This is my continuation of my series looking at the article “Raphael Lataster and Questioning the Plausibility of Jesus Ahistoricity Theories” by Raphael Lataster. In this post, I look at his criticism of the canonical Gospels.
My first observation is that I am shocked that a person with a PhD who teaches at a university can make such unscholarly claims. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I will say that the canonical Gospels are the best (but not the only) source we have for the historical Jesus. Most historians would love to have four ancient biographies written within the lifetime of people who could have witnessed the events. But Lataster is not impressed.
[T]he Gospels were written around forty or more years after the theorized death of Jesus,31 which could eliminate the possibility of them being written by eyewitnesses long after the fact, considering life expectancies in the 1st century CE.
I don’t think we have to argue that the Gospels were written by eyewitnesses in order to see them as valuable historical evidence. But Lataster claims that the possibility of them being eyewitnesses because they were written forty or more years after the events (See my post The Dirty Little Secret About Dating the Gospels).
Lataster’s claim is because of the low average life expectancy in the first century, that you are not going to have people over forty years old. But that is not what historians mean by the average life expectancy. Even in the first century, there were people who lived to seventy to eighty years of age. But because of the high mortality rate in childhood, the average age was brought much lower than it is today. Once you got past a certain age, you had a reasonably good chance to reach a nice old age.
The Gospel writers do not claim to be using trustworthy primary sources and do not name them; neither do they show skepticism with these hypothetical sources nor demonstrate critical methodology (Bayesian or otherwise). Even if they did, scholars do not have access to primary sources, and thus have no way to determine, with certainty, if the Gospels are truly reliable.
This gets to the heart of the Jesus Mythicist problems. What Lataster says here about the Gospels is true about all of our ancient historical sources. If we dismissed all ancient texts by this standard, we could say almost nothing about ancient history.
While the Gospels are anonymous, meaning historians cannot be sure of the authors’ reliability or motives, their supernatural claims makes it easy for critical scholars to see them as being far from secular and sober authors of history, whilst having no intention to evangelize.
This is part of a larger section on the problems of the supernatural claims. However, even if some today question the possibility of the supernatural, in the first century it was a prominent part of the worldview. Many historical accounts in the ancient world take for granted the supernatural and include miracles in their narratives. Lataster criticizes the writers for being “far from secular and sober authors of history.” And yet that could describe every other ancient historian and biographer.
Lataster quotes Bart Ehrman with this statement:
It is also true that our best sources about Jesus, the early Gospels, are riddled with problems. These were written decades after Jesus’ life by biased authors who are at odds with one another on details up and down the line.
This is a statement in an article titled Did Jesus Exist? by Bart Ehrman. It looks like from this quote that Ehrman is suggesting the historical sources are pretty weak. But what else does Ehrman say in that same article?
The question is not whether sources are biased but whether biased sources can be used to yield historically reliable information, once their biased chaff is separated from the historical kernel. And historians have devised ways of doing just that.
With respect to Jesus, we have numerous, independent accounts of his life in the sources lying behind the Gospels (and the writings of Paul) — sources that originated in Jesus’ native tongue Aramaic and that can be dated to within just a year or two of his life (before the religion moved to convert pagans in droves). Historical sources like that are is pretty astounding for an ancient figure of any kind. Moreover, we have relatively extensive writings from one first-century author, Paul, who acquired his information within a couple of years of Jesus’ life and who actually knew, first hand, Jesus’ closest disciple Peter and his own brother James. If Jesus did not exist, you would think his brother would know it.
Lataster quotes Ehrman repeatedly through his article as if Ehrman was agreeing with him but in fact, Ehrman believes exactly the opposite of Lataster when it comes to the historical evidence. Ehrman concludes his article, regarding the existence of Jesus, with these words:
One may well choose to resonate with the concerns of our modern and post-modern cultural despisers of established religion (or not). But surely the best way to promote any such agenda is not to deny what virtually every sane historian on the planet — Christian, Jewish, Muslim, pagan, agnostic, atheist, what have you — has come to conclude based on a range of compelling historical evidence.
Lataster attempts to discount the historical value of the Gospels with various critiques, from the anonymity of the authors, to the dates of the texts, to the presence of supernatural texts, to the bias, to the relationship between the texts, as if all of this was a slam dunk that the Gospels cannot be used.
What Lataster fails to tell the readers is that historians are aware of all of these things and still do not discount the Gospels. Not only that, but historians use other texts that are far weaker for historical sources for other historical figures.
Lataster can critique the Gospels all he wants, pointing out details that would make the case stronger. But historians work with what they have and historians except for an extremely tiny but vocal group of Mythicists accept the Gospels as more than adequate for supporting the evidence of the historical Jesus.
I recommend people interested in this subject read Bart Ehrman’s Did Jesus Exist?
