Book Review: The Case for Jesus by Brant J. Pitre

• Title: The Case for Jesus: The Biblical and Historical Evidence for Christ
• Author: Brant J. Pitre
• Published: New York: Image, 2016. Pages-242.

About the Author[1]

Dr. Brant J. Pitre is a native of Houma, Louisiana and is currently the Chair of the Department of Sacred Scripture at Notre Dame Seminary in New Orleans, Louisiana. He earned his Ph.D. in Theology from the University of Notre Dame in 2004, where he majored in Christianity and Judaism in Antiquity with a minor in Systematic Theology. His dissertation was “The Historical Jesus, the Great Tribulation, and the End of the Exile: Restoration Eschatology and the Origin of the Atonement.”  He currently lives in Gray, Louisiana, with his wife Elizabeth, and their five children.

My Perspective

“Did Jesus of Nazareth claim to be God?”[2]  That is the main question of this book.  But as I started to read it appeared more about the authorship of the Gospels.  This makes it appear as if Pitre was going off on a tangent, he is not, so stay with it.  It is vital to his argument.  If we have been led to believe that the Gospels are anonymous then the question on the veracity of their message comes in to play.  This book was a good one and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in Christianity.

I have heard the same message that Pitre heard from his college professor: “Although your English Bibles say ‘The Gospels according to “Matthew,” “Mark,” “Luke,” and “John,”’ these titles were actually added much later.  In fact, we don’t really know who wrote the Gospels.  Nowadays modern scholars agree that the Gospels were originally anonymous.”[3]  I remember getting an uneasy feeling, just like he mentions, when I was first told this. He goes on to reveal that “I began to realize that many contemporary New Testament scholars do not believe that Jesus of Nazareth ever actually claimed to be God.”[4]  This is serious.  How does this happen?

Pitre recalls the argument of C. S. Lewis for the divinity of Jesus in Mere Christianity where Jesus is either “1. Liar: Jesus knew he wasn’t God, but he said he was; 2. Lunatic: Jesus thought he was God, but he actually wasn’t; 3. Lord: Jesus was who he said he was – God come in the flesh.”[5]  But, with the concept that the Gospels are anonymous there opens up a fourth option, “that the stories about Jesus in the Gospels in which he claims to be God are “legends.””[6]  Take a moment to think about that.  In other words, the Gospels are lying.  “More than anything else, it was this idea – the idea that Jesus never actually claimed to be God – that led me personally to begin having serious doubts about who Jesus was.  It slowly dawned on me that C. S. Lewis’s Liar, Lunatic, or Lord argument had assumed that all four Gospels (including John) tell us what Jesus actually did and said.  Take that assumption off the table and everything changes.”[7]  This led Pitre to almost losing his religion.  I am sure many do.  So, what did he do?

He did what many are not capable of doing, he studied the original sources, studied church fathers, took courses in advanced Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic, learned Coptic, and lastly, he looked for those “anonymous” copies of the gospels that he was told over and over again that existed.

I began looking for the “anonymous” copies of the Gospels that I had learned about during my undergraduate years.  Surely, I thought, there must be some anonymous manuscripts, since every textbook I had read started with the assertion that the four Gospels were originally anonymous and that we don’t know who actually wrote them.  But I wanted to see for myself. … What I quickly discovered is that there are no anonymous manuscripts of the four Gospels.  They don’t exist. … (T)he only way to defend the theory that the Gospels were originally anonymous is to ignore virtually all of the evidence from the earliest Greek manuscripts and the most ancient Christian writers. … (T)here are compelling reasons for concluding that the four Gospels are first-century biographies of Jesus, written within the lifetime of the apostles, and based directly on eyewitness testimony.[8]

This is the crux of the book.  For the rest of the book, he explains how he came to this opinion, and how he defends it.  “I began to see clearly that Jesus did claim to be God – but in a very Jewish way.  And he does so in all four first-century Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.  But in order to see this clearly, you have to take one very important step.  You have to go back and read the Synoptic Gospels from an ancient Jewish perspective.”[9]  This looking at the primary sources from their own historical period is crucial for any historian.  How did we get away from this?  Is this new?

