Endnotes
1 See esp. Jonathan Hill, What Has Christianity Ever Done for Us? How It Shaped the Modern World (Downers Grove: IVP, 2005).
2 Stephen Prothero, American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003).
3 The most thorough and even-handed presentation and assessment of these data appears in Robert E. van Voorst, Jesus Outside the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), from which the English translations of Tacitus, the Talmud, and Josephus have been taken. Peter Schäfer, Jesus in the Talmud (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), is particularly helpful from a Jewish perspective on the clear references and various additional possible allusions in the rabbinic literature. What Josephus originally wrote has been disputed, but a reasonable consensus suggests that the only Christian interpolations were to affirm Jesus’ messiahship and resurrection rather than simply note that his followers alleged that they occurred. See John P. Meier, “Jesus in Josephus: A Modest Proposal,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 52 (1990): 76–103.
4 Peter H. Davids, The Epistle of James (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982), 22, 47–48.
5 Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 333–34.
6 Stanley E. Porter, “Images of Christ in Paul’s Letters,” in Images of Christ: Ancient and Modern, ed. Stanley E. Porter, Michael A. Hayes, and David Tombs (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997), 98–99.
7 See esp. David Wenham, Paul: Follower of Jesus or Founder of Christianity? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995).
8 Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, Today’s New International® Version TNIV©. Copyright 2001, 2005 by International Bible Society®. Used by permission of International Bible Society®. All rights reserved worldwide.
9 Striking support for these claims appears in the work of atheist historian Gerd Lüdemann (with Alf Özen), What Really Happened to Jesus? A Historical Approach to the Resurrection (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1995), 15.
10 See esp. N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996); Ben Witherington III, The Christology of Jesus (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990).
11 Craig L. Blomberg, “The Legitimacy and Limits of Harmonization,” in Hermeneutics, Authority, and Canon, ed. D. A. Carson and John D. Woodbridge (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1986), esp. 169–73.
12 A. N. Sherwin-White, Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), 187.
13 A. W. Mosley, “Historical Reporting in the Ancient World,” New Testament Studies 12 (1965–66): 10–26; Terrence Callan, “The Preface of Luke-Acts and Historiography,” New Testament Studies 31 (1985): 576–81.
14 Loveday C. Alexander, The Preface to Luke’s Gospel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
15 See further Ben Witherington III, Jesus the Seer: The Progress of Prophecy (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1999), 293–328.
16 See further Charles L. Holman, Till Jesus Comes: Origins of Christian Apocalyptic Expectation (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1996).
17 I. Howard Marshall, I Believe in the Historical Jesus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977), 15.
18 As is the thesis of Maurice Casey, From Jewish Prophet to Gentile God: The Origins and Development of New Testament Christology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1991).
19 For all these and related practices, see esp. Birger Gerhardsson, Memory and Manuscript: Oral Tradition and Written Transmission in Rabbinic Judaism and Early Christianity (1961, 1964; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, repr. 1998); idem, The Reliability of the Gospel Tradition (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2001).
20 An excellent introduction to Gospel source criticism, as this exercise is called, which presents the various hypotheses that have been proposed with the major rationales for each, is Robert H. Stein, Studying the Synoptic Gospels: Origin and Interpretation (2d ed.; Grand Rapids: Baker, 2001). This volume also deals nicely with the features of oral tradition and final editing of the canonical Gospels.
21 Two of the most important researchers and their most important works have been Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales (2d ed.; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000) and Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition as History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985).
22 Kenneth E. Bailey, “Informal Controlled Oral Tradition and the Synoptic Gospels,” Asia Journal of Theology 5 (1991): 34–54.; reprinted in Themelios 20 (1995): 4–11.
23 Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 51–52.
24 Nicely summarized and supplemented by Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 319–57.
25 Kenneth E. Bailey, “Middle Eastern Oral Tradition and the Synoptic Gospels,” Expository Times 106 (1995): 563–67.
26 But see Craig L. Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels (2d ed.; Downers Grove: IVP, 2007), 152–95; and Darrell L. Bock, Jesus According to Scripture: Restoring the Portrait from the Gospels (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2002).
27 For an excellent analysis of all of the so-called contradictions surrounding the various accounts of Christ’s resurrection, see John W. Wenham, Easter Enigma: Do the Resurrection Stories Contradict One Another? (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1984).
28 Bart D. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), 9.
29 Not until the eighteenth and final cluster of definitions given by Walter Bauer, et al, eds., A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (3d ed.; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 367, does a temporal usage (“in the time of”) appear.
30 See esp. John W. Wenham, “Mark 2.26,” Journal of Theological Studies 1 (1950): 156.
31 See throughout my “Legitimacy and Limits of Harmonization,” 139–74.
32 See esp. Richard Bauckham, ed., The Gospels for All Christians: Rethinking the Gospel Audiences (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998).
33 See further Craig L. Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of John’s Gospel: Issues and Commentary (Downers Grove: IVP, 2001), 17–67; Paul N. Anderson, The Fourth Gospel and the Quest for Jesus: Modern Foundations Reconsidered (London: T & T Clark, 2007).
