World of the Bible Podcast, a Tyndale House Production
The Tyndale House podcast now has a new name: World of the Bible podcast. It is still coming to you from Tyndale House, Cambridge, bringing you the same engaging bible research to help you better understand the Bible and explore reasons why it can be trusted.
World of the Bible Podcast, a Tyndale House Production
Trusting the Gospels - Dr Peter J Williams pt1
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
In this episode Dr Andrew Ollerton and Dr Peter J Williams discuss how we gauge trustworthiness in everyday life and how we approach the question of the credibility of the four Gospels.
Dr Peter J Williams is Principal of Tyndale House. He received his PhD in the study of ancient languages related to the Bible from Cambridge University. His 2018 book, Can We Trust the Gospels?, examines evidence from non-Christian sources to assess the trustworthiness of the four biblical accounts of Jesus’s earthly life.
Trusting the Bible is a collaboration between Tyndale House, Cambridge @Tyndale_House and the Bible Society @biblesociety.
Visit us online: Tyndale House & Bible Society.
Editing by Tyndale House. Our music is The Album Clean by Podington Bear soundofpicture.com
Edited by Tyndale House
Music – Acoustic Happy Background used with a standard license from Adobe Stock.
Follow us on: X | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube
Trusting the Bible is a podcast series from Tyndall House Cambridge and Bible Society. Conversations with experts in biblical studies. In our first series, Trusting the Gospels, we're exploring the reliability, relevance, and reality of the four gospel accounts. In this episode, Dr. Andrew Olerton and Dr. Peter J. Williams discuss how we gauge trustworthiness in everyday life and how we approach the question of the credibility of the four gospels.
SPEAKER_02Well, welcome to this podcast series. My name's Andrew Olerton. I work with Bible Society. I'm joined by Dr. Peter J. Williams, who is principal of Tyndale House, and together as organizations, we're partnering with this podcast series to raise confidence in the Bible, something we're all passionate about. Peter, great to have you with us today. Great to be with you. And just share a little bit. You know, Tyndale House, we're here in Cambridge recording it on site. What is Tyndale House? What do you get up to?
SPEAKER_01Well, Tyndale House is a research center for the Bible with a library, the best library in Britain, and people come from around the world, not the well, the best library of the Bible in Britain, let's say, and people come from around the world to study there. We've got a community of 50 people researching the Bible at the doctoral level or above. But our heart is that our research should serve the church and help people to be excited about the Bible. Great.
SPEAKER_02And you're obviously principal of Tinder House, what's what's what do you focus on? What's your day job?
SPEAKER_01Well, it's it's it's quite varied, but uh I get to lead the organization, set the vision, and represent it publicly as well as carry out research, uh teaching, speaking, and and and so on. So we've got an absolutely great team here.
SPEAKER_02Great, and somehow you get time to write books and various things as well. We've got um you've you've recently released the book Can We Trust the Gospels um with Crossway, which is uh which I've read and really enjoyed as long as many other people. Encourage our listeners to get hold of a copy. And uh obviously this is a lifetime passionate of yours. Could you just backtrack though? I say lifetime, I don't know that for sure. What when did you tell us a little bit about your faith journey, how have you come to a place where this matters to you?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so I I had the privilege of growing up in a uh Christian family, but um coming to university and coming across a home load of different ideas, you really realize that these things are incredibly disputed, and uh that sent me through a stage of uh of doubt and searching and finding answers and eventually sharing answers. And so one of the things I've been um thinking about for the last twenty or more years was this subject of the trustworthiness of the gospels, and I tried to write uh all the thoughts I'd had that were uh worthwhile uh in 140 pages. So I I wanted to make it very condensed and simple. I didn't want to use uh technical language unnecessarily. I just want to explain things uh so it's for an absolute beginner or someone who's been uh in um studying the gospels for quite a few years. I hope they'd both get a lot from it. Yeah, well that was what struck me was thank you for making it short.
SPEAKER_02I know that took you a lot longer. Lots of people write long books. Yeah, exactly. I know it takes you a lot longer to write a short book, which is the irony, but we're I think we're really grateful for that because I know I know how much uh goes on in your mind or some of it, but you've got it down, you've condensed it down to something very accessible. Um and I suppose that reflects a concern then that you you and Tinderhouse share about actually good scholarship is something that everyone can engage with, and every Christian, I suppose, can have an opportunity to really think for themselves on these things.
