The Gospel Standard: Fill & Download for Free

There are actually several reasons for this. The first reason is that the text we know today as the “Gospel of Mark” is actually completely anonymous. If you open up the gospel and read it without looking at the spurious title that has been given to it, the actual gospel itself says absolutely nothing about its author.Although the Church Father Papias of Hierapolis (lived c. 60 – c. 163 AD) mentions in a fragment that has been preserved through quotation by the later historian Eusebios of Kaisareia that the man named John Mark, who is mentioned in the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, had written a gospel, the earliest definitive identification of John Mark as the author of the gospel we know today as the Gospel of Mark dates to around the mid-second century AD, long after the Gospels of Matthew and Luke were already written.The fact is that all four of the canonical gospels included in the Christian New Testament are actually completely and totally anonymous. The reason for this is because the gospels were originally written by members of local Christian communities to be used by fellow members of those communities. In other words, whoever wrote the Gospel of Mark was writing for fellow members of his own community. Everybody in the community knew who the author was and the gospel was used by the whole community, so there was really no point in attaching anyone’s name to the actual text.ABOVE: Illustration by Jean Bourdichon of Saint Mark the Evangelist, the supposed author of the Gospel of Mark, from the Grandes Heures of Anne of Brittany, dating to 1503–1508Furthermore, attaching one’s own name to a gospel someone had written would have probably been as ostentatious and self-glorifying. Early Christians believed firmly in the essential virtue of humility. The gospels were not written for individual glory, but rather for the benefit of the whole community. Finally, unless you were someone who was already famous for having been an apostle or someone close to Jesus himself, it was generally assumed that no one would know or really care who you were anyways.Eventually, though, the gospels came to be used by people from outside the original communities in which they had been written. These new people from other communities had no idea who the original authors were and so the texts became anonymous. Much later, when there were dozens of different gospels in circulation, people started wondering who had written them and tried to find clues.Eventually, the gospels became spuriously attributed to various apostles and to friends of the apostles. To a large extent, these later attributions were motivated by a desire to boost each particular gospel’s credibility. No one wanted to read a gospel written by some anonymous Jewish guy who probably never even knew Jesus while he was on earth, but, obviously, everyone wanted to read a gospel written by someone who had been close to Jesus while he was alive, like the apostle Matthew, the apostle John, the apostle Thomas, or the apostle Peter.ABOVE: Third-century AD papyrus containing a portion of the text of the Gospel of LukeThe anonymous authors of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, who were probably both writing in around the 80s or early 90s AD, quite simply did not know who the original author of the Gospel of Mark was. Imagine for a moment that you are the author of the Gospel of Matthew or the Gospel of Luke and you are using a source written probably around a decade or two ago by some anonymous person from some community somewhere. You have no idea who this person is or even where they come from, but you are using the gospel they wrote as a source because it is one of the oldest complete accounts you can find of Jesus’s ministry.How exactly would you cite something like that? All you would be able to say is, “According to some source I found written by some anonymous person from somewhere…” Would it really make any difference? it certainly would be of virtually no help to anyone wanting to track down the original source.The second factor that goes into this is that the early Christians of the late first century AD when the gospels were written did not think of plagiarism the same way we think of it today. Today, English teachers drill it into their students’ heads from day one that copying someone else’s exact words without explicitly attributing those words to the person who originally wrote them is plagiarism, but the early Christians of the late first century AD do not seem to have thought of it that way.Instead, they seem to have thought that the gospels belonged to the Christian community as a whole, not to their individual authors. in their minds, there was nothing wrong with taking something someone else had written a decade or so before you, revising it, expanding on it with information from other sources, and calling it a new gospel. To them, that was not plagiarism; it was just part of the process of fashioning a new gospel for the community.The final reason why the authors of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke do not cite the Gospel of Mark as a source even though they both clearly relied on it is because none of the gospels were written by professional historians and, of all the gospel writers, only the author of the Gospel of Luke was apparently familiar with the methods used by professional historians.ABOVE: Text of the Gospel of Luke in the original Greek from the Codex Alexandrinus, dating to the fifth century ADThe author of the Gospel of Luke mentions at the very beginning of his gospel that he is relying on sources written by other people. In the Gospel of Luke 1:1–4, he writes, as translated in the NRSV:“Since many have undertaken to set down an orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, I too decided, after investigating everything carefully from the very first, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the truth concerning the things about which you have been instructed.”Nonetheless, the author of the Gospel of Luke never tells us anything more about any of his sources. None of the other gospel writers cite any sources at all, even though we know for certain from examining them that they all clearly relied on earlier sources, both written and oral.Citing sources is not really an instinctive thing to do. When someone is telling a story that they have heard, most of the time the person cannot even remember where they heard it. When ordinary people try to write history, oftentimes they apply the exact same standards they are used to using in ordinary, everyday conversation to the written word.The result is that, oftentimes, even today, ordinary people who are trying to write history do not even cite any sources at all. You can just look at Quora as a modern-day example of this. You will quickly notice that most people on Quora do not cite any sources for what they write when it comes to history. By golly, oftentimes I do not cite any sources here on Quora.

