Second edition

CONTENTS

Foreword to the first edition
Preface

Introduction

1 Traditional approaches to the reliability of the Gospels

Harmony in the Gospels
Dissonance in the Gospels
Evaluating the debate
The Synoptic problem

2 Newer methods in Gospel study

Form criticism
The classic approach
Memorizing the tradition?
Flexible transmission within fixed limits
Christian prophecy
The delay of Christ’s return

Redaction criticism
The method
Critique

The Gospels as midrash
Uses of the term
Application to the Gospels
Literary criticism
Narrative criticism
Deconstructionism
Reader-response criticism
Other methods
Conclusion and case study

3 Miracles
The problem of credibility
The scientific objection
The philosophical objection
The historical objection
The problem of identification
The question of parallels
The question of reliability
The resurrection
Conclusion

4 Contradictions among the Synoptics?
Conflicting theology?
The practice of paraphrase
Summaries introducing new terminology
Theological clarification
Representational changes
Synecdoche
Partial reports of longer sayings
Chronological problems
Omissions
Omissions of entire passages or sections
Omissions of details within passages
Composite speeches
General considerations
A test case: the eschatological discourse
The other sermons in Matthew
Apparent doublets
Variation in names and numbers
Personal and place names
Numbers
Conclusion

5 Problems in the Gospel of John
The distinctives of John’s Gospel
Similarities between John and the Synoptics
Interlocking
Authorship and date
The alleged contradictions reconsidered
Omissions and singly attested material
Theological differences
Chronological problems
Alleged historical discrepancies
Johannine style
Conclusion

6 The Jesus-tradition outside the Gospels
Apparent historical errors
The death of Judas
Abiathar or Ahimelech?
Zechariah son of Berachiah
Quirinius
The testimony of non-Christian writers
Graeco-Roman sources
Jewish sources
Extra-biblical Christian traditions
The Apostolic Fathers
The Nag Hammadi library
Other apocryphal Gospels
The Jesus-tradition in Acts–Revelation
The Acts of the Apostles
The epistles of Paul
The rest of the New Testament
Conclusion

7 Final questions on historical method
The genre of the Gospels
The burden of proof
The theory
Sample applications
Criteria of authenticity
Theory
Applications
Postscript
Appendix A: Archaeology and the Gospels
Appendix B: Textual criticism and the Gospels
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FOREWORD TO THE FIRST EDITION (1987)

There is, I imagine, no body of literature in the world that has been exposed to the stringent analytical study that the four Gospels have sustained for the past two hundred years. This is not something to be accepted with satisfaction. Scholars today who treat the Gospels as credible historical documents do so in the full light of this analytical study, not by closing their minds to it.

A problem arises in this television age from the exposure of the public to a bewildering variety of opinions about the Gospels in particular and the New Testament in general, including both the current scholarly consensus (if such a thing exists today) and every sort of way-out interpretation of the data, with little or no guidance being given about the criteria by which competing views are to be assessed and a reasonable conclusion reached. In this situation a work like Dr Blomberg’s is really helpful.

Dr Blomberg is a member of a team of scholars who have for a number of years been engaged on a ‘Gospels Project’, designed to explore the main critical issues in the study of the Gospels in our time. The findings of this team have been published in a series of six volumes entitled Gospel Perspectives. But these volumes are written by scholars for scholars. What Dr Blomberg has done is to digest their contents and present them, in the light of his own study and understanding of the subject, to a wider public. His book calls for careful thought on the part of its readers, but does not require technical knowledge. Here is an answer to the questions: Is it possible for intelligent people nowadays to approach the Gospels as trustworthy accounts of the life and teaching of Jesus? Must they be read with scepticism until their detailed information is confirmed? Or can we, in the light of present knowledge, take it for granted that their authors intend to record things that really happened? The answer Dr Blomberg gives to these questions is positive and satisfying, because he gives ample evidence of accurate and up-to-date acquaintance with the subject of his work and the relevant literature. I am happy to commend it warmly to readers who are interested in this question, and especially to theological students.

