CHAPTER 9 - The Gospels’ Written Sources
CHAPTER 9
The Gospels’ Written Sources
“[I surveyed] about 2000 volumes . . . we have collected in 36 volumes 20,000 noteworthy facts obtained from one hundred authors that we have explored. . . . For you must know that when collating authorities I have found that the most professedly reliable and modern writers have copied the old authors word for word, without acknowledgement.”
PLINY THE ELDER1
“. . . many have set out to compose a narrative of the events fulfilled among us . . .”
LUKE 1:1 (PROBABLY WRITING IN THE 70S OR 80S CE)
Some of those who wish to reconstruct material about Jesus are very skeptical about the only real extensive sources available for such a quest: namely, the first-century Gospels. Some of these scholars, ironically, seem more prepared to advance their own hypotheses on the basis of relative silence (after they have excluded our concrete evidence) than to consider the actual evidence of our first-century sources. Classicists recognize the various weaknesses of their sources, but nevertheless find them more practical than modern alternative reconstructions offered without any extant evidence.2 Historical Jesus scholars are at their best when they follow the same approach.
In preceding chapters we have argued for the likelihood that the Gospels, as ancient biographies from within two generations of the events (i.e., within the first century), preserve substantial information about Jesus. We have also argued that such writers would have historical interest and would likely preserve considerable historical information. In this chapter we examine more specifically some of the methods that scholars use to mine these sources.
Scholars have already offered detailed arguments regarding the sources of our present Synoptic Gospels. The predominant views have not achieved complete consensus, and I acknowledge that the minority views merit consideration. My views on Matthew and Luke using Mark and “Q” are the traditional and dominant ones in Gospels scholarship, although I leave them open to correction. Here, however, I will simply work with this majority view without supplying detailed arguments for it. I am doing so because this view has been argued extensively elsewhere; because I have nothing new to add to that particular discussion; because it is difficult to justify making this book longer for points that are already so widely held; because one must start the discussion somewhere (and a consensus position is the easiest place to start, especially when the writer agrees with it); and because most of those whose views I am challenging in this book also concede the existence of “Q.”
Where I can add to the discussion is the broader methodological question, more often discussed among classicists, of how ancient biographers and historians used sources. This discussion will be relevant even for those who reconstruct the sources of the Gospels differently than I do.