Is Critical Biblical Scholarship Valid? What the New Testament Itself Indicates!
In my previous post I argued that critical scholars who insist that the Gospels are not historically accurate accounts of what happened in the life of Jesus – even though they do contain some historically accurate information, which needs to be carefully and cautiously ferreted out of their narratives – are not trashing the Gospels. They are trashing unfounded fundamentalist assumptions about the Gospels. In this post I’d like to argue that this view -- that the Gospels are not sacrosanct-historically-accurate-to-the-very-detail accounts of what really happened in the life of Jesus -- is not merely a modern notion that emerged during the Enlightenment. It is that, to be sure; but it’s not merely that. In fact, I would argue that this is the earliest attested view of the Gospels from earliest Christianity. Let’s assume for this argument a view that most scholars hold and that I could demonstrate if I wanted to spend a lot of time doing so (for example here and here), that Mark was the first of our Gospels and that Matthew [...]