Section Ii - The Character Of The Gospels
SECTION II
THE CHARACTER OF THE GOSPELS
“Because the evidence offered by the gospels is hearsay evidence, scholars must be extremely cautious in taking the data at face value.”
THE JESUS SEMINAR1
As we noted in the introduction, some scholars consider “uncritical” those who pay too much attention to the canonical Gospels. Nevertheless, some of these same “critical” scholars on far less evidence have treated the Secret Gospel of Mark (now shown to be a twentieth-century forgery) as earlier than our canonical Gospels. These scholars sometimes criticize other scholars for a “canonical bias,” but the criticism is inaccurate. As Dale Allison points out, whereas nearly all documents in Crossan’s “earliest layer” of tradition are hypothetical and none surely predate 70, the only works providing information about Jesus that we can surely date before 70 all are accessible in the New Testament: Paul, “Q” and Mark.2
In fact, the majority of scholars working in Jesus research focus far more on the canonical Gospels than on works like Secret Mark or even the Gospel of Thomas. This is not because the canonical Gospels are “canonical,” but because they are simply all that we certainly have (apart from brief fragments here and there) to work with from the first century. The church’s interest in these works led the church to preserve them; but for all our historical interest in works that the church did not preserve, unpreserved works do not remain available for our examination.
We cannot force later preserved works to make up for earlier unpreserved ones; we simply have to work around our disadvantage when dealing with early preserved ones. (Luke’s lack of derision for earlier works in Lk 1:1, however, may suggest that most “Jesus books” in his day did not present a radically different Jesus, even if they were differently arranged.)3 Neither can we simply reject as “biased” all the information that we have, then argue from the silence that remains for a contrary view. We must ascertain how accurate these sources can be based on what we know of ancient writing practices and the degree of tradition in these sources that corresponds to the earliest environment of Jesus. In this section we will look at ancient literary practice. In the book’s later section, we will test sample gospel sources for correspondence to specifically Palestinian Jewish elements and try to offer elements for a cohesive picture of Jesus from these sources.
As noted earlier, we cannot know much very specific about Jesus (that would distinguish him from any other Galilean of his generation) apart from documents about him stemming from the generations immediately following him. Apart from a brief report in Josephus and mention in two Roman historians, we are dependent especially on those most apt to preserve reports about Jesus, that is, those to whom he most mattered — his followers. We may talk about their “biases” toward him, but ultimately we have little beyond these sources to work with, and if we want to talk about the “historical Jesus,” we must focus on the nature of our sources.
How reliable are these sources? Contrary to what modern writers sometimes suppose, “bias” did not make biographies into novels. We take bias into account when we read works of ancient biography or history, yet at the same time we depend heavily on these sources to understand the persons about whom they are written (both because they are the only sources available, and because comparison shows such works to preserve substantial information). If this is true for other figures of antiquity, why should it be any less true of Jesus? (And if some of us assume that it must be less true of Jesus, what does that say about our own presuppositions?)4
This observation raises several questions. First, what is the genre of those gospels that we find most useful? We will argue (with the current majority of scholars) that it best fits ancient biography, a genre normally expected to deal in historical facts insofar as possible (albeit told from the writer’s perspective).
Second, were ancient writers concerned with genuine history? Granted that three of the Gospel writers composed “biographies” rather than “histories,” what does the historical substance of histories tell us about ancients’ interests in historical facts? Our conclusions here will not support the common modern assumption that ancient thinkers were uncritical. Once we turn to apply these observations to the Gospels, we will explore as a particular example Luke-Acts, which was composed as a work of ancient historiography.
Afterward, we will turn to a discussion of the Gospels’ sources, both written and oral. Granted historical interest and biographic intention, would ancient writers have made good use of their sources? How accurately would the reports of eyewitnesses be retold and preserved? Only after we have laid these foundations will we begin to examine samples of information from the Gospels, in the extensive later part of the book.