It is all about evidence

[Contarini]

Contarini;11559227:

We have multiple independent accounts written within a few decades of the event.).

Thanks for your response. Are they independent, though, those sources?

Perhaps I should have said “two.” Mark and Paul. John is also probably independent–not that the author couldn’t have read the existing Gospels, of course, but John is so different from the others that it can arguably be counted as independent. But by the time we get to John perhaps “a few decades” is stretching it (John was probably written at the very end of the first century).

Furthermore, there are stories in Luke that are not in the others. You can take that as “divergence,” or you can take it as evidence that Luke had some independent witnesses. The “Cleopas” mentioned in the Emmaus story, for instance.

From what I understand, Mark is believed to have been a common source for the authors of Matthew and Luke.

Yes. That’s the majority view. There are alternative theories, but all of them involve the Synoptics depending on each other’s work. However, there’s clearly some independent material, particularly in Luke.

I also appreciate your thoughts about the comparative dearth of evidence regarding the virgin birth. The problem I see there is that, if one doubts the Biblical account of the virgin birth – and of the testimony of Matthew on this count – then there is more reason to doubt – all other things being equal – the testimony of Matthew on other things, such as the miracle accounts or the resurrection. It would, in itself, become a problem to say, “I’m not convinced by Matthew’s testimony regarding the virgin birth – it’s a bit suspect, in fact – yet I think Matthew’s a reliable witness and that everything else he says is trustworthy.”

Well, that’s one reason many people trust Mark more. (That and the fact that Mark is thought to be first–but one of the reasons Mark is thought to be first is that it seems to have fewer elements that look by normal historical rules like pious legends or theological elaborations. That’s why many conservatives question Marcan priority, because they think it’s based on dubious assumptions.) I myself do not regard Matthew as a very reliable source, because the story is so obviously shaped by theological considerations. Anything for which we have only Matthew’s evidence, such as the journey of the Magi, is quite likely, in my opinion, to be legendary or a theological interpretation written into the text. (That gets me into a lot of trouble on this forum, especially since one of the elements unique to Matthew is Jesus’ promise of the keys to Peter!) I’m willing to accept otherwise as a matter of faith if the Church tells me to do so, but as a historian that’s my tentative judgment. I think that the tradition of Matthaean authorship probably properly belongs to the collection of Jesus’ sayings which scholars call “Q,” and that Matthew as we have it is this original collection combined with the skeleton of Mark’s narrative and some other material (this other material being, from a historical point of view, the least reliable). Luke, on the other hand, strikes me (again, speaking by historical norms, though of course with a bias in favor of believing the Gospels) as a serious historical source who is trying to be accurate, although perhaps falling into some confusions (like the whole business about the date of the census). Mark strikes me as a source very, very close to eyewitness testimony, and I see no good reason to doubt the early tradition that Mark was writing down Peter’s memories. John, I think, was probably written by the students of the apostle John, and thus contains eyewitness reminiscences combined with a great deal of theological interpretation and reflection.

These are very tentative opinions, and don’t always agree either with majority scholarly opinion or with a conservative “party line.”

A final point: the idea that you accept or reject a source as a whole seems like common sense to most non-scholars, but it’s not how historians proceed. Of course you form judgments about some sources being more reliable than others, but historians generally don’t dismiss or accept sources in their entirety. Any source, pretty much, may have some genuine material (though few would argue that, for instance, the non-canonical Gospels other than the Gospel of Thomas have such material). And any source, even if generally reliable, may make mistakes or engage in hyperbole or (again, taking a strictly secular, historical approach) have reasons for being economical with the truth, or just find a beautiful story too hard to resist.

Again, the Alexander sources are a good point of comparison. Our most reliable source, Arrian, wrote four hundred years later and is confident that Alexander won his victories through divine assistance and that portents guided him through the desert in Egypt. Modern scholars point out that he’s a secondary source, using other sources now lost to us, and that he was probably uncritical at times in so doing. However, he clearly has a concern to establish the correct story and weigh different sources against each other, and so he’s taken as fairly reliable. But we always want more sources for comparison, we always check literary sources against archeology, and we always treat the sources with some suspicion.

Or, to take another example: one of our sources for the later Roman emperors is a series of biographies called the Historia Augusta. Much of this is considered pure fiction. But how much is a matter of debate, and historians still take it seriously.

Edwin

 

[Contarini]

Two cents incoming.

I think that one of the things people often forget when they discuss things like this is the difficulty of transporting and protecting information in pre-modern ages. Europe and the Middle East were very turbulent for many centuries, many powers rising up and falling down over fairly short time periods.

Take Alexander the Great, for instance. It has been mentioned that most of what we know about him was written by Romans, years later. Perhaps there were more contemporary sources, but here’s the thing - they were destroyed by the passage of time, or possibly by violence, and as a result their absence is not unusual. It wouldn’t be right to call Alexander’s historicity into account because “surely someone would have written something down in his own time?”.
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We know that there were earlier sources. I think we may have some fragments–we certainly have names of historians.

No one, or almost no one, questions that Alexander existed. But whether our sources, such as Arrian, are reliable is a matter of debate.

Edwin