I gradually realized that confusion about who Jesus claimed to be is everywhere, and its spreading.  Despite the arguments of writers like C. S. Lewis, the old notion that Jesus was just a prophet or a great moral teacher is still alive and well.  It’s in the universities and college classrooms, where many students arrive as Christians and leave as agnostics or atheists.  It’s in the television documentaries that air right around Christmas and Easter that seem specially designed to raise doubts about the truth of Christianity and are often full of everything except actual history.  It’s in the dozens of books that are published every year claiming to reveal that Jesus was really a Zealot, or that he was really married to Mary Magdalene, or whatever the latest theory is.  In fact, the idea that Jesus never claimed to be God may be more widespread today than ever before in history.[10]

I think we are all very familiar with what he is talking about.  It is a systematic degrading of Christian thought.  We need scholars like Pitre to stand up and speak the Truth.  He looks at both internal and external evidence to defend his claim.  “In the first three centuries after Christ, even those identified as heretics and enemies of the Church seem to have accepted that the four Gospels were actually written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.”[11] But what about the other gospels: the gnostic gospels, and lost gospels?

(T)he evidence from the early church fathers shows they were unanimous in believing that the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were actually written by the apostles and their disciples.  Likewise, they were unanimous in their judgment that the apocryphal gospels attributed to Thomas, Judas, and Peter were not written by the apostles or their disciples.  This contrast is devastating for the theory that the four Gospels were originally anonymous and then later falsely ascribed to the apostles and their disciples.  If this were true, then why don’t we find a single ancient Christian saying as much?  If the four Gospels were really forgeries like the later apocryphal gospels, then why didn’t at least some of the early church fathers harbor doubts about whether Matthew really wrote Matthew, or John really wrote John?[12]

These doubts are later constructs meant to erode and weaken the faith of the people.  Pitre goes on with how the Gospels actually resemble and are consistent in style with other ancient biographies.

(T)he contention that the Gospels are not biographies is just plain wrong.  Moreover, the use of modern-day children’s folktales like the story of George Washington and the cherry tree as analogies for the kind of stories the Gospels contain is historically indefensible and, quite frankly, academically irresponsible.  Like the Telephone game, these kinds of comparisons utterly fail to do justice to the actual literary genre and historical character of the four Gospels.  The Gospels are ancient biographies that intend to record the substance of what Jesus of Nazareth really did and said.[13]

But what about the dating of the Gospels?  Many scholars look at the destruction of the Temple in AD 70 as a way to date the Gospels as written after this since they mention it.  But this assumes that they are writing afterwards and not that they are quoting Jesus for an event that will happen.  For example, why does the Gospel relate that the people should pray that the fall does not happen in the winter, when it actually occurs in the summer?  Why do the Gospels not say “the Temple fell as Jesus foretold?”  According to Pitre, the main reason for dating the Gospels for later is the destruction of the Temple.  There is also the question of sources.  This is called the Synoptic Problem.  What Pitre reveals is that there are actually many different theories about the order of the Gospels, not just the “Q” theory.  He mentions the Augustinian Theory (Matthew, Mark, Luke used both), Griesbach Theory (Matthew, Luke, Mark used both) and the Farrer theory (Mark, Matthew, Luke used both).  The point here is that many scholars disagree on the order of the Gospels and thus when they were written, and since this is so, how can we say with any degree of certainty when each was actually written?

Pitre continues on with interesting points on the Crucifixion and the Resurrection.  He has about forty pages of notes in the back, so the actual book is only about two-hundred pages.  I got a lot out of this book and it has prompted many a conversation since I read it.  Perhaps I have given you enough to pique your interest.  I hope so.

[1] “Brant J. Pitre, Ph.D.,” Notre Dame Seminary Graduate School of Theology, Accessed May 16, 2018, https://nds.edu/staff-members/brant-j-pitre-ph-d/

[2] Pitre, Brant J..  The Case for Jesus: The Biblical and Historical Evidence for Christ.   New York: Image, 2016.  Page 1.

[3] Ibid., 2

[4] Ibid., 4

[5] Ibid., 5

[6] Ibid., 5

[7] Ibid., 7

[8] Ibid., 9

[9] Ibid., 9

[10] Ibid., 10

[11] Ibid., 52

[12] Ibid., 65-6

[13] Ibid., 82