The Gospels and the Question of History

by Craig A. Evans

A few years ago, a prominent New Testament scholar writing for a popular audience explained why we need academic treatments of the gospels:

The reason we need books like these is that the Gospels cannot simply be taken at face value as giving us historically reliable accounts of the things Jesus said and did. If the Gospels were those sorts of trustworthy biographies that recorded Jesus’ life “as it really was,” there would be little need for historical scholarship that stresses the need to learn the ancient biblical languages (Hebrew and Greek), that emphasizes the importance of Jesus’s historical context in his first-century Palestinian world, and that maintains that a full understanding of the true character of the Gospels as historical sources is fundamental for any attempt to establish what Jesus really said and did. All we would need to do would be to read the Bible and accept what it says as what really happened. (Bart D. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee, 88)

On many levels, this is truly an odd statement. We are told that “the Gospels cannot simply be taken at face value as giving us historically reliable accounts of the things Jesus said and did.” Well, no, we cannot. No historian takes any document from antiquity and simply accepts it “at face value.” Every document needs to be evaluated as to its credibility, accuracy, and meaning. The biographies of Suetonius and Plutarch must be evaluated; so must the histories of Arrian, Livy, Polybius, Tacitus, and Thucydides. Nothing is simply taken at face value. Historians assess all documents as to their authenticity, date, reliability, and usefulness. This is the first principle of historiography, as articulated by Louis Reichenthal Gottschalk (1899–1975), long-time distinguished professor of history at the University of Chicago, who for years was regarded as the doyen of American historians. “Finding and authenticating the documents,” says Gottschalk, is important, but it is only the beginning of the historian’s task; more work needs to be done. If the documents under review are ancient and in an old foreign language, then a great deal more work needs to be done if they are to be understood.

In the paragraph quoted above, we are also told that if the New Testament Gospels were “trustworthy biographies that recorded Jesus’ life ‘as it really was,’ there would be little need for historical scholarship,” including knowledge of the relevant languages and the world of Palestine in late antiquity. Again, this is very strange. First, no historical narrative records an event or a life “as it really was” in some neutral, scientific sense. Every historical account is selective and interpretive; no account is free from bias and perspective. And, obviously, no account is exhaustive.

Even more strange is the idea that any ancient source could be read and fully understood without knowledge of the relevant language(s) and its historical and social context. Of course, this is where the truly difficult part of our work gets underway. Even when the historian concludes that the ancient document at hand is genuine and trustworthy, he or she has to be able to read the language in which the document was written, know the land in which it was found or to which it makes reference, know the social, historical, and political setting in which the document was written, and know something about the author of the document and his or her motives for producing it. The task of rightly interpreting the document is usually far more demanding and complicated than merely determining the authenticity or trustworthiness of the document’s claims.

Even if we believed that the gospels are completely trustworthy, we would still have to know the original language in which they were written, the land in which their stories are said to have taken place, how biography and history were understood in late antiquity, and pedagogy in late antiquity, that is, how a teacher (like Jesus) expected his students (like his disciples) to pass on and interpret his teachings. Most nonexperts, whatever their religious views, fail to read historical texts critically. Historians, of course, know that for an ancient text to be well understood, it is necessary to read it in its original language and to know a lot about the historical and social context of the author as well as the people, places, and events being described. No historian—whatever his or her religious views—thinks an ancient text is adequately understood simply by reading it in modern translation.

. . . Of course, the authenticity of the document and the meaning of the document often go hand in hand. A document that doesn’t make sense in the context and circumstances it alleges to reflect is a document that many will suspect is not genuine. Historical and contextual verisimilitude should cohere with what the document claims. The presence of verisimilitude both encourages the historian to view the document as authentic and at the same time assists the historian in understanding the document better.

I can illustrate this point by making reference to a work known as the Gospel of Barnabas, a work that many Muslims believe more faithfully tells the story of Jesus and his disciples than do the New Testament Gospels. Historians, however, do not agree with this assessment. Rather, they rightly recognize that the numerous errors and anachronisms in the Gospel of Barnabas point to a date of composition no earlier than the fourteenth century. In short, it is the absence of verisimilitude in the Gospel of Barnabas, not its theological rectitude, that prompts historians to ignore this writing. This lack of verisimilitude is largely due to its medieval date of composition.

Evidence for this late date is seen in the many anachronisms and blunders. I shall mention a few of the most egregious. According to the Gospel of Barnabas, Jesus was born when Pilate was governor and “in the priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas” (Gos. Barn. 3). This chronology, of course, is totally inaccurate. Pilate was appointed as prefect of Judea and Samaria two or three years before the adult Jesus began his public activities (ca. 28 CE). Jesus was born a few years before Annas became high priest and some twenty years before Caiaphas became high priest. We also find a remarkable example of topographical ignorance. The Gospel of Barnabas tells readers that Jesus and his disciples rowed their boat to Nazareth (20) and from there “went up to Capernaum” (21). The author of the gospel seems to have confused Nazareth, Jesus’s hometown, with Capernaum, his base of operations. The latter, of course, is on the northwest shore of the Sea of Galilee. It is to this city that Jesus and the disciples guided their boat, while Nazareth is inland and so would require a journey “up” and overland in order to reach it.