The question of why Jesus of Nazareth didn’t write down any of his own teachings has puzzled many Christians and non-Christians alike. From the perspective of a literate person in the twenty-first-century west, it makes little sense why a person who saw himself as a prophet would not bother to write down any of his own ideas. Most of us are accustomed to getting our information about religion from books, so we tend to assume that it would have only been natural for Jesus to write down his teachings.The problem with this assumption is that Jesus was not a twenty-first-century literate westerner, but rather a first-century CE Jewish itinerant preacher from Galilee. Although the canonical gospels consistently seem to portray Jesus as literate, it is an open question whether the historical Jesus was actually literate. Furthermore, even if Jesus was indeed literate as the gospels portray him, there are several good reasons why he might have decided not to write down his teachings.The Gospel of Mark’s portrayal of Jesus as a literate rabbiAll the oldest surviving gospels portray Jesus as extensively quoting and alluding to specific passages from the Hebrew Bible in ways that strongly suggest that the authors of those gospels believed that Jesus had read and studied these passages on his own.The earliest surviving gospel is the Gospel of Mark, which was most likely written sometime around 70 CE or thereabouts (i.e., around forty years or so after Jesus’s death). In the Gospel of Mark 2:23–28, Jesus is portrayed as asking the Pharisees if they have “read” the story of how David ate the bread of the Presence and gave some of it to his companions. The passage reads as follows, as translated in the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV):“One sabbath he was going through the grainfields; and as they made their way his disciples began to pluck heads of grain. The Pharisees said to him, ‘Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the sabbath?’ And he said to them, ‘Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need of food? He entered the house of God, when Abiathar was high priest, and ate the bread of the Presence, which it is not lawful for any but the priests to eat, and he gave some to his companions.’ Then he said to them, ‘The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath; so the Son of Man is lord even of the sabbath.’”The Greek word in verse twenty-five that the NRSV translates as “read” is ἀνέγνωτε (anégnōte), which definitely means “read.” The way this question is phrased very much makes it sound as though the author of the gospel believed that Jesus had read the story from the Tanakh on his own or, at the very least, that he had had someone else read it to him. There are multiple other passages in the Gospel of Mark that also seem to suggest that the author of the gospel believed that Jesus was literate.ABOVE: Illustration from 1866 by the French artist Gustave Doré depicting Jesus and his disciples plucking grain on the Sabbath, as described in the Gospel of Mark 2The description of Jesus reading aloud in the synagogue in the Gospel of LukeThe Gospel of Luke, which was most likely written sometime in around the 90s CE or thereabouts, is even more explicit in its portrayal of Jesus as a literate man. The Gospel of Luke 4:16–21 unambiguously describes Jesus as reading aloud from the scroll of Isaiah in the synagogue in his hometown of Nazareth. The passage reads as follows, as translated in the NRSV:“When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,because he has anointed meto bring good news to the poor.He has sent me to proclaim release to the captivesand recovery of sight to the blind,to let the oppressed go free,to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’”This passage strongly suggests that the anonymous author of the Gospel of Luke believed that Jesus was one of the few literate people in his village and that it was common for him to read aloud from the Tanakh in the synagogue on the Sabbath.ABOVE: Illustration of Jesus reading from the scroll of Isaiah by the French painter James Tissot (lived 1836 – 1902)The description of Jesus “writing” in the Pericope AdulteraeAnother passage that some people have tried to interpret as evidence that Jesus was literate is found in the Gospel of John 7:53–8:11. The text reads as follows, as translated in the NRSV:“[[Then each of them went home, while Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. Early in the morning he came again to the temple. All the people came to him and he sat down and began to teach them. The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery; and making her stand before all of them, they said to him, ‘Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?’ They said this to test him, so that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground.”“When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, ‘Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.’ And once again he bent down and wrote on the ground. When they heard it, they went away, one by one, beginning with the elders; and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. Jesus straightened up and said to her, ‘Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?’ She said, ‘No one, sir.’ And Jesus said, ‘Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.’]]”There are two reasons why this passage is much more difficult to use as evidence for Jesus being literate than the passages from the Gospels of Mark and Luke that I have already quoted above. The first reason is because, as I discuss in this article from February 2020, the entire passage found in the Gospel of John 7:53–8:11—known as the Pericope Adulterae—is widely recognized among scholars as a later interpolation that was not a part of the original gospel.The passage is missing entirely from all the earliest surviving manuscripts of this portion of the Gospel of John and, even in some of the later manuscripts, it is marked as probably a later addition to the text. The NRSV itself places the entire passage in brackets to show that it was probably not a part of the original text.The second problem is that, unlike in the passage from the Gospel of Luke, where it is clear that Jesus is actually reading words aloud, in the Pericope Adulterae, it is unclear whether Jesus is actually writing words. The word that is used in the Greek text is κατέγραφεν (katégraphen). This word could mean “he wrote” as in “he wrote words,” but it could also mean “he