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This transcript has been edited for clarity and space.
Caleb Friedeman
Hi, I’m Dr Caleb Friedeman, and I serve as David A. Case Chair of Biblical Studies and Associate Research Professor of New Testament at Ohio Christian University.
David Capes
Dr Caleb Friedeman. Caleb, good to see you. This is your first appearance on The Stone Chapel Podcast.
Caleb Friedeman
Yes, great to be on. Thanks for having me.
David Capes
I got to know you at Wheaton College a few years back when you were there, and since then, you have finished your degree. You’ve graduated, got your PhD, and are doing great work at your university.
Caleb Friedeman
Yes! I had a great time at Wheaton and enjoyed getting to spend a little bit of time together there. And the Lord blessed me with the opportunity to come to Ohio Christian University after I graduated, I’ve been here for going on eight years now. It’s hard to believe, in some ways. It’s been a good ride. And have had a lot of opportunities to preach, to teach, to write, and just feel very blessed.
David Capes
Well, you’ve written some great things, and the book that we’re going to talk about today is no exception to that. It’s a very interesting thesis, that is cutting some new ground. But let’s give a little bit more information about you. For those who don’t know, Caleb Friedeman, who is he?
Caleb Friedeman
I grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, and the Lord led me through my education. I went to Asbury University for undergraduate, and then Wesley Biblical Seminary for an MA. Then I went to Wheaton College for PhD work, which, of course, is where you and I met. Then the Lord opened up this job at Ohio Christian University. Right after that, I am married to Isabella. She’s from Honduras, and we have one son, Paul. I’m an ordained elder in the Church of the Nazarene. So, I am both a biblical scholar, but I also have a pastoral piece to my calling as well. And I do have some interest outside of writing and teaching. In high school I was a competitive power lifter, and I play piano and guitar as well. Transcribed by https://otter.ai – 2 –
David Capes
Well, you’ve written a terrific book entitled Gospel Birth Narratives and Historiography. The subtitle is Reopening a Closed Case. It’s published by Baylor University Press. It’s a really impressive book. Congratulations on it. First of all, let’s talk a little bit about it. What’s the big idea of the book? What are you trying to do here?
Caleb Friedeman
Well, as the subtitle implies, the Gospel birth narratives have really been a closed case when it comes to historical Jesus scholarship, for quite some time, I’d say. Easily, reaching back five to six decades, and maybe even longer. Just as one sounding on that, if you do a run through major books on the historical Jesus over the last 40-50, years, you’ll be hard pressed to find a substantive discussion of Jesus’s birth and childhood, even in significant, lengthy monographs. And sometimes, if you do find any kind of discussion, it’s simply to say why they’re disregarding the material. We do have these two birth narratives in Matthew 1-2 to and Luke 1-2, but scholars typically haven’t taken them very seriously. And so I try to dig into that in the book, and I distinguish between two things, two kinds of skepticism you can have toward a source.
One is skepticism of intent, which is basically to say, I don’t think that this source is intended to be historical. For example, if someone is trying to reconstruct the historical person Don Quixote, using the novel Don Quixote, then you might protest that this source is not intended to be historical. So, you’re just off on the wrong foot from the beginning. But the other kind of skepticism would be skepticism of truth. So that basically says, I recognize that this source is intended to be historical. I just don’t think that it’s correct at a given point.
If you look at those two, they’re both valid, and they’re both very important to use at certain points if we’re trying to do historiography. But skepticism of intent is a lot more efficient if you can pull it off. Which is to say, if I can convince you that what you’re looking at is more like Don Quixote or Goldilocks or something, than it is like Thucydides or some other historian or some historical biography, then we don’t really need to discuss the historicity of individual events. Because we’re just not dealing with that kind of a source.
And what I basically suggest in the introduction to the book is that the unique skepticism the scholars have leveled at the gospel birth narratives really is unique. I don’t know of another part of the gospels that we disregard in that way. That unique skepticism really depends on the skepticism of intent, because it’s hard to produce truth-oriented reasons that would justify ignoring historical sources in that way. And interestingly, you have had a good number of scholars, who really articulated a skepticism of intent. Even people like John Meyer, for example, doesn’t think that the birth stories are intended to be historical, necessarily.
David Capes
So, you have these two kinds of skepticism. Both can be useful in their own way when you’re dealing with the right kind of material, as you articulate. Since Richard Burridge’s work on the Gospels, a lot of Transcribed by https://otter.ai – 3 –
people accept the idea the Gospels are meant to be an ancient kind of biography. That means they are intended to be taken as historical.
