Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Aren't you inconsistent in your views of the historicity of the Gospels, written by Bart Ehrman, read by Ken toutch do contradictions in a story show that it didn't happen?
[00:00:17] When I first responded a few days ago to Mark Goodacre's five points calling into question the traditional story of the discovery of the Naghamadi Library, I was intrigued to receive a number of comments suggesting I sure seemed to be inconsistent in how I dealt with historical accounts. To wit, why would I say contradictions in the Naghamadi discovery story that Mark pointed out don't show that the basic account is false, that is, didn't happen. But I do use contradictions to call the Gospel accounts of Jesus into question. Is this an agenda driven inconsistency?
[00:00:56] Alright, fair question. First, let me remind you that in my post a few days ago about the Naghamadi discovery, I pointed out that just because a story changes over time does not mean that the gist of the story is false. If some tellings indicate that the jar was 2ft tall and others that it was six, or that there were two people involved, or seven, this does not indicate that the story is at its heart false, only that it has been changed. In the retelling. The comments I received pointed out that the arguments Mark Goodacre was making about the discovery of the library are precisely the kind of arguments that I and critical scholars generally, including probably Mark, would make and have made against the stories of the Gospels about Jesus.
[00:01:45] If I want to use those kinds of arguments against the historicity of the Gospel accounts, what grounds do I have for challenging them? When used to argue against the historicity of the account of the discovery of the Nag Hamadi Library?
[00:02:00] Here are two of the many comments I received along these lines interesting, but aren't Mark's reasons some of the ones you have for doubting the historicity of the gospel stories? Would love to see a discussion of the similarities and differences.
[00:02:16] I can't help thinking how you claim that there being multiple versions of the empty tomb story differing in how many women were there, what they saw, what they were told to do, what they later did do, makes the gist of the story unbelievable.
[00:02:33] In response, I think these are terrifically, interesting and important comments to answer them. First, let me clarify my view of historical evidence generally, as it applies to the Gospels, to the Naghamadi discovery narrative, and well, to most everything, this can help explicate the value of historical sources.
[00:02:55] My view of the matter, in short, is this if you have two or more accounts of an event, say something that Jesus did, or about the Naghamadi discovery narrative, and these two have differences, that much would be expected. Everyone will tell stories in their own way, not necessarily a big deal. Where it is a big deal is where the accounts are not just different, but contradictory. An account that says Jesus celebrated his last supper on the day of the Passover and an account that says this supper was in fact celebrated the day before the passover cannot both be right. It was either a passover meal or it wasn't. But it can't be both. In the naghamadi discovery narrative, if the jar was 2ft tall, it could not also be 6ft tall. Those are contradictions.
[00:03:47] So if you have two accounts that are contradictory, either one of them is wrong in that contradictory information and the other is right, or both of them are wrong, but both of them cannot be right.
[00:04:01] But, and here is one key methodological point if you have two accounts of something Jesus'last meal, the Nagamati discovery narrative that are contradictory in some information, that does not in itself mean that both of them are wrong. It only means that one of them has to be in that information.
[00:04:23] And so if the stories of the discovery of Jesus's empty tomb are hopelessly contradictory, that means they all cannot be true to what happened historically in their details. But it does not eliminate the possibility that one of them is true to history. One could be right and the other's wrong if they are contradictory. And it may be that one telling of the story, either of Jesus'last meal, the discovery of the empty tomb or the naghamadi discovery narrative may be right in one detail and wrong in another, whereas another telling might be right in the detail the other got wrong and wrong in the one the other got right. The contradictions between the accounts thus do not in and of themselves disprove the historical accuracy of one of the stories or more important, the gist of the story. Did Jesus have a last meal with his disciples? The accounts are contradictory, but that doesn't in itself mean he didn't have a last meal with his disciples, about which something can be known. Did Jesus's women followers discover his empty tomb on the third day? The accounts are contradictory, but that doesn't mean in and of itself that some such event didn't happen. Did Muhammad Ali and one or more others find a jar in the wilderness outside of the village of Nagh Hamadi that contained the 13 books of the Nagh Hamadi library? The accounts are contradictory, but that doesn't mean in and of itself that the event didn't happen.
[00:05:54] How then do we decide if the event more or less as it is narrated? The last Supper, the discovery of the empty tomb, the naghamadi discovery narrative actually happened? For that we need other kinds of evidence, something other than the fact that the accounts have details at ODS with one another. And that is why, in my book, How Jesus Became God, I spend so much time not just on the contradictions between the accounts of the discovery of the empty tomb, which I cover rather quickly, but on the historical plausibility of the very basic element of the story that Jesus was buried in a known tomb which was discovered empty on the third day. To show that the gist of the story is itself problematic, I turned not to contradictions, but to the known practices of the Romans when it came to crucifixion and the disposition of criminals'bodies. If Jesus was actually buried on the day of his death, that would have been highly anomalous in the provinces of the Roman Empire. And it is for that reason that I don't think it happened. I give the details and make the fuller argument in my book, for here the point is simply that the contradictions may lead you to wonder if the whole thing was made up, but they don't show you that it was. You need other evidence for that.
