In this episode Trent sits down with fellow apologist Jimmy Akin to give a broader overview of the themes and issues raised in Trent’s recent dialogue with Godless engineer on the historical reliability of Luke’s Gospel.
Welcome to the Counsel of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey everyone, welcome to the Counsel of Trent Podcast. I’m your host Catholic Answers apologist and speaker Trent Horn. Today I want to do a debrief episode of the recent dialogue that I had with John Gleason aka the Godless Engineer on the historical reliability of Luke’s Gospel. I’ve done a lot of these debriefs after debates and dialogues, and the purpose of these debriefs is not to go back through the entire exchange or to continue the exchange or anything like that. My goal…
Jimmy Akin:
Is to gloat.
Trent Horn:
Right or to do that, as my colleague here has let us know what we’re not doing. What I want to do, what Jimmy and I are going to do. And that’s why I’m really excited to have Jimmy Akin senior apologists to Catholic Answers to join me. The goal, what I want to do is to expand upon some of the things that were brought up in the dialogue because both John and I have read a lot on New Testament studies, historiography, things like that, the existence of Jesus. We’ve read a lot of different areas. And when two people have read a lot in different subjects, and they talk to one another, sometimes people listening to it from the outside.
Trent Horn:
Well, I believe that there is an expression for this. I guess, inside baseball would be the expression. It’s like, oh, you’re throwing around a lot of different terms, what exactly are some of these things you’re talking about? And I thought it’d be fun, Jimmy to bring you on to discuss some of that. So Jimmy, welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast.
Jimmy Akin:
Thank you, happy to be here again and looking forward to doing some inside baseball with deep cuts into dank New Testament scholarship names.
Trent Horn:
I like it. I like it. So yeah, that’s what we’re going to talk about today. For those of you who haven’t watched the dialogue, be sure to go and check it out. I’m releasing it right now, just five minutes before this episode. So if you haven’t seen it, you should definitely watch it. You might also benefit from listening to our debrief first so you can understand the concepts that John and I were disagreeing about, and then go and listen to it. But it’s also fine if you’ve heard it, and want more elucidation [inaudible 00:02:21] the terms are brought up. So Jimmy, what I want to start with is that the dialogue topic that John and I agreed about, originally, he asked me to go on his atheist YouTube channel, Godless Engineer, to talk about slavery in the Old Testament, and the commands of the Israelites to conquer and kill neighboring Canaanite tribes.
Trent Horn:
So I just told John right off the bat, I don’t know if you and I could have a good dialogue on those issues because there’s so many things we disagree about. If he doesn’t even believe that God exists for example, we’re going to have a hard time coming together on this. So that’s why I chose a narrower topic, even though we were still kind of far apart, which would be the historical reliability of Luke’s Gospel because he had just done a video on that. Could you comment a little bit on the importance of when we’re dialoguing or debating with people not being too far away from them so to speak on the subjects we dialogue about?
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah, it makes sense when doing debates and or debate like discussions to have a certain amount of common ground so that you have a common frame of reference for discussing the subject, otherwise it can be very challenging. For example, I would not debate a protestant on the assumption of Mary, because the doctrine of the assumption of Mary is based on more than just scripture. I wouldn’t pretend that I can prove it from scripture alone, but since protestants are coming from a solo scripture, a framework where they want to say that you have to be able to prove everything from scripture alone, and I don’t think you can do that for the assumption of Mary, you need to be able to appeal to tradition and the Magisterium. I wouldn’t personally enter into a debate like that with a protestant at least typically.
Jimmy Akin:
Similarly, I wouldn’t debate a Jehovah’s Witness on the question of does Jesus have one will or two. That was a controversy at a certain point in church history, and the Orthodox Christian teaching is that since Jesus is fully God and fully man, he must have both a divine will and human will. They’re not in conflict with each other, but they both must be there. And that’s a position known as [diofelitism 00:04:48], from duo means two and file ma means wills. So diofelitism is the idea Jesus has two wills. But I wouldn’t debate that with a Jehovah’s Witness because they don’t believe that Jesus is both God and man, they think he’s an angel. So we don’t really share enough common ground to be able to discuss that productively. In the case of your discussion with Godless Engineer, you do have some common ground. You both believes that there’s this early Christian document known as the Gospel of Luke, and that it was written either within the first century or very shortly thereafter, and that it relates ideas about the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth.
Jimmy Akin:
So you’ve got something of a common ground there, which allowed you to discuss a lot of things. It was still somewhat challenging though in that he’s coming from a mythicist perspective, meaning he doesn’t even believe Jesus exists. Whereas you’re coming from a perspective that’s going to not only say Jesus exists, but that the Gospel of Luke is actually quite good as a record. But because he views Luke as a late document that is essentially describing mythical history rather than real history, it makes it challenging to have that kind of discussion. But at least there’s more ground there than say I would have with the Jehovah’s Witness when it comes to the wills of Christ.
