Are the Gospels Historically Reliable? (InspiringPhilosophy response)

Apparently no one can doubt the veracity of Matthew, Mark, Luke or John until such time as they address everything in InspiringPhilosophy's 6+ hour supercut on gospel reliability. If you know anyone who is confident of the historical reliability of the gospels, send them this video.

original video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aacs0_E7Qdw

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Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:01

On my channel, I just did a 15 part series on the reliability of the gospels. And atheists have not really given me a lot of answers to that. How the amazing evidence supporting the gospels. Those stupid, lazy atheists. When we did that 15-part series on gospel reliability, we went through like data point after data point after data point of what conservative these evangelical fundamentalist scholars have put out. And no one addresses their points.

SPEAKER_07 0:28

No one addresses their points?

SPEAKER_03 0:30

All in all the 15 videos together about six hours of just data supporting the reliability of the gospels. I mean, there's so much data to go through.

SPEAKER_07 0:37

15 parts, six hours, move over argument from page count, Gary Habermas. No one reads anymore. Inspiring philosophy is bringing in the argument from video length.

SPEAKER_03 0:48

You go to our playlist section of this YouTube channel, you go to the reliability of the gospels. We got a 15-part video series on the reliability of the gospels. If that's the case, that means John is an eyewitness account. That means Matthew's an eyewitness account. Luke and Mark are also getting their information from eyewitnesses.

SPEAKER_05 1:04

We have a six-hour series on gospel reliability, right? So, like if you're just willing to entertain that the gospels actually faithfully preserve what the alleged eyewitnesses actually claimed and testified to have experienced when it comes to the alleged resurrection of Jesus.

SPEAKER_03 1:20

Do me a favor and watch, go to our go to our playlist section and watch our series on gospel reliability. There's a lot of data there that we give, and then we use that to help support our case for the resurrection.

SPEAKER_07 1:31

That is my frustration with resurrection debates. They really should be gospel reliability debates. So at least you're recognizing that.

SPEAKER_03 1:38

And also we we have argued extensively already that, hey, we do have good reliability for the gospels. We have a lot of evidence. We have a six-hour playlist on evidence for the reliability of the gospels. Uh he's kind of I kind of feel like he just kind of represented it as if we just assume that.

SPEAKER_07 1:54

Assume that, concluded that for insufficient reasons, tomato tomato, but fine. You're gonna continue to point to a six-hour video as your shortcut for not justifying a conclusion of gospel reliability, and brag that it stands unchallenged, but ain't nobody got time for six hours. For the purpose of sanity, we're gonna try to dispatch this in much less time than that.

SPEAKER_03 2:15

If anyone's interested, I just uploaded a six hour video on new t on um gospel reliability. Yeah, it's a lot, a lot of stuff. But you will you watch that video with an open mind, I guarantee you'll come away thinking the gospels are reliable.

SPEAKER_07 2:26

Ah, that brings up the first strange point. The openness of my mind is for some reason a factor here. Everyone with an open mind agrees with Mike, and everyone who disagrees with Mike has a closed mind. That is the guarantee. It can't be something as simple as, say, differing methodologies or starting assumptions. They don't seem to be accounting for the many, many ex-vangelicals who started off as Christians and had every desire in the world to remain Christians, but lost their faith upon learning new things and seeking evidence in good faith to bolster their faith. I am in that camp. And each and every one of us had open minds to gospel reliability. That was our starting assumption. But eventually, even the most closed mind will be changed when confronted with sufficient opposing facts. I was pulled kicking and screaming from my confidence in the gospels, very much against my will. One may think from Mike's title, Are the Gospels Historically Reliable, that he is accepting the burden of proof to make the positive case for reliability? Unfortunately, the video he actually made is, you can't prove that the gospels are unreliable, so I can just keep assuming that they are reliable. Most of his chapters open with a preamble about an area where mainstream scholarship doubts the gospels, but poses a weak question in response. What if mainstream scholarship is wrong?

SPEAKER_03 3:50

But is there any reason to think that what is recorded in the gospels could be accurate memories of Jesus? If the author reminds us multiple times throughout his work of the importance of eyewitness testimony and directly says he obtained eyewitness testimony, if we're being reasonable and apply the principle of charity, the conclusion we should come to is the author likely did consult eyewitnesses of Jesus in order to write his gospel. Luke should be considered innocent until proven guilty.

SPEAKER_07 4:14

Often the principle of charity is used in the sense of attempting to steel man your interlocutor rather than strawmanning them. Something I definitely endorse, but that's not the sense Mike is using it here. This is a question of burden of proof when it comes to ancient documents. Here, principle of charity would be ancient sources should be generally treated as truthful or at least sincere, unless there is a positive reason to distrust them. This is a position originally advocated by the likes of Thomas Reed and C.A. Crody. The opposite view is sometimes called methodological skepticism or critical historiography, which advocates ancient claims are not automatically trustworthy and must earn credibility through independent corroboration, contextual plausibility, source criticism, and analysis of motive and genre. Now, I spent most of my life in that first camp with Mike. But at one point it occurred to me that if Christianity was indeed the unequivocal truth, then it should obviously be able to stand up to these skeptical criteria. God has nothing to fear from truth, right? So I set out to demonstrate to myself that the gospels were true without first assuming they're true. And that is still the philosophical stance that I take towards the gospels, or anything really. If Mike is personally content proving the gospel to the lowest possible bar.

SPEAKER_08 5:28

If there is just one chance in a million that this is true, it's worth believing. Far from raising the bar or the epistemic standard that Christianity must meet to be believed, I I lower it.

SPEAKER_07 5:45

That's his choice. But I would think something as important as the evidence for the resurrection of the Son of God should be able to clear the most rigorous burden of proof, not merely a case for the maximally credulous. And I should note, to preempt some comments, yes, any story that contains miraculous and supernatural events is giving the positive reason to distrust it that Mike speaks of. That's not a naturalistic bias. Even when I was at my most committed Christian self, fully convinced that the devil was actively scheming in my life personally, I understood that miracle claims were outside the range of trust me, bro. While the style can be a little dry, the video we're responding to leans very heavily on quotations from papers and books from scholars. I will be foregoing some of my usual visual tomfoolery and casual explanations in order to mirror this style so that scholarship will be met with scholarship. And surprisingly often, I'll be quoting the same books that Mike quotes. Even though we sometimes have fun here with mispronunciation.

SPEAKER_06 6:47

How do I say this?

SPEAKER_07 6:50

Working on this one reminded me heavily that I'm mostly self-taught in these areas by reading books. Unfortunately, not through the formal education of listening to professors. As such, I'm gonna butcher some names here and there. I know, and I'm sorry. Final preamble. Despite the six-hour length, Mike's video is a rapid-paced gish gallop, or more charitably, a high-level overview summary of the gospel debate landscape. There were many individual sentences that warrant and deserve their own 30-minute videos to get into the details to properly respond. But since my goal here is to respond in kind with a high-level overview of the other side of the debate landscape, I've had to refrain. This was the most difficult part to reply to two sentences with just two sentences. Obviously, some rigor is lost. So if there are topics of interest, let me know in the comments what detailed videos might be interesting in the future, or perhaps you can just grab the books that I'm quoting. Alright, let's get on with it.

SPEAKER_08 7:44

Get on with it. Yes, get on with it, get on with it.

SPEAKER_07 7:53

In part one, Mike wants to tell us about the genre of the gospels.

SPEAKER_03 7:56

But towards the end of the 20th century, due to the work of Richard Burridge and others, and what emerged was the idea the gospels are Greco-Roman biographies, or lives. But most scholars today classify the gospels as Greco-Roman biographies.

SPEAKER_07 8:08

That depends on what you mean by most scholars. If you mean evangelicals who work at institutions requiring a statement of faith, you could probably get a modest majority over 50%, but with significant camps of pushback, including friends of Mike. Among classicists, the differences are more strongly emphasized. And in religious studies, the Greco-Roman influence is just one lens among many. Mike also sets up this proposal as a false dichotomy, often limiting the genre options to biography or a novel. Some scholars have argued the gospels are novels. And regularly expresses arguments against the genre of the gospel being a quote novel, as if that counts as evidence toward being biography.

SPEAKER_03 8:45

Biographical novels were rare. Scenes in these novels tend to be fleshed out. Historical novels were written mostly for entertainment.

SPEAKER_07 8:50

But the options aren't limited to biography or novel, as we'll see. What's Mike's case?

SPEAKER_03 8:55

What is the evidence that the Gospels are actually biographies, intended to report historical facts? To start, we can see the Gospels contain opening prologues. Mark begins with one sentence. Matthew begins with Jesus' genealogy. Luke has an opening preface explaining the purpose of his gospel, and John opens with a longer informal poetic prologue. These various openings reflect the range of possibilities we see in ancient biographies.

SPEAKER_07 9:16

The Burge was able to find for each gospel two vague parallels among Greco-Roman biographies, doesn't remove dissimilarities or erase the closer parallels to other genres. Scholars are unimpressed. For Mark, Helen Bond says Mark's lack of preface and lack of authoritative voice would have struck Greco-Roman readers as unusual and perhaps a bit unsettling. Lucian, who Mike includes in his list, derided histories without preface as bodies without heads. Bond finds Mark's abrupt opening to be most consistent with Jewish scriptures, like the prophets or Proverbs. David Litwa and Christian apologist Mike Licona, whom Mike cites in his video, are among those who point out that Matthew's genealogy is highly selective in order to use symbolic groupings of 14, the numerical value for David. This is to serve a theological point about messianic identity, not reporting precisely, distancing it from biological nobility tables of Greco-Roman biography. Loveday Alexander's analysis reveals that Luke's prologue actually bears the closest resemblance to Greek scientific and technical manuals, not biographical prefaces, an argument Mike will later embrace, for authorship. Andrew Pitts observes that Luke's preface is unlike biographies and that Jesus is completely absent, and the author himself announces a narrative of events, which was a distinct genre from entity-driven biography. Hugo Mendez is among those who notice that John's prologue mirrors Hellenistic Jewish philosophical speculations and shares rhetorical structures with philosophical writings of Philo of Alexandria, not biographies. Though not technically incompatible with biography, these four openings are more closely aligned with other genres.

SPEAKER_03 10:47

Performing a verb analysis, we can see in Mark, Jesus is the subject of almost a quarter of the verbs. The ratio of verbs of the main subject is what we would expect if the Gospels are biographies.

SPEAKER_07 11:02

Surely this is quite natural in a work that is focused on the life of a single, important individual. Again, no influence by other works is necessary. In terms of spatial allocation, Hagen others found this to be a major point of disanalogy. The coverage of just the last year in the life of the biography, with few openings backwards, is very unorthodox. And to the extent some exemplars can be found, Mike's friend Lydia notes that the gospel writer's theological belief provides plenty of reason for the evangelists to spend a lot of time on the story of Jesus' passion and death without any need for literary influences.

SPEAKER_03 12:12

Burge also shows the Gospels match other biographies in external and internal features. Starting with external features, we see the Gospels are written in a continuous prose narrative.

SPEAKER_07 12:41

Mike's friends Lacona and McGrew, though not friends of each other, both point out that scrolls at the time held at most the 25,000 words, so a general length of a work being 10 to 25,000 words is obviously explicable without any need to be influenced by a genre. She finds all of these criteria to be bland.

SPEAKER_03 12:58

The Gospels contain a framework of a basic chronological sequence with topical material throughout, a typical structure of biographies. Often sequences in the Gospels are not in chronological order. As we can see, differing order of events between the Gospels, but Arnaldo Mamiliano says, ancient biographies did not necessarily follow a chronological order, nor is chronological order a necessary feature even of modern biographies.

SPEAKER_07 13:19

Both chronological ordering and non-chronological ordering are compatible, thus making this a non-criteria for consideration.

SPEAKER_03 13:26

The way oral and written sources are utilized in the Gospels is also shared with biographies.

SPEAKER_07 13:30

I beg your pardon. Matthew Ferguson details how gospel authors, Luke's preface included, do not name their sources, discuss their methodology, or explain their personal relationship to the events. Instead of the active, analytical authorial voice found in sophisticated historical biographies, like those of Tacitus or Plutarch, the Gospels are highly anonymous and employ a third-person, omniscient, camera-like perspective that simply narrates unbelievable claims without methodological signposts. Internally, the Gospels also share general features with biographies. By general structures, Mike means parallels can be found to some biographies in ways where the opposite characteristics are also found, making such observations unhelpful.

SPEAKER_03 14:10

The Gospels were written in the style of Koignet Greek, which was a simpler form of Creek common of the first century.

SPEAKER_07 14:14

Scholar Feem Perkins writes, Echo-Roman biographies were addressed to a social and literary elite, which may explain why the Gospels, addressed to a much broader audience, do not match them very closely.

SPEAKER_03 14:25

So when we look at the data, the Gospels overwhelmingly conform to the genre of Greco-Roman biographies.

SPEAKER_07 14:30

Overwhelmingly? So many scholars disagree with Burridge's methodology and conclusions. More cybak size, it is difficult to know how anyone in the ancient world would recognize the Greco-Roman biography genre or a text in that genre category at all, according to Burridge's model. This is because his list is populated by fuzzy features that make it too imprecise to function as a standard. And surely this is a case in which, using the words of John Swales, a family resemblance theory can make anything resemble anything. Andrew Pitts concurs. The family resemblance model, based as it is on genetic similarity, fails as an exclusive model for genre identification. Adela Collins says Burge's case for identifying the Gospels as Bayoi appears strong in part. He did not seriously consider any alternative. It's not just that the positive case presented isn't strong. Scholars have a litany of reasons to disagree. A frequent complaint is that Burge overplays genre similarities and underconsiders genre differences. He did agree the gospels have unique features. For brief example, Greco-Roman biographies tend to care about the subject's physical appearance, education, and inner psychological development, where the gospels do not. Greco-Roman biographers frequently used first person to reveal their relationship to their subjects, explicitly name their sources, and critically weigh contradictory reports. The Gospels do not. Christian critics like McGrew note that one cannot hold this genre claim and traditional authorship at the same time, since Jewish Matthew, Mark, and John are unlikely to be aware of and want to emulate a specific Greco-Roman genre. Well-qualified classicists answer the gospel genre question in a full spectrum of ways, from the uncritical praise of hagiography to historical monograph of God's plan for history, to mythic historiography, grounding legends in historical artifice, to our etologies, divine man anecdote collections, to sacred fabulae or charter legends, to literary imitation, epic prose. Early church fathers, such as Eusebius, actively rejected Greco-Roman historiographic models, and instead firmly anchored the Gospels in the Jewish Old Testament tradition of Hebrew historiography.

SPEAKER_03 16:34

And perhaps most compellingly, in the 20th century, the most popular view was the Gospels were a unique type of Christian literature.

SPEAKER_07 16:40

Early forum critics like Rudolf Boltmann and K. L. Schmidt argued the Gospels are a unique genre, sui generis. If none of the Gospels fully fit, it's tough to argue that they aren't some unique combination and not strictly adhering to any formula. Laikona affirms the lines distinguishing some ancient genres were fuzzy and were often crossed, producing hybrid literature. Again, far from being an overwhelming conclusion that the Gospels are Greco-Roman biographies, it seems like some surface-level commonalities here and there is the best one should grant. The reason Mike makes this case at all is that he thinks the genre of Greco-Roman biography would help the case for gospel reliability, particularly in the areas of author intent and commitment to accuracy. But from my perspective, concluding that the gospels are Greco-Roman biography causes more problems for reliability than they solve. As Mike Lacona says, ancient biography had different objectives and allowed more flexibility in the way the past was reported than how modern biography is generally written. Classicists note the borderline between fiction and reality was thinner in biography than in ordinary historiography, and that the biographers felt in principle much freer than the historians in their use of evidence. The earliest representatives of ancient lives contain fictive elements, and elements that we now recognize as having later become important markers of ancient novelistic literature. Indeed, among so-called non-fictional narrative genres, biography seems particularly conducive to slippages into the realm of fiction. Some take historical accuracy more seriously, but none of them are free from some degree of fictionalization. From invented speeches to fictive accounts of birth and childhood, from intertextual allusions to other characters with whom the author wants to associate his subject, to imagined details at the hero's death. The anecdotes and biographies were frequently of indeterminate origin, spread about by gossips or storytellers, or pressed into the service of orators or moralists as exemplar. Elements such as setting, incidental characters, and even the identity of the main protagonist are subject to almost infinite variety. None of this was of any great concern to the biographer. Mike seems to be aware of this. The differences between ancient genres were not rigorous. A history could contain mythical elements. And some of the literary devices.

