Can the Gospels Still be Seen as Historically Accurate?
Tal Donahue
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Abstract
Is it still possible to claim that the Gospel accounts of Jesus are an accurate account of his life.
Key takeaways
- Many stories in the Gospels have been constructed in order that the sayings of Jesus may have some provenance and historical legitimacy, or that they may be easier to understand because of their tale-like structure; the episode of the Sermon on the Mount is an oft used example of this.
- There are two versions of the last supper pericope in the Gospels, the Lord's death till he come."
- The Historical Figure of Jesus.
- Plato inevitably attached his own personal philosophy to his Socratic character just as the evangelists and Paul used Jesus as a vehicle for their own theological purposes yet for Votaw, Whately, Sanders and Bornkamm (to name a few) "it is not too much to affirm that the Gospels give us the main facts and the main teachings about Jesus."
- The Problem of the Historical Jesus.
Related papers
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Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 1997
A REVEALING metaphor runs throughout The Practice of History, Sir Geoffrey Elton's first and fullest consideration of the methods and purposes of historical study. The aspiring historian is pictured as an apprentice—at one point specifically as an apprentice carpenter (p. 214)—who is aiming to produce a first piece of work to be inspected and judged by a master craftsman. Elton repeatedly speaks of the need for die young scholar to undergo ‘a proper apprenticeship’ (p. 103). He must acknowledge that ‘his life is that of an apprentice learning a craft’, and that he requires to be ‘instructed, guided, and trained’.
The Authenticity of the Gospels
The Authenticity of the Gospels, 2019
That the Gospels are the writings of their traditional Apostolic authors was long held to be settled truth. It was also long held that Matthew was first and as early as the 40sAD, followed by Mark and Luke, and lastly by John, and that all were written before about 70AD. These views have been doubted or denied by New Testament scholars from about the end of the 18thCentury. The dominant view is that the Gospels were not written by eyewitnesses, though they depend on material that may go back to eyewitnesses. Mark is said to have been written first and not much before 70AD. Matthew and Luke are later and depend on Mark and some unknown sources. John is last, follows an independent tradition, and could be as late as 100AD. The reason for this change of views is the so-called historical critical method, which claims to be scientific and up to date in literary criticism and the detection of different temporal layers in written texts. The method also assumes that reports of miracles and other supernatural phenomena are not historical but later inventions added for religious purposes. This book shows that the historical critical method is not historical or critical or even a method. For the method assumes but cannot prove that supernatural happenings are unhistorical; it ignores the historical evidence about the origin and authorship of the Gospels; its literary criticism is unimaginative and its application of it to questions of dating arbitrary. There is no reason to accept its results as well founded or even believable. The traditional dating and authorship of the Gospels is the only account that makes sense. Nevertheless, elements of the historical critical method have a legitimate use if they are applied fairly and taken along with the historical evidence and the fact (well established by eyewitnesses) of supernatural realities. When these elements are so used they can be shown to give plausible and defensible accounts of the origin, in particular, of the Gospels of Mark and Luke, which, along with Matthew, show signs of dependence and overlap. If the historical evidence is taken seriously, and if literary criticism is applied fairly, a plausible account can be given of the origin in particular of the Gospel of Mark, of how it arose from the preaching of Peter relative to the older Gospel of Matthew and to the newer Gospel of Luke sponsored by the Apostle Paul. This alternative account of the origins of Mark and Luke is a fine example of how historical evidence and literary criticism can be used to explain otherwise puzzling phenomena. This account is perhaps not the only one to save all the phenomena. But it shows how the traditional authorship and dating of the Gospels, contrary to the historical critical method, make excellent sense of all the phenomena: literary, historical, and rational. The traditional view about the Gospels is the only sensible view to adopt.
