The Case of the Four Gospels (Part I)

A brief sociological history

Recently, my friend Justin Brierley released a joint live appearance with historian Tom Holland, discussing Justin’s new book The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God. Justin is a British Christian broadcaster who’s spent a number of years chronicling the back and forth between Christians and atheists in the public square. Holland is one of several Christianity-friendly public intellectuals playing a prominent role in Justin’s thesis. This is just the latest of many conversations they’ve had, but the hosts still drew out some interesting new thoughts from both of them—most intriguingly, Tom’s story of how the Blessed Virgin Mary might have healed him from cancer several Christmases ago.

Holland is charmingly frank about how skeptical he tends to feel towards things like miraculous healings, angels, et cetera. He’s a modern man, after all. But sometimes, modern men have strange experiences they don’t quite know how to explain. Like this prayer to the Virgin Mary that was immediately followed by a string of bizarrely fortunate coincidences. Or that time he was in a ruined cathedral in Sinjar and thought for a moment he heard angels’ wings brushing the roof. As Tom poignantly phrases it, these are things he “hugs to himself.” They almost tempt him to throw reason to the wind and make a Kierkegaardian leap of faith. Then he wakes up, and he’s back in the land of reason. Then again, he thinks, people generally don’t become Christians because they fell in love with Five Proofs for the Existence of God. They become Christians because they fell in love with, well, God. Maybe Martin Luther was right. Maybe “reason is a whore.”

Justin Brierley is very British and very polite, and so he accepts all of this with good humor. But he does offer some gentle pushback, suggesting that this is a false dichotomy. Tom doesn’t need to cut himself off from reason. He just needs to baptize it.

It will surprise no one that I agree with Justin, even though I feel like I also understand Tom fairly well. I know a lot about apologetics, but some apologists can bore me to tears—at best. At worst, they drive me to drink. (I exaggerate! Slightly!) One reason I don’t use this space to do more explicitly apologetic writing is that it really takes time to craft such writing in a way that will actually engage people. It’s not that I think apologetics has no place, or that I share Luther’s sentiments about reason. It’s just that I cringe at the thought of making my readers feel like they’re reading a longwinded textbook or a dry journal article. I would rather make them feel like they’re reading a story. It seems like this is how they should feel if they’re reading about the story of Jesus. It’s the greatest story ever told, after all.

However, with the release of Justin’s book, along with its companion longform podcast, it feels like this Easter season might be a natural time to risk slightly boring you all and do a bit of apologetics. Don’t worry. I’ll try to keep things spicy.

Justin was gracious enough to feature some of my ramblings in the podcast, which has been cleverly paced so that Holy Week and Eastertide are coinciding with the release of more apologetics-heavy episodes. In a way, the whole show has been building up to them. Episode 15 discusses the reliability of the Gospels, blending various scholarly reflections with an unlikely conversion testimony from religion historian Molly Worthen. The next episode will focus more specifically on the resurrection. Justin generously let me preview these before their release, and I’m sure he’ll be gratified to hear that they didn’t drive me to drink. It helps that he’s incorporating some important research from both my parents, Tim and Lydia. It was them who first taught me that faith and reason were not natural enemies, but dancing partners.

However, I would have made some different choices in hanging the frame for these episodes, because I think that without intending to, Justin’s frame gives a somewhat misleading impression of what scholars are generally thinking about the four Gospels. Now, as will become clear, I personally don’t put much stock in “what scholars are generally thinking” about…well, much of anything, actually, unless it’s something so abstract or so dusty that nobody could be fired for having the “wrong” opinion about it. As my dad likes to say, show me you know what you’re talking about, and I don’t care what degree you have. Show me you don’t know what you’re talking about, and I don’t care what degree you have. (Dad has a Ph.D. in philosophy, incidentally, but he hopes you won’t assume he knows what he’s talking about just for that.)