F. F. Bruce

Extracts from the PREFACE

From 1980 to 1986 a series of six volumes entitled Gospel Perspectives appeared from Sheffield University’s JSOT Press. All six addressed the question of the historical reliability of the Gospels at a technical, scholarly level. Volumes 1 and 2 gathered together a relatively unstructured collection of essays, while volumes 3, 5 and 6 presented articles relating to more specifically delineated themes. Volume 3 set the Gospels against the background of the various types of Jewish history-writing of the day, volume 5 discussed the evidence for the traditions about Jesus from sources other than Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, while volume 6 grappled with the unique problems surrounding the miracles of Jesus. Volume 4 was the only one that was not a multi-author work. Here David Wenham provided an intensive study of Mark 13, its parallels in Matthew and Luke, and related passages containing Jesus’ teaching on events involving the end times and Christ’s return. The entire series was the product of the Gospels Research Project of Tyndale House, Cambridge, a residential library and centre for biblical research under the auspices of the Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship in England. The series eventually presented the fruit of the labour of an international team of scholars over a period of nearly ten years.

During my doctoral studies in Aberdeen, Scotland, between 1979 and 1982, and thanks to the gracious invitation of my supervisor, Professor I. Howard Marshall, I became a part of this team and contributed essays to volumes 3, 5 and 6, along with helping David Wenham edit volume 6. The UCCF offered me a fellowship for the 1985–6 academic year, enabling me, along with my wife, Fran, to live, research and write in Tyndale House and produce the first edition of this book. This enterprise was born out of the Gospels Research Project’s desire to disseminate the findings of its work to a wider audience at a somewhat more popular level. The book was geared especially for the new theological student and the educated layperson, but its wide-ranging survey was designed to help scholars and pastors as well. Although birthed by the Gospel Perspectives series, the work became an independent volume in its own right. It in no way gave each essay in the series equal attention and a few were virtually relegated to footnotes. At the same time, it drew freely from a breadth of recent research, discussing numerous topics that the Gospels Research Project had not addressed. But one objective remained the same as for the six-volume series: ‘to provide answers to the questions of historicity which will stand up to serious academic scrutiny and will provide some help for those who are perplexed by scholarly disagreement’.

When I submitted the manuscript in 1986 to be published the following year, I never allowed myself to imagine that it might stay in print for twenty years. If it lasted ten, I thought, I should consider myself extremely fortunate. But here we are twenty years later and IVP have asked for a revised, twentieth-anniversary edition. ...

In keeping with one of the objectives of the first edition – accessibility to the thoughtful layperson – I have kept references to foreign language material to a minimum, even while increasing their numbers slightly where particularly important or recent works cry out for notice. But I have read or skimmed a much larger volume of literature than the footnotes explicitly reflect. I have increased substantially the total number of footnotes, along with the number of items in numerous existing footnotes, not least to demonstrate the wealth of scholarship that supports the positions defended here. It may have been just barely understandable twenty years ago that some scholars were not aware of the strength of the case for the Gospels’ trustworthiness; it is inexplicable today in the light of the voluminous quantity and excellent quality of relevant works that have appeared in the last two decades. ...

Craig L. Blomberg

INTRODUCTION

Every year, countless university students around the world are taught that only a small percentage of the New Testament accounts of the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth reflect what he really said and did. In most cases, lecturers are simply passing on what they have received from their teachers. The reasons for their opinions may vary over the years according to the latest sceptical fashions, but some arguments prove remarkably persistent: the Gospels were not written by people in a position to know what Jesus was like, primitive cultures believed in miracles like the virgin birth and resurrection that we know are impossible, oral traditions quickly distorted early Christian claims, theological interest precludes historical accuracy, what we call ‘heresy’ actually preceded ‘orthodoxy’, non-canonical Gospels disprove the stories found in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and so on. Probably few of the instructors who pass on such claims even realize how weakly supported their positions are and how some of these claims have actually been disproved. In most cases, they leave their students wholly unprepared to sift truth from error.

