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<\/a><\/p>\n(This lecture was given at the Greer-Heard Forum \u00a0last Saturday at New Orleans Baptist Seminary after the presentations the previous day by Bart Ehrman and Craig Evans)<\/p>\n
I listened to my scholarly colleagues yesterday give us a variety of answers as to whether the Gospels are historically reliable when it comes to their portraits of Jesus, debate differences in the accounts and their significance, talk about how we derive historically responsible conclusions about\u00a0 Jesus, and speak with passion and conviction about their subject matter, and one might add, also some exasperation.\u00a0 They were both exasperated with flat, insipid, overly literalistic fundamentalistic readings of the four canonical Gospels served up by the right Rev. Billy Bob Proverb all too regularly on a cable network near you.\u00a0\u00a0 And I understand and share that exasperation.\u00a0\u00a0 But at the end of the day I was also\u00a0 frustrated with what I heard from both Bart and Craig yesterday to some degree, and I will now explain why.<\/p>\n
We are all products of our education, and in case of myself and indeed all of us, we were all trained to analyze the Gospels in detail using source, and form, and redaction criticism.\u00a0\u00a0 Now these methods have their pluses and minuses.\u00a0 They can be useful in getting at certain aspects of things about the historical Jesus, but unfortunately these methods cannot help us very much to deal with the canonical Gospels\u00a0 if we seek to treat them\u00a0 as they were intended to be treated by their original inspired authors.<\/em> More on that in a minute.<\/p>\n These Gospel authors were not operating with the canons of modern secular historiography which tends to have an anti-supernatural bias with its practitioners regularly muttering astoundingly dogmatic things like \u201cthat didn\u2019t happen because those kind of things don\u2019t happen. \u00a0People don\u2019t rise from the dead.\u201d\u00a0 \u00a0I have to say that that sort of dogmatic statement puts the dog back in dogmatic just as much as the dogmatic statements of some fundamentalist TV preachers. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0It is especially proper to ask persons who are dogmatic in modern secular anti-supernaturalist ways, just as it is proper to ask persons who are dogmatic in others ways\u2014\u00a0 \u2018How do you know things like that don\u2019t happen?<\/em>\u2019\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And if the answer is \u2018I have never seen such a thing happen\u2019\u00a0 then we realize we are dealing with persons who needs to get out more,\u00a0 see more of the world of human experience,\u00a0 but have the arrogance to assume that his or her private, individual experience exhausts what is possible when it comes to the limits of historical reality.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 This person is in fact saying \u201ctalk to the hand with your miracle reports, the face is not listening.\u201d\u00a0 What is even worse is when such scholars then take the next step of suggesting that if you don\u2019t have these sorts of presuppositions you are not a critical scholar, and are not doing proper historical analysis of the Gospels.<\/p>\n Now I must admit that in many ways this anti-supernatural philosophical presupposition is the one that undergirds much of modern historiography, and that is what it is\u2013\u00a0 a philosophical presupposition, an a priori that miracles don\u2019t happen. It <\/em>is of course certainly not based on an exhaustive study of empirical reality, or even a representative study of empirical reality, because indeed there have been millions of reports and testimonies to miracles even in modernity with verifiable empirical data, and indeed there are some being given even as we speak.\u00a0 \u00a0But the \u2018modern\u2019 historian with the anti-supernatural bias, just as dogmatically as the fundamentalist preacher in another way wants to say\u2014 \u201cdon\u2019t confuse me with the facts, don\u2019t give me all these stories, however credible and however verifiable even by medical records before and after\u2026\u2026 I know what I know.\u00a0 Those things just don\u2019t happen.\u201d \u00a0\u00a0Is such a person open and fair minded to the complexities and varieties of human experience or human history?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I am afraid not.<\/p>\n Because the answer is no, when in fact there is plenty of contrary evidence, \u00a0one has to get louder and more vociferous on insisting that this is the only proper way to analyze reality or history.\u00a0 Like the old preacher who revealingly wrote in his sermon notes at one point \u201cnot actually sure about this point, pound the pulpit harder and speak louder\u201d\u00a0 such a person would like certain doubts to go away, doubts that he or she might be wrong,\u00a0 but alas, he can\u2019t exorcise the demon of those doubts so this person just becomes more strident\u00a0 in their insistence that they are right, and others must be wrong.