Hey, and welcome back to Words of Life. Last week, we shared part one of a three-part conversation with Dr. Craig Keener. If you missed that first episode, Dr. Keener is a professor of biblical studies at Asbury Theological Seminary. He's an author of over 30 books, a teacher, speaker, and a passionate follower of Jesus Christ. If you did miss that episode, subscribe to Words of Life on your favorite podcast store or visit wordsoflifepodcast.org to get caught up.
Here again is Bernie Dake and Dr. Craig Keener. They talk about Jesus more than they talk about Pilate. Anyway, we could go on.
There's so much cool stuff we could talk about. If God had tried to explain creation in terms of quantum physics or something like that, how would the Hebrew language have accommodated that? They didn't have words for those things. So it's presented in a way that's culturally relevant in the Hebrew language in the time in which the people receiving it lived. One of the subjects that you've written about specifically is the reliability of acts and the gospels. And we were wondering, how can you use that historical knowledge to support the reliability of the New Testament? Sometimes people make claims about history on a popular level that they can't be backed up. Like the people who say that Jesus never existed, for example. I mean, of professors in universities and seminaries and so on of New Testament or of classical antiquity, historians of those professors, I mean, there are thousands of them globally.
I don't know any of them who espouses that view. There's just so much evidence. Now, we have some extra biblical writings about Jesus. Obviously, the people who wrote in what became the Bible were more interested in Jesus. They said more about him. That's true about any historical figure, that the person's followers will give us more detail about the person.
But we do have plenty of material from outside. And also, what we can do with the material that became part of the New Testament, because originally these were just books that Jesus' followers were writing about him, what we can do with it, we can test the material there to see how well it fits the environment that it reflects. So, for example, the four gospels are written in Greek. They were circulated more widely in the ancient Mediterranean world. But they're talking about events that took place in Galilee, which was considered mostly a rural backwater. Most people in the Mediterranean world didn't even know about Galilee. Certainly, they wouldn't have heard of Capernaum or little Nazareth, just had a few hundred people.
They didn't know about those things. And yet, what we see in the gospels fits that environment so well. And even though the gospels are written in Greek, often Jesus' sayings have echoes of the kind of Jewish teachings that were familiar in places like Galilee and Judea, but not elsewhere in the Roman world, even though there were Jewish people scattered around the Roman world. And you have figures of speech that Jesus uses that make sense in Aramaic, which was the local language. Even though it's recorded in Greek, you still have the figures of speech carrying over.
We also have the gospels in terms of their form. They fit the form of ancient biographies, ancient BOI. Now, biographies in antiquity were written differently than they are today.
But one of the things in common was they were about a person. They were supposed to give you accurate information about the person, or at least as accurate as the people who were writing knew. And interestingly, if you trace the development of ancient biography from say the 5th century BC to maybe the 5th century AD, just over that period, the period where they were most concerned to get the story right historically was the period of the early Roman Empire. So biographies from that period were essentially historical works by the definition of historiography in antiquity, the way they wrote it. And also, the most accurate of those would be the ones that were written within living memory of the person. Most ancient biographies that survived are written about somebody a long time before, but the best, the most reliable are the ones written within what oral historians call living memory.
That's the period when the eyewitnesses are alive or the people who knew the eyewitnesses are alive. And the gospels in the New Testament are all written within living memory. So the latest of them is usually dated like 65 years later, but living memory is usually estimated from between 60 to 80 years. So one of the gospels by the most common dating is 40 years, you know, it's just one generation later. And it would be written when eyewitnesses were still alive.
Now, some people date them earlier, some people date them a little bit later, but we're talking about all of them being within the period of living memory. Caring for someone with dementia is one of the toughest journeys, but you don't have to do it alone. I'm Allison Schreier, and my experience caring for my husband inspired me to create Zinnia, a therapeutic streaming service designed to support people living with dementia and reduce caregiver stress. Zinnia offers research backed videos intentionally created for people with dementia, engaging, calming and easy to follow. Whether you need to ease agitation, create moments of joy or make daily routines smoother, Zinnia is here to help. Family and professional caregivers use our content to turn challenges into opportunities for connection. Accessible by subscription on mobile devices and connected TVs, Zinnia is simple to use whenever you need it, because when caregiving feels easier, life feels better. Go to ZinniaTV.com and sign up for a free trial today.
Use the code RESOURCE for 15% off an annual Zinnia subscription. I could give some examples like getting a camel through the eye of a needle. That was a Jewish figure of speech for something impossible to get the largest animal you can think of, which in Galilee would have been a camel, through the eye of a needle. Or moving mountains was also a Jewish figure of speech in that period. The son of man that Jesus often calls himself, literally in Greek, the son of the man. That makes no sense in Greek. That's a Semitic figure of speech used in Aramaic and Hebrew.
So you've got all sorts of indications like that. Plus, we know from other sources, like Paul's letters, which virtually all scholars agree that Romans and Galatians and Corinthians and so on, these are real letters written by Paul, the real congregations. Most of them written two to three decades after Jesus' resurrection, two to three decades later. So way before the usual consensus dating of even the Gospels, they're talking about some of the same events. They're also telling us that the eyewitnesses are in leadership in the Jerusalem church.
