Transcription
My name is Riley and you are listening to the Riley Hepner [Music] podcast. As we begin, can I start with just asking you what your own journey into biblical scholarship looked like? Like, were there significant, I don't know, moments, revelations, experiences that stick out to you that led to a a career, a calling, and ministry in New Testament studies?
For sure. Like, like you had mentioned how you were called, I, I was, I was called. My call to ministry was a call to to share God's word. And so I, uh, I didn't know exactly what that looked like initially. What I thought it would be, uh, well, especially as I understood that that focusing on the Bible and explaining the Bible, I thought that that would be, you know, just going from church to church and preaching in a bunch of different churches. Um, but I felt like the Lord wanted me to go to Bible College and learn Greek and Hebrew. So I went to learn Greek and Hebrew. And after my first couple years there, I was going to then go out and preach. But I began to notice that, um, my professors were training a lot of people in the Bible, and that that kind of role, you can train a lot of people. And I began to notice that the people who were writing also could have a have a big impact and serve a lot of people. And began to realize I could do more that way.
But also, I just, as time went on, like, I was reading 40 chapters of the Bible a day and, uh, really learning the Bible. I had to catch up because I was converted from completely unchurched atheism. Okay. But, but once I, once I started getting into this, after a while, I realized that the, the authors were taking for granted things that they and their audience knew. I mean, not least the language in which they were writing, that that people today ordinarily don't know. And, you know, I already had some background in in Greek and Roman literature and so on. But, um, now I began to study it for the sake of of understanding the Bible, and especially the Jewish sources, which I hadn't delved into before I became a a Christian. And just once I started into it to try to get the information to feel like I really understood the background and could articulate this is the message of the text in light of all that background, by then I had a PhD. So I was kind of on the on the way at that point.
So I, I think it goes without saying, I think you you essentially said this, going into to scholarship that felt like a ministry for you. That was a calling. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Oh, sir, go ahead. Well, no, I just, I also felt like you can't expect everybody to do what I did. Um, and it wasn't what I'd planned to do. I was going to just, you know, once I realized they needed a background, I just wanted like a reference book that I could take with me as I was getting ready to preach and, and, you know, pull out the background, you know, all in one volume that I could carry with me as I traveled or whatever. Until I finally realized, wow, you know, already this has taken me like 10 years just to collect this much background. This book wasn't available at that time. So that's why I wrote the background commentary. And then some people said, ah, you don't have enough documentation. Well, yeah, it was supposed to do one volume, uh, for the for those kind of people, not like you, but the kind of pastors who prepare their their Sunday sermon on Saturday night or their preach on Saturday, their Friday night, whatever. So I, like, okay, well, you want the footnotes? Here's the footnotes. So that's why I started writing these big commentaries that gave the documentation. But obviously, they end up being multi-volume and so on when I go into that much detail.
Okay. Uh, have, as you have pursued this ministry of scholarship, have you felt encouraged by the church in terms of, uh, how you've been able to impart resources and wisdom to them? Yeah, I have. I have very much. I still struggle, um, not as much as I used to. But I also knew the way that I came to Christ as somebody was unchurched, was there were people out in the street sharing the gospel. Um, and so I did that. After, after I became Christian, I was out in the street sharing the gospel. And, and often I struggled with this while I was in seminary, while I was, not so much when I was doing my doctoral work because I had a good ministry on campus with the undergraduates. But I often struggled with, am I making enough of a difference? Would I make more of a difference reaching people one-on-one than I do with these commentaries? And in terms of evangelism, you know, I'm not sure. But in anyway, I, I, I try to work hard, pour everything that I am into this, this work on these commentaries to make it like, this is the biggest difference I can make. Yeah, it seems to me like this is where I can make the biggest difference. Feel the Lord's pleasure in, um, in doing this research. But sometimes I still, and I'm weighing and I'm like, oh, there's so many needs in the world. But yeah, but this is where I'm gifted, especially.
