Dr. Craig Keener, Matthew, Lecture 1, Reliability of the Gospels

this is dr. Craig keener on the book of Matthew session number one the reliability of the Gospels my name is Craig keener and I'm married to me Dean with Sanga keener from Congo and I have written a couple commentaries on the Gospel of Matthew which is why I've been asked to do this teaching series in Matthew but I also should let you know that in Matthew 23 it says to call no person rabbi because you have one teacher even Jesus and that's the teacher that we're going to be learning about in particular in the Gospel of Matthew but before we start the Gospel of Matthew itself we have to introduce the Gospels which are literally the meaning of gospel is is good news and that's what the Gospels are about and that phrase good news comes from Isaiah 52 7 as well as a number of other passages but but it especially is Isaiah 52 7 that's alluded to in the New Testament how beautiful in the mountains are the feet of the messengers who bring news who announce peace who bring good news who announced salvation who say to Zion your God reigns in the context it's about the restoration of God's people and the fulfillment of all of God's promises ultimately including a new heaven and a new earth and in the Ministry of Jesus this restoration began to be fulfilled and we'll also see that as we look at Matthew's Gospel that's a very heavy emphasis because Jesus is the one who brings restoration the one who will save is people according to Matthew 1:21 now the meaning is mainly in Matthew's narrative but first we need to survey some historical questions if you ask how important or historical questions well we know that they're important for ministers since overseers are entrusted with God's work they need to be blameless and must hold firmly to the trustworthy message as it has been taught so that they can encourage others by sound teaching and refute those who oppose it and so in other words we need to be ready to articulate the faith and be able to defend the faith when people raise challenges against it there are a number of these that we're going to look at before we actually start into the Gospel of Matthew as an introduction to the Gospels and the historical reliability of the Gospels one of the objections that has been raised often in the West but is sometimes being cited beyond the West is something called the Jesus Seminar which voted with marbles on which sayings of Jesus were authentic now actually from what I understand they only voted with marbles when the media was present because it was a way of getting the media's attention but in any case they thought that the majority of Jesus sayings weren't authentic and many Western media outlets cited them because they seem to be newsworthy and that is that has been true on a number of TV productions and so on that may have been cited in other parts of the world now in terms of the majority of New Testament scholars that's not where the majority of New Testament scholars stand but if somebody in your congregation would ask you about the program what would you respond you could say well you shouldn't have a television actually you would have more time to study if you didn't maybe up or just believe whatever you want that's a common Western response or well if the scholars say it it must be true because they went to school for a long time and I didn't pay attention or you can say I I quit I'm going to find a different career or you could try to come up with some reasonable answers and there been a number of attempts to offer reasonable answers and actually mainstream scholarship offers reasonable answers but also those who particularly write defending the the accuracy of the Gospels you have Craig Evans Darrell Bock Ben Witherington myself Craig Blomberg and others from from what we would call more centrist scholarship that scholars who may not they're starting from what they can demonstrate historically and so you know things that are in history you can't prove everything in history because it happened a long time ago and some of the evidence isn't still around but there's enough evidence around that mainstream scholars who are working only with historical evidence still come up with a substantial amount that we know about Jesus from the Gospels quite a substantial amount some scholars are skeptics and they they come from a skeptical premise because since the Enlightenment academia in the West has harbored a prejudice against the Bible largely because it's hard to harbor to prejudice against miracles that was how it started out so we'll talk about miracles in a little while but when you meet people who are influenced by these kinds of ideas they may be people who are trained in this way they may be people who are just looking for excuses sometimes not to believe and so they cite some of the popular things on the internet where do we where do we start how do we answer it well first of all we look at the issue of genre genre is the kind of writing that something is now that doesn't solve all the issues but it's a good place to start it's like when you have a hammer what can a hammer be used for well you can use it as a weapon you can use it as a doorstop but basically the way a hammer is designed the purpose of its design is evident in its design it's designed to pound nails or at least the usual kind of hammer that we talked about so what is the genre of the Gospels what were they designed to do some people say well the Gospels are unique well there's a sense in which the Gospels are unique because they talk about a unique person but while Jesus was unique we have to ask the broader kind of question well when you have a work like this about a particular historical person what was this called and in ancient times as well as a modern time this was called biography now most scholars today in contrast to maybe 30 years ago are in agreement with the majority of you through history which is that the Gospels were by our biographies that's a that's been argued by a number of scholars most fully by Richard Burrage in a dissertation that was published by Cambridge well when we asked whether the biographies through most of history people assumed that the Gospels were lives in Greek bi biographies of Jesus but in 1915 some scholars noticed that the Gospels were not like modern Western biographies and therefore claimed that they weren't biographies however by now most scholars have decided that the church was right all along after all and that they were biographies sometimes you have to be careful because for like a generation or two you had students who were being taught that they're not biographies and they're going out thinking this and then the scholars changed their minds but going back to the evidence for it the Gospels are biographies but their ancient biographies not modern biographies and that was the reason for the confusion modern biographies are usually in chronological order that was not necessary in ancient biographies in fact the majority of them were arranged topically so when you have events sometimes in a different sequence in Matthew and Luke it's not a problem in fact Matthew in particular the the gospel that we are going to be looking at in detail arranges things topically Matthew very much likes to arrange things topically so it's easier for preaching usually modern biographies will start with the person's birth or very early ancient biographies didn't have - Matthew and Luke do start with Jesus birth but mark after the preaching of John the Baptist basically opens with Jesus public ministry when many ancient biographies started with the person's adult career so again this is not surprising the Gospels fifth is onra of ancient biographies a biography was almost the only kind of work focused on a single character biographies fell within a very particular range of length which is also the range of lengths we have in the Gospels and a biography wasn't just meant to praise the person sometimes biographies praised a person sometimes they criticized a person usually they did some of each obviously if you're writing about God in the flesh it's going to be positive but biographers weren't required to say only positive things and you read through Suetonius you can see that usually there's a mixture in ancient biographies biographies were mainly a sort of historical writing contrary to what one of my professors said actually during my first doctoral course in the Gospels the professor said that the Gospel of Mark is ancient biography ancient biographies were fictitious and therefore the Gospel of Mark was fictitious now the problem wasn't with the logic of his argument it was with his information is claiming that biographies were fictitious and I raised this issue to him afterwards I said well most ancient biographies actually there were historical kind of writing and I went into some detail explaining this which has also been noted by various classicists and so on and at the end of my explanation he said well I don't know I don't know anything about ancient biography that's not to tell you don't ever listen to your professors since I am a professor I happen to like professors but it is to say don't always believe everything everyone tells you you have to go back and check the information but I'm trying to give you the the best information here that I have available and I've actually read through ancient biographies have read through all of Plutarch's Suetonius --is and other ancient biographies so I'm not acting like that Professor was genre doesn't settle all the historical questions but it does shift the burden of proof because if something was an ancient biography that means that it was about a historical character and it was dealing with historical information you don't have novels written about somebody in recent history novels usually are about entirely fictitious characters but when novels are about real characters on occasion once in a while in ancient history and and when they weren't romances which also was rare they were they were about somebody who lived long ago not somebody who lived amazing past what we have in the Gospels could not be a novel it only could be an ancient biography novels lacked clear sources they didn't have historical prologues or prophecies like Luke does and in terms of teaching moral lessons which the Gospels do in in antiquity novelists weren't usually trying to teach more lessons historians and biographers regularly tried to teach moral political sometimes theological lessons through their works and that's what we find again in the Gospels now you may say well the Gospels are fun to read and some people have said well look novels are exciting they're adventuresome but that's true of ancient biographies as well they were meant to be fun to read the difference between novels and historiography and biography was the historic ography and biography were meant to be not just entertaining but also informative they were meant to teach based on real information well granted that good biographers were substantially accurate that is they were dealing with events how accurate were they in details well here's where Jean WA doesn't solve the issue because it depends based on the particular biographer particular biographers could have considerable freedom on details even though they weren't allowed to invent events so how do we evaluate particular cases well one question is where they're writing about the recent past or the distant past and then the other question is how closely they stick to their sources so we can look at both of those questions well what kind of sources did biographers often use when writing about the distant past they often admitted that they used legends yet they often cited large numbers of varying sources by name when possible and many critically evaluated their sources now sometimes even when writing about the distant past that could be very accurate and we can tell this again by comparing the different sources the later sources and the earlier sources and so on but when writing about the recent past they didn't give any apologies for well we don't have any way to verify this information while writing about the recent past they often consulted eyewitnesses or they consulted those who had consulted eyewitnesses they depended on those who had already written about these things before them so when they were writing about the recent past the previous generation or two normally they're very accurate and this can be tested and I've worked through it and tested it in a number of cases now how are these works composed well normally a writer who wasn't an eyewitness himself would start with one main source sometimes even an eyewitness could use another source so some people say well how could Matthew use mark if Matthew was my witness there's a debate as to as to whether Matthew was was what whom we call Matthew but if Matthew even if Matthew was the eyewitness he could still use mark just like Xenophon a few centuries earlier is writing an account of something that he himself experienced he was he was one of the leaders in this expedition but he also uses an earlier source because that person had published before him and everybody expected that you would use that source they would weave other sources around their main source and the work would then be read publicly in small circles of friends or sometimes at banquets or in public readings and then based on feedback that they would get from the people who are listening they would especially about well you could have worded this better and so on they would they would revise it now in terms of the pub location methods seismic expense so publishing long documents required funding when you think for example of the letter of Romans Paul's letter to the Romans sixteen chapters few ancient letters were that long that was an expensive letter one scholar Randy Richards calculates that in US currency that would have been about two thousand dollars just to have the papyrus and normally to have somebody writing that document well Matthew's Gospel is twice as long as that so this was a major undertaking this wasn't something somebody wrote off the top of his head this is something that he thought about he practiced in front of groups of people and then finally the final version of this is written down and begins to be circulated it was a major undertaking gospels are what are called foundation documents they're major literary works not something written off the top of one's head each was a book in ancient terms we think of the bible as a book it's a it's a collection of books in antiquity books could only be so long or you know the scroll wouldn't hold them very well or you'd have a very awkward sized scroll matthew is the size of a very large scroll in terms of the means of publication again works would be circulated at banquets and public readings and interested here is might request and pay for their own copies somebody who was literate could copy it by hand if they wanted to back then mass production meant a room full of scribes taking dictation and somebody would read a document they'd all be writing it that was the closest they could get to mass producing work if a work received a good reputation it generated more readings and more public demand for the early believers the way this would have taken place presumably is in the early church settings many public readings in antiquity were banquets or the banquet setting of the early church was the word supper as part of the church service there was a range of historical reliability in history and biography as I pointed out to that professor and he acknowledged afterwards Plutarch and Libby could spice things up a little bit especially as they were writing about people of the distant past but Tacitus and Suetonius they were historians and biographers who wrote about the more recent past they stuck very closely to their facts sometimes in particularly when they were writing about somebody they didn't like they would give you every bit of dirt that everybody said about this people but they stuck very closely to their sources and then you have just Cephas Josephus was a these were Roman historians Josephus was a first century Jewish historian and he was somewhere in between say Plutarch and Livy on the one hand and Suetonius and Tacitus on the other in his autobiography Josephus makes himself look suspiciously good he summarizes the Judean Roman war is if it were almost an accident and yet when he is dealing with details archeology often confirms him confirms him down to the details of the the the structures in the harbor of Caesarea maritima it confirms him down to particular structures in Jerusalem it confirms him down to the color of paint on Herod's bedroom wall I do not know how Josephus had access to Herod's bedroom but in any case he had good sources for all this and in his details he could be quite accurate in terms of historical standards what was expected ancients demanded that historians deal in facts they were especially the elite historians which the New Testament writers are not but the elite historians were were very much interested in rhetoric they were very much interested in shaping things in a way that would communicate well to their audience in in terms of lower-class they were very interested in shaping things in a way that good storytelling technique but the events had to be real the question was just how you were going to present them and you can do that with any true story today I've done it and others have done it as well in writing their own biographies or biographies of others to make it interesting is just you choose the most interesting information you you uh you recount it in certain ways that highlight suspense you know as a storytelling technique you may you may break off at a certain point and pick up at another point that just the way you arrange the material draws in draws in the reader well rhetoric was allowed but too much invited criticism and the same would be true of storytelling biographies allowed a bit more of that than history per se but they had to be based on accurate information again the difference between novels and history Lucan was a an orator in the second century and a satirist you with a lot of satires but he said that good biographers must avoid flattery that falsifies events and only bad historians make up data plenty the younger he was a statesman a politician in the early second century and he said that what's distinctive about history is its concern for accurate facts so it's not just historians bragging on their own trade it's other people who recognized it as well now Polybius was a historian writing before the time of the new testament and he says that history must assign praise and blame according to one's actions in other words if you're going to say something nice about somebody are bad about somebody it better be true again plenty plenty younger emphasizing that you can use rhetoric provided that your basis is facts also Aristotle who was a philosopher writing a few centuries before the new testament the difference between poetry and history is not the form you could write history in verse but their content history must deal with what happened not just with what might happen in terms of biographies of recent characters they stayed close to their sources their objective was not to invent things it's quite different from novels and they can give you here a concrete example which is from Suetonius Caesar he's Roman historian writing in the early second century he's writing about the Roman Emperor Otto and I compared him with accounts by the Roman historian Tacitus and the Greek biographer Plutarch who also wrote about off though now you may not have heard of although you may have heard of Augustus Caesar Augustus lived a lot longer and had a better propaganda machine but also was a very short-lived Emperor so this was a short biography it was easy for me to go and compare and just like people will compare Matthew Mark and Luke I compared these different writers on what they said about although and what I found was kind of what you find in the Gospel so you find a lot of overlap each is distinctive but you find a considerable overlap even though this writer wanted to emphasize this point this writer wanted to emphasize that point I found roughly fifty points of correspondence between sue atonia and each of the other two authors and and a number of other points of Correspondence as well but keep in mind sue atonia this biography of author is only 28 paragraphs long it's only about 2,000 words it's about one-fifth the length of Mark's Gospel so if Mark was using the same kind of historical method as as sue atoh Gnaeus was using as a biographer we could expect that if we have the same kinds of sources we could find maybe 250 points of Correspondence Justin marks very short gospel mark is 1/2 the length of Matthew so what I'm what I'm saying about all this is when we go back and actually test ancient biography with the other sources available from from its time and all these biographies were writing about the time the same length of time after all though as Mark was writing after the time of Jesus when you compare these it shows you that ancient biographies were interested in historical information they weren't making things up off the top of their head and we should be able to trust the Gospels as giving us considerable historical information even if we were not starting from a Christian starting point we were just starting as a historian examining the data looking at the data and saying well what can we know about Jesus and I believe that should lead us to believe in Jesus but in any case granted that biographers was substantially accurate how accurate were they in all their details well that's that's where scholars began to explore what we call historical critical method ologies and I will not spend a lot of time on these because they're often covered elsewhere but you'll find them if you if you have access to commentaries you'll run across these these are issues like source criticism or source history form history and redaction history source history historians in the nineteenth century began examining the Gospels for their sources now some people say well the Bible is God's Word it would never use sources but if you if you actually look at biblical texts all over the place it says that they use sources I mean you have the the book of the Wars of the Lord it's written in the book of Joshua and first and second chronicles refers the reader to a work of kings which is not our first and second kings but refers to that about 10 times and first and second Kings refers to a book of chronicles not our Book of Chronicles but more than thirty times well do the Gospels ever use sources Luke says that many sources were known to him many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us many doesn't mean just one person it doesn't mean just two people many means that by the time Luke is writing many people have already written about these things well it's good news for us it means that the Gospel writers weren't simply making things up they were doing what good biographers should do they were depending on sources that were available to them now they couldn't copy things the way we do today they didn't have copy machines they didn't have certainly the the Internet they didn't have scanners they didn't have all these things that we have today they didn't have publishing houses but almost everyone acknowledges that Matthew Mark and Luke are closely related you can you can see this when you see how much about 90% of Mark's Gospel appears in some form in Matthew as well 90% of his accounts appear in Matthew as well and that's significant because remember what John says John says the world itself couldn't contain all the books that would be written about Jesus now that may be hyperbole rhetorical overstatement for grabbing your attention but the point is lots of things could be told about Jesus and yet Matthew tells so many of the things that Mark told why probably Marcus is one of the sources that he uses now not all scholars agree on this a number of scholars think that Matthew works first and there are reasons for that but the majority of scholars think today that mark is the first of our Gospels that have survived that he got the information from Peter is what the early tradition says and that that you know Jesus is obviously the source then you have oral tradition and maybe notes mark has it from one of the eyewitnesses there's also material that some scholars call Q it's material that's in Matthew and Luke that's not gotten from market overlaps and then into other sources that we no longer have available that Matthew has all of these kinds of sources that he can draw on and Luke has all these kinds of sources that he can draw on now what's important to remember of this not all the details but just that most scholars think that Matthew and Luke both used mark and also some other shared material which scholars call Q scholars debate about exactly what Q look like and we won't get into all that but that's the vast majority of scholars both liberal and conservative and everywhere in between but again it's not all scholars now I believe that Matthew used mark for a number of reasons one is that Matthew exhibits consistent patterns in the way that he Bree be AIT's Mark Luke certainly cleans up marks grammar for a more sophisticated audience it's very unlikely mark would have changed the grammar for a different kind of audience also when Matthew is quoting the Old Testament he quotes it making his own translation or using some other translation than the standard Greek translation except where he's using material from mark mark always quotes the standard Greek translation Matthew uses the standard Greek translation wherever he overlaps with mark so again that's a reason to think that Matthew is is using mark now what I think this is again not what everybody thinks but pay pious writing in the early second century he says that Matthew wrote first wrote the logia which often can mean Oracle's or sayings of the Lord and uh and Mark wrote down what he heard from Peter I think that Matthew probably wrote down many of Jesus sayings it could be some of what we call cue this this material shared by Matthew and Luke but then that Matthew was also able to incorporate some of the narrative material that depended on Peters authority once Mark's Gospel was published on on Peters authority now Luke and Matthew even though they overlap there's certain places where I think they would have written differently if Matthew had Luke's finished gospel or Luke had Matthews finished gospel so again that's another another long story but just to say we don't need to speculate on all these things as people sometimes do what what would Matthew look like before he edited mark and so on a lot of these things we don't know and scholars like to explore things we don't know and there's nothing wrong with that but for practical purposes we know enough to to move ahead with with our study of the Gospels some other 19th early 20th century scholars after dealing with source criticism they focused on form criticism there are various distinguishable literary forms in the Gospels we have obviously parables and a number of different kinds of Jesus sayings woe to you Capernaum is more like a Oracle but the forum critics tried to try to determine something about how this material was used in the preaching of the early church and tried to determine what material we could trace back most reliably to Jesus in its current form and sometimes they used arguments that were actually not not very good but sometimes they used arguments that that historians could use for example if we have material or the kind of material that's attested not just in one source its attested say in the shared material between Matthew and Luke it's also tested in mark for example Jesus told parables Jesus spoke about the kingdom this is something that historians would would say well this is this is very well attested again the criterion of embarassment is it is a fairly good criterion I think something that the early church wouldn't actually want to say I wouldn't want to make up for example the church would not have made up Jesus being crucified on the charge of being claimed to be claiming to be king of the Jews because that meant that he was executed for the for the charge of high treason and anybody in the Roman Empire who followed him could be considered treasonous that's not something you would want to make up you you also wouldn't want to make up Jesus being baptized by John the Baptist who was preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins now Jesus doesn't do it because he needs to be forgiven but but Jesus does identify with his people in that baptism and again you probably wouldn't want to make up Jesus saying father not my will but yours be done or Jesus saying and no one knows the day nor the hour not even the Sun those are things that the early church probably wouldn't have wanted to make up there's also the criterion of Palestinian environment or Judea and Galilee an environment that is there are there are many characteristics in the Gospels that fit Jesus environment but don't fit the environment a later church well historians wouldn't say those things are made up now from a standpoint of faith we accept we accept those things you know we trust the Gospel writers sometimes you need to simply trust scholars sometimes work with what's called a hermeneutic of suspicion and when I was working on that for one of my books in historical Jesus scholarship you know I was just using the scholarly method to say okay here's the critical minimum that historians can say it's not to say that's all we actually believe because everybody acknowledges that the critical minimum of what you know from historical methods is not all that happened and that if you have a reliable source you can depend on the reliable source but I got into this method so much that my wife would say something to me and I would say to her can you give me evidence for that assertion now I can assure you that well I don't know maybe your culture is different but I certainly got in trouble for that and what I what I had to come to grips with is if you have a reliable source you don't always need external evidence that source itself is evidence and we need to take that very seriously especially when we found that source to be reliable in other cases there are weaknesses of these traditional form critical approaches and that was especially when they were used to say well you know if it doesn't fit this criterion then it's not accurate for example they tried to use the criterion of dissimilarity if if something was often said by other Jewish teachers they said well then if it's attributed to Jesus we don't know that Jesus actually said it it might have been borrowed from other people or if the later church agreed with it then they said well then Jesus maybe didn't say it because later church may have made it up for him now if my students were to go out and agree with some things that I said should we therefore say that I never said those things because my students agreed with them that's the danger of that kind of approach or if I happen to agree with some things that some other scholars said would that mean that I didn't really say them that they were just borrowed from other scholars so that criterion that was used against the reliability of the Gospels has actually fallen from the wayside by most scholars it's not it's not generally used and many of the criteria that people used Rudolf Bultmann used many criteria in the mid 19th century to talk about how traditions were expanded or contracted but EP Sanders in 1969 showed that those were flawed for example just take boatmen agreed that Matthew used mark but Matthew he said you know the later sources expand the earlier sources matthew often condenses marks stories so it doesn't work even on boatman's own on criteria so most scholars have moved against that the the popular kinds of things you see on the internet about motifs about Jesus being borrowed from mystery religions and so on those are not even in the scholarly conversation those are that's just people's imagination most of the parallels people make up for that are parallels that they took from Jesus and read into mystery religions and they've studied the mystery religions these things are later centuries later when the mystery religions were borrowing from Christianity because it was popular and some of them are not even from antiquity at all in fact many of them are just made up by modern people on the Internet in any case scholars moved on to what was called in 1970s moved on to what was called redaction history editing history so you have these different sources what you what do you do with them I mean how does that help you with preaching for example if Matthew has something in mark if he changes the wording what does that tell us how is Matthew preaching from mark how is Luke preaching from mark and if Matthew consistently makes a particular change maybe we can learn from it for example Matthew speaks of the Kingdom of Heaven mark speaks of the kingdom of God Matthew uses kingdom of God only four or five times everywhere else you changes the expression the kingdom of heaven why is that does it teach us something theological or maybe it's just matthew is putting it in a in a way that's more familiar his audience mark was writing for an audience probably in Rome or similar like that Marx audience includes many Gentiles would have no idea what was meant by the Kingdom of Heaven so mark kind of translates it for his audience Matthew may have translated back for a Jewish audience these are these are things we can notice the differences we don't always know why but the Gospels clearly and undeniably have differences don't let anybody tell you that they don't have differences in Mark Jesus curses a fig tree he goes in and cleanses the temple Jesus disciples find the fig tree withered and then Jesus gives a lesson of faith and Matthew jesus crist a fig tree the fig tree withered it once Jesus gives a lesson on faith and then cleanses the temple now does that mean Jesus cursed to fig trees and then went and and one withered it once and then the other had withered by the time they came back and and Jesus gives a the same lesson on faith both times you know sometimes the disciples were slow to get things but not normally that slow my thinking here is that Matthew is just doing what he often does he arranges things in the logical sequence now mark mark tells us something too I mean Jesus curses a fig tree is enacted parable and then goes in and cleanses the temple which has leaves but no fruit in a sense they're not burying the fruit of repentance they're not doing the fruit of serving God but in Matthews case he likes to arrange things in a very organized way and again what we saw earlier that's normal in ancient biographies ancient biographers did that all the time it's not a problem that's just part of the genre we could compare parallel passages with the kingdom of God and the kingdom of heaven and so on editorial history or redaction history just sacks why why was a particular change made the problem was that some of the early critics doing redaction criticism just carried this too far they tried to explain everything in the basis of mark and Q and they assumed anything that they they couldn't have from those sources must have been invented as if those were the only sources that existed back then just because those are the only sources we think we have today also they said anything that fits the writer style must have been just made up by the writer writers put things in their style and their own style all the time that was standard practice in ancient literature Luke changes mark style when he uses mark so these things were not what we're not very accurate on the part of the redaction critics also but by the way this will get more interesting as we go on right now I'm just this is the most this is the part of the course that is most tedious perhaps if it's not something that you're particularly interested in the rest of the course will get more exciting but but I just wanted to deal with these things because these are standard things that are traditionally dealt with at least in Western classes and and so forth but I'm not going to spend a lot of time on them differences don't mean unreliability often you have differences among ancient historians and yet modern historians use them for historical information they don't assume that to be a problem Luther didn't assume that to be a problem when he was reading the Gospels and another