In works of fiction two different characters never have identical names (or even very similar ones) in order to avoid confusing the reader. Similarly, myths don’t tend to pop up where non-historical characters have names that could be easily confused. If you don’t believe me, try picking up a work of fiction and finding two different characters with identical names (unless, of course, it’s part of the plotline) Conversely, in real life if you were to have a room full of people the chance that at least two of them will share the same name is quite high. Thus, a story in which several of the characters have the same name is likely to be historical at its core rather than fictional.
In the New Testament there are many character with the same name (e.g Mary the mother of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, John the Baptist and John the disciple) and in the case of Judas the authors of the gospels seem to go out of their way to make sure readers don’t get confused between Judas Iscariot and the other disciple named Judas. Thus, the characters mentioned in the New Testament are almost certainly historical people.
The historian Richard Bauckham has taken this further in his book Jesus and the Eyewitnesses and shown that the statistical spread of names of character within the New Testament is not what you would expect if these characters never existed.
Do you accept that the majority of the characters mentioned within the New Testament are historical? If not, how do you explain this statistical distribution of their names pointing towards it being historical?
Posted: January 1st 2011
Reed Braden www
So the Bible is true because the authors weren’t very creative?
Posted: January 5th 2011
SmartLX www
Bauckham has apparently conflated two types of fictional works: those intended to be recognised and enjoyed as fiction, and those intended to be accepted as fact.
The re-use of names throughout the New Testament (other than that which can be explained by the fact that there were multiple authors and they didn’t all have access to each other’s work) does make it seem less likely that someone made them all up from scratch. That is exactly why someone who did make them all up from scratch would deliberately re-use names: to make them seem less made-up.
That aside, the analysis is admittedly statistical and the New Testament, taken as a single work, may simply be an outlier. Here are some other recent examples:
- The film Being Human features at least four main characters all named Hector. They are the same man, reincarnated.
- In the Scott Pilgrim comics, there is a minor character known only as “Other Scott”.
- In the Sister Act films, the adopted name of every other nun, including the main character’s alias, is apparently “Sister Mary [something]”.
(I wonder whether Bauckham’s analysis takes into account occasions when deliberate re-use has its own dramatic or humourous purpose, as in some of the above cases?)
Posted: January 4th 2011
Eric_PK
This is a silly argument. A very silly argument.
We can take a history of George Washington, change it slightly so that instead of riding his horse Nelson, he rode a Unicorn named Aurora, and that will meet your test for truth.
Have you never heard of historical fiction? Really?
Posted: January 3rd 2011
Mike the Infidel www
So basically, the argument is that if there is such a distribution of character names, it’s not possible for the document to be even partially fictional?
Heh. Nice try.
Posted: January 2nd 2011
brian thomson www
What names is Bauckham referring to? The original Aramaic names or the Romanized / Anglicised names? Most people 2,000 years ago were illiterate and could not write, so oral retelling was the primary method of story-telling. Have you never gotten names wrong in the retelling? It’s a bit unwise to assume that the names found in e.g. King James were the exact ones in use at the time – and unwise to draw any serious conclusions from them, in my opinion. That’s one problem.
The other problem has been stated many times before, on this site and elsewhere: the historical existence of certain people is interesting, but mere existence doesn’t mean that they did all the things that have been claimed in their names. Even if we can say there was a “Jesus”, that doesn’t mean that “Jesus” was a miracle worker, or said the things he’s reported to have said. It helps to remember that none of the NT books were written until decades after the events they purport to describe, or by the original “witnesses”. The writers (and later editors) of the Bible were not objective: they had an agenda, which was to spread Christianity and enforce Papal infallibility.
This is just another example of modern “apologetics”: reduced to looking for little scraps of “proof” in obscure places. A more intellectually honest approach would be to face the evidence (or lack thereof) head-on and draw the appropriate conclusions – but that doesn’t happen if you have “faith”, does it?
Posted: January 2nd 2011