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For the last decade or so, I've worn a silver denarius on a chain around my neck. I'm wearing it right now. This Roman coin was roughly equivalent to a day's wages in the first century, though it's worth a little bit more today. Mine has the image of Emperor Tiberius on the front and his mum Livia on the back.
That tells us it was struck sometime between AD 14 and 37, in the mint of Lyon, as it turns out, since the dates of Tiberius' reign are firmly established. I wear this piece of Roman history partly for sentimental reasons. It's the coin Jesus pointed to. I mean the denomination, not necessarily the very coin, though it could be.
when he was cornered over the issue of whether Jews in Judea should pay taxes to Rome. Whose image and inscription is this, he asked, as he indicated the denarius. Caesar's, Thales said. Well, give back to Caesar what is Caesar's, he said, and give to God what is God's.
But I also wear the coin for more intellectual reasons. It's a powerful reminder to me that the ancient past is as real and solid, or at least was once as real and solid, as this lump of silver around my neck. I often take it in my fingers and let my imagination run wild. Perhaps a worker was handed this after a brutal 12-hour shift in the ash mines of Naples.
Maybe a senator tossed it to his musicians after a particularly pleasing performance of the song of Sicilius, which was a hit in the day and it had a key line that said, enjoy life while you've got it. What groceries did this coin buy? And who was the poor mug that eventually lost it in the dirt to be recovered almost 20 centuries later? My coin is a kind of bridge back in time.
History, certainly the history of Tiberius and his mum, is real. It isn't Middle Earth or a galaxy far, far away. It's part of the story of the same planet we inhabit today.
But is Jesus' history in the same way? And are the sources about him, the Gospels mainly, as solid as the sources for Tiberius? Many, of course, would say no chance. But my guest today may just change your mind. I'm John Dixon, and this is Undeceptions. Undeceptions
Every week we'll be exploring some aspect of life, faith, history, culture or ethics that's either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. With the help of people who know what they're talking about, we're going to try and undeceive ourselves and let the truth out. Today we're asking the question, can we really trust the Gospels in the Bible?
And how does this evidence stack up against the evidence for other historical figures of the same period? And to help us, we're speaking to Dr. Peter Williams. Peter is an internationally renowned biblical scholar from Cambridge. He's the principal of Tyndale House, which is a specialist library for biblical and ancient studies. I spent a glorious six weeks buried in that library during my doctoral research.
Peter has written a marvelous new book for the general public called Can We Trust the Gospels? His answer is basically yes. Perhaps there's no surprise in that. But the way he gets there is pretty unusual. You make the surprising claim in your book that our sources for Jesus compare reasonably well with our sources for the most important man at the same time, Emperor Tiberius. Really?
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, obviously with Tiberius you have other things such as coins, but then for Jesus you have things beyond the four gospels that I was writing about in terms of letters about him and so on, all about Christianity.
First things first, Emperor Tiberius. He was the adopted son of the first emperor of Rome, Augustus. When Augustus died in AD 14, the 56-year-old Tiberius stepped up to rule this vast empire, which spanned from Egypt and Israel in the east all the way to Britain in the west, until his death 23 years later in AD 37.
This is the emperor who reigned through all of Jesus' adulthood. He's the guy Jesus references when he says, give to Caesar what is Caesar's.
Anyway, Peter Williams is gaining a reputation for amazing Twitter threads where he runs hypothetical arguments to expose the silliness of hyper-scepticism about historical matters. And there's this great satirical Twitter thread, you should go and find it, where he shows how easy it is to disqualify all the evidence that Tiberius ever existed.
using the same conspiratorial tricks and traps that skeptics sometimes use to disqualify Jesus as a historical figure. Here's a taste of Peter's thread, and I'll get producer Kayleigh to play the skeptic in the thread. ♪
So, believers in Tiberius, where's your evidence? The burden of proof is clearly on those who believe such an unlikely figure existed. Well, what about all the coins archaeologists have found with, you know, Tiberius' face and name on them? They're fakes. Look at his nose on those different coins that have been collected. How can one person have so many different noses? And while we're at it, noses on coins are actually good evidence against the existence of many of the Roman emperors.
