Now why is that important? Well, one reason it's important is because that's what the internal evidence of the gospel says. Another reason it's important, though, is because sometimes scholars who will object to the gospel having actually been written by an eyewitness will argue in this way. They'll say there's no way any of Jesus disciples could have written any of the gospels because his disciples were a bunch of illiterate fishermen. In fact, I mentioned Bart Ehrman earlier. He actually makes this argument in several of his books. He says even if Jesus disciples had wanted to write a gospel, they couldn't do it because they weren't literate. They were illiterate fishermen from Galilee, which is kind of like the backwaters of the Holy Land. Well, it should be obvious there's a real problem with that argument, because while it is true that some of Jesus disciples were fishermen, they weren't all fishermen. As the list of the 12 tells us in Matthew chapter 10, Matthew was a tax collector, Right? Now think about it for just a minute. You're traveling around with Jesus, put yourself in disciples shoes, and you're listening to the sermons. This guy's giving the parables. You're like, this guy's really good. Right? We can imagine that. No, okay. He's really good teacher. Maybe one of us should write some of this down. Students did in antiquity. So let's see who might write it down. Okay. Fisherman. Fisherman. Fisherman. Fisherman. Tax collector. What would tax collectors have to do? They'd have to write documents. They had to be scribally literate. They had to write not just in the language of the people, which might be Aramaic or Hebrew, but also in the language of the empire. Right. In Greek. So who is exhibit A among the apostles in terms of prime candidate for actually writing down some of the sayings and deeds of Jesus? Jesus, it's who Matthew. Right. At the same time, however, tax collectors were widely despised and widely hated. So you might not want to leave with that person in the sense of trying to publicize it. It'd be like saying today, like, trust me, I'm an IRS agent. I don't know if I want to trust you. Except that tax collectors in the first century were more despised than IRS agents in the 20th century. Well, at least almost equally so. In any case, the point is, he's actually a very plausible candidate for being one of the eyewitnesses to Jesus who would have not only had the ability, but would have been the likely person among the 12 to write down the words and deeds of Jesus. All right, what about the second Gospel? Mark, the companion of Paul And Peter, what does the internal evidence say about the Gospel of Mark? Well, once again, all of the copies of Mark that we possess have the title Euangelion Katamarchon. Right? The good news according to Mark. And we know from several passages in the New Testament, like Philemon 23, 24, Acts 12, 12, 14, Acts 15, that this figure of Mark was a well known early Christian figure. He was a Jewish man of Jerusalem. So he had two names. John, which is his Jewish name, and then Marcus, which is his Latin name, which was very common, by the way, in bilingual situations for a person to have two names. I taught at Notre Dame Seminary in New Orleans. We have a very large Vietnamese community in New Orleans. Right? And many of my Vietnamese students would share their Vietnamese names with us as professors. But some of the names are very difficult for English speakers to pronounce. So they would often just say, just call me Paul or call me Chris, like, take an English name, that's an easier name, as a kind of second name. Because certain languages, especially like moving from Greek to a Semitic language like Hebrew, can be very difficult for the Romans to speak. So it's very common for people to have more than one name. So John, Mark was a resident of Jerusalem, who also happened to be a companion, not just of Paul, but of Peter himself. And you can see this in the first letter of Peter 5, 12, 13, which says these words by Silvanus, a faithful brother, as I regard him. I have written briefly to you, exhorting and declaring that this is the true grace of God. Stand fast in it. She who is at Babylon, who is likewise chosen, sends you greetings, and so does my son, who Mark. And that's a spiritual sonship that he's referring to there. So first, Peter provides us some evidence that Mark was a companion of Peter when Peter is in Babylon, which is a code word for Rome. And there's other evidence as well, which, by the way, would make sense if Peter is an illiterate fisherman. But he wants to tell the stories of Jesus, what Jesus did and said, what might he do? He would use a scribe. Right? And that's the function that, as we'll see in the next session, the church fathers say Mark played. All right, what about Luke, the third Gospel? Luke is identified as a physician, a companion of Paul and the author of Acts. And I've got several passages from the New Testament that provide us evidence for fleshing out who this figure of Luke is. I'm just going to read one of them to you. It's from Colossians. This is at the end of one of the letters of Paul, and it's an important passage, it says this. Aristarchus, my fellow prisoner, greets you. And