We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.

5568303244_70fe46dedf

Are the Gospels Historical Fiction?

Some scholars today argue that the stories recorded in the Gospels are actually intentional fabrication. In essence, they argue that Mark took Paul’s theology and robed the story of Jesus in a fictitious historical narrative. The other Gospels followed suit. The argument is clever and removes the difficulty of explaining how a legend of a God-man could arise so quickly among first-century Jews.

But there are 7 major problems with this contention:

  1. The Gospels don’t read like a fictional genre of literature. To the contrary, they give us many indications that they genuinely intended to report reliable history. In addition, they pass all the standard tests scholars usually apply to ancient documents to ascertain a general historical reliability.
  2. We must ask why the authors of the Gospels would want to create a new, fictionalized Jesus story. What was their motivation? By the time that these authors were writing the Gospels, Christians were being tortured and put to death for their faith. So what could these authors have thought they or their readers would gain by fabricating and embracing this fictional story?
  3. We have to wonder why any early Christian would have accepted them as true.
  4. How did the authors of the Gospels think they could get away with creating a fiction situated in the recent past and in such close geographical proximity to their audiences? We must remember that Jewish religious authorities had a vested interest in putting an end to this movement, which they considered to be a dangerous sect. If the story these authors were telling was false, it seems it would have been relatively easy to expose it as such.
  5. To accept the version of the early church history offered by these scholars, we must also accept that the version of the church history given in the book of Acts is largely false. For many reasons that cannot be addressed here, the book of Acts is a remarkably reliable piece of ancient historiography.
  6. An understanding of the Gospels as fictitious completely ignores the role that writing plays in orally-dominant cultures. Writing was not the primary means of communication among people in the first century. Rather, information was passed along primarily by word of mouth. Writing plays a very different role in these cultures than in “literary cultures.” In literary cultures, novelty and innovation in literature is valued. In orally-dominant cultures, it is generally frowned upon. The primary purpose of writing, rather, is faithfully to re-express an established oral tradition.
  7. Research has demonstrated that in orally-dominant contexts people tend to be quite resistant to change in terms of the essential components. Oral performers—those who regularly recite oral traditions for their communities—are allowed a certain amount of flexibility in how they recite traditional material. But if the oral performer alters anything of substance in the tradition, members of the community customarily interrupt and correct him or her. Hence, the suggestion that a fictional writing from an anonymous author could have overturned established oral traditions about Jesus in the early church must be judged as massively improbable. This is simply not how orally-dominant cultures tend to operate.

—Adapted from Lord or Legend? pages 42-45

Image by Walters Art Museum Illuminated Manuscripts via Flickr

Related Reading

Would God Kill a Baby To Teach Parents a Lesson?

Question: We have a group of guys that are going through your book “Is God to Blame” and a question came up that I would be curious how you would look at it. In the beginning of the book you ask the question “do you really think that God kills babies to teach parents a lesson?”…

God is Not a Monster

Pastor Brian Zhand has a way with words that captures the imagination. And he is a pastor that has taken time to read the church fathers. In a recent post, he quotes Saint Antony who wrote, “I no longer fear God, but I love him. For love casts out fear.” Brian confronts the common misconceptions and images of God that…

Finding an Alternative Jesus

The “Newly Discovered” Jesus One of the most common, and most disturbing, refrains heard in the media’s coverage of contemporary radical views of Christ is that New Testament scholars have recently “discovered” new sources of information about Jesus that contradict the Bible’s own view of Jesus. It is claimed that works such as the Gospel…

Pre-Modern Readings of Genesis 1

Biologos posted a three part reflection on Pre-Modern readings of Genesis 1 that are worth a closer look. And no matter what your particular way of reading this portion of Scripture, let’s pay attention to what edifies the Church and whether our reading contributes to that. From Part I of the series: Key theologians of…

The Perfect Love of God

The Father, Son and Spirit exist as the infinite intensity and unsurpassable perfection of eternal love. We know this about the triune God not by speculation but because Jesus demonstrated that love (Rom 5:8) in his willingness to go to the furthest extreme possible to save us. When the all-holy God stooped to become our…

Predestination Part 2: Seeing Destiny Rightly

For Part 1, click here. In Ephesians Paul teaches that God “chose us in [Christ] before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight” (Eph 1:4). In Christ, Paul continues, God “predestined us for adoption to sonship…to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in…