34 See esp. Leon Morris, Studies in the Fourth Gospel (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 40–63); D. A. Carson, The Gospel According to John (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), 52–55.
35 See esp. my Historical Reliability of John’s Gospel, 71–81; cf. Richard Bauckham, The Testimony of the Beloved Disciple: Narrative, History, and Theology in the Gospel of John (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2007).
36 In addition to my writings elsewhere, for the kinds of interpretations of texts utilized in this subsection, see esp. Carson, John; Andreas Köstenberger, John (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2004); and Craig S. Keener, The Gospel of John: A Commentary, 2 vols. (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2003).
37 For the Gospels overall, the state-of-the-art work is now James H. Charlesworth, ed., Jesus and Archaeology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006). Emphasizing the Gospels’ accuracy in light of archaeology is Bargil Pixner, With Jesus through Galilee According to the Fifth Gospel (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical, 1996).
38 See esp. Derek Tovey, Narrative Art and Act in the Fourth Gospel (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997).
39 See esp. Richard A. Burridge, What Are the Gospels? A Comparison with Graeco-Roman Biography (2d ed.; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004).
40 Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code: A Novel (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 1.
41 Excellent recent introductions to Gnosticism include Riemer Roukema, Gnosis and Faith in Early Christianity (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1999); and Alastair H. B. Logan, The Gnostics: Identifying an Early Christian Cult (London: T & T Clark, 2006).
42 Nicholas Perrin, Thomas, the Other Gospel (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2007), 73–106.
43 Elaine Pagels, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas (New York: Vintage Books, 2003); Karen L. King, ed., Images of the Feminine in Gnosticism (Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 1988).
44 See esp. Majella Franzmann, Jesus in the Nag Hammadi Writings (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1996).
45 Rodolphe Kasser, Marvin Meyer, and Gregor Wurst, eds., The Gospel of Judas (Washington, DC: National Geographic Society, 2006).
46 E.g., Bart D. Ehrman, The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer and Betrayed (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 172–73.
47 The standard, critical English translation of an introduction to all the non-canonical Gospels of which we know is Wilhelm Schneemelcher, ed., New Testament Apocrypha, vol. 1 (2d ed.; Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1991). Standing almost alone in defending part of the Gospel of Peter as older and more trustworthy than the canonical texts is John Dominic Crossan, The Cross That Spoke: The Origins of the Passion Narrative (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988).
48 Oddbjørn Leirvik, “History as a Literary Weapon: The Gospel of Barnabas in Muslim-Christian Polemics,” Studia Theologica 54 (2001): 4–26; Jan Joosten, “The Gospel of Barnabas and the Diatessaron,” Harvard Theological Review 95 (2002): 73–96.
49 Per Beskow, Strange Tales about Jesus: A Survey of Unfamiliar Gospels (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983).
50 See Craig L. Blomberg, “Canonical and Apocryphal Gospels: How Historically Reliable Are They?” From Athens to Jerusalem 6.3 (2006): 1–7. The one exception is a reference to one of the Infancy Gospel’s miracles in Qur’an, attesting to the heterodoxy of at least some of the Christians with whom Muhammad came into contact.
51 For sample comparative statistics, see Darrell L. Bock and Daniel B. Wallace, Dethroning Jesus: Exposing Popular Culture’s Quest to Unseat the Biblical Christ (Nashville: Nelson, 2007), 31; or J. Ed Komoszewski, M. James Sawyer, and Daniel B. Wallace, Reinventing Jesus: What The Da Vinci Code and Other Novel Speculations Don’t Tell You (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2006), 71.
52 See esp. Gordon D. Fee and Mark L. Strauss, How to Choose a Translation for All Its Worth: A Guide to Understanding and Using Bible Versions (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2007). The only exception to this principle is the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ New World Translation which mistranslates the Greek at those places where the New Testament contradicts their doctrine, in order to hide this fact from their readers.
53 For full details on this history, see esp. F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture (Downers Grove: IVP, 1988). For the various lists and catalogues of New Testament collections from the early centuries, see “Appendix D” in The Canon Debate, ed. Lee M. McDonald and James A. Sanders (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2002), 591–97.
54 See Graham A. Cole, “Do Christian Have a Worldview?”
55 Paul Merkley, “The Gospels as Historical Testimony,” Evangelical Quarterly 58 (1986): 328–36.
56 For the Gospels, see esp. Graham H. Twelftree, Jesus the Miracle Worker (Downers Grove: IVP, 1999); René Latourelle, The Miracles of Jesus and the Theology of Miracles (New York: Paulist, 1988).
57 See further Joseph Houston, Reported Miracles: A Critique of Hume (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
58 E.g., Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana, Talmudic accounts of Hanina ben Dosa or Honi the Circle-drawer, Gnostic Redeemer myths, Greco-Roman “divine men,” and Roman Mithraism more generally.
59 See Ronald H. Nash, The Gospel and the Greeks: Did the New Testament Borrow from Pagan Thought? (2d ed.; Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed, 2003); Eric Eve, The Jewish Context of Jesus’ Miracles (London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002).
60 See esp. N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003); Larry W. Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003).