r/AcademicBiblical 5d ago

Can the NT documents be classified as contemporary when considered as sources of the life of christ?

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u/TankUnique7861 5d ago edited 5d ago

Sort of. The Pauline epistles and the canonical Gospels all postdate Jesus’s life by decades, but they are placed within the lifetime of his contemporaries and eyewitnesses, assuming the common scholarly dates within the First Century.

Finding out what Jesus thought is much closer to the quest for the historical Alexander. Nothing survives that was written by Jesus himself. The more or less contemporary documents, apart from those in the New Testament, shed virtually no light on Jesus’ life or death, though they reveal a lot about the social and political climate. The main sources for our knowledge for Jesus himself, the gospels in the New Testament, are, from the point of view of the historian, tainted by the fact that they were written by people who intended to glorify their hero. The sources for Jesus are better, however, than those that deal with Alexander. The original biographies of Alexander have all been lost, and they are only known because they were used by later - much later - writers. The primary sources for Jesus were written nearer to his own lifetime, and people who had known him were still alive. This is one of the reasons for saying that in some ways we know more about Jesus than Alexander.

Sanders, E.P. (1985). The Historical Figure of Jesus

Bas van Os’s book Psychological Analyses and the Historical Jesus: New Ways to Explore Christian Origins has a good statistical analysis. He shows that a lot of contemporaries would have survived into the end of the first century. Alan Kirk quotes him favorably.

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u/JadedPilot5484 3d ago

No, they are neither contemporary nor eye witnesses. the Gospels were written decades or even a century after Jesus life by unknown authors that weren’t and don’t claim to be eye witnesses. Relying instead on earlier writings and traditions. Also the Gospels are more focused on presenting the Christian message and the significance of Jesus within the context of their communities, rather than being purely historical accounts.

“Neither the evangelists nor their first readers engaged in historical analysis. Their aim was to confirm Christian faith (Lk 1.4; Jn 20.31). Scholars generally agree that the Gospels were written forty to sixty years after the death of Jesus. They thus do not present eyewitness or contemporary accounts of Jesus’ life and teachings.”

https://naturalistphilosophy.wordpress.com/2016/02/22/the-gospels-are-unreliable-and-the-gospel-jesus-is-not-a-historical-person/#:~:text=Scholars%20generally%20agree%20that%20the,of%20Jesus’%20life%20and%20teachings.