This is another book I read thanks to its endorsement in Ross Douthat’s Believe. It’s excellent! And more good news (so to speak): The whole book is available online here: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/64c13fbd86667f166b3c5901/t/6605a833f6068e6a27855728/1711646775902/Can%2BWe%2BTrust%2BThe%2BGospels.pdf
The book is fairly recent (2018), short (140 pages of text), and with good footnotes (and both a general and a Scripture index). There’s a nice blurb by John Lennox, and here’s the author’s bio (from the back cover; the work of Tyndale House is described a bit more on page 117):
Peter J. Williams (PhD, University of Cambridge) is the principal of Tyndale House, Cambridge, one of the world’s leading institutes for biblical research. Previously a senior lecturer in New Testament at the University of Aberdeen, he is the chair of the International Greek New Testament Project and a member of the ESV Translation Oversight Committee.
After a short preface and introduction (each only one and a half pages), the eight chapters are: 1. What Do Non-Christian Sources Say?, 2. What Are the Four Gospels?, 3. Did the Gospel Authors Know Their Stuff?, 4. Undesigned Coincidences, 5. Do We Have Jesus’s Actual Words?, 6. Has the Text Changed?, 7. What about Contradictions?, and 8. Who Would Make All This Up?
I think it should be clear from the title of the book and its chapters what the gist of the book is, so for the rest of this post I’ll simply list my favorite points and quotes under each chapter title.
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Preface
The “top recommendations” by the author (13 n.1) of “great treatments” regarding the “vast amount of evidence for the trustworthiness of the Gospels,” “each with its own focus,” are: Charles E. Hill, Who Chose the Gospels? Probing the Great Gospel Conspiracy (2010); Lydia McGrew, Hidden in Plain View: Undesigned Coincidences in the Gospels and Acts (2017); Brant Pitre, The Case for Jesus: The Biblical and Historical Evidence for Christ (2016); and, “at greater length,” Craig L. Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the New Testament (2016). The author also thanks Richard Bauckham, among others, in the preface (13). Richard Swinburne is cited in the book’s last footnote. (140 n.37).
Chapter 1: What Do Non-Christian Sources Say?
Here (17-18) is a good overview of chapter 1:
Some sources, however, cannot be accused of bias in favor of Christianity. These include non-Christians who wrote within ninety years of the origins of Christianity and left us with records we can investigate. We will begin by considering three writers: Cornelius Tacitus, Pliny the Younger, and Flavius Josephus. Each of these had his own reason for writing, but in no case was it the promotion of Christianity. Tacitus and Pliny were, in fact, openly hostile to Christianity.
And here (35) is a good summary of chapter 1:
All I want to establish at this stage is that, were it not for the amazing nature of the claims made about Jesus, few would have any problem believing biographical details recorded so close to the alleged events.
We have now looked at three non-Christian writers and what they said about Jesus Christ or Christians. We have seen
• the confirmation of basic facts from the New Testament, such as Christ’s death under Pontius Pilate in Judaea between AD 26 and AD 36,
• that Christ was worshiped as God early on,
• that Christ’s followers often experienced persecution,
• that Christians spread far and fast,
• that some early Christian leaders would have known of Christ’s family origins.
Chapter 2: What Are the Four Gospels?
The author shows that the Gospels are the top four sources we have of information about Jesus (37-39); makes an interesting (and favorable) comparison of the information we have about Jesus with the information we have about the Roman emperor Tiberius (39-42); and argues for an early date for the Gospels (47-49).
Chapter 3: Did the Gospel Authors Know Their Stuff?
Regarding the Gospel authors’ geographical knowledge, the author writes (54):
1. All writers display knowledge of a range of localities from well known, through lesser known, to obscure.
2. No Gospel writer gains all his knowledge from the other Gospels, since each contains unique information.
3. All writers show a variety of types of geographical information.
Continuing in this vein, he writes (62-63):
Three conclusions naturally follow:
• The writers either were acquainted with the land themselves or accurately recorded what was reported by others who were acquainted with the land.
• The information the writers had is consistent with what we would expect if the Gospels were by their traditional authors.
• The resulting Gospels are not what we would expect from people who made up stories at a geographical distance.
