Ep. 113 – Are Many New Testament Documents Forged? – Part 1

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Fraud In The Bible?

Fraud in The Bible by the New Testament authors? Say it isn’t so! Not really. The claim that anonymous authors, centuries after the life of Christ and the apostles were the real authors of the Christian Scriptures is false. In fact, without a full-on skeptical presuppositional worldview, one could see just how amazing the New Testament manuscripts really are.

Timeline Breakdown:

00:00 – Introduction
01:39 – 5 Claims Of Proof Of NT Forgery
03:55 – Treating Ehrman’s Writings Like Ehrman Treats The NT
11:14 – Ehrman On Weaponizing The Canon
14:20 – Ehrman Thinks The Disciples Couldn’t Or Shouldn’t Write The NT
15:10 – A Short Overview Of The Response
18:20 – Claim #1 – NT Weren’t Written By Jesus’ Companions
20:19 – NT Writers Were Too Biased
21:32 – If True, Why Were Those Who Were Picked Chosen?
24:00 – Why Are NT Witnesses Too Biased To Be True?
29:22 – Jesus & The Eyewitnesses Can Be Trusted
30:07 – Ancient Historians Relied On Eyewitness Testimony
30:28 – The Importance Of Papias
32:41 – The Accuracy From The Names Used In The Documents
36:55 – Myth Vs. History In Oral Traditions From Other Societies
37:44 – Internal Support For Good Eyewitness Testimony In The NT
38:42 – The Silent Witness Of Bart Ehrman
40:43 – Conclusion

The episode link is cavetothecross.com/ep113

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Transcription

Introduction

Patrick: Hello, I’m Patrick.

Tony:  I’m Tony.

Patrick: Welcome back to the Cave To The Cross Apologetics, where we’re figuring out if we can find truth in this culture of doubt and we’re going over chapter five now of answering the question are many New Testament documents forged. And so, Bart Ehrman has a number of things critiques here of pretty much how the Bible can’t be what we think it is because certain characteristics of the authors, of the alleged authors, of the time of place of which everything took place. And then, still looking through the lens of Walter Bauer and his hypothesis that we started a little, or that we really looked at last chapter in chapter four. So yeah, I haven’t been there yet that was a good and fun chapter and something that needs to be responded to, because that tends to be because of the fame of Bart Ehrman he’s popularized the Bauer hypothesis. And so, you kind of see a lot of that stuff out there and in the ether, if you will. And a lot of people like Ehrman, so he’ll be getting a lot of those talking points.

5 Claims Of Proof Of NT Forgery

And so, we’re addressing five claims. In this chapter, we’re probably only going to get to two of them today and then I’ll force you to come back. That’s your teaser to get the other one. So you’re like, “Oh, I really want to get to four.” So unfortunately next one. So, so here are the claims addressed. The first one is that the New Testament Gospels are not historically reliable and are comparable to the various other heretical gospels because they were not actually written by Jesus’ companions. Okay?

The second that the first disciples were illiterate and therefore could not have written the parts of the New Testament attribute to them. That would make it hard – you can’t write.

Tony: Or read

Patrick: Right.

The third one is that many of the New Testament books were not really written by the authors to whom they are ever ascribed. And despite the internal claims of the books themselves, instead, they were forged. Yes.

The fourth one is other forms of Christianity are represented in various other writings, which have it as equally valid claim to Christianity as the 27 canonical New Testament books. So we talked about the Gnostics out there and different groups and subgroups vying for kind of supremacy of the Christian name the ability to call themselves fully Christian. And just the ones that we have won the day.

Tony:  Right. The most powerful ones took the cake.

Patrick: Even though we don’t quite see that in history, but okay. And our final one is that the proto-Orthodox, so before Orthodox version, used the Canon as a weapon to impose their own branch of theology on all forms of Christianity and eventually succeeded in about the fourth century by way of the powerful church of this period.

So kind of getting into where were we, us Protestants, kind of point to the Roman Catholic church, not the full-on version that we have today, but definitely that’s the ability for Rome as the nation-state to adopt Christianity and a good old Constantine comes into play there and different councils and whatnot.