Trent Horn:
Right. And I also thought it’d be helpful because when he originally proposed an emotional topic like biblical slavery, or warfare in the Old Testament, these can be emotional topics to discuss even for Catholics and Christians to discuss what is the proper way to interpret these sorts of passages. So it just becomes very unwieldy when your interlocutor doesn’t even have common ground on Christ or the existence of God. So you’re right, I felt that this would be also more manageable, and that we have more common ground, and it’s not as emotional as a topic.
Trent Horn:
We’re saying, “Okay, is this document reliable?” But you’re right though, we’re still pretty far apart because between my position and John’s position, you could add the middle ground which is well, I think Luke, is a good historian and describes a lot of things, but I don’t think the miracles happened. There’s probably a lot of scholars who would support Luke, at least in the natural things reports, maybe they reject the supernatural. But yeah, so we were still pretty far apart but I think [crosstalk 00:07:15]. Go ahead.
Jimmy Akin:
Or you could have people who think that Jesus is a real historical figure and Luke is trying to record accurate history, and he’s just terrible at it.
Trent Horn:
Right. Yeah, you could also [inaudible 00:07:26]. So there’s a lot of different positions. So we were somewhat far apart but I don’t think too far apart to discuss the question of what makes something historically reliable or not. But before we go to that, maybe you could just expand a little because some people may not be as familiar with what mythicism actually is that it would strike them as a very surprising thing. And it is surprising to believe Jesus didn’t exist, but it has some vociferous defenders, especially on the internet.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah, so mythicism is a position that is actually not at all common in scholarship. You have scholars who were Catholic and Protestant and Jewish and agnostic and atheist, who were New Testament scholars. And almost without exception, they will say, “Oh, yeah, Jesus is a real historical individual. And the gospels are trying to tell us things about his life.” But there has been, at least in the last couple of centuries, a handful of people who have claimed that Jesus is no more a real historical individual than Apollo, or Thor, or some other divinity from the ancient world, and that there was no real historical individual known as Jesus of Nazareth. This position had a little bit of a brief flowering in the 1800s and then it got eclipsed. It was never prominent, but it was at least there in the 1800s and then it sort of got eclipsed for a very long time.
Jimmy Akin:
But then in the early 21st century it began to gain an advocacy especially on the internet, which has been a home that’s allowed a variety of different views that are not particularly popular to have a following. Flat earth is another example. That was not very popular for a long time but today there are actually quite a number of flat earth supporters on the internet in the same way other viewpoints that are not taken seriously by the scholarly community have been able to gain traction on the internet.
Trent Horn:
I do feel the flat earth people, they really have taken intellectually lazy route because everybody knows that the earth is actually hollow, it’s not flat, and there’s a kingdom of monsters at the center of it.
Jimmy Akin:
And we’re living on the inside. Yes, that is one of the viewpoints, the hollow earth and we are on the inside view.
Trent Horn:
So have these views but it’s simply, there are a few individuals maybe like I can count on my hand that have relevant PhDs who endorse this, but I think Bart Ehrman, in his book Did Jesus Exist, said that it’s virtually every expert on the planet, says Jesus did exist. But even still, I think that made it, you could tell him the dialogue that I had with John, I think it was helpful that he sort of embodied and it’s helpful for listeners to see how I interacted with him. Because I think that what he embodied is a very common view of the Gospels, and one that we have to understand people will have when we’re engaging them, which is kind of guilty until proven innocent mentality. And that simply because it is the Bible, it’s talking about as if it’s one book, that it should be presumed to be false or not historical, unless something else proves it.
Trent Horn:
And it’s given a lot of skepticism whereas other books are not given that same kind of skepticism. And that’s a double standard I tried to share with John in our dialog show, I think that this is happening and it’s not an appropriate way to look at these texts. Is that something you also see sometimes in dialogues like this?
Jimmy Akin:
Well, it’s not just unique to him. And by the way, I had not seen him before but he came across as a really nice guy.
Trent Horn:
Oh, yeah, I thought he was great.
Jimmy Akin:
So I thought that was a very nice aspect of your discussion with him. But he does have this guilty until proven innocent when it comes to the historical reliability of New Testament texts approach. And that’s not unique to him, you actually see that a lot in secular scholarship where the New Testament gets treated in a way or the Old Testament for that matter. But the Bible gets treated in a way that’s different than other works of ancient literature. So if someone is say reading a Roman historian like Suetonius, let’s say, and Suetonius in the lives of the Caesars says, “Well, under this Caesar, this battle occurred.” They will take that at face value. Now they’re going to critically examine Suetonius and they’re not going to believe everything he says, but they’re going to be open to okay, well, here we have a piece of evidence that this battle occurred.
