In yesterday’s post I laid out the “wish list” historians have when it comes to sources of information about persons and events of the past, and evaluated how well the Gospels stack up against the list.  Now I want to move into the kinds of criteria biblical scholars use when trying to extract historical information from the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ life, criteria made necessary by the fact that the Gospel writers were not trying to write objective historical narratives of what really happened, so much as trying to “proclaim the good news” of the salvation brought by Jesus.  These Gospels were not meant to be providing history lessons per se.  But nonetheless, they do contain historical information.  If we want to learn that information, how do we proceed? Here is how I explain the beginning point in my book Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet.   *******************************************************   Using Our Sources: Some of the Basic Rules of Thumb Before elaborating on some specific criteria that scholars have devised, let me say something about a few very basic [...]

While writing the posts in my thread on the contradictions in the New Testament, I had the impression that some readers thought I considered it virtually impossible to use the New Testament for historical purposes.   That’s actually not the case at all.   I’m going to discuss this issue over a number of posts, focusing on the Gospels.  Oddly enough, it appears I’ve never devoted a sustained thread to this precise end, of explaining how historians go about their business of reconstructing the past when all they have are highly problematic sources. My general view is that when trying to determine what actually happened in Jesus’ life – to figure out what he said, did, and experienced – it is important to avoid two extremes.  On one hand, it simply won’t work to claim that if something is narrated in the Gospels, it is necessarily historical.  There are lots and lots of things that can’t be historical in the Gospels.  Just on the most basic level, if one Gospel really does appear to contradict another about, [...]

I will not be going through the entirety of the four Gospels to point out how contradictions between one account and another make these texts difficult to use for historical purposes.  My previous post briefly summarized the situation with respect to the birth narratives, and similar statements could be made for numerous events of Jesus’ life as narrated in the Gospels.  In this post I’ll instead make an overall point about the kinds of problems one finds throughout these books. Recall: the reason I’m dealing with this matter is that some readers have thought that the only reason biblical scholars identify contradictions in the New Testament is in order to show that these books aren’t inspired.  That’s not true at all.  My points so far are that New Testament *could* be inspired by God even if it has contradictions (I personally don’t think so, but that’s mainly because I’m an agnostic and so don’t think *anything* is inspired by God; but if I were a believer still I probably would think it is in some [...]

Realizing that there are contradictions in our surviving New Testament texts matters a good deal when it comes to trying to reconstruct the history behind them.  I’ll devote several posts to this question, a couple of dealing with the life of Jesus and at least one other involving the life of Paul. The basic issue, of course, is that if you have two contradictory witnesses to an event, then they both can’t be right: they contradict one another!   At the point of the contradiction, either one of them is wrong, or they are both wrong, but they both can’t be right – unless the contradiction can be reconciled in some way (in which case it is not really a contradiction). And so the first step is to look carefully at the sources and see if they line up with one another or if there are places where they are at odds.  If they appear to be at odds, then the next step is to be see if it is only an *apparent* contradiction or an [...]

In this post I continue with the New Testament accounts of the death of Judas Iscariot.  In my previous post I talked about the first account, found in Matthew. Now I look at the second (and only other) one, found in the early part of the book of Acts, written by the same author as the Gospel of Luke.   This post comes in two parts, both taken from my book The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot.   In the first part I discuss the speech allegedly given by the apostle Peter to the other disciples in Acts 1, where he describes Judas’s death – in terms very different indeed from those found in Matthew.  Are these reconcilable?  In the second part I ask whether we can say anything *historically* about how Judas actually died. ********************************************************************* In his speech, Peter describes Judas’s death in graphic terms: Now this one [Judas] purchased a field with the wages of his unrighteous act [the betrayal] and falling headlong he burst forth in the middle and all his intestines spilled out.  [...]

My recent post on Judas Iscariot has raised a number of questions among readers of the blog.  Here is one of them, about Judas’s death.   QUESTION: Do you have any sense of how Judas met his end after the betrayal? Matthew's version seems at least somewhat plausible, but Act's doesn't.  Or maybe he just took the money and moved elsewhere.   RESPONSE               This is an interesting question for a number of reasons.  For one thing, the only writers who thought that Judas’s demise was important enough to deal with were Matthew and Luke – Mark, John, Paul, and all the others are silent on the matter.  As far as we would know from the Gospels of Mark and John, Judas would have lived to be an old man.  They just don’t say.   And Luke doesn’t give an account in his Gospel, but only later in the book of Acts.  Moreover, the account in Acts certainly seems to stand at odds with what Matthew says in his Gospel. To make sense of it all [...]

QUESTION: How is it that all four gospels portray Pilate as recognizing the innocence of Jesus and being extremely reluctant to order his execution?   RESPONSE: What is most intriguing (and enlightening) is that over time in the Christian tradition – both inside the New Testament and outside of it – Pilate becomes more and more innocent in the death of Jesus with the passing of time.   You can see this clearly simply by lining up the Gospels chronologically and seeing how they portray Pilate at the trial of Jesus. Our earliest Gospel is Mark (15:1-15).  There Pilate is somewhat reluctant to do what the Jewish leaders ask him to do – crucify Jesus – and he seems a bit bewildered.  He has a custom of releasing a prisoner during Passover and suggests Jesus.  But the crowd, stirred up by the chief priests, wants Barabbas instead.  And so, after a very brief trial Pilate, does what they ask.  Here Pilate is simply complying with the Jews’ wishes; he puts up some resistance, but not a [...]