Religion on Trial: Cross-Examining Religious Truth Claims (Second Edition) by Craig Parton

Author:Craig Parton [Parton, Craig]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Concordia Publishing House
Published: 2018-05-16T16:00:00+00:00

In short, Ehrman’s “more variants than words” claim is grossly misleading.

The Internal Evidence Test: Did Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John Possess the Means, Motive, and Opportunity to Record the Events Correctly?

While it is important to establish that a work has a trustworthy and reliable manuscript authority behind it, that is not the end of the inquiry. Even if copies come very early (even on top of the events they record), and even if there are a substantial number of copies that lead one to conclude that the original text can be accurately reconstructed, it is still quite possible that the work is generally unreliable. That can be the case if the “internal evidence” for the document is problematic. By this, we mean if evidence generated from within the document itself indicates that the authors were not in a position to have firsthand knowledge of the events they describe, or that they lacked the requisite skill or opportunity to get the facts right, or that they suffered from incurable bias, the document may still be unreliable in terms of providing a sound and verifiable base for its claims.

Fortunately this area of inquiry has been well-developed, particularly within the domain of the law, lawyers, and trial courts. Simon Greenleaf, the renowned professor of evidence at the Harvard Law School in the 19th century and author of the definitive 3-volume treatise on evidence for its day, wrote widely on this precise topic. Greenleaf looked carefully at the question of whether the biographers of Jesus had the necessary means, motive, and opportunity to correctly record the events of the life of Jesus. The conclusion of Greenleaf, and numerous trial lawyers after him who have examined the evidence,25 is that these writers more than meet the test. First, they had the means to do this kind of careful recordation. For example, Luke was a physician by training and he records that he set out to carefully develop the entire chronology of events of the life and ministry of Jesus. Luke provides enormous historical detail in his writings, which is precisely what one would not be doing if the goal is to deceive or play fast and loose with the facts. The following portion of the Book of Luke is the type of factual minutia we get from this author whose historical style has been compared to that of Roman historians Tacitus and Suetonius:

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