And yet, I still think it’s important for earnest Christians and curious non-Christians alike to understand the actual lay of the land here. On which note, I’m afraid I have some bad news. But I also have good news, which we’ll get to next time.

With a theme like “surprising rebirth,” it’s natural that Justin wants to create the sense of an arc of scholarly history, so to speak, which hasn’t always bent towards evangelical Christianity but may now be turning in our favor. In the beginning, there was David Strauss and Co., the German scholars who dismissed the Gospels wholesale and thereby ushered in countless Victorian crises of faith. Then came Rudolf Bultmann, a Lutheran who in his own way continued their work for them by explaining that a historical analysis of the Gospels was missing the point. As Michael Ruse likes to put it, it’s not about whether Jesus really multiplied loaves and fishes for the crowd, it’s about the fact that we must all share our loaves and fishes with each other. Or something.

But then, as the 20th century wore on, something shifted. There was a “Jewish reclamation of Jesus.” The tide began to turn, until a majority of even skeptical scholars came to view the Gospels as “very credible sources.” So radical was this shift that one could even call it a “reversal of scholarship.” And if that wasn’t good enough news, “the central facts undergirding the inference to the resurrection of Jesus are actually acknowledged by the wide majority of New Testament critics today, be they Christian or non-Christian, liberal or conservative.” At least that’s how Christian philosopher William Lane Craig frames things in this clip, featured in Justin’s podcast:

There’s no diplomatic way to say this, so I’ll just be undiplomatic: William Lane Craig is completely wrong here. But that’s okay. I’ll explain.

Here’s the small grain of truth to what Craig is saying: It is true that the second half of the 20th century saw something of a “Jewish reclamation of Jesus,” during which skeptical Jewish scholars became somewhat less skeptical about how much information could be mined from the Gospels. At the time, this caused a stir among more conservative evangelicals. Was something Happening? Well, that depended on one’s definition of “something.” As Donald Hagner wrote in his study, in the end that “something” amounted to these Jewish scholars finding some common ground with highly skeptical non-Jewish scholars. All of them agreed that you could mine some historical nuggets about Jesus from the Gospels—specifically, Jesus as Jewish teacher. But that was always the limit of any skeptical scholarship, even for the “moderate” skeptics: mining nuggets. And at no point would any of them have referred to the Gospels as “credible,” particularly the Gospel of John. There was certainly nothing like a “reversal of scholarship.” Not even close.

Further, when Craig says the Gospels “are now regarded as ancient biography,” this ironically is in tension with even the idea of a “Jewish reclamation,” since he’s referring to the theory that they belong to the genre of Greco-Roman biography. And the most popularly cited scholar to put this theory forward, Richard Burridge, did so while completely ignoring the Gospels’ traditional Jewish authorship. Let’s suppose, for one heady moment, that the Gospel of Matthew was written by a Jewish fellow named, I don’t know, Matthew. Wilder still, let’s entertain the impossibly daring hypothesis that the Gospel of John was written by (gasp) a Jewish fellow named John. How likely is it that Matthew or John would have so much as heard of “Greco-Roman bioi,” let alone self-consciously written their Gospels in that “genre”? How likely is it that they would have grown up learning Greek literature alongside Torah study? Right. So, naturally, Burridge deals with those awkward questions by avoiding them altogether. So much for “the Jewish reclamation of Jesus.”

And that’s not even getting into the ways that this genre theory has actually played itself out even in some evangelical circles, with the conjecture that the Gospel writers took generous fictionalizing liberties with important sayings and incidents in Jesus’ life. (For example, Craig Evans admits in debate with Bart Ehrman that they won’t have much of a debate over John, because they mostly agree that John invented, e.g., the “I am” sayings.) Needless to say, this doesn’t exactly contribute to a consensus that the Gospels are “very credible sources.” Fortunately, it turns out that even the Greeks and Romans by and large didn’t consider themselves free to take such liberties anyway, so the whole theory is rubbish on literally every level. More here. (Sorry, I know I’m supposed to be giving you bad news here—got ahead of myself.)