Caleb Friedeman
Yes, and I think Burridge and that whole trend of recognizing the Gospels are ancient biographies is really where my project starts. And interestingly, one of the things that I agree with scholars, whom I disagree overall with, is the fact that the Gospels are ancient biographies. And certainly, if not that, at least that ancient biographies give us the best comparisons for how we should be reading the gospels. One thing that’s interesting is, if you look at scholars who have made these kinds of arguments for why birth material should be regarded as legendary or, ahistorical, they’re typically appealing to ancient biographies.
You might say the argument goes something like this. From the other side, the side that I’m pushing back against scholars will say something like this: birth material, or birth stories in ancient biographies was not intended to be historical. The Gospel birth narratives are in ancient biographies, and so the gospel birth narratives also are not meant to be historical.
I basically take that argument on and say, I’ll grant you that we’re dealing with ancient biographies here and that that needs to be the backdrop. But I actually disagree on all points. I basically say, let’s start with ancient biographies and look and see how it seems like their authors intended them to be read. My argument is basically birth material in ancient biographies was intended to be historical. And as ancient biographies, then the birth material that we find in the gospels, like in Matthew 1-2 and Luke 1-2 is also intended to be historical. I spend the first part of the book dealing with a range of different ancient biographers and looking at how they write their birth material. And then I get into the gospel birth narratives in part 2.
David Capes
Let’s talk about some of those historians, or historical figures that you’re talking about. Give us a bit of a rundown.
Caleb Friedeman
I’m basically looking for biographers who wrote within a century of the Gospels on either side. And I’m also looking ideally for biographers who have written more than one biography that has birth material we can look at because a sample size of only one biography for an author isn’t the most helpful. I end up going with Cornelius Nepos, and he is actually our first Roman biographer. And then I do Philo, who only has one biography, his Life of Moses. But that has been such a major player in these discussions. Because it’s our only Jewish biography at all that it’s worth dealing with, even given that we only have the one. And then I also do Plutarch. Of course, many people are going to be familiar with Plutarch’s Lives, and those are some of our most important sources for reconstructing what ancient biography was like. And then I do Suetonius as well. I spend a chapter on each of those authors.
Just a little bit of the backstory of this book too. I mentioned earlier that there are these scholars who are making these cases about ancient biographies. When I was getting into scholarship, even preparing for PhD work, I started to read this scholarly literature about gospel birth narratives. And it wasn’t just Transcribed by https://otter.ai – 4 –
about the historical parts. I was just reading things like Raymond Brown’s Birth of the Messiah and reading a whole range of works about the gospel birth narratives. And I kept encountering this claim by various authors that this material wasn’t intended to be historical. They were citing ancient biographies to back this up. And at some point, I just said to myself, okay, I want to go read this stuff for myself and see what’s going on.
I started reading the kinds of biographies that were cited. For example, Plutarch’s Life of Alexander or Romulus or Suetonius Biography of Augustus. I just kept noticing these features that didn’t really track with the story I’d been told about what these biographies were supposed to be doing. For example, they would do things like cite sources for the information they were giving. Well, that’s an odd thing to do if you’re just writing something that’s meant to be legendary. I don’t find a lot of source citation in fairy tales. I would see something like that, or I would find a biographer mentioning differences among their sources. There are three accounts of how this happened. Here’s how the first one goes. Here’s how the second one goes. Here’s how the third one goes. And then they might even go further and say, and I’m going to evaluate these and tell you which one I think is the most accurate or truthful. Or maybe I’ll come up with my own reconstruction of what’s going on.
And then one last thing is they would sometimes distance themselves from more miraculous or supernatural kinds of claims, or just more fantastic kinds of things. What I mean by distancing is basically putting distance between their authorial reputation and the claim that’s being made. Instead of simply asserting that, a God had intercourse with the subject’s mother and then that led to this person being born. They might say it is said that and then give the tradition. Plutarch might not want to be held accountable for that material, but it allows him to pass on this information into sources without taking responsibility for it, which again, indicates a historiographic consciousness.
Those four things that I just mentioned, I call those historiographic features, and they’re the basis of the analysis in this book. Those would be sources. And by that, I mean citation of sources in some form or indication that an author has sources. And then transparency, that’s where you note differences between accounts. Then evaluation, where you evaluate the trustworthiness of those accounts, and then distancing, where you distance your reputation from a claim. I basically use those as at least one key part of my analysis when I get to these ancient biographers, and then also when I talk about the gospel birth narratives in part two.
David Capes
You have these criteria that you’ve looked at and evaluating. Now, Plutarch writes, in his Lives, I think about 50 plus different people. But he doesn’t give birth narratives to everyone right?
