The Historical Unreliability of the Passion Story in the Gospel of Mark - INDEX

 

The Historical Unreliability of the Gospel of Luke - INDEX

Here are links to my posts about the historical unreliability of the stories about alleged events in the life of Jesus found in the Gospel of Luke that involve changes or additions to the stories about alleged events in the life of Jesus found in the Gospel of Mark:

The Unreliability of the Gospel of Luke - Part 1: General Considerations

The Unreliability of the Gospel of Luke - Part 2: Birth, Infancy, & Childhood Stories

The Unreliability of the Gospel of Luke - Part 3: Unhistorical Genealogy

The Unreliability of the Gospel of Luke - Part 4: Chapter 1

NOTE:

I plan to write several more posts about the historical unreliability of the Gospel of Luke, and will add links to this page as those posts are written and published.

The Historical Unreliability of the Gospel of Matthew - INDEX

The Unreliability of the Gospel of Luke - Part 4: Chapter 1

EIGHT STORIES IN LUKE'S BIRTH NARRATIVE

In the first two chapters of the Gospel of Luke, we find eight different events related to the birth, infancy, and childhood of Jesus that are not found in the Gospel of Mark:[1]

• Miraculous Conception of John (Luke 1:7-25)
• Miraculous Conception of Jesus (Luke 1:26-38)
• Mary Visits Elizabeth (Luke 1:39-56)
• Birth and Naming of John (Luke 1:57-80]
• Birth of Jesus (Luke 2:1-7)
• Visit of the Shepherds (Luke 2:8-20)
• Dedication of Jesus (Luke 2:21-40)
• The Young Jesus in Jerusalem (Luke 2:41-52)

In this post, I will critically examine the four stories in Chapter 1

of the Gospel of Luke.

MIRACULOUS CONCEPTION OF JOHN 

The first story related to the birth and childhood of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke concerns the conception of John the Baptist:

5 In the days of King Herod of Judea, there was a priest named Zechariah, who belonged to the priestly order of Abijah. His wife was descended from the daughters of Aaron, and her name was Elizabeth. 6 Both of them were righteous before God, living blamelessly according to all the commandments and regulations of the Lord. 7 But they had no children because Elizabeth was barren, and both were getting on in years.

8 Once when he was serving as priest before God during his section’s turn of duty, 9 he was chosen by lot, according to the custom of the priesthood, to enter the sanctuary of the Lord to offer incense. 10 Now at the time of the incense offering, the whole assembly of the people was praying outside. 11 Then there appeared to him an angel of the Lord, standing at the right side of the altar of incense. 12 When Zechariah saw him, he was terrified, and fear overwhelmed him. 13 But the angel said to him, “Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer has been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you will name him John. 14 You will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his birth, 15 for he will be great in the sight of the Lord. He must never drink wine or strong drink; even before his birth he will be filled with the Holy Spirit. 16 He will turn many of the people of Israel to the Lord their God. 17 With the spirit and power of Elijah he will go before him, to turn the hearts of parents to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous, to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.” 18 Zechariah said to the angel, “How can I know that this will happen? For I am an old man, and my wife is getting on in years.” 19 The angel replied, “I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God, and I have been sent to speak to you and to bring you this good news. 20 But now, because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their time, you will become mute, unable to speak, until the day these things occur.”

21 Meanwhile the people were waiting for Zechariah and wondering at his delay in the sanctuary. 22 When he did come out, he was unable to speak to them, and they realized that he had seen a vision in the sanctuary. He kept motioning to them and remained unable to speak. 23 When his time of service was ended, he returned to his home.

24 After those days his wife Elizabeth conceived, and for five months she remained in seclusion. She said, 25 “This is what the Lord has done for me in this time, when he looked favorably on me and took away the disgrace I have endured among my people.”