Honest to John! A Response to the Reviews of The Fourth Gospel and the Quest for Jesus
2008
Jesus of history. As they all acknowledge, the disjunction of these two subjects has been the prevalent modern paradigm for conducting both Johannine and Jesus studies in recent decades, but such a move has its own sets of new critical problems. While this book calls attention to those new problems, it also seeks to find solutions to the original issues that modern critical theories have tried to address. In doing so, it seeks to build on the most plausible of literary and tradition-development theories, even if new approaches and syntheses are required. In taking seriously the character and claims of the Johannine tradition, however, this approach attempts to be honest to John. On that score, critical and traditional approaches alike have too often fallen dismally short. Jeff Staley has done an excellent job of describing the overall thrust of the book. He rightly notes the importance of the literary theories the book advances, including their implications for a plausible view of the development of the Johannine tradition. His introduction also points helpfully to the connections between the historical subject of the Fourth Gospel, Jesus and the unfolding history of the Johannine situation. As one who has appreciated Staley's literary-rhetorical analyses of John over the last two decades or more, I hope to benefit from the best of reader-response and new literary-critical approaches to John while not assuming that fictive literary function implies a fictional character and origin of the narrative. In that sense, historical narrative functions in many ways similar to fictive narrative. And, one literary characteristic claimed by the Johannine narrator is that at least some of the origin of John's tradition is rooted in first-hand encounter with the ministry of Jesus. While it is impossible to prove that any or all of John's material goes back to an independent Jesus tradition, just as it is impossible to prove that none of it does, the overlooked reference to the apostle John's making a statement with an undeniably Johannine ring to it in Acts 4.20 (cf. 1 Jn 1.3) makes this a critically plausible consideration. 'We cannot help but testify to what we have seen and heard!' could not have been crafted as a more characteristically Johannine utterance, and while it may be misguided or wrong, it was written by Luke a full century before Irenaeus. Since the writing of the book, I have found another three dozen ways in which Luke departs from Mark and sides with John, doubling the evidence for Luke's dependence on the Johannine tradition in its oral stages, as argued in Part III. The point is that the 16. This chapter was first presented in 2003 at the John, Jesus, and History Consultation under the title, 'Why this Study is Needed, and Why it is Needed Now', and it is now published in Paul N. Anderson, Felix Just and Tom Thatcher (eds.), John, Jesus, and History. I. Critical Assessments of Critical Views (Symposium Series, 44; Atlanta: SBL Press, 2007), pp. 13-70. The John, Jesus, and History Project is scheduled to go from 2002-2010 at the national SBL meetings, involving three triennia covering (1) literature reviews and introductory matters, (2) aspects of historicity in John and (3) Johannine contributions to Jesus research.
Aspects of Historicity in the Gospel of John: Implications for Investigations of Jesus and Archaeology
2006
Of the many tensions characterizing the Gospel of John, one of its perplexities most needing to be addressed critically is the set of issues related to aspects of historicity. 1 On one hand, John is the most spiritual, theological, and symbolic of the canonical Gospels, leading scholars in recent decades to take seriously the literary fe atures of the work. On the other hand, there is more archaeologi cal, topographical, and apparently historical material in John than in any other Gospel, or even in all three combined. 2 It is no surprise, therefore, that many of the essays presented at the millennial conference on Jesus and archaeology held in Jerusalem (August 2000) dealt with issues and details alluded to directly in the Gospel of John. And yet, because the prevalent opinion among New Testa ment scholars ascribes little if any historical weight to the Fourth Gospel, this trend presents a formidable obstacle to the scientific investigation of Jesus and archaeology. Consider, for instance, the opinion of Edgar J. Goodspeed regard ing the purportedly ahistorical nature of the Fourth Evangelist: "It must be re membered that topography and chronology were among the least of the au thor's concerns. His head was among the stars. He was seeking to determine the place of Jesus in the spiritual universe and his relations to the eternal realities. 1. Tensions between the humanity and divinity of Jesus, the Son's egalitarian or subordinate relation to the Father, embellished and existentialized presentation of Jesus' signs, heightened or diminished sacramentology, present or future eschatology, and literary unity or disunity in John have been addressed especially in P. N. Anderson, Th e Christology of the Fo urth Gospel: Its Unity and Disunity in the Light of John 6, WUNT 78 (Tiibingen: J.C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1996; Val ley Forge, Pa.: Trinity, 1997); also included in Th e Dialogical Autonomy of the Fo urth Gospel-the Purpose, Development, and Meaning of John (Eugene, Ore.: Cascade Books, 2 006). 