\u00a0\u00a0 One wonders whether they are more trying to convince themselves or others, at the end of the day.<\/p>\n Me personally I don\u2019t believe in \u2018justification by doubt\u2019.\u00a0\u00a0 I don\u2019t believe that philosophical skepticism is the same thing as critical thinking, and I also don\u2019t think that the sort of historiography that is undergirded by such a prioris can help us very much with the question are the Gospels reliable, truthful witnesses when it comes to the historical Jesus.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In fact, if you want to actually get at the truth of something, you have to enter into dialogue with that source giving it the benefit of the doubt, allowing it to have its say, and while one doesn\u2019t put one\u2019s critically thinking cap aside,\u00a0 if you do not approach the material with an open mind and a willingness to learn from it,\u00a0 you won\u2019t get at the truth of the matter, not even the historical truth of the matter.\u00a0\u00a0 You can\u2019t possibly analyze the actual nature of a raging fire, by pouring cold water on it, and then picking over the ashes and charcoal thereafter.<\/p>\n What then are the Gospels, and how should they be analyzed, and are they historically reliable when it comes to the historical Jesus, whether in general or in detail?\u00a0\u00a0 The Gospels are written according to the ancient conventions of biographical and historical writing.\u00a0\u00a0 They are like Plutarch\u2019s\u00a0 Lives, not like\u00a0 a modern biography<\/em> of\u00a0 JFK or\u00a0 a modern historiographical monograph on WWII.\u00a0\u00a0 It is not only unfair to analyze ancient documents using modern conventions as one\u2019s guide,\u00a0 it may in fact lead to more confusion than clarity, like the example of the man who came up with six denials of Christ by Peter because some accounts say the cock crowed once and some say twice.\u00a0\u00a0 But none of the canonical Gospels say that Peter denied Christ six times, so there must be something terribly wrong with a kind of synthetic reading of the Gospel that makes them say something that none of them say.<\/p>\n When a modern person puts those four accounts into their mental cusinarts\u00a0 with no understanding of ancient genre of literature, and based entirely on a contextless reading of the Gospels, if by context we mean the ancient contexts\u2014- stuff happens.\u00a0 \u00a0Bad stuff.\u00a0\u00a0 The evidence is distorted not clarified. \u00a0\u00a0Now the irony is that this happens just as assuredly with the modern secular historian who fails to take the lead from the ancient genre of the documents, but rather prefers the modern discipline of form or source criticism, just as assuredly it takes place, when Billy Bob Proverb mushes all these things into his red letter brain.<\/p>\n I want to suggest as clearly as I can that the four canonical Gospels are portraits of Jesus, not snapshots, they\u2019re more like Monets four paintings of the front of\u00a0 Rouen Cathedral than they are like\u00a0 four black and white photos of\u00a0 Ted Williams taken at various angles in Fenway on the same day by four different photographers,\u00a0 and if one fails to analyze the document according to the type or kind of information it is trying to give you\u2014- you\u2019ve made a category mistake,\u00a0 a huge one.<\/p>\n Now the art historian examining those four Monet paintings knows perfectly well that he is looking at the real historical Rouen cathedral, but through the interpretive lens of impressionistic approaches to painting, which were concerned with\u00a0 light and the difference light makes in the way things appear to us. \u00a0Impressionism reminds us that in fact reality is not in the eye of the beholder, for the eye can be deceived, any more than meaning is in the eye of the beholder.\u00a0\u00a0 Yes, Virginia there are definitely meanings in those texts, but it is also true that we are active readers of the texts. \u00a0When you go to the Louvre or elsewhere and see these four paintings of Rouen cathedral, you see that in one the cathedral almost looks pink, in another almost yellow, in another almost white, and after the light was gone, in another\u00a0 gray.\u00a0\u00a0 And yet clearly these are four recognizably representational paintings of\u00a0 that cathedral, which anyone who had ever seen the cathedral or even seen a bad picture of the cathedral would realize.<\/p>\n Now the art historian is not the same as a paint historian.\u00a0 A paint historian will get up next to the picture and analyze the details of the painting from up close\u2014 did he use tempura or oil, did he do it on a canvas or a piece of papyrus,\u00a0 why in this picture do we have a glob of purple paint right on the cathedral door which seems to complete contradict the glob of brown paint at this tiny spot on the other three paintings?