The Latest at Behind the Gospels
A lot has been happening at Behind the Gospels - and it can be difficult to keep up!
For those who’d like to be filled in, here is a précis of a few of my favourite posts:
#1. Bart Ehrman’s Telephone Game. This post analyses Bart Ehrman’s popular analogy that the stories and sayings of Jesus were passed down like a Telephone Game. Drawing upon a critique of this idea by New Testament scholar, Alan Kirk, I show how this analogy doesn’t make sense of how oral tradition actually works. In a nutshell, the tradition was not handed down unreliably in a single line of transmission, but rather as a ‘network’ or ‘web’ which made it more stable.
#2. Can the Dates of Jesus’ Death Be Reconciled? Perhaps the most glaring contradiction in the Gospels is the date of Jesus’ death; was it after Passover, as the Synoptic tradition claims, or was it before (as John has it)? I used to believe that there was a way to reconcile these traditions. This post explains why I changed my mind.
#3. Was Jesus… Short? I wrote my doctoral thesis on the physical appearance of Jesus in the Gospels. In that research, I came across Isaac Soon’s fascinating argument that Luke describes Jesus, not Zacchaeus, as ‘short in stature’ in Luke 19:3. In this post, I defend the traditional reading that it is Zacchaeus who is small.
#4. Why Matthew Didn’t Write Matthew. This three part series takes a look at the authorship of the Gospel of Matthew. In part one, I look at some of the common reasons why modern scholarship does not consider Matthew as the author of the Gospel. In part two, I look at one attempt to link the Gospel to the tax-collector, Matthew, through its use of money. And in part three, I explain how the Gospel may have a genuine connection to the apostle, even if it is not as author of the Greek text.
#5. Who is Mark’s Mystery Man? As a student of the Gospels, I have occasionally been asked on my opinion about mysterious young man in Mark who flees naked from Jesus. But I have never had a good answer - until now! In this post, I line up five candidates for the mystery man - an anonymous fugitive, Mark himself, a secret disciple, Jesus, and the reader - and give it my best shot at working out who he is.
#6. Can We Know what Jesus Really Said? There are a number of problems for recovering the teaching of Jesus; problems of language, distance and contradiction. But scholars still believe that we can generally recover what Jesus taught. In this post, I explain why I believe that we can recover the gist of the teaching of Jesus.
#7. Women Witnesses at the Tomb - An Argument to Retire? It is often said that the empty tomb story is historically reliable because the evangelists would not have invented women as the witnesses to the empty tomb. Here, I take a critical approach to that argument, arguing that women were the most natural figures to find it empty.
If you would like to see the full archive of posts, see here. And to let me know what you would like to read in the future, please leave a comment below!