The Case of the Four Gospels, Part IV: Details, Details

On the gospels as history

This spring, I launched a little series about the provenance and reliability of the four gospels, one of my all-time favorite topics for study and writing. As can tend to happen with my well-intentioned series plans, I got distracted by life and other topics and only cranked out a grand total of three entries this year. However, this summer Ross Douthat was kind enough to point his readers to the last entry, on unnecessary clues, which helped me pick up some new subscribers. I have no idea how many of you all are still here reading this, but if you are, here finally is more of what originally got you to visit my little corner of the Internet! It only took me about six months! There’s still more to come too. I sincerely hope I haven’t bored you by writing about other stuff in the meantime.

I’ve gained more new readers thanks to the interest in my recent piece on Jordan Peterson, so to all newcomers, welcome. If today’s topic interests you, the first entry in the series is free. I’ve been keeping other entries reserved for paid subscribers, including this one, so if you’re hooked after the free sample, consider upgrading! My end-of-year sale is ongoing, so now is the time to lock in the next year’s worth of exclusive content for a trifling $30.

Speaking of Jordan Peterson, I’ve been inspired to kick this series back into gear by the Daily Wire’s new guided panel discussion on the gospels, which follows the same freewheeling format as last year’s Exodus seminar. Inevitably, with Peterson at the helm, much time is spent chasing various symbolic rabbit trails, which will be intolerable or endearing depending on how used you are to Peterson. Jonathan Pageau drives a lot of typological discussion on parallels between Old and New Testaments, some of which is interesting, though in my judgment it can get quite strained. Based on Pageau’s other material, I’m particularly wary of how he plans to handle the resurrection accounts, and I worry that his Eastern Orthodox filter sometimes clouds more than it clarifies. But he can also be helpful, and meanwhile there are other impressive thinkers like Bishop Barron and Dr. James Orr on deck to help ensure the text is handled carefully and well as history, not just myth.

I do agree with Pageau that the gospels are best taken separately rather than smashed into a harmonization. Peterson has insisted on using the latter for the seminar, but Pageau politely takes issue with the choice, stressing the importance of each gospel writer’s unique perspective. In these posts, I’ve been looking at how numerous small details in the four accounts casually interlock with each other. This interlocking yields a very powerful cumulative case for the texts’ reliability as history. I don’t see too many contemporary scholars articulating this case at the level of detail it deserves, for complicated reasons I reflected on in Part I. But a couple of those scholars happen to be my parents, and these posts are effectively designed as samplers of their extensive research. Anyone who wants more where this stuff came from should have a look at my mother’s New Testament bibliography, starting with her recent Testimonies to the Truth. One of the highlights of my year was recommending this work to a religion scholar, a new convert who had read all the apologetic works she could find, yet had never encountered something this loaded with unique lines of argument.

In the last couple entries, I looked at some elements of the gospels’ composition that provide internal markers of their authenticity as eyewitness accounts, including undesigned coincidences, unexplained allusions, and more. Today, I want to highlight some ways they interlock with external sources on the gritty details of the story’s setting—the geography, the culture, the customs, all the sorts of things that would have been impossible to “research” for someone who wasn’t up close to it, especially since Jerusalem was destroyed in A. D. 70. People tend not to realize these are the areas to look for external confirmation, instead asking whether we have other historians who talk about Jesus’ miracles, resurrection, etc. Lots of ink has been spilled over one small fragment of Josephus that began as a rather spare summary and got embellished over time. Of course, this is a valuable record of Jesus’ existence, but not much more.

The best kind of external corroboration is a subtler kind. It’s found in the accumulation of obscure details that speak to the writer’s intimate familiarity with the place and time. This doesn’t mean the writers will never get anything wrong, but it does mean they get a lot of hard things right. Another excellent resource here is Peter Williams’ Can We Trust the Gospels? Once you start digging in, you discover there’s an embarrassment of riches here, so I’m just going to pick out some shiny coins that especially catch my eye and arrange them in a way that hopefully whets your appetite for more.

