As we established in Parts 1 and 2, Mark's gospel was far from being an eyewitness account of remembered history. It was in fact, a fictional drama set in a pseudo-historical landscape, by a Greek author who had probably never set foot in the region. From there we determined that Matthew's gospel too was not an eyewitness account, but had simply taken Mark's drama, blatantly plagiarized from it, and attempted to historicize Mark's work, in an effort to create a new religion (If Joseph Smith and L. Ron Hubbard could do it in a world that was primarily literate, then just about anybody could do it in a time where access to information and fact-checking was sparse and - depending on your region - literacy rates were anywhere from 3-20%).
Now that we have that brief refresher, let's take a look at Luke - the third canonical gospel to have been written - and see if he holds up as an eyewitness of Jesus.
Luke, the Compiler
1. What was Luke's Source?
As with Matthew, the first question we should ask is "where did Luke get his information?". After all, as I said about Matthew, being an being an eyewitness necessitates that you witnessed the events with your own eyes. As with Matthew, Luke is going to fail this test right out of the gate. For proof of this, we need look no farther than Luke 1:1-3:
"Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. With this in mind, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I too decided to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus,"
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| A graphical representation of the relationship between the synoptic gospels. Note: While the percentages differ slightly between this graph and the cited article, the differences are trivial. |
If we go back and examine the similarities between Mark and Luke, we will notice that 88% of the material in Mark is duplicated in Luke's gospel. Further, as we saw with Matthew, Luke also demonstrates some agreement with Mark in parenthetical material (two quick examples being Mark 2:10-11 vs Luke 5:24; and Mark 10:18 vs Luke 18:19). This copied material is somewhat less than the 97% of Mark that was copied by Matthew, but it is still more than enough to demonstrate that Luke based some 47% of his gospel on Mark's fictional drama.
Further, there are about 235 verses that Matthew and Luke share, that are not found in Mark (Illustrated by the "Double Tradition" section in the graph above). While it is tempting to argue that Luke merely copied from Matthew as well as Mark, this is not necessarily clear. While many of the similarities between Matthew and Luke are simply too exact to be the work of wholly independent authors (such as Matthew 6:24 vs Luke 16:13; and Matthew 7:7-11 vs Luke 11:9-13), it's also worth noting that in those instances where Mark, Matthew, and Luke all tell a similar story (the "Triple Tradition" material) Luke strongly favors Mark's original material over Matthew's upgrades. For example in Mark 1:32-34, Jesus heals many sick and demon-possessed people. In retelling the story in Matthew 8:16-17 this healing is now a fulfillment of prophecy. However, in the second retelling in Luke 4:40-41 the fulfillment of prophecy is omitted in favor of other additions to the story. Again, in Mark 1:11, after Jesus' baptism, a voice from heaven says “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.” Matthew 3:17 upgrades this proclamation by making it public, saying "This is my beloved Son; with whom I am well pleased.” But by the time Luke 3:22 rolled around, it was back to Mark's original. It seems unlikely that Luke would've omitted a fulfilled prophecy or failed to recognize the stylistic improvement of having Yhwh make a public proclamation, unless he hadn't read Matthew's gospel. What's more, there is an abundance of fairly rich material present in Matthew's gospel that Luke leaves out (such as "The Great Commission" the presence of Magi at Jesus' birth, the "Flight to Egypt" which also allegedly fulfills a prophecy) and which one would suppose that Luke would have included, if he had read Matthew's gospel.
As a result, many scholars have surmised that there may have been an additional source (known as "Q") which inspired much of the "Double Tradition" material; however, there are no surviving copies of this "Q" source, meaning that claims about its existence remain entirely speculative. The other hypothesis is that Luke simply had different theological and sectarian tastes than Matthew did, and so Luke copied the material from Matthew that he liked, reverted to Mark's original when he didn't like Matthew's version for any reason, and made up his own material as needed. I will let the reader decide which hypothesis is more plausible. I personally am not firmly committed to either hypothesis and even if I were, I doubt that I possess the time or resources necessary to resolve this issue.
