By far the simplest explanation is that the Gospel authors were able to give an authentic pattern of names in their narrative because they were reliably reporting what people were actually called. Given that names are also hard to remember, the authentic pattern of names in the Gospels suggests that their testimony is of high quality. After all, if they have correctly remembered the less memorable details—the names of individuals—then they should have had no difficulty in remembering the more memorable outline of events.
