Did the gospel writers know what they were talking about?

“For we did not follow cleverly devised stories when we told you about the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ in power, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty” (2 Peter 1:16).

If someone were to tell you an incredible, supernatural story, what would be your first question? It would probably be, “Did you actually see it?” You wouldn’t treat an urban legend or a story your friend got from his friend’s cousin’s uncle the same way you’d treat something your friend saw with his own eyes. We want our news to come from people who saw it or, failing that, people who talked to the people who did.

So did the gospels come from people who were there? Some of them. Tradition says the Gospels According to Matthew* and John were written by actual apostles and that Mark’s was a record of Peter’s teaching. Luke “carefully investigated everything” (Luke 1:1) before giving us his account, suggesting that he spoke to as many witnesses as he could get his hands on.

And there were still witnesses. People debate when the gospels were written, but only the most close-minded opponents date them outside of possible lifetimes of witnesses. Conservatives think Mark may have written his gospel as early as the mid 50s; liberals and skeptics put it in the 70s. Dates for Luke range from the late 50s/early 60s to the mid 80s. In either case we’re talking about a period well within the lifetime of witnesses to the kinds of things people would not forget. So if the gospel writers were making things up, there would have been people around who could object.

And the first generation of the church knew the power of eye witness reports. The quote above from Peter is similar to the assurance given by John: “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life” (1 John 1:1). The message of the apostles was “we’re telling you what we saw.” The Church would not have accepted the written gospels if they were from just anyone.

But is there any actual evidence that these accounts come from witnesses? Yes.

There are two “minor” things that I think make a major difference. The first is the use of names and locations in the gospels. As Richard Bauckham has shown in his Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, the names used in Judea and Galilee were different than Jewish names in other parts of the world, and the gospel writers not only use the right names, but they disambiguate the right names — that is, they know which names are common and make it clear who they’re talking about. So, for example, we don’t need to disambiguate a less common name like Andrew, but we need to know that the Joseph who asked for Christ’s body is the one from Arimathea.

In a similar manner, the geography in the gospels makes sense. The right towns have gentiles, and the towns with tax collectors are the kinds of town where you would expect them. Unlike later “gospels” like Thomas or Mary, the canonical gospels go into quite a bit of detail about the geography of Palestine, and they get it all right, suggesting that these stories come from people who were there. As Peter Williams pointed out, you couldn't just google these details back then. The kind of details they casually drop into the narrative are evidence that the stories originated from that part of the world.

The second “minor” thing is something known as undesigned coincidences. For example, in John’s account of the feeding of the five thousand, Jesus asks Philip where they can get bread for everyone (6:1-5). Why Philip? Philip was from Bethsaida (John 1:43-44), and as Luke alone tells us, this event occurred near Bethsaida (9:10). Undesigned coincidences are all these kinds of little, insignificant details that really could not have been coordinated but allow one author to clarify another. These are only possible because the authors are telling stories that really happened. Whole books are dedicated to identifying these things, the most recent of which is Hidden in Plain View by Lydia McGrew.

Any one of these things might be brushed off, but together they make a pretty strong case. So I think we can have confidence that we have not believed “cleverly devised fables” but true stories about the most amazing thing that has ever happened in the history of the world. If these stories are true, they beg the question, “What will you do about it?” How should we live if these stories are true?


For more information, see a different Can We Trust the Gospels?, this one written by Peter J Williams.

* I’m not going to go into detail on this, but suffice it to say, if you were going to make up names for the authors of the gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke are pretty much the last names you’d fabricate.

Image credit: Tamar Levine under Creative Commons