So well, when I look at your Acts commentary, I mean, as it's stacked up, uh, I always think, this man has clearly been called to this purpose because who could, there's not many people, I think, that could so comprehensively prepare and present, uh, all the sources that the data like that. I think you're, uh, I, I think it's clear to me, I mean, not knowing you, that, you know, the Lord custom-cut fit you, called you to what you are doing. And I'm so thankful that people like you exist, you know, where God has called them to be. Thanks. Thanks. I'm also ADHD, okay? So, so, you know, it helps me being interdisciplinary because I'm always thinking, oh, what about this? What about over? But, um, there's a thing with ADHD where you're going to hyperfocus, okay? So that has been very helpful. The ADHD itself is like, it entertains my students when I teach because they go, engine. But, um, but it can make concentration and sitting still hard unless it can go in the hyperfocus, okay? When it happens, you know, may as well keep going all day.
But isn't that amazing then how the Lord has used, used your ADHD for such a kingdom purpose that, you know, you get into that hyperfocus, you know, place that a lot of people probably can't get into, which is a, a neat thing. I mean, a sovereign God, that's amazing. Uh, Craig, of course, we're chatting about the book Christo biography, memory, history, reliability, the Gospels. What initially led you to explore the relationship between ancient biography and the Gospels?
Actually, I'd been thinking about it for a long time. I mean, when, like before I was a Christian, I was reading Tacitus and Plato and, oh, even before, oh, yeah, yeah, before, yeah, all, all those things. I, I was, I was staying away from the Bible, you know, but I was reading all these other things from antiquity. But then, um, so after I became a Christian, now, some of the early comparisons I made were really way off, like Plato and and Paul were not, uh, I needed more of the Jewish material. But in terms of, um, seeing the nature of the Gospels, they look to me like ancient biography. And that was already, you know, when I mentioned I went to Bible College, in terms of later on, uh, there were a number of scholars who had, um, developed that. Actually, it was kind of the majority of you throughout church history, if you define biography in a, in a broad way. And kind of fell away in the mid, well, early to mid 20th century in scholarship. But then you've got, um, Charles Talbert was really brilliant. He broke ground on that. Not everybody paid attention. But, uh, David Ani developed that further. And then Richard Burd in his Cambridge monograph on the Gospels as Ancient Biographies, really, you know, the consensus shifted. So that was actually the majority consensus by the time I was coming in on this.
Well, I'd written some on historical Jesus research and had just mentioned, you know, not, not at great length, about the nature of ancient biography and the Gospels. And by the time that was coming out, I realized, oh, wait, there's something I didn't mention because actually, probably a lot of New Testament scholars haven't read enough ancient biographies to just take for granted that what I'm saying is correct. And sure enough, uh, at least one of the reviews said, hey, how do we know this is correct? So I said, okay, well, I got so, I did an article on it. But it was like, I did a comparison with one ancient biographer and a couple of his biographies and in the Gospels and showed how, you know, this one, it was very information-based. It's not to say that they didn't have perspectives and so on, but it was definitely information-based, just full of, you know, depending on prior, prior sources. So I was like, well, how do we explore all these sources? But my, my, my doctoral students in my, um, historical Jesus course, I suggested one time, hey, you don't have to write your paper on this, but if you want to, let's see if we can know, take this biographer, take that biog, when, whichever biographer they wanted, and let's look at the evidence. And so, you know, one of them took Diogenes Laërtius, um, another, I think, took Tacitus's, biography as father-in-law, and, and so on. And they wrote, they wrote really good papers. We put them together as a book, published the book, so we could all then depend on each other's research because some of them decided to develop dissertations out of this. Okay. So even beyond what I have in Christo Biography, there's even more information now.
The, something else that I discovered, though, and this was from Arnaldo Migliore, a classicist writing on ancient biography, was how the genre developed over time. And once I put the, the biographies in sequence, you know, from the proto-biography to hagiography and late antiquity, over that thousand-year period, in the middle of it is the apex of historiographic dependability. So in the period of the early Empire, which is the period of the Gospels, um, actually from the end of the Roman Republic, Cornelius Nepos, until like Diogenes Laërtius in the, in the early 3rd century, what we have is, um, biography almost as a subtype of historiography in general. It was very much oriented towards historical sources. And, you know, that's, that's really helpful for putting the Gospels in context as information-based works.
How would you summarize your main argument that the Gospels fit within the genre of ancient biography, of of bios?