Regardless of whether Luke copied from Matthew or whether Luke and Matthew both copied from the hypothetical "Q" source, Luke got nearly half of his material from Mark's fictional drama, nearly a quarter either from Matthew's plagiarized upgrade or from an unknown source that may or may not exist, and got the rest from his own imagination. All told, there is nothing in his account that gives us any reason to suspect that Luke's gospel is historically reliable.
2. The Bethlehem Fakery
Although Luke has fallen flat on his face as a witness - or even an historian - of these events, there's a bit more that I think I had ought to say while I'm on the topic (frankly, I find Luke to be a very dull gospel, and I'll probably never come back to these points if I don't address them here). The first point I would like to make is to address one point brought up by the late, great Christopher Hitchens in his book "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.” In his book, Hitchens - in an effort to be open and fair-minded about the possibility of an historical Jesus - writes:
“The best argument I know for the highly questionable existence of Jesus is this... the jumbled “Old” Testament prophecies indicate that the Messiah will be born in the city of David, which seems indeed to have been Bethlehem. However, Jesus’s parents were apparently from Nazareth and if they had a child he was most probably delivered in that town. Thus a huge amount of fabrication—concerning Augustus, Herod, and Quirinius—is involved in confecting the census tale and moving the nativity scene to Bethlehem... But why do this at all, since a much easier fabrication would have had him born in Bethlehem in the first place, without any needless to-do? The very attempts to bend and stretch the story may be inverse proof that someone of later significance was indeed born, so that in retrospect, and to fulfill the prophecies, the evidence had to be massaged to some extent.”In short: If the Gospel of Luke is fiction, then why would Luke go through all of this trouble of including a census that required the entire known world to go back to the hometown of one of their ancient ancestors, just so Mary could give birth to Jesus in Bethlehem before going back to Nazareth, when Luke could've just had Jesus be born and raised in Bethlehem? Hitchens (quite magnanimously, I might add) supposed that perhaps someone important really was born and raised in Nazareth, and this required Luke to go back and create this very contrived tale to move the place of his birth over to Bethlehem, the city of David before having him be raised in Nazareth.
This is a pretty good argument, but I maintain that it does not hold up to scrutiny. First of all Mark refers to "Nazareth" or refers to Jesus as a "Nazarene" on six different occasions in his gospel. Now, to be utterly fair to Christians, I have heard it said by many a scholar, that the oldest manuscripts of Mark make no reference to "Nazareth", but only refer to Jesus as a "Nazarene". It has further been argued that this word "Nazarene" does not mean "one who lives in Nazareth", but perhaps means something like "bringer of truth" or "offshoot" (in this case, an offshoot of Judaism) or some similar title or descriptor of Jesus. This is of some importance because - if Mark explicitly stated that Jesus was from Nazareth, then Hitchens' attempt to defend Christianity falls flat, as we suddenly have a reason why Luke had to undertake these ridiculous contortions to move Jesus' birth to Bethlehem: to keep the story in line with Mark's original. I will say this again for the benefit of the Christian reader: it is possible, that Mark never said and never meant to imply that Jesus was from a city called "Nazareth".
However, regardless of Mark's intentions, Matthew very clearly thought that Mark meant that Jesus would grow up in the city of Nazareth, as Matthew 2:19-23 states that Jesus being taken to live in the city of Nazareth as a child was the fulfillment of a supposed prophecy that "he would be called a Nazarene". It's also worth noting that in Matthew's version of events, Jesus is born in Bethlahem, and he and his parents flee to Nazareth (after making a detour through Egypt to fulfill another supposed prophecy) to escape from Herod. So Matthew writes the virgin birth story exactly as Hitchens would've expected if the whole thing was just made up rubbish.
If we assume that Luke read Matthew's Gospel, and had also read the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Jewish Scriptures, which Luke should've read since he appears quite able to quote from it), then he would've realized that Matthews supposed "Nazarene" prophecy simply doesn't exist in Jewish scripture, and his whole reason for Jesus' moving to Nazareth would've been shot. As a result, Luke stuck with the idea that Jesus had grown up in Nazareth, but needed a new reason for Jesus' parents to be in Bethlehem long enough to give birth to him and fulfill that prophecy. Luke found his pretext in a census recorded by Josephus, which he then fudged to include a requirement that everyone return to their ancestral hometown in order to achieve the effect of fulfilling a supposed Jewish prophecy. (On the other hand, if we assume that Luke never read Matthew's Gospel, we need only assume that Luke made the same mistake as Matthew, in assuming that "Nazarene" meant "from the city of Nazareth" and once again Luke came up with this contrived story of a census to move the action over to Bethlehem to fulfill a supposed Jewish prophecy.)