How could so many emperors independently have such large pointed noses? How could not even one ever have a small nose? Big noses are part of the emperor myth. What about the busts of Tiberius' head? There's one you can see in the British Museum. Obviously fakes. They're not all the same. How can one person have different shaped heads? Okay, but there are records of Tiberius in historical documents by Tacitus, Suetonius, Cassius Dio.
Oh, come on. Those manuscripts are only from the 9th century. Trusting them is clearly as irrational as taking someone today as a source for Robin Hood or Joan of Arc.
The Twitter thread goes on for quite a while, but the point is not one legitimate historian thinks Tiberius didn't exist. But it is possible, with a bit of creativity, to deny all of the evidence. When it comes to Jesus, people feel free to be deniers, even though, as Peter argues, our sources for Jesus are in many respects just as good as those for Tiberius.
But if you just take biographies, you basically have four main biographical sources for Tiberius. You've got Valaeus Patroclus, you've got Tastus, you've got Suetonius, you've got Cassius Dio, and you've got four sources, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, for Jesus. And in terms of length, they're comparable. Tastus is a bit on the longer side, but it's not all about Tiberius. Some of it's about his reign.
Tacitus was a Roman aristocrat and government official. Writing about 80 years after Tiberius, his Annals of Imperial Rome are universally regarded as the best historical sources for the period. Suetonius, he's a Roman biographer writing shortly after Tacitus.
Cassius Dio is writing later still. He's in about the year 220, so a good 180 years after Tiberius. And Valleus Perturculus is our earliest sources. He was a Roman soldier and writer at the very time of Tiberius. But he was also the ultimate fanboy of Tiberius, making his work less useful than we'd hope.
In terms of the closeness in time, one of Tiberius's is a lot closer, but that's the one that seems to be least reliable, the propagandist Valaeus Perturculus.
but the other ones are probably more distant, the other three, than you have with the four Gospels. So all of this, you know, stacks up rather well. If someone's prepared to accept that we have reasonable sources for the life of Tiberius, then we're doing as well with Jesus. A few ancient non-Christian writers mention Jesus in passing. Tacitus, for one, but also the first century Jewish writer Josephus. We're sure to do episodes on them in the future. But the Gospels are the main sources...
and all of them were written closer in time to Jesus than Tacitus was to Tiberius. And Peter argues the Gospels are rich historical sources. So I'd say our sources are...
really extraordinarily good because we have in our sources in the gospels long speeches of jesus lots of back and forth dialogue and you get different kinds of speech so you get parables you get arguments and so on and that probably is going to have a greater range than you'd have for other people from the ancient world
Peter mentions that the Gospels are biographies, accounts of the lives of particular historical figures. This is widely agreed in scholarship today. Some years ago I made a documentary called The Christ Files, which set out to discover how we know what we know about Jesus. One of the scholars I interviewed was the polymath Richard Borkham. I asked him to explain what it means to call the Gospels biographies.
If you think how would a contemporary reader of the Gospels, how would one of the first readers of the Gospels have thought of it, what sort of literature would they have thought it was? I think the answer that is actually very widespread among scholars now is that they would have seen them as biographies.
We need to be a bit careful with that because it's biography in the ancient sense of a biography, not necessarily much like the kind of biographies that people write today. So there are things that you wouldn't expect to get in an ancient biography that you might expect in a modern one, such as an interest in psychology, which is very typical modern. You don't get much of probing into a person's inner development and so on in ancient biography.
But people would have seen the Gospels, I think, as an ancient biography in the sense of an account of the life of some prominent figure. There were biographies of all kinds of figures, generals, politicians, artists, writers, philosophers, and so forth. And they would have seen this, I think, as a biography of Jesus. And the importance of that, of course, is they would expect this to be a record of what happened.
they would be looking for historical information. They would not have expected it to be mere legend or an entertaining bit of fiction or other kinds of literature that you could be reading. The Gospels look like a biography. That is, they look like historical writing of a particular kind. There are several ways to challenge all this, including the next question I put to Professor Borkham in The Christ Files. Are the Gospels too biased to be considered good historiography?
We'll deal with that question in a future episode. Or you could get your hands on the CrossFiles documentary. We'll put a link in the show notes. Certainly, an important atheist like Richard Dawkins goes to town on this question. The only difference between the Da Vinci Code and the Gospels, he says, is that the Gospels are ancient fiction while the Da Vinci Code is modern fiction.