Um, well, actually, I was, I was following Talbert's argument on, okay, Talbert and, um, Burdge, and, you know, their, their basic argument because it was pretty much the consensus. It's not to say everybody holds that, and obviously around the edges, you know, genres are not airtight, so they can overlap. Um, but the basic way I would, uh, summer, well, what I was doing was saying, okay, granted that the Gospels are biographies, what does that tell us about the information they provide? Because it looked to me like that was a lull in scholarship. It hadn't been done that much. So I found that the Gospels are information-based biographies. And the, it's kind of a three-pronged approach, namely, uh, first of all, they come from the period when biographies were most tied to historiography, most information-based. Also, also, they are from within living memory, which only a minority of surviving ancient biographies were. So the fact that the, um, all, all, all four of our first-century Gospels are by definition, to being in from the first century, are from within living memory of Jesus' public ministry. Oral historiography usually counts the period of living memory or, um, what they call oral history versus oral tradition, like 60 to 80 years. So the period when eyewitnesses are still alive or those who knew the eyewitnesses are still alive, um, normally the memory is much more information-based, or maybe more extensively information-based is a better way to put it, because in in later oral tradition, you've got, um, some key features remembered, but not, not as much by, by any means.
So I, it's in your title, so I think this is rhetorical, but, uh, your aim at, uh, studying bios in this genre is to help us better understand the historical reliability of the Gospels. Was that kind of the main goal here?
Yeah, and so that we can recognize that what the Gospels, um, that the Gospels are actually good sources for knowing about Jesus historically. And of course, there's a bunch of other other factors that we take into account. But, but this gives us kind of a default setting, like, um, the nature of ancient biography. If it tells you an episode or an event, I should say, then it's normally in this period because the biographer believed that that event happened. They have some sort of source that suggests that that event happened. So the, the Gospels actually give us a lot of information about Jesus, even by a purely secular historiographic standard that we would hopefully use for most other Gospels, not, or most other Gospels, most other biographies. Not all studies of ancient biography recognize that. But I think when you narrow it down to those within living memory, and we're talking about full-length, U biographies, like the kind you have in Suetonius or Plutarch or Tacitus's father-in-law, or, or Josephus's autobiography, although he makes himself look really good there, or, or Philo's Life of Moses, even, you know, these are, these are from within the right period. And what they show us is that they're depending on prior information, sometimes oral tradition, sometimes written information. And they, they stick. I mean, they're not out to invent events.
Sure. Well, some scholars, obviously, would argue that ancient biographers took significant liberties with their material. How, how does your work in Christo biography challenge or nuance that claim?
First of all, it depends on what period of biography we're talking about, okay? So, like a few centuries before, when the genre was just, you know, beginning to develop, yeah, they did take significant liberties. And certainly in hagiography, the liberties they took were pretty much in line with the liberties that were taken by ancient historians as well. So, um, uh, how do I go into that? Um, with biography, they didn't have to be in chronological order. Okay? And, and sometimes we can demonstrate they weren't in chronological order. Um, they, for example, Philo, his Life of Moses, he got two sections, one is in chronological order, the other is arranged topically. Um, and Suetonius arranges things topically often as well, where here are the person's good deeds, here are the person's bad deeds, and so forth. Also, you didn't expect things to be verbatim, okay? So, um, you know, even, even with historians, a later historian might basically crib an earlier historian's speech of somebody, you know, how do we know what was said in the Occ? Well, he uses the earlier historian's speech, but he puts it in his own words, he paraphrases, okay? So there were, there were clearly liberties like that. And, you know, when somebody wasn't there to hear the speech, the historian would give you the most plausible reconstruction. You know, today we'd say they might have said this, but ancient historians would just give you the, the most plausible reconstruction. Or sometimes Josephus writes a, a few speeches where he was just showing off his rhetorical skills. But that, those were mostly in histories. But in, uh, in, in terms of, you know, events, they didn't normally make up events. And in terms of biographies of sages, like teachers, these were often passed on in the schools of those teachers. They were meant to, um, to recall what the teacher actually taught, rather than to make up, uh, ideas for, for the teacher. And especially within living memory. So I went into comparisons with ancient Greek philosophic schools, ancient education in general. Some people object when you, I had one article where I mentioned Rabbi memory and and person jumped on that and said, ah, the rabbis are too late. That was only one quarter of the evidence that I cited for ancient schools passing on the memory. I mean, it was, it was the unanimous practice, okay, in this period. But anyway, I'm, I need to let you talk. No, I'm fascinated by by all of this. Please answer as long as you want.
