Are the gospels based on credible eyewitness testimony? This is a question on which modern scholars line up on both sides of the divide. From my point of view, the cumulative case for the gospels being based on the testimony of eyewitnesses is clear and convincing. In his groundbreaking work, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, Richard Bauckham (professor of New Testament studies at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland) lays out an array of compelling evidence for the trustworthiness of the gospels. Among them is the test of personal names, which is covered in chapters 3 and 4 of the book. What he finds is that there is a remarkable correlation between the frequency of names found in the Gospels and Acts and the frequency of names found in writings outside the New Testament. This argument is also developed by Peter Williams, of Tyndale House in Cambridge, in this lecture.
The top 2 men’s names (Simon and Joseph) in first century Palestine outside the New Testament have a frequency of 15.6%. The frequency of those two names in the gospels and Acts is 18.2%. The frequency of the top 9 men’s names outside the New Testament is 41.5%; whereas the frequency in the Gospels and Acts is 40.3%. The frequency of the top two women’s names (Mary and Salome) outside the New Testament is 28.6%; the frequency in the Gospels and Acts is 38.9%. The frequency of the top 9 women’s names outside the New Testament is 49.7%; and 61.1% in the Gospels and Acts.
The top 6 male names in first century Palestine are:
1) Simon/Simeon
2) Joseph/Joses
3) Lazarus/Eleazar
4) Judas/Judah
5) John/Yohanan
6) Jesus/Joshua
The frequency of New Testament individuals with those names is 8, 6, 1, 5, 5 and 2 respectively. We can see, therefore, that there exists a remarkable correlation between first century Palestinian names outside and inside the New Testament. What is especially remarkable about this is that the rankings of names in Palestine does not correspond with the rankings of those names in other regions. For example, the rankings of names in Egypt during that period are:
1) Eleazar (ranked 3rd in Palestine)
2) Sabbataius (ranked 68= in Palestine)
3) Joseph (ranked 2 in Palestine)
4=) Dositheus (ranked 16 in Palestine)
4=) Pappus (ranked 39= in Palestine)
6=) Ptolemaius (ranked 50= in Palestine)
6=) Samuel (ranked 23 in Palestine)
Such a correlation clearly suggests a close connection to the time and place (first century Palestine) in which the events that the gospels narrate unfolded. Curiously, this contrasts strikingly with the second century apocryphal gospels in which such a correlation is not borne out. Furthermore, even if a writer does have a close connection to the time and place of the events that they narrate, one’s intuition with regards the rankings of popular names is not likely to be very reliable.
But we can go further. Consider the following excerpt from Matthew 10 (verses 2-4) where we are given the names of the twelve disciples. Where these names feature in the top 90 names, their ranking is given in brackets:
Simon (1), called Peter, and Andrew his brother, and James (11) the son of Zebedee, and John (5) his brother; Philip (61=) and Bartholomew (50=); Thomas and Matthew (9) the tax collector; James (11) the son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus (39=); Simon (1) the Cananaean, and Judas (4) Iscariot, who also betrayed him.
Notice that there is correlation between those names that have a high ranking and those names that are assigned a qualifier. The lower ranked names do not have a qualifier.
What is even more curious is that there is a difference between how names are given in quoted speech and how names are given by the narrator. For example, consider the following excerpt from Matthew 14:1-9. Pay close attention to how the name John (rank 5) is given in quoted speech vs. how it is given in the narration.
At that time Herod the tetrarch heard about the fame of Jesus, and he said to his servants, “This is John the Baptist. He has been raised from the dead; that is why these miraculous powers are at work in him.” For Herod had seized John and bound him and put him in prison for the sake of Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife, because John had been saying to him, “It is not lawful for you to have her.” And though he wanted to put him to death, he feared the people, because they held him to be a prophet. But when Herod’s birthday came, the daughter of Herodias danced before the company and pleased Herod, so that he promised with an oath to give her whatever she might ask. Prompted by her mother, she said, “Give me the head of John the Baptist here on a platter.” And the king was sorry, but because of his oaths and his guests he commanded it to be given. He sent and had John beheaded in the prison, and his head was brought on a platter and given to the girl, and she brought it to her mother. And his disciples came and took the body and buried it, and they went and told Jesus.
Notice that, in quoted speech, the name John is always given a qualifier whereas, in the narration, the name is not assigned a qualifier. This makes sense when you understand that the original speaker needed to provide such a qualifier to specify which John was the subject of discussion. The narrator, however, can safely assume the reader knows which John is being talked about. This is a pattern which is found throughout all four gospels.