\u00a0\u00a0 It would be a mistake to think that the paint historian can get at the meaning or significance or historical character of the paintings by examining them only from two inches away.\u00a0\u00a0 You lose all perspective, indeed you can\u2019t see the representation of the cathedral at all.\u00a0 All you see is particular globs of paint, and you can complain all you want, that this painting can\u2019t be accurate because it uses the wrong color here, or the wrong brush technique there,\u00a0 but you would be wrong to do so.\u00a0\u00a0 The reason is,\u00a0 an impressionistic\u00a0 painting is supposed to be analyzed for what is\u2014 an interpretive portrait of something or someone and you can only see the resemblance and the character of the person involved\u00a0 if you stand far enough back from the painting and analyze it in the way the artist meant for you to analyze it. <\/em><\/p>\n The four canonical Gospels are interpretive paintings of Jesus.\u00a0 Yes they are representational,\u00a0 yes they have historical reality behind them and indeed historical substance to them,\u00a0\u00a0 but no, they should not be analyzed by reading them purely\u00a0 horizontall y\u00a0 from a distance of one inch from the canvas, and then yelling\u2014- aha,\u00a0 contradictions.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The Gospels simply are not going to yield up their meaning, significance or even historical worth to that kind of analysis.\u00a0\u00a0 This sort of analysis reminds me of someone trying to test a person\u2018s hearing without a tuning fork, but rather looking in someone ear with a lighted ear probe and complaining \u2018alas all I see is wax\u2019 I see no hearing,\u00a0\u00a0 it\u2019s the wrong tool,\u00a0 it\u2019s the wrong sort of analysis, and it yields the wrong sorts of results, by and large! <\/em><\/p>\n I am insisting friends that the Gospel writers were all artists, artists who cared about history as well as theology and ethics, but nonetheless artists.\u00a0\u00a0 Under inspiration, they have a certain freedom to creatively edit their material, arrange their material, present their material, but always with the goal that they wanted to present to their audience the real and historical Jesus, both human and divine.<\/p>\n What I am complaining about is a horizontal reading of the Gospels at the expensive of both the genre of the documents and at the expensive of a vertical reading.\u00a0\u00a0 I am not suggesting that horizontal readings (for example where we compare the four tellings of the feeding of the 5,000 in the four canonical Gospels),\u00a0 shouldn\u2019t be undertaken.\u00a0 I am simply saying that if that sort of reading is used as a sort of Ockham\u2019s razor, a tool to get at the historical reliability of this material while ignoring the Gospel writer\u2019s intentions, the genre of the Gospels, and the vertical reading of the Gospels, one has made a horrible mistake.\u00a0 Should\u00a0 we really suppose that when the First Evangelist\u00a0 has Jesus say \u201cWhy do you ask me about the good?\u00a0 No one is good but God alone\u201d he expected and hoped that we would compare this to Mark\u2019s version of this same saying where Jesus is reported as saying \u201cWhy do you call me good?\u00a0 No one is good but God alone.\u201d \u00a0No, what the First Evangelist expected is a fair reading of this presentation of Jesus\u2019 saying in the context of the Matthean presentation of the story, and in the even large context of the whole flow of the First Gospel.\u00a0\u00a0 When the historian points out\u2014- \u201cMatthew has probably deliberately altered his Markan source here\u201d\u00a0 we can certainly agree,\u00a0 but then the question has to be asked\u2014- \u2018to what purpose?\u2019\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 These are not accidental changes, not discrepancies in the normal sense of the term,\u00a0 any more than they are straightforward contradictions. To the contrary they are deliberate alterations to make other or different theological, ethical, or historical points than Mark wanted to make.\u00a0\u00a0 And this of course makes the historical assessment much more difficult.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Can we say \u201cwell Mark is probably closer to what Jesus said on the occasion\u201d?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Yes, we can say that, not least because the Markan form of the saying is more offensive.<\/p>\n But then we have to remember that Jesus was not likely speaking in Greek at all\u2014 neither Mark\u2019s Greek nor Matthew\u2019s Greek.\u00a0 He was speaking in Aramaic.\u00a0 If we were really interested in figuring out what the historical Jesus actually said, we would need to engage in retrojection back into the original Aramaic (see for example the retrojection work of Maurice Casey on the Gospel of Mark).