Chapter 7
Chapter 7
Gospel Truth
The Historical Reliability of the Gospels
Craig S. Keener
Historical information about individuals is normally preserved especially by the circles that value it; thus our best sources for ancient sages come from their disciples, for Muhammad from his followers, and for Jesus from His disciples. What we know about Jesus historically can be only as accurate as our sources. The most complete of these sources, from within a generation or two of Jesus' time, are the Gospels. How reliable are they? If scholars examine the Gospels in light of contemporary sources from their own period, instead of accumulated theories of skeptical scholarship, they should regard them as very useful sources for understanding the Jesus who lived in history. I rehearse below some key principles from my recent Historical Jesus of the Gospels.1
The Controversy
How reliable are the Gospels? Most readers are aware of some skeptical voices in the media. One very public voice is the Jesus Seminar, which has gained notoriety by using marbles to vote on which sayings of Jesus were "authentic." This self-selected group is no more a cross-section of all biblical scholars than a self-selected group of conservative scholars would be. The actual range of scholarly views is considerable (with the center to the right of the Jesus Seminar and to the left of most conservative scholars), but some have marketed more skeptical scholars as the voice of scholarship in some media circles.
More generally, sectors of academia have harbored a prejudice against the miraculous, hence against documents such as the Gospels, since the radical Enlightenment. Segments of New Testament scholarship have built theory upon theory to explain away the possibility of eyewitness claims of miracles or divine activity in history, and hence have argued against the possibility of significant eyewitness material in the Gospels. Other scholars (growing in number today) instead support eyewitness material. Majority opinions among scholars shift back and forth on many points with new publications so simply taking a head count cannot settle much; instead we will look briefly at some evidence.
If we examined the Gospels by comparison with analogous works from their period, what would we gather? Are the Gospels mere works of propagandistic fiction, or do they recount a true story? No one doubts that they "preach," but the best evidence shows that the "text" from which they preached was the genuine life of Jesus.
The Gospels as Ancient Biography
Like readers through most of history, ancient readers assumed that the Gospels were "lives" (bioi), biographies of Jesus. The genre of biography—a work about a historical person—existed well before Jesus' ministry and was popular in the period of the Gospels. In the early twentieth century, however, some scholars noticed that the Gospels were not like modern biography, and hence decided that they were not genuine biographies. In time, however, dissenting voices chipped away at that consensus, and in the past two decades scholars favoring the category "biography" for the Gospels have become a strong majority.2 Why is this the case?
Scholars arguing that the Gospels were not biographies were partly right in terms of what they meant: the Gospels are not modern biographies. The Gospels do, however, fit the character of ancient biographies—that is, they are written the way biographies were written in their era. Modern biographers normally arrange their material chronologically, but while ancient biographers sometimes did this, they usually arranged their material topically (as, for example, Matthew appears to do). Modern biographies normally start from their subject's birth; while ancient biographies sometimes did so (as in the case of Matthew and Luke), they often simply opened with their public careers (as in the cases of many philosophers and politicians, and as we have in the case of Mark).
The cost of papyrus and limitations of ancient publishing required biographers to be selective in what they included; they often thus focused on those points that would teach the audience valuable lessons. They could focus at length on their subjects' deaths (as in the Gospels) when these were particularly significant (e.g., martyrs). Jesus differs from other biographic subjects, but that is a difference in Jesus, not in the genre; biographies were works about historical persons.
Ancient Biographies as Essentially Historical Works
Ancient biography was a form of historical writing.3 A second-century critic wrote that good biographers avoided flattery that falsified events,4 and that only bad historians invent data.5 A later statesman who was alive during the time that the Gospels were written allowed historians to show off their literary skills provided they stuck to facts; this was what was distinctive about history, in contrast to some other genres.6 A few centuries earlier, the Greek philosopher Aristotle also insisted that the fundamental characteristic of history was that it must address what actually happened.7
Biographers had perspectives, often including personal interest in and feelings about those concerning whom they wrote. Nevertheless, they and historians were supposed to try to report people's character accurately, without bias.8 Sometimes this commitment compelled them even to report information unflattering toward persons they genuinely respected.9 While not all biographers lived up to this standard, accuracy remained the ideal. In contrast to those writing about politicians, Jesus' followers had no reasons to "flatter" Him; if they did not believe that their story was true, they had no reason even to risk their security by following Him.
