Does the "Gap Defense" Matter in Assessing the Virtue or Truthfulness of a Religious Document

This blog follows up on a post I made a few days ago. Here, I only want to look at one way to address what I call the "Gap Defense" used by Fundamentalist Christians to defend the superiority of their scriptural heritage. One may pose the question as such:

Does the claim that the gospels were written close to Jesus’ life make them more reliable than sacred writing in traditions that were not close to the life of their central figures?

Of course, one will immediately want to know what the question suggests by "close" or "reliable," for example, but let's pretend we know what they mean as much as Fundamentalists pretend to understand. One apologetic strategy used by Fundamentalists is to point to the fact that the gospels were written very close to the actual time of Jesus, not hundreds of years later. This is supposed to work in proving that time lapse or time gap contributes considerably to the veracity and integrity of the transaction that occurs between an oral tradition and its composition.

I remember reading Evidence that Matters, Josh McDowell’s magnum opus on defending the integrity of Christianity. In making this claim, he added that unlike versions of Homer’s Illiad that appear hundreds of years later, the gospels maintain their integrity. How do we know this? One reason is because we have four versions of Jesus’ life that all agree. What Fundamentalists fail to do next is to tell us what the four gospels should look like, they simply believe that what they look like in relation to one another is reasonable criteria.

For stories occurring 50 to 150 years after the death of their subject, should we expect to see a large margin of factual error, confusion over chronology, and inconsistency or omission of detail?  Never mind the fact, that in a court of law first-person witness testimony often varies (I think about the details concerning the Ferguson shooting of Michael Brown most recently), the criteria of acceptance for the gospels is largely based on an assumption that because there is so much agreement in the stories that the details of those stories don’t matter as much. This is a point that Bart Ehrman constantly makes when debating evangelical scholars. His questions often look something like this:

The gospels are nothing BUT the details they contain. So how do we know what matters? And if the details don’t matter, why does? Folks like Craig Evans, in debating Bart Ehrman, will usually go to a place that looks something like this:

There is a core unit to the story that each gospel faithfully recalls. So while  the details may differ, where they count, there is consistency.

What this means, however, is unclear. The identifiable core (the passion narrative, or to use a more technical term approximate to this idea, the  kerygma) is supposedly NOT simply a mass of details as well. It is something more…something that we can continue to latch onto without too much concern that what we are doing is creating categories of meaning. But what that more is, no one quite knows from where the authority comes to create such a valuation of meaning. All of this makes more sense when we do some comparative thinking.

In Hindu culture, the Ramayana has multiple versions. Among the two most important are Valmiki’s 4-5 BCE and the other Goswami Tulsidas’ 16^th century Ramacharitmanas version. They both agree in many places, i.e., they get the basic structure of the story, plotline, and characters correct. All have Rama chasing after Ravana in search of Sita. All have Hanuman intervening of Rama’s behalf and leaping across the ocean to reach Lanka where he confronts Ravana. Oddly enough, just like the accusations made against Mark, the earliest of the gospels where the original copy has no resurrection account, we see some of the same problem occur in the Ramayana in which the versions do not agree on the first and final chapters and so in some versions Sita is put out and exiled after her rescue and in others Rama takes her back. Hinduism is not interested in soteriological history, but dharma. And so this is about as important to Hindus as the resurrection or lack thereof is important to Christians. Three of the four gospels believe that the resurrection of Jesus is important.

Unlike the gospels which share a range of a few centuries, Ramayana versions occur between two millennia.

The point is it does not seem a particularly unique or strong argument in favor of the truth claims about Christianity’s story that because a shorter amount of time passed between Jesus’ death and the first composition to appear that Christianity’s truth is more secure.  Both the millennia separating  the versions of the Ramayana and the 50 to 150 years separating the gospels show the same compositional deficiencies and editorial flourishes.

Interestingly enough, in terms of dissimilarities between the documents it is recognized by both Christian scholars and Indologists who look at the gospels and Ramayana/Ramacharitmanas that the development gap between their documents lies in the deification of the central figure becoming more important with the latter documents.  From the standpoint of compositional queues we simply do not see much difference between the development of the gospels and certain Hindu scriptures.