Consider the following excerpts in relation to the name Jesus (rank 6), paying close attention to how the name Jesus is given in quoted speech vs. the surrounding narration.
Matthew 21:6-12 — The disciples went and did as Jesus had directed them. They brought the donkey and the colt and put on them their cloaks, and he sat on them. Most of the crowd spread their cloaks on the road, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. And the crowds that went before him and that followed him were shouting, “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!” And when he entered Jerusalem, the whole city was stirred up, saying, “Who is this?” And the crowds said, “This is the prophet Jesus, from Nazareth of Galilee.” And Jesus went into the temple…
Matthew 26:64-75 — Jesus said to him, “You have said so. But I tell you, from now on you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power and coming on the clouds of heaven.” Then the high priest tore his robes and said, “He has uttered blasphemy. What further witnesses do we need? You have now heard his blasphemy. What is your judgment?” They answered, “He deserves death.” Then they spit in his face and struck him. And some slapped him, saying, “Prophesy to us, you Christ! Who is it that struck you?”
Now Peter was sitting outside in the courtyard. And a servant girl came up to him and said, “You also were with Jesus the Galilean.” But he denied it before them all, saying, “I do not know what you mean.” And when he went out to the entrance, another servant girl saw him, and she said to the bystanders, “This man was with Jesus of Nazareth.” And again he denied it with an oath: “I do not know the man.” After a little while the bystanders came up and said to Peter, “Certainly you too are one of them, for your accent betrays you.” Then he began to invoke a curse on himself and to swear, “I do not know the man.” And immediately the rooster crowed. And Peter remembered the saying of Jesus, “Before the rooster crows, you will deny me three times.” And he went out and wept bitterly.
Indeed, this pattern is uniform throughout the gospels. On one occasion Jesus is addressed in quoted speech without such a qualifier — where Jesus is spoken to by the criminal on the cross (“Jesus, remember me.”; Luke 23:42). But it can be reasonably assumed that there would be no doubt about the Jesus to whom he was referring.
In conclusion, the pattern of names given in the gospels reflects exactly what we would expect if they were written by eyewitnesses with a close connection to the time and place of the events that they narrate. This is not a pattern that would have been at all easy for a forger to create.
1) It’s a perfectly normal practice when writing stories of all sorts, fiction or non-fiction, to qualify a person’s name when telling the story in the third person, it adds verisimilitude. “And Salome said, Give me the head of John the Baptist.”
2) Speaking of Bauckham’s statistics, I’d like to know how few names we possess for each time period and for each Jewish occupied region of the ancient world, such as Jewish names in Rome and Jewish names in Syria, and how quickly or slowly the frequencies of such names changed each century. Because If you possess only a relatively small number of names that maintain a relatively stable frequency over a long period of time, from 330 BCE to 200 CE, a 530 year period, then there’s not much you can say concerning the TIME of composition of a piece. In fact I read a report that said we possess 247 names of Palestinian females from the 530 year period just mentioned. That’s on average 2.1 names per year that we know about, during a 530 year period. We also know that during this 530 year period the names of Mary and Salome remained among the most popular, And scholars have even supposed that the popularity of Mary and Salome may be due to their being borne by members of the Hasmonean royal house. Anyone familiar with the long popularity enjoyed by some names in Palestine, would be likely to include them in their story.
