"You can't trust the Gospels—they're unreliable."

Copan, Paul. True for You, But Not for Me: Overcoming Objections to Christian Faith. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2009.

Almost everyone has heard the charge “The Bible has been corrupted over the centuries; we just can’t be sure we have anything remotely resembling what was first written down.” True, we don’t have the original documents, but can we have a decent idea of what the New Testament originally said? Skeptics like Bart Ehrman have misleadingly claimed that there are more variant readings of the New Testament manuscripts (400,000) than there are actual words in the New Testament (138,000). While technically correct, Ehrman makes sensationalistic claims that suggest core doctrines like the Trinity are in question.

While the media make hay with all this, there is a more sane and credible perspective behind all the bluster. There are excellent reasons for taking the New Testament to be textually and historically reliable.

We Needn’t Begin by Treating the New Testament as a Holy Book or Sacred Writing

We should urge honest inquirers to investigate the New Testament as they would other purportedly historical documents, like the writings of Josephus or Tacitus. Skeptics don’t have to believe the New Testament is divinely inspired to discover valuable historical information. Some people dismiss it because of so-called irreconcilable discrepancies in, say, the resurrection accounts. However, no decent historian rejects wholesale any sources that have variations in secondary details. The New Testament has an astonishing track record of historical integrity.

With all the attention surrounding the “Gnostic Gospels” and the Da Vinci Code, many have been hoodwinked into accepting quasi-historical inventions. These concoctions assert that anti–Old Testament, anti-historical, anti-creational, anti-physical, anti-woman Gnostic writings from the late-second and third centuries should be preferred over the Old Testament-, creation-, woman-, physical-, and history-affirming canonical Gospels written in the first century. Another part of the new mythology is that Jesus was merely human; powerbrokers in the church arbitrarily excluded certain books from the New Testament canon and invented a divine Jesus in the fourth century. Talk about fabrications!

Take just one example to show the opposite: The earliest undisputed writings of Paul—from before the Gospels were written—reveal a very high view of Jesus. First Thessalonians (unmistakably written in AD 50, just after Paul left Thessalonica) calls Jesus “Lord” and “Christ” (1:1) and “Son from heaven” (1:10)—not to mention “he died for us” (5:10) and “salvation” is “through our Lord Jesus Christ” (5:9). This was straightforward and accepted by the earliest church. We don’t have to believe the Bible is a holy book to see something truly world-changing took (and continued to take) place in history.

Some dismiss the Gospels’ credibility because of alleged anti-Semitism. One writer claims, “A central goal of the Gospel writers was to instill contempt, an odium, against Judaism: Jews were children of hell, their leaders a brood of vipers [cf. Matthew 23].” And doesn’t John’s gospel speak disparagingly of “the Jews”?

Anti-Semitism is unacceptable, but the Gospels shouldn’t be blamed for it. The New Testament authors were themselves Jewish, as was Jesus, and the early church—which started in Jerusalem—was initially Jewish. What’s more, many Christian Jews wondered how one could be a Christian and not be Jewish (cf. Acts 15)! In fact, as James Dunn (b. 1939) notes, rabbinic Judaism (which emerged after Jerusalem’s destruction by Rome in AD 70) would eventually come to define Judaism and Jewishness. But in subsequent decades “it was still by no means clear that rabbinism was going to triumph and so also that Christianity was going to be excluded from ‘the Jewish community.’”

Also, while negativity in John’s gospel is directed toward the hostile Jewish leadership, John speaks positively of the Jews: Jesus is “a Jew” (4:9), and salvation is “from the Jews” (4:22). Further, why should critics take allegedly anti-Semitic passages straightforwardly but then explain away passages concerning Jesus’ unique identity as being invented by early Christians? And, theology, not race, is the crucial issue. Indeed, Jesus’ denunciation of the leaders sounds a lot like the Old Testament prophets! For instance, “Hear the word of the Lord, you rulers of Sodom; listen to the law of our God, you people of Gomorrah!” (Isaiah 1:10). Surely Isaiah wasn’t trying to “instill contempt, an odium” against the Jews.