Then there’s Craig’s claim about a vast bipartisan consensus on “the central facts undergirding the inference to the resurrection of Jesus.” Though he doesn’t use this phrase, this is a version of the so-called “minimal facts argument,” which tries to prove Jesus’ physical resurrection using only what even skeptical scholars will grant—e.g., that Jesus was crucified, that his disciples had experiences leading them to believe he had risen again, or that the empty tomb is an early tradition, not a legendary accretion. One can see why this sort of argument would have a strong rhetorical appeal, in theory. The problem is that when people quote-mine scholars like Gerd Ludemann, Géza Vermes, or Bart Ehrman, these scholars are consistently being taken out of context at best or outright misinterpreted at worst. Reading them in context clarifies that they all keep the details of the resurrection “experiences” in such soft focus that they could be just about anything, including experiences that could be evidence against a physical resurrection—a distant glimpse, a grief hallucination, a vivid dream. Perhaps a ghostly apparition, for those who have a taste for the paranormal. They’ll grant that the disciples were sincere, but then lots of people are sincere. People have sincerely thought they saw the Virgin Mary. People have sincerely thought they saw Elvis. At most, a paranormal enthusiast like Dale Allison might leave the door open for a “spiritual resurrection,” while cringing at the idea that the resurrected Jesus had (wrinkles nose) a body.

As for the fleshy, “crunchy” details of those appearances as we find them in the gospels—Jesus touching people, being touched, eating fish, having long conversations—you’ll find these are consistently just assumed to have been added later. In other words, it’s not simply that skeptical scholars are skeptical about whether Jesus actually rose from the dead. They’re even skeptical about what the disciples claimed they saw after Jesus’ death. This remains a point of some disconcertingly widespread confusion.

In short, yes, it is in one sense trivially true that there’s a great gulf between Bart Ehrman and the Reddit-tier Jesus mythicist. It’s trivially true that skeptical scholars like Ehrman believe that one can find some historical bits of something, somewhere in the Gospels. And it’s trivially true that in particular, there’s a little handful of bits around Jesus’ resurrection on which one can find broad agreement in the literature. But none of this should be enough to make the eager evangelical’s heart beat high, or stir more than mild curiosity in the skeptic.

I took William Lane Craig as a jumping-off point, but in fairness to him, he’s not alone. He represents a fairly common, though unfortunate trend among evangelical academics in this area, especially American evangelicals: the trend of noticing that there has been some kind of scholarly shift, then rushing to interpret it as a significant shift in their direction. It would be as if I noticed a shift in the Michigan weather from “cold and cloudy” to “cold and mostly cloudy,” then reported that the weather had become positively cheerful. Sociologically, this of course is understandable. Evangelicals are keenly aware that they are a beleaguered, patronized academic minority. They constantly seek opportunities to prove that they aren’t against rigorous scholarship, that they can meet skeptics halfway and win, in some sense, on skeptical “turf.” In this way, they are eager to distinguish themselves from the only minority still more beleaguered and ridiculed than evangelicals—the fundamentalists. For the fundamentalist, you see, has never cared about scholarly consensus. Indeed, not caring about scholarly consensus is a point of great fundamentalist pride. And so a great deal of the evangelical scholar’s time and energy is occupied with loudly shouting over the fundamentalist: “DON’T MIND HIM! WE CARE!”

But, of course, one doesn’t need to be a fundamentalist not to care. I’ve been told an amusing anecdote about a “minimal facts” presentation by one of these scholars, who shall remain nameless, to a British audience. A contrarian academic who shall also remain nameless was sitting in the back, and at the end of the talk he piped up to ask why this American evangelical was so interested in building on consensus scholarship, when he himself, a non-evangelical Brit, had spent his whole career saying that consensus was regularly wrong.

An excellent question, which makes a natural place to wrap up this installment of bad news, with a hopeful eye to the good news next week.