Sometimes students’ confusion is compounded by the fiction promoted in popular culture. Since 2003, tens of millions of people worldwide have either read the book or seen the film The Da Vinci Code. The story is almost entirely fictitious, but its very first page erroneously claims that ‘all descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate’. In fact, virtually everything it claims about documents from the first five centuries of Christian history is false, but myriads of readers do not have the educational background, the research skills or the desire to investigate the story’s claims, and thus they wind up believing them. In 2004, Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ enthralled viewers around the world. This film was based on some serious historical research but it, too, contained some glaring errors, most notably the exclusive use of either Aramaic or Latin on the lips of Jewish and Roman characters who would have communicated with each other almost entirely in Greek! In 2006, a flurry of media interest surrounded the release of the English translation of the Gospel of Judas, a late second-century Gnostic document that briefly recasts portions of the passion narratives of the canonical Gospels so as to make Jesus commission Judas to betray him and promise to reward him in the afterlife for doing so. Although even very liberal scholars recognized that this document posed no threat to the traditional accounts of first-century history, popular novelists have still based fanciful reconstructions of Christian origins on this Judas-Gospel. Is it any wonder that the international public has difficulty separating fact from fiction concerning Jesus of Nazareth?

On other occasions, bona fide but eccentric, unrepresentative scholarship adds to the confusion. Throughout the decade of the 1990s, the Jesus Seminar met semi-annually to discuss and vote, passage by passage, on the probability of Jesus having said or done everything attributed to him in the four New Testament Gospels and in the Coptic Gospel of Thomas. They concluded that only 18% of the sayings and 16% of the deeds described in the five Gospels corresponded even reasonably closely to the words and actions of the historical Jesus. By successfully courting media attention in ways that most scholars do not, they succeeded in convincing a wide swathe of news gatherers that they spoke for the majority of scholars, even though with a few exceptions they instead represented the radical fringe of New Testament scholarship.

On the other hand, one of the better kept secrets of the last quarter of a century is the growth of what has been dubbed the third quest of the historical Jesus, in which a large number of scholars, and by no means just conservative Christian ones, have been growing in their confidence in how much we can know about the Jesus of history and in how reliable the New Testament Gospels are. Indeed, Grant Osborne, probably overly generously, attributes the Gospel Perspectives series on which this book is based, and the first edition of this book itself, as one of two sets of publications that ‘paved the way for a reappraisal’ of the relationship between history and theology in the Gospels, leading to the most recent period of scholarship in which history is viewed not as the antithesis to theology but as a vehicle for it. In reality, the shift was more gradual and the influences more diverse, but the current trends remain undeniable, notwithstanding the Jesus Seminar’s utter lack of acknowledgment of them. N. T. Wright thus sums up the current options for the role of historical research in the doing of theology and the life of faith under three main headings. (1) Some scholars – the smallest percentage – find it is appropriate to apply the standard criteria of historical investigation to the Gospels but believe that the results prove largely negative: not much turns out to be historically probable. (2) More commonly, others believe that it is methodologically inappropriate to apply historical criteria to documents that were first of all intended to be theological. (3) A final group, perhaps a plurality among fully credentialled New Testament scholars today, agrees with the first in the use of the criteria but argues that the results actually make the historicity of the main contours of the canonical Gospels more probable than not. Certainly, a majority of New Testament scholars fall into camps 2 and 3 put together. Wright himself is perhaps the most able and prolific exponent of position 3 at present.

But why is there still as much disagreement as remains? Some of it is due to varying presuppositions. Is the miraculous possible or not? Should we be a priori more sceptical of the biblical material due to its theological nature or not? Some involves varying criteria or varying uses of the same criteria, which in turn often relates to the question of how similar or dissimilar we expect Jesus to be from the Judaism of his day and the Christianity that followed him. Still other differences stem from the broader philosophical questions surrounding the relationship between religion and historical investigation. We shall return to all of these questions at the appropriate places below.

Yet another issue that accounts for the complexity of the question of the Gospels’ trustworthiness involves the nature of the other ancient data available with which to compare them. Two somewhat opposite problems confront historians here. On the one hand, they discover much less independent testimony to the life of Jesus than they might have expected concerning one who founded such a major world religion. On the other hand, when they look just at Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, it seems as though there is too much testimony. Many of the details of Christ’s life reappear in two or more of the Gospels, sometimes with the identical wording, while in other places apparent discrepancies and contradictions cast doubts on the trustworthiness of the information supplied.

