Transcription
There is not one book of the Bible that was written by someone who had met Jesus.
All right, let's see it.
Are you sure?
Well, the majority of the experts are pretty sure.
Some of the gospels are attributed to Jesus's disciples, but scholars agree that they didn't write them. They were written decades after Jesus's death.
Uh, we don't know when Mark's gospel was written. We have, we, we can say it was not written after our, our earliest manuscript that we have, but we don't know how early it was written. We don't know how long it took for people to write things down. The consensus view of scholars is still that it was written within a year or two of about 70 CE. Maybe it was written before the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in the summer of 70 CE because people could see the writing on the wall, or maybe it was written shortly after that. But I think if you looked at the timelines that have been promoted by scholars, the overwhelming majority of them are going to have the Gospel of Mark written within a year or two before or after about 70 CE.
So, if you really want to start asking questions like, how, how, how early was this written? Was it written by someone who knew Jesus? Was it written by an eyewitness? You have to look at internal evidence, right? You have to look at what the text says and you have to find some metric by which to judge, uh, whether it seems plausible that it was written by someone who knew Jesus. So, two things here. First, critical scholars have been coming up with such metrics for literally centuries. This is nothing new. Uh, but second thing, determining whether or not it's plausible only tells you whether or not it's plausible. Most scholars are interested in determining what is most likely because lots of things are plausible that are not likely. And if all you're aimed at is trying to determine what's plausible, well, then you're going to be mired in an apologetic methodological tangle where all you're trying to do is jin up the tiniest little sliver of, well, it's not impossible. We should be concerned for ideally what's most likely. I think we really retreat to what's plausible when we don't like the conclusion regarding what's most likely. So, historical Jesus research, the field of trying to figure out what was really going on with Jesus is overlapping to a large degree with concerns for the origins, the authorship, the historicity of the gospel. And when we look in historical Jesus research, we've got a lot of different criteria for authenticity that have largely kind of been sidelined because they have not been incredibly helpful. But we still have established a bunch of metrics for trying to determine what's most likely regarding the relationship of this literature to historical reality. We've been doing that for a long, long time. And the majority of scholars agree it does not sound likely that the gospels were written by eyewitnesses. That is why the majority view, the majority of scholars agree that the gospels were not written by eyewitnesses.
That's what Richard Bacham did. He's like, "Okay, we have manuscripts, whatever. We can date them. But what does the text itself reveal to us about its author and what that author knew?"
So, it's almost like this video is trying to make it sound like Balcom came out of nowhere to do something no one has ever done before. And that's simply not the case. This book was written in 2006, 20 years ago. Balcom was doing mostly the same kinds of things that had been going on for generations before Balcom. He's innovating on this research into the origins of the gospels in a couple of ways. For instance, incorporating more social memory research in an effort to try to convert the stabilizing abstraction of community to the stabilizing abstraction of eyewitnesses. But most scholars would say the attempt to replace community with eyewitnesses is based more on the ability of the authors to present some local color, which is not necessarily indicative of eyewitness testimony specifically to Jesus and the events of Jesus's life. But Balcom's innovation in that regard has led to the incorporation of a lot more social memory research into the gospels and their relationship to history. However, that research has kind of gone in the other direction and led to more skepticism about the historicity of the gospel accounts and their relationships to any eyewitnesses to the events that are being narrated. And Balcom incorporates some concern for genre, trying to make the case that the gospels are written in a way that is intended to say to the audience, this is eyewitness testimony. And Balcom kind of suggests because of that, we should accept that it is more or less eyewitness testimony or at least based on eyewitness testimony. And the degree to which that has been accepted by critical scholars is also a little shaky. So, Balcolm's not doing something that has never been done before. Balcolm is not arriving at conclusions that have never been arrived at before. Balcom is doing what more conservative and apologetic authors do. And Balam's theories, Balam's conclusions, Balcom's arguments have not shifted the consensus of the field. It's moved the needle a little bit methodologically, but the majority of scholars still agree that the gospels were not written by eyewitnesses and were not directly based on eyewitness testimony. And Bacham is like, "Okay, if someone who's someone who's narrating a story about Jesus going from here to here to here to here to here and he's going to this place, he's talking to these people named, you know, Shimon and like Miriam and all these these names, right? Um, we should be able to look at all of this evidence. We should be able to look at the geography and then look at the actual geography, like look at the geography of Mark or Matthew or Luke and and look at the geography of the Holy Land. We should be able to do that and compare them and say, well, uh, is it actually a day's journey from here to here or is it actually like, is this river actually that direction from this place? We can look at all of that."