Some complain that the Gospels are engaging, like novels. Because most historians and biographers wanted to write in such a way as to keep their audiences interested, however, their works are usually engaging, often reading like stories. The difference between such works and novels is not that the former were boring and the latter were entertaining, but that the former were also meant to be informative. Moreover, historians and biographers (far more often than novelists) sometimes recounted their historical information specifically to provide moral, political, or theological lessons for their audiences (less an interest of novels). Unlike biographies, novels lacked historical prologues (such as we find in Luke 1:1–4) and usually lacked clear sources. Novels were never about recent persons and usually not about historical characters at all; they reflected little interest in communicating much historical information. Though some biographers took more liberties than others, they were clearly not writing novels.
Biographies of much earlier characters could draw on legend, but biographies of figures from the previous generation or two (like the Gospels) depended on a vast amount of historical information.10 For example, Tacitus, writing about his father-in-law, and Suetonius, writing about recent emperors, stick very close to their sources. Josephus wrote both history and autobiography; despite his slant on some points, archaeology often confirms his substantial information. When writing about an emperor just half a century earlier, biographers and historians overlap on a vast number of points.11 If people concede that such biographies were even mostly historical (and they were), they should concede enough about Jesus in the Gospels to consider His message.
How Historical Are the Gospels?
How do we evaluate particular cases of ancient biography? Two factors merit special consideration. First, historians and biographers writing about the fairly recent past (including Thucydides, Polybius, and often Tacitus and Suetonius) were much more apt to have genuine information to convey than those writing about the distant past. Second, we must ask how closely particular historians stuck to their sources (which we can sometimes reconstruct by comparing earlier historians). Everyone allowed ancient historians to put their material in their own words, which results in some variation, but some closely followed their sources.
Where do the Gospels fall by these standards? The latest of the four extant first-century Gospels, John, was written perhaps 65 years after Jesus' death, and the earliest (probably Mark) within a generation of Jesus' death—when some eyewitnesses presumably remained alive (see discussion below). Among ancient biographies, then, the Gospels would be, by purely historical standards, among the more dependable sources for reconstructing the life of their subject.
How closely do they stick to their sources? While we cannot test every source, we should assume that the places where we can test them are representative; after all, the Gospel writers could not have known which sources would survive two millennia for later readers to test! Although scholars disagree on the exact relationship among the Gospels, the majority of scholars believe that Matthew and Luke used both Mark and another source that they shared in common. If we compare these sources, we see that, apart from variations in wording that were fairly minimal by ancient standards, the Gospels, where we can test them, stuck quite closely to their sources.
When we apply the standards of historiography to ancient biographies in general, therefore, the Gospels appear to be among the most rather than the least accurate. On purely historical grounds, then, even a person with no theological commitments can look to the Gospels to learn about Jesus.
Luke Reveals His Historical Method
Whereas the Gospels, taken by themselves, are biographies, Luke's Gospel is part of a two-volume work that scholars generally consider a historical monograph. Historians sometimes devoted a volume of their work to an individual figure, so that the Gospel of Luke is a biographic segment of Luke's larger history. Whereas the other Gospels do not tell us much about their method, Luke, writing history, provides information useful for learning his method even in the beginning of his volume.
Like many historians, Luke includes a historical preface, addressing the "events that have been fulfilled among us" (Luke 1:1 HCSB). Because his work is brief compared with multivolume histories, he has a correspondingly brief preface, which we find in Luke 1:1–4. This preface reveals Luke's sources, his probable research, and his purpose of confirming what Theophilus (and presumably others like him) knew about these "events that have been fulfilled among us." By studying his prologue, we learn about written sources available in his day (1:1), oral sources going back to eyewitnesses (1:2), his thorough knowledge (1:3), and the wide circulation of the accounts already by the time he wrote (1:4).12
Written Sources (Luke 1:1)
The vast majority of scholars date Luke somewhere between the years 62 and 90. While earlier dates might work better for our purposes than later ones, even the latest date in this range (which I think is unwarranted) places Luke within 60 years of Jesus' crucifixion. This is quite recent by ancient biographic standards. In any case, Luke notes that "many" had already written gospels before him; at least some had achieved a measure of prominence (see comments on Mark below). This means that written sources were already proliferating in the lifetime of some of the eyewitnesses, even at a time when the Christian movement was experiencing a phenomenal rate of expansion, carrying its stories about Jesus with it. Most historians would be delighted if more of our Greek and Roman biographies derived from a period so close to the subjects of the biographies.
