Person

Peter J. Williams

British New Testament scholar and Principal of Tyndale House, Cambridge, a research library and institute for biblical studies. He works on the ancient languages and early translations of the Bible and on the text of the Greek New Testament, and he is known to a wide audience for Can We Trust the Gospels? (2018), which presents the evidence that the Gospel writers knew the people, places and customs of first-century Palestine.

The 30-second version:

Peter Williams runs Tyndale House in Cambridge and specialises in the languages and text of the Bible. His short book Can We Trust the Gospels? gathers the small details the Gospel writers got right without trying: place names, local customs, and especially personal names. He shows that the Gospels use the names that were popular in Jesus's world and add tags like "Simon Peter" to the common ones, which is how people talk about real people.

Tyndale House, Cambridge, the biblical studies library and research institute Williams has led since 2007. Photo: Magnus Manske, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Life

• MA, MPhil and PhD from the University of Cambridge, in the ancient languages related to the Bible.
• Research Fellow in Old Testament at Tyndale House, Cambridge, 1998-2003, followed by lecturing posts at the University of Aberdeen.
• Became Warden of Tyndale House in July 2007, the youngest in its history. The title became Principal on 1 January 2017.
• Affiliated Lecturer in the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge, a member of the Translation Oversight Committee of the English Standard Version, and chair of the International Greek New Testament Project.

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Major works

• Early Syriac Translation Technique and the Textual Criticism of the Greek Gospels (Gorgias Press, 2004), on how far the early Syriac versions can be used to recover the Greek text of the Gospels.
• The Greek New Testament, Produced at Tyndale House, Cambridge (Crossway and Cambridge University Press, 2017), the edition led by Dirk Jongkind, on which Williams was associate editor.
• Can We Trust the Gospels? (Crossway, 2018), translated into several languages. Its third chapter, on whether the Gospel writers knew their setting, sets out the evidence of personal names.

Contribution to apologetics

• Names. Williams presents the Gospel Name Frequencies Argument for general readers: the Gospels' most common names match the most common names among Palestinian Jews of the time, and the writers attach tags to popular names (Simon Peter, Simon the Zealot, Mary Magdalene) while leaving rare names such as Andrew, Philip and Thomas untagged. He contrasts this with the later apocryphal gospels, which drift from the pattern.
• Local knowledge. He gathers the Gospels' accurate references to places, coinage and customs, the kind of incidental detail a distant writer tends to get wrong. The codex draws on this on Gospels Are Constructed Encomium Objection Defeater.
• Undesigned coincidences. He presents places where one Gospel explains a detail in another without seeming to intend it, which fits independent accounts of the same events.

Scholarship

Published academic works this page draws on, each matched to a publisher, index or library catalog record.

• Peter J. Williams, Can We Trust the Gospels? (Crossway, 2018). Open Library

See also

• Gospel Name Frequencies Argument, the names evidence he brought to a wide audience
• Richard Bauckham, whose Jesus and the Eyewitnesses first set out the name data
• NT Authorship and Eyewitness Apologetics, the wider eyewitness case
• Gospels Are Constructed Encomium Objection Defeater, where his evidence of local knowledge is used
• Anonymous Gospels Objection Defeater, the objection the name evidence answers