In chapter five of his book, Bart Ehrman sketches out a basic narrative of the historical process which led to the production of the Gospels. I do not really disagree much with him about either the dating of the Gospels, or the Synoptic problem (i.e. the relationship of Matthew, Mark and Luke), but where I would have serious disagreements is with his analysis of the historical process that led to the production of the Gospels. In essence the difference is this—he imagines a long chain of oral tradition, involving the telling of these narratives by many people who were not eyewitnesses, which eventually led to the writing down of these traditions by others who were neither eyewitnesses nor in touch with eyewitnesses. By this means he seeks to explain what he sees as the many discrepancies in the Gospels. Besides the fact that this analysis is based on some enormous unproven assumptions, it in fact goes flatly against both the internal and external evidence we have about the matter. Let me illustrate, starting with Lk. 1.1-4.

In Lk. 1.1-4, Luke tells us that he had observed, for a long time the “things which have happened amongst us” and more crucially he says that many had compiled a written account of things before he did. In addition, and most crucially he adds that he had consulted eyewitnesses and the original preachers of the Gospel message. On the prima facie showing of this preface to his Gospel what would it be reasonable to deduce about the gap between Luke and the original Gospel events? Was he writing at a time or a place so far removed from the original events that he could not consult those who were actually eyewitnesses of these things? Unless one wants to claim Luke is simply telling a lie, which few scholars would do, Luke is telling us that while he himself is not an eyewitness of the life of Jesus, nevertheless he knew and had consulted those who were, and used them as sources in his work. We must also conclude that he had written sources, which he calls ‘many’. I suspect he means Mark, perhaps a written collection of Jesus’ sayings (‘Q’), and perhaps Matthew as well, and there may have been other sources as well. Now it is the consensus of most scholars that Luke is the latest of the Synoptic writers, using Mark, and possibly knowing Matthew as well, but in any case later than Matthew. He probably wrote sometime in the 70s, or possibly even the 80s. This reminds us of an important point. There were still eyewitnesses around to be consulted until the very end of the first century, as Papias tells us, for he consulted a couple of them in the early second century.

Now if Luke indeed consulted eyewitnesses and written sources, then the myth of a long chain of oral tradition with many weak links cannot stand close scrutiny. But there is in addition external evidence as well on this matter from a reliable tradition in Papias. It says the following:

“And the presbyter said this. Mark having become the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately whatsoever he [i.e. Peter] remembered. It was not, however, in exact order that he related the sayings or deeds of Christ. For he [Mark] neither heard the Lord nor accompanied Him. But afterwards, as I said, he accompanied Peter, and formed his [Peter’s] instructions into chreiae, but with no intention of giving a complete narrative of the Lord’s sayings. Wherefore Mark made no mistake in thus writing some things as he remembered them. For of one thing he took especial care, not to omit anything he had heard, and not to put anything fictitious into the statements.”
Now the presbyter in this statement is the man Papias calls John the elder. This is not John Zebedee, whom Papias had not met, but rather John of Patmos, who himself had been in touch with the earlier eyewitnesses, including the Beloved Disciple. If you want this statement by Papias properly unpacked at length, read Richard Bauckham’s excellent treatment of it in Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, and if you want a lengthy critique of Ehrman’s myth about long and weak chains of oral tradition see my critique of James Dunn’s Jesus Remembered, forthcoming in my What’s in a Word?. Here it must be sufficient to say that Mark was the interpreter and translator of Peter. What the Greek text of this passage suggests is that Peter often spoke in Aramaic, and Mark translated for him, and this included translating various stories about Jesus and his words and deeds into Greek. This explains a good deal about the Gospel of Mark (not least its various parenthetical translations of Aramaic words). Jesus spoke in Aramaic and so did Peter. Mark was more skilled in Greek than Peter.

Now Papias tells us that Mark had no intention to give a full or completely chronological account of the life of Jesus, but simply to present some of the salient memoirs of Peter. He also tells us that Mark formed these narratives into chreiae, the rhetorical form for a persuasive short story that normally ended with a bang with either a notable saying of the hero, or a notable action of the hero. What this tradition tells us of course is that there is no long oral tradition gap between the events in the life of Jesus and Mark’s Gospel— Peter himself is the missing link. And here it is worth adding that it is highly unlikely that the second century church, so enamoured with apostolic and eyewitness testimony, would have made up the notion that two of our earliest Gospels were written by non-apostles and non-eyewitnesses like Mark and Luke, who on the very showing of the NT itself were minor figures in early Christianity, not major ones. To this of course we could add the testimony about the Fourth Gospel from John 21 which says explicitly that the Beloved Disciple was an eyewitness of some of the events in Jesus’ life, that he wrote down his own memoirs, and that later the community collected them and composed what we call John’s Gospel. I would suggest the reason it is called that is because it was in fact John of Patmos who, having returned to Ephesus from exile, was the one who collected and edited the Beloved Disciple’s material. This is the same John who wrote Revelation and whom Papias had met.

There are other points in Chapter Five that need to be challenged: 1) the notion that Paul tells us nothing about Jesus or his words and deeds. In fact every Pauline scholar I know would say this is false. Not only because he can recite the tradition passed down to him about the last supper (1 Cor., 11), or the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus (1 Cor 15), but also because with some regularity he draws on the teaching of Jesus (see 1 Cor. 7, and Rom. 12 and Gal. 6 for example). Furthermore, in his earliest letter, Galatians, Paul tells us he went to Jerusalem more than once and consulted the three pillars of the Jerusalem church James, John, and Peter (Gal. 1-2). You may be sure that the subject of the many conversations included Jesus and his words and deeds. 2) Amazingly, Bart Ehrman serves up warmed over Albert Schweitzer and his largely discredited theories about Jesus, from over a century ago, not only in Bart’s own book on Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet, but again here in this book. Schweizter to his credit was right that Jesus’ message and mindset was eschatological and prophetic, but he was quite wrong that Jesus thought the world was definitely ending in his lifetime and completely wrong that Jesus predicted the world would end within a generat
ion. We have already dealt with this in a previous post (see e.g. Mk. 13.32). The fact that Ehrman ignores the numerous critiques of Schweitzer’s theories in most other recent detailed scholarly works on Jesus (see e.g. Wright’s Jesus and the Victory of God, or Flusser’s Jesus as Sage, or my Jesus the Sage, and Jesus the Seer, or John Meir’s massive multi-volumes on Jesus a Marginal Jew, or A.J. Levine’s A Misunderstood Jew and there are many more), is frankly just not responsible scholarship. Of course the masses who read Ehrman’s book don’t realize that most Jesus scholars would disagree with him about this, because of course their works have not appeared in such popular form as this easy to read book. 3) on p. 174 we come to a statement which explains much, historians are unable to discuss miracles. He says this because he believes “there cannot be historical evidence for a miracle” (p. 175). This of course depends on what counts as evidence. I do not frankly see the evidence for ancient or modern miracles as any different than the evidence for other sorts of events. We should use the same criteria to evaluate all historical claims— multiple attestation by reliable witnesses, and the like, which criteria Bart lists. A miracle, like any other historical event is a unique event. It does not differ from other historical events in this respect. This is of course why any historical event differs from a repeatable laboratory chemical experiment.

And this brings me to the issue of the study of history as opposed to the study of nature. The form is largely an analytical art, the latter is a science which involves empirical experimentation. It is a mistake to see the study of any ancient historical event as a “science”. It isn’t because historical events are by definition unrepeatable one time occurrences. It is equally a mistake, and this is where Bart’s definition of a historian goes sadly awry, to assume either that: 1) we know all the laws of nature, or 2) that they cannot be accelerated or transcended by the God of nature. At a minimum, even a skeptical historian must allow that remarkable and inexplicable things do happen in history, things not explicable by modern science. This is no knock on science, but like any discipline of knowledge it has its limitations. Just as I would not use my wife’s knowledge of botany to study Napoleon, so we should not apply the rules for chemical experiments or scientific testing of nature to study any historical event. Historians of course do seek to establish what probably happened in the past, and since miracles by the millions have been reported in all ages of history including the current one, it is quite impossible to say that miracles are the least probable historical occurrences. How in the world could we know that? Has anyone assessed all the occurrences of everything in all of human history and then weighed the probabilities? Certainly not. No one has that sort of exhaustive knowledge, and no historian should be so presumptious as to assume that he knows miracles have always been improbable. Rather, in humility, he should be open to whatever is the most plausible historical explanation of this, that or the other event, and then in addition admit, that sometimes we have to say ‘I don’t know or can’t explain that. Maybe it really happened and really was a miracle.’

Me personally, I am not merely open minded about this, I have been present when miracles of healing happened, that the doctors were unable to explain. This doesn’t mean it didn’t happen or a good historian should just ignore this kind of event in someone’s life, though he may be led to say ‘I don’t know how that happened, it doesn’t seem explicable in purely naturalistic terms’. But then there is no law that requires a good critical historian to be a naturalist in his assumptions about all life. None whatsoever. Let me leave you with a true story.

Some time ago I was pastoring in Coleridge N.C. and had gone to Charlotte with my wife for a few days to visit my folks. One of our most stalwart church members, Bertha Albright, suddenly and unexpectedly became ill on a Saturday and was dead by the time we returned. This was in an age before cell phones, and when I arrived back in Coleridge my neighbor was frantic and asking me to come to his house. He was worried his mother had gone bonkers. You see, Mrs Whitehead had been Bertha Albright’s best friend, and about 4 or so that afternoon she had received a phone call from Bertha, which her son Roger had overheard. The phone rang, they talked for a while, and then Mrs. Whitehead hung up. She had been talking to Bertha. The problem is, that Bertha was already dead some hours, and so a phone call of that sort was, on a naturalistic set of assumptions, quite out of the question.
When I came across the street and was told all of this, because of course now Mrs. Whitehead had learned Bertha was dead and was distraught, I tried to calm her down and ask her some questions. I asked her was she sure it was Bertha? Oh yes, she had known this person for many many years. How did Bertha sound? “She sounded far away.”

I remember saying “I guess so, it was truly a long distance call.” But when I asked her what Bertha said, one of her remarks struck home “She asked if Ben would be back to preach on Sunday, and to tell him not to be discouraged but to keep giving those good sermons and doing the ministerial work.” I was a pastor of four churches, and it was difficult. And indeed I was discouraged, and wondered whether I belonged in the pastoral ministry. And that message was precisely the word of hope and help I needed on that weekend.

I could tell many other stories like this from my life, but the bottom line is, anyone who rules out God and the miraculous and calls that good historiography has indeed left out a large amount of history from our purview. It is a sad, and stunted version of reality that is involved, and worst of all, it’s not really true to reality. Modern historians do not need to be theologians to do their work, but when they step on holy ground, they ought to have the good sense to realize that they don’t know enough to rule God ought of the equation. They would do better to simple say ‘something remarkable happened as the evidence we have suggests…. But I simply can’t explain it.”