Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Were the Gospels in Chronological Order? And lots of other interesting questions with Jonathan Pennington

Episode Date: June 11, 2020

Do the Gospels ever seem inconsistent or confusing? Do they raise a lot of questions? Get some answers in this guest interview with New Testament scholar, pastor, and teacher https://www.jonathanpennington.com/ (Dr. Jonathan Pennington). Interested in more content like this? Scroll down for more resources and related episodes, including Dr. Pennington's https://www.jonathanpennington.com/ (website) and https://www.jonathanpennington.com/books (books). Also, make sure to check out https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/podcasts/how-to-become-a-christian-learning-to-follow-jesus-luke/ (How to Become a Christian) and our interview with Sandra Richter on https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/podcasts/what-does-saving-the-environment-have-to-do-with-salvation/ (What Does Saving the Environment Have to Do with Salvation?). Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. To learn more, visit our https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/ (website) and follow us on https://www.facebook.com/TheCrossingCOMO (Facebook), https://www.instagram.com/thecrossingcomo/ (Instagram), and https://twitter.com/thecrossingcomo (Twitter) @TheCrossingCOMO.  Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. And I'm Patrick Miller. You ever read the Gospels and get confused because it seems like they're out of order? Or you read through the Gospels and you're looking for language about your relationship with Jesus, but it's not there. You hear about it in your church, but you don't read Jesus talking about it. I've had all those questions. I still have a lot of questions just like that, and I never know who to ask. Maybe you're in the same boat. You don't want to go ask your pastor because you don't want to sound dumb, and you don't have time to read a lot of books on these topics.

Well, if that's you, you're in luck, because we've got a guy, a friend of mine from a long time ago named Jonathan Pennington on this episode. And Jonathan is an expert in the New Testament. He spent a lot of his life studying it, and he's got his Ph.D. from St. Andrews. He now teaches at Southern Seminary. So welcome to our podcast, Jonathan. Hey, it's come to reconnect with you and be here. Great. So Jonathan, you went to seminary with Keith, and I love hearing anything about Keith's past that embarrasses him. Do you have any good stories about Keith from Seminary that you'll tell us? Oh, yes, indeed. memories of funny things. So maybe this will be disputed. Here's a very distinct memory I had of him. I remember we were in a systematic theology class.

It was one or two. And we had a bunch of classes together because we were all kind of doing night school together, et cetera. And I remember so distinctly studying for an exam together and it related to the doctrines of grace and God's sovereignty. And Keith saying, something like makes me so angry and I'm so mad about this, and I reject this idea. And then within only a semester or so, he had converted.

I remember that. Do you remember it that way, Keith? Wait, is this Keith's Calvinist conversion? Well, it could be. I was there. Jonathan is right that I went into seminary saying that if these things were true about God, I didn't want to become a Christian. And I left seminary saying, I can't believe that anyone could read the Bible and come to any other conclusion.

So I don't know exactly what that says about me, but it does mean that there was a conversion moment there somewhere. And Jonathan, it was there and witnessed it. I was there and witnessed it and, of course, was going through it myself as well. But Keith's was a little bit more violent. Well, that's a story of my life. More violent. That's a good thing. Well, Jonathan and I, like you said, had a lot of night classes together. They had a lot of classes total together. and we would go across the street into one of the dorms in Trinity College. We were across the street in the seminary, but we'd go eat dinner together and just talk about life and what we were learning. And then all of a sudden, I turn around and Jonathan's popped up, and he's kind of a big-time

guy on the New Testament scene. So it's fun to talk and reconnect. So Jonathan isn't just on the show because you're friends. He's here because he is the expert that we wish we could. He's actually funny. I read a book of yours, and I told Keith, I read this book. It's a great book. to read this and he goes, oh, I knew that guy. I'm like, what? You didn't know that guy. That guy's way above