Luke is always going to stand out in these discussions, not because the other gospels are inaccurate (to the contrary, as we’ll see) but because Luke gives himself so many opportunities to go wrong. He approached his gospel with a reporter’s eye, so he’s the writer most concerned with nailing down the setting in highly specific ways. There’s a lot of back-and-forth specifically around the Nativity census and whether he got the name of Quirinius wrong, but it’s unfortunate that this discourse tends to overshadow Luke’s truly impressive record at many other points, not only in his gospel but in the book of Acts. He’s especially impressive in navigating the uniquely confusing political makeup of pre-Destruction Palestine, whose part Roman, part native governance went through a revolving door of setups. You simply had to be there and paying close attention to which puppet governor was in place at which moment, what title he had, what kind of authority he had, and so on. There was a double system of taxation, a double justice system, sometimes a double military command. At any given moment, Jewish and Roman customs were in play and chaotically overlapping.

Yet Luke maneuvers through this minefield with confidence and accuracy. Consider just these couple verses opening Chapter 3, as he sets the scene for John the Baptist’s wilderness ministry: “In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar—when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, Herod tetrarch of Galilee, his brother Philip tetrarch of Iturea and Traconitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene—during the high-priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness.” This almost feels like a journalistic flex, it’s so densely packed with names, most of which mean nothing to us today. But based on other sources, we can almost completely reconstruct this precise intersection of rulerships at this precise time. We don’t happen to have another source confirming that Philip was tetrarch of Iturea, but Josephus tells us that Herod Antipas gave him Traconitis. This strengthens Luke’s place as a historical source in his own right. He himself isn’t going to return to many of these names later. They’re here for the sole reason of making sure we, the readers, understand his purpose.

But there’s even more to be mined in the reference to something like a joint priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, which we also see in John’s gospel, as well as a different reference to Caiaphas being “high priest that year.” Old-school skeptics got lots of mileage out of all this as supposed proof that the gospel writers were out of their depth, since the Old Testament establishes the high priesthood as a lifetime office. Shockingly, it turns out that Luke and John knew something 19th-century skeptics didn’t. And as Joseph Lightfoot pointed out, so did Josephus, who makes similar references. What they’re all reflecting is the fact that under Roman rule, the office of the high priest became politically malleable. A priest could be here one year, gone the next, hence John’s line about Caiaphas (who himself rotated out in A. D. 36). We also know Annas was Caiaphas’s father-in-law and had been an influential priest in an earlier era before the Romans deposed him. It’s not a stretch to picture him still retaining a measure of priestly power and influence in Caiaphas’s time.

I could devote a whole post just to the various ways the gospel writers have been vindicated against snarky modern critics. Particularly satisfying is the archeological evidence uncovered for John’s gospel. I’ve discussed John in further detail here, for those curious. One more obscure thing I haven’t highlighted before is how the accounts of Jesus’ teaching ministry reflected the known customs and disputes of his time. In John 5, he angers the religious leaders by healing a lame man on the Sabbath at the Pool of Bethesda (which we’ve found, among other locations). Not only did this healing miracle constitute “work,” Jesus also gave the man “work” by telling him to carry his pallet. A couple chapters later, he justifies himself by pointing out that baby boys are still circumcised on the Sabbath if that’s where their eighth day happens to fall. We can confirm that the question of what to do in this situation had been a conundrum the Jews took very seriously, requiring rabbinic rulings to decide which law would override the other. This move is typical of Jesus’ own keen rabbinic mind, always several steps ahead and ready to beat the ruling class at their own game.

