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Here's another piece I'll trust you and joy.

Welcome back. This is the Victor Davis-Hansson show, and Victor has spent 20 years teaching, and part of that time was spent teaching especially the gospel of John in

Greek. But he has read the entire thing in Greek and so I'm kind of excited to learn about

the gospels from a scholar's point of view, Victor, and what are we supposed to think about them and how are we

supposed to understand these Gospels and when were they written and all that kind of stuff?

Go ahead. Let us know.

Well, I could, I mean, I'm a classical scholar, not a biblical scholar, but I have read the New

Testament several times in Greek and the epigrapha, and I've read my favorite is revelations, I confess, although it's very difficult to read.

But I taught at Cal State and other places the New Testament, and especially the Gospel John.

And so there were all these in the period after Jesus' death, roughly from, I don't know, 50, 60 AD all the way into the 200s.

There were competing narratives, and some of them were based on an oral tradition.

Because everybody thought Jesus was coming back to life. So they felt no reason,

you know what I mean, to chronicle his life. They thought any day he would be back on earth.

So most of it was an oral tradition. So by the time people figured out that he wasn't coming back

or had not coming back or that people who said they were Jesus and had been resurrected

were not, they began systematically to write down what they remembered either.

And these are people who were probably not alive during Jesus' life.

So they were dealing with either a mysterious, I don't know why, I can't remember, it was Q or something,

it was a unknown body of literature that doesn't exist now, but they had access.

And we know they had access to it because in the four gospels there, except for John,

there's similar passages that must have come from an original, which we lost, our originals.

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