When it comes then to us, you know, debating back and forth sometimes on which gospel writer is more chronological, you know, is it John? Is it Mark? Or wherever? Is that conversation a little redundant then in terms of, well, let's say in terms of say, it's say it's, uh, uh, you know, non-Christian scholars using that to argue the reliability of the Gospels? That's a silly argument, I think. That's a silly argument. I think it's, it's judging them by the standards of saying, okay, well, here's what we would do in a modern biography and then imposing a genre that didn't exist yet, okay? I mean, it developed from the ancient one, but imposing that grid on ancient biography and saying, look, the Gospels aren't the way we would write biography, they're unreliable. I mean, I don't even, that argument doesn't even make sense to me because you have to judge them according to the standard for which they were writing. Um, you know, if we can even speak of that as a standard because there were variations. But, but certainly in this period, the expectation of, of, uh, peer review, so to speak, or the expectation of people picking up a work that looked to them like a bios, a life of somebody, their expectation would be that this is, um, supposed to actually recount if events from the person's life and the substance of their teachings. And, you know, we can, you know, as a Christian, I, I would go further. I have a, you know, I have a confidence in the Providence of God and the work of the Holy Spirit and so on. But just speaking as a historian, I mean, we've got plenty of evidence, plenty of things we can say about Jesus. And in terms of the Gospels having to be chronological, I mean, most, most scholars who speak about them being reliable don't require, you know, that's not part of their expectation.
Yeah, just, I mean, you compare Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Just compare, say, Matthew 8 and 9 with the parallel material in, in Mark. And there was, uh, one, one person from the Reformation period, Andreas Oecolampadius, who wanted to make sure that everything was in chronological order. So he had to have things repeated multiple times to to make them so. Jesus raised Jairus' daughter from the dead three times. She was really, really dead, right? Um, you know, and Calvin said, that's that's crazy. It's not. And then Luther was even more free with it. Luther said, um, U, he thought that Jesus cleansed the temple toward the end of his ministry, where Mark had it, rather than toward the beginning where John had it, in terms of historically. But he said, who cares? Yeah, whether it was here or there, the issue is he cleansed it. It doesn't affect the gospel. It doesn't affect the gospel message. So, most, most scholars did. They, and then you've got the cursing of the fig tree, where, um, even within the unit in Matthew and Mark, they're in different sequence, and it's a day apart. Yeah. So explicitly. But, you know, it's not a, it doesn't affect, by the standards of ancient biography, that's not an issue.
Yeah, and would you say the same then, and I think you already did, about the precision of some of the details in the narratives? I remember for a little while, I did some study with Craig Evans on Kerygma specifically, and Kerygma in Mark, and we were kind of looking together, you know, in, in kind of, I don't know, ancient Greco-Roman and Jewish studies, as you were learning rhetoric and you learned the art of storytelling, and Kerygma as it fit in there, you were allowed to kind of adjust some details to fit the, I don't know, the purpose of your your speech. Would that be accurate to say that that doesn't take away, that doesn't disqualify the credibility of the writer?
Yeah, you can, historians actually would sometimes fill in, um, and, and sometimes if you've only got so much information and you're trying to recount a story in a cohesive way, there's going to be things you you'll inadvertently fill in based on assumption. And then we end up with two of these, and they appear to be in contradiction, but it's because we don't have all the all the information. I know when my wife, wife, actually, uh, she was a war refugee in Congo, okay, before we were married, but we had already been friends. But she gave me, you know, I was taking notes talking with her after we got back together after the, after the war. And, and also she had kept a journal. And when I was going through her journal and also my notes, I said, wait, like here you said that this was a, she had malaria, she was spitting into a plastic container, and here she said she was spitting into a bottle. Well, of course, people don't remember all the details. But, but I asked her, so which was it? A plastic container or a plastic bottle or a bottle? She looked at me, she was like, it was a plastic bottle. Like, oh, duh, you. I was thinking in these, like, um, I think I was assuming a glass bottle. But anyway, sometimes we are so picky on those things. And if we had more information, we could fill in. Or sometimes the person who communicated it made an inference that it was this, um, rather than this. But it, these are like such minor things. These are not the substance. They don't make any difference in what's being communicated. Yeah.
You emphasized the role, uh, obviously of eyewitness memory in the transmission of the Jesus tradition. Can I ask, how does your argument build on or differ from, uh, Bauckham's Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, if it does in any significant ways?