SPEAKER_01That's right. I I think uh uh an analogy I often use is with the sort of ingredients that we have on tins and uh food and these sort of things, where uh we're not all dietary experts, but we're all taking a bit of an interest. Uh nowadays every parent feels they have to read ingredients sometimes in order to know what's in it. And so I think it's it's the same way with the Bible. It's not that everyone's gonna be a scholarly expert on the Bible, but everyone can take an interest in the nuts and bolts of how it's come to us and uh what we can say about it. So that's what I'm encouraging people to do, to to just take take an interest.
SPEAKER_02That's great. Yeah, good good uh good analogy. So Pete, like every author, you probably chose your title carefully. And I noticed you you landed on can we trust the gospels, not you know, can we prove the gospels? Let's start with that word trust. You know, what's what's your um what do you mean by that? And how how what's your ambition for this book? What is what would it mean to trust the gospels?
SPEAKER_01Well, trust is something that every human exercises every day. Um we are social creatures and we depend on each other for our lives. Literally. Um when we consume food, we buy food from shops, you know, there's enough um that we're consuming that if it were poisoned we'd be dead. And we can't not rely on what the shop supply or you know what other people supply. You can try and imagine going off on and living on your own and not relying on anyone else. And it's gonna be exceedingly difficult. And so uh because trust is something we exercise every day, um, that's actually uh something we we can't avoid doing coming to the Bible. People are often looking for some sort of mathematical or philosophical proof when really what the Bible's presenting to us is God as a person, and we are wired so that we um uh know how to decide whether to trust people or not. We sometimes make mistakes, but fundamentally we are all making decisions about whether to trust people or not. And so this is where this question of can we trust the gospels at a personal level, um, do they come across as credible reporting? That's something that I'm wanting to ask. I think it's a the it's the right question to ask. Um the question, can we prove everything in the gospels to be true mathematically? No, you can't, you you can't prove the most important things in life. You can't prove your mother loves you, you can't prove um that uh life has a purpose in those sort of way. You can't prove the value of a human being using a mathematical proof. Uh so so and even science, which people say is you know is about proof, you can't there's no scientific experiment you can conduct to show you that science has a value. So so science, you've got to believe in the value of science in order to do it.
SPEAKER_02And we're talking here history, aren't we? So I suppose in that sense, which by definition is unrepeatable. So there's a sense of. Yeah, that's right. And and so you look at the categories of personal trustworthiness when it comes to testimony. Okay. So that's particularly so with within the context of the gospels and history, we're thinking here are the accounts that we have, I mean the four gospels that in that are included in the Bible, are they trustworthy? That's that's the question at stake. And um, before we get into the detail of why you've come to the conviction that they are, and you've you know that's been pretty well road tested in in academia and all sorts of um contexts where you've had to think that one through, let's just, for the sake of our listeners and uh revisit what are the gospels? You know, what when we we've we've got these four, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, in essence, what are they? Uh, how would you summarize them?
SPEAKER_01So the four Gospels you have uh at the beginning of any New Testament are the earliest accounts that we have of Jesus' life, and they focus particularly on his teaching, his activities, and his death and resurrection. So that they they they have this uh they're not trying to tell you everything about what happened in life, they have this focus. And they're about nine hours worth of text if you read them through out loud.
SPEAKER_02Okay. So so would you describe them as something like ancient biographies then?
SPEAKER_01What what would you uh what sort of phrase would you use to say what kind of We can think of them as uh biographies, provided we recognise that the way we would do things is somewhat different, because we would if someone lived for 70 years and we had seven chapters, we'd tend to do about ten years per per chapter. And the way the gospels work is about a third to a quarter of the entire gospel is taken up with that last week of Jesus' uh life leading up to his his death and resurrection. That's the focus. So it's presenting Jesus as um God's son come into the world to save us, and uh it doesn't drift from from that.
SPEAKER_02Okay, so that so that almost that's a clue, isn't it? I mean if you're gonna spend a ther up to a third or half of the gospel on one final week, you're you're it's more of a message than a sort of neutral biography, if you like.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so e even the word gospel, meaning um the the good news, uh is therefore telling you it it's not just uh a record of of history, it's also particularly meaningful history of of events that matter to all of us.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Ross Powell So what do you say, given that's the case, what do you say then to those who I hear this plenty of times where people say, well, precisely for that reason they're not reliable, because they're they're clearly biased. I mean, you know, they're not they're not writing history in the sort of objective sense they are um you know putting a spin on things because they've got a message. You know, what what do you say to those who say, well, the gospel writers are Christians, therefore it's not proper history?