2. Professor von Wahlde's essay in the present collection examines over fifty archaeological and topographical passages in John, so the treatment of specific passages should be considered in his essay. These were the matters that interested and absorbed him, not itineraries a nd time tables, so that practical mundane considerations that might apply t(j' Mark, Matthew, or Luke have little significance for his work."3 Clearly, John fa greatly interested in Christology, but does that mean its narrator had no interest:� in the empirical details he includes in his narrative? If John's patent ahistoricity is a worthy thesis, this would be important to establish. This would mean that John's archaeological and topographical references would be disconnected: sev� ered from the events narrated, thus requiring an alternative explanation. How� ever, if this modernistic thesis itself emerges as less than resilient when sub� jected to critical scrutiny, the historical-critical scholar must explore alternative means of accounting for the distinctive character of the Johannine witness. This is especially important, given the fact of John's archaeological and topo-: graphical fe atures, many of which appear also to be accurate. Along these lines, several serious errors are made by otherwise critical scholars. (a) First, John's differences with the Synoptics are wrongly understood as three against one, with John being the lone Gospel out. If John and Mark: may be considered the Bi-Optic Gospels,4 John's differences with the SynoptiCS: are better considered one against one, with at least some of them consisting of an individuated perspective providing an alternative-perhaps intentionally so-to Mark. (b) Second, it is a gross error to assume that because John is theological in its tone it is ahistorical in its character and origin. By analogy, the crucifixion of Jesus was of paramount theological significance to early Chris� tians, but this fact alone does not prove its ahistoricity. Spiritualized reflection more often follows upon significant events rather than concocting them, and ' critical judgment must be used in discerning whether a theological comment in • John betrays a spiritualized refl ection upon an event or whether it reflects projection of a theological notion on to the narrative. Facile conjecture alone does not meet the test of critical scrutiny. (c) A third error is to fail to notice the many ways John's traditional accounts appear more authentic than, and even historically superior to, those in the Synoptics. This is not to deny the many ways that the Synoptic presentations of Jesus are preferable to the Johannine; the point is that the multiplicity of issues between the Gospels must be consid� 3. See Edgar J. Goodspeed, An In troduction to the New Tes tament (Chicago: University of•.
Betwixt Past and Present: Jesus and John in Tradition, Text, and History
Bridges in New Testament Interpretation: Interdisciplinary Advances, 2018
Two quotations point to the theme of this essay. First, from Richard A. Horsley: "Social memory should not be reified as something in itself. It is rather a sensitizing concept that leads us to recognize social and cultural relations that we might otherwise miss or misunderstand." 1 The second comes from Edward Shils: "No society remains still. Each one is in unceasing change. Yet each society remains the same society." 2 The Gospels and the academic quest for the historical Jesus throw into sharp relief the question of the present's relation to the past. That is, to what extent are groups and the individuals that comprise them free to portray the past according to present needs and interests, and to what extent are such portrayals constrained by the past itself, whether the actual course of events as they happened, or previous accounts of those events in public discourse? These questions have not received much attention from historians of Jesus, who have preferred instead to identify, sharpen, taxonomize, and apply various "criteria of authenticity" to the Gospels and traditions laying beneath or behind them. 3 The evangelists' relative freedom or constraint vis-à-vis the actual words and events of Jesus' life and ministry is, more often than not, decided a priori rather than on the basis of explicit discussion. The Jesus tradition, in this kind of scholarship, is either an atemporal construction of the evangelists' interests, on one hand, or a preservation of Jesus' words and deeds without influence from contemporary concerns, on the other. These are generalizations, of course, but we can find examples of these generalizations at work in analyses of the Gospels and the historical Jesus. Regarding the relative freedom of the gospel tradents vis-à-vis the past, John Dominic Crossan speaks regularly of the "intense authorial creativity and
Contra-expertise on the authenticity of the gospels in confrontation with MARTIN DIBELIUS. FORM CRITICISM OF THE GOSPEL (I-XI)
Dibelius
The research into the historicity of the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles is a history of skepticism and criticism, which often led to alternative explanations of origin when compared with traditional understanding as literal . Whereas the struggle that this meant in the past two centuries has always been about the amount of myth versus historicity, in the middle of the twentieth century this issue was focused and dominated by interrelated 'Form-criticism' and the 'History of the synoptic Tradition’. It is my intention, going back to and starting from the middle part of this development, form-criticism, which as systematic criticism, although it came to bizarre hypotheses out of self-created need, nevertheless offers us the opportunity to do so, to show how solving the discussed puzzles should not be done and how this can be done better. This will then happen in such a way that a 'Ding an sich' considered unknowable - that is: how things happened - is not as unknowable as it is thought to be; that subjective and congregational interests do not play such a leading role as one has come to believe because of one's own reality-preventing impulse, but: that - with less detachment of abstraction - having an eye for both the described ‘course of the action’ and for sometimes small references leaves to recognize much more of historicity.
'Cracking the Canon: John Toland, 'Lost' Gospels and the Challenge to Religious Hegemony'
A. K. M. Adam & Samuel Tongue (eds.), Looking Through a Glass Bible: Post Disciplinary Interpretations from the Glasgow School, Leiden, 2014., 2014
This essay intersects with the theme of religious pluralism (among other questions of socio-cultural diversity), and some of the critical methods employed by biblical scholars and historians of ancient Christianity. More specifically, it offers a sketch of personalities and controversies in the his- tory of modern scholarship, focussing on debates about the authenticity of ancient religious texts, and the legitimacy and limits of religious diverersity within a modern context. The essay will conclude with an appreciative assessment of historical scholarship in this area, before offering some sceptical, though not hostile, remarks on the modern tendency to appeal to non-canonical sources in attempts to unsettle the religious certitude of those who espouse religiously and socially discriminatory views.
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2006
Preface Part I Modern Foundations for the Critical Investigation of John, Jesus, and History A. The Story of John's Historical Marginalization. 1) The Traditional View and its Advocates-From Papias to Schleiermacher 2) Modern Challenges and Advances-From Brettschneider to Bultmann 3) Critiques of Modern Hypotheses-From Lightfoot to Carson 4) The Transcendence of Modernism-From Brown to Staley B. Findings as Beginnings-Recent Approaches to the Fourth Gospel 1) The "Traditional" View: John's Apostolic Authorship 2) The "Critical" View: John's Employment of Alien (non-Johannine) Sources 3) Markan-Dependence Theory 4) Midrashic-Development Approaches 5) Historicized Drama Hypotheses 6) Multiple Editions of John 7) The History of the Johannine Situation. C. A New Synthesis Advanced Part II: John, Jesus, and History-The Relevance of the Investigation A. Planks in Platform A: The De-Historicizing of John-Strengths and Weaknesses 1) John's Differences wit...
Review: Craig Blomberg. The Historical Reliability of John's Gospel
Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism, 2021
Review for the Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism of Craig Blomberg's historical commentary on the reliability of John's Gospel (based on the paperback reprint in 2011).
"THE HISTORICAL RELIABILITY OF THE GOSPELS" BY CRAIG BLOOMBERG - BOOK SUMMARY & REVIEW
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This is a paper that i wrote for the Synoptic Gospels class in Chongshin Theological University and Seminary. It is a summary of a book entitled, "The Historical Reliability of the Gospel," by Craig Bloomberg. I also provide a short review of the book.
The Voice that Thundered--Witness and History in the Gospel of John
This paper examines the "historicity" of the Gospel of John in terms of the Gospel's function as witness. The Gospel of John is neither pure history nor pure fiction but rather "interpreted history" designed to evoke faith in the reader/hearer.
Can we trust the gospels?
In the gospels Jesus is reported to have said that any disciple who treasures his teachings and shapes his life according to them is like a wise man who built his house on rock. 'The rain poured down, floods overwhelmed it and the gale beat against it. But it will not fall because it had been built on rock' (Mt 7:25). Since Jesus is my teacher whose resurrection gives a totally new meaning to my life, his teachings are a precious gift that I value highly. But can I be sure that what I find in the gospel texts are the genuine teachings of my Master? Since the Enlightenment many doubts have been thrown on the reliability of the gospel traditions. The critics who express such doubts will commonly admit that Jesus was a preacher who lived and died in Palestine, but they maintain that few of his original words have come down to us intact. We have some fragments of Jesus' teaching, they will contend, fragments which have been enlarged and re-interpreted by his disciples. Moreover, to corroborate the disciples' belief in Jesus' salvific death and divinity, many so-called sayings of Jesus were 'created' by the early Christian community and attributed to Jesus himself. If we were to believe these critics, it is not the original Jesus who is speaking to us in the gospels, but rather the divinized product of collective imagination. What should we make of these allegations? Can we disprove them? Can we show that the teachings presented in the gospels do go back to Jesus himself? I believe we can. We will first study the attitude of the evangelists, the writers of the gospels. Then we will look at the trustworthiness of the written documents and oral traditions which they used as sources. Finally, we will consider the importance of eyewitness accounts. The message of a foreword Before we judge the work of the evangelists by scrutinizing what they actually do, it is only fair to listen to what they say about their intentions. Luke for one tells us in so many words that he has studied the facts and wants to present an accurate report. Telling us the truth about Jesus is his declared purpose.
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Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus, 2018
As Pontius Pilate nearly asked, What is history? This article draws upon memory and media studies to question the notion that we find history within the text of the Fourth Gospel. Rather than trying to identify and isolate history within John’s Gospel, our discussion aims to recover how the Gospel works as a set of historical claims, joining with or competing against other historical claims within the social sphere of its author, redactor, and/or audience. After a précis of memory’s and media’s significance for our question (What is history?), we will localize these abstract issues by turning to the Johannine portrayal of John the Baptist and his testimony for Jesus. This approach respects the Fourth Gospel as a written text that developed and was compiled/redacted in the late first century without imposing a rigidly atemporal conception of Johannine theology onto John’s claims about events six or seven decades earlier.
Book Review: Darrell L. Bock & J. Ed Komoszewski (eds.), Jesus, Skepticism & the Problem of History: Criteria & Context in the Study of Christian Origins (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2019), in Fides et Historia.
In the early twentieth century, New Testament scholar, theologian, and missionary Albert Schweitzer concluded his Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906) by famously declaring, "there is nothing more negative than the result of the critical study of the Life of Jesus." Historical Jesus scholarship has only succeeded in creating a "Jesus of its own making." 1 Over a century later, in Jesus, Skepticism & the Problem of History, Darrell L. Bock, J. Ed Komoszewski, and a host of other New Testament scholars attempt to offer a more positive assessment. Many of the essays in this collection seem to be a response to another edited volume, namely Chris Keith and Anthony Le Donne's Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity, published in 2012 (Clark). In this book, Keith and Le Donne argue that the traditional "criteria of authenticity," which have been used in New Testament scholarship since the 1970s, have failed to deliver on their promises. For decades the criteria of authenticity, which include such criteria as "dissimilarity," "embarrassment," "historical plausibility," and "multiple attestation," have been advocated by scholars as the only tools for reconstructing the life of Jesus. But according to Keith and Le Donne, the criteria are mere literary tools that have only succeeded in substituting "the historical Jesus for the pre-literary oral tradition." 2 The criteria, therefore, cannot give us the historically authentic elements of the Gospels. Indeed, this line of scholarship has only produced preconceived reconstructions of the historical Jesus, thus creating many "Jesuses" rather than revealing the real Jesus of history. In short, Keith and Le Donne and others have reached the same negative conclusions Schweitzer did at the beginning of the twentieth century. By contrast, Bock and Komoszewski and the other contributors in their recent collection argue that such tools remain useful, whatever their limitations. As well-known New Testament scholar and theologian N. T. Wright aptly observes in the foreword to this volume, "Christianity appeals to history," and therefore "to history it must go" (10). Like any such volume, the quality of Jesus, Skepticism & the Problem of History is often uneven. Some chapters read like seasoned scholarship; others like
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