\u00a0 But of course we have no Aramaic original to compare it to.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 My point is this\u2014- both Mark and Matthew and the other Gospels\u00a0 are artful representations trying to reveal to us the character, the true character of Jesus and the kind of things he said and did.\u00a0 They are not trying to give us the ipssisma verba Jesu the exact Aramaic words of Jesus.\u00a0 And because they are not trying to do that with either the words or deeds or general story of Jesus, but rather they were operating within the general conventions and flexibility of ancient biographies or historical works, we must take the latter always into account in assessing whether they give us a historically reliable portrait of Jesus. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I would stress that they do give us historically reliable portraits of Jesus, but within the literary rules and genre practices common to ancient biographers and ancient historians.\u00a0\u00a0 A flat horizontal reading of the Synoptics does not actually help us much in answering the historicity questions because it ignores the larger questions.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 These accounts can be historically reliable in the larger and proper sense and still have many differences, indeed many deliberate differences because they are and should be assessed as portraits, not photographs, and individual stories or sayings cannot be properly assesses apart from the larger perspective of what an Evangelist is trying to achieve in those ancient genre of biography or historical monographs.\u00a0\u00a0 And there are rhetorical considerations that affect the framing of the material as well.<\/em><\/p>\n What about the old, tired, and wrong canard\u2014the Gospel of John presents us with a divine Jesus, whereas the Synoptics do not.\u00a0\u00a0 I am quite sure the first three Evangelists would object to that mischaracterization of their portraits of Jesus.\u00a0 \u00a0Jesus in Matthew is the Wisdom of God come in the flesh, and he says so of himself in Mt. 11.\u00a0 This comports with the portrait of Jesus as God\u2019s Wisdom who was present with God before the world was created and has come in the flesh (see e.g. \u2018Before Abraham was, I am\u2019).\u00a0\u00a0 If we ask the question did the historical Jesus actually see himself as God\u2019s Wisdom come in person to his people,\u00a0 I would say yes he did\u2014 this is one of the ways he viewed himself, and Matthew and John artfully present Jesus as Wisdom in interestingly different ways, but the point is the same.\u00a0 The differences do not negate the similarities, but rather they reflect the different purposes of these different Evangelists.<\/p>\n Jesus in Mark is presented as the Son of Man who one day will come on the clouds back to earth and judge its inhabitants as Daniel 7 forewarned.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It was this latter claim to divinity and the bringing in of a judgment only Yahweh could bring to earth, that causes the high priest to tear his ropes and declare blasphemy.\u00a0 It was not the claim that Jesus might be messiah\u2026 a human category.\u00a0\u00a0 In other words Mark as well presents Jesus as divine as well as human,\u00a0 something that a close reading of Daniel 7.13-14 and the Jewish tradition of interpretation of that text makes clear.\u00a0 In Luke Jesus is portrayed as the Lord who raised the widow of Nain\u2019s son from the dead, not merely as a young and fearless prophet, though he is called that in that same story as well.\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0So in different and artful ways, all four Gospel writers present Jesus as both divine and human.<\/p>\n The problem with the minalmilist analysis of the Gospels using tools like form and source criticism is that it may prove accurate as far as it goes, but it never ever goes far enough.\u00a0 Using those tools the historically reconstructible Jesus is a mere tiny subset of the historical Jesus, and it is\u00a0 dangerous mistake to take or mistake the part for the whole. \u00a0That frankly is just bad modern historiography.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Imagine an art historian who insisted that the only way to appreciate those four paintings by Monet of Rouen was looking only at the details of the paint in the canvas, or worse looking at what was behind the canvas, as if the real Jesus would suddenly emerge from behind door number five.\u00a0\u00a0 Of course it is right to say that there is a danger of mushing all things together in our wonderfully synthetic mental cuisnarts.\u00a0 There is just as grave a danger of trivializing and misinterpreting Jesus\u00a0 by trying to get behind the four canvases and then concluding that like going behind the curtain at the end of the Wizard of Oz, the wizard must surely be a far more puny and trivial historical figure than we often imagine.