Eyewitnesses Almost

BREAKFAST BIBLE STUDY

Luke 1:1-6 (NIV)

5/18/25

“Christians have left Jesus for Donald Trump.” – Grace Pecker

Now that we are busy with planting, Christian and Grace want to skip breakfast Bible study, but I tell them that if I work later on the weekdays, we still have time on Sunday for all the family stuff, including breakfast Bible study. If we can’t do breakfast Bible study, I warn them, I will have to spend all day at church.

“You slept past sunrise this morning, Cole,” Grace told me when I came to the kitchen for my morning coffee this Sunday. “That’s good. You needed the sleep.”

“It’s been really hot and dry and then really cold and wet, but we’re planted,” I said. “We did good this year. It went faster than usual.”

“Cole, are you putting our conversations on the Internet?” Christian asked when he came from his bedroom. “The books are one thing—”

“I needed traffic and stuff,” I said. “You have to do posts to get traffic.”

“Who’s proofing these posts?” Grace asked.

“AI,” I said. “It makes the same changes you would make. The AI doesn’t like some of the Bible passages because of their violence and sex. It wants to block bad verses. I don’t need permission to post. It’s freedom of speech and stuff.”

“It would have been nice if you asked,” Christian said.  

“I use aliases, just like in the books,” I said. “You’re not really named Christian and Grace in real life. It’s just like Dad changed Jesus’ name to Mr. Manning.”

“You want more site traffic,” Grace said, “and so you poke the fundamentalist bear. You quote some of my one-liners out of context. I might have said that Christians have left Jesus for Donald Trump, but that’s not all Christians.”

“Poke a bear? Like in Elisha?” I asked.

“I want to go look at the planters this morning,” Christian said. “Can we get going with breakfast?”

“Sure,” Grace said. “I just have to heat up the breakfast pizza.”

“Cole, you said something about the inviolability of the gospels last week,” Christian said. “I thought briefly, very briefly, we’d discuss that while we ate.”

“I don’t know what that word means,” I said.

“It means the gospels must be respected because they are eyewitness accounts,” he said.

“Yep.”

“Are you sure Luke is an eye-witness account?”

“Yep.”

“Have you read how it starts?”

“Yep,” I said. “It has a Christmas story, just like Matthew, but a little different.”

“Okay,” he said, pushing his Bible at me. “Read the first few lines.”

“‘Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. With this in mind, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I too decided to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught.’”

“That’s far enough,” Christian said.

“See,” I said. “Luke tells us he’s an eyewitness. It says so right there.”

“Does it?” Christian asked.

“Um,” I said. “Wait, they were handed down from eyewitnesses?”

“So the author of Luke was not an eyewitness?” Christian asked.

“But it’s inspired by God.”

“Does the author of Luke make that claim?”

“I guess not.”

“He’s writing hearsay,” Christian said. “His account wouldn’t hold up in court.”

“So?”

“These accounts were written many years later,” Christian said. “Handed down from eyewitnesses. The accounts may be true, but the author never claims he was an eyewitness himself. In fact, the rhetorical devices at work imply that there are degrees of separation between him and the eyewitnesses. He claims that many people were writing about Jesus. He’s just an additional voice.”

“Yep,” I said. “Four gospels and all those letters and stuff. Wait, who’s Theophilus?”

“We don’t know,” Christian said. “Theo means God. Philus means love. In other words, lover of God. It might be a fictional name. It may not. We don’t know.”

“But Luke was writing it for this guy?” I asked.

“Maybe,” Christian said. “The point is the author of Luke was not an eyewitness.”

“Like John, Matthew, and Mark.”

“None of those authors identify themselves by name in the gospels,” Grace said as she pulled the breakfast pizza out of the oven. “Those were early church guesses.”  

“So?”

“We were taught, growing up, that eyewitnesses wrote all four gospels,” Christian said. “According to the author of Luke, that isn’t true. Maybe three were, not all four.”

“So?”

“When Jesus and Paul are talking about scripture,” Christian said. “They aren’t talking about the New Testament. Those books hadn’t been written yet.”

“What are Jesus and Paul talking about?” I asked.

“Old Testament books,” Grace said.

“And maybe the Book of Enoch,” Christian said.

“Who?”

“Another time,” Christian said.

“But we know the Old and New Testament are scripture,” I said.

“Early church fathers called Paul’s letters and the gospels scripture. Jesus did not because none of those documents existed in his time. Paul didn’t ever claim that his letters were scripture. To him, they were just letters.”

“Wait, what does this have to do with what passages teachers shouldn’t teach in public schools?” I asked. “The last couple haven’t been about passages that shouldn’t be taught in public schools. We should go back to that stuff unless there’s no more passages you can find in the Bible.”

“Be careful what you wish for,” Grace said.

In state legislatures across the country, Christian fundamentalists are passing laws meant to force the teaching of the Christian Bible in public schools. From the posting of textually inaccurate iterations of the Ten Commandments on the walls of classrooms to the incorporation of the “Trump Bible” across multiple pedagogical disciplines, these laws and mandates are sweeping the reddest parts of this nation.

The height of hypocrisy is banning books in the name of “protecting children” while mandating one particular book rife with numerous acts of sexual violence and scenes of graphic violence and genocide.

Book bans are dangerous. The Bible is worth reading and exists online and in public school libraries across the country, but proponents of mandating its formal teaching in public schools need to know what it actually says.

I witnessed everything in the books below.