The Reliability of the Gospels: Minding the Gap between Event and Gospel - Darrell Bock

"Many people question whether the New Testament Gospels can be trusted, given they were written decades after the events they portray and with some debate about whether we can know who wrote them. Does the combination of eyewitnesses, oral culture, tradition, and the floating nature of memory work well in an ancient setting that produced these four key books of the Bible? This class will consider how the Gospels emerged in an oral cultural context with a note about how the tradition worked, how the Gospels relate to each other (especially the relationship between the Synoptics and John), dealing with the differences between them, the role of cultural background, and finally a look at how the Gospels make a case for who Jesus is.

This is Part 1 in a 5 part series on 'The Reliability of the Gospels and Their Picture of Jesus'.

1. Minding the Gap between Event and Gospel

How can we be sure that the distance between the event and the Gospel writing preserved the event’s telling well? This is a look at how orality worked in the first century in a way that prevented free creation of events and that suggests the tradition of authorship knew what was going on."

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Darrell L. Bock is Senior Research Professor of New Testament Studies at Dallas Theological Seminary in Dallas, Texas, as well as Executive Director of Cultural Engagement for the Hendricks Center for Christian Leadership there. An author or editor of about fifty books, his special fields of study involve hermeneutics, the use of the Old Testament in the New, Luke-Acts, the historical Jesus, Gospel studies, and the integration of theology and culture. It is this latter area that is the focus of his work at the Hendricks Center, where he is responsible for producing a web-based, weekly podcast on issues of God and culture called The Table and author of the recent book, Cultural Intelligence: Living for God in a Diverse, Pluralistic World. He is a graduate of the University of Texas (B.A.), Dallas Theological Seminary (Th.M.), and the University of Aberdeen (Ph.D.). He has had four annual stints of post doctoral study at the University of Tübingen, the second through fourth as an Alexander von Humboldt scholar at Tübingen University through a scholarship offered by the Federal Republic of Germany (1989-90, 1995-96, 2004-05, 2010-2011). He was editor at large for Christianity Today for several years and served as President of the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS) for the year 2000-2001. He currently serves on the boards of Wheaton College, Chosen People Ministries, Christians in Public Service (CIPS), and the Institute for Global Engagement (IGE). He also serves as elder emeritus at Trinity Fellowship Church in Richardson, Texas and as advisor to staff at Bent Tree Fellowship. Married to Sally for almost fifty years, he is the father of two married daughters and a married son, and is also a proud grandfather of five.

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