17. The Implications of This Study

Traditional skeptical and fundamentalist approaches to the Gospels have generally committed the same error: judging the Gospels by standards foreign to their original genre. In this book I have sought to support a more historically and culturally sensitive approach.

The many variables already noted preclude us from using the Gospels’ genre to pronounce decisions on the historical authenticity of all their reports a priori; such an approach would run far beyond the evidence. Thus, none of the foregoing discussion by itself proves that any given pericope in the Gospels reports genuine historical information. Although historical and literary analogies may offer evidence, by their limited nature they fall short of proof. An exclusively historical epistemology is restricted to probabilities, genre is descriptive rather than prescriptive (suggesting but not controlling expectations), and analogies are always incomplete and imperfect. Historiography today can thus plot only degrees of probability.

This is one of the cases, however, where historical evidence does suggest a higher degree of prior probability for teaching themes and narrated events in the Gospels than some circles assume. The Gospels most likely serve a function at least in many ways similar to that of other biographies from the early empire about figures in living memory. This fairly self-evident analogy suggests a significant a priori probability in favor of at least a core of genuine historical information behind the average account in the Gospels. In contrast to the position of radical skeptics that the burden of proof rests on any claim in the Gospels, a more historically probable starting point is that these biographies written within living memory of Jesus do in fact succeed in preserving many of Jesus’s acts and teachings, even for many events that are not independently attested in multiple sources.¹

Historical method is limited in what it can tell us about the past, and certainly about events two thousand years ago. In a real sense, however, the gap in our case is not two thousand years but three to seven decades, since we have accounts about Jesus from within living memory. If the earliest biographic sources available to us about Lincoln were from a comparable period after his death, we would have to deal with tendentious constructions of memory, but we would still have very substantial information about a real historical figure. Studies about the historical Jesus based on material in the Gospels present some additional complications, but in terms of chronological distance, the sources are not unlike the imaginary material about Lincoln offered here for the purpose of illustration.

If any ancient biographers have much historical information to teach us about the biographees, the Gospels are surely among them. Various factors support this recognition:

They are full biographies of a publicly known figure, rather than brief lives of poets.

They are from the most information-based period in the development of ancient biography, namely, the period of the early empire. Biographies in this period are generally developed beyond less historically minded earlier encomia, yet they also predate later hagiography. Comparing different biographies from this period about the same figure illustrates these biographies’ anchoring in information.

The Gospels were composed within living memory of their subject, making substantive accurate information likely.

The most respected leaders in the traditioning community were eyewitnesses.

Not only were the most respected leaders in the traditioning community eyewitnesses; they were also disciples, who of all people would work hardest from the start to preserve their mentor’s legacy and teaching.

Something not explored in this volume, but easily confirmed by perusing a synopsis of the Gospels, is the significant overlap of material in the Synoptics. This overlap confirms that these works are information-based rather than novelistic and that their authors regarded their own sources as sufficiently trustworthy for information-based composition.

Information-based first-century Gospels that used sources cannot have been significantly (more than a few decades) later than those sources that they used, and they likely had good reason to assess the reliability of their sources the way that they did.

Logic suggests a further conclusion. More sources circulated in their day (Luke 1:1) than remain, and the Gospel authors could not know what information would remain extant in subsequent eras. Therefore, we should expect them to adapt their sources where we cannot test them in ways comparable to where we can. When Matthew and Luke (on the standard view) follow Mark so closely, sometimes nearly word for word, it seems incredible to suppose that they often simply invent entire stories from whole cloth wherever we cannot test them, any more than we would expect such invention from other ancient writers who follow their sources where we can test them.² In short: it is not fair to simply say, “For such-and-such a point, we have no evidence outside the Gospels, and therefore we lack evidence.” The Gospel narratives are themselves evidence.