(Luke 1:5-25)

MIRACULOUS CONCEPTION OF JESUS

(Luke 1:26-38)

MARY VISITS ELIZABETH 

(Luke 1:39-56)

BIRTH AND NAMING OF JOHN 

(Luke 1:57-80]

END NOTES

1. Raymond Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament (New York, NY: Doubleday,1997), from footnote #23 on page 236.

The Unreliability of the Gospel of Luke - Part 3: Unhistorical Genealogy

 A SECOND REASON FOR THE HISTORICAL UNRELIABILITY OF THE GOSPEL OF LUKE

In this post, I am going to provide more specific evidence that the changes and additions to stories about Jesus from the Gospel of Mark made by the author of the Gospel of Luke are dubious and historically unreliable.

Here is the second reason that supports this conclusion:

REASON #2: The Gospel of Mark has no stories about the birth, infancy, or childhood of Jesus, but the Gospel of Luke adds stories of eight such events, and there are good reasons to doubt the historical reliability of those stories in the Gospel of Luke. 

In Part 2, we saw that most mainline NT and Jesus scholars view the birth stories in Matthew and Luke as being unhistorical legends and that there are at least three good reasons why scholars are skeptical about these stories.  Given that in Part 1 we saw that there were eight general considerations that cast doubt on the reliability of the stories in the Gospel of Luke that are added to or changed from the Gospel of Mark, and that the birth stories are not based on the Gospel of Mark, we may reasonably conclude that the birth stories in the Gospel of Luke is probably historically unreliable.

NINE ASPECTS OF THE BIRTH STORIES IN LUKE 

In the first two chapters of the Gospel of Luke we find eight different events about the birth, infancy, and childhood of Jesus that are not found in the Gospel of Mark:[1]

• Miraculous Conception of John (Luke 1:7-25)
• Miraculous Conception of Jesus (Luke 1:26-38)
• Mary Visits Elizabeth (Luke 1:39-56)
• Birth and Naming of John (Luke 1:57-80]
• Birth of Jesus (Luke 2:1-7)
• Visit of the Shepherds (Luke 2:8-20)
• Dedication of Jesus (Luke 2:21-40)
• The Young Jesus in Jerusalem (Luke 2:41-52)

Also related to the birth of Jesus, the Gospel of Luke provides an alleged genealogy of Jesus:

• Jesus' Genealogy (Luke 3:23-38)

If this genealogy is historically dubious, then that would cast doubt on the historical reliability of the eight alleged events in the first two chapters of the Gospel of Luke.

LEADING NT AND JESUS SCHOLARS DOUBT JESUS' GENEOLOGY IN LUKE 3:23-38

The genealogy of Jesus presented in Chapter 3 of the Gospel of Luke is dubious and probably fictional.  If so, then this is another good reason to believe that the birth stories in the Gospel of Luke are historically unreliable. 

NT and Jesus scholar Raymond Brown doubts that the genealogy in the Gospel of Luke is historical:

There are many differences [in Luke's geneology] from Matt's geneology (especially from David on)... While Luke's list may be less classically monarchical than Matt's, there is little likelihood that either is strictly historical. ...Both serve a theological purpose, e.g., Luke has a pattern of sevens even as Matt had a pattern of fourteen [generations] to show divine planning.[1]

NT and Jesus scholar John Meier views the genealogies in both the Gospel of Luke and the Gospel of Matthew as "theological constructs":

Any attempt to use one of the two genealogies of Jesus (Matt 11-17; Luke 3:23-38) to establish Mary's lineage is doomed to failure because (1) both genealogies explicitly trace Jesus' genealogy through Joseph and (2) both genealogies are theological constructs and should not be taken as biological records. ...With minor exceptions, the two genealogies contradict each other from the time of David to the time of Joseph, legal father of Jesus.  In theory, one of the two genealogies might possibly contain some historical information, but it is impossible for us today to know which that might be...[2]

NT and Jesus scholar E.P. Sanders does not discuss the genealogies of Jesus in detail, but he does clearly imply that the genealogy of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke is unhistorical: 

