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For decades, scholars have claimed that ancient birth narratives were never meant to be taken as history. Then one scholar went and actually read them.
Show Notes
For decades, scholars have claimed that ancient birth narratives were never meant to be taken as history. Then one scholar went and actually read the ancient biographers, and what he found in their own writing doesn't fit the story we've been told.
New Testament scholar Caleb Friedeman compared Matthew and Luke to 95 other ancient biographies and found the average biographer wrote 360 years after his subject's birth, while the gospel writers worked within decades, close enough to talk with people who knew eyewitnesses. He also walks through the two genealogies, the census in Luke, and why two accounts with different details are not the same thing as a contradiction.
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What is Faith Lab?
Christianity is deeper than you've been shown.
Nate Hanson digs into the parts of Christianity most of us were never shown: the evidence for Jesus, the strange spiritual world of the Bible, miracles, the first Christians, and true stories of people Jesus changed. Short episodes, grounded in serious scholarship. Earlier episodes feature conversations with scholars like N.T. Wright, Tim Mackie, and Craig Keener.
Nate was a pastor, spent most of a decade deconstructing, and came back through scholarship.
Faith Lab is free and listener-supported. Help keep it going at faithlabshow.com/support.