GOS-05 The Gospel According to John

Why should we be concerned with the Bible’s human authors?

Christian tradition has attributed authorship of the fourth gospel to the apostle John. But does it really matter who wrote it? Evangelicals believe that all Scripture is the inspired Word of God. So, if the Holy Spirit is the ultimate author of the Scriptures, why should we be concerned with the Bible’s human authors?

We know that the Spirit inspired the writing of Scripture. We believe that as Christians. But we have to remember that he inspired human authors, and so it’s obviously important, that we be aware that the Scripture is inspired, “breathed … by God,” as Paul said. But we have to remember that God doesn’t inspire the writers of Scripture in a way that sort of overrides them as individuals, as people. So it’s very important, we have to remember, these are human authors and they’re using human language, and they’re communicating with human beings. And so we need to pay attention to them because they are the messenger, so to speak. You could put it that way. They’re God’s messengers to us — to the people they’re writing to and then also to us. We have to remember, I mean, God accommodates himself to us, you know, in every way. And one of the greatest ways that God has accommodated himself to us is by giving us his Word in words that we can understand. I mean, God’s not limited to language. God’s not limited to any language at any time. God accommodates himself and speaks to us through human beings, and since he’s speaking to us through human beings, we have to take those people seriously and see them as the ones who are most directly communicating to us what God is saying. And so if we kind of skip over or dismiss the human authors of Scripture, in many ways, we’re dismissing the divine author of Scripture by ignoring the fact that he, in fact, spoke through human beings.

As we think about the issue of how the Holy Spirit inspired the authors of the Bible, it’s actually a lot more complicated than I think we sometimes think. There’s a Caravaggio painting from, I guess, it’s the seventeenth century that has Matthew sitting there at his easel, and there is an angel basically whispering things into his ear, and at some points in time, guiding his hand. I think that’s our perception — that the Holy Spirit spoke directly, maybe through angels, to give an exact transcript of the biblical authors. And I think that certainly could have happened, but I don’t think that’s probably what happened most of the time. We think about different examples. I think looking at the Gospels is a great example for this, because we’ve got four gospels. Why do we have four gospels? You would think, why don’t we just have one story, the biography of Jesus? But there are four gospels, and each of them are different, and it’s one Holy Spirit that was inspiring each of those four authors. So I’m assuming that the character of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John affected how they wrote.