According to Luke's own genealogy (3.23-38), David had lived forty-two generations before Joseph. ...No one could trace his genealogy for forty-two generations, but if he could, he would find that he had millions of ancestors (one million is passed at the twentieth generation).[3]

If no one could trace his genealogy for forty-two generations, then Joseph, Jesus' legal father, could not have traced his genealogy for forty-two generations. If Joseph could not trace his own genealogy for forty-two generations, then clearly nobody else, such as the author of the Gospel of Luke, could trace Joseph's genealogy for that many generations. Therefore, the genealogy in the Gospel of Luke is unhistorical, according to Jesus scholar E.P. Sanders.

Jesus scholar Geza Vermes doubts that the genealogies of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke and in the Gospel of Matthew provide historically reliable information about Jesus:

The first impression we gain when we compare the often discrepant names advanced by Luke with the list of Matthew is that the documents before us are unlikely to be reliable from the point of view of history.[4]

The substantial differences between Matthew and Luke are beyond dispute and have always puzzled the theologians and the Bible interpreters of the Church. New Testament scholars have attempted since time immemorial to iron out the discrepancies and reconcile them, but without visible success.[5] 

 ...the most probable explanation of the enigma is that the aim pursued by Matthew and Luke in compiling their genealogies was doctrinal, and not historical. To prove the Davidic family connection of Jesus, a prerequisite of his Messianic standing, they probably employed documents. But since their records are contradictory, they must have laid their hands on separate registers of David's descendants.  All they needed to do was to re-edit them so that they both ended (or started) with Joseph and Jesus (or Jesus and Joseph). This was definitely possible, as we know from Jewish as well as from Christian sources that genealogical lists of this sort were circulating among the Jewish inhabitants of Palestine at the beginning of the Christian era.[6]   

NT scholar M. Eugene Boring is skeptical of the historicity of the genealogy of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew. Many of his skeptical comments also apply to the genealogy of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke: 

The purpose of the genealogy is not to give accurate history, but to set the story of Jesus into the context of the ongoing story of God's acts in history... The genealogy is not the result of a biographical effort to discover genealogical data, but a literary-theological construction by Matthew himself, from his Bible, and (perhaps) from traditional genealogies circulating in Jewish Christianity.

[...]

 Except in priestly families, detailed genealogical records were rarely available. Many genealogies were tangled, and even some religious leaders could not trace their own genealogy. ...Occasionally, genealogies were produced by imaginative puns on the words involved rather than from history or tradition. Joshua and Jonah were provided with genealogies by imaginative midrashic exegesis, as were famous rabbis. Thus, the speculative, novelistic picture of Matthew or some other early Christian researching the genealogical archives of Bethlehem or interviewing members of Jesus' family should be abandoned as a fundamental misunderstanding of the historical reality of the times and of the gospel genre.[7]

One of the Jewish objections to the Christian claim that Jesus is the Messiah was that according to Scripture the Messiah is to be born in Bethlehem (cf. John 7:42), while Jesus came from unbiblical Nazareth. ...It could well be that Jesus was in fact born in Nazareth, and that Christian scribes provided Jesus with a Davidic genealogy and a Davidic birthplace based on their conviction that Jesus is the Christ and their interpretation of Scripture...[8] 

Boring clearly does not view the genealogies of Jesus found in the Gospel of Matthew or the Gospel of Luke as providing historically reliable information about Jesus.

NT scholar R. Alan Culpepper's commentary on the Gospel of Luke does not explicitly state that the genealogy of Jesus is historically unreliable, but nearly every point he makes about the genealogy implies skepticism about its historical reliability:

Documentation of ancestry was especially common among royal and priestly families.  Succession and kinship conferred power and privilege.  Genealogies established lines of relationship among families and tribes, but they could also describe the character of an individual.  In order to fulfill such purposes, genealogies were often oral and marked by fluidity.  First Timothy 1:4 warns against those who are preoccupied with "myths and endliess genealogies that promote speculations."[9]

The genealogies of Jesus in Matthew and Luke both reflect attention to their structure, deliberate numerical patterns, and evidence of their author's theological interests.[9]

If the genealogies were shaped by these non-historical concerns and interests, then the genealogies are probably not historically reliable.

