e the authors in a position to know? “If you were some second-century Christian wanting to make up an author for a Gospel, you would never choose Mark, even if he was believed to have been a companion of Peter. And you would never choose Luke because he had no direct connection to Jesus at all, even though he played a bit part in the writings of Paul. If second-century Christians were fabricating traditional authorship for the canonical Gospels, surely they could have done a better job.”
Transcript
Were the authors in a position to know?
“If you were some second-century Christian wanting to make up an author for a Gospel, you would never choose Mark, even if he was believed to have been a companion of Peter. And you would never choose Luke because he had no direct connection to Jesus at all, even though he played a bit part in the writings of Paul. If second-century Christians were fabricating traditional authorship for the canonical Gospels, surely they could have done a better job.”
“So, ironically, the tendency of the noncanonical Gospels to assign Gospel authorship to prominent disciples actually increases the likelihood that the traditions concerning New Testament Gospel authorship are true, at least with respect to Mark and Luke. And if the orthodox tradition can be seen as trustworthy in these cases, then the presumption of suspicion about the tradition must be wrongheaded. We should accept the ancient tradition unless we have good reason to do otherwise. Moreover, the anonymity of the biblical Gospels bears the stamp of truth whereas the pseudonymity of the noncanonical Gospels suggests their falsehood.” (Roberts, Can We Trust the Gospels?)
Were the authors in a position to know?
Over 5,800 Greek manuscripts (from @ 50 to 1,500 yrs)Over 10,000 Latin manuscriptsHundreds of Coptic, hundreds of Syriac manuscriptsOver 2,000 more other ancient translations
Nothing in antiquity comes close! What if we lost all of these?
“The quotations by the church fathers of the New Testament number well over one million — and counting” (Reinventing Jesus, 81).
Copies reasonably close to the originals?
“The wealth of material that is available for determining the wording of the original New Testament is staggering: more than fifty-seven hundred Greek New Testament manuscripts, as many as twenty thousand versions, and more than one million quotations by patristic writers. In comparison with the average ancient Greek author, the New Testament copies are well over a thousand times more plentiful. If the average-sized manuscript were two and one-half inches thick, all the copies of the works of an average Greek author would stack up four feet high, while the copies of the New Testament would stack up to over a mile high! This is indeed an embarrassment of riches.” (Reinventing Jesus 82)
Copies reasonably close to the originals?
J.P. Moreland:“Most historians accept the textual accuracy of other ancient works on far less adequate manuscript grounds than is available for the New Testament.” (Scaling the Secular City, 136)
F. F. Bruce: “The evidence for our New Testament writings is ever so much greater than the evidence for many writings of classical authors, the authenticity of which no one dreams of questioning. And if the New Testament were a collection of secular writings, their authenticity would generally be regarded as beyond all doubt.” (The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? 15)
Copies reasonably close to the originals?
“What is interesting about the Gospels, however, is that they do include incidental detail while giving us every reason to believe they were intended to pass on historically rooted tradition of actual events of the past. Not only this, but some of this detail has been independently confirmed as reflecting the situation of first-century Palestine—a point that can bolster our estimation of the reliability of these works.” (Boyd and Eddy, Lord or Legend, 102)
Examples: Aramaisms, places, personal names, etc.
Reports consistent with eyewitness testimony?
Bauckham: “The Gospels were written within the living memory of the events they recount” (Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 7)
“There is one phenomenon in the Gospels that has never been satisfactorily explained. It concerns names. Many characters in the Gospels are unnamed, but others are named. I want to suggest now the possibility that many of these named characters were eyewitnesses who not only originated the traditions to which their names are attached but also continued to tell these stories as authoritative guarantors of their traditions. In some cases the Evangelists may well have known them.” (39)
Reports consistent with eyewitness testimony?
Examples from Mark’s Gospel (Eddy and Boyd, 102):
1. Jesus’ family thought He lost His mind (Mark 3:21; John 7:5). 2. He associated with people of ill-repute (Mark 2:14-16). 3. Some thought Jesus was possessed by the devil (3:22, 30). 4. Jesus’ hometown rejected Him, affected His miracles (Mark 6:2-5). 5. Healings weren’t always instantaneous (Mark 8:22-25). 6. Disciples were unable to exorcise demons (Mark 9:18). 7. Disciples obstinate and fought among each other (Mark 9:34). 8. Jesus betrayed by a disciple and another denied Him (Mark 14). 9. Women first to testify about seeing Jesus alive again (Mark 16).
Self-damaging material?
Difference between difficulty and contradiction
Contradiction requires mutual exclusion
Ben Witherington: “Taking into account all contextual issues and all conventions that I know of that were operative in the day and time of the NT writers, I have yet to find a single example of a clear violation of the principle of noncontradiction in the NT.” (The Living Word of God, 117)
For core historical events, it is not necessary to prove flawlessness
Reasonable Consistency?
“…when we cease treating these works as though they were written with a modern, literary register and, instead, appreciate them as (written) recitations of an oral tradition intended to be heard in a community setting—not silently studied in an isolated setting—the level of variation we find within and between the Gospels is not such that it should lessen our confidence in their historical veracity. To the contrary, this level of variation, and even apparent discrepancy, is precisely what we should expect given that these works were written as inscribed recitations of an already well-known oral tradition.” (Boyd and Eddy, Lord or Legend, 112)
Other Literary Evidence? These refer to specific people, various events, beliefs, and practices.
They don’t sound like Christians, but they confirm enough to show that the biblical documents are true to those times and places.
The reality of Jesus and His disciples is undeniable.
“The problem is that the unequivocal commitment of historical-critical scholars to a naturalistic presupposition is such that it rules out at the start the possibility of genuine supernatural occurrences in actual history.” (Eddy and Boyd, The Jesus Legend, 55)
“My basic point in this book is that if you look squarely at the facts as they are widely understood, and if you do not color them with pejorative bias or atheistic presuppositions, then you’ll find that it’s reasonable to trust the Gospels” (Roberts, Can We Trust the Gospels, 20)