But perhaps the most common myth about the Gospels, says Peter Williams, is that they were written a long time after Jesus is said to have lived. I think that probably the biggest thing is this idea that there's just a huge gap between
between Jesus and the Gospels and that these could have been made up by people just a very long time later. And, you know, we know this isn't the case. Even those who are skeptical scholars, people who have actually studied things, would accept that the gap between Jesus and the Gospels is far shorter than probably the public imagination thinks.
We're told in passing that Paul was in Corinth for 18 months crossing over with a man called Gallio who was proconsul of the region and we know from other sources that that's the year 51. So this is like a chronological peg in the ground we can go backwards and forwards from there. Now that helps us date Paul's letters and the events of his life but how does that help with the gospels?
Well, from that fixed date we can work out that one of the Gospel writers, Luke, was a travelling companion of Paul from at least the late 40s AD. This means that his Gospel must have been written sometime before the year 80. He wouldn't have been alive for long after that.
And that helps us with another gospel. Most scholars believe that Luke used Mark's gospel as one of his three sources in writing his own gospel. That means Mark had to have been written a decent time before Luke.
Most put Mark 10 to 15 years earlier than Luke, partly because there had to be a bit of time for it to disseminate to get picked up by Luke, and partly because Mark's gospel seems to have been written while the Jerusalem temple was still standing, and we know that it was destroyed by the Romans in August AD 70.
Anyway, Matthew's Gospel is placed around the time of Luke, maybe a decade later, so in the 80s, and John is placed usually in the 90s, though personally I think it's a bit earlier, but we'll just go with the mainstream dates. What all this means is that the latest of all the Gospels, say John, is still closer in time to Jesus than is our best source for the emperor of the same period, the account of Tacitus.
I think in the public imagination, they imagine there's probably centuries of hearsay before you actually get things written down. And even the most extreme sceptics are not thinking in those terms. But also, as we get into these...
stories in the gospels we really see that they are very fitting to the time and place in which they're set they would not fit you know in a different time and it's hard to explain the correlations they have with early Jewish teachings if they're written by Christians and
A couple of generations after, Christians have become an awful lot less Jewish in their ways of thinking. So all of these things fit together. I mean, why would someone making up a gospel several generations after Jesus put on his lips as he dies, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me, which is what you have in Matthew and Mark? You know, it doesn't make any sense. But actually, Peter says it's the little details included in the Gospels that help us to establish their veracity.
A large part of your book gives us a tour of incidental details in the Gospels, which you say are inconsistent with the popular claim that these writers just made stuff up. So before I ask you about some of those specific details, how could incidental details be historically worthwhile? Well, I think incidental details often do help us
build you a very clear picture of an author so one of the things you look at when you look at literature is often what you could call the implied author um and you could say what can we infer about the author from this because um that there's the author's display knowledge is on display so we we start building up a picture for instance of authors who knew quite a lot about uh the um Judea and Galilee and so on um that's significant at least it um
disproves the hypotheses that these people were ignorant of the time and place of Jesus. That's all relevant. Also, sometimes people have an idea that the stories about Jesus have been corrupted by being told and retold many times. And the problem with that hypothesis and the small details is...
if there's a version of that hypothesis that requires the central bit of the story to be corrupted while the peripheral bits the small details get left in place because there isn't really a mechanism of having selective corruption of information like that so if someone for instance says well the miracles of jesus got exaggerated as they were told from one person to another they didn't really happen but all the incidental details around the miracles they they're correctly preserved that's uh
That doesn't really have much explanatory power. It requires something we can't find parallels for.
In his book, Peter has created a table of 26 towns and villages that are mentioned in the Gospels, displaying precise knowledge of the region, which wouldn't have been possible without keen local knowledge. There are the big towns like Jerusalem and Tiberias, named after the emperor, but also some small obscure ones like Bethany, Bethsaida, Cana, Chorazin, Nain and so on. It's just interesting that they mention these sorts of things because...
