This is the continuation of a series on “The Case for Christ” by Lee Strobel. If you missed them, here are the other parts in the series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3a and Part 3b.
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When I left off last time, Lee Strobel was having what he might say was a well-reasoned and critical look at the gospels as part of a discussion with Christian apologist Craig Blomberg. In the opening pages of Chapter 2, Strobel is asking Blomberg about various elements surrounding the validity of the New Testament gospel writers, and Blomberg claimed that the authors intended to portray events as they happened (See here for my refutation of pages 39-40).
In the rest of the chapter, Strobel and Blomberg subject the gospel writers to numerous “tests,” including ability, character, consistency, bias, etc. In the ability section, Strobel questioned Blomberg on the writers’ ability to accurately relay information by word of mouth a good 30 years or more after the events of the life of Jesus took place. Blomberg noted that in Old Testament times, priests were well known to have committed the entire Jewish scriptures to memory, much like the hafiz in Islam.
Here’s Blomberg:
Books — or actually, scrolls of papyrus — were relatively rare. Therefore education, learning, worship, teaching in religious communities — all this was done by word of mouth. … it would have been well within the capacity of Jesus’ disciples to have committed much more to memory than appears in all four gospels put together — and to have passed it along accurately.
Of course, Blomberg is making pure conjecture here about the gospel writers’ strength of memory, but in any case, his argument is actually strengthened if the gospels were passed down by oral tradition and not written down because at least then, we would not be able to piece together the puzzle of how these documents came to be grouped together as the New Testament gospels. They would simply stand apart as a collection of memories from some people named Matthew, Mark, Luke and John who managed to relay a remarkably cohesive narrative, even if we concede some errors in consistency. Minor flaws in the details, apologists will say, is to absolutely be expected if the gospel writers were working from memory. As we will see, however, a greater case can be made that the gospels were based on earlier works.
This article provides a wealth of examples suggesting that at least some ordinary people could read and write in Jesus’ day. Established estimates put the literacy figure at about 3 percent in first-century Palestine under Roman rule. As one example, the article points to the parable of the shrewd manager:
A deed of debt, dated 55–56 A.D., was discovered among the Second Revolt documents and may be an example of the debt notes Jesus referred to in the parable of the Shrewd Manager; in the parable, the manager instructs his master’s debtor, “Take your bill, sit down quickly and write half the amount.” It is taken for granted that an ordinary man would be able to write out a numerical sum.
In others examples, excavations have uncovered ossuaries with writing from family members of dead relatives, along with numerous potsherds with inscriptions in the Masada area:
While most materials that were written on—leather, papyrus and ossuaries—were expensive, one writing material was free and readily available: the potsherd. Ancient crockery was usually simple earthenware (terracotta), which broke easily. Pieces lay scattered in the streets and courtyards of towns and villages—free scrap paper. You could scribble a note on a suitable sherd, then throw it away once you were finished. A Hebrew alphabet found on a potsherd at Qumran is a good specimen of a pupil’s attempt at learning his letters.
Many inscribed potsherds, called ostraca, were found in the excavations at Masada and were left by the Jewish rebels who held out against the Romans until 73 A.D., three years after the Romans destroyed the Jerusalem Temple.
And then we have the case of the writer, Luke, who said in his opening that
Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word.
While the Q document is lost to antiquity, numerous biblical scholars — not to be confused with the kind of biblical apologists Strobel “interviews” for his book — believe that similar content in Matthew and Luke were derived from the earlier text, Q ((Christoph Heil & Jozef Verheyden (Ed.) The Sayings Gospel Q: collected essays, Vol. 189 of Bibliotheca Ephemeridum theologicarum Lovaniensium, Peeters Publishers Pub., 2005 pp. 163 – 164)), while Helmut Koester, Ron Cameron and John Dominic Crossan have argued that Mark was a later version of an earlier work known as Secret Mark ((D. Crossan, Four Other Gospels: Shadows on the Contours of Canon, Minneapolis, 1985, p. 108.))
