There's this argument I've seen come up whenever anybody attempts to use the gospels as a source of historical information about Jesus. The argument is that if we applied the same methods to Harry Potter as we do to the gospels to extract historical information, we could prove that people really do use magic wands and fly on magic brooms, which is absurd.
This argument is fallacious for at least a couple of reasons. Let me mention the minor reason first before going on to the major reason. The minor reason is because an historian doesn't naively cite the gospels as proof of what Jesus said or did. Instead, they apply "criteria of authenticity" or "historical methods" to extract accurate information. One of those criteria is multiple independent attestation where the same piece of information is reported by more than one author writing independently of each other. That obviously couldn't apply to Harry Potter since Harry Potter only has one author.
I vaguely remember being in a conversation in which somebody mockingly applied one of these historical criteria to Harry Potter in order to prove something absurd. I wish I could remember the specifics or find that conversation so I could use it as an illustration here, but I've been digging around for a while now, and I can't find it. But let's grant, for the sake of argument, that there is some criteria that, if applied to Harry Potter, would lead us to believe some absurdity about what happened in the real world.
The major problem with that and with any other argument from analogy with Harry Potter is that there is a confusion of genres. Harry Potter is a known work of fiction. That was J.K. Rowling's intention when writing the story.1 The book is marketed as fiction, and if you found it in a book store or library, it would be in the fiction section. To compare Harry Potter to the gospels is to beg the question against the historicity of the gospels and merely presume that it belongs to the genre of fiction, which doesn't help in an argument about whether the gospels record history or not.
It is a mistake to make this comparison because the gospels definitely do not belong to the genre of fiction. That was not the intention of the authors. There has been some debate among scholars about what the genre of the gospels is, though. Some have said the gospels are a unique genre of their own. Some have said they are "faith documents" or "religious propoganda." Some have said they are midrash or pesher.2 Marcus Borg once said the gospels are "history mythologized" or something like that. But since the publication of Richard Burridge's book, What Are the Gospels? in 1992, most scholars have come around to the belief that the gospels are "ancient biography" or "Greco-Roman biography." In the comment section of one of his blog posts Bart Ehrman said,
Yes, these are certainly fiction [Aesop’s Fables or Plato’s Allegory of the Cave]. I’m not saying that there was no fiction in the ancient world! The Greek novels are among my favorite pieces of ancient literature. And of course the plays of Euripides, Sophocles, and Aeschylus, and — well lots and lots. But these are *genres* that are meant to be fiction: writers wrote them that way and readers (always) read them that way. And so the question is entirely one of genre. There is wide agreement today that the Gospels are, in terms of genre, ancient biographies. Biographies were not fictional pieces but are meant to be historical accounts. For full discussion of the Gospels as biographies, the best treatment is still Richard Burridge, What Are The Gospels: Comparison with Greco-Roman Biography.
I was recently digging around trying to find out what various scholars thought about the genre of the gospels, and a number of them cited Burridge's book as having been instrumental in bringing about wide agreement among scholars that the gospels are ancient biographies. I don't remember everybody who said that, but I do remember N.T. Wright being one of them, though I can't remember where I read it. Mike Licona recently wrote a book called Why Are There Differences In the Gospels? in which he argued that the gospels are ancient biographies by comparing them to the biographies written by Plutarch. There's been a big debate between Licona and Lydia McGrew about that, but Licona's view is representative of the majority of scholars from what I've been able to ascertain.
To me, there are some impressive similarities between the gospels and other ancient biographies. I haven't read Burridge's book yet, but I have read some other stuff, including Licona's book. But besides those comparisons, there is some internal evident suggesting that the genre of the gospels, whatever they may be, are certainly not fiction. For example, Luke writes in his prologue:
“Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile an account of the things accomplished among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, it seemed fitting for me as well, having investigated everything carefully from the beginning, to write it out for you in consecutive order, most excellent Theophilus; so that you may know the exact truth about the things you have been taught” (Luke 1:1-4).
Luke’s intention is clearly to report what actually happened. He claimed to be writing about “things accomplished among us,” saying they were passed down from eyewitnesses to those events.
The author of Acts is the same person as the author of Luke. In Acts, we get a history of the church from just after the resurrection to the early 60’s when Paul is under house arrest in Rome. Much of the material in Acts overlaps with what Paul wrote in his letters about his own travels and events in his life, so we know that at least some of it is historical. Since there is a seamless transition from the ministry of Jesus in Luke to the events in the life of Paul and the early church in Acts, it follows that Luke’s intention in writing his gospel was to record history.
Since Mark and Matthew fall under the same genre as Luke and contain much of the same material, it stands to reason that they intended to record history as well. However, they did not appear to give anything more than a very rough chronological account. The ministry comes before the crucifixion, and the crucifixion comes before the resurrection, but as far as events within the ministry, the order of the events differs from gospel to gospel.
In the case of John, we get a glimpse of the author’s purpose near the end. After narrating some of the appearances of Jesus after his resurrection, he says, “Many other signs therefore Jesus also performed in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these have been written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing you may have life in his name” (John 20:30-31). At the end of the gospel, Jesus predicted the death of Peter, and Peter asked about the fate of another disciple who the author calls “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” Then it says, “This is the disciple who bears witness of these things, and wrote these things; and we know that his witness is true. And there are also many other things which Jesus did, which if they were written in detail, I suppose that even the world itself would not contain the books which were written” (John 21:24-25). So the material in John is attributed to a close disciple of Jesus’ who the author of John took to reliably convey truths about Jesus.
Whether the gospels authors actually succeeded in writing accurate history is a different discussion. I only meant to say that their intention was to record history. The standards of historical precision are different in ancient biographies than they are in modern biographies, so as historians, one still must use historical methods to sift the gospels for information that is accurate by modern standards. But however accurate or inaccurate the gospels are, they are certainly not works of fiction like Harry Potter, so people should stop using Harry Potter as an analogy to undermine historical claims derived from the gospels. It's a bad argument because it's question-begging and it confuses genres.
NOTES
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1. Actually, I used to day dream that what was really going on was that Harry Potter was a true story except that some of the names were changed. J.K. Rowling was actually the same person as Hermione Granger. After all, she admitted in an interview one time that she based Hermione's character on herself. Rowling (aka Granger) didn't like this huge division between muggle society and wizard society and all the secrecy that was involved. She couldn't come right out and expose it all, so she wrote a "fictional" story about it in hopes of maybe easing people into it. Or maybe it was just to get it off her chest. I brought this theory up to somebody on a discussion forum somewhere, and they said they had a similar theory except that J.K. Rowling was the same person as Rita Skeeter.
2. Actually, I don't know if there are a whole lot of scholars who have said the gospels are midrash or pesher. Barbara Thiering thought the gospels were pesher and John Shelby Spong thought the gospels were midrash, but neither of them are New Testament scholars.
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