Again, let's say you're living in Rome or Greece or Italy or Turkey, wherever it is, and you're wanting to make up a story about Palestine. Actually, it's not a trivial thing to be able to just name towns and villages in the right relationship to each other or the right area. So you've got to ask yourself the question, how do the writers even access these sorts of names? Now, I think the obvious explanation is that they lived...
either lived in the land or they had detailed conversations with people who lived in the land. Those are your two basic explanations. If we say it's detailed conversations, they didn't actually live in the land, it has still to be detailed conversations where they care about the answers and want to sort of be faithful to some sort of framework of understanding
geography for instance so that's where I think it can be significant you can also compare it with other writers so Pliny the Elder was a great writer on geography and he'll tell you about the Dead Sea and the River Jordan and so on even though he'd never been to those places he's
research from his books but what he can't do is tell you the names of the little villages of Judea, Galilee and so on and even as one of the great scientists of his day he makes mistakes you know about where the towns were when he talks about where Magdala was or Tarakea was and when he talks about where Tiberius was where he actually gets them in long relationship to each other and one of the things we also know is that
Pliny the Elder was a Roman writer of the first century. He mainly wrote about geography and culture. He was sort of the inventor of the encyclopedia, actually. And the poor guy died in the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. But he wasn't quite Encyclopedia Britannica. He made a few slip-ups, mainly because he was relying on second-hand reports rather than first-hand experience for everything. For example, he speaks of mysterious floating islands somewhere in Italy.
So this is where the top Roman book writers, if you'd just gone and looked at them, you wouldn't be able to build up a picture of geography. So this is a telltale mark of someone who knows the subject matter, at least. You say something similar about the use of personal names, Simon, Joseph, Mary, and so on. What's the significance of that? Well, again...
Jews in Rome generally had Latin or Greek names. We also know that Jews in Alexandria had different sorts of names. In Egypt, you know, Ptolemy was a popular name, Docetius and so on, Pappus. These are popular names there. Then you can go up to Turkey and you can look at the Aphrodisias and you can look at the names that people have there. Jews, large populations.
And in each of these different places, they have different sorts of names. Now, when you then look at the Gospels, you find the characters have the right sort of names for the time and place. And you can correlate what you have in the Gospels with the sorts of names you get in Josephus when he's recording Jews in Palestine, sort of things you get in the Dead Sea Scrolls and so on. You build up a picture that
All four Gospels as a whole and individually are true to this pattern. And that is not at all what you would expect. From a massive database of ancient names from this particular time and place, we know that the most popular male names were Simon, Joseph, Eliezer, Judah, Jehoi-nan and Joshua, which by the way is the name Jesus. Outside of Galilee and Judea, these names weren't popular.
An analysis of the names in the Gospels and the Book of Acts shows that there is a striking correspondence between the relative frequency of names used in this precise region and the relative frequency of the same names in the New Testament.
that would be impossible to fake. You might be able to guess the top two or three names, but the New Testament gets the frequency right all the way down to the less popular names like Zacchaeus, Jairus and Nathaniel. And Director Mark, you were just telling me about a book you're trying to write about Japan that is facing this problem. Yeah, I'm writing a book at the moment that's actually set in post-World War II Japan. It's not that long ago, under the governorship of MacArthur,
and it's almost impossible to get names that are right for the towns or what they were called then or even the names of the people. It's incredible. I mean, you would have to do all these sorts of googling to find that out. I'm trying to talk to first-hand sources and sometimes people don't even remember. I mean, it's just that hard. Yeah, you would get caught out a thousand years from now for the mistakes. And what we're finding is the Gospels get place names and human names
not just right, but in the right frequency of usage that we find around Judea and Galilee. I'm just going for what sounds nice. If the gospel writers are getting these sorts of details correct, that's highly significant about the sorts of quality of information that they're getting overall.
And then there are the undesigned coincidences. This is a theory first put forward by the 18th century clergyman William Paley and given a name by the 19th century theologian J.J. Blunt. Peter tells me that the Gospels show peculiar signs of authenticity that could only be undesigned coincidences. Yeah.
An undesigned coincidence can really just be a very subtle agreement that you have between a couple of sources where it's so small that you're not going to say that the detail was put in there to make people believe the story because the danger is that you would never see the detail. So for instance, in the feeding of the 5,000, we have in Mark's gospel that it says lots of people are travelling around at the time, many people are coming and going.
and in it doesn't tell you why, it doesn't tell you what time of the year it is. And then you look in John's Gospel and it doesn't tell you lots of people are travelling, but it does tell you it's Passover time. Now, those two things fit together in an indirect way because Passover time is the biggest Jewish festival. So therefore, it's a time when the most people are travelling. So it's, you know, like I suppose if we had...