3) Prof. Goldacre and his commentors pointed out a statistical error Bauckham made when calculating the frequency of some names, fascinating little read:
http://ntweblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/how-likely-is-it-that-jesus-sisters.html
4) And as one reviewer summed things up:
It must be said however, that many will remain unconvinced by the alternative model of a “Formal Controlled Tradition” that Bauckham proposes in this book. It may be true that the literary features of mark show a closer connection with the testimony of Peter than is commonly assumed. But the evidence fails to sustain Bauckham’s hypothesis of a fixed body of Jesus tradition formulated by the Twelve in Jerusalem and mediated directly to the author of Mark through the apostolic preaching of Peter. Without accepting Bauckham’s dubious claim that Peter’s appearance at the beginning and end of Mark represents a literary device for identifying the work’s authoritative witness, it is very difficult to affirm the other alleged indication of the author’s reliance on Peter’s testimony, which are ambiguous at best. Equally questionable are the historical conclusions Backham draws from Paul’s Letters about the formal transmission of Jesus traditions. The level of institutionalization thus ascribed to the Jesus movement in the earliest stages of its development strains credibility. Likewise, Bauckham’s hypothesis about the Beloved Disciple as the eyewitness author of the Fourth Gospel will not convince many. Often resting on unproven assumptions, the argument frequently invokes highly conjectural explanations of textual evidence that are not easily affirmed. For examples, most will find fanciful the attempt to account for the infrequency and obscurity of references to the Beloved Disciples by appealing to the author’s need to establish his credibility as a perceptive disciple before disclosing his identity as the actual author of the Gospel. Even if we were to accept as probable many of the conclusions Bauckham draws from the Gospels, there still remains a larger question that weakens the argument of the book. If it is true that the Evangelists attached such importance to eyewitness testimony, then why are indications of this not more obvious and explicit? In response, Bauckham claims that ancient readers would have expected the Gospels to have eyewitness sources and so would have been alert to the subtle indications provided by the text. This explanation ascribes to the Evangelists and their readers a full measure of literary sophistication and an informed familiarity with the canons of Greco-Roman historiography. But this seems to far exceed what we can claim to know about the first eyewitnesses and those who listened to their testimony. [Dean Bechard of the Pontifico Instituto Biblico, Rome–final paragraph of his review of Richard Bauckham’s, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. Review published in Biblica, v.90, fasc.1, 2009, p. 126-129.]
5) Lastly, Bauckham does not deny the evidence in favor of Markan Priority. He has embraced Markan Priority. Speaking of which see this great Gospel comparison chart: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UO95rB_vO4I&feature=share&list=PL237D47CA1AACC95D
Matthew utilizes more of Mark (90%) than any other Gospel, and the wording is more similar with Mark more times than it is with Luke who includes a bit less of Mark than Matthew does. Starting with Mark being the earliest and then Matthew and Luke both building on Mark (and John building on the previous three) how much is “eyewitness” testimony and how much is reused (with revisions) from earlier Gospels? Such a question is constantly being debated, though Markan Priority is accepted by the majority of NT scholars today (even by the ones who are Q-doubters).
As each new Gospel arose, they appeared to want to supersede previous ones, Mark followed by Matthew who apparently was seeking to supersede Mark’s Gospel, and Luke claiming his was more authoritative than “previous attempts,” and then the fourth Gospel repeating ad nauseum that it is “true.”
Scholars also debate whether or not new legends continued to pop up and grow popular and become inserted into Mark’s basic template, from Matthew’s genealogy and miraculous birth story to Luke’s longer genealogy and a doubling of miraculous birth stories (Jesus and John the Baptist’s miraculous birth stories, complete with holy songs), and finally John, a miraculous pre-birth story), is something scholars are debating. Interestingly, Matthew and Luke’s stories differ the most in exactly those place where they couldn’t follow Mark because Mark was silent, namely nativity stories and post-resurrection stories.
Another obvious change in trajectory over time is the emphasis on seeing Jesus first in Galilee (Mark and Matthew)( and seeing Jesus first in Jerusalem. (Luke and John). Luke’s message delivered by an angel at the tomb is changed from “He has gone on before you to Galilee, there ye shall see him,” to, “Do you not remember what he said to you while he was preaching in Galilee?” Very obvious change that very obviously suits Luke’s intention of including tales of Jesus’ first appearances not in Galilee but in Jerusalem. http://www.umass.edu/wsp/journal/wsp1/wsp1-171-172.pdf
There are additional trajectories as well from Mark —> John. One can see the story over time growing bolder as each new Gospel author builds on the previous, emphasizing more of the positive proofs, signs, even adding more of them, and deleting the negative. Though not all trajectories following through all four stories, the difference between Mark and Matthew, as well as Mark and Luke is clearly visible, and the fourth Gospel seems to have built on stories remembered and/or “new born” from all three previous Gospels to some degree, though mostly Mark and Luke. See also the award winning book, Scripting Jesus: http://www.amazon.com/Scripting-Jesus-The-Gospels-Rewrite/dp/0061228796
Ed writes:
1)
It’s a perfectly normal practice when writing stories of all sorts, fiction or
non-fiction, to qualify a person’s name when telling the story in the third
person, it adds verisimilitude. “And Salome said, Give me the head of John the
Baptist.”
But this response misses
the point that this sort of qualification repeatedly appears in direct
quotation but not in the surrounding narrative.