<\/p>\n The reason we have four different interpretative portraits of Jesus, but recognizably the same Jesus, is precisely because as Eduard Schweizer said long ago,\u00a0 he is the man who fits no one formula, he is so complex, so rich, so enormous\u00a0 a historical figure that he cannot be reduced to a measly pile of facts about his words and deeds, if you have any hope to really assess who he was, and what his significance was. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Many, perhaps most of the differences in Gospels are intentional, not accidental, as each Evangelist seeks to bring out different aspects or nuances of Jesus\u2019 true character. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0But it is wrong to privilege difference at the expense of similarity if we want to assess the historical reliability of the Gospels in their portraits of Jesus.<\/p>\n Those of us who hold to Markan priority rightly conclude that Matthew takes over some 93% of the source material found in Mark, with a verbatim rate of about 51%.\u00a0\u00a0 Now if I have two term papers by two different students and they have that high a degree of similiarity, I am going to know there is a literary relationship between those Gospels.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 What this means in terms of Matthew and Mark is that probably the author of the first Gospel thought Mark was overwhelmingly\u00a0 right<\/em> in what he said about Jesus, but more needed to be said, and more nuances and tweaking needed to happen to what was said to make different points for different audiences.<\/p>\n Imagine for a moment two Presidential portraits of FDR at the end of WWII some time ago.\u00a0 What is interesting about such portraits is that it is recognizably the very same figure in both paintings, but in one he is portrayed as tired and sitting in a wheel chair, in another he is strong and standing tall speaking into an ancient microphone.\u00a0 Now a wooden literalist, or a modern secular historian might complain\u2014 which was it when he gave that Fourth of July address\u00a0 in 1944?\u00a0\u00a0 The problem with the question\u00a0 is that he was both.\u00a0 While outwardly wasting away, FDR was inwardly being renewed day by day by the news that the Nazis were going down for the count.\u00a0\u00a0 He had stood tall ever since the day of infamy, and he would see us through to the end of that war.\u00a0 Portraits are interpretive, and artists have the license to vary from one narrow portrayal of a man, in order to get at his true and genuine historical character.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The Gospels are also like that.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 They are not like those four photographs of the splendid Splinter Ted Williams, and they shouldn\u2019t be analyzed as if they were.\u00a0\u00a0 That\u2019s just being a paint historian not an art historian, and what is needed to understand the historical Jesus as portrayed in the Gospels is the latter. <\/em><\/p>\n Do the Gospels presents us with historically reliable portraits of Jesus?\u00a0 Absolutely they do, all four of them, if we analyze them in the right sort of historical manner.\u00a0\u00a0 They are historically accurate in detail in so far as they intended to give us some particulars, and they are historically accurate in general when they use their wide angle lenses.\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0But of course they are not interested in always being particular,\u00a0 and you should never fault a person for not being particular when they are intending to be general or wide angle or give a different angle.<\/p>\n Let me give you an example.\u00a0\u00a0 In the Gospel of Mark, Mark has a favorite adverb\u2014- euthus <\/strong> (illustrate).\u00a0\u00a0 It shows up more than forty times and if we make the mistake of reading it as late Western overly time conscious people, we will think Jesus ran around Galilee at breakneck speed with his tongue out.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But in fact, what Mark means by euthus <\/strong>is not what we mean by immediately.\u00a0 He means \u2018next\u2019,\u00a0 or he means what my grandfather used to mean when I asked him when are we going out for ice cream\u2014 his reply was always \u2018directly\u2019\u00a0 by which he meant, \u2018after a while\u2019.<\/p>\n Or let\u2019s take another example,\u00a0 let\u2019s take the doubling that shows up in Matthew\u2014 we have two cock crows, we have two donkeys on Palm Sunday, we have two blind men and not just blind Bartimaeus.\u00a0 Maybe the number has to do with Hebrew use of symbolic numbers.\u00a0 Maybe Matthew would object if someone said, but that was not precisely what happened with the retort, but this way of telling it better brought out the historical and theological significance of what happened.