If we're going to trust any birth narratives from the ancient world, then I think the gospel

birth narratives should be among the foremost of those.

Can you actually trust the gospel birth narratives? I'm Nate Hansen, and today on Faith Lab,

we're getting into the hard questions, the census, the genealogies, with New Testament

scholar Caleb Friedman, who studied 95 ancient biographies and found something that reframes how we should evaluate

Matthew and Luke.

I take a sample of 95 biographies outside the Gospels that I look at their birth material

and analyze it.

So 95 biographies from authors like Cornelius Nepos, Pilo, Plutarch, Suetonius.

One of the things I analyze is the time elapsed between when the

person was born and then when the biographer wrote. So how much time was there between

when this person was born and the biographer who's writing about it? On average, across all those

95 biographies, the average time elapsed is 360 years. So what that means is in the vast

majority of cases, even when the biographers are doing their very best work, the best that they

have to rely on is typically written sources. So very, very, very rarely are they having a chance

to go and talk to either eyewitnesses or people who knew eyewitnesses. And when you run that same

comparison for Matthew and Luke, now, obviously, scholars differ as to when Matthew and Luke were

written, but even if you just kind of take a midline, this is a general consensus kind of date,

you know, Matthew and Luke are breathing rarefied air when it comes to their proximity to the events they're reporting.

And they would have almost certainly had the opportunity to interview people who were close

to eyewitnesses. So, for example, Jesus' brother James or Jude or perhaps the Apostle Peter,

they would have almost certainly had access to people like that in their

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