Right setting, wrong story

 I'd like to revisit one issue in the recent Ehrman/Williams debate:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuZPPGvF_2I

Ehrman dismissed the copious evidence provided by Williams on the grounds that even if the background information in the Gospels is accurate, that has no bearing on whether the accounts of Jesus are accurate. For instance, a columnist can get the background details right on a story but get the story wrong. 

But there are some basic problems with that objection:

i) For many years, Ehrman's schtick has been to claim that the Gospels are unreliable because they were written by anonymous authors decades after the fact who never lived in Palestine, weren't eyewitnesses to the life of Christ, and knew no eyewitnesses to the life of Christ.

Now, however, Ehrman does an about-face. Williams marshals multiple lines of evidence to demonstrate that the Gospel authors either lived in Palestine or interviewed people who did. 

So where does that leave Ehrman's original argument that the Gospel authors were out of touch with the facts on the ground? That they were too far-removed from the time and place to be in a position to accurately report what happened? Having lost the first football game, he moves the goalpost under cover of darkness to help his team for the rematch. 

ii) Sure, it's possible for an eyewitness to willfully misrepresent what happened. But that's a drastic shift from the argument Ehrman has been hawking for years. 

And there are problems with the new argument. If the Gospel authors were in a position to know what happened, why would they misrepresent events when they had so much on the line? It was very risky to be a Christian back them. 

iii) In addition, Jesus has a polarizing effect on people. If, say, you witnessed him perform exorcisms or nature miracles, you're forced to draw some conclusions. You're forced to take sides. On the one hand, his enemies admitted that he did those things. They heard what he said and saw what he did, right before their eyes. So they couldn't remain neutral. They attributed his supernatural abilities to witchcraft. 

But what would motivate the Gospel authors to misrepresent Jesus favorably if they knew what he did, even from their own firsthand observation or the eyewitness testimony of their informants? 

iv) Ehrman posits that the sources for the Gospels passed by word-of-mouth through many links before the authors wrote down the latest oral traditions. But there's no presumption that that's the case.

If, however, traditional authorship is correct–and Williams provides some direct evidence as well as alluding to other evidence–then Matthew and John were eyewitnesses. For that matter, Mark was probably an eyewitness. He's a younger contemporary of Jesus living in Jerusalem at the time of Christ's public ministry.  

Moreover, there's no presumption that Luke's sources involve a chain of transmission. He could easily interview eyewitnesses to the life of Christ. Many were still alive at the time he conducted his investigations. So there's no justification to stipulate a series of intervening links. The same holds true if Matthew, Mark, or John supplement their firsthand observation with testimony from other informants. The same holds true even if Matthew, Mark, and John weren't eyewitnesses.