oh, look here, Mark, the cousin of Barnabas. So notice again, Paul and Peter both know Mark. It's a very small world in the early church. Actually, still today I'll go to another country and I'll meet Catholics. Oh, you know this person? You know that person. I always say the Catholic Church is 1 billion small. It's really a rather small club when you get to it. It's really easy to meet people who know other people. So Paul knows Mark, the cousin of Barnabas. And then he goes on to say, and Jesus, who was called Justus, these are the only men of circumcision among my fellow workers for the kingdom of God, and they've been a comfort to me. Luke, the beloved physician, and Demas greet you. So notice here it's from this passage in Colossians that we derive the information that Luke is first, not among those of the circumcision. In other words, he's not a Jew. He's the only Gentile to whom any of the books of the New Testament is attributed, although he does write a fourth of the New Testament, so that's pretty good. And then second, he's a beloved physician, so he's a friend of Paul, and his profession is that of a physician. And we look at other passages, like in the Acts of the Apostles, what we'll find out is that the same person who writes the Gospel of Luke in terms of internal evidence is also a sometimes companion of Paul. So there's our third Gospel. And then fourth and final, we'll wrap up with this. What about the fourth Gospel? What's the internal evidence for the fourth gospel? Well, traditionally, once again, the title of every copy of John that we have says this Good news according to Yoannes, good news according to John. But in John's case, we have something unique. It's not just the title that provides us with internal evidence for who wrote it. The gospel itself tells us at the very end by whom it was composed. And so I want to read this passage to you. This is from John, chapter 21, verse 20, 24 and 25. This is after Jesus has told Peter very famously, three times, do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me? Right. And then he goes on to predict Peter's death. And Peter, in classic Peter form says, well, what's going to happen to this guy? And he points to John. And Jesus says, don't worry about him. Just worry about yourself. And then this is what the Gospel says. Peter turned and saw, following them, the disciple whom Jesus loved, who had laid close to his breast at supper and said, lord, who is it that's going to betray you? This is the disciple who is bearing witness to these things and who has done what, written these things. And we know that his testimony is what True. So John's Gospel ends by telling you that the beloved disciple, the one who laid on the breast of Jesus at the Last Supper, is the one who has written the text. That's internal evidence for John, the beloved disciple, as author. All right, then, in closing, some people might say, once again, well, wait a second. The New Testament also says that John was an illiterate fisherman. And it's true. In the Book of Acts, chapter four, you remember when Peter and John go before the Jewish council and they start to preach and teach, the Jewish leaders are stunned because they said, these men are agramatos. They're illiterate, they haven't studied. Where did they get all this, right? And so some skeptics will say, aha, look, this shows John could not have written the fourth Gospel because he's illiterate. But once again, just like in modern times, so too in ancient times, if for some reason you aren't able to write either because you're illiterate or because you're pressed for time, what can you do? You can hire a secretary, right? Dictate. Actually, you don't even need that. All you need is a phone. Now you just put voice to text and you put it on and you can write whole documents just by what? Dictation. And the interesting thing about John is if you read it out loud, try it sometime, it reads like somebody is talking aloud, kind of wanders, kind of rambles sometime, but there's a distinct voice throughout the whole text. So in closing, what have we seen? What I hope to have shown you here is that the widespread idea that the Gospels were originally anonymous, that they can't be trusted, that they weren't written by eyewitnesses, is actually just from the perspective of history, not faith. You don't have to be a Catholic, you just have to look at the historical evidence is a bad theory. It doesn't have historical grounding to back it up. In fact, all of the historical evidence that we do possess from the internal documents themselves points to the four Gospels actually having been written. Wait for this. It's radical. By Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Now, you might be thinking, as soon as I say that, though, is, well, wait, what about those other gospels? What about the lost Gospels? What about the Gospel of Thomas or the Gospel of Mary Magdalene? Right. When we return, we're going to look at that evidence and say and show why on the basis not just of internal evidence, but external evidence, we as Christians accept these four gospels, but not those other gospels as actually having been written by eyewitnesses to Jesus. So I hope to see you there. Thanks.