So, so we’ll look at those and see if we have to throw away our Bibles because they’re all forged. Unfortunately, I think mine has a, an autograph copy.

Tony: Well, surely that one wasn’t forged.

Treating Ehrman’s Writings Like Ehrman Treats The NT

So, he begins this particular chapter by talking about this issue of forgery and bringing the New Testament down. So they give us a kind of a an imaginary story, right?

So they say, imagine 2000 years from now someone visiting a library containing some ancient writings, he happens to stumble up on an entire section of books from the first part of the 21st century, all bearing the name of Bart Ehrman. As he reads through the collection of Ehrman’s writings, he comes across some quotes that seem to be intentioned. So, these quotes are, their intention. For instance, he reads a passage, Ehrman wrote in 2009 and it says this,

“And so we have an answer to our ultimate question of why these Gospels are so different from one another. They were not written by Jesus’s companion or by companions. They were written decades later by people who didn’t know Jesus, who lived in a different country or different countries from Jesus. They are different from each other in part because they also didn’t know each other to some extent they had different sources of information.” (Jesus Interrupted, 2009)

All right? So what he’s suggesting there is that these particular accounts, written by different people, in different places, at a different time. Basically, it is, has nothing to do with what we think, how we think generally traditionally think that the Bible was put together.

It may say John, but it really wasn’t John who wrote it, right? It may say Matthew, but it really wasn’t Matthew who wrote it. It was somebody years later in a different country and that sort of thing. And so that’s the claim that he’s making in this particular passage of this book that he wrote in 2009.

Patrick: In 2009, right. On the other hand, these are the same people group that find Bart Ehrman’s book and pick up another one. And this one is one published in 2011, just a couple of years after the previous quote, obviously. And he says this, he says,

If historians want to know what Jesus said and did. There are more or less constrained to use the New Testament Gospels as their principle sources. Let me explain that this is not for religious or theological reasons. For instance, that these and these alone can be trusted. It is for historical reasons, pure and simple. The only real sources available to historians interested in the life of Jesus are there for the New Testament Gospels.

Tony: What?

Patrick: This is weird. So, you’re – the quote that you read says we can’t trust these documents because they don’t they barely even know who Jesus is. They definitely didn’t walk with them and talk with them. These are people out in the world away from point A, point J of Jesus

Tony: By both time and georgraphy, right?

Patrick: Right. But then a couple of years later, he writes a book that says, essentially, if you want to know about the historical Jesus not

Tony: Not religious, but a historical, right? The historical account of Jesus

Patrick: You’re constrained by the Gospel narratives because they’re the clearest best picture of who this historical Jesus is. And mind you. Bart Ehrman has rallied against the Jesus mysticism, the belief that Jesus is this fictitious person or a collection of different dying Messiahs or what have you. That he believes that Jesus is a real person who lived at the time that we kind of come to know and love.  And so he’s saying, go to the sources.

Tony: And the sources are the New Testament. Right? The New Testament Gospels. And that’s where we’ll find out who the historic Jesus is. So, so we got this fictitious man of the future, 2000 years later. And what should the manner of future conclude from these two different statements right from Ehrman, right?

Well, he could conclude several things. He could imagine the author changed his position along the way. Or he could presume that the author’s position developed in a way that was not contradictory to its initial position.

Patrick: Tries to find a link to save one and then the other.

Tony:  Yeah. Or he could assume he had yet he hadn’t fully grasped what Ehrman was all about, what his position is. So maybe he kinda misunderstood what Ehrman was trying to say, or perhaps due to historical and cultural differences, from the author a failure to integrate correctly, all of his statements, he kind of didn’t get what he was trying to

Patrick: I don’t even know what those words mean.

Tony: Or, he, the reader could simply assume one of the books was forged. One of them was unwritten by Ehrman.

Patrick: At least one.

Tony: Yeah. So, these are just some of the possibilities our authors tell us that we’ll explain these two statements. The correct explanation for apparent tension is not the point. The point they’re trying to make is that plenty of options account for this tension between these two books that take seemingly contradictory in all positions. Forgery is only one possibility.