Most scholars who compare the Gospels argue that at least one of Luke's earlier sources was Mark's Gospel, which most scholars date to around AD 70 or somewhat before (many conservative scholars, including myself, prefer a date of about 64, but the difference is negligible for our purposes). According to early second-century traditions, Mark's Gospel achieved prominence, despite its less-sophisticated style, because it was based on the memoirs of Peter. While I think this tradition likely,13 it is enough for our purposes here to point out that this Gospel stems from within four decades after Jesus' public ministry.
Are the events of four decades before us shrouded in amnesia? Even if we lacked publications and videotapes, most of us, regardless of our age, know eyewitnesses who lived through events four decades ago. If doubt arose as to the nature of the events sufficient to concern us, we would go to the eyewitnesses. Ancient historical writers likewise consulted eyewitnesses as their ideal sources.14
Oral Sources (1:2)
Luke notes that his accounts were handed down from the original eyewitnesses of Jesus' ministry. The term he uses for "handing down" had several meanings, but in contexts involving oral tradition often suggested careful transmission. How accurate could this transmission be? To answer this question we must consider memory and memorization in antiquity, especially in school settings, where some even took notes; afterward we will return to the question of eyewitnesses. No one expected verbatim recall in normal settings, but remembering the substance of the information was very important.
Like other societies with a heavy emphasis on orality (which could coexist with written sources), Mediterranean society prized memory in a way that often astonishes Westerners accustomed to sound bites and information overload. Bards, despised by the elite as uneducated, could recite the entire epics of Homer from memory; Jewish people could likewise retell lengthy stories and recall large segments of Scripture. Of course, "oral performers" could vary their wording at times, but the substance remained.15 One of the five basic tasks of oratory was memorization of one's speech, which could often be two hours in length.
Once people began valuing and training memory, exceptional feats were possible. Seneca the Elder, father of the famous philosopher by that name, notes that in his younger days he could repeat back 2,000 names in exactly the sequence in which he had just heard them. After apologizing that his memory was no longer so strong in his old age, he proceeds to repeat parts of over 100 practice speeches he heard when he was in a school that trained speakers. He also tells of others who could memorize poems as they heard them or repeat back an entire day's sales at an auction from memory.16 Even if we allow for some exaggeration, ancient Mediterranean culture valued, hence emphasized, memory to a degree modern Western readers consider extraordinary.
Memorization was at the heart of basic education, often involving memorizing the sayings of famous teachers; Jewish boys memorized especially Torah. More relevant to Jesus' disciples is discipleship, a form of advanced education usually beginning in the mid-teens. Greeks had two main disciplines for advanced education, rhetoric (professional public speaking) and philosophy. In both cases, students learned by heart their teachers' teachings, which they were responsible to represent accurately even if they later came to disagree with them. Memorization and propagation of the founder's teachings was even more relevant in philosophic schools. We may take as an extreme illustration the Pythagoreans, who were said to arise from bed in the morning only after they had recited the previous day's learning.
What was true of the Mediterranean world in general was also true of Jewish disciples. Our sources suggest that Jewish disciples were even more rigorous in preserving and transmitting the teachings of their teachers, although many of these teachings proved to be common property of the sages.17 Students were also interested in their teachers' example, and rabbis often appealed to earlier rabbis' actions to establish legal precedents, often assuming that their behavior would have been honorable.
Virtually everyone agrees that Jesus was a teacher and had disciples. Based on the above observations, should we not assume that Jesus' disciples, like those of other teachers, would seek to preserve and promote their teacher's teachings? Students could eventually articulate their own views, but they did not normally attribute these new views to their teachers. For some critics to treat Jesus' followers as singularly unreliable, against the normal expectation for other ancient disciples, is to reveal the critics' specific prejudice against Jesus and His movement. It is not those who defend the reliability of the Gospels who engage in special pleading on this point but those who deny it.
Students often took notes. Quintilian's rhetorical students took such careful notes that they published a book in his name without his knowledge; though wishing that they had first consulted him, he attests that they accurately presented his content.18 Arrian took careful notes on his philosophic teacher Epictetus, duplicating even his rambling style (which is not Arrian's own). Rabbis emphasized memorization more than note taking, but some cases of note taking are known even in those circles, and the literacy of Palestinian Jews was, if anything, higher than average in the Empire. This does not prove that any of Jesus' disciples took notes at the time, but we cannot rule the possibility out. Some may have been literate, but even illiterate bards displayed feats of memory.
