I just read this in a book called Why Believe? by Neil Shenvi and it is the first time I heard this argument and I'd like to share it with you. It isn't the best argument for the validity of scripture but it is just "piling on" which since this isn't football, it is allowed and encouraged.
Most common boy names 1800's -
John, William, James, George, Charles, Frank, Joseph, Robert, Henry, Edward, Thomas, Harry, Walter, Arthur, Fred, Albert
Most common girl names 1800's -
Mary, Anna, Margaret, Elizabeth, Emma, Helen, Florence, Minnie, Ethel, Bertha, Clara, Alice, Annie, Bessie, Ida, Grace
Most common boy names 2000's -
Jacob, Michael, Joshua, Matthew, Daniel, Christopher, Andrew, Ethan, Joseph, William, Anthony, David, Alexander, Nicholas, Tyler, Ryan
Most common girl names 2000's -
Emily, Madison, Emma, Olivia, Hannah, Abigail, Isabella, Samantha, Elizabeth, Ashley, Alexis, Sarah, Sophia, Alyssa, Grace, Ava
Notice how different today's names are from 200 years ago? Only 2 or 3 overlap out of the top 16. The top 5 boys names of 2023 aren't even found in this list - Noah, Liam, Elijah, Oliver, Lucas. Imagine in 2024 you were writing a fictional story that occured in the 1800's and you had to come up with character names. Would you even consider trying to use timely names? Maybe. If you did, where would you come up with them? Probably the internet like I did.
Critics of the Bible who say that the Bible is a bunch of legends written down hundreds of years afterwards might have a similar problem with names. If these were stories written 200 years later, what names might be used to be historically accurate? Would they even consider it? They didn't have the internet. You would expect a lot of names that weren't common in 1st century Palestine.
Onomastics - the study of the history and origin of names - strongly supports the reliability of the gospels. A few decades ago, historian Tal Ilan, put together a list of hundreds of proper names drawn from burial boxes of Jews born during the times of Jesus. The most common name for males was Simon and for females, Mary. How does that jive with the gospels? Simon and Mary are far and away the most common names in the gospels and Acts. The name Joseph occurs 8% of the time, John 6.4%, Ananias occurs 4% of the time in the New Testament. If you compare that to the Jewish equivalent of tombstone names in that same time period, you get Joseph at 10%, John at 5.7%, and Ananias once again at 4%. Mary and Salome, the top 2 New Testament names were #1 and #2 in ossuaries. Mary occurs 35% of female names in the gospels and Acts while Salome is at 6%. In Jewish "cemeteries" at that time, Mary was 25% and Salome at 23%.
"It seems highly unlikely that the four authors of the gospels would have had the foresight, let alone the ability, to write fictional narratives that so accurately, yet subtly reflect their historical settings" *.The best explanation of this data is that the writings were done in the time period in which they happened.
*Neil Shenvi pg.45 , Why Believe?
