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Historians always want to know if the sources they have are based on eyewitness testimony. Also, especially in societies in which teaching tended to be preserved in oral form years before being written down, they want to know about customs relating to memorization, education, and expectations and practices relating to remembering, editing and passing on someone’s teaching. All of this is relevant for the Gospels.

In his recent book, popular writer Reza Aslan declares that not only are the Gospels not based on eyewitness testimony, they really are not historical documents. He says,

The [G]ospels are not, nor were they ever meant to be, historical documentation of Jesus’ life. They are not eyewitness accounts of Jesus’ words and deeds, recorded by people who knew him. They are testimonies of faith composed by communities of faith and written many years after the events they describe. Simply put, the [G]ospels tell us about Jesus the Christ, not Jesus the man.¹⁵

This statement is highly dubious in almost everything it asserts. The Gospels certainly are historical documentation. If they were not, no one—including Aslan—would be in any position to say anything about the Jesus of history. The statement that the Gospels were “not eyewitness accounts…recorded by people who knew him” requires qualification. First of all, the Gospels of Matthew and John may well have been written by eyewitnesses or by persons acquainted with eyewitnesses. Secondly, although the apostle Peter did not himself compose the Gospel of Mark, early, credible tradition says the evangelist Mark made use of Peter’s reminiscences. Finally, almost all critics agree that the Gospels, especially the three Synoptic Gospels, heavily rely on very early material (such as Q), much of which likely originated with eyewitnesses.

Aslan’s final statement, that the “[G]ospels tell us about Jesus the Christ, not Jesus the man,” is little more than a gratuitous assertion. Some critics may agree with it, but many will not. Aslan’s book shows no acquaintance with the ablest and most recent scholarship concerned with the historiography of the New Testament Gospels. And in any event, if Aslan actually believed that the Gospels do not tell us about “Jesus the man,” how was he able to write a book about the historical Jesus?¹⁶

In recent years, there has been a considerable amount of work done in the fields of orality, memory, pedagogy and historiography in late antiquity. All of these fields are relevant when we consider the nature of the portraits of Jesus that the New Testament Gospels have given us. We can only touch on a few of the most significant contributions.

In 2003, James Dunn, Lightfoot Professor of Divinity at the University of Durham, published his monumental Jesus Remembered,¹⁷ in which he argued that although the Jesus tradition in the early Christian community was a living tradition that could be adapted as the need and occasion required, the tradition as a whole was early, stable and reliable.

Dunn’s findings complemented Samuel Byrskog’s work, which focused on pedagogy (teaching youth) and the protocols for the transmission of a master’s teaching. Byrskog shows that within the Gospel of Mark, the first of the three Synoptic Gospels to be published, is evidence of the pedagogical practices of the time, by which a master’s teaching was carefully preserved and accurately taught, and not free-wheeling invention of tradition, as at one time imagined by some critics.¹⁸

Building on the work of Byrskog and others, Richard Bauckham, long-time Bishop Wardlaw Professor of New Testament at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, has made a compelling case for the presence of extensive and accurate eyewitness testimony in all four New Testament Gospels¹⁹ and that this eyewitness tradition remained available until the time when the Gospels were composed.²⁰

One of the important indications of an ancient document’s veracity is something historians call verisimilitude.²¹ That is, do the contents of the document match with what we know of the place, people and period described in the document? Do the contents of the document cohere with what is known through other written sources and through archaeological finds? Do the contents of the document give evidence of acquaintance with the topography and geography of the region that forms the backdrop to the story? Does the author of the document exhibit knowledge of the culture and customs of the people described? Historians ask these questions and others like them of a document they think may contain historical information.²² If the document lacks verisimilitude, historians will make little or no use of it.

The New Testament Gospels and Acts exhibit a great deal of verisimilitude.²³ They speak of real people (e.g., Pontius Pilate, Herod Antipas, Annas, Caiaphas, Herod Agrippa I and II, Felix, Festus) and real events (e.g., death of John the Baptist, death of Agrippa I). They speak of real places (e.g., villages, cities, roads, lakes, mountains, political boundaries) that are clarified and corroborated by other historical sources and by archaeology. They speak of real customs (e.g., Passover, purity, Sabbath, divorce law), institutions (e.g., synagogue, temple), offices/officers (e.g., priests, tax collectors, Roman governors, Roman centurions) and beliefs (e.g., the beliefs of Pharisees and Sadducees; interpretation of Scripture). Jesus’ engagement with his contemporaries, both supporters and opponents, reflects an understanding of Scripture and theology we now know, thanks to the Dead Sea Scrolls and related literature, was current in pre-70 Jewish Palestine.

The first-century New Testament Gospels and Acts exhibit the kind of verisimilitude we should expect of writings written within a generation of their principal figure, that is, writings significantly informed by eyewitness tradition. We find linguistic verisimilitude, and by this we mean Hebrew and Aramaic traces in what are otherwise Greek writings. We find geographic and topographical verisimilitude, cultural and archaeological verisimilitude, and religious, economic and social verisimilitude.

The verisimilitude of the New Testament Gospels and Acts is such that historians and archaeologists regularly make use of them. We can illustrate this claim by directing readers to a recently published book entitled Jesus and Archaeology,²⁴ a book that grew out of a conference in Israel that included the usual learned papers but also included onsite visits and examinations of archaeological excavations. The volume includes 31 essays. One-third of the contributors are Jewish, and about one-third are trained archaeologists. The remaining are historians and biblical scholars. If one turns to the index in the back of the book one will find more than one thousand references to the New Testament Gospels and Acts. This simply would not happen if the New Testament Gospels did not contain accurate and informative information.

In contrast to the verisimilitude of the New Testament Gospels and Acts stand the apocryphal Gospels and Gospel-like writings of the second century, such as the Gnostic Gospels and Syria’s Gospel of Thomas. These writings do not exhibit verisimilitude, at least not verisimilitude with early first-century Jewish Palestine. On the basis of Gospel of Thomas alone, would we know that Jesus was Jewish? Would we have any sense of his message? Any sense of his travels, of his itinerary? Would we know anything of Jesus’ death? Would we have any sense of life in first-century Jewish Palestine? The answer to all of these questions is no.

We may raise the same questions with respect to the Qur’an and other early Islamic traditions. The historian will find in these writings even less verisimilitude than he will find in the second-century Gospel of Thomas. Despite its great length, if everything we could know about Jesus was limited to the Qur’an, we would know very, very little about this significant figure. For this reason, archaeologists and historians make no more use of the Qur’an in doing research into the history and culture of first-century Jewish Palestine than they make use of the apocryphal Gospels from the second century and later.