So I mean, the best source for the information was alive at the time this information was being circulated. Some of the quotations of Jesus that we have in Paul are the same quotations we have in the Gospels, in the same form that we have in some of the early sources of the Gospels that we've been able to reconstruct. You have Josephus, who's a first century Jewish historian, talking about Jesus in his Antiquities Book 18, paragraph 63 and 64. He talks about Jesus as known as a wise sage, a worker of miracles, and somebody who was condemned by the leaders of the elite in Jerusalem, along with the Roman government. I mean, the basic outline that we have in the Gospels, even though Josephus clearly was not a Christian himself, and Josephus also tells us about John the Baptist and about James the brother of Jesus, and already in Rome by the year 64, you have a fire there.
The Emperor Nero blames the Christians that are already a big movement in Rome. Some 34 years after Jesus was executed by the Roman state and the records of that time that have been preserved for us by Tacitus in the early second century. So he's writing later, but he's writing based on information from the period around 64, saying that Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate. Now, we know that Pontius Pilate existed and was governor at that time. There's an inscription about him, also some Jewish sources talk about him, but in terms of Roman historians, they didn't really care that much about these distant provinces. So this is the only mention of Pontius Pilate that Roman historians actually give us.
They talk about Jesus more than they talk about Pilate. Anyway, we could go on with a lot of this, but even talking about the site of the empty tomb, I mean, there's so much cool stuff we could talk about. Caring for someone with dementia is one of the toughest journeys, but you don't have to do it alone. I'm Allison Schrier, and my experience caring for my husband inspired me to create Zinnia, a therapeutic streaming service designed to support people living with dementia and reduce caregiver stress. Zinnia offers research-backed videos intentionally created for people with dementia. Engaging, calming, and easy to follow, whether you need to ease agitation, create moments of joy, or make daily routines smoother, Zinnia is here to help. Family and professional caregivers use our content to turn challenges into opportunities for connection. Accessible by subscription on mobile devices and connected TVs, Zinnia is simple to use whenever you need it, because when caregiving feels easier, life feels better. Go to ZinniaTV.com and sign up for a free trial today.
Use the code resource for 15% off an annual Zinnia subscription. The oral tradition was so strong in these days that the written accounts would have been done by people that were memorizing these stories and sharing. Is this true? I don't want to misspeak, Dr. Keener, but I think there's just generations of this oral tradition as well.
Yeah. As long as we don't define the memorization in terms of verbatim memorization, which verbatim memorization could be true for sayings, and those are the ones we actually do have from one gospel to the next that are pretty close to verbatim, but things like parables and so on, you tell the gist. It's like, if I were telling my kids about Jack and the Beanstalk or something, it wouldn't be the second time I tell the story, they say, wait, you used a different word last time. But yeah, in terms of memory and antiquity, I mean, today we have kind of collective memory with Google, right? But back then, people didn't have that. And if they did have books, they didn't have an easy way to search them. They'd have to remember things. Memonics was so important back then. Disciples, their main role was to remember what their teacher taught them. Whether they were literate or illiterate, their job was to remember what their teacher taught them. Jewish boys would be taught to memorize the Torah. So memorization was central in all of ancient education. I'd heard that Christians believed that the world was created in, well, six days, literal days.
And that was actually one of my big objections. I didn't understand the nature of Hebrew language, I mean, the creation narrative. It uses the word yom, day, three different ways. So it's used for a day and a night, a day and a night together. And then the day that included all the days of creation put together. So what is a day? I mean, what does it mean in that context?
It's a structuring device, clearly. Augustine, he says in the 400s, you know, a day is like a thousand years, he doesn't take them literally. The idea is just that God is the author of all this. If God had tried to explain creation in terms of quantum physics, or something like that, how would the Hebrew language have accommodated that?
They didn't have words for those things. So it's presented in a way that's culturally relevant in the Hebrew language in the time in which the people receiving it lived. I really hope you enjoyed part two of our three-part conversation with Dr. Craig Keener. It was such an honor to have him on the show. And we just want to say thank you again to Dr. Craig. If you're a regular listener of Words of Life, I have a favor to ask of you.
We have some great episodes and series planned for 2025. But we would still love to hear from you. We'd love to hear what types of conversations or topics that you would love to hear on this show. So please visit words of life podcast.org. And you can go to our contact page and just shoot us an email. Just let us know if there are any questions or topics that you would love to hear someone speak on, because we want this show to do nothing but help you with your walk with God. So again, please visit words of life podcast.org, go to the contact page and reach out to us.
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They have shows about prayer, Bible studying, parenting, and more. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you next time. Do you want to better understand the Bible and give biblical answers to those who ask you about your faith? Hi, this is Perseus Pokou, host of the Sound Reasoning Podcast show. Listen to us weekly as we bring the truth often found in the ivory towers of seminary down to the steeple towers of the local church. Join me along with many of the nation's top theologians as we offer answers to life-tough questions from an apologetic perspective. Subscribe to the show at lifeaudio.com. The Historical Jesus Podcast is the sweeping saga of the life and times of Galilean Jesus of Nazareth, as well as the faith, religion, and church founded to honor and disseminate his acts and teachings. Join me, Mark Vinette, on this fascinating journey through time exploring the many great works of Christian theology, literature, architecture, music, and art inspired by the words and deeds of Jesus Christ.