SPEAKER_03 18:57

Authors could transfer lines from someone to another, paraphrase someone's speech, displace an event from one context to another, compress a time sequence or speeches, spotlight one character while ignoring others involved, or utilize other similar techniques.

SPEAKER_07 19:09

No wonder gospel advocate McGrew wants to distance them from the genre label, and concludes, if the gospels belong to the genre of Greco-Roman biography, that in and of itself means that we will find it difficult to determine whether the reports have a historical intention and where history ends and legend begins.

SPEAKER_03 19:27

Given the data, it seems the authors were very interested in finding out who the historical Jesus was and what he taught and accomplished.

SPEAKER_07 19:33

I'm sorry, Mike, that does not follow. There's precious little one could reliably conclude, even if he were correct. And as those friendly to his cause will attest.

SPEAKER_04 19:43

It's, I think, hazardous to draw broad generalizations about all ancient Greco-Roman biographies and then impose these uh generalizations on the Gospels, either in order to uh uphold their historical accuracy or in order to impugn it. Because uh ancient biographies differed in quality among themselves, uh, one from one from another.

SPEAKER_07 20:11

Greco-Roman biography was a broad and flexible genre. The idea that the genre itself is flexible could mean that within that genre, various individual works and authors may fall at different points on a spectrum of factual reliability. Some given author writing in the genre might choose to be fanciful or to intermingle fiction in his writing, or some given author might be careless about checking his facts, use poor sources, or have a bad memory. But some other author, as far as we could tell, could be extremely scrupulous and knowledgeable. This is a major reason why genre identification is not very informative. And from the same book from Keener that Mike has been quoting throughout, genres are useful for classifying similar works. They are not templates to which the writers must adhere. That is, they are descriptive rather than prescriptive, an observation that immediately limits the degree to which we can project our expectations onto a given work, including any of the gospels. And the many variables already noted preclude us from using the gospel genre to pronounce decisions on the historical authenticity of all the reports a priori. Such an approach would run far beyond the evidence. In part two, Mike Broadley explores authorship of the four canonical gospels. I'd rather everyone watch my Who Really Wrote the Gospels video, but here we are.

SPEAKER_03 21:33

You know the four gospels are attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. But many argue the Gospels were originally anonymous, and the names were only added later to give them more authority. But is this accurate? In the first century, were the Gospels entirely anonymous, and only when they were criticized did second century Christians add names to give them more authority.

SPEAKER_07 21:51

Yes, and it will help us cut to the chase to present a brief version of the best case for this upfront, since Mike will not be presenting the reasons against his view. First, The important date to keep in mind for this whole discussion is 180 AD or 180 CE. That is the year Church Father Irenaeus gives us our earliest extent attestation that the canonical gospels we have were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. At no point will Mike cite an earlier source, because there are none. Second, throughout the century before, the Gospels were quoted and alluded to completely anonymously by early church figures like Ignatius, Polycarp, and the author of the Didicky. Justin Martyr, writing around 150 A.D. in Rome, extensively quoted the texts, but referred to them only collectively as the memoirs of the apostles. Mike will not mention this. And third, a prerequisite for initial anonymity of writing.

SPEAKER_03 22:43

None of them internally mention an author, either in the preface or main body. Thus the Gospels are by definition internally anonymous.

SPEAKER_07 22:50

So up until 150 A.D., people were quoting the books, but giving no author names. By 180 A.D., there are author names. An incredibly reasonable inference, and by my lights, the most reasonable inference is that somewhere between 150 and 180 AD, someone attributed names to the Gospels. The rest of Mike's case is making excuses for these anchoring facts.

SPEAKER_03 23:15

Or are there good reasons to think the Gospels really did come from Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John? Starting with internal anonymity. Thus the Gospels are by definition internally anonymous, but that doesn't mean they ever circulated without names attached to them.

SPEAKER_07 23:28

Of course it does. As Mike will discuss at length, there are many books where the author is identified only on the cover and not on the pages inside. But if the author did identify themselves on the pages inside, then there could be no case for anonymous circulation, could there? So scholars bring this up as a prerequisite condition for anonymity. Moving on.

SPEAKER_03 23:48

There were, of course, numerous ways of indicating an author's name in or on a role or codex outside of the work itself.

SPEAKER_07 23:53

Yes, ancient equivalents of the modern cover existed. But since we have no examples from before 180 AD, we don't know if Gospels had named labels in the anonymous period. Moving on.

SPEAKER_03 24:05

But what if they claim that the four Gospels were not attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John until the second century? Well, there are many reasons to think their titles were actually original. First, the gospels would have needed to be identified when copies were added to private library collections of the various churches. So it is likely they came with some form of external title to identify them.

SPEAKER_07 24:21

Indeed, the structure of titling them Gospel according to so-and-so gives every impression that these were added by a later organizer and not the original authors, as renowned scholar Bart Ehrman notes.

SPEAKER_06 24:33

The titles are not titles that an author would have given them. Well, nobody writes a book and calls it according to me. That's not that's not a title. That's somebody later telling you who, in their judgment, wrote the book. So that you know, oh, this isn't the one that Mark wrote, this is the one that Luke wrote. Okay, this is Luke's book. So it's not not in the title. Suppose I were to write a gospel, which I won't, but suppose I I do. I wouldn't call it the gospel according to Bart. And in the manuscripts, it actually doesn't say the gospel according to. In our manuscripts, when it has the names of these authors on it, it's just according to. And so Matthew's gospel is just the title in our manuscript is according to Matthew, or according to Mark, according to John. And so that that's somebody else telling you who wrote the book so that you can identify which is which. And so the question is when did when did people start identifying the authors of these books?

SPEAKER_07 25:29

Well, ancient libraries contained many unlabeled works. So desire to organize didn't always win the day. That a library or collector may have attempted differentiation doesn't mean that person used author names, or that they would have had any insight into authors' names if they did. Libraries were full of falsely attributed scrolls, like the non-canonical gospels. The prologue of Luke's gospel indicates it was sent to someone named Theophilus. As Theophilus translates to beloved of God or lover of God, there is some debate as to whether this was a real person or a general honorific for anyone reading.

SPEAKER_03 26:05

It is inconceivable the gospel would have been sent to him without Theophilus knowing who wrote and sent him a copy of a gospel.

SPEAKER_07 26:11

Even if an initial recipient like Luke's Theophilus knew the author's identity, this knowledge did not necessarily survive the text's wider dissemination, as the books were copied and circulated.

SPEAKER_03 26:27

We know in the first century, Paul's letters were circulating between different churches, and whoever was delivering the letters would have been able to verify the letter came from Paul.

SPEAKER_07 26:34

This is a bad example, because 2 Thessalonians 2.2 tells us that forged letters claiming to be from Paul were circulating, and people were believing them. Most scholars agree some of these forgeries made it into the New Testament, including 2 Thessalonians, ironically. While technically correct, remember that 180 AD date, there is no surviving discussion about authorship before 180, denying or affirming. Mike is calling this early, hoping the audience will forget or not know how late this is. We have no idea what debates were happening in person, or even written speculation that didn't get copied. Many works were written that did not survive, so that everyone followed suit after 180 serves as no guarantee for the anonymous years when people were using other phrases for the titles of these books.

SPEAKER_03 27:55

Even early copies of the Gospels that have survived that still have a title, attribute them to the respected authors.

SPEAKER_07 28:00

Again, early here is after 180. There are no manuscripts that give pre-180 AD attestation. Mike is going to spend several minutes listing names of people after 180 who speak as if it's Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. But this later repetition of the party line can't tell us what was believed in the anonymous period.

SPEAKER_03 28:21

But perhaps a skeptic could argue they all got their information from the same source before it spread out. Even if this was true, given that we have cited many second century sources, the original point of the tradition must have been early, for it to have become such a widespread tradition by the second century. Meaning it likely originated in the first century, when the gospels were being composed.

SPEAKER_07 28:38

Mike gives no mechanism for determining how early the notion would have to be in order to be known after 180 AD, other than his vibes.

SPEAKER_03 28:47

But also we should note, it seems that the names attached to the Gospels would be unlikely pics of later forgers. Matthew is a gospel that is for evangelizing the Jewish people, but it was attributed to a tax collector, which was a despised profession among the Jews.

SPEAKER_07 28:59

As we'll discuss, there was an existing tradition that Matthew wrote something. So David Trobish argues that the author changing the name Levi to Matthew was enough to make this connection. Why not attribute the Gospel of Mark to Peter? Which tradition says was Mark's main source? Michael Coke points out that Mark was the least favorite gospel among the second century fathers. But as it was too early and foundational to be removed, a lesser figure, John Mark, imperfectly recording the teachings of Peter, may make sense. Why would you pick two people as gospel authors who were not direct disciples of Jesus? We'll get there. But if the author Acts was a companion of Paul, then there weren't many Greek names in Paul's letter to choose from, so the pool was shallow.

SPEAKER_03 29:40

Finally, it has been noted by scholars like Richard Baucom, if the Gospels were truly anonymous early on, we should expect church father commentary on their authorship to resemble the talk on the book of Hebrews. Hebrews is truly an anonymous work, and instead of the church picking an author to attribute it to, they debated on who wrote it and suggested different authors. As Gadicol says, this sort of diversity is exactly what we do not find in references to the authorship of the Gospels. Instead, we have unanimous agreement. Not church fathers trying to figure out who wrote anonymous biographies.

SPEAKER_07 30:07

Using Hebrews here actually backfires. Origen commended people for attributing it to Paul, even though he didn't personally believe it. Despite significant doubts among leadership, questionable apostolic authorship may have been attributed to a cherished writing that was considered useful in segments of the Christian community in order to justify its continued use in the churches. Who knows what gospel debates ended the same way, but were not recorded for posterity. So when we survey the data, there is no reason to deny the traditional authorship of the gospels. Listen to that phrasing. No reason to deny traditional authorship. If your starting point is just to believe the Bible's table of contents, you can construct scenarios to hold on to that. But this is a far cry from taking a neutral observer and convincing them that these are the authors based on compelling evidence. In part three, Mike wants to discuss general reliability of memory.

SPEAKER_03 31:03

When we recall memories, the brain has to reconstruct what happened. It is not like playing a video recording. Over time, false memories creep in, and details change that make our memory unreliable. Correct. Certain types of memories are more reliable than others. And the memories that the disciples would have formed about Jesus were far more likely to be retained with little change over long periods of time.

SPEAKER_07 31:23

What is Mike's assumption here? That the disciples are authors or sources for the canonical gospels? Of course, I've demonstrated that there is insufficient evidence to believe that this is the case. So most of this is irrelevant to me. It's possible that some things recorded in the Gospels could be accurate memories of Jesus. Seems like a pathetically low bar, but yes. That said, some of Mike's points are adjacent to my own work on the decades before the written gospels. Psychological and anthropological insights argue that because the early Jesus tradition was left to the limits of human memory and oral performance, while simultaneously primarily motivated and rewarded by winning converts, it was structurally built to change rather than to be preserved with historical accuracy. Some of White's claims here are pet peeves of mine, so we'll touch on a few before moving on.

SPEAKER_03 32:07

The human memory is not like a video recorder. Although specific details may be omitted or misremembered, our memory systems do a remarkably good job of preserving the general contours of our past in terms of constructing a more or less accurate rendition of the gist of past events. Moreover, false memories and inaccuracies that occur are rarely radically different from the original event.

SPEAKER_07 32:25

That's quite the claim when Elizabeth Loftus showed us in the 1990s that you can implant a completely false memory of being lost in a shopping mall at age six by doing nothing more than having a trusted family member describe it as something that happened. Researchers have since implanted false memories of animal attacks, near drownings, hot air balloon rides, and spilling a punch bowl at a wedding. How would Mike judge if these are radically different from the original when the original event didn't happen? That said, we don't need radically different ideas for legendary development. Since nearly everyone spreading pre-gospel stories about Jesus, never even met Jesus, having mere just memory of hearsay stories, allows compatible ideas to fill in unknown gaps, details like a tomb, and a Sanhedrin member owning said tomb, and that tomb owner being rich, and so on and so on, all compatible with and predicted by just memory research.

SPEAKER_03 33:17

Research does seem to indicate that after about five years, memories tend to become stable for long periods of time. It is safe to conclude that the memories of most eyewitnesses, 30 to 60 years after the crucifixion, would have been as reliable and complete as their memories three to five years after it. There is no reason to dismiss the gospels as unreliable information that were written down too distant from the life and ministry of Jesus.

SPEAKER_07 33:36

Ebbingha's forgetting curve does show that the rate of forgetting slows down over time, but the 10-year study on Americans' memories of 9-11 found consistency dropped to 61% within the first year. After 10 years, it was still sitting at 60%. So yes, the leveling off is real, but it's those first years that Jesus movement studies are most concerned with. And time isn't the only factor. Every time you access a memory, you reconstruct it. Sharon Ranganoff likens accessing a memory to hitting play and record at the same time. Each retrieval infuses the past with the residue of the present. 30 to 60 years of frequently recalling and retelling would be a lot of editing. Even worse, the older and fainter the memory, the easier it is to overwrite.

SPEAKER_03 34:20

Evangelists themselves did not pretend to capture Jesus' words verbatim. What matters more is the substance of his acts and teachings, the gist, the sense. And we have very good reason to believe that this is what the gospels offer us. Of course, this does not prove that what we read in the Gospels is eyewitness testimony. However, given that we've already looked at the biographical nature of the Gospels, which shows us that when they were written, they were written with the intent to record accurate history of the life of Jesus. And given that there is strong evidence the authors were Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, it is likely the Gospels did come from eyewitnesses, close associates of the disciples. Meaning the information we read in the Gospels is likely the reliable memories of the eyewitnesses of Jesus.

SPEAKER_07 34:55

Given the strong evidence that the Gospels are, as Bard Ehrman puts it, memories of memories of memories passed through chains of people who weren't there. It is certain that each retelling was shaped by the needs of their own community. John Dominic Crosson identified three layers in the Jesus tradition: retention of some core material, development of that material for new situations, and invention. The Gospels contain all three, thoroughly mixed together, with no label telling you which is which. In Part 4, Mike explores the follow-up question: Do the Gospels represent accurate memory?

SPEAKER_03 35:31

People in the ancient world and in oral cultures that still exist today train their memories to be far more useful for retaining accurate information. The Gospels were written in this type of culture, and when we study them, we find internal clues that suggest the teachings of Jesus would have been easy to memorize. So there are good reasons to believe what we read in the Gospels was accurately preserved orally before being written down.

SPEAKER_07 35:52

I like how psychologist Ulrich Neisser puts it. Illiteracy cannot improve memory any more than my lack of wings improves my speed afoot. People in the first century had identical brain hardware to what we have now. The early Christians were subject to every cognitive bias and memory failure that modern psychology has documented. Ian Hunter surveyed studies of oral cultures across multiple continents, Slavic epic poetry, oral African history, even Icelandic sagas, and found no examples of what he defined as lengthy verbatim recall, meaning word-for-word correspondence of 50 or more words. He concludes that literate people project a textual bias onto non-literate cultures, imputing abilities that only become meaningful when there is a fixed written text to anchor them. Without that anchor, there's no mechanism for detecting deviation, and no framework in which deviation registers as a problem in the first place. Albert Lord, whose field work with South Slavic oral poets, confirms that oral singers create the text anew each time they tell the story. The Lord's Prayer appears in different forms in Matthew, Luke, and the Didicate. The words of institution at the Last Supper vary across Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Paul's first letter to Corinthians. These are among the most liturgically central texts in early Christians had. If anything was going to get memorized precisely, it was those. And yet they weren't. I agree with Dale Allison that early Christian literature leaves the clear impression that the followers of Jesus were uninterested in parent-like verbatim memorization. Anthropologists who study oral cultures have found that oral tradition doesn't even try to function as an archive, preserving the past for its own sake. Jan Vancina's research established that oral societies continually adjust their traditions to stay congruent with the community's current social identity and present needs. Information that becomes irrelevant gets dropped. Information that conflicts with how the community understands itself right now gets reshaped. This happens without any conscious sense of distortion because the community isn't trying to preserve an accurate historical record. It's trying to maintain a coherent account of itself in the present. As Goodyan Watt observed, in oral societies, the individual has little perception of the past except in terms of the present.

SPEAKER_03 38:00

Jews were capable of memorizing large amounts of scripture. David Carr says, well-educated scribes often could write out verbatim, memorize forms of an older authoritative text, so faithfully reproducing it that its borders and clashes with other material would still be visible in the final product. Furthermore, having learned such precise verbatim memorization in a text-supported oral education system, Israelite authors were able, like non-Israelite authors taught in similar ways, to echo their own writing. Their training in verbatim memorization in a text-supported environment gave them tools for exact, her semi-exact repetition that allowed them to produce works that featured remarkably precise parallels.