Jimmy Akin:
They’re not going to automatically dismiss it in less they can find confirmation from whoever the opponents of the Romans were. Unless we can find a German source, we’re not going to believe that Caesar had this battle with the Germans. The fact that it’s a Roman historian writing is sufficient to at least present us with evidence that this happened. But what you find a lot of skeptical folks doing is saying, “Well, okay, here, the Bible says something happened. But unless we can find the same thing confirmed from people outside the Bible, we’re not going to credit this, we’re just going to dismiss it automatically, rather than treating it as evidence.” And in the mythicist community that gets taken to a kind of extreme that goes beyond even what’s typical in a lot of skeptical scholarship.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, well, I find it to be it’s frustrating. And that’s why I think we need to let people know about this so they can be aware of the double standard, that a system is set up in the dialog, I use the expression heads I win, tails you lose, to mean you set up a system where the mythicist, or the extremely critical hypothesis can’t be falsified. So for example John brought this up that for John like no matter how many times I could bring up that Luke get something right, or that he gets something many other historians disagree with. Well, that’s to be expected of someone who’s trying to write historical fiction, they’re going to get a lot of history right but it’s still fiction. I guess, what ends up happening is, no matter how many times it’s proved right, that’s not good enough. And any single apparent difficulty or error is enough to torpedo the whole ship, which to me, I think is an unfair standard that if you apply that.
Trent Horn:
And I think this is another theme that we should bring up when engaging people on is the Bible reliable? If you use that standard for any other ancient work, you would destroy ancient historiography, no other book could meet these unrealistic standards that are set for the Bible. I don’t know, what do you think of that?
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah, I would agree. Also, I even started a list after I watched the discussion of I didn’t finish it. But let’s see if we can list the different types of double standards that are in play because there were a number of them. For example, one of his desiderata, one of the things that he was desiring to see Luke do in order to credit him as a historian is mentioning himself in the text. And you pointed out well, Luke does that in Acts, we have the we passages, but then those are dismissed as kind of literary fiction.
Trent Horn:
Well, let’s talk about those because that [crosstalk 00:15:15]. Go ahead.
Jimmy Akin:
Let me know [crosstalk 00:15:16].
Trent Horn:
Go ahead.
Jimmy Akin:
Before we get there though.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, sure.
Jimmy Akin:
He’s dismissing those where Luke does mention himself and saying, “Well, that’s a literary device. That’s not really Luke. That’s not accurate. Luke’s not claiming to be here, really.” And then he looks at other passages and says, “Well, Luke’s not mentioning himself here.” So it’s like, well, dude, you can’t have it both way. It’s either if Luke mentions himself, you got to credit that and you can’t then say he never mentions himself when he patently does. And incidentally, and we can go to the we passages, but incidentally, that’s not the only place Luke mentions himself. He also mentions himself in the prefaces to both the gospel and Acts right. So Luke clearly does mention himself in the text, as if that mattered. This is another one of my concerns about the viewpoint he was expressing. Historians do not have to mention themselves in their works. That’s not true of modern historians, it’s not true of ancient historians. They don’t have to inject themselves into what they’re describing.
Trent Horn:
Right. And sometimes even when you look at ancient historians, for example when Josephus in the Antiquities, while in the Jewish War, when he’s describing events that include himself, he refers to himself in the third person. So that can show also that even someone who’s an eyewitness talking about themselves, let’s say, Matthew, there’s no strangeness in them using the third person as opposed to the first. But speaking of the first person, this was an interesting point that I think got glossed over that our listeners might benefit more from hearing about, which is saying, “Okay, well, why should we trust Luke? Well, who were Luke sources?” If Luke had intimate contact, well, I should say proximate contact with Paul as being a traveling companion, and getting a lot of sources from there among others. Well, that places him in a good place to relate to us historical facts about the early church and also about Jesus’s ministry, because Paul knew the apostles. So one of those are these we passages in Acts. So maybe you can tell us more about those and some of the debates surrounding them.
Jimmy Akin:
So the we passages are a variety of different sections in the book of Acts, where Luke uses the second person plural, the first person pronoun plural, we. He’ll say, we left from this city, and we came to this city, and we did this. And so he’s talking as if he’s part of a group that was actually on this journey, that they left from a certain place, they arrived at a certain place, and they did certain things. And prime aphasia, in any narrative, you’re reading just on the face of it, you see someone say things like we left and we arrived, and we did this, you’re understanding that the author of the narrative is saying, I was there, I was part of this group that did this. And that’s not really in dispute. It’s not in dispute should text be read like that.
Jimmy Akin:
The question is, are we meant to take it seriously? And in the last little while there have been a handful of scholars who’ve said, “Well, this is a literary device from the time, it’s not meant to be taken literally.” It’s like if I say, we’ve got an important person coming so let’s roll out the red carpet. I don’t mean that there’s a literal red carpet we should roll out. And in the same way, Luke doesn’t really mean that he was present in these we passages. They’ll say that this was a common way particularly in connection with sea voyages of describing voyages over the sea. And it was just meant for literary effect, but it’s not meant to be taken literally. The problem is, and there are actually several, we won’t obviously have time to go through them all. But among the problems with this view, is when you look at the actual texts that they’ll cite to try to show that this was a real trope in ancient literature, that it falls apart.