I think it agrees with Bauckham, but it disagrees with the way a lot of people have interpreted Bauckham. So, okay, a lot of people were were taking, I don't know, it's not what he said, but the people who jumped on him afterwards, some of the critiques that came afterwards were like, well, no, people don't remember things exactly. And in terms of, uh, you know, the eyewitnesses didn't write the Gospels. Well, there's that, that's open to debate with some of them. U, but be that as it may, nobody says that Luke or Mark were eyewitnesses of Jesus' ministry, or at least most of it. Um, I, I don't think they, they were. In the ancient church, didn't think that they were. Um, and as for Matthew and John, of course, there's debates. I mean, Bauckham argues for, um, the eyewitness who stands behind the, the Gospel of John, the Beloved Disciple, um, you know, that that person was an eyewitness. But, and that Luke consulted people who were eyewitnesses. But the, the importance of his argument is, can these things go back to eyewitnesses? So you've got living memory, would people consult eyewitnesses? Would the, the teaching of the eyewitnesses be considered most authoritative, so that's what people would listen to and check things with? Or was it just uncontrolled free tradition of anybody said anything and they could get away with anything? I think, I think Bauckham is 100% right, yeah, on this argument, not the way people have misrepresented his argument now. Because it doesn't have to be written by an eyewitness to be eyewitness information. Sure. So, like if I, if I tell one of my wife's stories, I'm basing it on her eyewitness evidence. Or sometimes it'll be, you know, I can tell a story from her brother that I got through her, although I did consult her brother afterwards, trying to be a good historian. Um, but yeah, we, I think, think he's right. It wasn't. And when he challenges form criticism, I wouldn't do that with a broad brush because there, there were different kinds of form critics. So you've got Bultmann on the one side, who clearly took things too far, and most people today recognize that. Dibelius didn't take things as far as Bultmann did. Then you've got much more conservatively with form critics, somebody like Joachim Jeremias, C.H. Dodd, or especially Taylor, Vincent Taylor, British form critic. But today we have kind of a reformulated form criticism in, in, in memory theory. But again, I think we need to distinguish between the period of living memory, which is the period of the Gospels, and a later period. But that's, that's going beyond the biography part, that's just, um, dealing with how things were preserved until the time that they got written down in biographies.
Speaking about some of the pushback to Bauckham's work, were there some, as you were writing, even some pushback to to your book that you expected that would come that you would be fielding answers for, or maybe some pushback that you didn't expect? What, what were some of the, as you maybe sat in SBL, at maybe, uh, you know, taking questions, what were people's biggest concerns with Christo biography?
I don't remember a whole lot of pushback, except, um, one, one, one colleague, and we're on great terms, okay? One colleague, um, who works on ancient biography, but working on it from a literary perspective and doing a great job with that, suggested that, well, I know ancient biographies aren't that reliable, and cited a work talking about, uh, fictionalization in ancient biography. But you actually read that work, it's not saying that ancient biographies were novels or fictional, that there's no difference. It defines fictionalization so broadly that if you define it that way, I would have to agree with them. Um, it's like the moment you narrativize anything, the, the very fact that you're putting it into a framework is fictionalization, okay? So the very fact that you're not just giving a list of events, the very fact that you're even choosing certain events to talk about and, uh, the, the very choice of them, the very, um, practice of writing about them or interpreting them, they defined all that as fictionalization. But I would distinguish, and I think they would distinguish if we could, you know, come to agreement on our terminology, I think they would also agree that that's completely different from saying that the writers just made up events or they came up with completely new teachings. I mean, over the period of centuries, maybe legends can do that, obviously. But that wasn't the purpose of biography, certainly in this period. And I think we've shown that, you know, with the work I did and the work my doctoral students have done, just comparing, especially the ones from this period, um, comparing them with, like, if you put Suetonius, Tacitus, and Plutarch in parallel, the way people do often with the Synoptic Gospels, make a synopsis of their content, you'll see that they're overlapping so much. They're not just making things up. You know, it's not to say somebody couldn't have made things up before them, and, you know, they did that. But they, uh, it's, it's, it's prior information on which they're based. And this is especially true when they're writing about figures within the past half-century or so.