SPEAKER_07 38:36

First, the memorization culture being described belonged to a literate scribal elite and had almost nothing to do with Jesus' followers. William Harris and Catherine Hesser both estimated literacy rates in Roman Palestine at under 10% of the total population, and possibly as low as three. Scholars studying complex mnemonic techniques in antiquity note that they were, in Jocelyn Penny Small's words, very much an art of literacy for the highly literate. These systems were built around written text used to fix written text in memory. Peter, James, and John were fishermen. Fishing is not a profession with a literacy requirement. The idea that they are functioning like scribal academy students is fanfiction. Second, the rabbinic memorization model being invoked is mostly a post-70 CE development, being projected backward into a pre-70 movement. Jacob Neusner spent a career demonstrating that Berger Gerritsen, the scholar who made this argument famous, was reading later, idealized, rabbinic literature and assuming it described conditions hundreds of years earlier. Niusner called it conceptually primitive. Hester's analysis of Jewish education concluded that the picture of widespread Torah schools, where all the children memorize scripture, is a retrojection of later ideals that probably never existed in the form described. The system Mike is appealing to wasn't operating during Jesus' ministry.

SPEAKER_03 39:54

Now it is important to keep in mind, scholars have recognized there are different types of oral tradition. Kenneth Bailey said there are controlled and uncontrolled oral traditions. A controlled tradition means the material is memorized and identified as a preserved tradition. It is not meant to change but be preserved, whereas one that is uncontrolled is a living tradition, which is subject to variations for the needs of the community. A third type is informal controlled. These are controlled traditions. They are not meant to be fluid or change. But there is flexibility now the story is worded. Bailey says the community is preserving its store of tradition. By informal, we mean that there is no set teacher and no specifically identifiable student. As stories, poems, and other traditional material are told and recited through the evening, anyone can theoretically participate.

SPEAKER_07 40:36

There are still controls that prevent a tradition from changing. Bailey's informal control model came from field work in 1970s Lebanon, where he observed Christian and Muslim villages with centuries of embedded tradition, not communities navigating a brand new movement spreading rapidly across foreign cultures and languages. The temporal gap and the cultural disanalogies alone are disqualifying. But Theodore Whedon went ahead and compared Bailey's own story examples against a 1914 written account of the same tales, and found substantial differences, meaning Bailey's data didn't demonstrate preservation at all. And this whole enterprise conflates stability across retellings with evidence for historical authenticity that the events described happened. Bailey's own primary examples demonstrate stable retellings of fabrications, like the tale of an accidental shooting at a wedding that actually preserved a community cover-up of a politically problematic murder. What we know of the pre-Gospel Jesus movement demonstrates no level of narrative control. Peter, James, and John were geographically anchored in Jerusalem, where most of the growth, and eventually the writing of the Gospels, was everywhere else. It wasn't the named eyewitnesses starting churches. It was Paul, Barnabas, Mark, and Silas, and an army of unnamed merchants and wandering charismatic figures. Paul's letters demonstrate that there were massive theological differences within these congregations. So it seems like special pleading to have to imagine that there was somehow harmony and deference when it came to Jesus stories. We see no enforcement mechanism active in the movement. In part five, Mike wants to discuss how Paul really got us our first gospels.

SPEAKER_03 42:16

Most people believe the first gospel was either Matthew or Mark. But the gospel message existed prior to this. The first gospel was the oral version. And despite what people think, we still see evidence of this orally transmitted gospel, preserved in Paul's letters. Most of Paul's letters were sent out before the Gospels were written down. A common belief is Paul was unaware of the Gospel story.

SPEAKER_07 42:37

This is irresponsible conflation of the word gospel. This entire six-hour marathon is about the reliability of the Gospels, specifically the canonical books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. That's the sense that's on everyone's mind. Biographical books about Jesus didn't exist during Paul's lifetime. Paul used the word gospel only in the original sense of good news. And that good news was Jesus died for your sins, the death, deity, and resurrection, as Gary Habermast puts it. At no point did Paul ever think of gospel in the sense of Jesus anecdotes.

SPEAKER_03 43:10

A common argument against the reliability of the Gospels is to appeal to the silence of Paul. He is our earliest Christian source, but he doesn't mention much historical information about Jesus, which must mean he knew little about who Jesus was in the gospel narrative. But this is not accurate.

SPEAKER_07 43:24

It's true. We can't use the silence to conclude that Paul didn't know about the life of Jesus. But what it can and should tell us is that Paul didn't consider the life and ministry of Jesus to be particularly important for his ministry or mission.

SPEAKER_06 43:37

It's worth noting that Paul himself, in all of his letters, if you take them all together, says very, very little about the historical Jesus. He only quotes him on the three occasions that I've mentioned in all of his letters. He doesn't say anything about Jesus' miracles, or his confrontations with the Pharisees, or his trial before Pontius Pilate, or his transfiguration, or the Barabbas incident, or his baptism, or his temptation. Go down the room. He doesn't say anything about any of these things. So if these are the things that he was most desperate to find out when he went to Jerusalem, why wouldn't he mention them as matters of importance?

SPEAKER_09 44:10

You know, Paul was a pretty straightforward guy. He could have gotten a little bit, I don't want to call it a dig, but he could say, No offense, Peter, but um man, bummer, you re you uh you denied your Lord three times.

SPEAKER_06 44:24

Paul shows no knowledge of Peter ever denying Jesus. Unlike Gary, Paul hadn't read the New Testament Gospels and they hadn't been written yet, by the way. So yeah, well, Paul might have said that. Paul might have decided he wanted to talk about the weather in w Western Asia Minor right now. I mean, I don't know what he talked about.

SPEAKER_03 44:40

Some argue that Paul claimed he received his information on Jesus from personal revelations alone. So the gospel he was preaching was probably not the gospel message we find in the canonical gospels. If that is the case, it is odd he correctly knew so many facts we find in the gospels. But the problem is Paul never claimed his knowledge of Jesus is limited to personal revelations. In fact, Paul tells us he met with James and Peter to confirm he was preaching the same message, and they added nothing to him.

SPEAKER_07 45:05

Nope. Paul's entire purpose in Galatians 1 and 2 is to prove the opposite. His gospel came by direct revelation from God, not from any human source. Paul is in an active fight with people in this congregation dismissing him. So he narrates how long he stayed away from Jerusalem, how little contact he had, and how independently his mission was already running. He mentions connecting with Peter and James only in language designed to downplay its importance. Paul just liked to pretend the word historio in Galatians 1.18. He's connected to our English word history or to make an inquiry. James Dunn once argued this way, but has since walked this back to join the rest of scholarship to the obvious contextual meaning of just get acquainted with a person. There's no evidence that Peter and Paul swapped notes on Jesus' life. They may have, but that's conjecture, and clearly the opposite of Paul's purpose in having the meeting.

SPEAKER_03 45:59

Now some may try to argue that later Christians borrowed from Paul's letters to construct the Gospels, and that is why we find similar teachings in them. But once again, if that is what occurred, why did the Gospel authors not invent stories based on the appearances Paul lists in 1 Corinthians 15? If this was the case, we should observe more literary correspondence, rather than mere similarity in teachings. Instead, the gospels appear to follow the information they received from their witnesses, instead of trying to concoct a story from known sayings about Jesus or from scheming Paul's letters.

SPEAKER_07 46:26

There's no real dispute that Paul's letters are the earliest Christian documents we have, dateable with high confidence, and they predate every gospel by decades. It's also non-controversial that Paul's influence on the New Testament is, as James Tabor puts it, permeating and all-pervasive. Mark, our earliest gospel, is, in the judgment of most critical scholars, almost wholly Pauline in its theology. Specifically, Jesus is the suffering son of God who gave his life as an atonement. Matthew follows Mark. Luke Acts is structured around Paul. Even John reflects Paul's essential framework. Beyond the influence, there's also obviously some clear copying from Paul's letters to the Gospels.

SPEAKER_03 47:04

One of the most obvious references to Jesus' teachings is in 1 Corinthians 11. For I receive from the Lord what I also deliver to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, This is my body which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me. This is a clear reference to the tradition of the Last Supper in the Synoptics. Richard Bacham notes we have close verbal parallelism to what we find in Luke 22.

SPEAKER_07 47:26

Paul is the earliest extant source for those words. Mark, writing decades later, puts them in Jesus' mouth. Matthew and Luke then copied from Mark. We literally cannot start with Mark and treat Paul as confirmation of an independent tradition. So why didn't the Gospels just copy Paul's appearance list from 1 Corinthians 15? Probably because they weren't trying to harmonize facts. They were making arguments to address the specific theological disputes of their own communities. Mark has no post-resurrection appearances at all, ending with the women fleeing in silence. Richard Miller points out that the empty tomb was a standard Greco-Roman literary convention, what scholars call a translation fable, used throughout ancient Mediterranean literature to indicate that a hero had achieved supernatural status. Mark doesn't need to list appearances because the empty tomb already does his theological work. Mark does gesture toward Paul's appearance list. The young man at the tomb tells the women to go tell Peter specifically that Jesus will meet him in Galilee. Tabor's read is that Mark knows no details of that appearance beyond the few words that Paul provides in 1 Corinthians 15, where Jesus appears first to Cephas. So Mark points at it without narrating it. Everything Mark knows, he gets from Paul. Then Matthew fills in the mountain appearance that Mark skipped. Luke relocates everything to Jerusalem, as Jesus eating fish to counsel anyone who might think that the resurrection was merely spiritual, and edits Mark's passion narrative, to erase Mary, the mother of James, from the tomb accounts, replacing her with women who had come from Galilee. That editing runs through both Luke and Acts. Tabor reads it as a deliberate campaign to mute James and the family of Jesus while recasting Paul as the hero of early Christianity. It is likely the gospel message was already in existence as a vibrant oral tradition when Paul was writing. Correct. Christianity predated Paul's belief in it. And the stories about Jesus were not yet written down.

SPEAKER_03 49:13

Thus there is no reason to doubt the reliability of the material we find in the Gospels. They contain much reliable biographical information on who Jesus was that came from the eyewitnesses.

SPEAKER_07 49:22

Wrong. That does not follow. Paul was not a witness. Everything he heard was secondhand, and he simply cannot attest to anything about the life of Jesus, as he met Jesus only in a post-death vision. In part six, Mike will make a pitch as to why the Gospels might be written early.

SPEAKER_03 49:41

Most scholars date the Gospels to after 70 AD, meaning they would have been written after the destruction of the Jewish temple. This means they were likely written when many of the eyewitnesses had passed away due to persecution or age. But is this accurate? But this seems to be presupposing the idea that Jesus didn't have the ability to predict the temple's destruction. One is merely imposing a naturalistic assumption onto the text, and then using that to date the synoptics. In other words, since Jesus could not have made such an accurate prediction, Mark must have been written during the event itself.

SPEAKER_07 50:11

The Vaticinium ex eventu argument, prophecy written after the fact to fit events, is a relatively weak reason to date Mark late. And late date scholars know this. Joel Marcus, who thinks Mark dates to around 70, concedes a post-destruction writer would have known about the surviving wall and wouldn't have had Jesus say that not one stone would be left upon another. The temple burned catastrophically, but Mark mentions no fire. But this is not a problem, because the actual dating case rests on other things entirely. Most directly, in Mark 13, Jesus is supposedly talking to his disciples, but the author interrupts the speech with a parenthetical, let the reader understand, meaning, whatever evil the author is alluding to is already known to the reader and is so bad it must be spoken of in code. Marcus agrees the best candidate is the zealot occupation of the inner temple in the winter of 67 to 68 CE, when a revolutionary faction under Eliezer son of Simon took over the sanctuary, installed an unqualified high priest by lottery, and filled the holy precincts with violence. That is exactly what the abomination of desolation, standing where it ought not be, looks like. And the point is, whatever he's referring to, it was already known to his readers and not a future mystery. Adela Yarwell Collins placed his composition after 66 CE, because that's the earliest Mark's false messiahs become identifiable. Menahem, son of Judas the Galilean, took a messianic role in 66. Simon Bargiura emerged as the major messianic leader in the revolts of 68 to 69. These are the most plausible reference for many will come in my name. Paula Fredericksen argues that Mark is best understood as being written for Gentile Christians, probably in Rome, during or just after the Jewish War, and that the gospel is partially organized around making the temple's destruction mean something. The tearing of the temple veil combines the death of Jesus and the fate of the temple into a single divine judgment. Jesus' statement, I will destroy this temple and rebuild it in three days, is also mapping the temple destruction onto Jesus. Again, this literary design requires that the reader already know the temple fate. None of these arguments require deciding in advance that Jesus simply couldn't predict the future. They converge on 66 to 70 CE independently.

SPEAKER_03 52:25

It is obvious Matthew's gospel was written for a Jewish audience, with special attention on facts about Jerusalem. Rodney Reeves says, most scholars contend that Matthew's gospel was written by a Jew for Jews. Special attention to the field Judas hanged himself in would have been irrelevant for a scattered Jewish population after 70 AD.

SPEAKER_07 52:43

Matthew 27, 8 says the Potter's field is called the field of blood to this day. Raymond Brown points out that to this day is a stock phrase used to explain place names from long ago. You use that phrase when you're at a distance from the event. Such a description would be very inappropriate if Mark was written only two to three decades after 33 AD.

SPEAKER_03 53:04

Mentioning the importance of the temple tax after 70 AD would have been problematic, as it would have been going to a pagan temple.

SPEAKER_07 53:10

After 70 CE, every Jew, including Jewish Christians, had to pay that specific tax to fund a pagan cult. Matthew's story of Jesus and Peter choosing to pay the tax voluntarily, even though they're technically exempt as children of the king, is directly applicable pastoral advice for a community deciding whether to pay an offensive Roman tribute.

SPEAKER_03 53:32

In Matthew 5, Jesus gives instructions on how to offer a sacrifice at the temple. Information that would have been useless to include in this gospel account if the temple was already destroyed when Matthew was writing.

SPEAKER_07 53:42

As a direct parallel, the Mishnah, compiled around 200 CE, presents laws governing temple sacrifices and priestly duties in the present tense, as though the temple were still standing. But the temple had been gone for over a century by then. Schurer notes that Jews continued to study temple law, debate proper temple piety, and transmit it as living Torah because they expected the temple to be rebuilt. Matthew is doing exactly what the other Jewish authors did.

SPEAKER_03 54:10

As time progressed, the church movement became predominantly Gentile and less focused on its Jewish roots. Placing the Gospel of Matthew after 70 AD, when Christians were disconnecting from their Jewish roots, seems to be out of place. It makes more sense to place it among the first generation of Christians and before 70 AD.

SPEAKER_07 54:27

Among the strongest arguments for a post-70 date is Matthew's theology of the destruction itself. Matthew portrays the temple's fall as divine judgment for the rejection of Jesus. That's our retrospective theological interpretation of a catastrophe. It's implausible that it is future projecting meaning for readers unaware of an event that hasn't happened yet. It matches the literary behavior of 4 Ezra and Tubaruch, other late first century Jewish texts that also frame Jerusalem's destruction as judgment for Israel's own failures.

SPEAKER_03 54:55

An important theme in the synoptics in Acts indicates they were written in a time before Roman persecution. According to both Suetonius and Tacitus, Christians were persecuted under the Roman Emperor Nero, which began in 64 AD. The Book of Revelation is critical of Rome, referring to it as a beast while mentioning Christian persecution, which indicates it was written after or during a period of Roman persecution. But in the Synoptics and Acts, we see a friendlier attitude towards Roman authority figures. A centurion is said to have more faith than anyone in Israel. Pilate finds no guilt in Jesus and wants to set him free. A Roman soldier rescues Paul from dying at the hands of the Jews. And another treats Paul kindly. Mark said a Roman centurion was one of the few at the cross who understood Jesus was who he claimed to be. Rome is never considered a direct enemy or threaten the Gospels and Acts. The focus is more on the Jewish sects, who were opposing the Church long before Rome started.

SPEAKER_07 55:49

The Jewish war ended in 70 CE with the destruction of Jerusalem. And after that, Jews were toxic in the Roman Empire. They had just cost Rome a brutal, expensive war. Steve Mason says the Gospel's efforts to relieve Pilate of guilt and dump it on the Jewish leaders are understandable in the light of the Christian's social political situation after AD 70. The Jews were already considered troublemakers as a result of their failed revolt, and the Christians were in desperate need of a claim to legitimacy. So what do you do? Hans Konselman finds that Luke emphasizes that to confess oneself to be a Christian implies no crime against the Roman law. John Dominic Crossen calls Luke Acts a defense brief for Christianity, carried by Paul into the imperial court at Rome, promoting a Christianity that is within rather than against the Roman Empire. Notice that this strategy requires a villain to replace Rome, and that villain is Jewish leadership. Per Paula Frederickson, the Gospels argue that opposition to Jesus was Jewish, not Roman. The result, Roman Christianity are both on the same side against the Jews.