SPEAKER_01Well, I think sometimes the problem is the category of history that we can think of that as just about uh dispassionate facts which have no meaning. But when we think about, say, accounts there were of the Holocaust, Ellie Weasel's book Night, um Alexander Soljenicson's uh record, The Gulag Archipelago, these are witnesses of um tragedies and terrible events. And to say that we shouldn't trust them because they have an argument about what is right and wrong, i it makes no sense at all. And I think that let's say someone does a great injustice to someone, they may be very invested in the argument that uh an injustice has been done against them. A victim is going to feel victimized uh a and so on. Does that mean you can't trust anything that they present in terms of evidence? Um this isn't the way it works at all. So I think that we've got to move away from I mean, history departments are great, but remember that um in terms of deciding the meanings of things, that we've got to come to something a little bit more uh every day. That we t every day recognise there there are witnesses to events that matter. And so here we have people writing to us saying these events happen, they matter. They they should be classed as testimony and evaluated as such in the way that we normally do. Okay, so testimony is an interesting word as well, isn't it? Yeah, it's a word that comes up again and again testimony.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. They've seen something or they've they've had some access to eyewitnesses who've seen something and they're bearing witness to that, which is Yeah, okay. And so in terms of these gospels then, we've got four of them, um, which in itself is interesting, isn't it? I mean, partly because that's a lot and and there's a there's a content-rich element to this, which I mean could you share something about that? Because you you pick up on this in the book that actually it's it's unusual. It's it's uh whereas we might be more used to the plethora of books that surround you know our world, and so maybe there are several biographies about Winston Churchill or whatever. That's our reality. Um but back in the first century, uh when the gospels were originally um w authored, this was unusual, right? Could you share a bit more about about why four is unusual?
SPEAKER_01Yes, well, I mean, uh it was unusual that you should have books written about someone who isn't from the elite classes or dead long ago. So that's already strange that you have these gospels. Then we recognise that actually almost no one has that much written about them. Even the most famous person alive at the time, namely the Roman Emperor Tiperius, really only four major accounts of of his life. And and on a whole uh they are uh shorter and somewhat later, somewhat more distant from the events than we have with Jesus. So I'd say Jesus' life is very well attested, and in fact, when we look at that last uh week leading up to his his death and resurrection, this is the best attested week in antiquity, you know, in terms of the number of d different testimonies we have about it.
SPEAKER_02So that so that of I suppose that's just the sheer volume, right? And and but also you're picking up, which is interesting as well, that it's not just the volume, it's the fact of this was a I mean, this is a life from lived largely in an incredibly isolated and insignificant location, right? I mean, in terms of Nazareth and Galilee, these the the locations themselves, not particularly uh eye-catching.
SPEAKER_01I I would say insignificant, yes, in the sense that these these are not um uh places of which had otherwise made a historical mark. In terms of isolated, I I would say n less so. You see, I mean Capernaum's actually on a major trade route. I mean, one of the things about the Israel and the Holy Land, Palestine, whatever you want to call it, is it is at the juncture b between continents. And uh I I think actually, you know, uh one of my arguments for the reliability of the gospels is that the people that Jesus came across or and and that uh who witnessed things were not as ignorant and as uneducated as some people might want to make out. So, you know, Capernaum is a place of um uh of commerce and and so on. Nazareth, yes, uh much more of a backwater, you know, but um even then it's not that far from a significant city.
SPEAKER_00Do you want to go further in your knowledge of the Bible? Tinder House and Bible Society have more resources to help you do just that. Why not check out Inc., a free magazine from Tinder House that aims to bring you current research on Bible manuscripts, languages, and the ancient world. It's for everyone, regardless of academic knowledge or experience, and it's free. Sign up for a post or e-subscription on the Tindar House website. There's also the Bible course from Bible Society. The Bible course is an eight-season small group resource that combines video teaching from Dr. Andrew Olerton with interactive study time. It shows how the whole Bible fits together, from Genesis to Revelation, and how it applies to our lives today. Search the Bible course or visit Bible Society's website to order a coffee today.