problem with reduction criticism is that not all changes are theologically motivated Luke cleans up marks grammar like we mentioned Matthew makes marks language more precise when he describes herod antipas not as a king but as a Tetrarch or especially describes him that way Kingdom of Heaven is a way of relating it to to Matthews audience and also Matthew symptoms abbreviates mark for space constraints and mark the paralyzed man is let down through the roof and Jesus forgives his sins and heals him and Matthew Jesus forgives his sins and heals him but he doesn't he doesn't mention the roof is that does that mean that theologically Matthew is again the destruction of private property I think probably Matthew just leaves it out because of space and he is condensing it and just getting to the main theological point of the narrative paraphrase was a standard rhetorical exercise in antiquity when you when you retold accounts you were supposed to be able to tell them in your own words so skeptics and misinformed defenders sometimes make the same mistake assuming that differences in wording or sequence means that the substance is inaccurate that does not fit what we know of the genre of ancient biography or historiography but the biggest problem with redaction criticism was this what a writer includes is just as important as what a writer adapts so if if I'm telling a story that my wife told me if it's not important just what I change in her story it's also important what I keep from her story I mean I'm telling her story for a reason so today the emphasis is moved beyond just looking at what a writer changes is it is if all the readers of Matthew's Gospel were the hearers of Matthew's Gospel because normally one person would read it and the congregation would hear it it's not just important what the hearers would would hear changed from Mark is if they have mark in front of them but it's important how the whole Gospel of Matthew fits together over how the whole Gospel of Mark thats together and so on so tracing the themes through a gospel and that's the main approach we're going to we're going to use we're not going to focus mainly on on these other kinds of details we're going to mainly focus on what Matthew has to say to us what Matthew has to teach us now in terms of the reliability of the Gospels we're now moving to some more relevant points how reliable are the Gospels can you defend their authenticity return you the historical question here are some points that scholars have come to that have stood the test of time genre the hospitals or biographies and have historical intention the Gospels use written sources composed soon after the events that they describe the Gospels also have sound world tradition stemming from eyewitnesses we can see this in particular looking at Luke chapter one verses one through four because of all the Gospels Luke is the one who actually gives us his methodology who lays it out for us at the beginning in verse one we find out that he uses written sources he has access at least two written sources verse two he has access to oral sources from eyewitnesses who used those verse three Luke confirmed this with his own investigations and verse four Luke couldn't couldn't get away with making things up because the material was already widely known in the early church now you don't have to worry if you didn't get all that the first time through because that's my outline of what I'm about to cover in somewhat more detail the dating of Luke is is much in question the majority of scholars date Luke between 62 and 90 now conservative scholars tend to date Luke well-conserved actually conservative scholars across this range - but some conservative scholars date Luke in the 60s some datum in them in the 70s some even datum in the in the 80s there are some other scholars that date Luke even later a minority of scholars not normally conservative scholars but in terms of the before 60 - scholars usually don't date Luke before 60 - because the book of Acts actually ends around the Year 62 but in any case acts as the second volume of Luke Luke and acts together but by the time that Luke writes I'm just going to take a median date of around 75 which also happens to be about the range that I think is probably correct but you can go either way it could be in the 60s simav argued for that as well it could be later as well but somewhere in this in this range I'm taking a median range of about 75 by the time that Luke writes many people have already written about Jesus and we saw that earlier so within about four and a half decades of the events now if somebody were to come along and say things that we knew about from four and a half decades ago really couldn't have happened things that were you know we knew about from our parents are the events four and a half decades before us shrouded in amnesia and some of us I hate to tell you my age but some of us were around four and half decades ago and those of us who weren't we know people who were so this is within living memory of the eyewitnesses this is something that's within history that can be verified Luke also speaks of the availability of oral sources in verse two he says just as these sources were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word and in technical context about oral tradition parody to me the passing down language has to do with the kind of careful teaching that would be passed down by teachers to students say in philosophic schools or so on where they were expected to carry on the teachers teaching now I had here a picture of Anna gulick my neighbor who is now I believe 96 years old and Anna even though she's from the United States even though the United States is not known for having very good memory because we do everything on computer now but Anna she's she's 96 years old she was born before all that she was born before television she was born before I think before radio certainly before people used radio very much she was born in an era in the United States when people would sit on the front porch and tell stories and they would tell family stories and she remembers stories from her family they go back to the 1700s and I've been able to go back and verify some of this information with external sources so oral tradition in cultures that value oral tradition can be passed on accurately for hundreds of years and that has been true even in some cultures that don't value it today but did value it in the past now how accurate it is depends on the culture and depends on the people transmitting it but how accurate was oral transmission well here's an outline of what I'm going to cover on the subject we need to look at memorization in antiquity we need to look at notes and sayings collections and evidence for Aramaic rhythm and the Gospels and the prominence of eyewitnesses in the church I'm mainly going to focus this on memorization and antiquity because that's the part where usually my students don't already know about it don't already have information about it it's not usually included in other textbooks and so on but the exclusively oral period when information was being passed on just orally before it was written down can't be any longer than the period between Jesus public ministry and the writing of mark that's the longest it can possibly be and on average scholars usually date that about 40 years it