Patrick: And so obviously we’re going to try and draw parallels to Ehrman saying that these have to be forgeries. There’s no other explanation to. And as, as we’ve seen in the past presuppositions kind of getting get in the way here.

So if the pattern Ehrman has set in evaluate New Testament authorship were adopted, the reader would wrongly conclude that choosing any option other than forgery is nothing but a biased attempt to reconcile these two contradictory statements, right? Because they are in contradiction. They do seem to be contradiction. And thus, and for Ehrman didn’t really write one or both of the books. Maybe he had ghostwriters out there that, that kind of knew what he was saying. And so wrote on his behalf and wanted to honor him. And one, one put the Bible out outside of Jerusalem and the apostles one was like, ah, well, we’ll give the Christians a little bit of credit.

Tony: Or, this was, again, this guy reading from it 2000 year perspective. Maybe people years ago from a different country who never knew Ehrman kind of put these two books together. And so they were both forged.

Patrick: I’d be surprised if he could read. It’s all emoji texts and whatnot. So this example then illustrates that Ehrman’s unwarranted skepticism, which consistently causes him to cry, “Forgery! Forgery!” When other more likely explanations are available. So again, it’s one of those options that you kind of have to really prove your point. And we kind of do an internal and an external critique of, where the New Testament documents were written. It’s really hard, I think, once we see and once the complete historical narrative is played out that it’s really hard to say that these were all forgeries.

Ehrman On Weaponizing The Canon

Tony: Yeah. Yeah. So Ehrman’s argument that much of the New Testament was forged is part of his larger overall narrative where the Canon of the New Testament is recast as a historical accident that could have easily featured some, not so Orthodox writings, right? Apocryphal.

Patrick: Yeah. Gospel of Thomas Mary Magdalen wanting to be a man because that’s the best way to be close to God and all this stuff that. The giant talking cross is in there too, reaches to the heavens and to start talking. All the fun.

Tony: So in order, our authors, tell us that in order to make such a case, he must demonstrate that the Christian heretical writings of the second and third centuries rival the historical credentials of the new Testament documents.

In other words, he must somehow take these apocryphal writings that came later and everybody acknowledges that came later. And somehow say they are equal to what we have with regard to the New Testament documents. That’s what he has to do in order to make this forgery kind of. A case where the New Testament documents are no better or equally valid as these other documents, but he kind of has to do something like that.

Patrick: And so, that what we’ll do. So instead of attempting to bring the apocryphal writings up by arguing for the historical credentials. He brings the New Testament documents down attempting to make their historical merits or demerits resemble these other writings. So he wants to kind of put them in the milieu of have instead of the Gnostics and these other potential gospels or potential New Testament writings be of later importance or later development from the early New Testament church. He’s wanting to say, Oh, these documents that came 50 to a hundred years before are stuck in the muck in the same way that these ones are. And you have people kind of piecemealing and grabbing that, which ones they’ve, they view and they go out and then, however you suppress all the other ones and then make one, the former one, which we do see in history, and in other capacities. I was talking about the Uthman revision of Uthman collecting all the different early versions of the Qur’an and saying, okay, here’s the one authoritative version. Let’s burn these other ones and so the historical and textual critique that you can do with the New Testament is lost to this were this revision.

Tony: So you make the New Testament documents as much as in the muck, as the rest of them. You bring those documents down to the level of these other things,

Patrick: Right. it’s kind of a Rocky six. Rocky has already fought, at least four different times. I don’t really count Rocky five as a Rocky, but you bring them out of retirement again. And you say you got to fight the best in the world now. And hope he does just as well. Okay. Well, it’s already Rocky six, but drag six is really good too.

Ehrman Thinks The Disciples Couldn’t Or Shouldn’t Write The NT

So, thus, according to Ehrman, Jesus’ disciples were illiterate, backward, backwoods peasants. These uncultured swine or the Jewish versions of that. The New Testament writings were not written by Jesus’ disciples or their associates, much of the New Testament was forged. And even if the New Testament were based on eyewitness testimony, it can’t be trusted because even eyewitnesses are biased. All eyewitnesses are but especially these people that have a stake in it that believed maybe that Jesus rose from the dead in some capacity and our church leaders at the time.