This study will begin, therefore, by examining the various methods of historical criticism that have been applied to the Gospels. Chapter 1 surveys the main approaches employed throughout the history of the church. Chapter 2 turns to the distinctive developments of the last century, which are often equated with ‘modern scholarship’. Chapter 3 addresses the unique problems associated with the study of the miracle stories in the Gospels. While focusing primarily on the issues raised by the application of historical criticism to these narratives, it also briefly considers the scientific and philosophical questions surrounding the concept of the supernatural. The next three chapters turn to the two problems of too much and too little historical testimony. Chapters 4 and 5 consider some of the most significant apparent contradictions among the Gospel parallels, first by looking at several of the seeming discrepancies among the three Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke), and then by examining the distinctive questions raised by the Gospel of John. Chapter 6 deals with the evidence for Jesus’ life and teachings outside the Gospel tradition: in contemporary Jewish and Graeco-Roman sources, in other early Christian literature, and in the rest of the New Testament writings. Finally, the question suggested by the title of this book is raised again: do the New Testament Gospels present reliable history? Chapter 7 thus consolidates the findings of previous chapters and outlines a method for dealing with the details of the Gospel tradition that have not been discussed.

In 1943, Professor F. F. Bruce, who during his lifetime was one of the most widely respected evangelical biblical scholars, produced his first book-length work, entitled 'The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable?' This book underwent six editions, the most recent in 1981, and faithfully served a generation of students and interested lay people. In many ways, my first edition of the present study sought to function as an expanded and more amply annotated supplement to Bruce’s fifth edition of 1960, though limiting the focus of attention to the Gospels. It was no coincidence that its title resembled Bruce’s title, but the word ‘historical’ was added to make clear that it was the question of historical reliability and not just theological trustworthiness that was under investigation.

A comparison of tables of contents discloses important similarities and differences between this work and Bruce’s. Bruce devotes a chapter to the Gospel miracles just as this study does. He uses three chapters to survey the evidence for the Jesus-tradition outside the Gospels; here the topic has been condensed into one chapter. He dwells at some length on the archaeological evidence that confirms the accuracy of details in the New Testament and on the early dating of the documents, which brings them into relatively close proximity with the events they narrate. He also emphasizes the New Testament’s abundant textual attestation; that is, the number and nature of ancient manuscripts that have been copied and preserved from the Greek originals. These issues are not explored in as much detail here, because their relevance for the Gospels is more limited than for some of the other sections of the New Testament. Most of the events of Jesus’ life have left no physical traces for archaeologists to unearth (but see also Appendix A). Even a conservative approach to authorship and dating of the Gospels places them about thirty years after Jesus’ death, with two of them written by non-eyewitnesses, a sufficient scenario for errors and distortions to creep into their accounts, if other factors conducive to such changes were present, while even on late dates and theories of pseudonymous authorship, the early church could easily have preserved accurate information (see pp. 53-62 below). And almost no-one denies that highly accurate texts of what the four Evangelists originally wrote have been preserved; the controversy today centres on whether or not what they wrote was true; that is, a valid or faithful record of the events (but see also Appendix B).

At the same time, new challenges to the Gospels’ trustworthiness have arisen that played little or no role in the scholarly debates of past generations. Biblical critics have begun to draw much more heavily on the study of oral criticism; hence the survey of the ‘newer methods in Gospel study’ in chapter 2. The distinctives of John lead virtually all commentators to treat the Fourth Gospel quite differently from the Synoptics, so this Gospel has been given special consideration. Nevertheless, even though a wide range of topics has been surveyed, there are still gaps and omissions. Much of what has been chosen for discussion has been dictated by the direction of recent research in general and of the Gospel Perspectives series in particular (see pp. 9–11 ). For the most part this survey makes no attempt to break fresh ground, but instead seeks to make the terrain traversed by recent scholarship familiar to a wider audience.