Some would argue, you know, that the Gospel authors were primarily theologians rather than historians. Does your research challenge that distinction? Does that distinction really even matter?
That's, that's been challenged for a long time, okay? Like, I, I, Howard Marshall with his Luke, historian or theologian, historian and theologian, because there was a time when people were just saying everything is theological reduction. Well, it is theological. It, but in terms of the way ancient historians and biographers wrote, as opposed to the way novelists wrote, I mean, novelists have a free hand normally with, I can think of one exception in antiquity where they had a mostly free hand, but they used some material. But, um, but novelists could just make up whatever they wanted to, um, if they were writing about historical, a historical person, which was rare, usually they were writing romances about fictitious characters. But if they were writing about a, um, a historical person, then they probably, probably want to get some information correct, but not much. They didn't really do research for that. It was just a novel. But in terms of historical works and biographies, often they actually tell us, if you, if you read enough of them, uh, what their historical method was. And it involved, uh, pulling, well, using historical information. But they also used it in what they considered an edifying way. So, um, I'm recounting these, these, uh, episodes from the past so that you can have examples for good behavior and here examples for bad behavior. And usually people can figure out which is which. But sometimes historians, or especially biographers, will tell you, or they can say, these are good models for speeches, or good models for, um, military campaigns, or good models for, uh, political rulership, or so on. Um, they, ancient history and biography, it was meant to be engaging, just like novels were. So it'd be fun to read or something interesting. So, like, not just telling you what the person had for lunch last week, if you know it was something normal. But, you know, if it was the person got poisoned, then they might tell you that because that's more, more interesting. But also, it was meant to be, it was meant to be based on facts. But these facts were pulled together to make a point, okay? And, and so the Gospels fit that. They don't fit novels. And actually, in terms of novels, so far as I, I know, in all of antiquity, we don't have a novel about a recent historical figure that is from within living memory. Um, we do have biography and history written then. And that was considered, even in antiquity, on a much, much more historically reliable level than history or biography written about things in the distant past. So, I mean, this comes out very clearly in the book.
But I wonder if I could just ask you anyway, based on your research, how much confidence do you think we should have, Christians should have, in the historical reliability of the Gospels?
Obviously, I think we should have great confidence in them. Now, as a historian, now I can't, I can't pretend to not be a Christian, so I, I have that piece of position. But I was an atheist before. And I think that then if I looked at this evidence, I would have said, wow, we know a lot about Jesus. I, I think I probably would have demurred from the, from the miracle accounts and said, well, you know, they must have just made these up because they didn't believe in miracles. Um, now, if somebody had given me evidence that miracles did, in fact, happen, you know, I probably would have backed off even on that and said, wow, Jesus was certainly a miracle worker. And, um, and all this. But whether that's some sort of hidden supernatural power latent in human beings, or, you know, I, as an atheist, I had all sorts of ways of going around it. But, no, but I have, I have great confidence. And, but I think what, what a historian could say, whether they're Christian or not, is that, you know, just like we have a whole lot of historical information about, um, Otho, the Roman Emperor Otho. It's only one Suetonius's biography of Otho is only like, one-fifth the length of Mark's Gospel. So when I say a whole lot of information, at least he packs it with with prior information. There's a lot we can say, therefore, about, um, emperors within that period. I think we should be at least as confident from a purely historical standpoint that, you know, paragraph after paragraph, we're getting a lot of solid information, a lot of solid memory about Jesus.
Maybe this is a weird question, but kind of flipping it, what do you think is the strongest argument against the historical reliability of the Gospels? And how would you respond to that?