Tony: So notice the rampant skepticism, right? I mean, it’s, this could not be real.

Patrick: It seems like anything that’s current Orthodox it’s just, well, it’s the opposite.

A Short Overview Of The Response

Tony: Right? Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So, in order to respond to these kinds of claims, then the chapter that we are in has been divided into five portions. They tell us the first three arguments respond to various reasons given by Ehrman, who contends that the New Testament lacks historical credentials and therefore can’t be trusted.

And then the next is a survey of second and third century. And even later writings that Erhman presents as virtually indistinguishable from the New Testament documents that they provide these on. This will be kind of an interesting. We get a peak here into some of these apocryphal writings right there, kind of parade them for us so that we can kind of look at them and say, okay, is this equal to the New Testament writings?

So what they’re going to do, then there’s going to show that the evidence that these later works do not contain anything close to the historical merits or the books of the New Testament. So that’s what they were attempting to do when they do this second part.

Patrick: Yeah. And again, put yourself in the shoes of the early church. Is it four of the Gospels are good? Why not more? If they’re out there wouldn’t you want more? Wouldn’t you want more stories? Wouldn’t you want more guiding literature? Wouldn’t you obviously you want to throw out your second cousins really bad, Christian fiction that has whatever version of the Amish back then you want to keep that out there. You want to placate him and say, okay, well, we’ll print a couple copies for your mom and our family, but Hey, that’s six more gospels of. Great. Let’s include them. Why didn’t they do that?

So dealing with the final response into a claim, number five, that the, can, it turns out to be the expression of first-century belief that God has spoken through Jesus Christ as a fulfillment of Old Testament promises Messiah. That’s what they’re attempting to show with Ehrman’s to kind of a proto-Orthodox. That the Canon was this weapon that was used to divide. Well, I’ll give you this. It was used to divide.

Tony: Yeah, it did divide whether they intend it or not. And so we have these basic responses that they want us to see in this particular chapter.

They’re going to say that they’re going to show that instead of what Ehrman suggests that the New Testament lacks historical credentials that and it can’t be trusted that in fact it has historical credentials and it can be trusted. And instead of saying that these other apocryphal writings are at the same standard and equivalent to the New Testament where they’re going to show that they’re a way different and totally inequivalent to what the New Testament adds.

And then finally, instead of the Canon turns out to be an expression of what other people thought. Well, these later people thought, no, actually it is about Jesus Christ in the fulfillment of the Old Testament Messiah. So that’s where we’re heading.

Claim #1 – NT Weren’t Written By Jesus’ Companions

And so the first claim then is this it’s they suggest this, the New Testament Gospels are not historically reliable and are comparable to the various other heretical gospels because they were not actually written by Jesus’s companions.

Patrick: Right. So kind of the Orthodox belief of Christianity is one of the ways that we can accept something as a part of the Canon is that that it was written by an apostle or someone that knew the apostle. So, you can sneak Mark in that way because he was a follower of both Paul and then took the words of Peter at least historically within the church this is the belief. Ehrman is gonna try and get around that a little bit and sat it’s a foot of Peter, and then

Tony: Fred did it

Patrick:  It’s a different Mark Mark. Oh. And then the John of that time is not really the John that you’re thinking of. It’s a different John. So, how do we, how was the argument go in this one?

So, are they real, are they counterfeit? That’s the question here for claim one. So much of Ehrman’s skepticism towards the New Testament Gospels is bound up in the distrust of the Gospel authors themselves.

NT Writers Were Too Biased

He argues that the tradition concerning their authorship arose in order to assure readers that they were written by eyewitnesses and associates of eyewitnesses.

So here’s my version of the gospel of well, no one knows me. So who else can I do? Peter. There we go. Everyone knows Peter.

Tony: So let’s make something up and then put Peter’s name on it and say there that’s what we should be following because Peter wrote it.,

Patrick: And so that’s why we have the gospel of Pet… Oh, well we don’t have it, okay.