SPEAKER_02So Jesus obviously lived his life there and we um and and played out in Jerusalem in the final week and so forth, and the Gospels record this. But just in terms of the, if you like, the the the stages you've got from the just for the sake of our listeners, just helping tease this out from from when Jesus actually, if you like, spoke and did and acted in the world uh through to when the Gospels were actually first penned and and brought to paper. Tell us a little bit about the journey and how you understand that period.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and uh there's a lot that we we don't know. Um so the Gospels come with these names Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John on. I think that's they are by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Matthew and John being um disciples of Jesus, one of e each one of the twelve disciples, uh Matthew being a tax collector, John being a fisherman. Mark, I think, got his information from Peter who was a disciple, and Luke is a doctor who did a lot of investigation. But in terms of the dates they're written, they don't give us dates, but they have to be written within the lifetimes of people who could plausibly be disciples and uh early followers of Jesus. So that gives us some limits. How do they get their information? We get some uh hints about uh this in terms of Luke saying that he investigated things. But with Matthew and John, of course, they were disciples, and disciple only has one job, that is to learn, to follow, uh, to do what their their master says. And so uh if Jesus is presented repeatedly in the Gospels as a teacher, and they are presented as learners or students of his, um then it's not really surprising that they should be able to pass things on. Now, people have these technical debates about how uh how much people wrote down at the time, how good people's memories were. Uh, but the point is it doesn't actually matter how good it people's individual memories are, if you have a good teacher who makes sure that they learn. Um that so I I think Jesus would check up and make sure that they'd learnt it. And if you have to go through the lesson one more time, then you do that. Um so I I think there's a very thick bandwidth to get reliable uh accounts of the teaching of Jesus from him to the books.
SPEAKER_02Okay. But just say a bit uh I get that, but just say a bit more about that because obviously, nevertheless, we I mean part of it is we're in the digital world now, are we? We you know, memory is something that we have on our phones more than in our brains now, isn't it? Uh increasingly What are your what are your thoughts about the what we I mean we call it the oral tradition, don't we? We call it this period of time where uh rather than it being necessarily, at least in in the current f form of the gospels, fully written down, some of what Jesus said and did is being passed on through um through word of mouth, if you like, and that sounds to us intrinsically unreliable. In that context, what what are your thoughts about the reliability of the period where the where the the the teachings of Jesus are being held within this eyewitness community?
SPEAKER_01So often what people do is they they take us to general studies of how reliable oral traditions are, and and they they they can vary uh a lot. And I would prefer not to go there because I would say we can get into the details of the gospels and see they clearly know what they're talking about, they clearly have high quality information. The question of how they got that is a separate question. So, I mean there are theories that people used waxed writing tablets and they could write down contemporaneously with Jesus. Um someone like Matthew's a tax collector, he would had to write an awful lot of receipts in his life. Um, you know, don't pay tax without getting a receipts. Um and uh and and and so on. But there's uh uh another side which is whether or not they wrote things down, he's a teacher and he has twelve learners. That's the whole idea of of having disciples. He has a school, um, and uh he has more than just the twelve, and he teaches repeatedly. So you can see certain things, say in Matthew's gospel, where he teaches the same thing more than once. He teaches about divorce more than once, he teaches if your um eye offends you cut pluck it out more than once. Uh the the phrase he who has ears to hear, let him hear, occurs many times. Um there are certain things which he would say repeatedly, and I think that um the idea that these things can't be passed down properly is problematic. So even in the thing that we call the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapter 5 through to 7, we think of it now as a sermon, but what it actually says is he opened his mouth and he taught them saying. So it doesn't call it a sermon, it calls it a lesson effectively. Um and so that then you rather than having to think, oh, could they do shorthand and you know memorize this all in the spot, you can think, oh, actually, this is a whole syllabus we've got. He also sends out his disciples to do their own sermons. So does he help go over their outlines and and and and prepare that? How much material uh do they get? And when he goes, as he says it says, from village to village, you know, uh does he use a different sermon every night or does he use the same? I mean, I've given some talks like a hundred times. Um uh uh my brother was once uh working with a uh very famous artist as his PA, and uh he said by the end he could do the stand-up show, you know, almost from memory. That that's repetition just occurs. And in that context, you you can have a a lot of um potential for good things being handed down, right things being handed down.
SPEAKER_02Including some of the differences then. So so the Beatitudes in Matthew's gospel they they are recurring in Luke but with slight differences. And your view would be, well, Jesus said that several times, and maybe you want to.
SPEAKER_01If you've come up with sayings or memes as good as that, would you only ever use them once? I mean, really, you know, when you taught them to people, you you crafted these uh amazing pieces that are are steeped in Old Testament reference, that have alliterative structures in them in Greek and so on, would you only use them once? It's it's almost uncon inconceivable. And the Gospels effectively tell us that Jesus repeated uh sayings. So why would we expect uh him him not to do that? I mean, i I I think a lot of it has has is failing to take seriously the idea that he is a an itinerant teacher.