your love. I was like, no, we went to seminary and learned Greek together. I'm like, what happened to you, Keith? How did you end up where you're at? That's exactly right. I was the guy who was asleep in the bag of the class and Jonathan was developing tools for people to learn Greek. He had just learned it himself, but somehow he was already teaching other people how to read it. I was like, Jonathan, teach me, help me, bro. I'm your friend. Now that we've thoroughly embarrassed you probably at this point, let us get around to some of these questions that I think a lot of Christians ask. I'll share a little bit of my experience. I remember reading through the Gospels in college and kind of putting together for the first time that I would read these sections where Jesus is talking in the gospel of Luke. And the same thing in the gospel of Matthew. And I noticed they don't sound exactly the same. And I kind of had this tape recorder idea in my head. Like the apostles were going around with tape recorders, getting all Jesus's words and then giving us the exact form of them. And so that was a little bit surprising. And so I guess, on to Google and I'm searching, why is this the case? And I start finding out that all these people are

saying, this is why you can't even trust the Gospels because, see, they're inaccurate. They're not on board. So maybe it's a great place to start. How would you answer that question for someone who's wondering, why does Jesus sound different in different places, even though it seems to be the same story? Such a great question. And that's not a moderate question. That's an ancient question, because the church decided very early on that instead of having just one big, what we might call jumbo gospel, where they just kind of take all the stories and just create one official document, instead they decided to maintain four distinct gospels that we call Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. In fact, they didn't even call them the gospels.

They called them the gospel, singular, according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. So they were very aware of the fact that the accountant, don't say the exact same thing. They never contradict each other. That's important to emphasize, but they never say exactly the same thing either. And it would have been so easy for the early church for apologetic reasons, just for ease of explanation reasons to eliminate all those distinctions and just have one gospel, but they chose not to. So sometimes what a lot of the people in the early church is, they wrote books like Augustine. You may have heard of him. He wrote a whole book going through some of these apparent discrepancies and showing that in every case, they really make sense, that there

are differences of wording that don't make a substance difference. And so this was a very old question and one that has been given great answers throughout the history of the church. I'll pause, because maybe you want to ask some follow up to it, but there's more I can say about that as well, if you want. Well, I think the modern day vision of history is almost like you would have a documentary film. Like, we'd have a camera set up and we would watch Jesus walk around. stop at this town or that town, say these things in his teaching. But then as you read the Gospels and see how maybe the Sermon on the Mount is presented differently in Matthew than it is in Luke, it just gets confusing. So can you help us think through that? Absolutely. The first thing to

recognize is that the documentary film idea, even that involves all kinds of editing, doesn't it? I mean, in the reality is that whenever you write history or trying to refilm something about history, you all have to be involved in a lot of what we might call selection and deselection. You have to figure out what parts of what happened you're going to report and what parts you're not, not just because you're not trying to hide things, but just because you can't say everything that happened. You have to select it. And if you think we've had children or had children or have children, you can think about when children are growing up, this is one of the things that it takes them a little while to figure out is that when you ask them, hey, how was your day

at school or something? You actually, don't have time for an entire eight-hour version of that. I mean, not because you don't care, but kids take a while to figure out that storytelling, still being faithful and true history of what happened, it needs a lot of editing. In other words, you need to select out the things that are irrelevant and you need to highlight the cause and effect, for example.

You have to figure out why this event affected that event. So the first thing I'd say is simply that history retelling involves interpretation. There is no such thing as history retelling that doesn't also have a goal. It doesn't mean it's inaccurate. It means that it's trying to teach you something. And when you talk about the Bible's history, we believe it's accurate and what it's saying is what really happened. But it has a goal that's bigger than just reporting the mere facts.

It's meant to teach us about who God is and who Jesus is and what's theological truth and how to live. And so that explains part, I think, of some of the differences between the Gospels. But another thing to think about is the fact that Jesus traveled around for three years and taught constantly. He was in conversation with people and he's standing up in front of lots of people. And he had a pretty straightforward message. The kingdom of God is coming from heaven to earth. And so he taught that in the form of parables.

He taught it in more direct things like the sermon on the mount. But because he was an itinerant teacher and preacher, he went around and said these things in a lot of places. And I think some of the reason why you see differences between, say, Luke's and Matthew's sermon on the plane versus sermon on the mount is because Jesus said a lot of these things, probably a lot of different places and times. And again, with the selection, deslection, God inspired the different gospel writers to include certain aspects of Jesus's many various teachings and to put them together in a certain form to teach us.