Tony: We really don’t.

Patrick: We’ll get to that one. We’ll get to that one. So he argues that there are the tradition concerning their authorship arose in order to assure readers that they were written by eyewitnesses, associates of eyewitnesses. He then goes on to argue that even if the Gospels were based on eyewitness testimony, Oh he’s doing us a favor and granting us that ability, due to their bias, the reality is that eyewitnesses cannot be trusted to give a historically accurate accounts.

And, I tend to give Ehrmana lot of credit because he deserves a lot of credit, but this seems to be the, you can’t have your cake and eat it too. This is oh, these weren’t even written by the eyewitness, but if they were. Well, if they were you can’t trust them because there were too bias.

Okay. Which is the historical all argument here, or you’re just going to, it’s going to make, okay. Well, if they were written by aliens who saw Jesus resurrected, then they’re birds eye view perspective doesn’t get them they don’t understand the historical context. I mean, how many variations of his argument is he going to do. Stick with the one that you subscribed to the historical, whichever version and account either.

These weren’t were in by eyewitnesses or associates, or they’re too biased, but you know which one you mean, right?

Tony: Yeah. And so he wants them both, right? Yeah.

If True, Why Were Those Who Were Picked Chosen?

So, our authors point out that his arguments has have several problems. First, he fails to explain why if the church wanted to use early church figures to gain widespread acceptance for these documents, they chose Matthew, the tax collector.

Mark who, left Paul and Barnabas in the middle of Acts, in the middle of a

Patrick: It split the dream team. He split the dream team.

Tony: Ya, so, he left him in this middle of that while they were evangelizing across the world. And then later, you’re right, he caused him to get into this huge argument. So of course, that’s the guy we want to add credibility. And then Luke, I mean, he wasn’t even one of the, he wasn’t even a Jew and he wasn’t one of the apostles, right? So, rather obscure figures in the early Christianity, why in the world would they choose these folks that they’re trying to, build up these documents as being authentic, because they were written by these folks who knew Jesus, walked with Jesus, where his apostles and that sort of thing?

In other words, if all the early church did, was assign names to the Gospel documents in order to invest them with greater authority, it’s seems that they would have chosen authors who occupied more significant roles among Jesus’s inner circle.

Patrick: Yeah. Gospel of Thomas, just saying, if you’re going to get the guy who doubted and had the change of heart or we’ll write Mark’s name on it and not Peter’s unless there was already an assumption of who was doing what and how documents of the time back then were signed and written and just the historical explanations that are there. If you want to be skeptical that’s there, but you’re having to prove your case and Ehrman is going to try and do that, but our authors are going to counterclaim it.

So that was the first claim.  They’re not famous enough. That’s the first claim.

Tony: Yeah. That’s the first problem that we have right with this. Some of them are not even famous at all at least, in terms of what we read in the New Testament. And so yeah. So why use these folks?

Why Are NT Witnesses Too Biased To Be True?

Patrick: Second, it is wrong to suppose that a person with a vested interest is necessarily an unreliable witness. So, you’re a bank teller at a bank. It gets robbed. You’re handing over the cash and the guy beats feed out of there and the cops come up to you and go, Oh were you here at the time that the robbery happens?

Yes. Yes, I was. And he stuck a gun in my face. I can tell you exactly where he was, how tall he was, what gun he used. I saw some of the serial numbers from it. And when he was flipping open his wallet to pretend that he was giving me a bank slip, I saw part of his ID. And so I can, I think I can give you a good assessment.

Hold on. Hold on, sir. You are, you were way too close to the scene. You cannot give me an accurate description. You are too biased. You want revenge. You, you want to keep your job. So, the bank stays open you were in the heat of the moment and you want to be a hero. You’re too biased. I’m sorry.

You are too biased. Yeah, because you were too much a part of what was going on. You can’t have perspective.

Patrick:  You have vested interests, and so even more so if you are going out of Judaism into this new cult Christianity, if you’re a leader of the church, if you are, of the impression that God is going to save you from your sins, that you can reign with him and perpetual paradise for all eternity.