Lack of space has clearly prohibited the kind of detailed treatment that each individual topic requires if it were to be argued comprehensively. A nontechnical work of this nature thus risks two pitfalls. On the one hand, theological students may complain that its discussion is too brief and selective. On the other hand, laypeople who are unaccustomed to the complexities of modern scholarship may wish that the issues were even less intricate. Nevertheless, the book reflects the sincere hope that it may find a welcoming readership among both groups of people, for it is intended for student and layperson alike. For those who require more detail, there are frequent footnotes and the works to which they refer. The abundance of in-depth, well-reasoned conservative scholarship on the topics surveyed here, which has appeared in recent decades, deserves more serious attention than it has often received. For those who find the discussion complex, a careful checking of the scriptural references provided throughout should offer much illumination. The issues are not simple, and simplistic summaries serve neither the cause of Christianity nor of scholarship.

The thrust of this volume should be compared and contrasted with two opposing perspectives, both of which have acquired much popular currency. On the one hand, many who write as if they had never studied the Gospels in a scholarly context believe that biblical criticism has virtually disproved the existence of Jesus or that no-one can take the Gospels seriously as sources of reliable historical information without surrendering intellectual integrity. One thinks, for example, of many of the publications of Prometheus Books or traditions in ancient cultures and on the insights of literary and sociological of a work like Ruth H. Green’s The Born Again Skeptic’s Guide to the Bible (1999). Countless self-appointed experts have created websites, too, that either attack or defend Scripture, often without adequate knowledge of the full breadth of biblical research that needs to be taken into account. For the most part, the present study has ignored the most outlandish claims of isolated scholars, along with the Internet material that is posted without having passed the rigorous process of peer review that characterizes true scholarship. It has interacted instead with what is widely accepted as genuinely academic, however well or poorly known it is outside the academy and whether or not it is available online.

At the same time, a very popular conservative apologetic for the deity of Christ stems from C. S. Lewis’s famous ‘trilemma’: the person who did and said the types of things the Gospels portray Jesus as doing and saying could be no merely human teacher or prophet, however enlightened or exalted. He must be a liar, a lunatic or the Lord. The problem with this argument is that it assumes what is regularly denied, namely that the Gospels give substantially accurate accounts of the actions and claims of Jesus. One can preserve Lewis’s alliteration and introduce a fourth option: the stories about Jesus were legends. This option represents the most common unorthodox explanation of the more spectacular deeds and extravagant claims of Jesus in the Gospels: they were the product of the early church’s desire to glorify him, and so it exaggerated its portraits of him above and beyond what the facts permitted. Unless one can successfully dismiss this alternative, one cannot appeal to Lewis’s apologetic. An examination of the Gospels’ historical reliability must therefore precede a credible assessment of who Jesus was.

Throughout my professional career, a variety of people have jumped to the conclusion that I hold the views that I do because I was raised to believe in a conservative or evangelical form of Christianity. I was not. I was brought up in a mainstream Protestant church and educated at a college with a very liberal department of religion that was associated with that denomination. I came to the scholarly positions that I hold through academic investigation and inquiry, not because my upbringing or education predisposed me to believe as I do. Others assume that I continue to hold the views that I do because I teach at a seminary that endorses a very high view of Scripture. If I changed my perspectives noticeably, I would need to resign and look for a different teaching position; certain critics assume that I would be unwilling to do this. Again the assumption errs. I have had an adequate number of diverse job offers over the years so that I would not hesitate to seek employment elsewhere rather than annually sign a doctrinal statement I could not affirm with integrity, if I ever changed my mind on the topic of this book.

Indeed, the goals of this volume remain modest. I neither presuppose nor argue for the complete inerrancy, infallibility or inspiration of Scripture, even just with the Gospels. These are the logical and/or theological corollaries of other prior commitments. I believe there are good reasons for holding them, but a defence of that conviction would require a very different kind of book. I wear my historian’s hat, not my Christian believer’s hat in this project. If readers wish to reject my conclusions, let them show how my arguments fail on historical grounds rather than simply accusing me of presupposing my conclusions because of some predisposition or bias they wrongly think I maintain. It is true, though, that it is the sceptics whose views are novel and aberrant in comparison with the vast majority of people who have carefully examined the issues throughout church history. To that degree I am influenced by history. But this consensus should give us pause before we glibly overturn time-tested tradition. Of course,Western culture is steeped in the myth that newest means best. So we need to resist this temptation and examine the evidence afresh with as much openness as possible to the directions in which it leads.