Because the disciples continued as a group, they could prod and correct one another's memories rather than depending only on an individual's recollections. We know that in the mid-first century, shortly before Mark wrote his Gospel, key witnesses remained in the chief positions of leadership in the church (Gal 1:18–19; 2:9) and were known to all the churches (cf. 1 Cor 15:5–7). Those whose reports would be most respected were the sources and continuing guarantors of the tradition during the period when written sources began to emerge. W. D. Davies noted that only a single lifespan "separates Jesus from the last New Testament document. And the tradition in the Gospels is not strictly a folk tradition, derived from long stretches of time, but a tradition preserved by believing communities who were guided by responsible leaders, many of whom were eyewitnesses of the ministry of Jesus."19
Many of the witnesses—fishermen, tax collectors, and women—were not among the most respected classes whose testimony ancient society valued; no one would have invented such witnesses, about whom aristocratic pagans later complained. Yet what limited sources we have about them indicate that these witnesses were prepared to die for their testimony, and none of them renounced their claims even under duress (a situation that would have invited a defensive response).20
Luke's "Thorough Knowledge" (1:3)
Luke claims "thorough knowledge" of the matters about which he writes. Where could he have acquired such "thorough knowledge"? Luke's first-person pronoun resurfaces in his second volume, in particular scenes in Acts 16–28. Unwilling to grant that Luke traveled with Paul, critics sometimes contend that his "we" is a fictitious literary device; but why would a fictitious "we" appear mostly in minor travel scenes rather than at significant occasions such as Pentecost? The "we" leaves off in Philippi (Acts 16:16) and picks up there later (20:6). Moreover, fictitious "we's" are almost entirely limited to fictitious genres. As Harvard classicist Arthur Darby Nock pointed out, use of the first person in historical narratives is almost always a genuine claim to have been present; abundant evidence confirms (and most scholars recognize) that Luke was writing history, not a novel. Nor is it likely that Luke inadvertently simply retained another witness's "we," since he does not do this with any of his other material.
The "we" was with Paul in Judea for as much as two years (Acts 21:17; 24:27; 27:1–2). That means that Luke had plenty of time to consult with eyewitnesses and those who knew the traditions directly from them. Luke was able to do what any historian today would do if he or she could: consult the eyewitnesses to corroborate the information already available.
Luke Appeals to Common Knowledge (1:4)
Luke writes to confirm what Theophilus had already been taught (Luke 1:4). This appeal indicates that the information Luke recounts was already widely known; Luke would hardly appeal to Theophilus's knowledge and then contradict it by making up something completely new!21 When Luke notes that he is confirming what Theophilus has already been taught, he is confirming that the message about Jesus circulating a generation after Jesus' public ministry matches with what was reported by the eyewitnesses and their circle in Jewish Palestine. The Gospels connect us with the very information about Jesus already circulating within a generation of His ministry.
Other Evidence
Although the later church debated many issues such as circumcising Gentiles, the Gospel writers did not read their views back into the collection of Jesus' teachings. The Gospels apply Jesus' teachings to their time, but they do not feel free to invent new ones attributed to Him. Indeed, if they were simply inventing stories about Jesus freely, we would not have so much overlap, especially among the "Synoptic" Gospels. Paul felt free to qualify Jesus' teaching for a new situation, but distinguished between his own teaching and "the Lord's" when he did so (1 Cor 7:10–16). His letters incidentally attest other teachings of Jesus (e.g., 1 Thess 4:15–5:4), including about the heart of his mission (1 Cor 11:23–25), circulating before our Gospels were written.
Jesus probably spoke primarily Aramaic in Galilee, and many of His sayings in the Gospels preserve Aramaic figures of speech (not least the repeated "Son of man," which is good Aramaic but absurd Greek). Yet the bilingual Jerusalem church must have shifted quickly to Greek so that its "Hellenist" members could participate fully; the early church in urban Antioch would also have spoken Greek. Although they sometimes translated into colloquial Greek, echoes even of Jesus' Aramaic style often come through in the Gospels, and these surely come from the earliest bilingual churches.
