Are the Gospels and Acts historical? Testing names for goodness-of-fit before, during, and after

Thomas M. Menino Convention & Exhibition Center 

Are the personal names in the Gospels and Acts historically grounded? In a 2024 study published in the Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus, we applied goodness-of-fit tests to compare name distributions in the Gospels and Acts with a historical reference database of over 2,200 attested individuals from Palestine (4 BCE–73 CE). The results showed that Gospel and Acts name frequencies fit this historical reference distribution at least as well as those found in the works of Josephus, and significantly better than name distributions derived from ancient fictional texts and modern historical novels.
Because name distributions vary over time, we extend this analysis by applying the same goodness-of-fit methodology to reference datasets from periods preceding (330–5 BCE) and following (74–135 CE; 136–200 CE) the time of the Gospels and Acts. We find that the Gospel and Acts names fit the contemporary period only, and fail to fit both earlier and later periods. This temporal specificity provides a discriminative test between historical and fictional name generation and is consistent with the names reflecting the onomastic environment of their purported time of composition.

goodness-of-fit

goodness of fit

Bible

Gospel

name distribution

onomastic 

Section on Text Analysis