I am really late on this, but what do commenters think of this enjoyable video (HT Chris Tilling, Brian LePort, see also the Q & A below). I posted on form criticism (the idea that stories/sayings of Jesus were handed down individually, shaped into various literary forms, edited or even invented to serve different needs of various anonymous Christian communities, before finally reaching the evangelists who put them in their gospels) as well as alternative models, so I assume Dr. Williams supports a more formal process of transmission (i.e. the evangelists had direct access to eyewitnesses or the process of oral transmission from authoritative teachers or communal social memory was able to largely preserve the tradition). So the question to reflect on after watching this is whether details mentioned about geography/names/customs of Palestine reflect eyewitness testimony or whether some of the evangelists and/or their sources may have been Jews from Palestine and therefore could supply local colouring to lend verisimilitude to their narratives and what of some other scriptural echoes (e.g. the feeding narratives echoes the feeding of the Israelites with manna in the wilderness)
[...] Maurice Casey, etc.), including many conservative Christian scholars who share the view in my last post on the historical reliability of the Gospels (Ben Witherington, N.T. Wright, James Dunn, Scot [...]