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| Lion of St. Mark, Piazza San Marco, Venice |
As regular readers know, I originally wrote this series on Mark back in 1998, and at the time I was more-or-less stumbling alone in the dark trying to make sense of the historicity of the gospel. I was working as a church historian in Thailand and doing a good deal of oral history interviewing. I was struck by how similar the Gospel of Mark was to the kind of data I was collecting, and used these snippets that I am now posting on Rom Phra Khun to try to work out my church historian's instinct about Mark. I wish I had had access to some of the work now being done on the gospels as historical literature—for example, the video below.
There is a video of a lecture delivered by Dr. Peter Williams in March 2011 as part of "The Lanier Library Lecture Series," that is appearing on various church-based blogs, which discusses some of the evidence for the reliability of the four gospels as historical sources. William's argument is that the gospels consistently reflect basic elements of Jesus' first century Jewish culture accurately to such a degree that their contents could only have originated with eyewitnesses who were a part of that culture. It is impossible to believe, he argues, that the gospel writers could have "made up" the stories they recount because the details in them always reflect the real world of the stories' day and age. It is also impossible to believe that the stories, such as of Jesus' miracles, "grew in the telling" over a period of time because the cultural details in those stories reflect precisely the time of Jesus himself. It is an entertaining lecture and well-worth the time spent listening to it, if one is interested in the question of the historicity of the gospels in general and Mark in particular. Here it is:
