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Who Wrote the Gospels?
• A study of the minds of the authors The names we associate with the gospel writers are all second century guesses. If this comes as a surprise, welcome to the cutting edge of modern biblical scholarship. According to Helms, the gospels were written to convert or confirm their highly colored arguments of powerful authors, not just transparent windows upon the historical Jesus. If we adjust our focus from the brilliant imaginative pictures to the imaginations that produced them, to the situations out of which they arose, we get to the point of this book - a study of the minds of the authors.
178 pages, Hardcover
First published September 1, 1997
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
December 13, 2015
You may want to take my endorsement of Who Wrote the Gospels with a grain of salt, as Helms was my instructor for several classes I took as an undergrad and one of my favorites. As a professor, he was great at connecting with students, giving fascinating lectures, and connecting literature to the world we live in now. So I'm predisposed to like his stuff. His Bible as Literature class changed the way I read a book that I had been familiar with all my life.
Who Wrote the Gospels is a nice, short, and accessible tract asking some basic questions about by whom and how the Gospels were written. It is both an entry point and a reminder that there is a vast body of scholarly work about the Bible that is never taught in a church, and that is generally ignored by people who are under the impression that they are experts on the Bible. They are, in fact, only experts at reading the Bible devotionally, not in understanding the text in its own historical and cultural context.
The most controversial claim made by Helms in the book is the contention that Luke-Acts was authored by a woman. He does demonstrate that Luke-Acts is more attuned (or at least not totally indifferent) to the existence of women on the planet, but the actual evidence that a woman authored the text is conjecture. Still, it's a fun conjecture, if perhaps not as plausible as Helms would lead us to believe.
This is a great companion piece to Funk and Hoover's The Five Gospels and Harris's Understanding the Bible. These are texts for people that wish to understand the Bible as it is, not as they wish it to be.
Who Wrote the Gospels is a nice, short, and accessible tract asking some basic questions about by whom and how the Gospels were written. It is both an entry point and a reminder that there is a vast body of scholarly work about the Bible that is never taught in a church, and that is generally ignored by people who are under the impression that they are experts on the Bible. They are, in fact, only experts at reading the Bible devotionally, not in understanding the text in its own historical and cultural context.
The most controversial claim made by Helms in the book is the contention that Luke-Acts was authored by a woman. He does demonstrate that Luke-Acts is more attuned (or at least not totally indifferent) to the existence of women on the planet, but the actual evidence that a woman authored the text is conjecture. Still, it's a fun conjecture, if perhaps not as plausible as Helms would lead us to believe.
This is a great companion piece to Funk and Hoover's The Five Gospels and Harris's Understanding the Bible. These are texts for people that wish to understand the Bible as it is, not as they wish it to be.
December 31, 2008
I enjoyed this book. Helms has a tendancy to repeat himself a lot, but the arguments are fairly well presented. The proposal that Luke and Acts were written by a woman is great fun. The book prompts me to read the works of other researchers into gospel origins to see whether Helms' ideas are viable or not.
February 19, 2018
Two stars not so much because it's bad itself (it's really a three-star book) but to offset the uncritical five-star reviews.
Helms does have two BIG problems.
One is in common with many other critical scholars of the NT, who claim the "we passages" in Acts have not been solved.
Au contraire!
A.N. Sherwin-White, in "Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament," demonstrated just what the "we" passages are.
Greco-Roman historical romance literature of the 1st-2nd centuries CE ALWAYS shifted narrative to first person plural when the protagonist embarked on a sea voyage and shifted again when he disembarked. Go read Acts again now and see where the first person plural passages are.
This, in turn, undercuts Helms' claim that the purported author made herself a shadow female presence and that the "we" is a kind of a "royal we."
Helms idea of feminine authorship for Luke-Acts is not all wet but this undermines it.
(Sidebar: I do not now WHY so many NT scholars reject Sherwin-White on this; I just know that many do.)
Even bigger oops? Helms claims that a "Secret Gospel of Mark" as laid out by Morton Smith is a real thing.
In reality, any critical scholar with a brain knows that it was a spoof forged by Smith himself.
And with that, I'm thinking Helms has lesser errors too. And one mid-level error.
He dates Luke too early. He posits Mark's provenance in Syria, which tentatively undercuts the real issue that Mark is clueless about Palestinian/Judean geography.
And the midlevel error is claiming that only fundamentalists support the two-gospel hypothesis instead of the two source one.
That's totally incorrect, and further undercuts real insights in the book and even more undercuts Helms' worthiness to be treated credibly.
Helms does have two BIG problems.
One is in common with many other critical scholars of the NT, who claim the "we passages" in Acts have not been solved.
Au contraire!
A.N. Sherwin-White, in "Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament," demonstrated just what the "we" passages are.
Greco-Roman historical romance literature of the 1st-2nd centuries CE ALWAYS shifted narrative to first person plural when the protagonist embarked on a sea voyage and shifted again when he disembarked. Go read Acts again now and see where the first person plural passages are.
This, in turn, undercuts Helms' claim that the purported author made herself a shadow female presence and that the "we" is a kind of a "royal we."
Helms idea of feminine authorship for Luke-Acts is not all wet but this undermines it.
(Sidebar: I do not now WHY so many NT scholars reject Sherwin-White on this; I just know that many do.)
Even bigger oops? Helms claims that a "Secret Gospel of Mark" as laid out by Morton Smith is a real thing.
In reality, any critical scholar with a brain knows that it was a spoof forged by Smith himself.
And with that, I'm thinking Helms has lesser errors too. And one mid-level error.