Jimmy Akin:
You do not find this in historical works where it is intended as fiction. It’s also Luke doesn’t just do it when they’re traveling on the sea and Luke doesn’t do it consistently through the book. Paul goes on three major missionary journeys. Really you can count it as four, counting his final trip to Rome, and Luke does not do this all the way through Paul’s voyages. He completely is not present. There are no we passages in what’s called the first missionary journey. There is a little bit of we in the second missionary journey. There’s a lot of we passages in the third missionary journey and then in Paul’s final trip to Rome. So if this were just a standard trope, you would use for vividness.
Jimmy Akin:
When you have a travel narrative or a sea voyage, why isn’t Luke using it all the time? Why does he not have it there in the first missionary journey, not till towards the end of the second missionary journey, and then it’s more consistent thereafter. It looks like the second missionary journey is when Luke first met Paul, and that’s why he starts using we there and not before.
Trent Horn:
Right. So I’m really excited for you to be able to share about this because this happens in these dialogues, you’ll be on one subject and then quickly run to something else, and it doesn’t get the treatment that it deserves. So you’re right, I think it was Vernon Robbins, who argued for this motif back in the ’70s, but later research by Susan Prater and others, shows what you’ve just mentioned that it’s not a universal kind of trope. And we have all these other problems. Although Gleason I believe he was actually, I don’t even think he was familiar with Robbins’s sea voyage motif research. He seem to be citing the New Testament scholar Dennis MacDonald, who claims that Mark and Luke are not trying to write history, they’re actually repurposing Greek fiction to sound like the life of Christ.
Trent Horn:
So when you look in Acts chapter 27, where you have all these we passages and the famous shipwreck narrative when Paul’s on his way to Rome, and get shipwrecked on Malta, he tries to say, “Well, this is just Luke taking something in the odyssey and putting it in this new context.” I’m sure you can have thoughts on this, but one thought that appears new when people make [crosstalk 00:22:11].
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah, I want to cite [inaudible 00:22:12] if that’s what Luke’s do and I want it to Cyclops.
Trent Horn:
Right. I’m like, Where are the monsters? But yeah, the problem here is that Samuel Sandmel’s in the 1960s, the Society of Biblical Literature called this Parallel Romania, trying to find parallels when they don’t exist. And also life has parallels. I mean, I could tell a story about going on a road trip across the country and someone later could maybe make an argument that I’m actually repurposing National Lampoon’s Vacation, because when people go on road trips, they get conned, tourist traps, they lose things, they get lost. So like the when people try to say the sea voyages in Acts are, “Oh, that’s Luke copying the Odyssey.”
Trent Horn:
Well, but people also went on sea voyages in the ancient world, and you would expect things like storms to happen, or shipwrecks or things like that, which were fairly common. I just find those kind of arguments really weak and tenuous, when they’re put forward. I don’t know but I’m sure you feel the same.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah. In order to claim that one author is copying from another, you need more than just there’s a similarity of topic. If I write a term paper on let’s say, I don’t know cellular mitosis, which is how cells divide. If I write a term paper on mitosis in a biology class, that doesn’t mean I’m cribbing from some other student. The teacher may have assigned all of us to write that paper or may have assigned the previous semester or will assign it again next semester. Just because you have a similar topic doesn’t mean you can claim one person is plagiarizing another.
Trent Horn:
Right. And what really amazed me that I mentioned in the book is that the details Luke gives, especially in Acts 27, about the shipwreck, I think it makes more sense the we passages is that he vividly recalls these things happening. And he tells us details that are things we wouldn’t expect someone writing decades later, who didn’t have intimate knowledge of the area to communicate. For example, I believe Luke said that the time they were journeying to Rome, it was dangerous to be on the seas that there was a point where if you went after, like in September, it was dangerous and after November, it was impossible.
Jimmy Akin:
Right. That’s the end of the sailing season because of how stormy the Mediterranean gets in the ancient world there was a season where after which you didn’t sail and then you had to wait over the winter before you could pick up again in the spring. There are other details in that same narrative that suggests personal memory to me, rather than invention, some details like the healing of Publius’s father on Malta. It reads like something a doctor would be interested in, but it doesn’t read like something an ordinary person would make up especially the details of what’s going on with Publius’s father.
Trent Horn:
And that’s why when John asked me what do you think of Luke, like what is the Gospel of Luke to you for its reliability. My assessment of it is that I think, Luke and Acts read like a doctor who is doing his best to be a historian. That we see someone who is intelligent, learned, skilled in a trade and applies that same analytical thinking to another field, which would be historiography. And so yeah, when you read the Gospel of Luke, it’s fascinating. He uses for example, while the other gospel authors will describe ailments generically, Luke will use the precise terminology from the medical manuals of his time referring to dropsy, the correct plural noun for fevers and like the healing that you mentioned there on Malta.
Trent Horn:
The other thing with the sailing, the reason I brought that up is that Luke tells us, it was after the day of the atonement. And so it was dangerous to travel, which have you calculated back to the year when that probably took place, it will place it around in October. So it all lines up. And that for me is like, “Hey, when you see him get things more and more right, that should count for him, not against him.” [crosstalk 00:26:32].
Jimmy Akin:
My favorite example of Luke displaying the fact that he’s a doctor occurs in the healing of the woman with a hemorrhage.