And so I hope that helps some of it. Yeah, I think it's really helpful. Keith and I recently read a biography of Frederick Douglass, and I don't think anywhere in that biography did they tell us his breakfast eating habits, which is interesting because he actually ate breakfast every day. I have to guess he ate breakfast most days. And that's kind of a big part of his life if you think about it, but it was deselected. It wasn't included on the inside of it. And that's true of all stories that we tell. But I think you're bringing up another really interesting point, which is that these authors, they had to make choices. They had to decide what they were going to put in, what they weren't. How do you think they made those choices? Why pick the things that they picked? One of the things I talk a lot about in my classes and in the book that you guys were referring to before we started, the reading Gospels Wisely book, is that the gospels are three things simultaneously. And we need to retain all of these. They are historical. They're theological and they're formative. The historical part of it is the confessional and plausible assertion or conviction that these are telling the truth, that these gospels are really telling who Jesus really was.

and what he was about. But a lot of times, unfortunately, that's as far as we get, and we forget the other two aspects of what the Gospels are, that they are theological. And this is the answer to your question. That is that they are intending to teach us who God is and who Jesus is. And so they have a goal, a very clearly stated goal. You can see it throughout all the Gospels,

but maybe the easiest place to see it is in John chapter 20, verse 31, where he says, I've written these things that you may believe Jesus is the Christ, and in believing you may have life in his name. In other words, they're not just saying, we don't care what happens to this information. We just need to tell the truth. They're very clearly intending to teach us who God is,

and that relates to the formative as well. They're teaching to make us disciples and to make us disciples of a certain sort. If I get your question right, I think, why did they select and deselect what they did? Well, we believe God inspired them to teach us something, and so all the choices they make of which stories to include and what elements of the stories to emphasize, all has a goal of teaching us something.

It's not just a bare facts reporting or something. So I think that's really helpful, Jonathan, because for a long time in my Christian life, probably embarrassingly long time, I thought the gospel writers were just telling us everything they knew about Jesus. Like they were just verbally vomiting up all the information they could remember or that they could find out from other people. And so it's really helpful to think in terms, no. I mean, even the gospel of John tells us that he could have told us more because there

was more information about Jesus that would have filled all the books in the world, in a sense. And so they were choosing which stories to tell her, like you said, what parts to emphasize. But I want to pick up on something you said a second ago. You said that Jesus went around talking about the kingdom. Now, whenever I imagine Jesus showing up in a city and I think, well, what would have been like to be there? I'd just like to ask people, what do you think Jesus would have said? Like, what kinds of things do you think he would have said? And what I find is that most people say a couple things. They say, well, maybe ethical truths, the golden rule, do unto others as you have them do unto you,

or parables because Jesus is famous for talking in these short kind of interesting stories. But I think you're saying he talked about something different, and that is the kingdom. Can you unpack that a little bit for us? There's no doubt that the primary message of the Gospels, and I would suggest the whole New Testament, is that God is returning now into the world through Jesus to restore his reign, his rule over the world that is currently in heaven perfectly, but on earth very imperfectly. And that that is the message that Jesus himself proclaims. The kingdom of heaven or the kingdom of God is at hand. And as you know, if you read the Old Testament, you see that it's pointing. forward to that. That's the great hope in books like Isaiah and other prophets that, oh, God, come to

bring upon the earth what we long for, where you restore justice and you restore life and flourishing, or the great Hebrew word for it is shalom, the time when things will be set right and that the world, its relationships between creatures and humans and animals and natural disasters, all that will be gone, all the bad parts of it will be gone, and that God himself will be present. And when you look at the whole Bible, that's really the theme that ties it together, isn't it? This great hope that God would restore his reign upon the earth, really to bring back the Garden of Eden, but even better in terms of it's a redeemed world that is flourishing completely. In my church, I'm a pastor as well, and we just preached a six-week series on hope,

and I just finished it last week talking about hoping in the new creation. And one of the striking things about Revelation 21 and 22 is that it combines all these images together in that the way the new Jerusalem or the new creation, the new heaven is described, it's a garden that's restored. It is the city of Jerusalem that's restored. And it has the exact measurements of the temple where God himself resides. So there's like three things together that the whole message of the Bible is talking about God's presence of people in a restored Eden and a perfect community. That's the vision of the

