In part one of this article we looked at various temporal and geographical indicators referenced within the Fourth Gospel which served to corroborate the author’s claim that he really could have been an eyewitness of the life of Jesus. The Gospel of John does indeed bear the marks of an authentic early first century text written by someone with accurate knowledge of Jerusalem before it was completely destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD. But there is another test we can use to further establish John’s credibility, and that is by considering the names that appear throughout his Gospel. An Israeli scholar by the name of Tal Ilan compiled a database of ancient Palestinian Jewish individuals who are named in various inscriptions, texts coins, etc., and currently her database contains over 3,000 male individuals. Richard Bauckham analyzed this data and discovered that when one compares the top ten most popular names of Jewish Palestinian males who lived around the time of Jesus, that list ends up looking remarkably similar to the list of the most frequently occurring names that appear collectively in the Gospels and Acts. This fact led Bauckham to conclude back in his book Jesus & The Eyewitnesses (2006) that, “These features of the New Testament data would be difficult to explain as the result of random invention of names within Palestinian Jewish Christianity and impossible to explain as the result of such invention outside Jewish Palestine. All the evidence indicates the general authenticity of the personal names in the Gospels” (p. 84).
Click for Full Text!