\u00a0\u00a0 I could walk through a plethora of differences in the Gospels, deliberate differences and point out how they serve the larger theological and historical purposes of those Evangelists. But by now you catch my drift.\u00a0 A flat horizontal reading of the Gospels, comparing details in the material they share in common,\u00a0 to the neglect of these sort of considerations cannot help us assess the question\u2014do the Gospels present us with historically reliable portraits of Jesus.\u00a0 Indeed, it may lead to the mistaken conclusion that the Gospels are riddled with errors and contradictions, which in fact is not really true.\u00a0 Each Gospel writer\u2019s portrait of Jesus must be assessed against the larger aims and the genre techniques that they seek to employ in presenting us with the Jesus of history who, as they believed,\u00a0 stands in continuity with the living Christ, but is not simply identical with him.\u00a0\u00a0 The risen Lord and the historical Jesus are the same person, but in two different conditions and phases of the one messianic mission.<\/p>\n It is always and everywhere the job of the historian to fairly analyze the data before him taking into account every contextual factor he can\u2014- including, in this case, the fact that we have interpretive portraits of Jesus in the Gospels in the form of ancient biographies, or in the case of Luke-Acts historical monographs, not modern snapshots.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0In the end, it is also the job of the good historian to prescind from philosophical pronouncements like \u2018miracles don\u2019t happen\u2019. \u00a0In the end it is the job of the good historian\u00a0 to give as much benefit of the doubt to these ancient sources as one would give to one\u2019s best friends in the guild of\u00a0 NT scholars.\u00a0 And at the end of day it is the job of the real historian to say\u2014- \u2018I don\u2019t know\u2019\u00a0 or\u00a0 \u2018this subject is bigger than I can full grasp\u2019, or\u00a0 \u2018it is na\u00efve to think that with my limited intellectual capacity and my lack of omniscient to think I can get my mental calipers fully around the historical Jesus\u2019<\/p>\n One day, I believe we will all appear before the bema seat judgment of Jesus when he comes to judge the quick and the dead, and we will indeed be required to give an account of the words and deeds\u00a0 we have done in the body.\u00a0\u00a0 \u2018When I get there, what I want to hear is \u2018well done good and faithful servant, inherit the kingdom\u2019.\u00a0\u00a0 What I do not want to hear is\u2014\u2013 \u2018you know Ben, you were largely wrong about me\u2019.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0The Gospel writers were not wrong about Jesus,\u00a0 but they did not present us with data that readily yields up its historical ore to horizontal analyses or historically anachronistic\u00a0 methods of assessment.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 They present us with the Jesus of the past and the living Christ, not merely with the historically reconstructible Jesus, if the reconstruction is being done with modern historiographical constraits and presuppositions. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0If you want to know how to get and set the picture straight about both the Jesus of the past and the Christ of faith\u2014 stand back from the portraits of Jesus, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John\u00a0 so that you can actually see the way Christ is presented and represented.\u00a0 Take in the whole first before getting up close to the canvases.\u00a0 And when you realize that Jesus is being presented from four different angles in these Gospels, not just one,\u00a0 don\u2019t complain when you get up next to the canvas that one of them looks more brown in the very same spot where the others look red.\u00a0\u00a0 They are works of art,\u00a0 not photographs, and actually the closer you get to the myriad of details on the canvas\u2014 the less you can see and assess them properly, even from a critical historical point of view. \u00a0\u00a0In short, reading each Gospel separately and vertically is what those Gospel writers intended us to do,\u00a0 what we ought to do first, what we ought to assess first before doing any horizontal analysis and closer comparison of the four.\u00a0\u00a0 That should guide is in the way we analyze the differences, the deliberate differences we find when we do the horizontal analysis of shared material.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" (This lecture was given at the Greer-Heard Forum \u00a0last Saturday at New Orleans Baptist Seminary after the presentations the previous day by Bart Ehrman and Craig Evans) I listened to my scholarly colleagues yesterday give us a variety of answers as to whether the Gospels are historically reliable when it comes to their portraits of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n