Something today where you had one source saying it was Christmas Eve or, you know, a couple of days before Christmas and another source that said lots of people were traveling or people said it was a few weeks before Christmas and another source was saying and lots of people were shopping. You know, it's the sort of way that these things dovetail that is hard to explain by super cunning authors trying to make the story sound authentic.
In our very first episode of Undeceptions, we talked about the claim that what we read in the Bible today isn't what was first written down 2,000 years ago, that the Bible's been changed through some kind of Chinese whispers or the telephone game, as they sometimes say. But as we discovered, the oldest surviving copy of Paul's letters, known as P46, which I got to play with in the University of Michigan vaults,
is incredibly similar to what we find in our Bibles today. Some things are different, spelling, word order and so on. One big difference in P46 is that there is a whole paragraph missing from the very end of Paul's letter to the Romans. But it's not completely gone. It's just in a different position. It's at the end of chapter 15 instead of the end of chapter 16.
And that's amongst the biggest discrepancies we find in these ancient manuscripts. Anyway, feel free to go back and have a listen to episode one for more on that.
This episode of Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics' new book, ready for it? Mere Christian Hermeneutics, Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically, by the brilliant Kevin Van Hooser. I'll admit that's a really deep-sounding title, but don't let that put you off. Kevin is one of the most respected theological thinkers in the world today. He's a
And he explores why we consider the Bible the word of God, but also how you make sense of it from start to finish. Hermeneutics is just the fancy word for how you interpret something. So if you want to dip your toe into the world of theology, how we know God, what we can know about God, then this book is a great starting point. Looking at how the church has made sense of the Bible through history, but also how you today can make sense of it.
Mere Christian Hermeneutics also offers insights that are valuable to anyone who's interested in literature, philosophy, or history. Kevin doesn't just write about faith. He's also there to hone your interpretative skills. And if you're eager to engage with the Bible, whether as a believer or as a doubter, this might be essential reading.
You can pre-order your copy of Mere Christian Hermeneutics now at Amazon, or you can head to zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions to find out more. Don't forget, zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions.
68-year-old Tirat was working as a farmer near his small village on the Punjab-Sindh border in Pakistan when his vision began to fail. Cataracts were causing debilitating pain and his vision impairment meant he couldn't sow crops.
It pushed his family into financial crisis. But thanks to support from Anglican Aid, Tirat was seen by an eye care team sent to his village by the Victoria Memorial Medical Centre. He was referred for crucial surgery. With his vision successfully restored, Tirat is able to work again and provide for his family.
There are dozens of success stories like Tarat's emerging from the outskirts of Pakistan, but Anglican Aid needs your help for this work to continue. Please head to anglicanaid.org.au forward slash Tarat.
Speaking to Peter, I ask him whether, in his view, it's possible for anyone to be confident today that what they read in the Gospels is what was originally written by the authors.
Well, I mean, I think today we live in a copying culture. We get our mobile phones and we get copies of information from around the world and we're very content with that. And we've got to recognize that actually ancient societies were copying cultures as well. You have scribes, they pass things on. And
When we look at ancient literature that survived to today, the vast majority of it has been reasonably well copied over time. So I think the starting position with anything
is that it's well copied, whether it's Homer in Greek or Virgil or the Bible or the Quran. These are all reasonably well copied texts. So that's one point. But I think then we can dig down a little bit further when we look into the Gospels specifically, where we can say, actually, we have more manuscript evidence for these than we have for many other things that we are prepared to trust. We can say that over time,
Our manuscripts are tending to become earlier. And it's a bit like an accountancy audit that a firm of accountants can go in and they can audit a very, very big firm without having to read every single financial record. All they have to do is they have to, you know, dig into some of the boxes and see if they're finding things that don't fit. And it's exactly the same with the New Testament that we've got accounts.
complete manuscripts of the whole lot. You've got complete manuscripts of the New Testament from the 4th century. But also, when you look at earlier sources than that, small fragments of papyrus or quotations and so on, we find that those
small bits are also fitting with that later picture. So in other words, it gives you very good grounds to believe that the whole lot has integrity. But we don't have anything from the first century. And so there's still the possibility of someone saying, OK, they started to copy really well from, say, the year 200. But before that, we don't know. Yes. So let's run with that for a minute. I think what
I would say is normally when you're extrapolating into let's say a gap you should do it on the basis of what the evidence you have rather than the evidence you don't have. So I can't prove that nothing's changed but I'd simply say that there's no reason to think that things have changed.
