CADRE Comments

A friend mentioned to me that he ran into an argument I had not heard for a while. Apparently, in A World Full of Gods , Keith Hopkins states that given the extremely low lifespan of the average Middle Eastern person, the eyewitnesses to Jesus must have died out fairly quickly, maybe even by the fifties AD. It goes like this: since the average life expectancy during ancient times was low, reports of eyewitness authors of the gospels or eyewitnesses speaking about Jesus' life in the second half of the first century are unreliable. According to the average life expectancy, no one would have lived that long. How likely is it that eyewitnesses to Jesus' life survived the 50s? A 20 year old at the time of Jesus' death would have been 49 in 62 AD. A 25 year old would have been 54 by that time. How likely is it that Papias--reportedly living from 60-135 AD-- had access to eyewitnesses? A 20 year old would have been 65 in 77 AD. A 25 year old would have been 70 by that ...

Today's Christianity Today has an interview with Richard Baukham, author of Jesus and the Eyewitnesses , entitled They Really Saw Him . Set up in a Q&A format, the article has some interesting insights into his book. What it the importance of "testimony" for interpreting the New Testament? I think it helps us to understand what sort of history we have in the Gospels. Most history rests mostly on testimony. In other words, it entails believing what witnesses say. We can assess whether we think witnesses are trustworthy, and we may be able to check parts of what they say by other evidence. But in the end we have to trust them. We can't independently verify everything they say. If we could, we wouldn't need witnesses. It's the same with witnesses in court. Testimony asks to be trusted, and it's not irrational to do so. We do so all the time. Now in the case of the Gospels, I think we have exactly the kind of testimony that historians in the ancient world ...