The strongest, oh, actually, there's a, um, piggybacking on something you said earlier. There are, there are a few other ways. One is a completely postmodern reading. And, and I'm not debating everything in postmodernism. I mean, everything has a perspective and so on. But, like, the completely, the, extreme postmodern, like Holocaust denial stuff, you know, there was no Holocaust, it was just a bunch of individual things, you can't group them together under a category. But, so for those extreme postmodernist approach, some, some treat ancient historic works as only rhetoric. Okay, rhetoric was important, uh, especially in elite histories. So, you know, normally beyond the level we have in the New Testament, but Luke is heading somewhat in that direction. But in terms of ancient historiography, yes, you had to tell it in a pleasing way, but you were shaping information. So again, it's different from from novels. And so again, you know, if you want to, if somebody wants to focus just on the rhetoric of historiography, the rhetoric of biography, that's fine. But don't, just because you're focused on that, say it's also not based on information, okay? Because that's a completely different genre. Um, and also, somebody has argued, and I need to check into this in more detail, but somebody has argued that the Gospels were second-century comps that were pure literary compositions, written not even by Christians, or something like that. I don't think that's, obviously not a majority view. But the idea that, that there's literary value to them, I mean, that part is is correct. And that the, the Gospels were probably dictated to amanuenses rather than just, that the Gospel authors wrote them down themselves, that's true. But again, those are not really dealing with what I'm, I'm talking about here. Um, but in terms of objections, I think the major objection is is the reason that people started doubting the Gospels to begin with, and that is, well, look, the Gospels include miracle accounts. One-third of Mark, Mark's narrative, well, no, half of his narrative, one-third of his gospel consists of healings, exorcisms, stilling storms, walking on water, things like that. And the, the response in light of, uh, Humean anti-supernaturalism, but Hume's essay on Miracles and the kind of deist background for that, the idea is, well, no eyewitness would ever claim anything anything like that. So this material obviously can't go back to eyewitnesses. Now, that got qualified a lot when people said, well, there could be psychosomatic recoveries and things like that. No walking on water, but there could be some other things. But all of that presupposes that Hume's argument was right, that these kind of things, no credible eyewitness claims, no credible eyewitness claims. But I think whether you believe in miracles technically or not, well, technically it depends on how you define it. But whether you depend on those or not, historically, what we can look at is whether the person was sick and now they're better. And, you know, if something like prayer happened in between, and, um, and do eyewitnesses ever claim these kind of things? Well, in fact, we have considerable evidence that eyewitnesses do claim these kind of things. There was a Pew Forum survey, I think it was 2006, and the projections based on the percentages in those surveys suggest that we've got hundreds of millions of people today claiming to have witnessed things like this. Not walking on water, we've got a few people claiming that, but I mean, in terms of, you know, people who were blind receiving sight and so on, they have medical documentation for some of these cases. So why would we think anything was different in the first century? The people in the first century wouldn't see things they thought were were miracles. And, you know, as a Christian, I, I actually believe in, this is what I brought up to one of my professors who didn't believe in miracles and just would dismiss those accounts. I said, you know, as a Christian, I believe miracles could happen. When I was an atheist, I didn't believe that could happen. But to take an agnostic, neutral starting point, so to speak, and say, maybe they happen, maybe they don't, let's look at the evidence. And so I started giving some of my own eyewitness evidence. Um, and, you know, I could have given a lot of other people's, but, you know, since then, I've done research where I've, you know, collected accounts from doctors and so on as well. But, but at the time, what I said to the professor is, you hear here are these things where I experienced this or I witnessed this. Now, if you want to challenge the possibility of these things happening, you're going to have to challenge my credibility as my witness. Whereupon the teacher graciously changed the subject. You idiot. You're just an idiot. He could have said, you're just an idiot out of the program, but no, it didn't.
Well, uh, kind of in a similar line, I guess, how should your findings in this book shape the way scholars now approach the Quest for the, or, or as it's called now, I think, the next quest for the historical Jesus?
I think, I mean, we can still use a lot of the approaches that we use. Some people think we should throw all those approaches out, um, based on on social memory. I don't think we need to throw them out. I mean, I think there's still value in some of them. I mean, criterion of dissimilarity, that one we can probably usually throw out. Yeah. But, but, you know, a lot of the other, you know, multiple attestation and so on, I think they still have value. By different names, they're still used in a lot of secular historiography. But having said that, we can start with more of a default trust rather than a default skepticism. Okay? So, now, as a Christian, I, I start with a default trust. But I'm, you know, as a, a historian, there are documents. Well, when I say default trust, historians, and this has been true ever since Thucydides, writing before the Gospels, historians will look critically at something and say, how much of this do we trust? But if you've got a source that is usually trustworthy, or if you've got a source from within living memory, or if you've got a source from somebody who knew the person about whom they're writing, then you're, you're going to have more of a default trust next time they say something, then you have a default mistrust. Like historians regularly, you know, there's certain sources we regularly mistrust, um, like fragments from Ephorus, an ancient, ancient historian, whereas there's others where we would trust more, like Thucydides or, or, or so on. And I think that that we should be willing to approach, keep in mind a default setting when we approach the Gospels, and not just go in saying, okay, we're going to be critical and just ignore how often, look, Matthew and Luke are using Mark, so they're not just making things up here. MH. We also see that they overlap on other stuff, so they're not making things up there. Why assume they're making things up elsewhere? And if they, they're writing soon after Mark, they probably knew the kind of writing that Mark was doing, you know, normally, if you're writing a historical work and you're dependent on sources for your history and you care enough about information that you're going to depend on sources, you're not going to depend on something you know is a novel that's just made up. You're going to depend on something. Um, and I guess again, if you're writing about the distant past and the best you've got is just a historical novel, you say, well, there might be something here, but, um, but that's not the case. You know, the Gospels are from within living memory, and they're from the period where it's the epitome of historical basis in ancient biography, at least when you're writing full-length lives of a person. And the Gospels are within that range. Yeah. I, I think, I think we should start with, um, more trust in their memory, okay?