2) Speaking of Bauckham’s
statistics, I’d like to know how few names we possess for each time period and
for each Jewish occupied region of the ancient world, such as Jewish names in Rome and Jewish names in Syria, and how quickly or slowly
the frequencies of such names changed each century. Because If you possess only
a relatively small number of names that maintain a relatively stable frequency
over a long period of time, from 330 BCE to 200 CE, a 530 year period, then
there’s not much you can say concerning the TIME of composition of a piece. In
fact I read a report that said we possess 247 names of Palestinian females from
the 530 year period just mentioned. That’s on average 2.1 names per year that
we know about, during a 530 year period. We also know that during this 530 year
period the names of Mary and Salome remained among the most popular, And
scholars have even supposed that the popularity of Mary and Salome may be due
to their being borne by members of the Hasmonean royal house. Anyone familiar with
the long popularity enjoyed by some names in Palestine, would be likely to include them in
their story.
Since the argument Bauckham is making here
is not for the date of the Gospels but rather for the authenticity of their
contents, this point is nothing more than an interesting rabbit trail. The fact
that the popularity of names shifts from region to region, as Tal Ilan’s name
lists have shown us, bears on our assessment of the writers’ knowledge of the
setting.
3)
Prof. Goldacre and his commentors pointed out a statistical error Bauckham made
when calculating the frequency of some names, … [snip]
Irrelevant to the point at
hand.
4) And as one reviewer
summed things up: … [snip]
So there is one reader’s unargued
opinion. Nothing in this paragraph bears on the significance of the handling of
names in the Gospels, which is the point of this post.
5)
Lastly, Bauckham does not deny the evidence in favor of Markan Priority. He has
embraced Markan Priority. … Speaking of which see this great Gospel comparison
chart:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…
Matthew utilizes more of
Mark (90%) than any other Gospel, and the wording is more similar with Mark
more times than it is with Luke who includes a bit less of Mark than Matthew
does. Starting with Mark being the earliest and then Matthew and Luke both
building on Mark (and John building on the previous three) how much is “eyewitness”
testimony and how much is reused (with revisions) from earlier Gospels? Such a
question is constantly being debated, though Markan Priority is accepted by the
majority of NT scholars today (even by the ones who are Q-doubters).
So what? Marcan priority has nothing to
do with the significance of the argument from names.
As
each new Gospel arose, they appeared to want to supersede previous ones, Mark
followed by Matthew who apparently was seeking to supersede Mark’s Gospel, and
Luke claiming his was more authoritative than “previous attempts,” and then the
fourth Gospel repeating ad nauseum that it is “true.”
Now we’ve gone down the
rabbit hole into psychology. This is not scientific criticism: it is literary
fancy masquerading as serious scholarship.
Scholars also debate
whether or not new legends continued to pop up and grow popular and become inserted
into Mark’s basic template, from Matthew’s genealogy and miraculous birth story
to Luke’s longer genealogy and a doubling of miraculous birth stories (Jesus
and John the Baptist’s miraculous birth stories, complete with holy songs), and
finally John, a miraculous pre-birth story), is something scholars are
debating. Interestingly, Matthew and Luke’s stories differ the most in exactly
those place where they couldn’t follow Mark because Mark was silent, namely
nativity stories and post-resurrection stories.
So each Gospel has some
material that the others do not. Creating Eohippus sequences from them proves
nothing.
Another obvious change in
trajectory over time is the emphasis on seeing Jesus first in Galilee (Mark and
Matthew)( and seeing Jesus first in Jerusalem.
(Luke and John). Luke’s message delivered by an angel at the tomb is changed
from “He has gone on before you to Galilee, there ye shall see him,” to, “Do
you not remember what he said to you while he was preaching in Galilee?” Very obvious change that very obviously suits
Luke’s intention of including tales of Jesus’ first appearances not in Galilee
but in Jerusalem.
Right, because obviously, Jerusalem is the natural end of a trajectory from Galilee, by the literary canon of speculatio ad nauseam.
This is also why John talks about appearances in Galilee—just
an inversion of the trajectory. How wonderfully flexible the canons of literary
criticism are in the proper hands!
There
are additional trajectories as well from Mark —> John. One can see the
story over time growing bolder as each new Gospel author builds on the
previous, emphasizing more of the positive proofs, signs, even adding more of
them, and deleting the negative. Though not all trajectories following through
all four stories, the difference between Mark and Matthew, as well as Mark and
Luke is clearly visible, and the fourth Gospel seems to have built on stories
remembered and/or “new born” from all three previous Gospels to some degree,
though mostly Mark and Luke. See also the award winning book, Scripting Jesus:
Translation: John contains
a lot of stuff that Mark doesn’t, though there are points of contact with the
Synoptics. Therefore, John made it all up and nothing unique to his gospel has
any historical value whatsoever. Because we said so.