drew.” In other words, the text doesn’t clarify whether Jesus is actually writing words in the dust with his finger or merely doodling.ABOVE: Illustration from 1866 by the French artist Gustave Doré depicting Jesus defending the adulterous woman from the angry mob wanting to stone herWas the historical Jesus literate?Leaving that whole matter aside, it’s clear enough that the authors of the canonical gospels—or certainly at least the author of the Gospel of Luke—believed that Jesus was literate. Unfortunately, the gospels are not reliable sources; they were all written many decades after Jesus’s death by anonymous, ideologically motivated authors who certainly never knew Jesus personally while he was alive on earth. The gospels do rely on earlier written and oral sources, so they are not entirely useless from a historical perspective, but anything they say should of course be taken with several grains of salt.Many modern scholars have rightly pointed out that the overwhelming majority of the people who lived in Galilee in the first century CE must have been illiterate. John Dominic Crossan, for instance, writes in his 1994 book Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, on page 25:“…since between 95 and 97 per cent of the Jewish state was illiterate at the time of Jesus, it must be presumed that Jesus also was illiterate.”The statistic Crossan gives here isn’t based on any real evidence and I suspect it is probably a bit exaggerated. I think the actual functional literacy rate was probably somewhere between maybe fifteen percent and five percent; I don’t think the literacy rate is likely to have been less than five percent.Nonetheless, there can be little doubt that the vast majority of Jewish people in Judaea and Galilee in the first century CE were illiterate. A Jewish saying attested in the Masekhet Soferim 11.2 accounts for a situation in which only one person in an entire village might be able and willing to read aloud from the Torah. We don’t know how common a situation like the one described in the saying might have been, but the mere fact that this situation was seen as a plausible one indicates that literacy rates were relatively low.The real flaw in Crossan’s argument in my opinion is that he assumes that Jesus must have been like the majority of people who lived in the same time and place as him and he does not allow for the entirely reasonable possibility that Jesus might have been better educated than most people of that time and place. After all, if Jesus were really no different from the majority of people in Galilee in the first century CE, then we would never have heard of him.We do know that there were some people in Galilee in the first century CE who were literate. Indeed, even the Masekhet Soferim seems to assume that at least one person in every village would be literate enough to read the Torah. I don’t see any reason why Jesus couldn’t have been one of those people. He was, after all, a religious leader and, even if we totally ignore everything the gospels say about him, it’s hard to imagine that he would have had no desire to study the Hebrew scriptures on his own whatsoever.I am personally inclined to think that Jesus was probably at least functionally literate. This is a controversial opinion and I know a lot of New Testament scholars will disagree with me, but it’s the conclusion that I think best suits the available evidence. Ultimately, of course, I don’t think it is possible for us to know for certain whether the historical Jesus was literate or not. It’s yet another a mystery about him that will never be conclusively solved.ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Great Isaiah Scroll from Qumran Cave 1Why Jesus didn’t write his teachings downIn all honesty, I’m not sure that it really matters in the long run whether or not Jesus was literate, because, even if he was literate, there are very good reasons why he might not have wanted to commit his teachings to writing. The first reason is because Jesus was a religiously observant Jewish man who intended his message for fellow religiously observant Jewish people. Naturally, he almost certainly wanted his message to reach as many religiously observant Jewish people as possible.Since the overwhelming majority of Jewish people in Jesus’s time were illiterate, it would make no sense at all for him to try to reach them by writing his teachings down. Thus, instead of putting his teachings into writing, Jesus travelled around from one village to the next, preaching his ideas by word-of-mouth. This method seems to have been quite effective.The only reason why Jesus might have plausibly had motivation to write his teachings down would have been if he wanted his teachings to be reliably preserved for later generations. Throughout the Synoptic Gospels, however, Jesus is portrayed as constantly reiterating that the end of the world is imminent and that Kingdom of God will arrive on earth before the end of his followers’ lifetimes. Indeed, the very first words he is portrayed as saying in the Gospel of Mark 1:15 are as follows:“The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”Later, in the Gospel of Mark 9:1, he is portrayed as saying:“Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come with power.”In the Gospel of Mark 13, Jesus is portrayed as giving a long sermon to his disciples, warning them how they should prepare for the End Times. He obviously intends this message for his own followers living in the early first century CE—not for random strangers who might hypothetically be born thousands of years in the future. Near the end of the chapter, in Mark 13:30–31, he tells the disciples:“Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.”The central message that the end of the world is imminent reverberates throughout the writings of the New Testament from the very beginning all the way to the very end. The very last thing Jesus is portrayed as saying in the Book of Revelation 22:20 is: “Surely I am coming soon.”Since Jesus seems to have believed that the end of the world as he knew it was imminent, he probably also believed that writing down his teachings for future generations would be a complete waste of time, because, from his perspective, there wouldn’t be any future generations.ABOVE: The Last Judgement, painted c. 1435 by the German painter Stefan Lochner(NOTE: I have also published a version of this article on my website titled “Was Jesus Literate?” Here is a link to the version of the article on my website.)