Bible altogether. And so that's what Jesus is talking about when he talks about the kingdom of God. It's not just some weird distant idea. It's the idea of an actual restoration of the world itself into what we longed for that is now coming through Jesus and now we're awaiting its final consummation when he returns. I hear what you're saying and I agree with a lot of it. But for me personally, my introduction to Christianity was essentially Jesus wants a personal relationship with you. Will you invite him to come live in your heart? And I didn't hear you, I think use any of those words in what you just said the

gospels are all about. So can you help interface those two ideas? Is that a wrong idea? Do they fit together somehow? What am I missing? Great question. And I didn't intentionally mean to avoid saying those things. I was trying to answer the question of what the kingdom of God is, but it's a very good

question. We tricked you. What did you say? I said we tricked you. Yes, I got it. Well, how they intersect, I think, is that the only way to enter into this kingdom is through that repentance of one's sins at an individual level and a turning of one's heart and mind and life from self only and the world to God as revealed in Jesus Christ.

So that aspect of the personal response is absolutely essential. And this is something that in our tradition, especially emphasized. But I think Christianity has always emphasized. the need for personal response. But I think the weakness of our tradition that I had to kind of get through, and I'm sure is the case for both of you as well, I know probably because we were both involved with campus group way back in the day, and I still love and I'm involved with Crusade to this day. So this is not a weakness to Crusade. This is a weakness of our tradition, is a lot of times we have defined the gospel only in those very narrow personal senses.

And the problem is that's true. It's just not the whole truth. So there's nothing wrong with talking about the gospel is the need for personal response. But you need more than that if you're going to talk about what the whole Bible's witness is about what the gospel is. And the whole Bible's witness is that it is actually a message of God restoring his reign upon the earth that we need to enter into. A related question a lot of times people talk about is the cross versus the kingdom. And sometimes, unfortunately, some Christians talk only about the cross and some Christians It's not going about the kingdom. But the truth is always a both and, not an either or that we need. The cross emphasizes our need for atonement or our need for forgiveness. And the kingdom emphasizes

our need for life itself and for order and structure of our lives and a hope for a life together. And Christianity, our Christian faith will always be imbalanced or pear-shaped if we only have one of those and not the other. We really need both of those together. Per-shaped like me, huh? Not in your Twitter picture. Yeah, not in my Twitter picture. I've got my skinny picture. You're very attractive in your Twitter picture.

Yeah, it's the best picture I've ever taken. It's everywhere. No, as I hear you talk, I think this is really helpful because what it's telling me is God's got a big plan for the whole world, and he called it the kingdom, and it's about his reign coming on earth as in heaven. And that's exciting. This is stuff people are talking about all over the world as we see something's wrong with the world, and someone needs to come to fix it.

And Jesus said, hey, I've got the solution to that problem. But right alongside that, you're saying the doorway, the way that we've been. participate in what God's doing begins with an active and a continual lifestyle of repentance and turning to Jesus for forgiveness and through him being reconciled in a healthy relationship with God. That's part of how that kingdom comes on earth. And that those aren't two separate things. They're one thing. They're one and the same. And that's really helpful to keep those two things united. I've met people before who call themselves New Testament Christians or even some churches out there who think of themselves as New Testament churches.

That's not us? No. I hope not. I don't know. We'll ask Jonathan and see what it should be or not, Dr. Pennington. I'm sorry. So a few years ago, there was a controversy center around a pastor out of Georgia named Andy Stanley, and you may or may not be familiar with him.

I think he's got some really good stuff to say. But he created kind of a storm around this idea that we should unhitch the New Testament from the old. And to tell you the truth, I don't look that much into it. I'm not exactly sure what he meant by that. But if we just take that phrase, unhitch the New Testament from the old, or we think about ourselves as New Testament Christians, and we can somehow distance ourselves from that difficulties

or maybe even yuckiness of the Old Testament. Is that right? I mean, is a New Testament scholar, do you have this sense that you can disregard or unhitch the New Testament from the old? Not if I want to be part of historic Orthodox Christianity. I can't, if that matters. And the reason is, is because to be a Christian, our belief in the Bible is that we have a two-testament canon.