Trent Horn:
Yes.
Jimmy Akin:
Because if you read Mark, which Luke is using for this account, Mark has is very harsh statement where he says that the woman has had this hemorrhage for 12 years and she spent all her money on physicians, but she got worse rather than better. And that’s not a very flattering thing to say about physician. She spent all her money on them and she actually got worse. Well, Luke changes that to she’s had this hemorrhage for 12 years, and none could heal her. So he’s being a little defensive about his profession there.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, he’s like, give us a break Mark, we’ve got a lot to handle and not much materials to work with. No, absolutely. And that also explains that seeing and this goes back. What’s interesting is John didn’t really challenge me on this in the dialogue that it was Luke, the physician, a companion of Paul, who wrote the gospel.
Jimmy Akin:
He did say, I mean, he thought that Luke was written earliest by ’93 [crosstalk 00:27:42].
Trent Horn:
He used the late date argument.
Jimmy Akin:
So he’s using late date. But you’re right, he didn’t too much challenge the idea that this is an actual companion of Paul.
Trent Horn:
Let’s talk a little bit about the synoptic problem. That came up at the beginning of the dialogue. And we’re talking about Luke and the sources he used, and if he’s reliable, and I did my best to explain the issues of the Synoptic Gospels, and then move into the discussion. But it might be helpful for you to give people another overview, or help them see how the issue of what’s called the Synoptic problem factors into the reliability of the Gospels.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah, I was kind of a little startled when he first mentioned this, because you were describing your view of Luke as a reliable historian. And then he says, well, then how do you explain the synoptic problem?
Trent Horn:
Yeah, I was taking [crosstalk 00:28:33] it back too.
Jimmy Akin:
What does the synoptic problem have to do with whether Luke uses his sources reliably or not?
Trent Horn:
Well, he took it to mean like, it’s a problem for my position, but it’s not.
Jimmy Akin:
Well, but anyone who’s competent in this area would know that it’s not the term, synoptic problem is not understood that way. Problem in this case means essentially puzzle or issue. It’s like this is something that scholars are trying to figure out. That doesn’t mean it’s damaging to anyone’s position. It’s just a puzzle. How do we explain the material that the Synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke all have in common? Synoptic is a word that comes from Greek roots, that means seeing together and if you read Matthew, Mark, and Luke, they see the ministry of Jesus in a very similar way, in the way they present it. John presents it from a different viewpoint. So that’s why he’s not a synoptic. But it’s clear that there are some kind of common links between the three synoptic gospels to explain why they present Jesus as ministry in the way they do. And there have been a number of different solutions proposed.
Jimmy Akin:
There’s actually a startlingly large number of solutions that have been proposed, but most scholars today would say, “Okay, Mark was the first Gospel to be written and then Matthew and Luke used Mark. And then they have some other material in common about 235 verses and there’s more of a range of views about how to explain these 235 verses that Matthew and Luke have in common. Now, I was interested to see what he did with that. He advocated a position known as the Farrer hypothesis. This view is actually somewhat common in British New Testament scholarship, but not outside of Britain. Farrer was a British New Testament scholar. And the basic idea of the Farrer hypothesis is Mark wrote first, Matthew then expanded on Mark, and then Luke took bits of Matthew, like those 235 verses, and other verses from from Mark. So you have Mark first, Matthew second, Luke third.
Jimmy Akin:
That’s not my personal favorite. My favorite is what’s known as the [Wilke 00:31:06] hypothesis, which flips the order of the other two Gospels. So I tend to want to say, Mark wrote first, Luke expanded on Mark, and then Matthew drew on both Luke and mark. Neither one of those is the most common in New Testament scholarship today. The most common view is what’s called the Q-hypothesis, also known as the two source hypothesis, which says that there was another word that’s now last called Q from the German word Quella, which means source, imaginative naming. And that Mark wrote first and then both Matthew and Luke independently drew on both Mark and Q. And one of the reasons that the scholars will say this, or propose this is that Matthew and Luke’s infancy narratives are very, very different.
Jimmy Akin:
Now, actually, they fit together really well. And I don’t think this is the explanation, but they’ll say Matthew and Luke’s infancy narratives look quite different. That could be explained if neither Matthew nor Luke knows the other is writing. So they’re writing independently of each other. And that would be an interesting point to pose to John because part of his case rests on the idea of Matthew copying from Luke, but that’s actually not the majority opinion in New Testament scholarship, the majority opinion is they didn’t know about each other.
Trent Horn:
And that’s why I asked him, because he brought up the differences in the birth narratives as if this was a irreconcilable contradiction and problem. To which I said, “Well, if Matthew was copying Luke, why did he create this problem in the first place if he’s using him as this kind of source?” And which I also posted to him that I felt like he said, I think he clarified to say, this is my position not [crosstalk 00:33:08] position.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah, he did.
Trent Horn:
But I think it was important for me to propose that because the way he was speaking would make it seem like to the listeners, well scholars agree it’s Mark, so he was for [crosstalk 00:33:21].
Jimmy Akin:
Matthew, Luke.