Culpepper points out a number of contradictions between the genealogy of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke and the genealogy in the Gospel of Matthew, and he rejects the attempt to reconcile the genealogies by the claim that the genealogy in the Gospel of Luke is about Mary's ancestors while the genealogy in the Gospel of Matthew is about Joseph's ancestors. He also draws this skeptical conclusion:

From these comparisons, it is clear that any attempt to harmonize the two genealogies is futile. Both evangelists presumably worked with traditional genealogies... Each evangelist exercised considerable freedom in constructing the genealogy, therefore, and each genealogy, by its selection and arrangement of the names, serves as a comment on the identity of Jesus.[9]

Clearly, if Matthew and Luke "selected" different currently available genealogies of the descendants of David, and if they "exercised considerable freedom in constructing the genealogy" and in the "arrangement of the names", then these genealogies do NOT contain historically reliable information about Jesus. Culpepper indicates that the purpose of these genealogies was not historical, but rather the purpose was to "comment on the identity of Jesus".  

In his final comments on Luke's genealogy, Culpepper suggests five different theological points that Luke had in mind in the construction of the genealogy of Jesus.[10] If the purpose and the "arrangement of the names" in this genealogy was to make four or five theological points about "the identity of Jesus", then the genealogy in the Gospel of Luke does not provide historically reliable information about Jesus. 

LUKE'S GENEALOGY CONTRADICTS MATTHEW'S GENEALOGY

There are a number of contradictions between the genealogy of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke and the genealogy of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew, and this is a good reason to doubt the historical reliability of both genealogies.

First, the number of generations from Abraham to Jesus is significantly different in the Gospel of Luke compared to the Gospel of Matthew:

Matthew declares that there are 42 generations between Abraham and Jesus (but gives only 41), while Luke lists 56...[11]

At least one of these two Gospels has a very inaccurate genealogy.  The Gospel of Matthew lists fifteen fewer generations between Abraham and Jesus than what the Gospel of Luke lists. 

Second, the Gospel of Luke also gives a different number of generations between David and Jesus compared with the Gospel of Matthew:

...Luke lists...42 generations from David to Jesus (for which Matthew has 27, claiming 28.[11]

At least one of these two genealogies must be incorrect.

Third, the two genealogies differ on which son of King David was an ancestor of Jesus:

Further, Matthew traces the line of Jesus through Solomon, so that names following David represent the royal line, the actual kings of Judah, while Luke's genealogy traces the line through David's son Nathan, resulting in a non-royal line.[11]

Fourth, the genealogies contradict each other about who was the father of Joseph:

Matthew and Luke even give different names for Joseph's father (Matt. 1:16, Jacob; Luke 3:23, Heli).[11]

Given these contradictions between the genealogies, at least one of these two genealogies must be mistaken. This gives us good reason to doubt the historical reliability of both genealogies.

CONCLUSIONS

Based on various general considerations, in Part 1 of this series, we concluded that the changes and additions made by the author of the Gospel of Luke to the stories found in the Gospel of Mark are probably historically unreliable.

Given this reasonable assumption, and given that most mainstream scholars view the birth stories in the Gospel of Luke and the Gospel of Matthew as unhistorical legends, and given the three reasons presented by the Jesus scholar Marcus Borg for viewing the birth stories as unhistorical, in Part 2 we concluded that it is probable that the birth stories in the Gospel of Luke are historically unreliable additions to the stories found in the Gospel of Mark.

