Name statistics argument 13: List of the 12 as a "source"?

Gregor and Blais suggest that the lists of Jesus' brothers and of the twelve apostles circulated prior to, and separately from, the Gospels and constituted a source from which realistic name statistics made their way into the rest of the Gospels and Acts. They suggest this despite the fact that the lists of the twelve and of Jesus' brothers are *part* of the Gospels and hence part of the data to be explained! They also suggest it despite the fact that they regard the existence many of the persons in these lists to be "contested," as elsewhere in the Gospels and Acts. All of this means that these lists don't really help in explaining the data. The presence of popular names, sometimes multiples of popular names (such as Simon and Jude) in the lists requires Gregor and Blais to "piggyback" the lists theory onto the Maccabean theory (discussed last time), so that they now have multiple stages at which informed invention is supposed to have happened. And there are more problems beyond this with this theory. The theories discussed so far don't even clear the first hurdle that a source of non-factual invention would have to get past! Thumbnail courtesy of freebibleimages.org