SPEAKER_02So, in a sense, getting from the events and the spoken words of Jesus through to the text that we have the gospels today, you in a sense you put the emphasis on, as I hear it, the genius of Jesus as a teacher and the re repetition of him as a teacher combined with um the disciples who were more than one, as you say, and the fact that in that culture you remembered stuff. I mean there there was a memory capacity that we've perhaps uh lost today as well.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so you think about the story of the two sons, of the prodigal son. It's a brilliant, amazing, powerful story. If you've thought up that story, are you only going to tell it once? I mean, it it seems to me an absurd idea. Um so I I think of of course this is something that that that that um Jesus would repeat.
SPEAKER_02So almost remember. I mean what one of the things I'm taking for this is as you read the Gospels, remember this is a sort of condensed and contracted summary of what was played out over years and therefore in multiple occasions um but has a reliability to it even precisely because of that repetition and uh and repeat. So just as I mean, just as you think then a couple of questions we bring this into land part one, but I just think um firstly, as you think about the record we have of Jesus as compared to any other equivalent hist uh figure in in history, particularly of in antiquity, um what gives you confidence, uh particular confidence that we can actually know Jesus through the Gospels?
SPEAKER_01I think that's a a huge question, and there are so many things I probably can't get them into a short answer. And the reason why is because there are lots and lots of converging lines of evidence with Jesus. So I've just been speaking, in a sense, about the historical testimony line. But there's also um the the argument that you could make from prophecy, where it seems that there are bits in the holy scriptures of the Jews that fit beforehand very well with Jesus' life. Jesus' life and death also have meaning and significance saving the world. Um all of these things come together. Uh and so I And they mutually reinforce, I would say. But just sticking with the sort of historical testimony of the Gospels, I would say that we can test the Gospels. We can see that they have lots and lots of local knowledge of multiple kinds. So you can test their knowledge of geography or weather or law or local customs. And they they get them right every time. They also have literary patterns which show um reliability. That is, you have overlap between Matthew and Luke, you have overlap between Mark and Matthew and Luke, but then you then you have bits which uh f fit with John and so on. And the when we look at these four Gospels, we have at least five types of material, in fact, amongst them, and we can test each one of those and we find that they all seem to be um local locally knowledgeable uh and uh and so on. So these things come together, and then you have to explain how did how did Christianity get going? I mean, I I think the whole idea that this religion uh took root is so much easier to explain with the death and the resurrection of Jesus. Um the death on its own, uh you know, crucified guy, why would anyone follow that at all? So so I think it's it's these things coming together making sense as a whole.
SPEAKER_02And in that sense, the word trust, back to that, whilst you can't put the the object in a test tube and and and perform some experiment on it, actually, and we'll come on to this in part two, you've begun to whet our appetite for some of that, but there's a sense in which you can actually run some tests and cross-referencing and so forth, and that gives us a real confidence we can trust that as we read the gospels-well, I suppose, and this is what I was gonna just come to as we bring this into line, just very personally now. I mean, I presume, you know, on a daily basis, or uh whenever you can, you're gonna be reading the Bible. And and so as you I want to imagine, sort of, you know, Pete Williams, you're reading the Gospels, and you're all of that background, you know, all the journey you've been on in scholarship and research, how does that affect the way that you actually experience it and read it?
SPEAKER_01Well, I think every day, you know, wake up and know that God's given us this day and that God's a loving father, we are wayward children, and that he has sent his son into the world to save us. And this is you know the message that's come through very clearly from the Gospels, and you can know uh that we are forgiven because of of uh Christ's death on the cross.
SPEAKER_02So, in that sense, the confidence, I suppose, is is changes the experience. And I think this is part of the thing I I hope we are sharing through through you know channeling your uh your experience and knowledge is almost that as we for our listeners as they read the Gospels, um, confidence can rise and therefore the experience increases as well. Absolutely. Pete, looking forward to part two. Thank you. Thank you.
SPEAKER_00Trusting the Bible is a collaboration between Tindar House Cambridge and Bible Society. Thanks for listening to this episode. Make sure you subscribe to catch the rest of the conversation. If you'd like to know more about what we do, visit us online at tindarhouse.com or bible society.org.uk. We'd love to hear your thoughts on the series, so do get in touch either on Twitter at Tindell underscore house or email us at communications at tindelhouse.com.