SPEAKER_03 56:49

Additionally, in John, which was likely written after 70 AD, we see a lack of passages painting Romans in a positive light. Which we would expect if the Christians no longer wished to betray Roman authority figures.

SPEAKER_07 57:00

Well, this is just factually wrong. John has the most extended Pilate scene of any gospel, with Pilate repeatedly declaring Jesus was not guilty and the Jewish leaders manipulating him into execution. Craig Keener says John goes to great lengths to emphasize that Pilate cooperated with Jesus' execution against his own preference. And this emphasis is understandable for apologetic reasons.

SPEAKER_03 57:23

Now James crossly notes that some arguments have been put forward to explain the ending of Acts and to preserve the late dating. First, Paul's death might be hinted to in Acts 20, 25 in verse 38. There is also no mention of the death of James, which Josephus recorded, so maybe Luke didn't want to record how the apostles died. Luke also doesn't mention the earlier Caligula crisis, so maybe Luke just omitted certain events for unknown reasons. The persecution of Christians in Rome may not have been mentioned because Luke's story simply had not got that far chronologically.

SPEAKER_07 57:51

Acts is not a biography of Paul. The character of Jesus tells you the book's purpose in chapter 1. The gospel was spread from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth. Rome is the end of the earth. When Paul arrives there, preaching openly and without interference, the story Luke promised is done. Whether Nero eventually kills Paul is beside the point. The narrative arc is complete. Raymond Brown suggests the early dating objection probably misunderstands the purpose of acts. Andrew Pitt's genre analysis of Luke Acts shows that the Greek histories characteristically used open endings, leaving matters unresolved in anticipation of further development. Dennis MacDonald points out that the Iliad ends with the burial of Hector, not the fall of Troy. The Aeneid ends with the death of Ternus, not the founding of Rome. The audience already knew what came next. Luke's readers knew Nero killed Paul. The point was that the kingdom of God survived anyway.

SPEAKER_03 58:41

Similar issues can be found in other places where it is claimed that Luke relied on Josephus. In fact, the scholarly consensus is that Luke and Josephus probably relied on similar sources, rather than one copying the other. As Gary Goldberg said regarding another alleged point of contact, Josephus and Luke may have used similar or identical sources in composing their passages. This explanation appears to be the simplest.

SPEAKER_07 59:03

The question isn't whether Luke reproduces Josephus perfectly. The question is whether Luke's specific mistakes are the kind of mistakes you'd make if Josephus were your source. Josephus is explicit that the Egyptian was a religious figure, unconnected to the Sicari, the daggerman who carried out crowd assassinations. But in both the Jewish War and Antiquities, he discusses the Sicari in the paragraph immediately before introducing the Egyptian. Luke, in Acts 21, 38, has a tribune ask Paul whether he is the Egyptian who led 4,000 Sicari into the desert, two adjacent Josephan sections, focused into one figure via memory lapse or uncareful copying. Further, Sicari is a Latin term, and Josephus appears to have been the first writer to use it as a Greek technical designation for Jewish rebels. Luke deploys it without explanation, as though his audience already knows the word. It had to come from somewhere, and the most plausible somewhere is Josephus. Hamelial speech in Acts 5 cites Tudis, and Judas the Galilean as a later example. Josephus dates Tudis to the mid-40s CE, a full decade after Judas. Luke has the order reversed. Mason disagrees that this is a mark of authenticity. In Antiquities 20, Josephus narrates Tudus' death and then transitions immediately to a governor whose main distinction was crucifying the sons of Judas the Galilean, reminding the reader of Judas and the census in the same breath. A writer recalling that passage from memory would reproduce exactly this sequence with no sense of the actual dates. This difficult reading traces straight back to Josephus. If Luke did not use Josephus, he had an independent source that featured the exact same three rebel figures, Judas, Tudus, and the Egyptian, grouped in the same way, placing the Egyptian adjacent to the Zicari, despite Josephus explicitly denying he belonged to that group, and containing the Latin loanword Sicari is a Greek technical term that Josephus appears to have coined. Mason notes that no other known work even approximates Josephus' presentation across this range. Positing such a source is just Josephus with extra steps. Luke omits the procurator under whom Tudus acted, Cuspius Fattus in the mid-40s CE, and this omission is sometimes offered as evidence of a different tradition. But Luke places the reference in a speech Gamaliel delivers in the early 30s, including Fattus's name, would have Gamaliel citing an event that had not yet occurred, so the name had to go. As Perville concludes, the hypothesis that Luke used Josephus solves far more problems than it creates, as long as you do not expect ancient writers to behave like modern researchers. Luke throw on Josephus selectively and sometimes carelessly. The errors he made are those Josephus's text would produce in a writer working from memory. Nothing he shares with Josephus is independently attested elsewhere, and the term he uses for Jewish assassins appears to be Josephus' own coinage. In part 7, Mike wants to pitch that Jesus spoke Greek.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:51

An argument against the reliability of the Gospels is that Jesus taught in his native language of Aramaic. But the Gospels are written in Greek. Much could have been lost in translation. So the Gospels cannot contain the original words of Jesus.

SPEAKER_07 1:02:04

I mean, maybe. Things will get lost in translation any time translation happens, but pretty good translation is possible. The real problem of language is much different, in my view. If Jesus was speaking Aramaic, and the Gospels are allegedly translating independently, decades later from memory, they would never arrive at the same word-for-word translations, yet they frequently do, affirming the only reasonable conclusion that the Gospels are not independent of each other. It also doesn't matter if Jesus spoke Greek. The question is, did the disciples Matthew or John, those who allegedly wrote Gospels, speak Greek and read Greek and be skilled in Greek composition? Acts 4.13 calls Peter and John unschooled ordinary men, or unlettered, which is perhaps better translated as illiterate.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:49

The scholar Maurice Casey notes in the Second Temple period, Greek was widely used throughout Israel. By the time of the Maccabees, many Jews had Hellenized, a process which included the building of a gymnasium and undergoing aspects of Greek education. We must infer that assimilating Jews in Jerusalem learned Greek.

SPEAKER_07 1:03:05

Catherine Hitzer, in Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine, confirms that the common vernacular of Jews in Roman Palestine was Aramaic, needs little explanation. William Harrisway's the anecdote where a local resident addressed a Roman officer in Greek. And the officer was visibly surprised and asked, Do you know Greek? As though he was experiencing something uncommon. Now, could someone in that environment pick up a few Greek words at market? Sure, Heser grants that. But she says a person who knows only a few words of another language, or who knows a few phrases that lead to a simple conversation, can hardly be called bilingual. That's just ordering fish.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:40

There is also good reason to think Greek was common in Galilee. Matthew referred to it as the land of Gentiles. Greek was used in the court of Herod Antipas, and was widely used in the cities of Sepphoris and Tiberius. Both of these cities were close to Nazareth. Scholars like Casey, Porter, Key, and Gleves list a ton of additional evidence that demonstrates widespread knowledge of Greek in the region throughout the Second Temple period.

SPEAKER_07 1:04:02

Except Maurice Cayce, who Mike cites here, points out that Sephorus is now known to have been a very Jewish city, which means they could have conducted all their business in Aramaic. Greek was strictly necessary only at the court of Herod Antipas. That's a very narrow window, and Jesus didn't even go near it, as far as we know. Craiginer notes that Jesus restricted his ministry almost entirely to Jewish villages, actively avoiding both Sephorus and Tiberias. He even denounces a list of Galilean towns by name for failing to respond to his preaching. Neither Hellenized City makes the list, probably because he wasn't there.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:38

Mark also tells us that when Jesus went to the region of Tyre in Sidon, he spoke with a Syrio-Phoenician woman. Porter suggests this would indicate she was a Greek speaker by birth. Thus Jesus would have conversed with her in Greek. Porter notes the way the conversation is worded that Jesus has with his disciples at Caesarea Philippi suggests it was originally in Greek. This is just begging the question.

SPEAKER_07 1:04:57

Sure, if this is a reliable account, then Jesus will speak in Greek. But this whole six-hour video is allegedly supposed to demonstrate that the account is reliable. Mike is assuming that conclusion here, and the rest of his examples will follow this pattern. Has my father sent you what? You speak English? Are you Jesus? I don't think this is a strong point Mike is trying to argue against in this part, but saying that Jesus sometimes taught Greek doesn't actually do anything to assuage the concerns that Aramaic teachings would still be translated. So I have no idea what we're doing here. In part eight, Mike explores the Talking truth about Bible names, or as he calls it elsewhere, onomastic congruence.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:05

If the Gospels are historical, they should reflect the actual naming patterns of the Jews of Israel from that time, and not the names of the Jews from the diaspora. In other words, the most popular names in the Gospels should be the most popular names for Jews in Palestine from Alan's lexicon. Baccom's conclusion was remarkable. The ratio of names in the Gospels aligned quite well with the ratio of names in Alan's lexicon. But later, Camille Gregor and Brian Blaze suggested that Baccom's argument doesn't work. They argued there aren't enough names in the Gospels and Acts to make a significant comparison. And they also suggest that a forger who had access to Josephus in some early Gospel traditions would have been able to copy some names here, add some authentic Jewish names there, and make a fictional account that looked just like a real one.

SPEAKER_07 1:06:47

Thus Baccom's test was not always thought to be. In fact, it was my great pleasure to have friends of the channel Camille and Brian visit to explain their new findings.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:56

When we re-examined Baucom's argument using the appropriate statistical methods, we discovered not only that its conclusions don't follow, but we even found some evidence against his thesis, or in other words, some evidence that some of the named characters in the Gospels and Acts are probably invented.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:11

The two most extreme opposite scenarios that we model are not empirically distinguishable given the limited data that we have available.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:21

We actually found some evidence against Balcom's thesis. Specifically, we found out that characters with rare names, which means names that are only ever known to have one user, are statistically significantly underrepresented in Gospels and Acts. Three out of the five most popular names in Gospel Acts are overrepresented compared to the contemporary population. We have too many Simons, too many James, and too many Josephs. If you use Baucom's approach and compare Gospels and Acts to other ancient works that do have a lot of fictional characters in them, they are not recognizably different.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:52

But recently, Gregor and Blaze's argument has been challenged by Luke Vanderway and Jason Wilson. Van Dewey and Wilson compiled all the name males in the Gospel and Acts and sorted them based on how popular they were in the general population around the time of Jesus. To make a comparison to other samples, they also binned the names of persons from other texts in the same way, and compared all these samples to the popularity statistics of the general population around the time of Jesus. Remember this note about how they binned the names. The results were astonishing. They found all three fictional samples, including the historical novels, had an infinitesimally small chance of fitting in Jesus' Palestine. Van DeWay and Wilson chose to organize the names into six bins because the rare names belonged to about a sixth of the population. So this distribution was the most even and optimal for the goodness of fit test.

SPEAKER_07 1:08:38

While Gregor and Blaze have not yet published a formal response to Van Der Wey and Wilson, peer-reviewed work takes time and they are busy people with many projects on the go. I have had the privilege to preview some of their observations and continuing work. One basic objection is on their logic. Van Der Wey and Wilson used the words fit and not fit in a way that smuggles in a conclusion. When a statistical test fails to rule out a hypothesis, that is not the same as confirming the hypothesis. It might just mean you don't have enough data to rule it out. Van Douai and Wilson turned a double negative into a positive, which is, quote, such a basic statistical error that it is surprising to see. A second objection is to their method. Because most names in the Gospels appear only once, you can't directly apply standard goodness of fit tests. Over 99% of the named characters in the Gospels and Acts fall into that single appearance category. Vanderway and Wilson's workaround was the process called binning that Mike spoke of in passing, where you group individual names into larger combined categories so the math can function at all. Gregor and Blaze acknowledge binning is sometimes acceptable, but they cite David McKay's work, noting it's a known source of problems. You throw away information to make the analysis work, and in a data set already too small to support confident conclusions, discarding information makes things worse. Sadly, I'm not yet allowed to share the most interesting development until their work is published, hopefully by fall. Now, their 2023 paper proposes that far from Mike's conclusion, that the name frequencies in the Gospels are so precisely calibrated to first century Palestinian reality that only eyewitness sources can explain the pattern, the data is equally explained by any author who knew some famous names from Jewish history and made everything else up. If all goes as planned, this will be further supported. The underlying problem hasn't changed since 2023. There simply aren't enough named people in the Gospels to distinguish between an author embedded in first century Palestinian society and an author who knew which names were famous and filled in the rest from imagination. In part 9, Mike wants to talk about reliability in the book of Mark.

SPEAKER_03 1:10:46

Scholars today argue that the Gospel of Mark did not come from any eyewitnesses. It was written down long after most had passed away. So it is not a reliable account that came from any disciple of Jesus. However, despite the prominence of this position in modern scholarship, there is a ton of evidence that confirms the reliability of Mark, and more importantly, that it is an account that goes back to Jesus' disciple Peter. Mark is in fact based on eyewitness accounts. Nope. The Gospel is never attributed to anyone else.

SPEAKER_07 1:11:13

All agree the author is Mark. You'll recall from earlier in this critique that this unanimous attestation begins around AD 180, which tells us little about the hundred years prior.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:23

Even Justin Martyr, who had no need to name the Gospel authors, appears to agree the Gospel of Mark goes back to Peter. He said it is recorded in the memoirs of Peter that Jesus changed the names of the sons of Zebedee to the Sons of Thunder.

SPEAKER_07 1:11:35

This is an overstatement. In dialogue with Trifo 106, Martyr refers to the memoirs of him, not memoirs of Peter, and there is ambiguity about who the subject of that pronoun is. Ehrman, following Peter Pilhoffer, argues Justin's memoirs of Peter, likely doesn't refer to the Gospel of Mark, since that assumes knowledge of Papias, whom Justin never cites. Instead, Pilhofer suggests Justin was influenced by the non-canonical gospel of Peter, pointing to shared distinctive details like blaming Jews for Jesus' death and the disciples fleeing.

SPEAKER_03 1:12:05

Tertullian tells us Mark was the interpreter of Peter. The anti-Marcyonite prologue records that Mark's Gospel came from Mark, the interpreter of Peter. Clement of Alexandria said Mark was a follower of Peter, who wrote down what he preached. Origen said the second gospel was that according to Mark, who wrote it according to Peter's instructions.

SPEAKER_07 1:12:22

As Mike's oft-cited Richard Bacham admits, later references to Mark's gospel as a record of Peter's teaching, such as those by the Muratorian canon, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, and the so-called anti-Marcionite prologue to Mark, are probably dependent on Papias and do not provide independent testimony to a tradition more widespread than Papius' own writing.

SPEAKER_03 1:12:43

Papias recorded that Mark was a follower and interpreter of Peter, who wrote down what Peter preached, and that Peter often accommodated his teachings to whom he was preaching to.

SPEAKER_07 1:12:51

As all connections of Mark to Peter come from this Papius claim, let's consider for a moment. Papias did not know the apostles himself, but got his information thirdhand from an elusive and highly debated figure known as John the Elder. And Papias was considered by early church historians like Eusebius to be a man of exceedingly small intelligence, who naively believed in bizarre legends and miracles. Here's what Papias wrote. Mark, having become Peter's interpreter, wrote down accurately whatever he remembered of the things said or done by Jesus, but not in order. But the book we call Mark seems to be fairly structured and in reasonable sequence, and it's by far the shortest gospel, which would be surprising if it contained every memory from Peter. When paired with Papias's thoughts on Matthew, that we'll get to, it's unconvincing that he's even referring to the books we have.

SPEAKER_03 1:13:40

Additionally, the first epistle of Peter says someone named Mark was present with him. So the evidence puts Mark and Peter together.

SPEAKER_07 1:13:47

We don't have time to get into it here for this one sentence, but 1 Peter is almost certainly a forgery, written long after Peter was dead. Richard Baucom also notes there is no reason to suppose that this was the John Mark of the New Testament, since this Latin name, Marcus, was in very common use in Greek as well as Latin.

SPEAKER_03 1:14:06

And we can also point out that Matthew and Luke use Mark as a source, but they made very little changes to Mark's narrative when compared to the types of changes other ancient biographers made to their own sources. This would support the notion the gospel was considered authoritative, given how little was changed by the standards of the ancient time, and this would support the notion it came from Peter.