Tony: And if you’re being persecuted for saying this, right?

Patrick: Although that might work the other way. So Greek and Roman historians believed ideal eyewitnesses were participants in an event who are able to draw on their experience to interpret its significance rather than dispassionate observers. And so, there are a number of podcasts out there that try and do this version. So you have certain historical podcasts that attempts to say, Oh, what if I’m like a Martian and I’m coming in and I’m viewing this? Well, that’s good to try and get a dispassionate view because you can become too passionate. If you’re talking about the start of World War II and you had a family member die at Pearl Harbor, you might have an offset view of, well, maybe that was the best course of action for the Japanese to take. And so you might not be able to have a dispassionate view to assess that question.

But an eyewitnesses isn’t, they’re not giving usually an assessment. They’re just telling what they saw. And so, now can you be biased about what you’ve seen, I guess you can. But generally speaking, who else would we talk with?

And so you might lose some of that historical or that that cultural or why was he saying that? And so I’m going to tell you, well, I said you are the Christ, and then I denied Jesus His ability to carry out that function. Then He told me, get behind Me, Satan. Well, okay. Let me go into an explanation of why He said that. So I’m going to provide you a very negative aspect to me to show exactly why He’s responding and so I’m going to that.

Tony: So make yourself look dumb, right?

Patrick: Yeah. So, if you’re in a battle and you’re watching two sides fight each other and you’re Cicero or whoever and you want someone from a point of view that’s the eyewitness that is able to be able to draw from not only their experience of this is why we did something cause sometimes warfare is weird and why did you pivot on the left side? Why not the right side? Why not go straight up the middle, right? That person can give you that kind of a perspective. Yeah. So, it’s not, and it’s really hard to find these dispassionate observers. You lose something in there and so, if you’re going to say that these men are from a cultural viewpoint of Greek and Roman historians if they’ve been trained in the same way that scribes and scholars attempt to take records, then this comes about this way.

So Ehrman is correct to argue that eyewitnesses don’t always necessarily get things completely right. I mean, it was used the example of the car crash or something happened really quickly. Oh, it was a green car. It was a red car. He was wearing a red jacket. He was wearing a red hat, not a red jacket. Come on now. But if the Gospels are based a night in assessment, it seems sensible to assume that eyewitnesses were passionate about making sure the events surrounding the life of Jesus were reporting accurately.

So, I can tell you what it was like to, for my firstborn to be born. I was really passionate about it, but I wanted to be accurate because I want to tell you how interesting that was to me. And you might not find it interesting, but I find it super interesting.

Tony: And your bank illustration, right? The clearly the bank teller can be passionate, but still accurate. Because he wants to make sure that this gets told right so this guy has put away.

Patrick: It doesn’t happen again. Doesn’t come back. I can take him out and put him in jail. So, he doesn’t come back and take me out as an eyewitness to his mob crime or whatever, but whatever the normal the story goes.

Jesus & The Eyewitnesses Can Be Trusted

Tony: Right. And so finally, Ehrman fails to grapple with the important contributions in recent scholarship which was significantly challenged and belief that the Gospels were not based on eye witness testimony. So what they do in this section, in terms of answering this with this final point, is they kind of excerpt some of Richard Bauckham book “Jesus And The Eyewitnesses”

Patrick: A really good book.

Tony: Yeah. And in particular, Bauckham here set forth substantial evidence that the canonical Gospels are based on eyewitness testimony and thus can be trusted. That’s what Bauckham tries to show.

Ancient Historians Relied On Eyewitness Testimony

So first Bauckham shows that in ancient Mediterranean times, historians relied as much as they could on eyewitness testimony.

The opening four verses of Luke matched established language used by historians of the day and it shows that the care taken in the composition on the Gospels.

The Importance Of Papias

Patrick:  Second while Ehrman quickly dismisses Papias, the pastor of the second century from whom we have testimony and it’s very important and reading it’s well worth the time to kind of get that perspective but Ehrman dismisses him. He just dismisses them as unreliable and irrelevant to the discussion of the authorship. Not really. But Bauckham traces out the evidence for a Papias’ reliability and the implications of his writings.

