Craig L. Blomberg - The Historical Reliability of the Gospels

THE HISTORICAL RELIABILITY
OF THE

G OSPELS

SECOND EDITION

CONTENTS

FOREWORD TO THE FIRST EDITION (1987)

There is, I imagine, no body of literature in the world that has been exposed to the stringent analytical study that the four Gospels have sustained for the past two hundred years. This is not something to be accepted with satisfaction. Scholars today who treat the Gospels as credible historical documents do so in the full light of this analytical study, not by closing their minds to it.

A problem arises in this television age from the exposure of the public to a bewildering variety of opinions about the Gospels in particular and the New Testament in general, including both the current scholarly consensus (if such a thing exists today) and every sort of way-out interpretation of the data, with little or no guidance being given about the criteria by which competing views are to be assessed and a reasonable conclusion reached. In this situation a work like Dr Blombergs is really helpful.

Dr Blomberg is a member of a team of scholars who have for a number of years been engaged on a Gospels Project, designed to explore the main critical issues in the study of the Gospels in our time. The findings of this team have been published in a series of six volumes entitled Gospel Perspectives . But these volumes are written by scholars for scholars. What Dr Blomberg has done is to digest their contents and present them, in the light of his own study and understanding of the subject, to a wider public. His book calls for careful thought on the part of its readers, but does not require technical knowledge. Here is an answer to the questions: Is it possible for intelligent people nowadays to approach the Gospels as trustworthy accounts of the life and teaching of Jesus? Must they be read with scepticism until their detailed information is confirmed? Or can we, in the light of present knowledge, take it for granted that their authors intend to record things that really happened? The answer Dr Blomberg gives to these questions is positive and satisfying, because he gives ample evidence of accurate and up-to-date acquaintance with the subject of his work and the relevant literature. I am happy to commend it warmly to readers who are interested in this question, and especially to theological students.

F. F. Bruce

PREFACE

From 1980 to 1986 a series of six volumes entitled Gospel Perspectives appeared from Sheffield Universitys JSOT Press. All six addressed the question of the historical reliability of the Gospels at a technical, scholarly level. Volumes 1 and 2 gathered together a relatively unstructured collection of essays, while volumes 3, 5 and 6 presented articles relating to more specifically delineated themes. Volume 3 set the Gospels against the background of the various types of Jewish history-writing of the day, volume 5 discussed the evidence for the traditions about Jesus from sources other than Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, while volume 6 grappled with the unique problems surrounding the miracles of Jesus. Volume 4 was the only one that was not a multi-author work. Here David Wenham provided an intensive study of Mark 13, its parallels in Matthew and Luke, and related passages containing Jesus teaching on events involving the end times and Christs return. The entire series was the product of the Gospels Research Project of Tyndale House, Cambridge, a residential library and centre for biblical research under the auspices of the Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship in England. The series eventually presented the fruit of the labour of an international team of scholars over a period of nearly ten years.

During my doctoral studies in Aberdeen, Scotland, between 1979 and 1982, and thanks to the gracious invitation of my supervisor, Professor I. Howard Marshall, I became a part of this team and contributed essays to volumes 3, 5 and 6, along with helping David Wenham edit volume 6. The UCCF offered me a fellowship for the 19856 academic year, enabling me, along with my wife, Fran, to live, research and write in Tyndale House and produce the first edition of this book. This enterprise was born out of the Gospels Research Projects desire to disseminate the findings of its work to a wider audience at a somewhat more popular level. The book was geared especially for the new theological student and the educated layperson, but its wide-ranging survey was designed to help scholars and pastors as well. Although birthed by the Gospel Perspectives series, the work became an independent volume in its own right. It in no way gave each essay in the series equal attention and a few were virtually relegated to footnotes. At the same time, it drew freely from a breadth of recent research, discussing numerous topics that the Gospels Research Project had not addressed. But one objective remained the same as for the six-volume series: to provide answers to the questions of historicity which will stand up to serious academic scrutiny and will provide some help for those who are perplexed by scholarly disagreement.

When I submitted the manuscript in 1986 to be published the following year, I never allowed myself to imagine that it might stay in print for twenty years. If it lasted ten, I thought, I should consider myself extremely fortunate. But here we are twenty years later and IVP have asked for a revised, twentiethanniversary edition. I am profoundly grateful to my editor, Philip Duce, in the UK office for the suggestion and to his counterpart, Jim Hoover, in the US office for his willingness (again!) to co-publish it. Where my original wording still seemed to be clear and its logic cogent, I have retained the text unchanged. Where better style or more recent study have suggested alterations, and particularly a fair number of additions, I have introduced them. Two appendices add brief treatments of topics that I did not discuss in the first edition and that would break my narrative flow if I included them in the text proper. The vast majority of all of the original footnotes have been replaced and/or supplemented with references to more recent works, in many cases thanks to considerable help from research assistants Zac Hicks and Mike Hemenway. These sources are more likely to be in print and/or reflect the most accurate and up-to-date scholarship. The main exception comes when I am citing or summarizing portions of the Gospel Perspectives series itself, both because I want to preserve this feature of the original edition and because I find very few places where that series does not still present reliable and useful material. The recent reprinting of all six volumes (20034) reinforces this perception.

In keeping with one of the objectives of the first edition accessibility to the thoughtful layperson I have kept references to foreign language material to a minimum, even while increasing their numbers slightly where particularly important or recent works cry out for notice. But I have read or skimmed a much larger volume of literature than the footnotes explicitly reflect. I have increased substantially the total number of footnotes, along with the number of items in numerous existing footnotes, not least to demonstrate the wealth of scholarship that supports the positions defended here. It may have been just barely understandable twenty years ago that some scholars were not aware of the strength of the case for the Gospels trustworthiness; it is inexplicable today in the light of the voluminous quantity and excellent quality of relevant works that have appeared in the last two decades.

Early in August of 1987, within a few months of when the first edition of The Historical Reliability of the Gospels rolled off the presses, I celebrated my thirty-second birthday. Our first child, a daughter, was not yet a year old. I was preparing to teach my initial full-time year at Denver Seminary in Colorado. Near the end of that month, Fran and I enjoyed our eighth wedding anniversary. In keeping with Genesis 2:24, I knew that I wanted to dedicate my first book to her. Readers can easily do the arithmetic and determine my age and years of marriage in 2007. Authors regularly thank their families for putting up with their long hours of work on their books; after sixteen singly or coauthored or edited volumes, I could scarcely express profuse enough thanks for such longsuffering! At least our older daughter has been away at college during the revision of this particular volume. And my younger daughter has been busy with high-school activities, while Fran herself has embarked on her doctorate in missiology and begun teaching half-time in our Intercultural Ministries Department at Denver Seminary. So I suspect that they have not noticed (or been bothered by) my work nearly as much as when I was occupied on various other writing projects a number of years back!