Can the Gospels Be Trusted?

When someone asks whether the Gospels can be trusted, he may be asking one of three different things, and an answer to one is no answer to the others. He may be asking whether they are generally reliable history: whether the people, places, teaching and events they report are substantially what happened. He may be asking whether they are without error in every detail, which is the doctrine of inerrancy. Or he may be asking whether what they say about Jesus is true in the deepest sense, that he is Lord and Saviour. A historian can answer the first. Christians disagree among themselves about how to state the second. No historian as historian can settle the third. Many arguments go wrong because the apologist defends the second when he was asked the first, or the sceptic attacks the first and believes he has refuted the third.

The apologetic case most Christian scholars actually make is for the first: general historical reliability. Craig Blomberg's The Historical Reliability of the Gospels (1987, revised 2007) is the standard example, and it argues that the Gospels, read by the ordinary methods historians apply to any ancient source, give a substantially trustworthy picture of Jesus. Bart Ehrman's Jesus, Interrupted (2009) is the standard sceptical reply aimed at a general audience: that the Gospels contradict one another, reflect the theology of later communities, and cannot be read as straightforward history. Both books are readable in a week, and a student who has read both will be harder to frighten and harder to flatter than one who has read only one.

The New Testament Survey track has already introduced each Gospel, its likely setting and date, and the synoptic problem; see its module on The Four Gospels, particularly the lessons Why Four, The Synoptic Problem and Luke and Acts. That ground is not repeated here. This lesson asks the apologetic question: what is the case for trusting these documents as history, what is the case against, and what can a student honestly say to someone who has heard only the second.

One honest note about the anchor before going further. Whether the apostle Peter wrote 2 Peter is disputed. Many scholars, including some evangelicals, regard it as written in his name after his death, citing its Greek style, its use of Jude, and its reference to Paul's letters as a collection (2 Peter 3:15-16); others defend Petrine authorship, sometimes through a secretary, and point out that the early church weighed the question and accepted the letter. The New Testament Survey lesson Peter and Jude gives both sides. For this lesson notice only this: whoever wrote it, the verse states what the earliest Christians believed they were doing, which was reporting what had been seen, not composing what was edifying. Whether they succeeded is the historical question.

The majority of critical scholars date Mark around AD 65 to 75, Matthew and Luke around AD 80 to 90, and John around AD 90 to 100. That is thirty-five to seventy years after the crucifixion. A sceptic will often present those numbers as though they were damning. Put them in their setting before you respond to them. The two writers historians rely on most for Alexander the Great, Arrian and Plutarch, wrote more than four hundred years after his death, and the earliest connected account of his life that survives, in the history of Diodorus of Sicily, was written nearly three hundred years after it. A gap of a generation, in which many eyewitnesses were still alive, is short by ancient standards, not long.

Some scholars date the Gospels earlier, and the reasons do not track faith. John A. T. Robinson, the Anglican bishop best known for the radical theology of Honest to God, argued in Redating the New Testament (1976) that every book of the New Testament was written before the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70, chiefly because none of them describes the temple's destruction as past. James Crossley, a scholar with no confessional commitment, argued in The Date of Mark's Gospel (2004) that Mark could be as early as the late thirties or forties. Others observe that Acts ends with Paul under house arrest in Rome around AD 62, still alive, which some take as the date of Acts and so place Luke earlier. On the other side, the main reasons for later dates are that Mark 13 and Luke 21:20 seem to some to reflect the siege of Jerusalem in 70, that the Gospels show developed theological reflection, and that Matthew and Luke used Mark. Be careful with the first of these: if it rests on the premise that genuine prediction is impossible, it assumes what is in question; but many who date Mark after 70 give literary and historical reasons as well, and a student should not pretend otherwise.

Authorship is harder. The four Gospels are formally anonymous: no author names himself in the text, and the headings According to Matthew, According to Mark and so on are not part of the original works. Papias, a bishop in Asia Minor writing in the first decades of the second century and quoted by Eusebius, connects Mark with Peter and says something about Matthew; Irenaeus, around AD 180, names all four authors. The sceptical case is that these attributions are later guesses meant to give anonymous works apostolic authority, and Ehrman argues it in several books. The case for the tradition, made at length by Martin Hengel in The Four Gospels and the One Gospel of Jesus Christ (2000), is that the titles appear to be uniform wherever the Gospels circulated, that we know of no rival attributions, and that a church inventing authors would hardly have chosen Mark and Luke, who were not apostles, over Peter and Paul. Simon Gathercole has argued more recently that the Gospels are less anonymous than is often claimed, pointing to features within the texts that presuppose a known author. This remains disputed.

Here is the apologetic point, and it is a point about strategy as well as truth. A case for the reliability of the Gospels should not be made to depend on traditional authorship, because traditional authorship is the part of it most open to doubt. Luke says plainly that he was not an eyewitness, and his reliability has been assessed on its own terms, by comparing his references to places, officials and titles with inscriptions and other sources, with results that are generally favourable and occasionally disputed; the New Testament Survey lesson on Luke and Acts sets out both. If a sceptic convinces your student that Matthew did not write Matthew, the student should not feel the floor give way. The floor is the content and its relation to what can be checked, not the name on the heading.