Not only Aramaisms but the abundance of rural, Galilean characteristics fit Jesus' actual background far better than they fit the movement soon after His departure because the center of the movement quickly became urban both in Judea and throughout the Empire. Various images fit Jesus' Palestinian Jewish milieu better than that of the later church, as one may illustrate with examples like the following:22
Objections Raised
Detractors raise various objections to the Gospels. Some contend that we should weigh other "gospels" as heavily as the Gospels we have mentioned above.32 I cannot imagine any scholar who would not be delighted if some other first-century historical sources about Jesus (such as are mentioned in Luke 1:1) would be discovered. Unfortunately, none of the other so-called "gospels" that remain today are this early; none stems from within living memory of the eyewitnesses, and many are centuries later than Jesus' century. The earliest, the Gospel of Thomas, is usually dated to around AD 140, and some now date it a generation later. The gnostic gospels are not "lives" of Jesus but collections of sayings attributed to Jesus, with so many gnostic and non-Palestinian elements that we cannot rely on their claims.
The apocryphal gospels similarly lack first-century Palestinian Jewish traits found in the four Gospels accepted by the church as authentic. They reflect their own time, do not reflect the sort of dependence on early sources found in Matthew and Luke, and fit the form of novels. The apocryphal gospels in fact stem from the heyday of novels, starting in the late second century.
A major reason some scholars doubted the Gospels to begin with was that they report miracles, which modern Western critics felt could not be attributed to eyewitnesses. Whether or not one believes that miracles are genuine, however, one cannot doubt that millions of eyewitnesses even today claim to have experienced or witnessed them (including cures of blindness and the raising of the dead). However one explains unusual events, it is not possible for knowledgeable persons to deny that people witness events that they understand in such terms. Moreover, the philosophic argument against the possibility of any unexpected cures being genuine miracles rests largely on the case of Hume, whose argument against miracles is entirely circular. Simply dismissing miracle claims without consideration is to work from a bias ultimately grounded philosophically in dogmatic atheism or deism.33
Conclusion
The Gospels are our best sources for Jesus, and by the criteria that we use to evaluate historical sources from antiquity, they are quite good ones. They are biographies from within a generation or two after the events they describe, depend on earlier sources, and, where we can test them, follow those sources carefully. Moreover, their sources arose in a time when people looked to the eyewitnesses for leadership and memories about Jesus. These eyewitnesses were disciples, who would normally be the very people trusted to preserve a sage's message. The Gospels did not invent new sayings of Jesus to address the crises of their day but used material already available. In contrast with what we would expect for fabricated sayings, they reflect early rural Galilean traditions that were no longer the setting of the Gospels' primary audiences. In short, those who reject the Gospels' witness concerning Jesus effectively are treating these works in an eccentric way that differs from how we would treat comparable historical reports from antiquity.
1 Craig Keener, The Historical Jesus of the Gospels (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), where I provide much more detailed documentation for the arguments offered here. Also my "Assumptions in Historical Jesus Research," Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 9 (2011): 26–58.
2 See esp. Richard A. Burridge, What Are the Gospels? A Comparison with Graeco-Roman Biography, Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series 70 (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1992; 2nd ed., Grand Rapids: Eerdmans; Dearborn, MI: Dove Booksellers, 2004).
3 See George A. Kennedy, "Classical and Christian Source Criticism," in The Relationships Among the Gospels: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue, ed. William O. Walker Jr. (San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 1978), 136 (125–55); for the close relationship, see also Benedetto Bravo, "Antiquarianism and History," in A Companion to Greek and Roman Historiography, ed. John Marincola, 2 vols. Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World (Malden, MA; Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 1:516 (515–27); Philip Stadter, "Biography and History," in ibid., 528 (528–40).
4 Lucian, How to Write History, 12.
5 Ibid., 24–25.
6 Pliny, Epistles 7.17.3; 8.4.1.
7 Aristotle, Poetics 9.2–3, 1451b.
8 Polybius 34.4.2; see also, e.g., Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Thucydides 8; Tacitus, History 1.1. For further discussion, see Keener, Historical Jesus, chaps. 7–8.
9 E.g., Philostratus, Lives of the Sophists 2.21.603 (of his own teacher, 2.21.602); the biographer Eunapius, Lives 461 (of Iamblichus, whom Eunapius considered supernatural, 459–61).