There’s an interesting discussion (57-58) of how the references to the Sea of Galilee are what you would expect if the Gospels were indeed written by the people to whom their authorship is traditionally ascribed; that is, there are lots of rather awed references to it by Mark (who traditionally was recording the recollections of Peter, who in turn made his living as a fisherman braving it), while Luke — who probably had seen more of the world — makes fewer references and is less impressed. Likewise, the author documents (82-83) how Matthew has more about finance and money than the other Gospels — just what you would expect if the book was indeed written by a tax collector! The section on “Disambiguation” (67-68) is persuasive, too — that is, the Gospel authors give additional identifying information for named characters in ways that show them to know which names were common at that time and place and which ones not.
The author makes the interesting argument (80-81) that the Jewishness of the Gospels — in their “outlook, subject matter, and detail” (81) — is evidence of them being written early, since of course as Christianity grew its followers became more and more heavily Gentile; contrast the Gospel of Thomas, written in from the mid-second century, which “reflects little Jewish background” (80, footnote omitted). The author notes, by the way, lots of evidence against the non-canonical gospels.
Chapter 4: Undesigned Coincidences
With regard to them, the author notes (91; note the reference to Lydia McGrew’s book in the author’s preface, supra):
I find that the argument from undesigned coincidences seems to impress people less if they do not know the text well or if they consider only a few examples. It is a cumulative argument from simplicity. The complexity of alternative explanations therefore becomes apparent as more examples are considered.
I also noted this passage, addressing the partial truth-telling argument (94):
Note, however, that none of our undesigned coincidences touches directly on the miracle. One might therefore be inclined to claim that the setting was realistic, but not the miracle. The miracle, someone might argue, arose as the story was told from one person to another and was exaggerated. But the problem with treating the central part of the story—the miracle—as careless exaggeration is that the undesigned coincidences suggest careful transmission of peripheral details. If transmission of the major elements of a story has been careless, we should not expect the minor elements to be well transmitted. Therefore, the idea that the miracle account arose through careless exaggeration involves an unrealistic process of selective corruption of information in the story. It lacks explanatory power for the current shape of the text.
Chapter 5: Do We Have Jesus’s Actual Words?
I liked this sentence (100-01): “In considering whether Jesus said something or not, we should remember that it is simpler to suppose that one genius came up with remarkable teaching than to posit that multiple people had brilliant ideas and all independently attributed them to the same prior teacher.” I noted the headings on 100, 101, and 102: “Genius: The Golden Rule,” “Parables,” and “Son of Man” (and maybe “The Difference between John and the Synoptics”).
Chapter 6: Has the Text Changed?
Here’s the first paragraph of the chapter (111):
As we consider whether we can trust the Gospels, we need to know if they have been reliably transmitted to us. In terms of sheer volume of manuscripts in different languages, the Gospels, or perhaps the biblical Psalms, are the best documented texts from antiquity by some margin. They are also arguably the most scrutinized texts.
And in the last section of the chapter, I noted this (120):
First, remember that this book is not about proving that the Gospels are true but about demonstrating that they can be rationally trusted. Hopefully, by the end of this book I will have demonstrated that trusting the Gospels is more rational than any of the alternatives. Proof of the mathematical kind does not exist with history.
Chapter 7: What about Contradictions?
I made this marginal note in chapter 7: “Does he avoid discussing the more prosaic contradictions?”
Chapter 8: Who Would Make All This Up?
The book prompted me to make this note: “Very strange for four independent writers to make such similar but distinct fake histories!”
I liked these two sentences (130-31):
But when Christians argue for the reality of Gospel miracles, they do not normally hang their entire argument for the truth of Christianity upon miracles alone. They believe that we live in a universe that shows signs of being made, and that the converging lines of evidence for the truth of Christianity include arguments from the nature of the message, the moral realism of the biblical story, the fulfillment of prophecy, the coherence of the Bible, the need for a source of moral absolutes, the seeming purposefulness of life and nature, their own experience, and more.
For the proposition that “Many books argue for the historicity of the resurrection,” the author drops a footnote that says (133 n.5), “See especially N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God [2003] ….”
