New Testament as History
I would imagine that if I went down the local shopping centre on a Saturday afternoon and asked people who Jesus was, they would probably say he was a good man or maybe a teacher. It is of course widely acknowledged, even by atheist or agnostic scholars, that a man called Jesus really existed. But many people also suppose that over generations the record of his life has been exaggerated: Miraculous events like healing the sick and Jesus rising from the dead were just ideas that were added in later.
It could be likened to a game of Chinese whispers, where the original message has become so distorted that by the end of the game what is said barely resembles the original facts. Is that what’s happened with Jesus?
Even with just a brief summary of the evidence (unfortunately all we have time for here) we see how this idea quickly falls down.
The Gospels: Too Early to be Legends
The first four books of the New Testament (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John), which are each a separate biography of Jesus, weren’t written by church leader’s centuries later, but by people who witnessed Jesus’ life first hand.
For example, take the Gospel of John. At the end of his biography of Jesus he even says, “I am Jesus’ disciple who was a witness to these things, and, I write these things that you may believe in Jesus Christ”. He is claiming to be a primary source, which are always the most reliable because they actually saw the events take place.
On the other hand, take Luke’s Gospel. You’ll read at the very beginning that he admits to not being an eyewitness like John was. However, he then writes, “but what I have done is set out to find people who were eyewitnesses and compile a reliable record of them all so that you will have certainty concerning the things Jesus taught and did.”
It is important to understand that these are not story book legends written centuries after the events. These authors were providing people with the evidence of Christianity, that’s their very purpose.
Matthew and Mark’s accounts identify that a man called Simon of Cyrene carried Jesus’ cross for him as he went up to be crucified. At the time of writing, Simon was still alive, it was in his lifetime and I’m sure that people would have sought him out and asked him to testify to the reliability of the account. There is no counter evidence from him or anyone that this is not true.
We live in the age of the internet, when there’s a death of a major celebrity or a cruise liner capsizes, our news services bring us the details in an instant. In the same way the speed with which the events of Jesus took place and historical records were written down, really is the equivalent of our modern day newsflashes. Let me explain.
It is important to understand that these are not story book legends written centuries after the events. These authors were providing people with the evidence of Christianity, that’s their very purpose.
We’re confident, as millions of people down the generations have been; that Jesus lived between 4 BC and 30 AD. Now the first of these written accounts appeared around AD 40; that’s only 10 years after Jesus’ death.
If I wrote a book about George Best, who died in the last 10 years, I could access access some pretty reliable sources in order to make a factual account of his life. If I interviewed his friends and family and those who knew him best, I could compile a very, very trustworthy biography. That’s exactly what happened with these Gospel writers, and as I say, some of them were even Jesus’ best friends, they were eyewitnesses themselves.
The Gospels: Historically Supported by Thousands of Copies
You might challenge me at this point and say, the earliest account was written in 40AD, but today all we have are copies. So how do we know that the version we read today was really the same as what was written down by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John?
As people copied these documents over the centuries, did they edit it or add bits in? Let’s think about it. If copiers exaggerated and added in fictitious events or stories, what we would have is multiple differing accounts of Jesus. But in fact, what we have is literally thousands of copies from all over the world that say almost identically the same thing.
Furthermore, we have some copies that date to just 30 years after the original and we even have a full manuscript of the New Testament, that’s not just one Gospel account but all 27 books, by AD 350 (See Table A below).
Scholars of ancient history use the science of textual criticism to decide on the reliability of events of antiquity. In Table A below there are a selection of historical events which are all considered to be events that we can very sure took place. Textual criticism works by considering two different variables. Firstly, how long the time gap is between the event taking place and the copies we now have access to, and secondly how many copies we know are in circulation.
We must be logically consistent here, if historians are very happy to say that events like Caesar's Gallic war took place, then the evidence for the reliability of the New Testament is simply overwhelming in comparison. Any doubt that these accounts are not what really took place has surely been eliminated.
For an event like Caesar's Gallic war, there are 9-10 copies available to historians, and there is a gap of 950 years between the event taking place and the earliest source material. Now, compare this to the New Testament - there is only a 30 year gap to the earliest source material we have from John's gospel, up to 310 years, a fraction of the time span of Caesar's Gallic war. But look at the sheer volume of the sources - over 24,000 copies of the New Testament, whereas only 9 or 10 exist for Caesar.
We must be logically consistent here, if historians are very happy to say that events like Caesar's Gallic war took place, then the evidence for the reliability of the New Testament is simply overwhelming in comparison. Any doubt that these accounts are not what really took place has surely been eliminated.
Historically speaking, the Gospel accounts of Jesus are incredibly reliable. What we have is eyewitness accounts, written only a few years after Jesus’ death and attested to by many, many primary sources. Then, thousands of copies were produced in the next few generations, all almost identical to each other and supporting these central claims of Jesus life, death and resurrection.
Table A
Taken from The New Testament Documents: Are they reliable? by F.F. Bruce (Intervarsity Press, 1981)