As we wrap up here, Craig, can I ask a more personal question? If you can remember, I mean, know this book is a little, a few years old, but I'm sure your research has been also lifelong and preparing for this. How has your research changed how you now personally read or teach the Gospels?
Sure. Well, I, I try to take this into account. And even, like I mentioned, multiple attestation, one of my doctoral students did his dissertation on ancient biographers who actually knew the person about whom they were writing, okay? That was a small number of them. I think maybe he was writing on four of them or so. But when he put them together and tried to test them by multiple attestation, because only a little bit of information has survived from antiquity, you know, we don't have like four early biographies of the person like we do in the case of Jesus, he found like only 4% of the material was multiply attested. Does that mean they made up 96%? It just means that we don't have more surviving sources. But it also shows us the limitations of how you use multiple attestations. So, you know, if you do have attested multiple sources, that's good. But if you don't have it in multiply attested sources, these were people who knew the person about whom they were writing. So chances are, you know, there's a lot of information there, even when you where you can't show it. So what I, um, since, since the time of Christo Biography, I've written, written a long commentary, it's not out yet, but on the Gospel of Mark. Okay? And so I, you know, um, I mean, I deal with literary narrative approaches, but also I'm looking at historical information, especially since Mark is probably our, well, it's our first surviving Gospel. So I, I look at those, those detailed questions. But also I come with these default assumptions that I, I state clearly in the introduction. So that when I, when I look, I'm, I'm more likely to state, okay, this one is multiply attested in these, in these independent sources. If it's not though, I don't, I don't say, okay, well, this isn't attested in multiple independent sources, so we're just going to throw this out. Historical information, um, I try to use the criteria more positively. And sometimes I just don't have, you know, any, any way to, to weigh the material specifically. But, you know, I believe Mark is writing soon enough after the events and he's, um, where I can test him, I can find, you know, well, here are things that certainly fit Jesus' Galilean environment. I don't think Mark was from Galilee. I think he was from Jerusalem. Some people think he's from the diaspora, but I don't think he's from Galilee. And yet he gets the Galilean details right. MH. Like with the, the roof and Capernaum and so on. Um, Luke adjusts it for his audience, the wording in Luke 5:19 from Mark 2:4. But anyway, you can tell I'm ADHD, I'm running all over the place. But usually I come back to the point.
Absolutely. No, I, again, I'm just fascinated following your, your, uh, yeah, just all the information is stored in your mind. So don't, don't apologize for the rabbit trails. Well, thank you for that answer, Craig. Uh, I just want to say thank you so much for Christo Biography. Thank you for all of the, I mean, prolific work you've done. But, uh, this is, this has been an important book for me, as much of your other work. But I've been fascinated by this, and it has only enhanced my confidence in the Gospels. And then to hear you, uh, reiterate that, you know, face to face, say how much you trust the Gospels, it's just so inspiring and encouraging, affirming for lay people, for pastors to receive that confidence from scholars that you're reading all these sources, and you're still confident in the life, death, resurrection of Christ. All the more. And, yeah, and the life, death, and resurrection, I mean, that's, that's definitely multiply attested. Yeah. Yeah. The death isn't really, well, except in Islam, the death isn't really questioned. 100, 100% mortality rate from antiquity. Yeah. Fair enough. Well, thank you for your time, Craig. Uh, and very nice to meet you. [Music]