For much of the twentieth century, critical scholarship assumed that the Gospel traditions were shaped by anonymous communities over decades of oral transmission, and that eyewitnesses played little part. Richard Bauckham's Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (2006, second edition 2017) is the most important challenge to that assumption, and it should be presented accurately because it is often overstated by those who have not read it. Bauckham does not claim the Gospels were written by eyewitnesses throughout. He claims that the Gospel traditions remained connected to named eyewitnesses who were known in the churches and who functioned as guarantors of the traditions throughout the period before the Gospels were written.

His evidence is of several kinds. Ancient historians valued testimony from people who had been present, and Papias, collecting traditions around the beginning of the second century, says he preferred the living voice of those who had known the apostles to written books. The Gospels name some minor characters and leave others unnamed, and the named ones are sometimes identified as though readers would know them: Mark 15:21 calls Simon of Cyrene the father of Alexander and Rufus, which only makes sense if Alexander and Rufus were known to Mark's readers; Bartimaeus in Mark 10:46 and Cleopas in Luke 24:18 may be similar cases. Mark begins its account of the disciples with Simon (1:16) and ends with Peter (16:7), which Bauckham reads as an ancient literary signal of Peter as the main source. And the personal names in the Gospels and Acts match the frequencies of names among Palestinian Jews of the period, as compiled by Tal Ilan in her Lexicon of Jewish Names in Late Antiquity (2002): Simon and Joseph are the commonest male names in both, and the Gospels add distinguishing labels, Simon Peter, Simon the Zealot, Simon of Cyrene, exactly where the commonest names would need them. Writers inventing a story far away, decades later, would be unlikely to get this right.

Now the case against, at full strength. The science of memory, much developed since the 1970s, shows that eyewitnesses are far less reliable than people assume. Memories are reconstructed each time they are recalled, they absorb details from later conversations, and confident witnesses are often wrong. Judith Redman made this argument directly against Bauckham in the Journal of Biblical Literature in 2010, and Ehrman's Jesus Before the Gospels (2016) builds a whole account of the Gospels on it, arguing that even if eyewitnesses stood behind the traditions, memory would have reshaped what they passed on, and that collective memory reshapes stories to serve the present needs of a community. On the names, critics reply that anyone who knew Palestine, as many early Christians did, would use the right names; matching frequencies shows familiarity with the setting, not that the episodes happened. And the claim that named characters were guarantors is an inference, not a statement any Gospel makes.

There is a further strand of this argument that students in oral cultures are better placed to judge than their teachers in the West. Kenneth Bailey, who lived and taught in the Middle East for decades, described in a 1991 article what he called informal controlled oral tradition: in village gatherings, stories important to the community's identity were retold freely in their details, but the community itself corrected anyone who changed the core or the key sayings. James Dunn drew on Bailey's model in Jesus Remembered (2003). Theodore Weeden criticised Bailey's examples sharply in 2009, arguing that his own anecdotes showed more change than he admitted. You may know from your own village how both things happen at once: some stories are told with jealous care, some grow with every telling, and the community knows which is which. The question the Gospels raise is which kind of story they were, and the inquiry asked you to think about that from your own experience before reading anyone's theory.

Where does that leave the argument? With a real debate in which neither side is foolish. The memory research shows that no eyewitness is a camera, and that should chasten any apologist who talks as if the Gospels were transcripts. Bauckham's evidence shows that the traditions were not floating free of the people who were there, and that should chasten any sceptic who talks as if they were village gossip. What can be said is that the Gospels have the features one would expect of traditions anchored in testimony, transmitted within a lifetime, in communities that cared about getting the core right. That supports general reliability. It does not support the claim that every detail is exactly as it happened, and section 5 will show why the Gospels themselves do not make that claim in the way modern readers sometimes assume.

Richard Burridge's What Are the Gospels? (1992, revised 2004 and 2018) argued that the Gospels belong to the genre of Greco-Roman biography, the bios or life, and that argument has persuaded most of the field. The New Testament Survey lesson Why Four and the Hermeneutics lesson Reading by Genre describe his method. The apologetic consequence is what matters here, and it cuts in more than one direction.

First, genre establishes intention. An ancient bios was written about a real person, usually recently dead, and its readers took it to be about someone who had lived. If the Gospels are biographies, then the earliest readers did not take them as novels, myths or allegories. That counts directly against the mythicist reading of Mark that the previous lesson described, and against the popular claim that the Gospel writers never meant their stories to be taken as history.

Second, genre sets the rules. Ancient biographers did not write as modern biographers do. They arranged material by theme as often as by sequence, compressed several events into one, gave the gist of a speech rather than its words, and sometimes moved an event to a different setting to make a point. Michael Licona's Why Are There Differences in the Gospels? (2017) studied these compositional devices in Plutarch, who wrote several lives covering the same events and told them differently in each, and argued that many Gospel differences are the same devices at work. If that is right, then a difference between Matthew and Mark is not automatically an error; it may be a convention their first readers recognised. Licona's approach has been criticised from two directions. Some conservative scholars, including Norman Geisler, argued that it concedes too much, and the dispute became public after Licona suggested, in an earlier book in 2010, that the raised saints of Matthew 27:52-53 might be apocalyptic imagery rather than a report of a literal event; they held that view incompatible with inerrancy. Sceptical scholars argue that it concedes too little, because a convention that allows a writer to move events and compose speeches also allows a great deal of invention.