And that's absolutely essential. And that's been the understanding from the beginning. If you want to get a little nerdy here for just a second, it's very interesting to consider impact that the change is adopted. They were early adopters of a new technology in the first century of the codex over the scroll. So if you imagine something being written on a scroll in the first and even second century AD, almost everything was written on scroll still. Eventually codexes, which are basically like a book, how we would do a book where pages are going to be opened. That new technology overtakes the scroll eventually, but Christians are very, very early adopters of that.

And one of the reasons that we surmise is probably the case is because what it enables you to do to have, have a codex rather than a scroll is that you can put together or letters together or writings together and by binding them together with like a wood case on the outside like we would like a hard back book or something you can actually say these books are to be read together or these ideas are to be read together and that Christians do very very early on is they start binding together the Hebrew scriptures or the Jewish scriptures with the apostolic teachings. So that's what we would call the Old Testament, the New Testament. The Hebrew scriptures and the apostolic teachings, they start binding them together and say, this is more. And the reason they do that is because they recognize

that both Testaments have an abiding voice. They both continue to speak because they are gods inspired and infallible authoritative word. And at the same time, their relationship does have a trajectory in them so that the ultimate writings are the ultimate explanation and the ultimate rotation of God's truth. So you've got to hold together this beautiful tension

that both parts of the Bible continue to speak and the New Testament is the sort of ultimate authoritative Christ-centered sort of revelation of God's speech. And so the idea of disconnecting us from the Old Testament, I think that's probably driven by ignorance often or

embarrassment or just inconvenience of some of the things that the Old Testament says, but we need the Old Testament to understand the new, and we need the new to understand the old, and we need to keep them together as one, two-testment Bible. Well, you said a few minutes ago in responding to another question that the Old Testament is talking about the kingdom that is then fulfilled in Jesus, that God in the Garden of Eden sets up his kingdom that is then thrown into chaos through sin, but that he goes, into Abraham to reestablish that kingdom, and we see that fulfilled in Jesus, that he is coming to fulfill all the promises of the Old Testament story that eventually are finally and fully fulfilled,

like you said earlier, in the book of Revelation. Yeah, I actually think Jonathan has a great talk that he did at the village, at the Institute. They're kind of seminary for everybody, thing that they're doing, and we'll link to that in the show notes. If you want to hear more about this idea of why the Old Testament understanding it really matters for what we are reading in the new Testament. And I mean, I can just speak personally. If you want to love your New Testament more, you're going to have to love your Old Testament more because it gives you the framework, the grounding, to make sense of everything that you're reading in the New Testament. My own study of the New Testament has only been enriched by deepening my love of the old. Okay, so changing gears a bit,

I think a great last question to ask you is for our listeners, they obviously don't have time to go get a PhD or an M-Div, and they might just be thinking, what are some first steps that I can take What are some things that I could look at, some things I could do to make the most of my own gospel reading? Because I love Jesus and I want to understand the gospels better. Tell me where to start. Yeah, that is a great question. And I've really given my adult life to trying to answer that and trying to help people learn how to read the gospels. And so it's a joy to answer that. I'd say the most important thing is to realize that these are stories and you can read them as stories. You don't need to read the gospels as if you're trying to kind of peel what's really going on

behind them or just read them as history. One of the problems I think with our gospels, a lot of times we read the gospels only as history and then we think we'll only get theology from Paul or someplace else. Instead, I'd encourage you read the gospels as great stories that are designed to teach you who God is in Christ. It's beautiful. And so that means just observe the story. You don't have to have a PhD to read the gospel as well. You can just pay attention. What is happening in this story? What's the issue here? What's the tension and what does Jesus say? And then ask, why are the stories on either side of it? What's going on on either of those stories? Because a lot of times, in fact, all the time, the gospel writers are telling kind of a throughline story and they're trying to teach you, not just fair facts again, but teach you who God is and teach you in a certain way to be a disciple. So if you, again, you don't have to have a PhD. All you have to do is look at the stories and ask good questions of the text. Why? this here? Why is this story here? What's going on in this story? What is she just trying to say to me about this? And I think that's a great place to start. And then we have so many great commentaries on Matthew,

