How Much Confidence Can We Have in the Historical Reliability of the Synoptic Gospels? (Part 11)

The method of searching for the historical Jesus that I have recommended in this web series cannot dispel an unjust “hermeneutic of suspicion” unless the basic characteristics of at least the synoptic gospel accounts inspire confidence in their value as historical reportage.

It is clear that in dealing with the life of Jesus, we are privileged to have three accounts (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) written by different authors, in different parts of the Mediterranean world, and each probably written within 30 years of the death of Christ (by comparison, although we have the writings of Julius Caesar about his own military conquests, the first two biographies that we possess of his life, by Plutarch and Suetonius, were both written more than a century after his death — yet no one doubts that we have plenty of fairly accurate historical knowledge about the life of Julius Caesar). With three “synoptic” gospels, we can check them against each other, and check them also against our knowledge of the geographical, political, and religious realities of the day, as revealed in ancient Roman and Jewish sources. In fact, such cross-checking has been undertaken by historians for many generations, and arguably the synoptic gospels do not contradict each other in significant ways, nor do they grossly contradict the relevant data about the ancient world. For example, in his book Searching for Jesus (2015) Robert Hutchinson documents the steady progress of the discovery of the evidence for the existence of Nazareth, the hometown of Jesus:

The earliest non-scriptural reference to Nazareth is found in the writings of the Christian travel writer Sextus Julius Africanus (ca. 180-250), quoted by the historian Eusebius (ca. 263-339), who describes the town of “Nazara.”… The first non-Christian reference to Nazareth was discovered in 1962 on a grey marble fragment in an ancient synagogue In Caesarea Maritima on Israel’s coast. It was dated by Israeli archaeologists to around AD 300. …

Almost one year after a “mythicist” writer named Rene Salm published a book in 2008, The Myth of Nazareth: The Invented Town of Jesus, Israeli archaeologists made a stunning announcement: they had discovered the remains of a stone house in Nazareth, just steps from the Basilica of the Annunciation, dating back to the time of Jesus. …

[T]he discovery of the house confirmed Franciscan archaeologist Bagatti’s suspicions that depressions in the underlying rock beneath the basilica church were probably remnants of stone houses from the Roman period. In other words: as amazing as it sounds, the cluster of ecclesiastical buildings in downtown Nazareth — the basilica, Saint Gabriel’s Church, Mary’s well — almost certainly were built directly over where the village of Nazareth lay in Jesus’ day. … Nazareth was indeed settled throughout the New Testament era, located in an isolated basin in the hills, far from any main road, and thus would not have been noticed by [the first century Jewish historian] Josephus or Roman officials. (pp. 95-96 and 98-99)

While the synoptic gospels intend to communicate a religious or theological message about Jesus, it is also clear that they intend to base this message on the impact that has been made upon their lives by the teachings and deeds of an historical individual. One of the Evangelists, St. Luke, explains clearly from the outset that what he writes is based upon the testimony of eyewitnesses themselves, as well as on earlier written accounts, and the educated Greek style in which he writes lends some credence to his claim. If we want to appreciate St. Luke’s intent to recount historical facts, we need only compare the preamble he wrote for his gospel with a preamble written for a first-century manual of medicine by a man named Dioscorides — obviously another ancient document in which the author strove to adhere as closely as possible to the facts:

Although many reports have been made, not only in the past, but also recently, about the production, effects, and testing of medicines, I nevertheless intend to instruct you, dear Areios, about them: the decision to undertake such things is neither needless nor injudicious, for some of my predecessors have not completed their works, and others have written most things down from hearsay. (Quoted in Craig Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels. IVP, second edition, 2007, p. 297)

Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things which have been accomplished among us, just as they were delivered to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word, it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, that you may know the truth concerning the things of which you have been informed. (Luke 1:1-4)

Brant Pitre in The Case for Jesus (2016) unpacks for us precisely what this remarkable prologue to Luke’s gospel implies about his work:

First, as many scholars point out, Luke’s prologue is strikingly similar to the prologues found in ancient Greco-Roman histories, by authors such as Herodotus, Thucydides, and Josephus. Like the prologues of other ancient histories, Luke’s prologue is intended to signal to the reader that the Gospel is historical in character. Second, Luke uses the word “narrative” (Greek diegesis) to describe his book. As Joseph Fitzmyer has shown, ancient Greco-Roman authors often use the word specifically for “the writing of history” (see Josephus, Life, 336; Lucian, How to Write History, 55). Third, Luke insists that his historical narrative is based on the testimony of “eyewitnesses (Greek autoptai) from the beginning” of Jesus’s public ministry. Now why would Luke emphasize the eyewitness nature of his sources if he were just telling folktales? Clearly, Luke wants his readers to know that what he says about Jesus can be corroborated by those who knew him. Fourth and finally, Luke explicitly states that that he is writing so his audience might know “the facts” (Greek asphaleian). Although some English Bibles translate the Greek word asphaleia as “truth,’ elsewhere Luke consistently uses it to refer to secure and verifiable facts (see Acts 21:34; 22:30; 25:26). In other words, the Gospel of Luke begins by insisting that it is an accurate, factual account, based directly on eyewitness testimony of what Jesus did and said. In support of this, in the book of Acts, Luke refers back to his own Gospel as an account of “all that Jesus began to do and to teach” (Acts 1:1). So much for the idea that the writers of the Gospels did not intend to tell us “what Jesus really did and said”! According to Luke, that is exactly what he did in writing his Gospel. (pp. 79-80).