SPEAKER_07 1:14:25

This is begging the question that the authors of Matthew and Luke copied the author of Mark tells us nothing at all about whether these men knew each other, or even who each other were. In fact, these later gospels seem to want to replace Mark, not honor it.

SPEAKER_03 1:14:39

Within the Gospel of Mark, we find an interesting phenomenon. The Greek is sometimes worded strangely. This language is cleaned up by both Luke and Matthew. Some have argued this indicates Mark was a clumsy author, but this is unlikely, because Maurice Casey has pointed out, when we recreate Aramaic versions, the language of Mark makes more sense. We have found substantial and decisive evidence that parts of Mark's Gospel are literal translations of written Aramaic sources. The fact that Mark used Aramaic sources makes no sense on the hypothesis. He was creating a fictional account in Greek. But it is expected if the church tradition about the origin of Mark is correct, that he was relying on Peter, who spoke Aramaic and would have heard Jesus teach in Aramaic.

SPEAKER_07 1:15:17

Neither Mike nor I speak Aramaic or Greek, and as one reviewer wisely said, looking at Casey's reconstructions as a whole, we can conclude that they are not sufficiently reliable to be used by anyone not in a position to check them. That said, reviewers point out that retroverting whole passages into Aramaic requires immense guesswork, and Casey's translations contain unexplained inconsistencies, grammatical errors, such as pairing masculine verbs with feminine subjects, and incorrect verb forms. Charles Worth notes that an Aramaic source had the exact same capacity to be inaccurate and distorting as any later Greek redactor, though scholars seem to agree that bad Greek is just bad Greek.

SPEAKER_03 1:15:58

James Crossley strengthens this by pointing out Mark preserves accurate Jewish customs. Mark 7 refers to the Pharisees' washing rituals, which included the washing of cups, pots, copper vessels, and dining couches. This suggests Mark had access to intricate knowledge of Jewish legal thought.

SPEAKER_07 1:16:13

That's odd, because scholars argue that the author of Mark often misunderstands first century Judaism. In Mark 2, Jesus references David eating consecrated bread in the time of Abiyathar the high priest. But 1 Samuel 21 names the high priest as Ahimlik. Abiathar was his son. Mark 7 pauses to explain to his readers that the Pharisees and all the Jews washed their hands before eating. E. P. Sanders says most Jews didn't purify their hands before meals, adding that even among the Pharisees it was optional. Randall Macaw thinks the author confused the stricter practice of his own era. Sanders also argues the Sabbath dispute in Mark 3 wouldn't happen because speaking was allowed. And it seems unlikely that Jesus casually abolished Torah dietary laws in Mark 7 when Peter kept following them long after Jesus' death. Peter J.

SPEAKER_03 1:17:00

Williams notes Mark records a whole group of tax collectors was in Capernaum. This would be expected if one knew the area, as Capernaum was situated at a strategic point on the northern end of the Sea of Galilee, and an important location for collecting taxes on what crossed the border of Herod Antipas's territory. This is a minor detail, but a detail one would expect to find if Mark was working with eyewitnesses.

SPEAKER_07 1:17:22

That's strange, because New Testament legend Raymond Brown concludes that the author of Mark was a Greek speaker who was not an eyewitness of Jesus' ministry and made inexact statements about Palestinian geography. For example, Mark 731 has Jesus traveling from Tyre north through Sidon, then southeast to the Sea of Galilee. But you can't get there from here. Hugh Anderson compared it to traveling from Cornwall to London by way of Manchester. Mark also sets the story of the pigs running over a cliff into the water in Jirassa, which is more than 30 miles inland. Lest you suspect those are secretly correct, somehow we don't understand, the author of Matthew noticed these errors and quietly fixed them.

SPEAKER_03 1:18:00

Thus the writers show knowledge not only of this word's use by Jews at a particular time, but also of its development over time. The Gospel writers have the word exactly as it was pronounced in the first century, even though this is not the sort of knowledge any author could obtain simply by consulting books.

SPEAKER_07 1:18:16

Oh, because when Jesus cries out in Aramaic, Eloi Eloi, Lama Sabacthani, the author of Mark has characters mistaking this for calling for Elijah. But in Aramaic, Eloi sounds nothing like Elijah. The confusion is linguistically impossible. The author of Matthew once again catches and fixes Mark's error by switching to a different language.

SPEAKER_03 1:18:34

In the Gospels we see many names. But when we get to the Passion narrative in the synoptics, many of the individuals surrounding Jesus' arrest and trial are left unnamed. Seems to me that the narrative motive for this anonymity is not hard to guess, for both of them had run afoul of the police. Both these people were in danger in the aftermath. As long as the high priest slave was alive, and as long as the scar from the sword cut was visible, it would have been inopportune to mention names. It would not have been wise to identify them as members of the early Christian community. Their anonymity is for their protection, and the obscurity of their positive relationship with Jesus is a strategy of caution. Both the teller and the hearers know more about these two people. Only in Jerusalem was there reason to draw a cloak of anonymity over followers of Jesus, who had endangered themselves by their actions. The date could also be pinpointed. Parts of the Passion account would have to have been composed within the generation of the eyewitnesses and their contemporaries, that is, somewhere between 30 and 60 AD.

SPEAKER_07 1:19:30

It's a creative argument. It's also built almost entirely on silence. And other interpretations are equally or more plausible. Dennis MacDonald has argued at length that both the Swordsman and the Fleeing Youth are literary creations modeled on Homer's Odyssey, mirroring Odysseus cutting off Melanthius' ears, and the character Elpinor, who leaves his body behind. That makes it just an advertised classical illusion. Joel Marcus concludes that the anonymity fits Mark's consistent technique of what he calls strategic opacity, where characters throughout the Gospel act without explained motives, creating psychological depth. Rudolf Boltman traced what he called novelistic tendency in early Christian writing, where anonymous figures routinely acquired names as the tradition developed. Mark Goodacre shows the same pattern in John specifically, where naming anonymous characters and creating one-on-one dramatic encounters is just what the author of John does. There are innumerable reasons that characters in a text could be unnamed, so it's impossible to draw a firm dating conclusion based on one of many plausible interpretations.

SPEAKER_03 1:20:32

Richard Bachum points out Mark uses a literary device called Inclusio of Eyewitness. This is where one refers to their primary eyewitness source at the beginning and end. And Mark opens by referencing Peter and ends with a reference to Peter.

SPEAKER_07 1:20:45

Noticing a pattern doesn't tell you why it's there. Michael Koch says the inclusio does not prove that he was one of Mark's informants. An author prominently featuring a character at the start and the end of a narrative is just authoring.

SPEAKER_03 1:20:57

We see a similar technique in other biographies. Lucian in Life of Alexander has a reference in the beginning to someone named Rutilianus. He also frequently mentioned him throughout and at the end.

SPEAKER_07 1:21:07

Baccom's main example is Lucian's Alexander, which is a satirical hit piece. The figure supposedly functioning as the eyewitness bracket is Rutilianus, a guy Lucian depicts as a credulous fool. Baccom himself admits that arguing from a parody to the genre it's parodying is clearly somewhat hazardous.

SPEAKER_10 1:21:26

I am your father's brother's, nephews, cousins, former roommate.

SPEAKER_07 1:21:33

Joel Marcus points out that Mark is devoid of psychology or personal reminiscence of Peter, and that the Gospel of John's depiction of Peter, dropping his nets to follow Jesus, has much more humanity to the character. Marcus concludes that were it not for the late second century testimony of Papias, one would never suspect that the second gospel was particularly Petrine, making this a circular argument. Werner Kelber argues that Mark is the most anti-Petrine gospel in the canon. Peter is dense, cowardly, and wrong at almost every significant moment, making non-Peter influence a more plausible scenario.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:08

We also see Mark use a plural to singular narrative device. This is where a plural verb, without an explicit subject, is used, to describe the movement of Jesus and his disciples. But then it is followed immediately by a singular verb, or pronoun, referring to Jesus alone. It is most often used when Jesus and his disciples are moving from place to place. For example, Mark 121 says, And they went into Capernaum, and immediately on the Sabbath, he entered the synagogue and was teaching. Now, if Peter was reciting this to Mark, he would state it as, We came from Bethany, and he was hungry. Mark would then write the we as they, but retain the sense of the group moving as one. If Mark was getting his information from someone who moved around with Jesus, we would expect this plural to singular device.

SPEAKER_07 1:22:49

Joel Marcus catalogues undefined third-person plurals throughout the Gospel of Mark, like they brought a paralytic to Jesus when there is no they. It's an impersonal construction, the functional equivalent of a passive voice. And Cuthbert Turner himself, the scholar whose 1925 observations that Bacham is building upon, later acknowledged that many of Mark's indefinite plurals represent an Aramaic passive that Matthew and Luke routinely cleaned up for grammar when they had no specific subject to name. An eyewitness fingerprint that early readers treated as mistakes isn't much of a fingerprint.

SPEAKER_03 1:23:22

We find extra details that center around Peter's involvement, and he is spotlighted like no other disciple. We find him at times speaking on behalf of the group, as well as being addressed in place of the whole group. And we find a combination of both. When Peter is on the scene, his perspective is given more detail in comparison to the other disciples. In Mark 9, Peter's motives are disclosed to the reader, something Mark could only have known if he had heard this from Peter. In fact, after Jesus, Peter is the most frequently named person in Mark. As Backup says, Mark's gospel not only, by its use of the inclusio of eyewitness testimony, claims Peter as its main eyewitness source.

SPEAKER_07 1:23:58

This is a non-sequitur. As Raymond Brown notes, Peter was the most important figure in early Christianity. Paul's letters, written before any gospel existed, independently confirmed that Peter stood at the top of the movement. So of course, any early Christian narrative is going to feature him heavily. You'd expect the same prominence whether Peter was the source or whether the author had never met him. Joel Marcus notes, Mark isn't even the gospel that's kindest to Peter. Matthew has Peter walking on water. Matthew has Jesus calling him the rock upon which the church will be built. Luke gives a more affecting account of Peter's denial than Mark does. Bart Armin says Mark's Peter comes off as a bumbling foot-in-the-mouth and unfaithful follower of Jesus, called Satan by his own teacher, denying him three times, understanding almost nothing. Werner Killer argued that Mark systematically turns the inner circle into disgraced outsiders. If you want to argue Peter is just humble and really hard on himself, then you have no way to historically distinguish between enemy polemics and self-reporting. And so such an observation can hold no evidential weight.

SPEAKER_03 1:24:59

So Mark indicates throughout his gospel Peter was his main source. When Peter was not present for the crucifixion or the discovery of the empty tomb, Mark points to women and others as his sources for information.

SPEAKER_07 1:25:09

Dale Allison and Joel Marcus have flagged that the specific phrase Baccom leans on, the women looking on from a distance, is a quotation from Psalm 3811 in the Septuagint, those closest to me from a distance. The Gospel of Mark borrows liberally from the Psalms in the Hebrew Bible. Dennis MacDonald notes that in the Iliad, three women witness Hector's death and lead the lament, his mother, his wife Andromache, and Helen. Mark's three women at the cross match the structure, the number, and the function of the Trojan women in the most imitated literature of the day. MacDonald also notes the names in this chapter echo people who are no longer in Jesus' life. Father Joseph becomes Joseph Vermathea. Simon Peter is replaced with Simon of Cyrene, and so on. David Litwa emphasizes that ancient historians who had genuine eyewitness access used that status to authorize their account. If Mark had actually tracked down the named informants, if these women genuinely vouched for his passion narrative, you'd expect him to say so. What we get instead are hints and inferences that 20th century scholars have to reconstruct. John Dominic Crosson and many others observe the literary need for someone at the tomb when the disciples were all gone, and subvert another expectation. The named women arrive at the tomb expecting to anoint a corpse, which means they didn't believe Jesus' predictions about his own resurrection. Speculation that names indicate sources cannot be affirmed, but it sounds nice. In part 10, Mike wants to look at the reliability of Matthew.

SPEAKER_03 1:26:39

Several church fathers suggested Matthew was originally written in Hebrew or Aramaic. Additionally, our earliest witness, Papias, said, therefore Matthew put the sayings in an ordered arrangement in the Hebrew language, but each person interpreted them as best he could. The problem is the Greek version that we have of Matthew does not seem to have originally been in Hebrew or Aramaic. And our earliest witness seems to be talking about something else, a list of sayings that was originally in Hebrew. Evans and Craig Blomberg point to a 14th-century manuscript of Shem Tov ben Isaac, a rabbi who sought to refute Matthew's gospel point by point. But he was writing in Hebrew, and he preserved the text of Matthew's Gospel in Hebrew. It is conceivable it may preserve a few traces of an original Hebrew Matthew.

SPEAKER_07 1:27:21

It's conceivable? The Shem Tov Hebrew Matthew is a 14th-century text preserved inside a Spanish, Jewish, anti-Christian polemical treatise. Ulrich Luz concludes the text arrived at its form after a long process of transmission and does not represent an original version independent of the canonical Greek Matthew. And Mike Lacona affirms, most scholars remain unconvinced that it represents the Hebrew Gospel of Matthew mentioned by the Church Fathers. No, Jerome almost certainly got confused after seeing one of the Jewish Christian Gospel paragraphs. Phrases in Aramaic or Syriac circulating at the time, like the Gospel of the Nazarenes or the Gospel according to the Hebrews. Timothy Thornton has shown that Jerome likely realized his mistake, since in later writings he backed off from his original confident identification and wrote only that most people call the document the original Matthew. Paul Neper Christensen says this claim has to be rejected.

SPEAKER_03 1:28:21

Although it goes beyond anything we can demonstrate, it has been plausibly suggested that this first draft of Matthew was what scholars call Q. Then either Matthew himself or some other Greek-speaking Christian would have later incorporated into this first draft elements of Mark, along with more distinctive traditions, to create the Greek version of Matthew we now possess. This of course is speculative.

SPEAKER_07 1:28:41

This convoluted scenario is to salvage Papias saying, Matthew composed the Logia in the Hebrew language. But Craig Keener points out that Papias calls both Matthew and Mark Logia. So building a theory where one is a sayings document and the other is a narrative is unwarranted. And as for Q, if it existed at all, scholarly consensus is Q was composed in Greek, not Aramaic. Commentator Raymond Brown calls this whole idea explaining the unknown through more unknown. This is a lot of work to rescue a terrible source.

SPEAKER_03 1:29:10

Charles Coral says, if Peter was indeed the authority behind Mark's gospel, then it is not surprising that Matthew would utilize Mark. Peter was a member of the inner circle of disciples, often served as their leader, and emerged as the most prominent member of the twelve in the history of the early church.

SPEAKER_07 1:29:25

First, general reminder that Mark doesn't claim to be based on Peter. Second, J.C. Fenton looked at this directly and said, the changes which he makes in Mark's way of telling the story are not those of correction which an eyewitness might make in the account of one who is not an eyewitness. What Matthew actually does is correct Mark's scripture citations. Third, and this should end the argument, Matthew copies his own conversion story from Mark. It's the first day he personally met his Savior Jesus, and he lifts it word for word from someone who wasn't there, changing only the name Levi to Matthew. Nope.

SPEAKER_03 1:29:58

Although the fathers may have overstated the extent of the Semitic origin of Matthew, modern scholars sometimes exaggerate in their complete denial of the very possibility that even a portion or substratum of the gospel was first composed in Aramaic.

SPEAKER_07 1:30:10

That's where you're at, begging for mere possibility that a portion of substratum of the gospel was first composed in Aramaic. W.

SPEAKER_03 1:30:18

D. Davies and Dale Allison note the author of Matthew knew Hebrew and likely Aramaic.

SPEAKER_07 1:30:23

And that same book says, our gospel, however, is not written in translation Greek. Again, this same book observes most of the Matthewan Semitisms appear in the Septuagint, which makes it possible to ascribe them to conscious or unconscious imitation, and we can thereby support no strong conclusions. When the author of Mark preserved authentic Aramaic, the author of Matthew removed them systematically for Greek equivalents. His editorial choices go in the opposite direction of Mike's attempted salvage here.

SPEAKER_03 1:30:51

Another objection to Matthew authorship is the story of his conversion. Mark and Luke say the tax collector that Jesus called was named Levi, but Matthew takes the story from Mark and says it was actually Matthew. Richard Baucom says it's unlikely someone would have two Semitic personal names.

SPEAKER_07 1:31:07

That's not the big problem. The big problem is using the words of someone who wasn't there to describe the day you met God incarnate.

SPEAKER_03 1:31:14

The etymological sense of some of the second names indicates they were likely nicknames. The name Matthew means gift of God. Given that Jesus changed Simon's name to Cephas, and James and John were nicknamed the Sons of Thunder, it is likely Jesus outright changed the name of his disciple Levi to Matthew to signify a new identity and leaving his old one as a tax collector behind.