Caleb Friedeman
Correct!
David Capes
So, birth narratives aren’t necessarily a given feature of every biography.
Caleb Friedeman Transcribed by https://otter.ai – 5 –
Yes, that’s right. I would say some people have failed to notice that, and other folks have noticed that, but failed to consider the significance. One of the things that I talk about for Cornelius Nepos, Plutarch and Suetonius, because that’s the only place where you have the opportunity to talk about absence. Because obviously Philo has got birth material, so he’s not going to have absence because he has no other biography. When I am looking at these authors that have multiple ancient biographies, one of the things I talk about is how we make sense of the absence of birth material from their biographies.
So not only do we find historiographic features in the birth material of many of these biographies, we also find that many of their biographies don’t have any birth material at all, or that the amount varies a lot. In some cases, you might have only a line or a sentence or two on somebody, or just even a very short sentence, if they’re just spinning all this out of whole cloth, and they don’t need any sources. They’re just making stuff up. Why not just have the same amount of birth material for everyone, or have the amount of birth material scale to how much they like the figure that they’re writing about. Which, again, just doesn’t seem to be the case.
You find all kinds of places where you don’t have that kind of scaling. For example, I believe Thrasybulus is one of Cornelius Nepos favorite subjects, and he doesn’t give him birth material. Why? If all this stuff is meant to be is some sort of legendary, non-historical anticipation of what this person is going to become as an adult. It just doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense. I think that the better explanation for that absence is actually that the reason we have absence, in some cases, is either because the biographer lacks sources, which is the kind of problem a historian or a historical biographer would have for sure. Or the information in their sources just wasn’t relevant or interesting enough to include. But what that really keeps out of bounds is the idea that, they’re just making this stuff up.
David Capes
Yes. I like that. I think that’s an important part of the argument. Now, what we find too, in the New Testament is that Mark begins and has no birth narrative. And same thing is said of the Gospel of John as well. There’s not really a birth narrative. There’s a theological prologue in GJohn that talks about his pre-existence. But that seems to be of a different class than saying the things that you say in these birth narrative
Caleb Friedeman
Yes, I would say the fact that Mark and John don’t have what we might call a birth narrative proper has actually become a lot less surprising to me the more that I’ve studied ancient biographies Because you just begin to recognize this is not a requirement or even a norm necessarily that you’re going to have these. There are too many exceptions to say that this was a universal requirement, or even something that was odd to leave out.
Just for example, as you look across those four authors that I mentioned, Nepos, Philo, Plutarch and Suetonius, I analyze 95 biographies from those authors. I can only discuss so many of those in detail in the chapters, but I give tables at the end of the book in appendixes that actually give an analysis of historiographic features of things like omens and miracles if they’re there. Then something called time elapsed, which we can come back to. But I give my analysis and those tables at the back. Transcribed by https://otter.ai – 6 –
If you go through and look, I also talk about where the birth material actually is in each life. I think it’s 18 of the 95 that don’t have any birth material whatsoever. And then that’s even being very gracious, because I’m counting things like, if there’s a sentence that pertains to the person’s childhood or birth. I’m including that as birth material. So on that count, actually, if you were to grant that any kind of claim about someone’s childhood or birth counts as birth material, then you might say that Mark and John have a little bit because, you’ll find a mention about being the son of Mary or the son of Joseph.
David Capes
And it’d not necessarily in the first chapter or the first writing that you encounter, but you encounter in the story that he has brothers and sister and those types of things.
Caleb Friedeman
And by the way, if you want to say, let’s not count that kind of stuff, and you then had a harder line analysis for all these other ancient biographies that I deal with. Well, you might end up saying that a lot more than 18 don’t have birth material.
David Capes
Yes, exactly.
Caleb Friedeman
I just say that I think what we find as you cross the four Gospels and whether or not they have birth material is within the range of what we’d expect for ancient biographies. I don’t think that it’s particularly unusual that Mark and John don’t have a birth narrative, and then that Matthew and Luke do.
David Capes
I guess the bottom line is that ancient biographies, when they did talk about birth material, their intention was to say, I’m writing history here, and I’m making judgments about that history. And so when we come to the Gospels, we can say that at least the intention of Matthew and the intention of Luke is to say that I’m writing history here. Not only in the things that Jesus said and did as an adult, but also in the stories of his origins, the stories of his family. Even those that are interlaced with some dream interpretation and visions and those kinds of things.