Mark, Luke and John can help you because sometimes you don't know what the answer to your questions are. But just be, as it was described to CSOS, be a mind awake. When you read the Bible, don't read it passively. Ask questions. Dig in. Pursue the truth. Seek it. And God will be very happy to reveal himself to you. And I think the Gospels are a place to start, whether you are a Christian or a very old Christian, going to the Gospels and just reading them deeply and with an open heart will really transform your life. Jonathan, I want you to tell us about a couple of the books that you've written that you think people who are listening might benefit the most from. I will say this, is that Jonathan is a regular guy. He's got six kids. We were just laughing. They got three Xboxes

going. He's a pastor as well as a seminary professor. I've known him for a long time. And when he writes something, it's going to be good. Now, you're going to put your thinking hat on. It's not something to read probably 10 minutes before you go to bed, but it's well worth the effort. And it's understandable and it's practical. So tell us a couple things where people might be able to find your resources. Thanks for asking. I do have a website, Jonathan Pennington.com, where there's sermons and a lot of videos and other things on there, if people want to hear some preaching things. I have written a number of books. Reading the Gospels Wisely is one that is kind of a textbook level, so maybe it's not beach reading or something, but I think it's very accessible. It really is all about how to read the Gospels as well.

I also have written a book on the Sermin on the Mount called The Sermin on the Mount and Human Flourishing that, again, is for a thoughtful reader, but I think would be maybe very beneficial. but probably the book that will be most accessible to people is not quite out yet as of today's conversation but it will be out in October of 2020 and it's called Jesus the great philosopher rediscovering the wisdom needed for the good life and we don't have time now to get into all of it it but the basis is that Christianity is a very thoughtful, practical philosophy of whole life. It's not just a religion. It's not just about the vertical aspects of our lives, us in relationship to God. It's very much about the everyday part of our lives.

And so I explore the biblical idea of Christianity being a philosophy and then talk about things like emotions and relationships andness and talk about what the world says about those things, especially what ancient philosophy said about them and then what the Bible says about them as well. So that book, I think, again, it's a thoughtful book. I mean, it's got a lot of ideas in it, but I think our listeners would find that very accessible. I do have a YouTube channel where I drive around in my old sports car and interview other theologians. Cars call theology inspired by Seinfeld originally,

but with a little bit more academic spin. So people seem to enjoy those episodes, and your listeners might enjoy that Cars Coffee theology as well. We'll link to all those in our show notes. I was on the Amazon page for your new book coming out of October, and I'm going to pre-order it. Will it eventually be in Kindle? That's not an option now, but that option you're saying is coming. That's good to know. Now, when you're reading a book, like reading the Gospels wisely, if you decide to pick that up, you don't have to absolutely understand every chapter. In other words, there are going to be some chapters in there that you're going to immediately get, and there are going to be some that are more challenging. But the only way you grow is to stretch yourself a little bit. So read the ones you can understand and take a stab at the chapters that are a little bit more difficult. And I think, think you'll get something out of all of it. But just because the whole book isn't accessible

necessarily to you right now, doesn't mean there aren't parts that are accessible. He's got some really good illustrations in there that Patrick and I have ripped off and used in our classes. So if you like our classes, we're reading books that Jonathan writes and then translating them. Maybe we shouldn't have people read them. We sound a lot smarter. We don't know where they come from. But I love your point, Keith. Jonathan's books will probably be a challenge, but there's a great growing opportunity. You're going to hate this analogy because it's a band analogy and I know how you feel about band. But I had a band director who said, you're in the band? I was in the band. What instrument? Trombone. Trombone. Yeah. And it's hard to play really high notes. And so what he would always say is if you

want to hit the high note, you have to aim above it. He's like you have to shoot a little bit higher than it and you'll find that you can hit it. And I think that's true in our education and our learning and our book reading is if you want to be someone who thinks deeply and understands things, just shoot a bit above where you are and all of a sudden you're going to think, huh, I read things, understand things. I never thought I could have before. Is there a sports analogy for that? You tell me, man. I haven't read a book on it, so I can't know. Jonathan, thanks so much for joining us. We really appreciate your time. And remember one more time, Jonathan Pennington.com. You can find all of his resources there, but again, links in the show notes. Take care. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this content,

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