On the same page (133, footnoted omitted) there is this sentence: “We may begin with two facts generally accepted even by those who doubt the resurrection: (1) that Jesus was buried and that the tomb was later found empty; (2) that a wide range of people believed that they had seen Jesus risen from the dead.”
A few pages later, I noted this passage (135-36, footnotes omitted):
One can make a good argument that the concept of the bodily resurrection of one person in advance of others would have been very odd within Judaism, and therefore it is unlikely that early Christians would have invented it in an effort to continue the Jesus movement after the death of their leader.
Moreover, the reports of the empty tomb and of the resurrection appearances were not of a random person but of someone who would have been an exceptional individual by all accounts. He is credited with more miracles than any other rabbi, with the first version of the positive Golden Rule, with some exceedingly popular stories, with a family line going back to King David, and with membership of arguably the world’s most remarkable ethnic group; and he seems to have been executed by the Romans for his claim to be king of the Jews, and just happened to die (even according to non-Christian sources) at Passover time, just when the Jews celebrated their greatest deliverance—out of Egypt. More coincidences could be added. However, there comes a point when rather than thinking that the miracles attributed to Jesus would spoil the pattern of a tidy mechanistic universe, one begins to think that they actually form a pattern. One can seek to explain away each phenomenon individually, but a single and simple explanation can make sense of all the facts.
In that passage, the author discusses in a footnote why Jesus’ “David genealogy seems to have been legally real” (135 n.32).
Toward the end of the book (138-39, footnotes omitted), the author writes:
It is noteworthy that in addition to the patterns dealt with so far, the record of Jesus within the Gospels also forms a pattern with the Old Testament—all of which was clearly composed before Jesus lived on earth. Throughout history, Christians have read the Old Testament as prefiguring Jesus Christ in ways that would take many other books for us to explore.
The Old Testament begins with the story of a perfect creation spoiled by human sin, and the consequent death penalty on humans and expulsion from God’s presence. Death is the punishment for sin, blood is sacred, sacrifice is needed, and it is promised that a future “seed” (i.e., offspring) will deliver. Abraham, the man God specially privileges, has a special son against all expectation and is told to offer him as a sacrifice, but this is called off at the last moment and the son lives on, being replaced by a ram. Abraham’s descendants spend time oppressed in Egypt and are rescued from there, but not before they have sacrificed lambs and put their blood on their doorposts to protect them from God’s judgment. Out of Egypt they experience God’s presence in their midst in a special tent, a presence to which all their access comes through sacrifice. Within the Promised Land they are given King David, who is promised a “seed” (2 Samuel 7:12 KJV) who will always be on his throne. A culture in which there is only one God speaks boldly through its prophets of a “mighty God” being born (Isaiah 9:6; compare 10:21), of God being pierced and mourned for (Zechariah 12:10), of One spoken of in terms only ever applied to God (Isaiah 52:13) as dying and yet thereafter living (Isaiah 53:11–12).
These things and many others map well onto the life, sacrificial death and subsequent resurrection of Jesus, not just in the eyes of devoted believers, but also in the eyes of those skeptical of the Gospels’ historicity, who use the high level of correspondence between the story of Jesus and the Old Testament to argue that much of the Gospels’ narrative of Jesus was invented on the basis of the Old Testament. For those unfamiliar with the Old Testament or the Gospels, the above list of correspondences may seem like dreamy thinking, but in fact the existence of large-scale correlation between the Gospels’ records of Jesus and the Old Testament is something on which a wide range of scholars agree, even while they differ on many specific points of interpretation.
And here is the book’s stirring final paragraph (140, footnote omitted):
A far easier position is to make a single supposition, that all of history hangs on Jesus. It is a single and simple supposition, but I am not claiming that it is a small one. It does have huge explanatory power as it accounts for the signs in the Gospels that would normally be taken as signs of reliability, for the genius of Jesus’s character and teaching, for the evidence for the resurrection, and for the correspondence of Jesus’s life with the Old Testament. Of course, if Jesus is the Word who is coeternal with God, and the one who has come to save the world, then the question of the trustworthiness of the Gospels is not a mere issue of historical interest. If the picture of Jesus in the Gospels is basically true, it logically demands that we give up possession of our lives to serve Jesus Christ, who said repeatedly in every Gospel, “Follow me.”