I’ve heard that veterans of the civil war were shocked to learn that Stephen Crane had himself not fought, so compelling was his description of war in the Red Badge of Courage.

It seemed to me that Douthat’s argument was that the gospels are eyewitness accounts of what really happened and was said.

That is presumably what he believes, but it isn’t quite what he explicitly argues here (though I’m sure rendering his own belief plausible is motivating him).

you have to go into the Gospels with a skeptical framework already to come away from them feeling [em. mine throughout] that the core narrative isn’t deeply rooted in eyewitness testimony. . . . You can say that the narratives represent a form of memoir [are recording things the author or his source remembers], or you can say that they’re an ingenious impersonation of personal testimony that would tax the skills of a brilliant 20th-century novelist [i.e., they are skillful fakes of memoirs]. But the reader who thinks the narratives read like after-the-fact legend making, Lewis rightly insists, “has simply not learned to read.”

And he immediately adds, “That a particular reading of the New Testament comes naturally doesn’t make that reading correct, of course”

Take his example of Mark including a number of quotations from Jesus in Aramaic. Obviously that doesn’t prove that Mark or his source was present and simply recording what he saw and heard–but that *is* certainly the impression that it gives.

uncritical acceptance of their ‘stories’, his “naive” reading, is exactly what the church has promoted over the centuries in its teachings, art, and even the design and decoration of its cathedrals

That’s not what he means by “naive”. He explains what he means:

In the not-so-distant past when 90 or 95 percent of Americans identified as Christian, it was hard for almost anyone in that vast majority to read the Christian Gospels naïvely — to come to them without preconceptions. . . . Instead, almost everyone encountered them first through either the structures of organized Christianity — as a text for Sunday school and Bible study, the experience of the scripture inseparable from the experience of church — or with the expectations set up by Christianity’s overwhelming cultural influence. . . . . But with the rapid decline of institutional Christianity . . . a more naïve encounter with the New Testament may become more normal . . . more people will experience the Gospels first as a form of testimony and storytelling that precedes any fully realized set of doctrines or vision of the church.

As to the naive reading being uncritical–I suppose it depends on what you mean by “uncritical”, but he doesn’t mean simply taking them as true; he say on a naive reading that many problems are obvious:

The naïve reader, going through the evangelists in order, will notice immediately much of what the skeptics emphasize about the seeming imperfections of the texts. That Jesus is given different genealogies in Luke and Matthew. That timelines and details differ among the authors. That Jesus drives the money changers out of the temple early in his ministry in the Gospel of John and just before his crucifixion in the others. That Jesus in John’s Gospel talks differently, with his long theological discourses, from Jesus in the other narratives. Whether or not it’s possible to resolve some of these issues, they present themselves directly to the reader, and they don’t require any special training to pick up. And the naïve reader will also intuitively understand, without needing to be historically aware of the details, the debates about Jesus’ identity that consumed the early church. The Gospels all present him as a messiah, clearly — but the question of what that actually means is not completely or consistently answered in an initial reading of the texts.

I don’t think that Douthat is right on a bunch of the details, but I don’t think he wrong about everything either: It is hard to read canonical texts (especially not texts as famous, influential, and consequential as the gospels) without some sort of prejudice—this is obvious in the case of devout Christians who approach the texts assuming they support their church’s dogma (e.g., of course Mark thinks Jesus was a divine person), but you see it from the other side as well (consider how popular mythicism is among amateurs: there is an apparent felt need to totally undermine Christianity).

I think Douthat is right to note that there is something very strange in the gospels. Just from a literary perspective, they defined their own genre. I don’t think there was a clear precedent for them when Mark put pen to paper, and what he produced was, arguably, a work of genius. And I understand the temptation, that I think is the subtext for Douthat’s piece, that their queerness should make us stop and wonder if there isn’t something really special going on here. But as I pointed out earlier, when you move from that initial position, when you move from the 30,000-foot view of Christianity and dig into the details to try to figure out what precisely was going on and to try to address some of those problems that leap off the page even to the naive reader, you end up having to conclude that, while there was certainly something unusual going on in the formation of Christianity, it wasn’t special for the reason Christians think it was special.