Trent Horn:
Matthew, Luke. So Luke would be last to which I said, well, other people say like Wilke, no, it would be Matthew would be last. And did let him know, hey, there’s other positions on this and whichever one you take, it doesn’t really address the core issue of whether any particular gospel Luke especially, is reliable or not, because you can be reliable and gather sources in a variety of different ways.
Jimmy Akin:
That brings up a point I wanted to make. One of the things he wanted to see Luke do in order to credit him as a reliable historian, is to see Luke citing his sources and telling us where he got this material. And I had a couple of thoughts about that. The first one is that something you find in academic histories. If you’re reading a popular history, it is not guaranteed at all that you will see sources cited. And that’s true today. If you read a popular history of the Civil War, or something like that, you very frequently will not find sources cited. It’s also true of action history. I was reading part of Suetonius Life of Vespasian, the Emperor Vespasian earlier today. And he’s talking about these things that happened to Vespasian and he’s not telling me any of the sources.
Jimmy Akin:
So it was not at all guaranteed either in a modern history or an ancient history that you’re going to have source citation. However, Luke actually does, this is second point of three, Luke actually does tell us his sources. In the prologue to the gospel, he tells his patron Theophilus that I’m writing you an orderly account of what has been accomplished among us, as has been handed down from eyewitnesses and ministers of the word. So he’s thinking of two classes of people that he’s getting information from. One are eyewitnesses and the second is ministers of the word, meaning people who were not eyewitnesses, but who have been authorized to go talk about this message. And so in general terms, those are Luke sources, eyewitnesses and ministers of the word. He also has written sources, because he’s obviously copying from Mark.
Jimmy Akin:
He doesn’t tell us that but it’s clear that he is copying from Mark. And then even within the gospel, he periodically identifies who his sources, this happens twice in the infancy narratives where he’s talking about Jesus’s birth and his childhood. And twice, he says, and Mary treasured these things in her heart. Now, this isn’t just to like, give us a warm fuzzy about Mary. The purpose of him saying Mary remembered this is to tell us how Luke knows this. So Luke is citing his source, he either talked to Mary directly, or he talked to someone who did talk to Mary directly. But one way or another, Mary is the source of this information. And it’s not just there, he does similar things elsewhere. Richard Balcom in his book, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses has a really fascinating proposal, which I think is correct. That the reason various figures get names in the Gospel like Jairus, whose daughter gets raised is because they became Christian and they would then…
Jimmy Akin:
And whereas other people who don’t get named like some random blind man that gets healed. Well, he didn’t become a Christian, so that he didn’t stay in the Christian community and repeat what happened to him and so they didn’t remember his name. But someone like Jairus became a Christian and would talk about what Jesus did for his daughter. And that’s how the gospel writers know about him and his name. The third thing I wanted to mention though is, in terms of, does Luke use his sources reliably? Is we’ve got a great test case here. I mean, I don’t need Luke to tell me the source. If I can see Luke is using Mark, well, then let’s just ask, how well does Luke use Mark? I mean, he may change phrasing here and there, or a little detail here and there, but the gist of what Mark is saying and often the very wording of Mark is obvious in Luke. And that suggests that Luke uses his sources responsibly.
Jimmy Akin:
He’s not changing them around willy nilly. And if we can show he’s doing that for Mark, then that would suggest that’s procedure when he’s using a source. He conveys the gist of it accurately and doesn’t feel the liberty to change it willy nilly.
Trent Horn:
Then I have my three thoughts now on your three thoughts.
Jimmy Akin:
Okay.
Trent Horn:
First, yes, about Suetonius that was interesting because in preparation for the dialogue, because I read a previous essay that I know John was familiar with from by Matthew Ferguson, saying, “Well, here’s how ancient history is different than the Gospels. And ancient historians, if there’s a contradiction between them and another author, they explain why they’re different.” No, that doesn’t happen because when you read the account of Emperor Vespasian healing the blind man and the lame man, Tacitus and Suetonius, you get very different vibes from it. Or at least Tacitus, it comes off a lot more, he’s probably faking this, whereas Suetonius seems a lot more neutral, that you have the contradiction there and neither tries to resolve with each other. The second point, on the using the sources correctly, that’s why I felt there’s a double standard where John or other skeptics will say, “Oh, look at these other secular historians, and they cite their sources, and Luke doesn’t do that.”
Trent Horn:
And one example we brought up was Arrian of Alexandria, his epic biography of Alexander the Great called the Anabasis of Alexander. And John says, well, he cites Polybius, he cites Aristotle’s in his preface, this is where I got the sources. To which I asked him, “Well, do we have those documents?” He said, “Well, no, we don’t.” Then we don’t really know if he faithfully cited them or not, whereas that’s a good point you raised. We have Mark, actually, we have independent manuscripts from Luke, so we can compare and test Luke, we can’t test Arrian and how well he used these different sources. So that’s two, the third point, we can maybe go a little back and forth on about the made up name, the names. I think Balcom is also right that names are preserved because those people later became known in the Christian community. This is also in Mark, that the children of Simon who carried Peters cross Rufus and Alexander. Correct and wrong, I think there’s a Rufus eminent in the Lord in Romans, I think. Right?