SPEAKER_07 1:31:33

The reason we know those are nicknames is because Mark tells us the stories of the nicknames and loves calling out labels like Simon the Zealot. If Mark knew Matthew was Levi, the call to Levi would have been an obvious place to make that connection, but he doesn't.

SPEAKER_03 1:32:00

And this is what we find when we read Matthew in comparison to Mark.

SPEAKER_07 1:32:03

Ah, but those so-called details and accuracy aren't the kind that require the author to be an eyewitness, just someone who understands Jewish culture better. As a typical example, in Mark, Jesus tells the disciples to pray that their apocalyptic flight not be in winter. Matthew adds, nor on a Sabbath, a natural concern for Torah observant Jews in any era. Speaking of heirs, Keener and others suggest Matthew's depiction of Pharisees seems to be a hyperbolic redaculad observum construct, more reflective of the post-70 environment rather than the pretemple destruction sensibilities.

SPEAKER_03 1:32:34

Garrett Thysen notes Mark uses a general term to refer to Herod Antipas. Matthew uses a more specific term for Herod, calling him a Tetrarch.

SPEAKER_07 1:32:42

The author fixed it in 14.1, but by verse 9, he was back to the less precise, the king was grieved. So I'm not sure what conclusion we should draw here.

SPEAKER_03 1:32:50

Jacob Newsner argues Jesus' statement in Matthew about cleaning the outside of the cup, but not the inside, is likely authentic, as it is evidence of Shamaite Pharisee purity laws that originated from prior to 70 AD, when the Shamaites had more control in Galilee. Matthew depicts Jesus speaking of the Pharisees on tithing their mint, Dil, and Kumen. This is probably authentic, because it reflects rabbinic practices.

SPEAKER_07 1:33:13

The problem is that the evidence for these supposed connections comes mostly from Jewish texts like the Mishnah and the Talmud, written much later. Scholars warn these texts reflect later rabbinic ideals, rather than be reliable snapshots of pre-70 Jewish society. The specific examples also do not hold up very well. The saying about cleaning cups was probably not originally aimed at the Pharisees at all, but was later adapted into an anti-Pharisee argument by Matthew's community. For the herb tithing example, later rabbinic sources do not actually match Matthew's details cleanly. Some of the herbs Matthew mentions were disputed or exempt from tithing in the traditions defenders appeal to. Rather than proving Matthew preserved highly precise historical memories from Jesus' lifetime, these passages more likely reflect the later conflicts between Jewish Christians and Pharisaic Judaism after the destruction of Jerusalem.

SPEAKER_03 1:33:58

Craig Keener notes Matthew adds a line to Mark's account on Jesus speaking about blasphemy of the Holy Spirit that is likely authentic. But if it is by the Spirit of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you. Keener notes this is in line with ancient Israelite anthropomorphic language, which equates the finger of God with God's Spirit. He says, early Christians had no other available source for the idea than Jesus himself.

SPEAKER_07 1:34:22

The parallel passage to this is Luke 11.20, where that author preserved what is likely in the Q source as finger of God, a direct echo of Moses' miracles in Egypt in Exodus 8.19, that the author of Matthew rewrote this to Spirit of God, to instead connect the saying to Isaiah 42.1, which he had just quoted, is a basic theological editorial choice, and tells us nothing about one or the other being an eyewitness.

SPEAKER_03 1:34:46

Michael Patrick Barber and Gert Thysen argue Matthew's description of Jesus speaking on clean and unclean foods is probably more accurate. They point out that Mark's commentary, thus he declared all foods clean, could be misconstrued to mean Jesus was abolishing kosher laws for Israelites. Matthew omits this line and does a better job at explaining what Jesus meant. This would be expected if Matthew was present for this exchange and could clarify what Jesus said.

SPEAKER_07 1:35:09

Scholars are not confused about what happened here. Matthew's community was Torah observant Jewish Christian, and Mark's wording was theologically radioactive for them. So Matthew weakens Jesus' message. No eyewitness presence required. This is the same thing Paul, Peter, and James fought about in Galatians, and the Mark version goes against Peter's position here. Odd if he was the source.

SPEAKER_03 1:35:30

Davies and Allison also point out that Mark says the robe stripped over Jesus was purple, whereas Matthew says it was a scarlet cloak. The two colors were very similar, and Mark's account can be understood as a generalization. But Matthew's version fits better with the garbs of Roman soldiers, and is deemed more historical by Davies and Allison.

SPEAKER_07 1:35:47

Purple was the color of royalty in the ancient world, and the point was ironic. They're mocking a would-be king with a king's color. Matthew changes it to scarlet, the standard color of a Roman soldier's cloak. This requires only someone familiar with Romans, not a specific witness. And the text explicitly says the disciples weren't there. So Matthew wasn't a witness to this anyhow.

SPEAKER_03 1:36:07

Proof to be sure is lacking, but one cannot overlook Galatians 1-2 as a possible witness to the very early circulation of something, very much like Matthew 16, 17-19. C.K. Bart has argued that 1 Corinthians 3.11 also shows Paul's knowledge of the gospel tradition about Peter. If Bart is right, at least the primitive character of an important portion of Matthew 16, 13-20 would be established.

SPEAKER_07 1:36:31

Matthew 16, 17 has Jesus tell Peter, flesh and bone has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven. Compare that to Galatians 1, 15 and 16, where Paul describes his own calling. God was pleased to reveal his son in me. This doesn't sound like eyewitness correction, but an author retconning Pauline resurrection theology into the Gospel narrative.

SPEAKER_03 1:36:49

Matthew has essentially taken a reliable biography of Jesus and enhanced it. Thus Michael Patrick Barber says, in fact, Matthew provides us with a more reliable portrait than Mark in certain places, is not merely possible, but probable.

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Assuming any of this is making the report more historically reliable is begging the question.

SPEAKER_03 1:37:07

Finally, within the gospel, we see indications it was written by a tax collector or someone who would have had expertise with coins from that time. Matthew talks more about coinage and monetary issues than any other gospel, which suggests the author had a special interest in this subject.

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The flagship financial figure in Matthew is the 10,000 talent debt in the parable of the unforgiving servant. Craig General at between 60 and 100 million denarii, more money than existed in circulation across Judea, Galilee, and the surrounding territories combined. Davies and Allison call this Matthew's oriental delight in large numbers. A professional accountant bringing his expertise to his writing would probably produce realistic numbers. Compare Matthew to Luke, where they cover parallel material. Luke uses minutes instead of talents, and features debts of 50 or 500 denarii. Ordinary household scale economics. Luke writes money in a way that maps onto real daily life. Matthew writes money in a way that maps onto theological abstraction. If you're looking for which gospel was written by someone who thought in financial terms, Luke fits the profile better. In part 11, Mike looks at the reliability of the Gospel of Luke.

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First, the unanimous attestation of the early church is that Luke wrote the gospel attributed to him, as well as the book of Acts. No one has ever ascribed the gospel or Acts to another author.

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We covered this much earlier in the video. The case against Luke is the lack of anyone attesting to it before AD 180, and we are entirely unimpressed with and unconcerned with attestations in the centuries that followed.

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The Moratorian fragment, which dates to around 150 AD, says, the third gospel book, that according to Luke, this physician Luke after Christ's ascension, since Paul had taken him with him as an expert in the way of the teaching, composed it in his own name according to his thinking.

SPEAKER_07 1:38:53

Scholars like A. C. Sunberg, Geoffrey Hanneman, and Claire Rothschild have demonstrated that the Muratorian fragment, language, spelling, theological concerns, and references are fourth century, not second century, as Mike suggests. Rothschild concludes it's a pseudopigraphon intended to retroject later opinions to an earlier time.

SPEAKER_03 1:39:11

And when we look at three letters attributed to Paul, we see he mentions someone named Luke was with him. In Colossians, it even says Luke is a physician. So the external evidence puts a physician named Luke in the company of Paul, and also confirms that Luke is the author of the gospel attributed to him.

SPEAKER_07 1:39:26

The beloved physician reference is in Colossians, and the vast majority of critical scholars thinks Colossians was not written by Paul, but rather appears to have been forged in Paul's name after his death. Raymond Brown suggests Steve Forger borrowed the supporting cast from Paul's authentic letters to Philemon to make the pseudonymous work look realistic. Paul's only undisputed reference to Luke is in Philemon, in a list of greetings. He's called a fellow worker, but nothing about being a Gentile or a physician, lending nothing to Mike's case here.

SPEAKER_03 1:39:54

It is unlikely the church made this tradition up. Leon Morris said, Luke was not, as far as we know, a person of such prominence in the early church as to have two such considerable volumes as these father onto him without reason. If people were guessing, would they not be much more likely to come up with an apostle?

SPEAKER_07 1:40:10

Just because a figure seems relatively obscure to modern readers does not mean they were considered insignificant in early Christian circles. The ancient church produced numerous books that were assigned to people about whom very little was known, like the apocryphal texts attributed to Philip, Thomas, Bartholomew, or Nicodemus. The obscurity might even make it easier. Attributing the gospel to Luke was de facto attributing it to Paul, something a disciple name would not do. Tertullian said this explicitly. Luke's narrative they usually attribute to Paul. It is permissible for the works, which disciples published, to be regarded as belonging to their masters. The we passages in Acts suggest the author traveled with Paul to Rome. So early Christians went to Paul's letters looking for a Gentile companion who fit, since the handful of names there, like Demas and Epaphras didn't work. Luke won by the process of elimination, and the forged physician detail was a bonus. But even if the books were written by a traveling companion of Paul, there's no reason to assume that person was someone named in a surviving letter. Paul knew other people.

SPEAKER_03 1:41:07

The Gospel opens with an interesting preface. It says he's writing to someone named Theophilus. Given that Theophilus, the dedicate, is named, he would have known who was writing to him. It's extremely unlikely Theophilus received an anonymous biography.

SPEAKER_07 1:41:20

The name Theophilus literally means beloved of God or lover of God. Scholars, including Bartherman, have noted this may be a symbolic address to the Christian community, the God lovers who are Luke's real audience, rather than a named historical person. Dennis MacDonald points out that it may be a literary choice modeled on the Aeneids' dedication to Augustus, the son of the divine, with Theophilus as a Christian parallel. If the addressee is a literary fiction, the argument has no anchor. But even if Theophilus was a real person who personally knew the author, that tells you something about the first recipients only. The famous second century physician and author Galen wrote about exactly this problem in On My Own Books. He had given texts to friends without formal titles, not intending them for publication. Later, when those texts circulated beyond his inner circle, no one knew what to call them.

SPEAKER_03 1:42:06

The preface is meant to indicate to Theophilus and others the historical nature of the whole work. Greg Sterling note, it is one of the most polished sentences in the New Testament. John Moles noted, the preface signals a conscious appropriation of the historical nature of works like that of Herodotus, Thucydides, and Polybius. In other words, Luke intended for his narrative to be read as any other Greek history and not as fiction.

SPEAKER_07 1:42:28

Luke's preface doesn't actually look like a classical historical preface. Love the Alexander did the most thorough study of Luke's prologue in the context of ancient Greek literature, and her conclusion was that comparing it to Herodotus or Thucydides is a misreading of the preface. Classical historians named themselves in the opening words. Thucydides of Athens has described the war. Luke names no one. Classical historians didn't dedicate their works to individual patrons. Thucydides said history was a possession for all time, not a letter to Theophilus. Alexander found that Luke's preface is much closer to the conventions of ancient scientific and technical manuals, medicine, mathematics, engineering, than to classical historiography, imitating Galen more so than Thucydides.

SPEAKER_03 1:43:08

Thus Luke employed lexical and semantic features that one would expect if he necessarily relied on eyewitness testimony. It is unlikely Luke would go through the trouble of carefully mimicking Greco-Roman historiographical work and use such powerful language if he was merely writing a fictional account, or did not honestly believe he was passing on accurate eyewitness testimony.

SPEAKER_07 1:43:27

After Thucydides set the standard of projecting methodological rigor, later writers borrowed the same rhetoric as a convention. Alexander calls it mere convention. Litwa makes the specific observation about Luke that his eyewitness claims are formulaic and not justified by precise details, no named witnesses, conflicting accounts, nor description of methodology. These are the gestures an educated ancient authors would include in a preface, regardless of whether he'd actually done the research. Litwa places Luke in a broader genre he calls mythic historiography, in which ancient authors used the tropes of historical accuracy to lend plausibility to narratives that included fantastical and theologically motivated elements. Richard Pervaux concludes, by our lights, Luke is better regarded as a creative author than as a historian.

SPEAKER_03 1:44:12

Some skeptics have argued that if Luke did rely on eyewitnesses, it is audi only mentions this in his preface and not throughout his gospel. But Peters notes Thucydides also appeared to only mention his sources and methods in his preface.

SPEAKER_07 1:44:23

Unlike the author of Luke, Thucydides named his methodology in detail and complained explicitly about the difficulty of reconciling conflicting eyewitness accounts, the accuracy of the report he wrote being always tried by the most severe and detailed tests possible.

SPEAKER_03 1:44:36

Luke Pitcher says one of the biggest problems we face is the fact that ancient historians concealed their sources within their narrative. So Luke was following the same pattern employed by other historians of his time.

SPEAKER_07 1:44:47

This so-called source concealment is far from universal convention, and Litwa notes that the function of unnamed eyewitnesses in ancient pseudopigrapha was to prevent falsification. You can't disprove an unnamed source. Philostratus's heroicus is one example.

SPEAKER_03 1:45:01

Some argue that Luke implied the written accounts that came before his were in error or inadequate. Since Mark was written before Luke, this could mean Luke was asserting he rejected the reliability of Mark. Since it is pretty clear Luke did use Mark as a source, he may not have rejected it outright, but merely thought it was missing important additional information that he obtained from other sources.

SPEAKER_07 1:45:19

The author of Luke is quick to correct Mark on theological matters and not mundane events, because Mark cares about theology, not history. For example, Jesus' death in Mark has him silent, abandoned, and despairing, and dies with the anguished cry, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Reflecting a theology in which suffering feels utterly devastating. Luke tweaks the language so that Jesus remains calm, compassionate, and fully in control, comforting others, forgiving his executioners, promising paradise to the repentant criminal, and peacefully entrusting his spirit to God at death. There's also what scholars call the Great Omission. Luke skips Mark 645 through 826 entirely, wiping out the walking on water, feeding of the 4,000, and the entire controversy over clean and unclean foods. But he saves this latter material for Acts 10 and 11, where he gives Peter the declaration about clean food, in direct contradiction of Paul's description of Peter's position in Galatians 2. There are so many strategic changes one could mention. But I should also point out that Mark's Jesus expected the end to arrive within a generation before the towns of Israel even heard the message. But that was problematic for the author of Luke, who was writing later, when the first generation was dying out. So Luke pushed the Parissa into the indefinite future and an open-ended mission to the Gentiles. The Gospel of Mark was a draft to be fixed and replaced with Luke's new version.

SPEAKER_03 1:46:40

We have good reason to believe the author of Luke was a traveling companion of Paul. In Acts 16, 10-17, something peculiar happens. We see the author refers to the apostles in third person before this point, but then he suddenly switches and starts saying we. Colin Hemmer noted, the use of we involves the claim to personal participation.

SPEAKER_07 1:46:58

The author of Acts contradicts Paul's own letters so thoroughly that close companion authorship is impossible on independent grounds. Acts says Paul went straight to Jerusalem after his conversion. Galatians says emphatically, under oath that he did not. Acts shows a Paul whose harmonious aligned with the Jerusalem apostles. Paul's letters show a Paul who publicly confronted Peter in Antioch and insisted his gospel came directly from Christ with no human mediation. At itinerary theology and conduct, Acts and Paul's authentic letters are in fundamental disagreement. Ehrman says the conclusion is hard to escape that Acts was probably not written by one of Paul's traveling companions. So what of these we passages? MacDonald's answer is that Paul's first we voyage from Troas to Thrace exactly mirrors Odysseus's departure from Troy to Thrace and Aeneas's flight from Troy to Thrace. All three narratives use first person plural for the same departure from the same region toward the same coastline. Homeric vocabulary is densest in Acts 27, the shipwrecked chapter, of any section of the book. I lean toward Aaron's suggestion that the we is a false eyewitness claim designed to authenticate the narrative. Ancient historians were criticized for not having personal experience of what they described. Polybius attacked Timaeus specifically because he does not write from the evidence of his eyes. An author could claim firsthand participation in Paul's journeys gained immediate credibility for his account.