Third, and this is the sceptic's strongest point on genre, ancient biography did not guarantee accuracy. Philostratus' Life of Apollonius of Tyana, written in the third century, is a bios full of wonders that most readers then and now regard as legend. Suetonius reports omens and portents alongside verifiable facts. To say that the Gospels are biographies is to say what they intended, not whether they achieved it. Some scholars prefer to place Luke and Acts closer to ancient historiography, and Loveday Alexander's study of Luke's preface (1993) compared it with the prefaces of technical and scientific works. Either way, the genre tells you what kind of claim is being made. The truth of the claim still has to be weighed.

The New Testament Survey lesson Why Four sets out the main Gospel differences and states, at full strength, both the case that they are differences rather than contradictions and the case that some are genuine contradictions. Read that section before teaching this. What it leaves for this lesson is a method for the conversation, and an honest account of the different ways Christians hold Scripture's truthfulness, since that is what a student is really defending when someone shows him two passages that do not line up.

Take the two pairs from the inquiry. In Mark, Jairus says his daughter is near death and messengers later bring word that she has died; in Matthew, the father says at the start, 'My daughter has just died'. In Matthew the centurion comes himself; in Luke he sends elders and friends. There are three honest responses. The first is harmonisation: Matthew, who habitually shortens Mark's stories, has compressed two stages into one, and the centurion who speaks through his messengers speaks as truly as an official who speaks through an ambassador. The second is compositional convention, Licona's approach: telescoping and the simplification of agents were standard in ancient biography, and readers would not have seen them as errors. The third is to say that the accounts simply differ in detail, as independent tellings of a remembered event often do, and that the substance, the raising of a dead girl and the faith of a Gentile officer, is unaffected. All three are held by serious Christian scholars. A sceptic will say the first is special pleading and the second permits anything; a believer should be able to answer both objections without contempt.

Behind those responses lie different convictions about what kind of truthfulness Scripture claims, and here the church is genuinely divided. One view, stated in the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (1978) and associated with B. B. Warfield and the old Princeton theology, holds that Scripture is without error in all that it affirms, in history as well as in faith; the Statement itself says that inerrancy is not negated by a lack of modern technical precision, by round numbers, by topical arrangement of material or by free quotation, and so it already allows much of what the compositional approach describes. Its defenders argue that a God who cannot lie does not inspire falsehood in any form, and that once errors are admitted in history there is no principled place to stop. Another view holds that Scripture is wholly trustworthy in what it intends to teach, and that its intention concerns what God has done and requires rather than precision in every incidental detail. Many Catholics read the Second Vatican Council's Dei Verbum (1965), which speaks of Scripture teaching without error the truth God wanted put into the sacred writings for the sake of salvation, in this way, though others read it as affirming full inerrancy; many Protestants outside the North American inerrancy tradition hold a similar view. Its defenders argue that it lets Scripture be the kind of book it is, and that it was the confidence of the church long before the modern word inerrancy existed. The systematic theology lesson Scripture treats this question at length.

Notice what this means for apologetics. The case for the general reliability of the Gospels does not depend on which of those views is correct. A sceptic who finds a genuine discrepancy has not shown that Jesus did not exist, teach, die or rise; he has shown, at most, that a particular doctrine of Scripture needs to be stated carefully. So do not let a conversation about the death of Jairus' daughter turn into a referendum on the whole faith. Say what the texts say. Give the best explanations, without forcing one. Say which view of Scripture you hold, and why, and do not pretend it is the only view held by Christians. And then bring the conversation back to the centre, where all four accounts and Paul agree: a crucified man and an empty tomb, and the question of what happened.

Add the second paragraph to your page headed My defence: Jesus. This one answers the question: aren't the Gospels full of contradictions?

Choose one of these pairs and work it with your Bible and a notebook: the death of Jairus' daughter (Mark 5:22-43 and Matthew 9:18-26); the centurion's servant (Matthew 8:5-13 and Luke 7:1-10); the blind man or men at Jericho (Mark 10:46-52, Matthew 20:29-34 and Luke 18:35-43); or the women at the tomb (Mark 16:1-8 and John 20:1-2). Write down exactly what differs. Then write one sentence for each of the three responses in section 5, as its best defender would put it. Then write one sentence saying which you find most convincing for this case and why.

Then write your paragraph, no more than 150 words. It should say what the Gospels are, as a kind of book; give one fact about their date that puts the gap in proportion; describe your chosen difference honestly; and end by bringing the question back to what the accounts agree on. Do not claim the Gospels contain no difficulties. A person who has already found one will stop listening if you do, and a person who has not yet found one will stop trusting you when he does.