could be it could be much less than that we don't know but on average scholars usually did that about 40 years that doesn't mean that oral tradition wasn't still continuing pay pious in the early second century says it was still continuing in his day and he actually liked the oral tradition better than you like the written Gospels but be that as it may the exclusively oral period before things began to be written down can't be more than one generation in terms of how accurate memories could be memorization storytellers could tell stories for hours and I'm going to do these in more detail to aura tours one of the five basic tasks of oratory was to be able to memorize your speech and be able to repeat it from memory sometimes these speeches were a couple hours in length elementary education emphasized memorization disciples of teachers that was their primary responsibility they were supposed to be able to pass on what their teacher told them and often these things would be written down within a generation or two generations of this oral tradition sometimes even even earlier and again in the case of the Gospels we don't know what the earliest was but we know that it can't be any later than then mark that it was written down in terms of storytelling this wasn't just among educated people who could remember these stories many illiterate bards people who couldn't read or write could recite the entire Iliad and Odyssey these are two fairly long books I mean in terms of in ancient terms the Iliad is twenty-four books long and the these ancient bards who were despised by people as uneducated despised by the elite is uneducated could repeat these from memory and they could sometimes change a little bit in performance but they'd always go back to the same basic story that they had by heart now in terms of carefully trained memories I'm going to give you an extreme example this is not meant to be average but just to show you how important mnemonics or the memorization of things was an antiquity Seneca the elder he said you know when I was young my memory was much better than it is now when I was young I could I could repeat back 2,000 names and exactly the sequence in which I just heard them I could recite up to 200 verses given to me in Reverse I said well now that I'm old my memory isn't so good but I will do my best and then he proceeds in his book the controversy I to recount long sections of over a hundred speeches they heard from his classmates in oratory school a generation earlier so decades later he's repeating back in his old age these practice speeches that he heard from his colleagues in his youth now my memory is not that good I remember in my homiletics class what I preached I don't remember what anybody else preached but Seneca the elder could do that he was exceptional but there are others we read about a person who listened to an auction all day and at the end of the day he could repeat back every item that was sold the price for which it was sold and the person to whom it was sold with no notes just for memory or another person who went to a poetry reading the the person in the front was reading the poem and the person in the back at the end of the reading jumped up and said that's plagiarism I wrote that poem you stole my poem and the person in front was stammering because you didn't know what to do how could he prove that he wrote the poem and then the person in the back said now just joking I just wanted to show you how good my memory was I just I just memorized it while you were reading it so it proved he proved said I can prove that it's mine because you know he recited it but he recited it because he memorized it well he heard it being read he was just showing off that's an emphasis on memory that far exceeds emphasis on memory at least in the West today in some cultures we still have heavy emphasis on memory some some places where people can't even understand Arabic and they can recite the entire Quran for memory that's that's an emphasis on memory that's that's missing in the West but in many parts of the world people do emphasize memory more it's a valuable gift in terms of speeches again one of the five basic tasks of Auditors was to be able to memorize the speech even speeches that were often several hours in length and students were trained to be able to do that now in terms of of ancient disciples there are two main forms of advanced education in the ancient world one was rhetoric that was oratory professional public speaking the other was philosophy that was among Gentiles among Jewish people of course advanced education focused particularly on the Torah on the unsquare two ancient disciples memory and note-taking memory was most effective in the first one to two generations within living memory of the eyewitnesses those those things would be passed on carefully by eyewitnesses and those who consulted them and could ask them questions it also was was passed on particularly carefully in school settings students rehearsed and passed on their teachers message well both those factors are relevant for the Gospels the churches were not a school setting and this has been this has been an issue of some debate but the church were not a school setting but most of its prominent leaders and basically everybody agrees on this most of its prominent leaders were not only eyewitnesses but they were disciples of a teacher Jesus was clearly a teacher his disciples were clearly disciples and disciples were supposed to learn their teachers teachings to be able to pass them on again that doesn't require them to pass them on verbatim paraphrase was common practice although as we'll see there are a lot of features of Jesus teaching in the Gospels that use the kind of wording that would have been used in Galilee not the kind of wording that would have been used later the most prominent feature of ancient education was memorization it's it's very prominent very widespread at the elementary level and at the basic level they would memorize sayings of famous teachers so again this was part of the wider culture and people people who didn't have that education would still be part of a culture where memorization was important at it advanced level at higher education which would come in the starting in the mid-teens Jesus disciples probably were mostly probably in their mid-teens higher education would include memorizing for orders memorizing many speeches and passages useful for speeches but but also in philosophic schools you would memorize the teachings of the founder of the school or memorize your your teachers teachings sayings attributed to the founders of Greek schools were transmitted by members of each school from one generation to the next the founders teachings often became canonical for the communities and often then the disciples would go out and publish their teachers teachings this this we see in a number of different philosophic schools Lu Qian writing in the early second century talking about philosophers talks about a philosophic student rehearsing the previous day's lectures in his mind that was a special emphasis among the pythagoreans the pythagoreans according to tradition that they passed on they were not allowed to get out of bed in the morning until they could repeat back everything their teacher had taught them the day before now imagine if your test over what I'm giving