An interpretive anachronism also appears in Barnabas. In lecturing his disciples about the fall of Adam and Eve (Gos. Barn. 39–40), Jesus refers to the fruit of the forbidden tree as “apples” (40). The belief that the fruit of the tree was the apple is a late tradition that is probably based on the Latin translation of Gen 2:9, 17; 3:5, where “evil” (malum) was understood to mean “apple” (also malum). We also find an example of philological confusion of the most basic sort when the author of the gospel has Jesus emphatically deny that he is the Messiah (42). Yet, this writing begins by referencing Jesus “called Christ,” which suggests that the author is unaware that Christ is the Greek and Latin for the Hebrew māšiaḥ, “anointed one.” Ignorance of the biblical tradition is also found. In Gos. Barn. 82, Jesus says the Jubilee is every one hundred years rather than every fifty years, as stated in Lev 25 and presupposed in a number of late antique Jewish writings. In all likelihood, the anachronism reflects Pope Boniface VIII’s declaration in 1300 that a Jubilee should be observed every one hundred years. In Gos. Barn. 91–92 the “forty days” is understood as an annual feast. The reference, however, is to the Christian tradition of fasting for forty days during the season of Lent, a custom that dates no earlier than the fourth century. There is no tradition of a forty-day fast in Judaism.

. . . The antiquity of the Gospel of Thomas, which some scholars contend originated in the first century and independently of the New Testament Gospels, has been called into question in recent studies by Simon Gathercole and Mark Goodacre. Both scholars are able to show that all strands of tradition in the canonical Gospels, including distinctive Matthean and Lukan redaction, are present in the Greek fragments and complete Coptic translation of the Gospel of Thomas. Accordingly, they date the Gospel of Thomas no earlier than mid-second century.

In my own study of the Gospel of Thomas, I point to a number of parallels with second-century tradition, including Tatian’s Diatessaron, which was published in the early 170s CE. Besides showing acquaintance with second-century tradition, which for an alleged first-century document is a problem of anachronism, the Gospel of Thomas exhibits no verisimilitude. In no sense does it reflect Jewish life in early first-century Israel. No archaeologist concerned with first-century Israel, I might add, makes use of the Gospel of Thomas.

. . . A few other extracanonical gospels and gospel-like texts have sometimes been appealed to as potentially early and as potentially preserving tradition that could reach back to the first century and perhaps back to the Sitz im Leben Jesu.* What usually casts doubt on claims of antiquity and independence from the canonical gospels is lack of verisimilitude and anachronism. It is thus no wonder that Rudolf Bultmann long ago remarked, after his magisterial assessment of the tradition that makes up the Synoptic Gospels and what can be known of the Jesus of history: “What we know of the Apocryphal Gospels does nothing to change the picture; they are but legendary adaptations and expansions.”

[*Editor’s note: Sitz im Leben, German for “setting in life,” refers to the original historical situation in which Jesus said or did something—who he was speaking to, what was happening, and why his words or actions made sense in that particular context. For example, a parable’s Sitz im Leben Jesu would be the real-life circumstances in Jesus’ ministry that prompted him to tell it.]

— Craig A. Evans is the John Bisagno Distinguished Professor of Christian Origins at Houston Baptist University. He is the author of several books on Jesus, the Gospels, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and archaeology. Evans has given lectures at Cambridge, Durham, Oxford, and Yale, as well as the Field Museum in Chicago and the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Ottawa, and has appeared in many television documentaries and news programs.

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Excerpted from Archaeology, Jesus, and the Gospel of John: What Recent Discoveries Show Us, edited by Paul N. Anderson (Eerdmans, 2026). Used by permission.

For years, the Gospel of John has been excluded from historical Jesus studies because of its distinctive theological and literary features. Yet, while John’s Gospel is often characterized as “the spiritual gospel,” it actually contains more archaeologically attested content and topographical details than all the other gospels combined. In this groundbreaking volume, renowned archaeologists discuss the Fourth Gospel’s material features and show how those features enrich our understanding of the historical Jesus.

More than two dozen contributors present evidence of the Fourth Gospel’s historical reliability. Some of the contributors focus on Johannine descriptions of Jesus’s ministry, using archaeological expertise to illuminate narrative details ranging from the stone jars in Cana to the fishing industry in Galilee. Other contributors focus on Johannine discussions of places and customs, bringing archaeological research to bear on narrative references to worship sites on Mt. Gerazim, the second pool of Siloam, crucifixion practices of imperial Rome, and more. Throughout the volume, research findings are documented with compelling images. Following discussions of specific archaeological data, the book concludes with a broad overview of the implications for historical Jesus studies. By challenging the longstanding critical bias against the Fourth Gospel’s historical content, Archaeology, Jesus, and the Gospel of John lays the groundwork for a new quest for the historical Jesus—an inclusive quest that fully engages the Johannine account.

“A landmark publication that shows how archaeology sheds light on the Gospel of John and how John in turn sheds light on the historical Jesus! John’s Jesus is not a figure of pious imagination, but one who walks the roads and valleys of first-century Galilee, Samaria, and Judea.”
— Michael F. Bird, Ridley College

“This splendid collection of essays demonstrates the degree to which the Fourth Gospel, long sidelined in the study of the historical Jesus, merits consideration as a historical source alongside the Synoptic Gospels.”
— David A. deSilva, Ashland Theological Seminary

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