And M. Bar-Ilan, a Jewish scholar at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, has argued that because reading and writing was less essential in Jesus’ time than today, and while 3 percent may seem like a low figure to modern people, that’s not the case if we consider society at the time:
Literacy data from all over the world show the relationship and dependence between farmers (or the state of agriculture), and literacy. This tie has been found in various peoples and in the course of time. The data ‘create’ a world-wide rule.
The other facet of this dependence is population growth, urbanization and infant mortality that apparently go hand in hand with literacy. This connection enables the student of societies in the past to deal with the problem of literacy whenever the direct evidence is not available. This study offers a method to analyze processes that took place in a specific society so that the literacy rate may be derived.
Comparative data show that under Roman rule the Jewish literacy rate improved in the Land of Israel. However, rabbinic sources support evidence that the literacy rate was less than 3%. This literacy rate, a small fraction of the society, though low by modern standards, was not low at all if one takes into account the needs of a traditional society in the past.
Further, are we to believe that out of the 1.5 million-3 million people estimated to have been living in Palestine at the time, not even a few Christians in first century Palestine were literate enough to be able to pen the gospel narratives? While illiteracy does not necessary correlate with inaccuracy, but if I were going to trust a writer, I would certainly want he or she to have some farthing of journalistic ability in being able to give a detailed, error free account of what happened, rather than the fragmented and sophomoric tales before us. Thus, by attempting to argue that the gospels were handed down by an oral tradition, apologists essentially let these writers off the hook, as it were, in expecting them to provide a true historical record of the events.
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Strobel’s short and largely irrelevant next section, titled “The Character Test,” questions whether the gospel writers were of sound moral rectitude. Since they claimed to be followers of Jesus, who again, claimed to have a monopoly on all that is good and loving in the world, I think it’s safe to say the gospel writers certainly thought of themselves as moral people. Of course, those of us who cringe at the noxious and immoral notion of vicarious redemption, that it’s right and just to heap a load of debt on an innocent scapegoat, might cast the writers in a different light.
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The next session of Chapter 2 deals with the consistency of the writers, which I mentioned already, but will again address briefly. Blomberg gives the writers a pass of sorts by claiming that they provided an “extremely consistent” narrative
by ancient standards, which are the only standards by which it’s fair to judge them.
By ancient standards? Why is this the only standard by which we should judge whoever wrote Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? Their very anonymity is a problem. But the bigger problem is that the Bible claims to be the unalterable, inspired one and only written transmission from the almighty God of all heaven and earth. I think their standard of judgment should be a few ticks higher than the run-of-the-mill Josephus or other Jewish historian of the day.
Blomberg also argues that if the gospels were “too consistent” they would be invalidated because then it would look like the authors were just copying each other. First, where is the rule that says we had to have more than one author to tell the story of Jesus? Why couldn’t God have simply chosen one person, let’s call him Jesus — since he’s also God, we know for sure he’s literate — to write the gospels and the rest of the New Testament? Surely, he, of all people, could get the facts straight. Why not have Jesus be born and grow into an adult and receive the revelation from God, which would have contained all the information God wanted humanity to know and which we would come to know as the New Testament. Already we know about wide gaps in the life of Jesus. Certainly he would have had time to write his own story before the cross.
Rather, for reasons that escapes comprehension, God entrusts his one and only writing to mankind to humans, who, in his (God) mind, have already proven themselves untrustworthy in the Garden. Not only that, but God allowed his “unalterable” text to become translated and translated ad infinitum for the better part of 2,000 years. I mean, is the God of the Bible all-powerful or not? Can’t he guide human history in such a way as to maintain his untarnished text so that it could hold up against, not only by ancient standards, but by modern ones? No. What we have are ancient writers talking about yet another savior whose life looks suspiciously similar to any number of “dying and rising” gods that have been thrown into the dust heap of religious history, and meanwhile, the texts themselves, remarkably mediocre in their writing, read just as they should read if written in first century Palestine by fearful, trembling individuals always looking to the heavens for answers.
