Part 4. Two Objections to Gospels as Historical Biographies
Two Objections to Gospels as Historical Biographies
The evidence presented so far suggests both that the Gospels were ancient biographies and that ancient biographies from their period worked from prior information. Nevertheless, critics sometimes raise objections to counter the notion that the Gospels draw on historical information the way that other contemporary biographies of recent figures did. Two objections seem particularly frequent.
First, the Gospels report miracles, the subject of chapter 12. Can such reports truly reflect originally eyewitness testimony, or must they reflect lengthy legendary accretion or the Evangelists’ (especially Mark’s) creativity? Abundant information available today, however, both confirms that Jesus’s contemporaries knew him for such activity and attests that many eyewitnesses do offer such claims. These observations do not require us to construe such claims as divine activity, but the observations themselves comport with the best historical evidence and together undercut the need to attribute such claims to legend or authorial imagination.
Second, John diverges so often from the story in the Synoptics that either he or they might be accused of greater flexibility than historical interests should have allowed (ch. 13). Yet John overlaps more often with the Synoptics than scholars sometimes recognize and probably depends on a genuine historical source that treats many occasions simply omitted in the Synoptics. John does appear to take some liberties, perhaps even conspicuously tweaking the traditional passion narrative with a hint toward its theological interpretation. Nevertheless, the liberties that John may take regarding details and especially discourse material appear well within the range of flexibility in both ancient biography and ancient historiography more generally.