This is a continuation of a response to R.G. Price’s Case Against Historical Jesus. Now we get into comparisons with other historical sources. Sort of.
The Gospels make many claims that are contradicted by the historical record
According to R.G. Price, one of the reasons that we should not take the Gospels seriously as historical sources is that they contradict the historical record.
Actually, Price is putting forth two different arguments. One is that some events are not mentioned in other sources and that other events are different in other sources.
Let’s start with the silence of some events in other sources. As has been often stated: absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence. Just because something is only mentioned in one sources doesn’t mean that it contradicts the historical record.
One example that Price uses is the star of Bethlehem. Such signs are in many historical texts, often not found in other texts, and yet we do not use it to dismiss the text as historically valuable.
The star is meant to be a pretty theological event. The killing of the innocents is something that we might expect to find in other sources. What we have to ask is, does this fit with what we know of Herod the Great? If everything else we knew about Herod was that he was a good guy who never hurt anyone, then Matthew’s description of the killing would be suspect. But Herod was the kind of person who would have done this, so it is believable.
Price then tries to show that the Gospels explicitly contradict the historical record. Both the census and the death of John the Baptist come from Josephus. Some apologists try to harmonize these, but I’m going to go a different route. Let’s assume for the moment that they give contradictory descriptions, here are some observations:
This is not a difference between the Gospels and the historical record but between two different parts of the historical record.
- Josephus is known to have made mistakes.
- Josephus sometimes contradicts himself when he is looking at the same event in his Antiquities of the Jews and the Jewish War.
- When we look at different Roman historians looking at the same figure or events, they usually have this same level of discrepancy.
- The fact that Josephus does talk about the census and the death of John the Baptist discredits of Price’s earlier argument that the Gospels belong to allegory and not history.
Silence in other sources and differences of details are not evidence that a text is unhistorical in nature and that all of the stories contained are purely fictional.