Jimmy Akin:
I would have to do checking on that. However, we can reasonably infer that Rufus was someone known to the Romans, because that’s the audience for Mark’s gospel.
Trent Horn:
Yes. Oh, it’s right here, Romans 16:13. When Paul is ending his epistle, he tells them to greet Rufus chosen in the Lord. So the reason we have the name of Mark, he might be the same person.
Jimmy Akin:
Well, actually, there’s a good argument that he would be because Mark, the information we have is that Mark was written at Rome for Roman audience. So the people in Rome knew who Rufus and Alexander were the sons of the guy that carry Jesus’s cross. And in Romans, where Paul is doing the personal greetings at the end, Paul has never actually been to Rome at this point. So he’s saying hello to lots of people. I mean, he’s got this, it’s the biggest list of all the greetings and all of the Paul [inaudible 00:41:19] epistles. You’ve got the biggest right here at the Romans. And how did he get these names? Well, he did know people who had been in Rome like Priscilla, and Aquilla. He also knew the scribe of Romans, a guy named Tertius. And Paul at the time he’s writing Romans, he’s in Corinth and Tertius, in the middle of the greeting, says, I Tertius, who wrote down this epistle also salute you.
Jimmy Akin:
So that tells us both that Tertius was known to the Romans otherwise, who’s this random nabob saying hello to us? And that he was with Paul in Corinth, but apparently had been in Rome, and was known to the Christian community in Rome. And when you look at the structure of Paul’s greetings to the Romans, he proceeds through them in a way that they fall into chunks. And it looks like there’s something like six chunks here. And the proposal, which I think is actually very good, is that these are the house churches of Rome in AD 54. That Tertius or Priscilla, and Aquilla have been in contact with Paul, Tertius most immediately, because he’s writing the letter. And he’s able to tell Paul, “Yeah, we’ve got these six Christian churches in Rome. And here are the names of the principal people involved in them.” And so Paul just goes and greets all of those people because he’s coming to Rome. He’s planning on coming to Rome. He wants them to welcome him and so he’s making nice with him before he even gets there.
Trent Horn:
And I think that all makes sense and I was actually… go ahead, sorry.
Jimmy Akin:
[crosstalk 00:43:00] that would with Rufus being mentioned here, and in Romans, Rufus is not a hugely common name. So to find more than one Rufus in the Christian community in Rome, in the mid first century, when both of these books were written, it would be improbable. So if I had to guess I guess they are the same Rufus.
Trent Horn:
Yeah, so it’s always hard when you do dialogues like this with someone and I looked over his previous videos and also the essays and articles that John cited in those videos, from other skeptical scholars. It’s always hard because you want to be prepared and there’s lots of different topics people could bring up. Some of them are interesting, this did not come up in the dialogue. But I was interested in it because in a previous video, John had said Luke is not a good historian claiming that he invented people’s names. So in the road to Emmaus narrative when Jesus appears to the two men on the road to Emmaus, one of whom is named Cleopas.
Trent Horn:
The claim and this goes back to [Richard Carrier 00:44:03] I think, is that well, no, this is fictional, Cleopas is a made up name, a Greek compound, that means report all, give glory to all. And so it’s just a symbolic name for a symbolic story. And that’s that versus saying the name was preserved because this person was an important individual in the church. I know you probably have a lot of thoughts on this, but for me, that just screams the etymological fallacy instead of more mundane explanations for what this name is and its origin.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah, so there is a figure who is found elsewhere in the gospels named Cleopas, and we know that it was very common for people in the first century Jewish community to have a Jewish name and also a Gentile name, like John Mark, John is his Jewish name, Marcus was his Roman name.
Trent Horn:
Or Saul and Paul.
Jimmy Akin:
Well, that’s where I was going to go next. Frequently, the names would be picked based on they sound similar. So the figure who we know as Paul, Paulus in Latin, Paulus sounds like Shaul, at least they’re similar in sound. And so that’s why Saul is known as Paul. And we see the same thing in our culture today. You may have someone from China, their name kind of starts with a D sound, and in America when they’re doing business, they chose to be known as David, or something like that, because it’s a more familiar name. It lets them interact with people more easily. Well, so there is this other figure in the gospels who’s a man named Cleopas, and we know about his family relations. Well, Cleophas is one vowel different from Cleopas. And the standard understanding is that Cleophas or Cleopas is the same guy. And it turns out in terms of this being a made up name, I don’t know where Carrier thinks he’s getting his information, but it’s not.
Jimmy Akin:
There has been a study of, the technical name for this kind of study is onomastics, which means the study of names. And even though Cleopas or Cleophas is an uncommon name, it is not unknown. It does not just appear in the Gospels. We also have an ossuary that has the name on it. And so this is not simply a made up name. This is one that’s out there. It wasn’t a common name, but it is not simply made up by Luke.