He shows how Papias identifies three generations. The eyewitnesses, the elders that sat at their feet, and the disciples of the elders. So those are the three kind of people that Papias shows here. And his claim is that when he was a young man in about 80 AD or after the Common Era, I think that’s what the non-religious version says. Many members of these three generations were still alive, including the eyewitnesses. Why does Luke or John or Paul say here were the 12, here are the 60, here are the 500. Go and talk to them.

Tony: And then many of them are still alive.

Patrick: Evidence points to the Gospel’s not being merely based on oral traditions passed down and altered during various stages of transmission, but on oral history communicated by eyewitness testimony.

And again, Luke is the best version of this. I am doing this as almost an outsider. Obviously, he’s a Christian. He’s following Paul in his travels for some of it. But he’s saying I’m going to interview certain people here. And so, him starting with kind of probably Mary’s story shows that Mary was probably likely still around at this time. And so that puts it at an early point in history in the first century. This isn’t a second or third century where it’s like, okay, what would have Mary said. That’s when the song, Mary Did You Know? because we don’t know what Mary knew because we can’t talk to her.

The Accuracy From The Names Used In The Documents

Tony: So, Bauckham here defends Papias, right? And thirdly, Bauckham argues that the names present in the Gospels themselves are meant to show the readers of their accuracy. Right? Now in a different way than Ehrman claims, right? He shows how throughout the Gospel, some figures are distinguished by use of their proper names while others are left nameless.

So, some of the folks that are involved are nameless, right? And so, he concludes that the names were meant to serve as living guarantees of the tradition. In particular, he notes the fascinating phenomenon, our authors point out, that while typically the longer past a given event an account is written, right? So, if it happened a hundred years ago versus if it happens one year ago, right? So, the longer past a given event an account is written, the less specificity we see in the Gospels the opposite scenario.

So, in the Gospels, what we see is the further back goals, at least let’s take John, right? Cause he’s the, probably the latest is what tradition has it. The more specificity we see in John, especially with some of these names. He tells us whose ear was taken off for. I mean, just so those are, that’s not mentioned in any other Gospel, he gives us a name right there. And so this is kind of an odd, this is opposite of what we would expect.

Patrick: Yeah. Or are reasons for this. So going back to John’s Gospel, which is almost certainly was the last of the four canonical Gospels written, records names of people in the Gospel stories, such as Lazarus from Jesus raised from the dead or Malchus. Yeah, my Greek Roman soldier names are really difficult here.

He’s the high priest servant whose ear Peter cut off at Jesus’ arrest. Why is it that contrary to what you would expect in the case of transmission of community tradition? So I got to get this person’s name in my head. And so I’m going to remember it and memorize it and tell it over and over again. And then over time, people are like, well, I don’t care. What the soldier’s name was that got his ear ripped off. Let’s talk about the ear!. More ears for everyone. Let’s include more Gospels. Although we don’t see that. So these names are not mentioned in the earlier Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, especially in Mark, where you read it and it’s almost like, some kind of people did some things, almost did kind of obfuscates it’s kind of on purpose. And so what’s the reason for that? But then suddenly it pops up at a later point in time. That’s odd. Why are you trying to add more information that can go back and go, well, that’s not what Mark was talking about. What’s going on here?

Bauckham’s answer is to protective anonymity here. So, why were the, these people hush about, well, look at the people who are being involved. You have the rich with the slaves, you have the Romans with the Jews, you have people facing persecution versus people who are still serving their masters or working with the State. And so these people need to be protected because they could be. Well, Tony was the one that was there that saw that Paul really smacked down the Roman magistrate. So, okay. Well, we need to take him in for questioning so he doesn’t tell about. So this protective, talk about me

Tony: Please! Just say some guy.

Patrick: Well this protective anonymity by which he means the practice of leaving the identity of the person concealed for protective purposes, as long as he or she is still alive. All revealing it once the person has died, there’s no longer the possible subject of persecution.

Tony: So, you say “some guy” until I died and then you can say Tony.

