Each year near Easter there is a rise in the number of articles, videos, and television documentaries that question the truthfulness of the gospel accounts. A single blog post cannot do justice to answer all the honest questions that people pose, but I want to make you aware of this phenomenon and give you one example of the reliability of the gospels as eyewitness accounts of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. What follows is one answer to one objection about the Bible as eyewitness.
Onomastics is the study of names and it is a significant resource for investigating the origins of gospel traditions. In his book Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, Richard Bauckham details studies that have been done of ossuaries (grave markers) and inscriptions found in the time of Palestinian Judaism to discover what are the most common names used by Jews of Jesus' day. This is in contrast to names used by Jews in later times (during the Diaspora) when some skeptics say the New Testament was put together as a concoction of invented stories. How exactly does onomastics help us? Let’s start with a few observations.
There are four lists of the twelve apostles found in the Bible. Three occur the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke ). The fourth is in Acts, written by Luke. The order of the first four apostles listed in Matthew and Luke are two sets of brothers - Peter and Andrew then James and John. The lists in Mark and Acts change the order to Peter, James, and John followed by Andrew. This is probably to highlight the fact that Peter, James, and John are the three disciples who figure most prominently into the account being given. Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, and Thomas follow this. Only in Matthew's gospel is Matthew described as a tax collector. Mark distinguishes Matthew from another man named Levi who was also a tax collector. The last four on all the lists always have the same order: James (son of Alphaeus), Thaddeus (also named Judas), Simon (the Cananaean or Zealot), and Judas, the man from Karioth, or Ish Kariot—Iscariot.
So what?
To get at the interpretation of the data, read Bauckham in his own words:
[T]he relative frequency of the various personal names in the Gospels corresponds well to the relative frequency in the full database of three thousand individual instances of names in the Palestinian Jewish sources of the period. This correspondence is very unlikely to have resulted from addition of names to the traditions...The usages [of names] in the Gospels also correspond closely to the variety of ways in which persons bearing the same very popular names could be distinguished in Palestinian Jewish usage. Again these features of the New Testament data would be difficult to explain as the result of random invention of names within Palestinian Jewish Christianity and impossible to explain as the result of such invention outside Jewish Palestine. All the evidence indicates the general authenticity of the personal names in the Gospels. This underlines the plausibility...as to the significance of many of these names: that they indicate the eyewitness sources of the individual stories in which they occur.
What does this mean and why bring it up now? What Bauckham argues very persuasively, and I commend his whole book to you, is that when you find a name in one of the gospels, you are also finding an eyewitness to the story being described. It's as if Mark is saying in chapter 10, "Go ask Bartimaeus about his sight. He'll tell you." Luke dares you in chapter 24, "Go find Cleopas and see if he doesn't tell you the same thing I've written here." An imaginative and skilled storyteller can also write with vivid detail. But named individuals give several of the eyewitness accounts of the NT.
So it is very plausible to assume that when we get a name in a story in the gospels we're getting the name of the person who told the gospel author what exactly happened in his recollection. What does that mean when we get this list of the 12? (No less than seven of them never appear again in the gospel where they are mentioned.) What is the purpose of giving their names? Bauckham makes a compelling case that it is because these are the eyewitnesses who are charged with the transmission of the authoritative story of Jesus as we have it down to this day! These aren’t just twelve guys mentioned, but this list lets us know that these are THE twelve who are overseeing the eyewitness about Jesus.
But then someone will object: Isn't it completely possible that the disciples were so taken with this man that after he was gone, they added to the actual account of being with Jesus? Couldn't the disciples have told some "big fish" stories and passed them around? It's like the way people talk about "The Big Game" from their high school days. Or it’s like the way people exaggerate the stories about how they "found each other" and fell in love. Stories just become more and more miraculous with each retelling. But how often have you found 12 men who could agree with the details over a big fish story? If this were truly the case with the Biblical account, we should have at least one of these men saying, "No, it didn’t happen like that." Judas was distraught to the point of his own death after betraying Jesus. He was deeply conflicted over disavowing Jesus. If it were a big fish story all he would have to do is go around saying, “It didn’t happen like that,” and he could have discredited Jesus. Instead he joined with the religious authorities of the day to betray Jesus to death to try and silence the truth of who he is—God incarnate.
How does this apply to you? Let me ask how you take this list. Do you put yourself in the position of authority and simply dismiss it? Or do you begin to see it as an invitation to believe the good news that surrounds it? If you can’t believe it on the grounds that you were there and saw it, can you believe it on the basis of the eyewitnesses who were there? Can you believe it based on the faithful transmission of that message down through the centuries?
As we approach Easter, I encourage you to consider the honest questions about Scripture that have confronted you. What questions have your friends asked, or what questions are you asking? Your questions are always welcome here, and I would love to hear them via email, or talk about them with you over a cup of coffee.
In Him,
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