Yes, we can. And scholars have been looking at all that for a long time. But knowing the geography or knowing what names were in use in this time period is what I referred to earlier as local color, which certainly suggests a familiarity with the area and with the time period, but not necessarily because of eyewitness testimony. Because you can point to Spider-Man or Daredevil or comic books that are set in real places and they will use real names that are in use in those times and places and they will refer to locations that really are such and such a distance from another real location. So again, this is just pointing to the existence of local color, which certainly is evidence that there might be a greater familiarity with the region in the time period than some critical scholars had suggested from earlier periods, but it doesn't establish that these are eyewitnesses to Jesus or to the events of Jesus's life. And, um, and Bacham's like, "It looks like whoever wrote the gospels, the four canonical gospels, had a familiarity with the geography of of Israel." And again, that is not establishing that they are eyewitness testimony. And that is why the majority of scholars have not changed their minds about the gospels not being eyewitness testimony. And let's just take a look at some examples of this. We had a lot of reviews in journals that were published shortly after Balam's book came out. So, for instance, the Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus actually had a bunch of reviews published and then had Balcom respond to those reviews and the majority of them were critical. For instance, Steven Patterson's "Can You Trust the Gospel?" a review of Richard Balcom's "Jesus and the Eyewitnesses." We also have David Catchpole on "Proving Too Much: Critical Hesitations About Richard Balcom's Jesus and the Eyewitnesses." Theodore Weeden, "Senior Pmic's as a Case for Descent: A Response to Richard Balcom's Jesus and Eyewitnesses." We also have Judith Redmond in the Journal of Biblical Literature. "How Accurate Are Eyewitnesses? Balcom and the Eyewitnesses in Light of Psychological Research." Jens Schroeder in the Journal for the Study of the New Testament. "The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony: A Critical Examination of Richard Balcom's Jesus and the Eyewitnesses." We also have monographs that have been published since then that are directly engaging the historical Jesus and the historicity of the gospels and overwhelmingly the monographs have not been convinced by Balcom to overturn the majority position. So, here's an edited volume, "Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity," edited by Chris Keith and Anthony Leiddon with contributions from Dale Allison, Mark Goodacre, Mona Hooker, Scott McNight, Raphael Rodriguez, Jens Schroeder, Lauren Stookenbrook, Dagmar Winter. You have Anthony Leadon's "The Historiographical Jesus: Memory, Typology, and the Son of David." This is one of the volumes that was published after Balcom that is incorporating social memory research. You have Dale Allison's "Constructing Jesus: Memory, Imagination, and History." Bart Ehrman's "Jesus Before the Gospels" is incorporating social memory research. You can even take a look at Ehrman and Craig Evans going back and forth. "Can We Trust the Bible on the Historical Jesus?" It is a discussion between the two. And for the most up-to-date and most thorough discussion of the research on the historical Jesus, James Crossley and Chris Keith's edited volume, "The Next Quest for the Historical Jesus," is as thorough and again, up-to-date as you can get. That's a wonderful volume that just came out in 2024. If you want to know where the state of the field is right now. But in short, this video does not change the fact that the majority of scholars would agree with the original content, the notion that there's nothing in the New Testament that was written by an eyewitness to the life or the exploits of Jesus of Nazareth. And this video, by just appealing to Richard Balcom, doesn't really make a strong case for any of the gospels having been written by an eyewitness to Jesus's life or exploits. And it doesn't really make a good case that this content creator is very familiar with the research that is out there. And the fit for this video is "Curse Your Sudden But Inevitable Betrayal."