I'd also say, imagine them running the same argument 500 years ago. So let's say when you're dealing with a scholar like Erasmus and his earliest manuscripts are from the 12th century, you could say, well, what could have happened in those 1,000 years? Well, we've covered most of those 1,000 years with known manuscripts now, and we don't find the big conspiracy changes. So we start...
Let me fill in the blanks. Peter is such a nerd, he expects us all to know that the famous literary scholar Erasmus produced a really important copy of the Greek New Testament in 1516. Based on the limited manuscript copies available to him, he offered a standardised text that became the basis for many English translations, like the King James Version.
What Peter is saying here is that in the early 1500s, Erasmus didn't have that many biblical texts in front of him that were older than about the 12th century, just a few hundred years before him. But these were the best copies he had, so he used them and scholars respected them.
What Peter's saying here is that you could have said to Erasmus, but how do we know that the more ancient manuscripts, which we don't have, were completely different from the ones that you have from the 12th century? He probably would have replied that the manuscripts we do have make clear that the copying process was mostly very accurate. But here's the thing. We've now discovered manuscripts.
Many texts, much earlier than those that Erasmus had. We have copies of the New Testament from the 9th, 8th, 7th, 6th, 5th centuries, going all the way back to the 2nd century. And these texts say basically the same thing that Erasmus' text said. No matter how early we go, we find that the copies say pretty much the same thing as the texts after them.
But then let's dig a little bit further down into this idea of the very earliest bits being miscopied. Well, there are several problems with that, say, if you've got four gospels, because if those four gospels are written in four different cities, and most people believe they are, you know, they're written at different times.
And the day after one of them is written, people don't know that's going to become part of the four gospel collection, the famous four gospel collection that we now hear of. So for them to know that if they want to foist a change of belief on people, they need to change all these four gospels, it's actually a very difficult thing to know at an early stage. It'd be something that someone might well know later if they wanted to change things, but they're not going to know at the early stage.
logistically getting people to change texts is is not easy because if they're in different places you're gonna have to travel around and because everything's copied by hand uh that's difficult so a single gospel might have quite a number of sheepskins or a lot numbers of sheets of papyrus to write it on so either way it's going to be quite an expensive thing uh so it
Expensive then to make multiple copies of. It all becomes just logistically very difficult. And even if you can make a physical copy, which is somewhat falsified, how do you get people to accept that? And so on. So you start just running into problems. So I'm not saying I can prove
that things haven't changed, but I can say that the hypothesis that they haven't has got good evidence in its support and is very beautiful and simple. It explains data and, you know, a more complicated hypothesis doesn't. Let's press pause. I've got a five-minute, Jesus.
You sometimes hear that the Gospels were never meant to be read as history. They're more like parables of the spiritual life, or myths and legends from antiquity, or maybe just about ethics, but certainly not about the flesh and blood history of the real world.
This was first proposed by the German scholar David Friedrich Strauss. In one of the most influential books of the 19th century, Strauss's The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, published in 1835, argued that the Gospels need to be understood as myth.
Now, by myth, he didn't mean just untrue, and nor did Strauss go along with the idea that the apostles just made everything up in a deliberate attempt to deceive us. What he meant was that wherever the gospel writers strain our rational minds, as in, say, miracle stories,
They are employing the religious imagination to express the inexpressible longings of the human soul. The resurrection narratives, for instance, are not out-and-out lies, nor are they historical reports. They are poetical images, myths of the divine life that the early Christians reckon they found in Jesus.
David Strauss believed that the core ideas of Christianity, as he saw them, peace and love, man, could still be preserved even if the basic events of Jesus' life were unhistorical. They are myth.
