Reply to Smart 185makes some general comments about the character of the Gospels and illus-
trates the possibility of naturalistic explanations by drawing on the thesis
(advanced by S.G.F. Brandon and others) that Jesus was a revolutionary
Zealot put to death for threatening insurrection against the governing Roman
authorities.
Let me reply in order, beginning with some broad points about scriptural
scholarship. First, the New Testament is the main, and by and large the only,
source for the events it purports to describe. There are some places where
external evidence is available, but apart from helping us with very general
features of the period extra-scriptural sources contribute little. This fact, how-
ever, is neither surprising nor problematic. Most of what is described in the
Gospels, Epistles and Acts of the Apostles concerns events that only the
followers of Jesus would have been witness to or had an interest in. That said,
the combination of internal and external evidence for the life and teachings of
Jesus is very much better than for most figures in antiquity. For example, he
merits several lines in the only remaining history of Judaism in first-century
Palestine,viz. Josephus’Antiquities of the Jews.^13 Also, while it is clearly the
case that the Gospels are composite works put together in stages from sayings
and episodes this technique is not of itself unreliable. Far from diminishing
the evidential value of scripture it encourages the idea that certain events
were so securely fixed in the minds of Christ’s followers and so compelling to
hearers that they survived in oral form until the passage of time and the
growth of Christianity made it necessary to commit them to paper. Some-
thing of the flavour of these circumstances is conveyed by the very matter-
of-fact opening of Luke’s Gospel:
Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things which
have been accomplished among us, just as they were delivered to us by those
who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word, it seemed
good to me also, having followed all things closely, for some time past, to write
an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, that you may know the
truth concerning the things of which you have been informed. (Luke 1: 1 – 4)The task of dating the earliest Christian documents is problematic. Given
that they probably evolved from anecdotes and aphorisms into comprehensive
texts, there is a theoretical question as to what to count as an early version of
a Gospel; and given the circumstances of the early Christians it is not to be
expected that anything from the first century will be found. Nonetheless,
there is a widespread consensus among theist, agnostic and atheist scholars
that Paul’s Epistles were written in the 50s and 60s of the first century and
that the Gospels, in more or less the form in which we have them today, were
composed between 70 (Mark) and 90 ( John) AD. Smart remarks that the