Because many leading Jesus and NT scholars doubt the historical reliability of the genealogy of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke, and because the two genealogies contradict each other on a number of points, and because there are other good reasons to doubt both the genealogy in the Gospel of Luke and the genealogy in the Gospel of Matthew, we may reasonably conclude that the geneaology of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke is probably historically unreliable.

We now have another specific reason to doubt the reliability of the birth stories in the Gospel of Luke: the probable historical unreliability of the genealogy of Jesus in that Gospel.

In upcoming posts, I will examine various alleged events that make up the stories in the Gospel of Luke about the birth, infancy, and childhood of Jesus.  

END NOTES

1. Raymond Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament (New York, NY: Doubleday,1997), from footnote #23 on page 236.

2. John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew, Volume 1 (New York, NY: Doubleday, 1991), end note #47 on p.238.

3. E.P. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus (New York, NY: Penguin Books USA Inc., 1993), p.86.

4. Geza Vermes, The Nativity (London: Penguin Books, 2006), p.36.

5. Geza Vermes, The Nativity (London: Penguin Books, 2006), pp.41-42.

6. Geza Vermes, The Nativity (London: Penguin Books, 2006), p.43.

7. M. Eugene Boring, "The Gospel of Matthew" in The New Interpreter's Bible, Volume VIII (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995), pp.128-129.

8. M. Eugene Boring, "The Gospel of Matthew" in The New Interpreter's Bible, Volume VIII (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995), p.140.

9. R. Alan Culpepper, "The Gospel of Luke" in The New Interpreter's Bible, Volume IX (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995), p.94.

10. R. Alan Culpepper, "The Gospel of Luke" in The New Interpreter's Bible, Volume IX (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995), p.95.

11. M. Eugene Boring, "The Gospel of Matthew" in The New Interpreter's Bible, Volume VIII (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1995), p.131.

The Historical Unreliability of Matthew, Mark, and Luke - INDEX

Here are links to my posts about the historical unreliability of the stories about alleged events in the life, ministry, trials, crucifixion, and burial of Jesus found in the first three Gospels:

The Strategy of my Case for the Historical Unreliability of Matthew, Mark, and Luke 

The Historical Unreliability of the Gospel of Luke

The Historical Unreliability of the Gospel of Matthew

The Historical Unreliability of the Passion Story in the Gospel of Mark

Because each of these Gospels are historically unreliable in terms of stories about events in the life, ministry, crucifixion, and burial of Jesus (i.e., careful investigation of these stories casts significant doubt on them), people who think critically will maintain healthy skepticism about any historical claims that are based on these Gospels, including historical claims asserted by Christian aplogists in cases for the resurrection of Jesus. 

That is, critical thinkers will demand clear and strong historical evidence before accepting any historical claims about alleged events in the life of Jesus (especially concerning the alleged trials, crucifixion, burial, and post-crucifixion appearances of Jesus) that are based on these Gospels. Simply quoting passages from these Gospels will NOT be sufficient evidence to establish such historical claims.

The Lousy Track Record of Supernatural Claims - INDEX

 This INDEX post contains (or will contain) links to posts about the track records of various specific kinds of supernatural claims:

The Lousy Track Record of Astrology

The Lousy Track Record of Telepathy/Mind Reading

The Lousy Track Record of Psychic Healing/Faith Healing

The Lousy Track Record of Precognition/Psychic Predictions

The Lousy Track Record of Ghosts & Mediums

The Lousy Track Record of Clairvoyance/Remote Viewing

The Lousy Track Record of Astral Projection/Out Of Body Experiences

The Lousy Track Record of Telekenesis/Mind Over Matter

The Lousy Track Record of Demon Possession and Exorcism

Because each of these different kinds of supernatural claims has a lousy track record (i.e., careful scientific investigation of these claims casts significant doubt on them), people who think critically will maintain healthy skepticism about any supernatural claims, including miracle claims. That is, critical thinkers will demand clear and strong scientific evidence before accepting any specific supernatural claim.

NOTE: As I write and publish posts on these topics, I will add links to those posts on this page.