How did the gospel writers know about Jesus?

Answer 1

Another answer from our community:Two of the four writers of the gospels, Matthew and John, knew Jesus personally because they were His disciples. They followed him and witnessed the things that they wrote about. Read about when Matthew began to follow Jesus in Matthew 9:9 and Mark 2:14 (Please note that Matthew has two names in The Bible; the other name is Levi). To read about when John began to follow Jesus, look up Matthew 4:21-22 and Mark 1:19-20. To read one of the lists given in the Bible of the names of the twelve apostles, look up Matthew 10:1-4. You will notice that Matthew and John's names are on this list. A third writer is named Mark, but he is also called John. (The Bible verses provided explain this.) Mark might have known Jesus personally, but we do not have any evidence of that in Scripture. What we do know however, is that he was a very close associate and friend of the apostles and other disciples who were the closest to Jesus. Mark was in close fellowship with Peter and the other apostles and traveled with Paul on portions of his missionary journeys. No doubt that whatever he didn't know about Jesus from personal experience, he was able to find out from the apostles. You can read about Mark traveling with Paul on his missionary journeys in Acts 12:25, and 2 Timothy 4:11. The apostle Peter also stayed with Mark in his house in Acts 12:12. The fourth and final writer is Luke. He explains in the beginning of the gospel that bears his name how he knew about Jesus. I would encourage you to read Luke 1:1-4, but I will only include verses 2 and 3 here: "Even as they delivered them unto us, which from the beginning were eyewitnesses, and ministers of the word; It seemed good to me also, having had perfect understanding of all things from the very first, to write unto thee in order, most excellent Theophilus..." He said that he was an "eyewitness from the beginning" and that he "had perfect understanding of all things from the very first". This tells us that Luke knew Jesus and had seen with his own eyes the things that he wrote about. We also know that Luke wrote Acts, travelled with Paul on his missionary journeys, and had much fellowship with the other apostles as well. If you read Luke's book entitled Acts, you will notice that the first 16 chapters are written in third person. In Chapter 16, verse 10, Luke joins the Apostle Paul's company and travels with him during most of the remainder of Paul's life (Paul, nearing the end of his life, states in 2 Timothy 4:11 that only Luke was with him, and all others had forsaken him).

Answer 2

they didnt

If you mean the four apostles, they were chosen by Christ to walk with him during his 3 ½ year earthly ministry. Later they reported on his life, death, burial and resurrection. They were given special powers to cure disease as a signal that they were in fact representing the Christ. They traveled throughout the known world helping the church grow among, first the Jews and then another 3 ½ years passed before salvation became available to everyone in the world. Including you!

For a detailed explanation of how to obtain salvation for yourself go to NewTestamentChurch.org

Answer 3

First of all, it is doubted by most scholars that the gospels were written by eyewitnesses of the public ministry of Jesus (Raymond E Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament). So, the New Testament gospels were necessarily based on received information. Moreover, we do not really know who wrote the gospels, as they were not attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John until the second century CE.
Scholars say that the first gospel, the Gospel According to Saint Mark, was written (in Greek) approximately 70 CE, an entire generation after the time attributed to the ministry of Jesus, so the author was unlikely to have even met a living eyewitness of Jesus' ministry. There is clear evidence that Matthew's Gospel and Luke's Gospel were substantially based on Mark's Gospel. Similarly, John's Gospel appears to have been drawn from Luke's Gospel and, to a certain extent, Mark's Gospel.

This effectively means that if we can ascertain how the author of Mark's Gospel knew about Jesus, then we can say how all the gospel authors knew about Jesus. Parallels have been detected between Mark and Paul's Epistle to the Romans and First Epistle to the Corinthians. A reasonable hypothesis could be that Mark developed his Gospel from what he could find in Paul's Epistles, combined with some oral testimony and a good deal of conjecture. While few scholars would doubt that John the Baptist was a historical preacher, Shimon Gibson (The Cave of John the Baptist) says that commentators are obliged to view the historicity of the information about John in the gospels with a healthy dose of suspicion.

Matthew and Luke also relied to some extent on sources other than Mark for their information about Jesus. The most important of these is a hypothetical sayings document called the 'Q' document. When quoting sayings from the Q document, Matthew and Luke use exactly the same words in Greek, but place the sayings in totally different contexts, including time and place.

The author of Luke seems to have known 1 Corinthians and seems to have preferred it at times to Mark. Whereas Luke's description of the eucharist in 22:19-20 is parallel to the eucharistic description in Mark 14:22-24, it differs in "my body which is given for you; do this in remembrance of me", which resembles 1 Cor 11:24: "my body which is [KJV: 'broken'] for you; do this in remembrance of me"). Similarly, Luke 22:20, "This cup is the new covenant [KJV: 'Testament'] in my blood which is poured out for you", resembles 1 Cor 11:25, rather than Mark 14:24.