Can we trust the historical accuracy of the Gospels if they were written decades after Jesus? Doesn’t that make them unreliable? Trent Horn answers this common challenge from atheists on Catholic Answers Live.
Transcript:
Caller: Whenever skeptics bring a question on the reliability of the New Testament—because of two specific things: one being that they were written anonymously, and two, they were written several decades after the lifetime of Jesus—how should I address those two points?
Trent Horn: I would ask them, Danny, “All right, what is your standard for a document in the ancient world to be reliable?” I would say, “You give me the standard when it comes to both how we determine the authorship of a work and how long after the events it describes it was composed.”
So I might say, “Look, are you saying a book is not reliable if it was written more than events of reports it describes? 40 or 50 years. If it was written, let’s say, a hundred years later?” If that’s the case, then they’re going to have to discount the vast majority of ancient history. You know, for example, the the claim that Hannibal crossed the Alps with war elephants was written down 50 or 60 years later by a Roman historian. The accounts of Alexander the Great, his biography was 400 years later. The first accounts we have of William Wallace in England, from the movie Braveheart, are from a blind minstrel that were written 150 years later.
So the problem is, I would ask them, “What’s your standard? And if the Gospels don’t meet your standard, you’re going to have to throw out almost all of ancient history as well. If you don’t throw out ancient history, then that means you have a double standard for the Bible, then, which is unacceptable.”
I would say, though, when it comes to “written within a few decades of the events they describe,” that is still within the framework for eyewitnesses to accurately record events. I was watching on the Library of Congress, they had old videos of World War 1 veterans that were recorded in the 80’s and 90’s. These are people who were talking about events that happened 70 or 80 years earlier that were as clear as if they had just been there yesterday. So if we trust that, then I would say, all right, do you trust people who describe when they fought—like, if you would talk to a Vietnam war veteran today, would you say, “He couldn’t possibly remember Vietnam, he couldn’t—” No, we wouldn’t say that. They could remember it even though that occurred 50 years ago, and that would put us in the same framework as the apostles. So I would say the Gospels were written—there’s good evidence that Matthew, Mark, and Luke were written before 70 A.D. And I talk about that in my book Counterfeit Christs.
As for their authorship, Danny, I would say to them: how do they know the Gospels are anonymous? They might say, “Well, the Gospels in their text never say who their author is, it’s just ascribed to it.” I would then ask them: “How is it that in the ancient church we have never found a manuscript saying that one Gospel was actually written by somebody else?” The manuscripts always align. It’s always—Mark’s gospel always has “The Gospel of Mark” at the top of it.
And by the way, if they were anonymous, strictly speaking, why would you pick nobodies like Mark or Luke or lower-tier apostles like Matthew? Why would you pick these if you’re just kind of, you know…the gospels that are made up have usually had names like Philip and Peter and things like that. That doesn’t discount John’s Gospel, we have very good historical evidence for John, but I would just critique that idea. So that’s just a few thoughts there.
I would also recommend to you, Danny a book called…I believe it’s called The Case for Jesus by Brant Pitre. But he has a whole series of chapters on the reliability of the Gospels. Well, two books: one is by Craig Blomberg, Reliability of the Gospels, and the other is The Case for Jesus by Brant Pitre, is what I would recommend for you. So is that a helpful reply?
Caller: Mostly, uh, just kind of adding on to that, because they also bring up the fact that, you know, if it is anonymous—because I have read a few historical papers, and a lot of them do say that there is good reason, I don’t remember the specifics of them, but there are good reasons to think they’re anonymous, and that they were compiled and written off of oral tradition, and that’s the other part of why some skeptics claim, because it was passed through oral tradition. And you know, that’s just the other aspect of it.
Trent Horn: Yeah, and what I would say, Danny, is that there’s going to be liberal—you can hold that view and still be Catholic. There are liberal Catholic biblical scholars who claim that the Gospels are anonymous and weren’t really written by Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John. I would say, though, that the consensus of the Church’s history places a very very heavy weight on that consensus of who the authors were. But if they say, “Well, they are anonymous,” I’d still press them: “Well, what are your reasons for it?” Because when we have—like the letter to the Hebrews, for example, I would say that is an anonymous letter, we don’t know who the author is. We know it has an apostolic origin to it somehow, but people in the early Church ascribed it to a variety of individuals. We never see that with the Gospels.
Now it’s true the Gospels don’t name their own authors, and some people say “Well, Matthew refers to himself in the third person, so clearly Matthew didn’t write Matthew.” Well, Josephus refers to himself in the third person, and he was a Jewish historian that lived in the first century. Or “Well, Matthew includes a lot of Mark’s material, so Matthew couldn’t have written it.” Well, Mark was the traveling companion of Peter, so it makes sense for Matthew as a lower-tier apostle, to go straight to the source: somebody who was in close contact with Peter, the leader of the Church and the person who was one of the closest people to Jesus during his earthly ministry.
Now with oral tradition, I would say to them: “Look, this isn’t a case of tradition being handed down over hundreds of years, being distorted. A.N. Sherwin-White was a Greco-Roman historian who said that it takes more than two generations for myth to overtake the historical core of a narrative that is passed on through oral tradition. Now, we know the Gospels were written within one generation of the lifetime of Jesus’s followers.
So check out Blomberg, Historical Reliability of the Gospels, and Brant Pitre, The Case for Jesus. My book Counterfeit Christs might also—well Danny, let’s get your email or your address, we’ll send you Counterfeit Christs. You might also enjoy that as well.