you now would be tomorrow morning before you can get out of bed you have to repeat back everything I taught you that would give you a great skill of memorization well of course I'm not testing you but the point is that people really expected disciples of teachers to be able to repeat back their teachers teachings not everybody went as far as the pythagoreans but it was important and it wasn't just sayings was also deeds teachers would would act in certain ways disciples would say well this must be alright behavior because my teacher did it so sometimes you had rabbis who would say well I know that such a behavior can't be against the Torah can't be against the law because rabbi so-and-so used to this in fact there's there's one story told in the Talmud where a rabbi was getting ready to spend some time alone with his wife and found the disciple under his bed he said what are you doing under my bed the disciple replied it is said that we must learn everything from the behavior of our teacher needless to say the disciple got in trouble but the point of the story is that disciples believed that they had to really learn from the example of their teachers and it wasn't just one person's memory like I say something to one person they say it to another person and you know it goes around to a thousand people and when you come back chances are somebody in that in that chain is going to have messed it up this is not a chain transmission this is what's called net transmission that is it's not just dependent on one person passing it on but there was a community of disciples they'd all heard this person's teaching if somebody published something if somebody said something that the teacher said that actually contradicted the the spirit of the teachers teachings they would be immediately refuted by a lot of other people in the same way if you're if you're teaching your classroom are you teaching your congregation there'll be many people there who hear you some people may get it the wrong way but hopefully most of the people there will get the sense of what you said and so this is communal memory which which helps it further now in terms of note-taking we don't know for sure that a disciple took notes while Jesus was teaching but it's certainly possible disciples often publish their teachers teachings that was expected that had been going on for for well over half a millennium by the time that Jesus began teaching that was true in both advanced disciplines it was true in philosophy and in rhetoric I'll just give you the example from an example from rhetoric quintillion was a professor of oratory professor of rhetoric and quintillions students who were boys took such careful notes on his lectures that then they went out and published a book in his name of his teaching to which quintillion replied actually this was accurate in fact it was even too accurate because they caught some of my grammatical mistakes in their notes and I wish they would have let me collect them first so you know if you take notes on on what I'm saying now you are responsible for what you say make sure you put your name on it too but anyway they took very accurate notes now Jewish disciples tended to not take as many notes because of a heavier emphasis on orality but they took some notes sometimes as mnemonic devices to help them recall larger blocks of material among Jesus disciples we don't know about the educational level of the others although fishermen tended to be better off than the peasants than the majority of people but certainly a tax collector would have had the skills to take such notes and later Christian tradition again pay pious suggests that in fact Matthew a tax collector did take notes on Jesus teaching it at some point published notes on Jesus teaching we don't we don't know for sure he took them at the time or maybe he took them you know after the resurrection but in a case these things were probably being written down by somebody when the memories were still fresh because that was very common especially afterwards but again in in Jewish tradition where they didn't take notes it wasn't because they said we don't care about what the teacher said it's because they they emphasized memory skills a generation two generations later it might be different but by then in the case of the Gospels we know things are being written down Jesus Jewish disciples Jewish disciples from what we know from our sources about them very much emphasized memorization Josephus tells us that memorizing the Scriptures was very important so memorization was a was a big issue one rabbi praised a student as being like a good water tank that never loses a single drop of water remembering everything the teacher taught him now some people say well this evidence from Jewish sources is later than the Gospels the evidence from Josephus isn't much later the evidence from the rabbis is much later but it's consistent with all the other evidence that we have from ancient sources again this is only one slice of our evidence but all of our evidence put together points in the same direction so if somebody comes along and says well you can't accept this evidence you can accept that evidence explains away all the evidence and says actually the accurate information is the exact opposite of what all of our evidence says I would not give that argument very much credibility the evidence is that we should expect that the Gospels are chock-full of information about Jesus that was accurately preserved even on purely historical grounds what should we expect from Jesus disciples why should we expect Jesus disciples to prove less reliable than other disciples of teachers when virtually all scholars agree that he was a teacher with disciples when the the common material shared by Matthew and Luke probably was already circulating well some of the eyewitnesses was were in leadership in the Jerusalem church probably only a single lifespan separates Jesus from the last New Testament document what does that suggest to us it suggests that this is not a Christian bias that makes us believe this I was Nathan before I became a Christian I was converted to Christianity from a completely non-christian background and I'm a Kris now I start from Christian premises now but if somebody doesn't start from Christian premises they're simply looking at historical evidence the way that they would look at other documents my belief is that if they're doing it objectively they will come to the conclusion that we know a whole lot about Jesus even from pure a purely historical standpoint now once you acknowledge Jesus is Lord then you have even more reason to believe because you know that he commissioned two disciples you know that these people were full of the spirit you know that these are trustworthy witnesses but even for a person is not a Christian we have a lot of evidence here that should suggest to them that what we know about Jesus is believable and if that's true that's good reason to become a Christian this is dr. Craig keener on the book of Matthew session number one the reliability of the Gospels

Channel: ted hildebrandt

Views: 9,774

Rating: 4.9633026 out of 5

Keywords: Craig Keener, Matthew, New Testament, Reliability of the Gospels, Ted Hildebrandt, biblibcalelearning.org

Id: 5jejjJJ8bDM

Length: 67min 29sec (4049 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 08 2016