I’ll skip Strobel’s “bias test” because the writers’ bias toward Jesus is self evident. That they were willing to risk their lives for their message makes them no different than thousands of other believers down through history, from Muslims who refused to bow the knee during the Inquisitions to the Heaven’s Gate nuts who thought they were going to get redemption on back of a comet.
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Strobel then asks Blomberg about some of the embarrassing or hard to explain details that pop in the gospels. Again, Blomberg argues that the existence of these details gives validity to the text because it would have behooved the authors to omit certain elements of the story.
For instance, John 6:5 suggests that Jesus could not perform miracles in Nazareth because the people there lacked enough faith. Jesus’s wonderworking power is stifled by heretics in his own hometown. Talk about embarrassing. Blomberg addresses this concern:
Now, ultimately theology hasn’t had a problem with these statements, because Paul himself, in Phillippians 2:5-8, talks about God in Christ voluntarily and consciously limiting the independent exercise of his divine attributes.
Here we have an instance of an apologist cherry picking from one part of the Bible to explain an inconsistency in another part. First, one has to wonder: What was so special about Nazareth? Jesus made a practice of hanging out with women of ill-report and, heaven forbid, tax collectors during his ministry, but the Son of God’s magic is quenched when he steps foot in Nazareth? Second, how are we to understand the phenomenon of God turning off the miracle machine in one specific moment in the New Testament when all throughout the gospels pages, Jesus is healing lepers, curing the blind, raising people from the dead and eviscerating demons from people before sending them into pigs. (A note on that last miracle: After Jesus sent the demons into the pigs, he then made the pigs run down a steep bank into a lake to die. Presumably, demons cannot die via drowning since they are spirits. So, here is a needless slaughter of pigs, but for consistency’s sake, at least this continued the anti-pork message that prevailed throughout the Old Testament. Further, was the global flood in Genesis another comical attempt to kill off all the demons living on earth at the time, along with all of mankind, save Noah and his soon to be incestuous family.)
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Next, Strobel and Blomberg consider whether the gospels can be verified with extra-biblical source material. Without providing a single detail, Blomberg simply confirmed that when the gospels mention specific places and times, they have been confirmed by archaeology. Of course, many of the places mentioned in the gospels actually existed; it’s absurd to think otherwise, but I doubt evidence from archaeology is ever going to be strong enough to increase the overall validity of the Bible. By the way, the archaeological evidence for the Old Testament, as it happens, is pretty scanty, and the famous exodus probably never actually happened. See The Bible Unearthed series.
Blomberg did make one statement in this short section that was a complete lie, namely that we can verify the story of Jesus through non-Christian sources. Again, he gives not a single example, only saying:
… we can learn through non-Christian sources a lot of facts about Jesus that corroborate key teachings and events in his life.
It’s hard to fathom a more misleading statement. There is not one contemporary, non-Christian source in antiquity that confirms Jesus’ existence, much less any “key teachings” during his ministry. See this video, this video and see my previous post on this subject, “Josephus and the historical Jesus.”
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Finally, Strobel describes something he called the “adverse witness test,” which is supposedly a way to check other sources to see if the gospel writers were not telling the truth about their claims surrounding Jesus. Here is a kind of last ditch effort by apologists to affirm the faith by saying something like, “Ah, hah! We can’t find any sources disputing that the miracles of Jesus took place, so they must have actually happened.” Of course, Jesus’ execution and the subsequent persecution of Christians for heresy might be proof enough since if Jesus actually healed people and actually raised Lazarus from the dead and this became public knowledge, wouldn’t Jewish leaders have had no choice but to bow the knee in reverence to the final coming of their long-sought-after messiah? Further, if Jesus was doing all these things, reason would suggest that not just one or two, but many historians of the day would have spilled gallons of ink on this miracle worker. But this is not what we have. We have four gospels written by people who loved Jesus and clearly had some kind of vested interest in seeing the new religion spread. We have no contemporary accounts of Jesus, and Josephus is the only one that finally gets around to mentioning him in 93 or 94 C.E., and that passage, much touted by Christians as an extra-biblical account, is almost certainly a forgery.