In modern times, someone like the popular American writer Bishop John Shelby Spong goes along with this Straussian model for understanding the life of Jesus. But virtually no one in the academy today buys any of this. The more we've discovered of ancient texts, the clearer it is that the Gospels are nothing like ancient myth or legend.
They are very much like historical biography, of which we have about 30 or 40 other examples from the time. No one in the ancient world will have picked up a gospel and thought that they were reading something like Homer's The Iliad or The Odyssey or Virgil's Aeneid.
No, the Gospels read like genuine accounts of a first century life. They might not be true accounts. That's for each of us to work out. But they are definitely aiming to be historical records. Let's compare the opening lines of Homer's Iliad, the greatest of the ancient world's legends. Here it is.
the wrath sing goddess of peleus son achilles the accursed wrath which brought countless sorrows upon the achans and sent down to hades many valiant souls of warriors and made them men themselves to be the spoil for dogs and birds of every kind
Cool opener. But let's compare it with the opening lines of Luke chapter 1.
Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. With this in mind, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I too decided to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught."
Think of all the history sounding bits in that opening paragraph. He refers to prior sources. He says that this material was handed down from people who were eyewitnesses. He says that he has investigated everything from the beginning and we can place him in the 40s. So that's pretty close to the beginning. He
He's writing an orderly account and he wants his readership to know the certainty. The Greek word is asphaleia, from which we get the word astel.
Asphalt, the stuff that roads are made of. This is the sturdiness of the things in this gospel. Now, many scholars have pointed out that Luke's opener is written in the very style of the introductions of other ancient historical works like Polybius, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and the first century Jewish writer Josephus.
Just a few pages later in Luke, chapter 3 that is, Luke introduces the adult ministry of Jesus with a classic historical pinpoint. I love this passage. It might not sound very spiritually enlightening, but historically it's exciting. Here it is.
In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, Herod, tetrarch of Galilee, his brother Philip, tetrarch of Iturea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias, tetrarch of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John, son of Zechariah, in the wilderness.
When the Gospels were written, there was no BC or AD. That dating system was invented 500 years later. So Luke dates the first year of Jesus' ministry by referencing overlapping historical rulers from the time. And we can verify every one of these rulers from outside sources.
Tiberius, of course, Pontius Pilate, but also Herod, Philip, Caiaphas and even John, son of Zechariah. That's John the Baptist who's mentioned in a non-Christian writing from the same period. This historical precision is nothing like the Iliad or the Odyssey and so on.
In other words, this stuff didn't happen in the time of distant dreams, but in the known history of Judea and Galilee. This is not a story from the land of the hobbits. It's a biography from the Middle East, the land of Pilate, Herod, and the Jews.
Herod, Caiaphas, and of course Jesus. There may be all sorts of decent reasons to resist picking up a gospel and reading it for ourselves, but the idea that the gospels are mere legend isn't one of them. You can press play now. None of this proves everything in the gospels. Peter isn't that kind of dogmatic scholar, and this isn't that kind of show.
But the point is, the Gospels have to be taken more seriously than many think. Richard Dawkins' famous idea that the Gospels are just ancient fiction, very much like Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code is modern fiction, really can't be sustained.
Contemporary experts might not privilege the Gospels as divine scripture, but they do increasingly regard them as serious historical sources for knowing about Roman Judea and Galilee, the customs, politics and personalities of the time, and of course, about the remarkable figure at the centre of the Gospels. If it's been a while since you've picked up a Gospel, perhaps it's time to give it a read.
Next episode, we'll be doing something quite different. We're speaking with Christians on the front lines in the war against cyber sex trafficking of children in the Philippines, a country that's considered the epicenter for this heinous crime.
It's a myth that there's no such thing as slavery in modern times. There were Christians leading the cause against slavery as early as the 5th century, and then again, of course, famously under Wilberforce in the 19th century. And we're going to be speaking to today's crusaders who want to see the absolute end of slavery for all time. See ya.
Undeceptions is hosted by me, John Dixon, produced by Kaylee No-Pain and directed by Mark Hadley, who is. Our theme song is by Bach, arranged by me and played by the fabulous Undeceptions band, editing by Bella Ann Sanchez. Hi, Bella. Head to undeceptions.com. You'll find show notes and everything related to the episode.