Nevertheless, they were not supposed to make up events like novelists did. They depended on prior sources, written or oral, that they believed conveyed accurate information.
By modern standards, the most historically based period of ancient biography starts in the first century B. Before and after that period, we encounter much more homiletical license. The Gospels, however, fortuitously come from the most historically based period of ancient biography.
The Gospels are from within living memory. Ancient historians and biographers freely admitted that when they recounted events from centuries earlier, they often had to depend on legends.
The case was different, however, with figures from within the past generation or two, when they often could even interview witnesses. After this period, legends are more likely to arise, although these legends often still contain information in condensed and packaged form. A majority of scholars date all four canonical Gospels to the first century. Usually scholars date the Gospel of Mark to A. Most of us know someone or are someone who was around more than four decades ago.
Granted, we forget most experiences and certainly most details, but we do remember most particularly striking episodes. Studies suggest that many events significant enough for us to remember after five years may stay with us even decades later, so long as our brains remain healthy.
Moreover, those who taught about Jesus were not simply modern Western consumers who can recheck our information on Google. They lived in a world that treasured memory. All our sources from the ancient Mediterranean world emphasize the importance of memory in education, from the elementary level up to the advanced level. Disciples were learners at the advanced level. Teachers expected disciples to learn and pass on their teachings and example.
This was true whether disciples were literate or illiterate, whether the instruction was in writing or oral. We can also be certain these stories circulated very widely in the first generation, making later alterations difficult.
Luke writes that he is merely confirming the story of Jesus that Theophilus already knows Luke That does not leave Luke room to fabricate his story about Jesus. The overlap shows their dependence on and respect for sources. By the time Luke writes, many others have written accounts about Jesus Luke Where Matthew, Mark and Luke overlap, we find them even closer to one another than was typical among ancient biographies.
This means that Matthew and Luke were writing information-based works. Since Matthew and Luke wanted to report information, this also means they believed that Mark and their other shared material were information-based. And since they wrote fairly soon after their sources, they were in a much better position to evaluate the quality of these sources than are we modern scholars, who are limited to guesswork. Ideally, historians today would love to interview the earliest available witnesses.
Of course, we ordinarily cannot interview witnesses for events 2, years ago. Luke, however, was in a position to interview contemporaries. He recounts his thorough acquaintance with the matters he reports Luke In ancient historical works, first-person claims were normally genuine claims to participation, so Acts suggests that Luke spent up to two years in Judea Acts , , This would have given him plenty of time to interview early witnesses Acts ,16, When we preach or teach from the Bible, we often update parts of the story to help make it relevant to our audiences.
One might dig through many Galilean roofs, but Luke explains the scene in imagery more familiar to his northern Mediterranean audience. Often, however, the Gospels retain earlier language or information simply because that is the way they knew the story. What can we say? Ten lines of evidence The manuscript evidence for the New Testament, when compared to other historical works, is overwhelming.
There are more than 5, Greek manuscripts, 10, Latin manuscripts and 9, early portions of the New Testament — a total of over 24, manuscripts. The oldest New Testament manuscripts we have date from within years of the original writings. For every other writing from that era the gap between original and oldest extant manuscript is at least years, usually over 1, years. Sir Fredrick Kenyon, former director and principal librarian of the British Museum, said about the New Testament: The interval, then, between the dates of composition and the earliest extant evidence becomes so small as to be in fact negligible, and the last foundation for any doubt that the Scriptures have come down to us substantially as they were written has now been removed.
The gospel writers certainly claimed to be writing history. The writers were either themselves eye-witnesses Matthew and John , or closely connected with eye-witnesses Mark associated with Peter, Luke travelled with Paul.
They were written while other eye-witnesses were still alive meaning if there was any embellishment of the truth, people could and would have spoken up to correct them. Then I ask how many of them know reliable witnesses who can remember events from four decades ago. All of them do. Then philosophic schools, schools of Torah teachers, and so on, often propagated those teachings from one generation to the next.
Of course, those who passed on the teachings had their own interpretive grids, but these grids were often also shaped to a great extent by what they learned from their teachers. The skepticism with which many scholars approach the gospels appears less persuasive when we consider analogies in the real world outside it, from antiquity or sometimes even from today.
If the gospels are comparable to other biographies in the Greco-Roman world of the first century, what does that tell us about their reliability as historical sources? If we apply these genre expectations to the Gospels, we should affirm that, at least on average, most accounts in the Gospels reflect actual events in the life of Jesus. Now, those of us with theological commitments to the text may believe more than that, and those with ideological commitments against the text may affirm less than that, but at least this approach can get us all into the same historiographic ballpark.
Most events and themes in the Gospels reflect relatively recent memory of Jesus. Thus the figure that we meet in the Gospels, despite different emphases from one Gospel to another, is the figure of Jesus. Novels and collections of mythography did not deal with real persons of the past generation or two. Most ancient novels are purely fictitious romances; the minority of novels that use historical characters are set in the distant past.
Moreover, they do not cleave closely to their sources the way Matthew and Luke obviously do. How would you respond to that charge? Our most useful information about Socrates comes from his followers; does that invalidate these sources? Most who wrote about Caesar had strongly felt opinions about him, pro or con. We know almost nothing about Muhammad as opposed to Islam more generally apart from the traditions of his followers.
It is normally those most interested in a figure, often his or her followers, who preserve the most useful information about the figure. Excluding their voices leaves us with little knowledge about them. Those who wrote most about Jesus, who were most interested in him, were naturally his followers. The Gospels come from the historiographic apex of ancient biography, the period of the early empire—in contrast to accounts of Socrates, when biography was just beginning to take shape.
Do the supernatural elements in the gospels discount them as historical sources, as skeptics tend to claim? I have written more extensively on this subject in my book on miracles. But either way, we are at most two removes away from eyewitness information. But either way, we are still talking about first-century testimony. Again, compare these last two points with the typical situation for other ancient histories and biographies.
This has often been doubted, primarily for two reasons. Who bothers to record history, even of that believed to be sacred, if they think the world might end at any time? Well, Jews, for one, at least since the eighth century B. Second, some allege that the ideological i. There is no doubt that a passionate commitment to a certain ideology can lead some writers to play fast and loose with history, but certain kinds of ideologies actually require greater loyalty to the facts.
Jews after World War II, for example, for precisely the reason that they were passionately committed to preventing a Holocaust such as they had experienced under the Nazis from ever happening again, objectively chronicled in detail the atrocities they had suffered. It was less committed people who produced the appalling revisionism that substantially minimized the extent of the Holocaust or even denied it altogether. Because Christian faith depended on Jesus having lived, died and been resurrected according to the biblical claims 1 Cor.
Even just thirty years after historical events, memories can grow dim and distorted.
0コメント