10 Ancients themselves recognized that they could speak more certainly about recent than earlier figures; cf. e.g., Thucydides 1.21.1; Diodorus Siculus 1.6.2; 1.9.2; 4.1.1; 4.8.3–5.
11 See Craig Keener, "Otho: A Targeted Comparison of Suetonius' Biography and Tacitus' History, with Implications for the Gospels' Historical Reliability," Bulletin for Biblical Research, vol. 21, no. 3 (2011): 331–55.
12 Treated in my Historical Jesus, chaps. 6, 9–10.
13 For arguments that the early church would have correctly preserved the authors of the Gospels, see Martin Hengel, Studies in the Gospel of Mark, trans. John Bowden (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985). Rarely were such large works transmitted anonymously.
14 See here especially Samuel Byrskog, Story as History—History as Story: The Gospel Tradition in the Context of Ancient Oral History (Boston, Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2002).
15 On oral tradition, see also discussions in James D. G. Dunn, A New Perspective on Jesus: What the Quest for the Historical Jesus Missed (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2005); Paul Rhodes Eddy and Gregory A. Boyd, The Jesus Legend: A Case for the Historical Reliability of the Synoptic Jesus Tradition (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007).
16 E.g., Seneca, Controversia 1.pref.2, 19; cf. Philostratus, Lives of the Sophists 1.11.495; Pliny, Epistles 2.3.3.
17 Although our sources before AD 70 are limited, we do read of early disciples of Jewish teachers and have no reason to think that they were wholly different from post-70 Jewish disciples or from philosophers' disciples.
18 Quintilian, Institutes of Oratory 1.pref. 7–8.
19 W. D. Davies, Invitation to the New Testament: A Guide to Its Main Witnesses (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966), 115–16; cf. similarly E. P. Sanders, The Tendencies of the Synoptic Tradition (SNTSMS 9; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 28.
20 For the argument that the Gospels reflect eyewitness tradition, see especially now Richard J. Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006).
21 Compare Paul's appeal to the Corinthians' eyewitness experience with miracles (2 Cor 12:12) and the availability of witnesses for the resurrection (1 Cor 15:6).
22 See Keener, Historical Jesus, chaps. 11–22; for the examples here, see idem, The Gospel of Matthew: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), passim.
23 See, e.g., Morton Smith, Tannaitic Parallels to the Gospels (Philadelphia: Society of Biblical Literature, 1951), 136.
24 Cf. mishnah Gittin 9:10; Sipre Deuteronomy 269.1.1.
25 See mishnah Sota 1:7; more fully, Smith, Tannaitic Parallels, 135; Gustaf Dalman, Jesus-Jeshua: Studies in the Gospels (New York: Macmillan, 1929), 225.
26 See Geza Vermes, The Religion of Jesus the Jew (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1993), 80.
27 See Abot 3:17; mishnah Sukkoth 2:10; tosefta Berakoth 1:11; 6:18; Baba Kamma 7:2–4; Hagigah 2:5; Sanhedrin 1:2; 8:9; Sipra Shemini Mekhilta deMiluim 99.2.5; Behuqotai pq. 2.262.1.9; Sipre Numbers 84.2.1; 93.1.3; Sipre Deuteronomy 1.9.2; 1.10.1; 308.2.1; 308.3.1; 309.1.1; 309.2.1.
28 See, e.g., tosefta Sukkoth 2:6; Sipra Shemini Mekhilta deMiluim 99.2.2; Behuqotai pq.3.263.1.5, 8; Sipre Numbers 84.1.1; 86.1.1; 89.4.2; Sipre Deuteronomy 3.1.1; 11.1.2; 26.3.1; 28.1.1; 29.4.1.
29 E.g., Abot de Rabbi Nathan 6A; 12, §29B; Babylonian Talmud Berakoth 63b; Sanhedrin 24a.
30 Israel Abrahams, Studies in Pharisaism and the Gospels (2nd ser.; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1924), 2:208; Dalman, Jesus-Jeshua, 230.
31 Jacob Neusner, "'First Cleanse the Inside,'" New Testament Studies 22 (1976): 486–95 (here 492–94).
32 See discussion in Historical Jesus, chap. 4, and other sources (esp. Craig Evans and Nicholas Perrin).
33 See at much greater length my Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011); see also my article, "A Reassessment of Hume's Case Against Miracles in Light of Testimony from the Majority World Today," Perspectives in Religious Studies 38, no.3 (Fall 2011): forthcoming.