Patrick: Right, or you’re out of the country. Yeah,

Tony: Yeah. So, this is the idea of protective anonymity. Right?  You don’t give up the name, it seems anyway is what we see here, until after the person is out of harm’s way after they’ve died and passed on and that sort of thing. And now you can say who the person was, so this was kind of an interesting thing here.

Myth Vs. History In Oral Traditions From Other Societies

Fourth, in response to those who claim primitive societies cannot distinguish between myth and history. I mean, cause they are primitive. Bauckham survey work in the field of oral traditions and primitive African cultures. His survey concludes that fictional and historical stories are clearly distinguishable and that primitive societies take much greater care to preserve historical accounts. So just because they’re primitive doesn’t mean, if I may say, they’re stupid.

Patrick: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we’re able to be here because they were there.

Tony: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you very much.

Internal Support For Good Eyewitness Testimony In The NT

Patrick: Yeah. And find the Bauckham explore studies in the field of psychology and specifically about the nature and reliability of memory which Bart Ehrman has kinda more recently attacked in some of his other books. But he, Bauckham here, marks of eyewitness testimony in the Gospels include vividness, excess detail, vantage points, and perspectives. And so when we talked to Lydia McGrew about the coincidences, the alleged coincidence is here, this is what would fit in this period. These features stand in stark contrast to fictional accounts of the time. Bauckham demonstrates there is good warrant for taking each of the four canonical Gospels as offering different perspectives on history. That’s exactly what you would see in eyewitnesses,

The Silent Witness Of Bart Ehrman

Tony: Right? So, other than then by quick dismissal, Papias, Ehrman never engages or even footnotes these types of arguments made by scholars concerning the eyewitness testimony of the Gospels in any of his popular works. This lack of engagement, our authors tell us, with opposing views and Ehrman’s works, can result in a kind of academic bullying. Lay readers are backed into a corner with nowhere to turn because, according to Ehrman, all good scholarship agrees with him, right? However, this, “Jesus And The Eyewitnesses” by Bauckham is just one example among many that prove Ehrman is not giving the complete picture of what some of the best contemporary scholarship, not necessarily evangelical, is saying or has to say on these particular issues. And so again, this is a criticism of Ehrman that we saw earlier that he’s not engaging in the folks that are scholars who disagree with him, or at least he’s not engaging very deeply. Again, Bauckham’s work was written three or four years before Ehrman’s book. And so, it was available and it was out there. And one would, if you’re doing a scholarly work, one, would they expect that you engage with folks who don’t agree with you and show where they went wrong.

Patrick: Especially if you’re going through and you’re trying to kind of upend what has been established or what we, at least what we thought had been established beforehand. So you want to kind of interact with the best work out there. But unfortunately, because of how scholarship has gone. It seems to be more of a castaway everything and build up from Descartian view viewpoint. And, skepticism is the area of the day, except don’t be skeptical of your own theories and conclusions.

Tony: It’s ok to be skeptic about everybody else.

Patrick: Yeah. Those people are wrong.

Conclusion

And so, I think we’ll end here. Unfortunately, I was a liar and I’ll ask for forgiveness. We only made it through the first one. But probably going over the next two is is a good set. And then the final two after that we’ll be there. So, stay with us. Hopefully, you’ve enjoyed this. And thanks for those people that keep messaging me and saying that the Gnostics have helped influence Christianity. So I have to go over and read more Gnostic stuff. So, I appreciate I appreciate the challenge.

And so, if you’ve enjoyed this we’ve passed 1500 subscribers on YouTube. You don’t always have to watch us. And so we appreciate it, even the audio downloads. And so, just tell somebody about it. Like, share, subscribe, all those things that I’m supposed to tell you to do, to let the algorithm do its thing.

Tony:  The biggest thing is if you really liked it, give it a Like because that causes the algorithm of YouTube to spread this out to more people,

Patrick: Create more accounts and then just like it.  You don’t even have to go back to it, but just, cycle through. It’s very easy to switch accounts now.

So thanks for joining us and we’ll see you next time to finish up chapter five.

Tony:  See you next time.