Answers to Tough Questions - Challenges from Skeptics

Are the Gospels reliable?

I was talking with a friend recently about Jesus, and she said, "Maybe the Jesus in the Gospels isn't really Jesus but Jesus through the people that wrote about him." She acknowledges that Jesus was a real person, but thinks that the Gospel writers in some way invented the things Jesus said and did. I asked her, "Why are the four New Testament accounts of Jesus' life viewed by some scholars as constructs when they don't view other ancient documents as constructs? (i.e., the works of Julius Caesar, marcus Aurelius, Plato, Philo, Socrates, Suetonius, and Josephus.) Why are the rules different?" She was surprised to hear this.

It is even more surprising when you discover that the New Testament is the best-attested document in the ancient world. One way of testing the reliability of ancient documents is to determine how many years separate extant copies from original manuscripts. The oldest New Testament copies are Egyptian papyri (labeled "P") that survived in the dry desert. A fragment from the book of John called P52 dates to about A.D.125, just 35 years after John was written. In comparison, the earliest extant manuscript for Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars is 1000 years after the original. That is typical.

Another way of testing the reliability of a document is by the number of copies that are known to exist. There are 24,000 surviving New Testament manuscripts. No other ancient Roman or Greek document even comes close. The second most prevalent writing of that period is Homer's Iliad, for which there are 643 extant manuscripts. Few other documents have more than 10 surviving copies.

So why are the gospels treated badly? Two hundred years ago, in the period called the Enlightenment, the "in crowd" decided that miracles did not occur and that the supernatural was nonsense. Nothing existed apart from what could be seen or physically tested. So Thomas Jefferson produced the "Jefferson Bible" with all of the miracles removed. Today people are beginning to realize that the very statement "only what can be tested exists" cannot be tested! In fact, the statement itself is a belief; and it flies in the face of almost universal acceptance of the supernatural throughout history.

Enlightenment scholars also rejected the gospels because they are "religious writings." The assumption here is that religious things aren't factual. But most ancient documents are deeply religious and deal extensively with the author's view of the supernatural world: e.g., Josephus, Plato, Socrates, and Philo.

A further objection to the gospels is that they're biased because Christians wrote them. If this were true, then no people could ever write about their own lives! Jews can't write about Nazi internment camps. Americans can't write American history books. Julius Caesar can't write about his battles.

There is still more prejudice against the gospels based upon the improbability of anyone writing about Jesus at all. Jesus was an outsider in a Roman-Greek dominated world. Tiberius Caesar was in the "headlines," but peasants in far-flung corners of the realm were too unimportant to make the news. For instance, where do you go to find out what the daily life of an American slave was in the 1800s? Jesus is dismissed today simply because the incarnation was so humble. Humble people don't get noticed. When speaking to skeptics, don't begin by trying to get them to believe the Bible is the Word of God. Just get them to treat it with the same respect they would any other historical document. The Bible has a way of selling itself!

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