In short, in order to argue that Luke's contrived "virgin birth" story is any kind of evidence of an historical Jesus, we must assume that Mark never said that Jesus was from Nazareth, that Luke never read Matthew's gospel and therefore never saw that Matthew placed Jesus hometown as being Nazareth, and that Luke knew that Mark's use of "Nazarene" did not mean "from the city of Nazareth", and yet still opted to have him be born in Bethlehem and grow up in Nazareth, instead of simply having him be born and raised in Bethlehem. I must admit that I find that the idea that Luke made the same mistake as Matthew in interpreting "Nazarene" as meaning "from the city of Nazareth" much more convincing.
[As an aside, it is worth taking a moment to mention that this census occurred in the year 6 CE. This is interesting in part because the death of King Herod (who supposedly alive at the time of Jesus birth as told in Matthew 2:1) died a full ten years earlier in 4 BCE. As such Matthew and Luke cannot even agree on the correct decade in which Jesus was born, much less the year. However, it is more interesting for a second reason: It is commonly held that Jesus was baptized at age 30, and had a ministry lasting from 1-3 years (the Synoptic gospels only mention one passover, whereas John mentions three different passovers during Jesus' ministry.) If we assume that Luke is correct, this places Jesus execution at the year 37 CE. However, Pontius Pilate (who was supposedly involved in the trial of Jesus in Luke 23:1-4) Was governor of the Roman province of Judaea from 26-36 CE. Pilate would've been gone for a year by the time Jesus got there!]
3. Luke's Genealogy: More Magic Numbers
As with Matthew's genealogy, Luke's ancestry of Jesus has less to do with recorded history than it has to do with establishing Jesus' divinity through the use of lucky numbers. This time however, it's less about establishing Jesus' claim to David's throne, than it is about establishing Jesus as the son of Yhwh.
Instead of the "42 generations" (which are actually only 41 generations) made up of three blocks of fourteen names to allude to King David, Luke opts for 77 generations (seven being the "number of spiritual perfection" in Judeo-Christian theology) stretching back all the way to Yhwh himself. In so doing, Luke hopes to prove that Jesus' birth had been specially arranged by Yhwh to occur precisely 77 generations after the dawn of time itself. As with Matthew, this has little - if anything - to do with history, but is merely using lucky numbers to establish Jesus' divinity.
As an additional curiosity, Zerubbabel, son of Shealtie, appears in both of Jesus' genealogies. in Matthew 1:12, Zerubbabel is Jesus' 8x great grandfather; however, in Luke 3:27, Zerubabbel is Jesus' 18x great grandfather. While this isn't really relevant to the question at hand, it does provide some nasty problems for those who try to claim that both genealogies are accurate (perhaps by arguing that one is the genealogy of Mary). It would require some extraordinary biological shuffling to make the same man be Jesus' 8x and 18x great grandfather. Even if one were to argue that one line goes to Mary, and the other to Joseph, it would be an incredible cosmic conspiracy (I say "incredible" if for no other reason than the sheer triviality of the issue) to ensure that one of Zerubabbel's children (and their descendants) breed so young, and another of his children (and their descendants) breed so late, as to create a ten generation disparity by the time of Jesus.
To recap, Luke blatantly plagiarized Mark, and may very well have plagiarized from Matthew as well. The blatant and obvious fakery associated with Luke's virgin birth does not hold up as any sort of evidence of an historical Jesus, and - as with Matthew - Luke's genealogy also betrays it's origins as being part of a system of "magic numbers" instead of being recorded history.
With three gospels down, we have one fictional drama (Mark) and two obvious plagiarisms. Curiously lacking is any independent eyewitness testimony of Jesus. That said, we have one gospel yet to look at. Come back next week to check out the Gospel of John.
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