Inevitably, presuppositions and objectives inform one’s comparisons; one could thus emphasize, for example, more differences in biographies of Otho or Galba than I have, or emphasize more common features in different works by Josephus than I have. Less plausibly, one could undercut the value of any ancient comparisons by denying, for example, that Jesus’s disciples were like typical disciples or that the Evangelists were like normal biographers of the period in terms of preserving information. But normal historical method requires more substantive evidence when one rejects contemporary analogies than when one accepts them.

In any case, I believe that my two most essential primary points are difficult to dispute: in the early empire, normal biographers writing full works about recent figures attempted to recount or reconstruct what they believed to be historical information (or perhaps in some cases, traditions that were at least possibly historical), normally for edifying purposes; and biographers could exercise a degree of flexibility in how they recounted that information.

More precisely, audiences from the Gospels’ era did not expect biographers to freely invent events, but they did allow them to flesh out scenes and discourse for the purpose of what they considered narrative verisimilitude. Biographers were not supposed to invent a teacher’s message, but they could interpret and communicate it from their own perspectives. If biographies of recent figures in the early empire normally recount genuine historical events, then this expectation follows, to a reasonable degree of probability, for the Gospels. If biographers of recent figures in the early empire felt free to adapt wording, chronology, and so forth, then this expectation likewise follows, to a reasonable degree of probability, for the Gospels. That is, neither the similarities of the Gospels nor their differences should catch us by surprise.

To note this range of flexibility is not to claim a priori where on the continuum any given biography or a Gospel falls, but the observation does provide a probable range to expect and within which historians may search.

Biographers varied among one another, and sometimes in their own works, as to the degree of fidelity and flexibility with which they treated their sources. Where do the Gospels, or more specifically individual Gospels, fit on this continuum? For this question scholars can still resort to source-, redaction-, and narrative-critical analyses of the Gospels, an analysis that lies beyond the stated limitations of this study. Moreover, as scholars increasingly recognize, the limited nature of the evidence means that for many passages more specific conclusions will often continue to elude our best available historiographic methods, leaving scholars to argue on philosophic grounds or to confess our uncertainties.

Helpful further research would include, ideally, quantifying more precisely the range of variation in various bioi where we can identify and evaluate their material. How much is prior information? How much is redaction? Such quantification cannot be an exact science, given the uncertainties and the variables to consider, but it may at least suggest orders of magnitude to help scholars plot individual works, including individual Gospels, on the spectrum. (Although the possibility might be presumptuous to assume, it would be ideal if it could yield more consensus than the seemingly simpler matter of quantifying the proportion of Acts devoted to its speeches.) The approximate results can then be applied to each of the Gospels (or at least Matthew’s and Luke’s use of Mark, on the most common configuration) to estimate where each of them lies on the spectrum.

What can be concluded already is that the Synoptics, and probably all four Gospels, fit within the range of variation found in ancient historical sources in general. These sources reflect a significant core of prior information and a degree of flexibility in recounting it. Most ancient historical writing was, in other words, both history and literature, both information and its rhetorical shaping.

The conclusions of the study are thus consistent with what one might expect by working from a synopsis of the Gospels—except where faulty paradigms have sometimes prevented some circles from attending to what such synopses show us. Following Bultmann, some have assumed a long folk tradition and have doubted early Christians’ interest in much reliable historical information about Jesus. Less commonly among scholars but not uncommonly on a popular level, some other circles have performed remarkable gymnastics to harmonize the Gospels’ chronology and sometimes even their wording.

The majority of scholars today, despite our diversity on particulars, lie between these poles. This study should encourage historical-Jesus researchers to speculate less about what might have happened to the tradition and to focus more on the basic staples of what the Gospels themselves suggest to us did happen to it.

1. That is, the criterion of multiple attestation is more effective in supporting than in denying genuine tradition. I comment less here on the other extreme (that of expecting verbatim quotations and strict chronological arrangement) because proponents of those views are not even paying attention to the Gospels themselves. I therefore do not flatter myself by supposing them likely to read this book anyway.

2. Cf. Downing, “Redaction Criticism 2,” 47, on the bizarreness of an analogous sort of incongruity.

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