The Case for Jesus: The Biblical and Historical Evidence for Christ

by Brant Pitre

the closest literary parallels are in fact Greco-Roman biographies.

ancient biographies would often begin with some kind of genealogy.

the Gospels are not biographies but folklore and fairy stories completely fails to reckon with the literary evidence.

the language of “good news” comes straight from the book of Isaiah,

The Gospels are not just about the life of the man Jesus of Nazareth; they are about the coming of God in the person of Jesus.

They are historical biographies, two of which explicitly claim to tell us what Jesus actually did and said and to be based on eyewitness testimony

“falsehood” (Greek pseudos).

But they can’t dispute that the genre of his writing is historical biography, and that he is purporting to tell what actually happened.

They also claim that they are based on eyewitness testimony. In other words, they insist that they are historical biographies.

Now, why would Luke emphasize the eyewitness nature of his sources if he were just telling folktales?

the Gospel of Luke begins by insisting that it is an accurate, factual account, based directly on eyewitness testimony of what Jesus did and said.

“testimony” (Greek martyria)

On the one hand—and I cannot overemphasize the point—it does not mean that the Gospels are verbatim transcripts of what Jesus said and did.

does mean that the authors intend to record the substance of what Jesus really said and did.

closely as possible to “the general sense”

you will quickly discover that they are not identical

guaranteed agreement in substance, not in exact wording.

“make no claim to literary accuracy”

historically indefensible and, quite frankly, academically irresponsible.

His students lived with him and learned from him for some three years.

Notice how different this is from the now widespread theory that our information about Jesus is primarily based on decade after decade of anonymous storytelling.

They are ancient biographies and authoritative accounts of the life of Jesus based on the testimony of his students.

As such, they function in part precisely as controls over what was being said about Jesus.

the disciples of Jesus would have frequently rehearsed their memories in the course of preaching and teaching.

these proposed dates are by no means as certain as they are often made out to be.

The argument rests almost entirely on the claim that Jesus’s oracles about the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple were written up after the fact.

Jesus’s prophecies of the destruction of the Temple constitute the main “evidence.”

But this way of dating the Synoptic Gospels has several major weaknesses.

then why don’t the writers emphasize that Jesus’s prophecy had been fulfilled?

I’ll give you one explanation: perhaps Luke does not mention the fulfillment of Jesus’s prophecy because it had not yet taken place.

“There is no material in Mark which must be dated after 70.”

“any time between the thirties CE and c. 70 CE.”29

that’s when the Acts of the Apostles was written—around AD 62.

to conclude that both the Acts of the Apostles and the Synoptic Gospels were written while Paul was still alive:

Because there wasn’t anything else to say.

then that means that either the Gospel of Mark or the Gospel of Matthew (or both) was also written while Paul was still alive.

that at least two of the three Synoptic Gospels, and perhaps all three, were written sometime before AD 62.

the Gospels are not the late-first-century end products of a long chain of anonymous storytelling.

Instead, they are ancient biographies written by the students of Jesus and their followers, written well within the lifetimes of the apostles and eyewitnesses to Jesus.

the Messiah would be not just the long-awaited king, but a divine being who would usher in a heavenly kingdom.

Jesus loves to talk about in the Gospels, it is the coming of “the kingdom of God”—or, in Matthew’s Gospel, “the kingdom of heaven.”

the key to unlocking the meaning of Jesus’s otherwise mysterious words can be found by going back to the Old Testament.

and it smote the image on its feet of iron and clay,

the fifth kingdom—the kingdom of God—

in the first century AD, it was believed that the kingdom of God spoken of by Daniel would come sometime during the reign of the Roman Empire.

with one important point of clarification.

Notice that the kingdom in Daniel is not a man-made kingdom;

it is represented as a stone “cut out by ...

supernatural kingdom made by God himself. And this is the context in which everything Jesus says about h...

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