SPEAKER_03 1:48:20

Colin Hammer went through the last 16 chapters of Acts, which are comprised mostly of Paul traveling around the Gentile world. He notes there is at least 84 facts in these chapters that are confirmed by archaeology and external sources. To give some examples, Luke notes the proper names of ports, local industries for various regions, the proper lines of borders, slang terminology, specific landmarks, local variations in languages, and the proper titles for local officials.

SPEAKER_07 1:48:45

Litwood documents the specific literary techniques ancient authors used to make their narratives look historically real, like mentioning known places, inserting named officials, and adding vivid circumstantial details. He calls it the myth of historicity, and it was common practice for historians, novelists, and mythic biographers alike. Samuel Bierscog makes the point that these seemingly ad hoc pieces of information provide, whether historically accurate or not, a realistic stamp. Local color is equally explained by a competent author as an eyewitness.

SPEAKER_03 1:49:14

Luke also has to cover the political landscape of Palestine, from Herod the Great, up until around 60 AD. But Luke easily navigated through this complicated mess where it would be easy to make a mistake. In telling the story of Jesus in the early church, he accurately depicts the complicated political changes, even though that was not his main focus. One does not obtain this kind of accuracy unless they were an eyewitness or were close with the eyewitnesses.

SPEAKER_07 1:49:38

Or Luke gets his details about the Herodian dynasty the same way we do by reading Josephus. Steve Mason did the systematic comparison. Luke links Judas the Galilean with the census of Corinius as a watershed event. He groups Judas, Theodus, and the Egyptian together as three notable rebel figures out of all the anonymous guerrillas of the period. He connects the Egyptian with the Sicarian with the desert. He characterizes the Pharisees. And Sadducees as philosophical schools. Josephus does the same in the same ways. At one point, Josephus reverses the order of the rebellions of Tudis and Judas the Galilean, and the author of Acts put that same mistake into the mouth of Gamelio. As Mason says, we cannot prove beyond a doubt that Luke knew the writings of Josephus. If he did not, however, we have a nearly incredible series of coincidences. Meanwhile, Mike would have us ignore historical problems in Luke, like placing the birth of Jesus simultaneously during the reign of Herod the Great, who died in 4 BCE, and during the census of Corinius, which happened ten years later in 6 CE.

SPEAKER_03 1:50:33

Albert Hochterp and Adalbert Deneau provided a comprehensive list of the available Semitisms throughout Luke Acts, and concluded Luke intentionally varied the Semitisms in his two books and infused them with the rhetorical aims of his prologue. This strengthens Luke's overall reliability and authenticity, to quote, with details of Semitic language and traditional backgrounds, Luke buttresses the point of authenticity and reliability of his gospel account about Jesus and his movement in early Jewish milieus of the first century CE.

SPEAKER_07 1:51:01

Fitzmeier did a careful linguistic analysis and concludes the so-called Semitic favor of Luke's material reflects Septuagint imitation, not Aramaic sources. Goulder reads the emphasis narrative as a Lucian composition, written in an artificial Septuagintalizing style to give a biblical feel. This is not unlike a modern screenwriter, using King James style phrasing to make something sound biblical.

SPEAKER_09 1:51:23

And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee.

SPEAKER_07 1:51:30

Earlier, Mike argued that the Greek in the Gospel of Mark was full of Aramaicisms, but Luke consistently removed the Aramaic transliterations and upgraded the grammar throughout, showing the author of Luke wasn't a passive transmitter of his source's stylistic character. When he chose to write in Septuagental Greek, it was a purely literary decision.

SPEAKER_03 1:51:50

Finally, another interesting aspect of Luke's Gospel is it contains more medical language than the other three Gospels. The church tradition is the author was a physician. If this is true, we should expect that he would have written in a way that would have subtly revealed knowledge of medical phrases and ideas. In the 19th century, W.K. Hobart documented numerous instances of medical terms throughout both works and used this to argue the author was a physician.

SPEAKER_07 1:52:12

Henry Cadbury decided to check this medical vocabulary claim and looked at where else those terms appeared. They showed up in Josephus, Lucian, Plutarch, and frequently in the Greek Septuagint. None of those authors were physicians. Cadbury concluded the style of Luke bears no more evidence of medical training and interest than does the language of other writers who were not physicians. Mainstream critical scholars across multiple generations confirm that Luke uses these terms no more frequently than any other educated writer of the period. Galen was the most prominent ancient physician writer, and he was explicit that he wrote in the writing of the clear, everyday language that ordinary people used, not jargon. So matching Galen just means matching language that non-medical professionals would also have come across. Humorously, Cadbury also showed that much of the supposed medical vocabulary in Luke Acts also appeared in ancient manuals for treating horses. Maybe the author was a veterinarian.

SPEAKER_03 1:53:07

Luke often adjusts Mark's wording to clarify the intensity of the medical description. Matthew and Mark only speak of a fever, but Luke made sure to emphasize that it was a high fever and used terminology similar to what we find in medical literature. It was common for physicians to distinguish between high and slight fevers, something Luke would have been aware of, whereas the other Gospels would not.

SPEAKER_07 1:53:26

Donald Alfred Hager's commentary notes this and flags it as perhaps in some tension with the notion of Luke being a physician. Physicians don't rebuke fevers. That's what exorcists do. The distinctive detail that Luke adds to this story is the one most inconsistent with medical thinking.

SPEAKER_03 1:53:43

In both of these accounts, Luke includes a reference to the length of illness, which was important for diagnosing someone in ancient medical literature. Wisenreiter says, the Lucan author's emphasis on the duration of an illness through the mention of an uncertain period of time, or a precise number of years, is striking in comparison with the virgins in the Gospels of Mark and Matthew. A statement of the duration of the illness, sometimes specifying a concrete number of years, is extremely relevant to the diagnosis of an illness in the Corpus Hippocraticum.

SPEAKER_07 1:54:09

Rudolf Boltman identified, noting how long people had been sick or that previous doctors had failed are standard features of Hellenistic miracle stories with no connection to the author's medical background. These were established literary devices for dramatizing a complaint.

SPEAKER_03 1:54:22

Comparing Luke to larger ancient corpus is not a fair comparison. Josephus and Plutarch wrote far more than the two books of Luke. The Septuagint is a far bigger corpus as well. The works of Lucian are less extensive. But Lucian was well educated and interested in medical subjects.

SPEAKER_07 1:54:38

If fever and paralysis appear in Luke more often than they do in Josephus, that means Luke's stories involve more sick people, which they do. Not that the author had clinical training. The argument is that these words were never clinical terminology to begin with. Baylor-More Cybok commentary notes that the medical vocabulary argument doesn't account for the fact that Luke also endeavors to use a correct professional terminology idiom in other spheres, including the legal system. Maybe the author was a doctor, a lawyer, and a veterinarian, or just an author educated across multiple domains. In part 12, Mike looks at the reliability of the Gospel of John.

SPEAKER_03 1:55:17

The first thing to note is the author directly claims to be an eyewitness. He records that the beloved disciple has witnessed these events. And in the last chapter, we read he is the one who has written these things.

SPEAKER_07 1:55:27

No, the text actually differentiates the writer from the eyewitness source. In John 21, 24, the author states concerning the beloved disciple, this is the disciple who is testifying to these things and has written them down. And we know that his testimony is true. This verse shifts from a third person, his testimony, to the first person plural, we, indicating that the author of the gospel is not the beloved disciple himself, but rather someone claiming to base his account on the disciple's testimony. And this is all from chapter 21, which many scholars recognize as an appendix added later. Hugo Mendez concludes that the author falsely positioned his gospel as an eyewitness account by inventing a nameless disciple of whom Jesus loved to validate the gospel's contents. And this wasn't unusual. David Litwin notes that introducing an eyewitness was a standard historiographical convention in antiquity, used to authenticate revisionary works that otherwise might have been questioned for their novelty in form and content.

SPEAKER_03 1:56:23

Colin Hammer lists eight elements of a reliable historian that were acknowledged in antiquity. But Craig Blomberg notes, six of them are employed in John's gospel. Eyewitness participation, eyewitness interview, limiting coverage to material to which the writer had privileged access, the prospect of checking details with contemporary documents, the use of sources for speeches, and the vigor of the concept of truth in history as it actually happened. If we recall what the Moratorian Fragment reports, it said there were others with John when he wrote, including the disciple Andrew. Interestingly enough, in line with this, the Gospel of John introduces Andrew, even before Peter, along with an unnamed disciple. So John appears to open by introducing himself and Andrew. The two main disciples the Meratorian Fragment says were present when the Gospel was composed.

SPEAKER_07 1:57:40

Dr. Mendez identifies the fragment's details as obvious embellishments in the tradition meant both to give John an apostolic imprimatur and to soften the apparent tensions between John and the other Gospels. This is a second century apologetic text doing damage control for two embarrassments: the Gospel's dramatic divergences from Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and the unexplained we voice. Richard Baccom, however, takes a different approach. Indeed, he does, because Baccom determined that the Moratorian author simply misread Papius, confusing elders with disciples, and picked Andrew because he was first in the list. The tradition is based on an error.

SPEAKER_03 1:58:14

We can see Jesus in John's Gospel is not wholly different from the Jesus in the Synoptics. Throughout the Synoptics, Jesus often spoke in aphorisms. Just because John reports that Jesus delivered long discourses, that doesn't mean short sayings are missing from John. We should also not think that just because Jesus spoke in parables and aphorisms, that doesn't mean he never gave long discourses.

SPEAKER_07 1:58:34

Nobody is arguing about speech length. The synoptics know how to record a long speech from Jesus. What they never record is Jesus giving long speeches about himself. In Matthew, the topic is the coming kingdom of God. But in John, the kingdom barely appears. And Jesus talks about almost nothing but himself. E. P. Sanders observes, Synoptic parables are built on simile. The kingdom is like a mustard seed. John's Jesus doesn't use similes. He isn't like a vine. He is the vine. And Bardarman asks, if Jesus really stood up and publicly claimed pre-existence, equality with God, and the ability to grant eternal life, why do none of these claims appear in Mark, Q, Matthew's special material, or Luke's four independent streams of perdition, all predating John, all completely silent on the most spectacular things Jesus supposedly ever said. Raymond Brown observes the theory of John supplementing the others is almost universally abandoned today, because the points of contact between John and the Synoptics create more chronological and historical problems than they solve.

SPEAKER_03 1:59:34

We also see a lack of evidence that John is using Mark as a written source, despite being aware of the Synoptic account. The fourth evangelist did not use Mark as a written source, at least not in the ways Matthew and Luke did. Otherwise, there would be at least several identical connections, rather than a broad similarity of some words, themes, and patterns.

SPEAKER_07 1:59:50

For most of Christian history, starting with Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, and Eusebius, they all assumed John wrote last, in full awareness of the other three Gospels, intentionally supplementing them. The independence argument is actually a 20th century development. Percival Gardner Smith kicked it off in 1938, C. H. Dodd expanded it in 1963, then Boltman and Raymond Brown signed on. And for a few decades, it became the dominant assumption for evangelicals. But scholars including Franz Neerink, Mark Goodacre, Stephen Hunt, Wendy North, James Barker, and Hugo Mendes have built a detail case that John knew all three Synoptic Gospels as written texts and was deliberately rewriting them. Even without slavishly copying the Synoptics, John preserves what Mark Goodacre calls diagnostic shards, precise verbal details too unlikely to arise independently. In The Feeding the 5000, both Mark and John specify the cost as 200 denarii. In the anointing story, both describe the perfume as costly ointment of pure nard, worth 300 denari. Matthew and Luke tell both stories and include neither figure. Goodacre notes these are the first appearances of those exact phrases in extant credited Greek literature. John preserved both of them across two separate episodes. When Matthew or Luke revised Mark, they made traceable editorial choices, small fingerprints. Mark calls Joseph of Arimathea a respected member of the council. Matthew specifically rewrites this to a disciple of Jesus. John also calls him a disciple of Jesus, with no trace of Mark's first. Mark says the burial tomb was cut from rock. Matthew adds it was his own new tomb. Luke adds it was where no one had ever been laid. John combines both editions into a new tomb in which no one has ever been laid, explaining that as independent oral tradition requires three simultaneous coincidences stacked together. Mark's Judas betrayal account has no theological commentary. Luke adds, Satan entered into Judas. John has Satan entered into him. Luke's edition, absent from Mark, presented in John. John also leaves gaps that make sense only if readers already knew the synoptic story. In John 3.24, the narrator notes that John had not yet been put in prison, even though John never narrates the Baptist's arrest. In John 11:1-2, Mary of Bethany is identified as the woman who anointed Jesus and wiped his feet with her hair. But the foot wiping detail comes from Luke 7.38. John's own anointing scene doesn't appear until the next chapter, and it doesn't quite match. Then John 6.1 opens with Jesus crossing to the other side of the Sea of Galilee, even though the entire preceding chapter was set in Jerusalem. The simplest explanation is that John was presupposing the Markin sequence, where Jesus was already in Galilee. Alongside Mark, it makes sense. On its own, it's an error. This is just scratching the surface. And you should check out the books like Mark Gudaker's The Fourth Synoptic Gospel and Higo Mendes's The Gospel of John, a new history for the full, overwhelming case that would take a whole series of videos to unpack. Suffice to say, the author of John undoubtedly knew Matthew, Mark, and Luke well enough to both echo and transform their editorial choices. And in no meaningful way could the Gospel of John be considered independent.

SPEAKER_03 2:02:51

The odds of a later author who didn't have intimate knowledge of Jesus' ministry or the geography, obtaining this level of factual information is extremely unlikely. An empirical reference is made to the smell of the perfume filling the room, and statements are made about perceptions, wrong ones, of Judas's intentions and actions. The particulars of the woman performing the anointing are known to the narrator. The Johannan presentation of the anointing of Jesus bears a remarkable degree of historical plausibility.

SPEAKER_07 2:03:16

What they prove is that the author of John was a skilled writer who knew how to make narrative feel credible. Samuel Byerscog observes seemingly ad hoc pieces of information within passages provide, whether historically accurate or not, a realistic stamp. Mendez shows that many of John's specific details might have been inserted strategically as varisimilitudes, giving the impression of historical reminiscence. And most of these details are unfalsifiable. Was it a charcoal fire or a wood fire? Were the loaves barley or wheat? Were the disciples 25 stadia from shore or 30? You can't check. Any exercise of fiction can supply what seem to be concrete particulars. Accurate geography doesn't require eyewitness presence. WG Davy surveyed John's geographical content and concluded that most details could have been gleaned from a thorough knowledge of the scriptures and the synoptic traditions. Mendez lists more alternatives like lost written sources, oral traditions, diaspora contacts, travel reports, or refugees from Palestine. The author of John was a wide and eclectic reader, operating in a highly connected ancient world. Raymond Brown argues, this does not mean that the Joanine information about Jesus has been verified, but at least the setting in which Jesus is placed is authentic. Even Richard Bacham, whose case for eyewitness sources behind the Gospels Mike leans most heavily upon, says explicitly that vivid detail has no probative force, for or against, in an argument about eyewitness testimony. Josephus mentions both figures and notes that Annas had five sons who became high priests and one son-in-law. But Josephus never identifies that son-in-law as Caiaphas. As C.K. Barrett notes, for this statement we have no authority other than John's. The claim may be true, but one document asserting something is not the same as verified historical accuracy.

SPEAKER_03 2:05:15

The breaking of crucified victims' legs is also likely historical, given we've discovered the remains of a crucified victim in Judea who had one leg fractured and the other smashed into pieces.

SPEAKER_07 2:05:24

In 1968, the remains of a crucified man was found near Jerusalem. The original examiner, Nico Haas, concluded that both legs had been intentionally broken, and this is the claim Mike is repeating here. The problem is that later reappraisal by Joseph Sayas and Eliezer Sekolis determined the breaks were post-mortem. Even pro-reliability scholar Craig Keener acknowledges more recent investigation allows that his legs may have been broken during burial.

SPEAKER_03 2:05:49

After the resurrection, we see John agrees with the synoptics that the empty tomb was discovered by women. But John reports that Mary exclaimed teacher. Later Christians would probably have used a more lofty title.

SPEAKER_07 2:05:59

Throughout John's gospel, rabbi and teacher mark an incomplete understanding of Jesus. Mary's use of the title signals she is clinging to a pre-resurrection relationship. The resurrection has already superseded. John 20 then ends with Thomas declaring, My Lord and my God, the highest Christological confession in any of our four Gospels. The Ark from Rabbi to my Lord and my God is a deliberate theological architecture. John places the humble title at the start of the chapter, so the confession at the end lands harder.

