Can We Trust the Gospels? – Ch 3: Did the Gospel Authors Know Their Stuff?

This is a chapter summary of Peter J Williams, “Can We Trust the Gospels?”.  For the book overview and chapter summary links, click here.

In this chapter, Williams aims to show that the authors of the Gospels wrote accurately about the time and place of the events they wrote about. He explains that if the authors did not show that they knew the things they were writing about, then they could not be trusted. To fake such knowledge would be implausible without making some mistakes, especially without the access to information we have today.

Some points which are mentioned are as follows:

1. There is a huge variety of places and locations mentioned in the Gospels, each mentioning slightly different sets of locations. While this is no definite proof, the fact that not only famous and recognisable places, but also obscure places are mentioned would give credence to the idea that the Gospel writers were not writing from a remote location with no connection to those places. (For example, in John, several minor villages such as Aenon, Cana, Ephraim, Salim and Sychar are mentioned.)
2. The Gospels did not only copy from each other, as there is unique information in each of the Gospels. 
3. All writers show a variety of types of geographical information. 
4. Williams argues that such knowledge suggests that the Gospel authors received the information either from their experience or from detailed hearing (not reading some other documentary source of information). 
5. The frequency at which the Gospels mention contemporary geography is similar to each other, whilst mentioning different places. Williams argues that this means it is highly likely that the mentioning of geography was not intentional to make the pieces seem authentic, but were genuine descriptions within the text.
6. The Gospels also show knowledge of how towns and places relate to one another, and the topography of Palestine. 
   1. E.g. in Luke 10, in the Parable of the Good Samaritan, the man was described as going down from Jerusalem to Jericho. There are 2 points to this. 
   2. Firstly, the passage suggests a direct route between the two cities, which there was in fact. 
   3. Secondly, it correctly describes the journey as going down, as Jericho is the lowest city on Earth at 250 metres below sea level. (There are multiple more examples, such as in John 2:12, Luke 4:31.) 
   4. In Luke 10:13-15, and its parallel in Matthew 11:21-23, Jesus rebukes three Jewish towns or villages (Chorazin, Bethsaida and Capernaum). The interesting bit is that Chorazin was very little known about, but is actually on the road to Bethsaida and a couple of miles north of Capernaum. There is no known other literary source that could have provided this information to a Gospel author.

Williams explains that he is not saying that the above points make the Gospels true. Rather, they disprove the narrative that the Gospels are wrong due to a lack of quality information. 

He argues, in fact, that this makes the Gospels highly valuable as geographical sources. For example, Decapolis, a group of ten cities known by their non-Jewish populations is first mentioned in Mark according to commonly accepted dating of different sources, even though its existence is ‘proved’ by secular sources that were found only much later.

The biggest point to takeaway is that the information the writers of the Gospels had was on the level of what is expected of the traditional authors, such that the Gospels are unlikely to be made up by people who were geographically distant.

The four Gospels can be distinguished in this regard from the later so-called apocryphal gospels that are not accepted as biblical canon, e.g. Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Philip, Gospel of Judas. These were all written much later and contain much less geographical information.  

The next section briefly goes into the different naming conventions of Jews in different parts of the world. The main point Williams makes is that the Gospels had written about people whose names made sense as the Jews were from Palestine with names such as Simon, Judah and Yohannan. In contrast, Jews from Egypt had common names such as Sabbataius, Dositheus and Pappus. Of course, there were some overlaps in names such as Eleazar (Lazarus) and Joseph.

The use of disambiguation also points toward the authors having detailed cultural knowledge of the time. 

Generally, common names were disambiguated while the less common names were not, which reinforces the point above. Disambiguation in the Gospels were generally in the form of addition of details like a father’s name, a profession or a place of origin. 

For example, Simon Peter (Mk 3:16), Simon the Zealot (Mk 3:18), Simon the Leper (Mk 14:3), Simon the Cyrenian (Mk 15:21). 

In Matthew 14:1-11, the use of disambiguation distinguishes the narrator and the character (Herod). The way that Herod speaks also reflects the situation described, which Williams argues has 2 explanations. Either the author merely reported what actually happened, or was very sophisticated as to be able to imitate in a believable way. Again, Williams argues that this reinforces the idea that the authors had significant knowledge at the very least.

Again, in contrast, the later apocryphal gospels had remarkably little names and disambiguation. 

The use of the name Jesus also reinforces the above point. In AD 30 Palestine, the name Jesus was very common, being an alternative form of the name Joshua, seen in the Old Testament. This is similar to the name Adolf in 1900 Germany, where the question ‘Which Adolf?’ would be asked. 

In the first appearance of the name Jesus being spoken in Matthew (Matthew 21:6-11), there is a clear distinction between the narration and the spoken mention of the name Jesus. The description ‘This is the prophet Jesus, from Nazareth of Galilee’ is used to clarify to the city of Jerusalem of which Jesus this was.

The entire point about names is that they are often very hard to remember. They are merely arbitrary words to identify individuals. In fact, in life today people usually are surprised by the results of surveys in identifying common names, as people are greatly influenced by their small number of contacts. 

Williams therefore argues that the Gospels should then be trustworthy as eyewitness accounts given the accuracy of their high-quality information. If they were not reliable eyewitness accounts, they would be prone to failure and a lack of quality information.

Williams also addresses critics’ analogy of the transmission of the Gospels’ accounts with the telephone game. He argues that the telephone game is by design optimised to produce corruption. In contrast, the circumstances of the transmission of information in the Gospels were unsuitable for production corruption: the Jewish society’s high emphasis on truth and authoritative teaching, a wide geographical spread among followers of Jesus, and a high personal cost to following Jesus. 

The rest of the chapter goes into more examples of little details which each point toward the Gospels being reliable sources of information (e.g. Jewishness of the Gospels, knowledge of botanical terms, knowledge of finance systems, knowledge of local languages, knowledge of unusual customs), but the general idea is there with the above examples.