The New World Translation (NWT) is an English translation of the Bible published by the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society. It is the version of the Bible most often used by Jehovah’s Witnesses. It is known for including a large number of passages that are translated quite differently from how those passages are normally translated. The NWT is especially controversial for its unusual translation of the Gospel of John 1:1.Here is the text of the Gospel of John 1:1 in the original Koine Greek:“ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος.”Here is a fairly conventional translation of the passage found in the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV):“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”Now, here is how the passage is translated in the NWT:“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was a god.”Did you notice the subtle difference?Let’s break the verse down into segments. Let’s start with the first part:“ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος…”This part is traditionally translated as “In the beginning was the Word.” The NWT’s translation of this part agrees with the NRSV’s translation exactly. The only caveat here is that the Greek word λόγος (lógos), which is traditionally translated as “word,” is actually a lot more complicated than that because the word in Greek carries a lot of connotations that our English word word does not.In Greek, λόγος literally means “a thing spoken.” This can be a single word, an entire speech, or an entire story. Furthermore, the word can also mean “reason,” “argument,” or “explanation.” It means “word,” but we need to put a bit of an asterix next to it to show that it means a lot more than that.Now let’s translate the next part:“…καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν…”The Greek word θεός (theós) literally means “deity.” It is the word that is normally used in classical Greek texts to refer to the Greek deities. For instance, when a deity is mentioned in the Iliad, the word Homer uses is usually θεός. On the other hand, θεός is also the word that is used in the Greek Septuagint to refer to the monotheistic God of Judaism.In this passage, θεός is in the accusative case and it is accompanied by τόν (tón), the accusative form of the Greek definite article. It is functioning as the object of the preposition πρός (prós), which, in this case, means “with.”We might translate this passage literally, then, as follows:“…and the spoken thing [i.e. the word] was with the deity [i.e. God]…”The NWT translates this part as follows:“…and the Word was with God…”I would say that the NWT’s translation of this bit is accurate.Finally, we come to the very last part of the verse. This is the part where the NWT’s translation stops agreeing with the NRSV. In the Greek text, we have this:“…καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος.”Literally, this means “and deity was the word.” Traditionally, it is translated as “and the Word was God.” The NWT, however, controversially translates this bit as “and the Word was a god.” In doing this, the NWT is clearly trying to distinguish the Word, which is Jesus, from God the Father, thus portraying the Father and the Son as entirely separate divine beings and negating the idea in Trinitarian Christianity that the Father and the Son are homoousian, or “of the same substance.”In Greek, there is no indefinite article, meaning the way you would write “deity” and “a deity” is exactly the same. The NWT’s translation, then, isn’t necessarily demonstrably wrong, but it does try to impose a distinction that, at the very least, is not obvious in the Greek text itself.If we were just reading the Greek text with no exposure to the NWT’s translation, the most obvious assumption would be that, when the gospel says “and deity was the word,” it means “and the word was God [i.e. the same God I just mentioned],” not “and the word was a god [i.e. a different god from the one I just mentioned].”It is possible that the author of the Gospel of John intentionally wrote this passage to be a bit ambiguous. After all, throughout the entire Gospel of John, Jesus is portrayed as constantly making statements that seem to suggest he is God without outright saying, “I am God.” The author of the gospel, then, seems to have wanted to suggest that Jesus is God without outright saying it.ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of Papyrus 75, a papyrus fragment dated to between c. 175 and c. 225 AD containing the end of the Gospel of Luke and the beginning of the Gospel of John in the original Greek