Also in John 7, we find one of Jesus’ most arresting and frequently quoted metaphors for himself, when he cries out to the people, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to Me and drink. He who believes in Me, as the Scripture said, ‘From his innermost being will flow rivers of living water.’” John tells us that he’s saying this on the last day of the Feast of Tabernacles. From other sources, we learn about the dramatic ceremonies that accompanied this feast, including a ceremony of lights and a ceremony of water-drawing from the Pool of Siloam. The Talmud says, “One who did not see the Celebration of the Place of the Drawing of the Water never saw celebration in his days.” This would all have been fresh in the people’s minds, and as is typical of Jesus, he uses an illustration near to hand to get their attention. Once again, we must keep in mind that this was all done away with when the city was destroyed, and it’s commonly thought that John is writing a generation after that. His audience would have included Gentiles and younger Jews with no memory of that great Celebration. The reference thus makes no sense as a fictionalizing touch, but it makes perfect sense as an organic piece of the scenery around this moment in John’s memoirs.

It’s also intriguing to explore Jesus and the disciples’ Galilean roots. Various verses clue us in that Galileans were looked down on, and this is borne out in Talmudic confirmation that they were seen as the “hicks” of their time and place. We even find jokes about those dumb Galileans, much like if you were growing up in Chicago in the 70s, you might have heard jokes about those dumb Polacks. That’s the sort of fine-grained regional detail my mother remembers as someone who grew up in that time and place, and because we have the Internet, it’s something I could go research if I wanted to. But with no Internet or printing press, she and others of her generation—people who were there—would be my only source.

There’s another lovely small detail about specifically Galilean customs in the story of Jesus raising the widow’s son, which is unique to Luke. We’re told she comes from Nain, which is roughly ten miles south of Nazareth in lower Galilee. As he approaches her son’s funeral procession, he gently speaks to her first, then goes and raises up the boy. This naturally gives us a picture of her walking in front of the bier. In fact, we know that this was the custom in Galilee. We also know it was the other way around in Judea—a minute difference in custom between two close regions. Yet we have here what seems like an effortlessly accurate record of the Galilean way.

Luke and John happen to dominate in the examples I’ve picked so far, so I’ll give Matthew his due with a couple notes about currency. One example comes from Jesus’ parable of the vineyard laborers who all receive a flat wage of a denarius a day. We know separately from Tacitus that this was a reasonable day’s wage for a Roman soldier, although lowlier soldiers sometimes received less and agitated for a raise. For anyone who’s dabbled in period fiction writing, think about scenes where you need to know what pay would be reasonable to give or demand for a certain job. If you care about that sort of thing, you take the time to look it up, but you won’t just know it offhand.

Also in Matthew, we have the story where Peter is pressed by some tax-collectors about paying the Temple tax and says that yes, his master pays it. Jesus mildly chides him that actually, they shouldn’t have to, but since Peter said they would, he’ll miraculously provide just enough in the mouth of a fish. Specifically, he says Peter will find a stater. A stater, we know, was worth four of another coin called a drachma. We further know that two drachmae covered one man’s tax. So Jesus is providing precisely the amount that will cover himself and Peter, presumably to avoid the further questioning that Peter would probably encounter if he brought just enough for one of them.

To wrap this up on a seasonal note, while I’m in Matthew I’ll come full circle a bit and just mention a very nice detail about how the region’s political situation intersects with the Holy Family’s return from Egypt. Matthew tells us that Joseph decides not to go back to Judea when he hears that Archelaus (son of Herod the Great) is now installed. All Matthew says is that “he was afraid,” but it doesn’t give details. However, we can fill them in from what we know about Archelaus’s first days on the throne. During Passover, Jewish men stoned some Roman guards, then fled and hid in the Temple. In response, Archelaus sent an army to surround it and slaughter a total of 3,000. Needless to say, Passover was canceled. It’s likely that Joseph encountered travelers urgently warning people to stay away. In the parceling out of Herod the Great’s territory among his four sons, Nazareth had fallen not to Archelaus but to Antipas, who had a milder reputation. This all dovetails with Joseph’s abrupt course change.

I should have grabbed something from Mark for completeness’ sake here, but this should be more than enough to go on with. Wherever you’re coming from on all this, I hope it’s of interest and inspires you to go further. I promise I won’t wait six months to do another installment, but if you’d rather not wait at all, I highly recommend having a look at a couple of the books I’ve plugged and discovering more for yourself. Treasure is waiting. And it’s all yours.