Caleb Friedeman
I think that’s exactly right. And I guess the way that I would put it is Matthew and Luke and other ancient biographers wrote their birth material with historiographic intent. That’s to say that they didn’t have a unique approach to this material vis a vis other parts of their biographies. All I’m really saying is we need to read this material the same way we would read anything else in a nature biography. Instead of treating it as a special case, we just should approach it with the same kinds of assumptions that we approach their accounts of the person’s adulthood. And that should be self-evident, but I think it hasn’t been in scholarship, and that has generated the need for this kind of book.
In addition to historiographic features and the absence of birth material that I look at, I also look at a couple other elements. One is their use of supernatural elements. Here I include both omens, which are Transcribed by https://otter.ai – 7 –
things that today we might call coincidences, but the people in ancient times often saw significance to. You would maybe have a coincidence, and then you would interpret it in a certain way. So that would be something like an omen. Then you actually have supernatural events, which you might call miracles, where the biographer is actually affirming that something happens. One thing that’s really interesting coming out of that is that number one, you really don’t find biographers typically making miracle claims in birth material a lot.
Usually, if they’re going to relate something supernatural, I would say the vast majority of the time, they’re going to include a historiographic feature that’s going to either distance them from it or make it just an act of transparency, where I have this in my sources. But it’s actually fairly rare to find a biographer affirming that kind of stuff. The number of supernatural claims that you find in birth material and these four ancient biographers that I deal with is actually fairly minimal.
The other thing that’s interesting that I look at is the time elapsed between the subject’s birth, and when the biographer is writing the biography. And obviously it’s a little hard to analyze that, because you don’t know exactly when these things were published or and it’s even harder to say when the research began. When did Plutarch begin researching this person’s life? But I do that kind of calculus, just as a broad way of making a comparison. If you look across those four authors and their biographies, what I find is that the average time elapsed across all 95 biographies from those four biographers is over 360 years.
David Capes
Wow, that’s a long time.
Caleb Friedeman
That’s the kind of remove that they’re operating in. And. It doesn’t tell you anything about their intention, but it does tell you something about the kinds of sources they would have had available to them, or that they wouldn’t have had available to them. For example, in very, very few, if any cases, are these four biographers, outside the Gospels, going to have access to eyewitness sources, or even to family members of the person. Or people who knew eyewitnesses well. 360 years. Then you do a comparison to Matthew and Luke, and it becomes really interesting.
But I just wanted to mention those two things, because they are pretty important for part one of the book. What all that does I think, is resituates the burden of proof when you get to the gospel birth narrative. If ancient biographers tended to write their birth material intended to be historical, then that means that if we’re going to deny that for Matthew and Luke, we need to have really good reasons why. But prior to that kind of analysis, I think many people would have said, well, you need to have extraordinary reasons to think that Matthew and Luke did intend their birth material to be historical. And I’m saying actually no, it’s the other way around.
David Capes
Yes. There are certain assumptions driving scholarship very often. And I’m curious what your conclusions were about the time between the events of the birth of Jesus and then the writing of that. You’re not talking about 360 years. You’re talking about, in some cases, maybe 60 years later, or 70 Transcribed by https://otter.ai – 8 –
years later. There are some that would date Luke, and Matthew, or both into the second century. But more and more, it’s interesting to note that people are actually beginning to date the Gospels a bit earlier than they were just even a few years ago. This is really fascinating. You’ve done a fantastic job. We’re talking to Caleb Friedeman about his book, Gospel Birth Narratives in Historiography: Reopening a Closed Case. So, is it closed again, or is it still open? What do you think?
Caleb Friedeman
Well, I guess the case that I want to open is actually talking about the historical value of what Matthew and Luke are saying about Jesus’s birth and childhood. I think the reason it’s reopening a closed case is because it’s saying these are historical sources that we need to analyze as historical sources. As opposed to simply dismissing them as being legendary or non-historical. The analysis that you still need, or where the scholarship still needs to be done, is to say, if they’re intended to be historical, how well do they achieve that? I would say, by and large, scholars haven’t really even been asking that question for several decades. You might be able to find a few exceptions to that, but I would say by and large, we really haven’t been asking the question about truth. If we’re talking about intent and truth, I think I’ve done my best to answer the intent question in this book. Now the truth question remains, where I’d like to see us do more work.
David Capes
Dr Caleb Friedeman has been with us today to talk about his book, Gospel Birth Narratives in Historiography: Reopening a Closed Case. It’s a fascinating book, an important contribution to the study of the New Testament and of the life of Jesus, the historical Jesus. He is reopening a case that has been closed on many accounts. Thanks for being with us today. Dr Friedeman.
Caleb Friedeman
Thanks, David. It’s been great to be here.
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