Trent Horn:
And another possibility is that Cleopas is a nickname or a shortened name for something like Cleopatras, which is people had common names, also, they’re not made up, like Glory to the Father. Well, people have very religious, all the names are essentially have, many them have religious meanings and connotations to them. So I guess I have two points on that. One, if you did take this argument really far, you could argue that in ancient Judaism, the Messiah and stars often have a connection. And so therefore, Simon bar Kokhba, which means Simon, son of the star, who was a messianic claimant in the early second century, in the second Jewish war. Well, he didn’t exist, it’s a made up name, Simon son of the star, no [inaudible 00:47:41] people at all different kinds of names.
Jimmy Akin:
The idea that someone’s name should be dismissed just because it has a meaning is a modern anachronism. In English, in the contemporary world, people don’t really remember what their names mean, they don’t have significance. But in the ancient world, they had lots of significance. And in fact, they would get assigned names that were characteristic of the person, like for example I mean, not only do we have these, they’re called Theophoric names where you have the name of a god embedded in the name like Dan-I-El, Daniel, it means God, El is my judge. That’s extremely common, and not just among the Israelites. Among the Egyptians, for example, Tut-ank-hamun, Hamun was a god. So Tut-ank-hamun, Tutankhamun means image of the living God [inaudible 00:48:41].
Jimmy Akin:
So it’s very common in the ancient Near East, but also in Greco Roman circles, a common slave name was [foreign language 00:48:50], because [foreign language 00:48:52] in Greek means useful. And if you’ve bought a slave, you want him to be useful to you. So you give him the name [foreign language 00:49:00]. And so people in the actual world were just used to having names having meaning.
Trent Horn:
Right, and so the name, one it has meaning that’s not a reason to dismiss it or say it’s fictionalized. But number two also could be nicknames are common then as they are now. So Cleopatras could be Cleopas, much the same as I believe that you have Herod Antipater. He’d be the son of Herod the Great, correct.
Jimmy Akin:
Yes. Also [crosstalk 00:49:31].
Trent Horn:
Who is also known as Herod Antipas.
Jimmy Akin:
Yeah, and one of the things. Now there are different types of nicknames. One type of nickname gives a description of a person like one of the apostles is James ho mikros, which means James the little or James the younger, and there you’ve like tacked on to his name, the ho mikros to tell us something about him. He’s little or younger compared To the other James. But the other kind of nickname is where you just shorten the name, or kind of slur it around a little bit and modify it. An example of that would be Lazarus, which is a simplification of Azariah.
Trent Horn:
[inaudible 00:50:22] there one minute. Okay.
Jimmy Akin:
Or in English, even though my legal name is Jimmy, Jimmy is just a variation on James for most people. So that’s a somewhat different kind of nickname. But yeah, you see that a lot where in action literature, both Ancient Near Eastern and Greco Roman where someone has a longer name, and then they’ll just kind of mush the name up a little bit. And so Cleopatras into Cleophas, that could easily happen.
Trent Horn:
Well, this has been an excellent exchange. I’m excited for people to go deeper into this subject. I think biblical scholarship and being able to provide historical reliability for our faith that is rooted in history, is so important. It’s why I did this dialogue, and I want people to keep learning about all these resources. My little guy walked in, I think it’s time for dinner at the Horn household. So Jimmy tell our listeners a little bit more where they can find out more about your work and maybe if you have any resources you’d recommend on this subject.
Jimmy Akin:
Okay, so like Trent I work for Catholic Answers, you can find a lot of stuff there at catholic.com. Also my personal website, Jimmyakin.com, I have a lot of additional stuff there. It’s J-I-M-M-Y and then my last name is so easy, it’s only four letters A-K-I-N as in Nancy, so Akin, Jimmyakin.com and also check out podcasts like Trent I’m on Catholic Answers Live, Catholic Answers Focus. And perhaps my best known podcast is Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World where we look at natural and supernatural mysteries from the twin perspectives of faith and reason.
Trent Horn:
Very good. [crosstalk 00:52:11].
Jimmy Akin:
Also, one of the one of the things that came up in your discussion was the infancy narratives.
Trent Horn:
Oh, yes.
Jimmy Akin:
And Matthew’s is quite different from Luke’s. I actually a while back, wrote a blog post where I show how they integrate with each other, and why they’re different. If you’re interested in that it’s at Jimmyakin.com but you can find it quickly just by googling how the accounts of Jesus’s childhood fit together. So Jimmy Akin, how the accounts of Jesus’s childhood fit together and it’ll come right up.
Trent Horn:
Very good. I’d also recommend a resource for our listeners who want to dive deeper into this. There’s of course, my book, Hard Sayings, a Catholic Approach to Answering Bible Difficulties. Another good book, if you want to go deeper, this is The Historical Reliability of the Gospels by Craig Blumberg, more of a semi academic treatment, he has another one also on the Gospel of John. And then we also have other resources of course at catholic.com. So Jimmy, thanks so much for being on the Counsel of Trent today.
Jimmy Akin:
My pleasure.
Trent Horn:
All right, and thank you guys for listening and I hope you all have a very blessed day.
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