Given that the gospel writers Matthew, Mark and Luke tell largely the same Jesus story (which, again, is why they are called the “syn-optic” gospels; because they see and portray the story in a very similar way), we are justified in claiming that all three gospels are of the same literary genre, and have roughly the same, largely biographical intent. Of course, it is possible that the authors of the synoptic gospels did not entirely succeed in remaining true to that intent. But here the student of ancient literature will be quick to note that these gospels contain three internal features which mark them primarily as historical reportage, and not as mere fiction, legend or myth.

The first is that they provide the reader with many theologically irrelevant realistic details in the course of their narratives. For example, Jesus teaches such a large crowd by the sea that he must get into a boat and teach them from offshore (Mk 4:1); when a great storm of wind arose, and the waves on the sea of Galilee were swamping the boats, Jesus “was in the stern, asleep on the cushion” (Mk 4:38); he raises the daughter of Jairus to life and then tells her parents to “give her something to eat” (Mk 5:41-43); he goes to the Great Temple of Jerusalem and “when He had looked around at everything, as it was already late, he went out to Bethany with the Twelve” (Mk 11:11); he travels with females in his entourage, including “Joanna, the wife of Chuza, Herod’s steward, and Susannah, and many others who provided for them out of their means” (Lk 8:3); and he tells the disciples how to find an upper room for the Passover celebration (Lk 22:7-13). Saint John’s gospel is replete with similar features: Jesus drove the money changers from the Temple with “a whip of chords” (Jn 2:15); when the woman caught in adultery was accused and threatened with the death penalty right in front of him, he twice, inexplicably, “bent down and wrote with His finger on the ground” (Jn 8:6, 8); Peter is let into the court of the High Priest after Jesus is arrested by means of “a maid who kept the door,” a contact known to “another disciple” (Jn 18: 15-18); Joseph of Arimathea collects the body of Jesus and puts it in “a new tomb where no one had ever been laid” (Jn 19:38-42) — and on it goes. The list of theologically and religiously irrelevant details in the gospel accounts is nearly endless. As C.S. Lewis, an expert in ancient myth and legend, once wrote about the gospels:

I have been reading poems, romances, vision-literature, legends, and myths all my life. I know what they are like. I know that not one of them is like this. Of this text there are only two possible views. Either this is reportage — though it may contain errors — pretty close up to the facts; nearly as close as Boswell [to the life of Johnson]. Or else, some unknown writer… without known predecessors or successors suddenly anticipated the whole technique of modern, novelistic, realistic narrative. If it is untrue, it must be narrative of that kind. The reader who doesn’t see this simply has not learned to read. (“Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism,” in C.S. Lewis, Christian Reflections. Grand Rapids: Eerdman, 1995, p. 155)

The second feature of the synoptic gospels that betrays their general historical reliability is that they usually do not shy away from including incidents in the story that were less than flattering to the early leaders of the Church. For example, they do not “edit out” of the narrative the constant tendency of the apostles to misunderstand the teachings of Jesus, their desertion of their Master on the night of his arrest, the threefold denial of Jesus by Peter, the chief apostle, and the pathetic bickering among the Twelve about which of them would be greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven. The gospels even include stories about Jesus himself that must have been difficult to reconcile with the exalted doctrines concerning him that were circulating in the Church at the time: for example, his baptism by the desert prophet John, his agonized prayers in the Garden of Gethsemane, and his anguished cry of God-forsakenness on the Cross (included in Matthew and Mark). In short, the synoptic gospels are not “slick” enough to be primarily fiction or propaganda: they must have a solid and extensive historical core.

The Jewish scholar Geza Vermes summarized for us the general historical quality of the New Testament documents we possess. If the Evangelists simply desired to teach and illustrate Christian doctrine, he claimed,

Was it not rather inept to adopt a biographical literary style, which provides liveliness and colour, but at the expense of simplicity and clarity? Their story is replete with Palestinian ideas, customs, linguistic peculiarities and realia of all sorts, incomprehensible to non-Jewish readers, and demanding continuous interpretive digressions which were bound to be catechetically harmful. … Early teachers such as Paul, James, the author of the Didache, found in any case no advantage in “biography” for the transmission of theological expositions, moral exhortations, and disciplinary or liturgical rules, and opted sensibly for a direct mode of communication. It is therefore difficult to avoid concluding that the evangelists chose to tell the life of Jesus because, whatever else they may have aimed at, they were determined to recount history, however unprofessionally. And if they include circumstances which were doctrinally embarrassing, it is because they genuinely form part of the narrative. (“The Gospels without Christology” in A.E. Harvey, ed. God Incarnate: story and belief. SPCK: 1981, p.55)

Third, and finally, all four gospels were written by Christians of Jewish background, and with their long history of monotheistic worship, and opposition to idolatry of any kind, the Jews were the very last people in the ancient world who would be likely to concoct legends in order to exalt and deify a mere human being. And yet, in a sense, just by telling us what really happened, that is precisely what they succeeded in doing. As St. Mark states in the very opening line of his book: “The Beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” …

Next Time: Did Jesus Really Perform Miracles?

Robert Stackpole, STD
© The Mere Christian Fellowship, 2017