He dates Luke too early. He posits Mark's provenance in Syria, which tentatively undercuts the real issue that Mark is clueless about Palestinian/Judean geography.
And the midlevel error is claiming that only fundamentalists support the two-gospel hypothesis instead of the two source one.
That's totally incorrect, and further undercuts real insights in the book and even more undercuts Helms' worthiness to be treated credibly.
February 22, 2016
This was an interesting perspective on who wrote the gospels. I think it's pretty commonly accepted that we don't really know who wrote the gospels; this is just one of several perspectives. The names to the gospels were given roughly 100 years after the death of Jesus. Mark (being the first), was written about 70 AD, then Matthew and Luke roughly 10-15 years after that, and then John, about 90 AD. Again, these are just rough numbers, but commonly accepted.
I won't ruin the details, but Helms states Mark misunderstood the words of the eye-witness, and of Jesus. Matthew then felt the need to correct his misunderstandings. Then, Luke (who was written by a woman, according to Helms), had to correct even more issues and then last comes John, who was written by multiple authors. It's clear the different tones that can be heard in the book of John, according to Helms, but I think we can all agree that it's just perspective, based on his own research. He references several reputable scholars who seem to share his same beliefs, Burton Mach, Asrland Jacobson, John Kloppenborg and Robert Gundry, but just because he's able to find scholars that side with him, doesn't mean he found the ultimate truth. The truth is, we can give the biblical text to 50 scholars and we will likely get many different interpretations, even if they get their information from the original greek and hebrew.
All in all, it's worth the read.
I won't ruin the details, but Helms states Mark misunderstood the words of the eye-witness, and of Jesus. Matthew then felt the need to correct his misunderstandings. Then, Luke (who was written by a woman, according to Helms), had to correct even more issues and then last comes John, who was written by multiple authors. It's clear the different tones that can be heard in the book of John, according to Helms, but I think we can all agree that it's just perspective, based on his own research. He references several reputable scholars who seem to share his same beliefs, Burton Mach, Asrland Jacobson, John Kloppenborg and Robert Gundry, but just because he's able to find scholars that side with him, doesn't mean he found the ultimate truth. The truth is, we can give the biblical text to 50 scholars and we will likely get many different interpretations, even if they get their information from the original greek and hebrew.
All in all, it's worth the read.
November 22, 2013
Helms certainly brought up material that was news to me! This is a slim work, and Helms has the same failing I had when I took algebra: he fails to show the math. Well, except when there is actual math.
Helms uses examples that can seem thin (Jesus reached the house where someone had died and everyone is crying. In Luke, Peter reaches the house where someone has died and everyone is crying - well, DUH Doesn't mean one story is based on the other!), or hilariously overwrought (Lazarus of Bethany is Osiris buried at Annu, AKA the House of Annu, AKA Bethanu Oh! and both had two sisters! Of course, we only know about Isis, being pertinent to the story. He leaves out that Nephthys means "Lady of the house" ... parallel to Martha? [Dramatic chord]).
There is so much to think about, juicy little nuggets that one doesn't notice except by studying the individual gospels by themselves and as literature.
Oh, I'd love to think the author of Luke was a woman ... but it just seems so very unlikely for the time period, when so few men were able to write at all, much less compose. But that author certainly did add more womenfolk in the narrative, women who have names, actual conversations with each other that aren't about men. Heh!
Great fun!
Helms uses examples that can seem thin (Jesus reached the house where someone had died and everyone is crying. In Luke, Peter reaches the house where someone has died and everyone is crying - well, DUH Doesn't mean one story is based on the other!), or hilariously overwrought (Lazarus of Bethany is Osiris buried at Annu, AKA the House of Annu, AKA Bethanu Oh! and both had two sisters! Of course, we only know about Isis, being pertinent to the story. He leaves out that Nephthys means "Lady of the house" ... parallel to Martha? [Dramatic chord]).
There is so much to think about, juicy little nuggets that one doesn't notice except by studying the individual gospels by themselves and as literature.
Oh, I'd love to think the author of Luke was a woman ... but it just seems so very unlikely for the time period, when so few men were able to write at all, much less compose. But that author certainly did add more womenfolk in the narrative, women who have names, actual conversations with each other that aren't about men. Heh!
Great fun!
May 19, 2013
The Nag Hummadi Library, which was found in Egypt, is mostly unknown by today's Christian; this author painstakingly compares The Septuagint scripture to the Biblical Canon and sorts through the jumbled and ambiguous nature of the gospels. Far from eye-witness accounts and revised and changed by unknown authors, this is a must read for anyone that has read the Bible with a critical perspective.
November 16, 2013
Certainly a scholarly work, though I'm not sure some of the conclusions quite follow. It's good to be reminded of the circumstances of the writing of basically all history and how slanted the perspectives can get based on the authors and their purpose and bias. I only wish people in the various religions would acknowledge that much is wrong and much is unknown about our understanding of the past and not try to pretend and continue to reinterpret in order to try to make everything be "gospel".
July 16, 2015
Some good ideas are presented in this brief history, however, the writing was rather stiff and uninviting. For a book that appeared to be specifically designed as an introduction to the subject, it was disappointing.
July 29, 2008
This book makes the argument that one of the Gospels was written by a female hand. Excellent read.
May 6, 2012
Interesting. But I don't feel it actually answered the question...if there really was an available answer. But the history was interesting.
December 14, 2013
Read for Seekers Class fall of 2013. Luke blew my mind. Also that Luke-Acts should be read together. It gave me much to think about.
August 3, 2015
The argument that Luke was written by a woman is almost seamless.
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March 13, 2008226.06
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January 14, 2014Interesting look at the authors behind the Gospels and the works they drew from.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews