The Historical Reliability of the New Testament

Countering the Challenges to Evangelical Christian Beliefs

Craig L. Blomberg, Robert B. Stewart, Robert B. Stewart

• Publisher: B&H Academic
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781433691706
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Questions about the reliability of the New Testament are commonly raised today both by biblical scholars and popular media. Drawing on decades of research, Craig Blomberg addresses all of the major objections to the historicity of the New Testament in one comprehensive volume. Topics addressed include the formation of the Gospels, the transmission of the text, the formation of the canon, alleged contradictions, the relationship between Jesus and Paul, supposed Pauline forgeries, other gospels, miracles, and many more. Historical corroborations of details from all parts of the New Testament are also presented throughout. The Historical Reliability of the New Testament marshals the latest scholarship in responding to New Testament objections, while remaining accessible to non-specialists.

Part OneThe Synoptic Gospels

Chapter 1The Formation of the Synoptic Gospels

Imagine the Internet buzzing with some latest discovery of an ancient document dug up in Israel. It is written in Hebrew and appears to shed startling new light on the Jewish religion of its day. But is it authentic? Are its contents true? How would reputable archaeologists, historians, and linguists proceed? Early in their analysis would be the attempts to answer a variety of questions. Can we determine the author of the document and its original setting? Are we able to estimate a date for the manuscript and dates for any events or activities described in the manuscript? May we discern anything about its composition, that is, how it was written? Do its contents parallel those of any other documents from the ancient Mediterranean world? If so, how similar or different are they? These and related questions usually take time to answer, even though ours is a world that demands instant information. One thing, therefore, we can almost certainly know when new discoveries like this hit the press is that every immediate opinion expressed by someone is tentative and provisional. Scholarly consensus, if it is achieved, will come much later, usually after all the initial publicity has died down. Unless one deliberately follows developments for a few months or even years, one risks believing the exact opposite or at least a considerable distortion of what is ultimately decided about the new find!

The New Testament Gospels, of course, have been known for nearly twenty centuries. Modern biblical scholarship has investigated virtually every subject one could think to ask about them from almost every conceivable angle for more than 200 years. Almost by definition what counts as news is that which is new, novel, or arresting. Virtually by definition what is utterly unprecedented in New Testament scholarship is almost guaranteed to be false because of the amount of investigation that has already gone into the discipline! It is almost guaranteed but not always.^[41] Still the proper response to any news item portraying Christian origins in some sensational new light is skepticism. Proceed cautiously, consult the sources, determine their credibility, look for dissenting views, and give the matter some time to see what, if anything is resolved. Many new theories are old ones recycled and tweaked, even though previously debunked. But a new generation that fails to study history carefully doesn’t know this and so can fall prey to the new appearance of the theory. Even the theorist may not be aware how well-worn his or her ideas actually are.^[42]

In assessing the reliability of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, some issues must be addressed that recur for all New Testament documents. Others are unique to the literary genre of a Gospel. And because the contents of Matthew, Mark, and Luke overlap to a great extent in ways not true of other Gospels, inside or outside the canon, still other concerns affect the analysis of the three Synoptics alone. In this chapter we will address the issues of authorship, date, and circumstances of their composition, as is necessary for all biblical documents. We will look at the question of the nature of a Gospel and its author’s intentions, an issue unique to Gospels’ scholarship. Finally, distinctive to the study of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, we will address the “Synoptic Problem”—the question of the literary relationship of the first three Gospels—along with related subjects that such study raises. These will include the nature of the oral tradition that preceded the writing of the Synoptics. Assessing the credibility of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke represents the ultimate goal of our investigation in all three of these categories.

The Settings of the Synoptics

What can we know about the writers of these three documents, along with the time and circumstances of their writing? Answers to a large degree depend on how much we value external evidence as over against internal evidence. External evidence refers to what information we have about the composition of a document apart from the contents of that document. Internal evidence refers to what we may deduce from the document itself. The external evidence for the formation of the Gospels begins to appear early in the second century. The standard New Testament introductions along with all the major commentaries on individual Gospels typically reproduce this information in detail;^[43] we need highlight only the most important claims here. Which internal evidence is considered significant varies widely from one scholar to the next; again we will note only the most commonly observed phenomena.

Authorship and Audiences

The Christian writer, Papias, early in the second century, offers the oldest known testimony concerning the Gospel of Matthew. His testimony is preserved in quotations by the early fourth-century church historian Eusebius. Several of the Greek words in his statement can be translated in more than one way, as indicated by the bracketed words that suggest alternate but probably less likely renderings: “Matthew composed [compiled] his logia in the Hebrew [Aramaic] language [dialect, style], and everyone translated [interpreted] it as they were able” (Hist. eccl. 3.39.16). The most ambiguous part of Papias’s statement is the meaning in this context of the Greek word logia, a plural noun I have left untranslated. A logion (the singular form) essentially means “a saying,” referring to spoken words.^[44] Some scholars have nevertheless assumed that here it refers to the entire Gospel because Eusebius has just cited what Papias taught about the whole Gospel of Mark, referring to it by means of the same word logia.^[45] Papias, who in turn is citing an elder named John, whom we will discuss later, says:

Mark was the translator [interpreter] of Peter; whatever he remembered, he wrote accurately, however not in order, of the things having been spoken or done by the Lord. For [Mark] neither heard the Lord nor followed him, but finally, as I said, was with Peter, who gave him the teachings as there was need (but not as making a systematic arrangement of the Lord’s logia), so that Mark erred in no way (Hist. eccl. 3.39.15).

Despite those who would take logia to refer to a whole Gospel, it seems clear that the word here cannot refer to Mark’s entire narrative because Papias is citing John the elder as describing constituent elements of that Gospel. He has just spoken of “the things . . . spoken or done by the Lord,” so he could be referring to some portion of the Gospel that contains both kinds of material. Or, a bit more naturally, in light of the root meaning of a logion, he could now be referring simply to teachings or discourses of Jesus, which makes it probable that he is doing the same thing a few sentences later when he speaks about Matthew writing the logia of Jesus.^[46]

What do we learn from all this testimony, if we accept it? At the very least we discover that Mark’s Gospel relied largely on information from Peter, who in the Synoptics is one of the three apostles closest to Jesus. Mark’s Gospel may not always be in chronological order, especially with respect to Jesus’s teachings, but it is completely accurate in what it affirms. Matthew wrote something, probably as a precursor to what we call the Gospel of Matthew, in Hebrew or Aramaic, perhaps a collection of Jesus’s teachings. There may have been multiple translations of this document, including into Greek, which could have resulted in any or all of what we know as Matthew’s Gospel.

From other early church fathers, we may add the testimony of the late-second century bishop of Lyons, Irenaeus, who declared that Matthew wrote his Gospel “while Peter and Paul were preaching the gospel and founding the church in Rome” (Adv. haer. 3.1.1), a reference that fits most naturally into the 60s of the first century. Because Eusebius quotes Irenaeus also (Hist. eccl. 5.8.2), and does so accurately here where we can check him, we can be more confident than we otherwise would be that he quoted Papias accurately where we cannot check him. Justin Martyr, in the mid-second century, declared that Mark’s Gospel was based on Peter’s apomnēmoneumata, that is, his “remembrances” or possibly “memoirs” (Dial. 106.3).^[47]

The only person we know of named Matthew from first-century Christianity was the converted tax collector, also known as Levi, who was one of Jesus’s twelve closest followers (cf. Matt 9:9 with Mark 2:14). Mark was John Mark, a companion of both Peter and Paul, best known for deserting Paul midway through his first missionary journey (Acts 13:13; cf. 15:38) but later reconciled to him (2 Tim 4:11; cf. Col 4:10). The early church in Jerusalem also met for a time at the home of John Mark’s mother (Acts 12:12). Luke was Paul’s “beloved physician” (Col 4:14 KJV)^[48] and travel companion off and on throughout his missionary travels. He was believed to have written the book of Acts as a sequel to his Gospel, so that the periodic shift from third-person to first-person-plural narrative (“we did such and such”) can then be explained as the places where Luke was actually present with Paul (Acts 16:10–17; 20:5–21:18; 27:1–28:16).

External evidence additionally claims that Matthew wrote in the province of Judea and, more specifically, from the city of Jerusalem (Monarchian Prologue, Jerome, Dorotheus, colophons of mss. K, 126, 174). Consistently, the patristic testimony insists that he wrote to Jewish Christians. Clement of Alexandria in the late second century declared that Mark wrote to Christians in Rome at their request (Frag. 9.4–20). One tradition notes that when Mark told Peter of his writing plan, “[Peter] neither actively prevented nor encouraged the undertaking” (Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 6.14.6–7)—a fairly halfhearted approval that would not likely be invented if it were fictitious!^[49] Of the Synoptics the least is said about Luke, but we do read that he was “incited by the Holy Spirit in the regions around Achaia” (the southern half of the Greek peninsula) and wrote particularly for Gentile believers, probably also in Achaia (anti-Marcionite Prologue; Gregory of Nazianzus). We are also told that Luke was originally from Antioch in Syria (Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 3.4).

What are we to make of these various claims? Each early Christian writer we have cited had a vested interest in linking the Gospels with apostolic tradition. Most of them elsewhere occasionally report information that appears to be distorted about some aspect of early Christianity.^[50] But it is hard to believe that the oldest traditions would uniformly associate the first two Gospels with Mark and Luke without some good historical reason, because neither was otherwise viewed as a significant character in first-century Christianity.^[51] First Peter 5:13 confirms that Mark and Peter were together in Rome (using the code word “Babylon”) in the early 60s, but otherwise Mark is best known for deserting Paul and Barnabas! Luke, as we have seen, appears by name only in two lists of those from whom Paul sends greetings at the end of his epistles. The apocryphal and Gnostic Gospels by comparison, not written until the mid-second century at the earliest, choose much better known figures from the first generation of Christianity as pseudo-authors of their more fictitious documents to try to gain them a hearing—Mary (probably Magdalene but maybe the mother of Jesus), the apostles Philip, Thomas, Bartholomew, Peter, James, and even Nicodemus.^[52] Since we know of apocryphal works falsely ascribed to Peter, if the Gospel of Mark were just another such document, granted that the church fathers attributed much of its contents to Peter already, why not just simplify things and say Peter wrote it himself? Those who would believe that claim would then accept the book’s authority that much more readily!^[53] Matthe...