SPEAKER_03 2:06:26

Finally, in John 21, John uses a specific word for cooked fish that no other New Testament author uses. John uses it five times throughout his gospel, and John A.T. Robinson noted that this word is a distinctive name for cooked fish, in which the trade would have been conducted. This shows familiarity with the fishing business, which is something we would expect given John 21 indicates the author was familiar with this line of work.

SPEAKER_07 2:06:49

In John 6, Opsarion refers to preserved fish, which matches its classical meaning. But in John 21, the same author uses it for freshly caught fish still sitting in the net. If this was carefully deployed professional vocabulary, you'd expect it to mean the same thing. Raymond Brown noticed this and concluded the two chapters were probably written by two different people, which is actually the near universal position in critical scholarship. John 21 is almost certainly a later edition by a redactor, not the original evangelist. And even setting all that aside, obsterian was just a normal Hellenistic Greek word for a side dish of fish. It is not specific trade jargon. Finally, at part 13, Mike has a classic keynote style, just one more thing.

SPEAKER_03 2:07:36

This video is the final chapter in a series on gospel reliability. We did it. Benny highlight differences between the gospels, just say they contradict, and then argue this is evidence not to trust them. But Anderson notes we cannot ignore the high amount of agreement between them. He lists 31 places where all four Gospels agree on aspects of Jesus' ministry. Given the criteria of multiple attestation, this should support the reliability of these events of Jesus' ministry.

SPEAKER_07 2:08:00

No, given that we've shown that Matthew, Luke, and John are all literarily dependent on Mark, John is dependent on Matthew and Luke as well, and Matthew and Luke borrowing from each other or a Q source, what you have here is collusion, not corroboration.

SPEAKER_03 2:08:14

These are a single source, and I can't believe it's taken me all this time to play it, but adding to this, the Gospels also confirm each other in unexpected ways, which are called undesigned coincidences. This is an older argument for gospel reliability that has recently resurfaced. They are defined as a notable connection between two or more accounts, or texts, that doesn't seem to have been planned by the person or people giving the accounts. Despite their apparent independence, the items fit together like pieces of puzzles.

SPEAKER_07 2:08:42

The undesigned coincidences argument requires that the gospel authors wrote independently of each other. They didn't, as is both the scholarly consensus and demonstrated repeatedly throughout this video. This detail alone makes this entire line of argument fail. But let's be generous and assume that some so-called undesigned coincidence examples survive all of this. What would they actually prove? At best, the two authors drew from the same underlying source. That's it. Not that the source was true. An oral tradition circulating for decades among the Christian communities could develop complementary details without any of those details connecting to real events. A shared legendary source would produce interlocking accounts just as easily as shared eyewitness memory. Lily McGrew and other advocates apply no consistent methodology for deciding what counts as a coincidence versus what counts as deliberate design, and she ignores the cases where the accounts flatly contradict each other. In the feeding the 5000, Mark sets the event in a remote, desolate place. Luke explicitly puts it near the town of Aseda. These two accounts can't both be right, and the contradiction is exactly the kind of thing the undesigned coincidences argument predicts should not exist if the Gospels are fitting together like a puzzle from real eyewitnesses. It's worth noting that Christian scholar Vincent Torley went through McGrew's list of 47 alleged undesigned coincidences and found that only one of them has anything to do with the resurrection. Even if it meant anything at all, the undesigned coincidences hypothesis lends virtually nothing to the central claim of Christianity.

SPEAKER_03 2:10:11

It is important to note, undesigned coincidences can only strengthen the reliability of the Gospels. Some have placed too much emphasis on them in attempting to demonstrate the Bible is true. This is the most correct thing, said this whole six-hour video. We believe they are useful, but only as part of a cumulative case for gospel reliability. A good place to start is something we find in Luke and John. Luke tells us that at the Last Supper, a dispute arose among them as to which of them was to be regarded as the greatest. Jesus ends the dispute by saying, Let the greatest among you become as the youngest, and the leader as one who serves. For who is the greater, one who reclines at table or one who serves? Is it not the one who reclines at table, but I'm among you as the one who serves. Jesus doesn't do any serving in this passage, but John's account of the Last Supper adds context to make better sense of this, because he tells us Jesus dressed as a servant and watched the feet of the disciples. This would explain why Jesus uttered what he said in Luke. An author provides details in one account that adds context to another account, allowing the story to make more sense.

SPEAKER_07 2:11:10

Except the author of John knew the book of Luke. Hugo Mendez's 2025 study shows John presupposes Lucan characters and events he never bothers introducing, because he expected readers to already know them from Luke. Rudolf Boltmann, Michael Goulder, Dennis MacDonald, and Harold Atridge all agree the Johannine Last Supper dramatizes the Lucan saying. He dropped the embarrassing squabble and replaced it with footwashing. Conservative apologist Mike Lacona concedes that Luke probably lifted the whole dispute from Mark 10, where it happens a week earlier in a completely different context, and relocated it to the Last Supper. If Luke moved the scene, it wasn't historically at the supper. And if it wasn't historically there, it can't be the real explanation for the foot washing.

SPEAKER_03 2:12:00

Says to the crowds, I find no guilt in this man. But didn't Jesus just admit to the charge? Why would Pilate find no guilt with him? So something is either wrong or missing. Luckily, John adds context. Pilate brings Jesus in and asks him, Are you the king of the Jews? And Jesus replies, My kingdom is none of this world. So his kingdom is a spiritual kingdom, which would not be a threat to Caesar, and why Pilate should find no guilt in him. This shows us nothing Luke says is incorrect, but John gives the context for it to make sense. But not only does John add context for Luke, Luke adds context for John. Because John doesn't give us the accusation from the Jews that Jesus claimed to be a king, which explains why Pilate would even ask Jesus if he was the king of the Jews. So both accounts support each other. Luke gives us the accusation, and John gives us the answer from Jesus as to why he was innocent.

SPEAKER_07 2:12:49

This is a great example of John being literarily dependent on Luke. Mark Goodacre showed that Pilate's threefold confession of finding no case against Jesus is a signature Lucan literary move. Luke uses that exact forensic finding language six times in his gospel and six more times in Acts, including Paul's trials before Roman officials. It's how Luke consistently portrays Roman officials as failing to find grounds to condemn Christians. John reproduces the same threefold structure here, while Mark and Matthew don't use it at all. And John's dialogue creates more contradictions than it fills in. Matthew, Mark, and Luke all say that Jesus answered once and then said nothing else, leaving Pilate baffled. John reverses that entirely. The silent accused becomes a philosopher, delivering speeches about truth and otherworldly kingdoms. These are incompatible. If this narrative portrays an accurate event, Bible scholars note that it is highly improbable that any of Jesus' disciples would have had access to a private interrogation between the Roman prefect and Jesus, let alone multiple disciples there, able to provide color commentary for the other. Lycona concedes that the author of John likely just knew the very basic gist of the trial and creatively reconstructed the dialogue with literary artistry.

SPEAKER_03 2:14:03

John also doesn't tell us the feeding of the 5,000 happened in Besseida, but in this account, Jesus asked Philip where they could buy bread for the people. Earlier in John, we see that Philip was from Bethsaida. So Luke also explains the existence of this question in John. Jesus asked Philip because he was from the region, which John doesn't connect in the actual passage of the feeding of the 5,000.

SPEAKER_07 2:14:24

Yet another problematic example. The first written version of the story cannot be in Bethsaida, because in Mark 6.45, immediately following the miracle, they get into a boat to go to Bethsaida. Luke relocated the event to Bethsaida, which created a problem he didn't fully clean up. His disciples asked Jesus to send the crowd to the surrounding villages for food because they're in a desolate place. Except in Luke, they're in a city. Mark Goodaker calls this editorial fatigue. Luke moved the story but forgot to update all the language. John followed Luke's relocated version, and John is the only gospel writer who expanded Philip into a recurring character with actual speaking parts. Harrier suspects John simply invented the idea that Philip lived in Bethsaida so he could cast him into a locally relevant role.

SPEAKER_03 2:15:05

Another aspect of this miracle is that Mark specifically mentions that Jesus commanded the people to sit down on green grass. This is odd because the grass isn't often green in the land of Israel. But Peter J. Williams notes it is green in the spring after the winter rains fall. John accounts for why Mark says the grass was green, because he says this miracle occurred when the Passover was at hand.

SPEAKER_07 2:15:25

Dale Allison and Joel Marcus have argued this is more Hebrew Bible illusion and typography than weather report. Mark 6.34 compares the crowd to sheep without a shepherd. Jesus then, as the good shepherd, makes the flock lie down on the green grass. That's Psalm 23, deliberately invoked.

SPEAKER_03 2:15:41

Williams also notes that John 6.9 informs us that the loaves Jesus multiplied were barley loaves, which aligns with this immediately following the barley harvest, which occurred around Passover.

SPEAKER_07 2:15:51

That's 2 Kings 4, where Elisha feeds a hundred men with 20 barley loaves. John's Jesus feeds 5,000 with 5. John specified barley loaves to amplify the Elisha typography, not because someone remembered what kind of bread was in the basket.

SPEAKER_03 2:16:05

Mark says they sat down in groups of hundreds and fifties, which would have made them easier to count. But John doesn't mention this detail, but adds that it was specifically the men who sat down. So John explains this detail in Mark, which in turn explains how the other gospel authors knew the rough estimate of men.

SPEAKER_07 2:16:20

Except Mark already told us those who ate were 5,000 men, using the Greek word Andres, which means adult males. All four Gospels use it. John didn't need Mark's seating chart to figure this out. He inherited the 5,000 Andras from the tradition. And those groups of hundreds and fifties echo Moses organizing Israel in the desert in Exodus 18, suggesting Mark is portraying Jesus as new Moses. Several other examples were given, but you get the idea. I'd encourage anyone interested to check out the book The Hypothesis of Undesigned Coincidences, a critical review, by friend of the channel, Michael Alter.

SPEAKER_03 2:16:54

Now some object and argue undesigned coincidences cannot prove the truth of the stories or that the miracles actually occurred. And we must agree. No one should argue undesigned coincidences prove the feeding of the 5,000 occurred. The philosopher Lydia McGrew says in her book on this topic, I do not want to be misconstrued as saying something quite so simple as we can see from undesigned coincidences that the Gospels are historically reliable, therefore they are reliable when they recount miracles, as well as when they give non-miraculous facts. Therefore, probably all these miracles happened. Or, therefore, these events probably happened. So undesigned coincidences should only be used to support the reliability and earliness of the accounts, not that they necessarily are true. One must use an historical case for the resurrection of Jesus to get to that step, in which the reliability of the gospels inevitably aids. And when we survey many undesigned coincidences, we can conclude they support the overall reliability of the gospels. This is on top of all the other data that confirms the reliability of the gospels. When we go through the evidence piece by piece, there is no reason to deny the conclusion that the gospels are reliable accounts of who Jesus is.

SPEAKER_07 2:17:58

I don't know. We just spent a long time going through the evidence piece by piece, and I believe I've given plenty of reasons to deny the conclusion that the Gospels are reliable accounts.

SPEAKER_03 2:18:07

The reasonable conclusion to draw from this data is that when we read the Gospels, we are reading history, not mythology.

SPEAKER_07 2:18:13

The only way to come to this conclusion is to start with this conclusion, as Mike told us he does during his introduction, and repeated exhortations to read the sources with maximum credulity. The Gospels are in fact eyewitness accounts. They are not. They are written by Greek-speaking men who never met Jesus, or likely even met anyone who met Jesus. They are works of evangelistic propaganda that drew upon decades of evolving oral tradition, which may have held some small kernels of truth, allusions to the Hebrew Bible, both technical and subject matter influence from their training in Greek composition, and a sprinkling of invention and correction to address specific arguments of the day to overcome barriers to conversion. Wait. Mike said part thirteen was the final part. Why is there a part fourteen?

SPEAKER_03 2:19:00

The Gospel of John ends with. But this is not really the ending of John. This is the last verse of chapter 20. There is a whole chapter after this. But this passage we read sounds like a fitting end of the Gospel. Because of this, many have argued John 21 was added on by a later scribe to solve issues in the church after the Gospel author had passed.

SPEAKER_07 2:19:31

You've actually heard me reference this a few times already. The well-accepted notion that John 21 looks like an appendix after the natural ending with John 20. Mike would agree with a lot of the observations that make scholars think it was added later.

SPEAKER_03 2:19:46

So we can agree that John 20, 31 is the ending of the main body, whereas the final chapter is an epilogue.

SPEAKER_07 2:19:52

But in order to salvage his gospel reliability narrative, he has to advocate that it was definitely the same author adding an addendum.

SPEAKER_03 2:20:01

It is not necessary to presume they had to come from a later scribe. John himself may have thought these points were important to include to dispel rumors in his day, which was the late first century. There is nothing in chapter 21 which necessarily has to be attributed to a later scribe.

SPEAKER_07 2:20:16

Scholars with less of a maximal agenda entertain the ending came from the community around John, but not the disciple himself.

SPEAKER_09 2:20:23

Now, maybe the clearest one in the Gospels is John. And what do you do with this verse? Chapter 21 is often said to be a Johannine appendix written by his community in Ephesus to say it's a stamp of approval on the rest of the gospel.

SPEAKER_07 2:20:41

But I think either answer is bad for John being an eyewitness account, since that's where the confusing, we know that his testimony is true passages. If the main author wrote it, the main author isn't an eyewitness. If a later forger wrote it, we have more evidence of tampering. I'm indifferent at this point, so we can move on. Speaking of extra endings, Mike has added on one more.

SPEAKER_03 2:21:07

MacDonald claims that Mark directly imitated parts of the Odyssey and Iliad. Luke built on this and imitated more throughout his works. As noted, this was intentional. MacDonald's view is these New Testament authors were purposely reworking Homer to create fictional accounts of Jesus.

SPEAKER_07 2:21:22

Again, you've heard me mention this kind of influence a few times in this video, but there's obviously a spectrum of possibilities here.

SPEAKER_01 2:21:40

That is not to say that what Josephus writes is inaccurate. It is about certain things where there's Homeric flavoring. It's just to say that he has arranged it in a certain way that readers could say, ah, you know, this is kind of similar to Homer here. And it's possible, I would think, that Mark did something similar and that there is some Homeric flavoring there, but that doesn't mean the stories were invented. And Mike himself seems to concede the observations of Homeric influence.

SPEAKER_03 2:22:11

To be clear, we're not saying there was no influence from Homer on the New Testament. Homer saturated the culture of the ancient world, and it would be hard to find any text that didn't have some influence from Homer, merely from the fact that his epics greatly shaped the culture of that day.

SPEAKER_07 2:22:24

While I'm not dogmatic about the extent to which one can conclude how much of the gospels are invented, the obvious influence of fiction tropes can't help the case that the gospel authors were concerned primarily with preserving unembellished history. Mike has put up a valiant effort to throw mass quantities of spaghetti at the wall to propose potential escapes for why one can continue to cling to gospel reliability even in the face of hundreds of scholarly observations that go against such a notion. I've attempted a speed run to show that these escape hatches are flawed or unsatisfactory to various degrees. To be clear, this wasn't my personal positive case for the non-reliability of the gospels. That would be a different video.

SPEAKER_03 2:23:07

I'm specifically responding to Mike's points because On my channel I just did a 15-part series on the reliability of the Gospels, and atheists have not really given me a lot of answers to that. How the amazing evidence supporting the gospels.

SPEAKER_07 2:23:20

Mike has been clear that his starting point is to assume that the gospels are accurate until someone can convince him they're not. One can make that choice. But if you are instead going to start from a neutral position, that the gospels have the burden of proof to demonstrate that they are reliable, then nothing that has happened in Mike's six-hour video is likely to meet this very basic burden for you. This should be infinitely simple for the all-knowing, all-powerful God of the universe, trying to convey the most important message that he could possibly convey. Instead, we have documents that bear all the markings of Greek-speaking men who never met Jesus, or likely even met anyone who met Jesus, writing evangelistic propaganda, drawing upon decades of evolving oral traditions, manufactured allusions to the Hebrew Bible, influenced by the style and content of Greek compositions, attempting to address the specific arguments of their day, all in an effort to win converts, not record history. To paraphrase Captain Kirk, what does God need with a six-hour defense of his reliability? Thanks for watching. That was a lot of effort, and it definitely put a pause on my other video creation and my writing project. So if you appreciate, please leave a super thanks, or perhaps consider the links in the description to become a one-time donor, or even a recurring member or patron of the channel. Support from people like you is the only reason I can do what I do, so thank you. In the meantime, please tap on the thumbnail on screen now for more of a former Christian taking look at the claims of Christians, and I'll see you over there. Until next time. Later.