Often at the heart of this matter is whether people will allow for supernatural explanations of historical facts and events. In his “Twenty-one Theses” for a “Radical Reformation,” Robert Funk (1926–2005), co-founder of the Jesus Seminar, made clear his antisupernaturalism. Here’s a sampling:

These assumptions will override any evidence that might suggest Jesus really did make remarkable identity-claims or bodily rose from the dead. Yes, such things don’t “naturally” happen, but neither does a universe “naturally” come into existence from nothing. Nature itself with its “laws” was produced a finite time ago—an event that couldn’t be predicted by natural laws.

We’re talking about the “something” outside the universe that brought it into existence. Why then rule God out of the picture? The problem’s not with the historical evidence; it’s with very questionable philosophical assumptions like “Dead people just can’t come back to life!” This sounds remarkably like “Universes just don’t pop into existence out of nothing!” If God exists, it’s a whole new ball game—and we have good evidence for inferring a supernaturally inspired Big Bang and a bodily resurrection on the first Easter. We don’t need to believe the Bible is a holy book to accept either event.

The New Testament Is More Textually Reliable Than Any Other Books of Antiquity

My Muslim friends have told me that the original gospel has been lost or terribly distorted—that what the New Testament gives us about the historical Jesus is radically different from what really took place. However, Muslims can’t give any clear evidence of distortion or of this actually taking place; in fact, we have many biblical manuscripts from well before the time of Muhammad that say many un-Muslim things. Furthermore, it’s worth noting that no serious historical-Jesus scholar takes Qur’anic information about Jesus as historically valuable. In addition, Muslims themselves who claim that the Qur’an is today as it was when first given (“dropped from the sky”) are incorrect. Qur’anic paleographer Gerd Puin’s work on manuscripts found in Yemen reveal an evolving Qur’an of earlier and later versions.

As for the New Testament, we have (handwritten) manuscripts from the second through the fourteenth centuries (5,600 in Greek, 10,000 in Latin, and 5,000 in other ancient languages)—far more than any ancient writing. According to manuscript scholar Daniel Wallace, less than 1 percent of the New Testament’s variations are significant. Most involve word-order changes, articles with proper nouns, and slight spelling differences—not exactly stuff to start a new denomination over. Christian doctrine hasn’t been affected in the least by such variations.

If We Accept the Textual Reliability of Ancient Works, We Should All the More Accept the Authenticity of the New Testament

We accept the integrity of Thucydides’ historical work (460–400 BC) even though we have only eight manuscripts and a few papyrus scraps of them. For many such ancient writings, we have precious little in terms of manuscripts. What’s more, gaps exist of hundreds or even a thousand-plus years from the time of writing to the earliest surviving surviving manuscripts, yet these texts are generally presumed authentic.

By contrast, we not only have far more New Testament manuscripts than of any other ancient work, but the gap between the writing of the books and the earliest extant manuscripts is far narrower. The famous John Rylands papyrus fragment ( John 18:31–33, 37–38) dates to c. AD 140—just fifty years after John wrote it. We have copies of most of the New Testament from 100–150 years after its books were written. Even if we didn’t have its Greek manuscripts, we could almost entirely reconstruct it just from the early (pre-AD 325) church fathers’ citations! In other words, virtually all of the original New Testament text is recoverable. From a textual point of view, the New Testament is sound and utterly unrivaled.

As With Other Historical Documents, We Should Assume the New Testament Is Reliable Unless Shown Otherwise

Some scholars make a curious assumption about New Testament documents—namely, that they’re unreliable unless proven otherwise through independent corroboration. To assume distortion and error unless shown the contrary is problematic for several reasons.

First, this approach leads to historical skepticism across the board; such agnosticism would require removing huge chunks of history from our textbooks. Why trust any historical work—ancient or modern? Historical study can’t even gain a foothold following this strategy.

Second, other works of antiquity aren’t handled in this way. Why pick on the Bible? If we want to take history seriously, we should carefully—not gullibly—assume truth telling and honesty unless some good reason renders them inherently suspicious. Being a book of supernatural events isn’t a good reason.

Third, the critic will ask, “What independent extra-biblical sources corroborate the historical Jesus?”—as though a purportedly historical account can’t be taken seriously without other support. We have two faulty assumptions here. Much of what we know through history is from one source; in many cases we don’t have the luxury of multiple corroborating sources. Also, the New Testament isn’t just “one source” but multiple independent sources of supporting testimony concerning the historical Jesus’ identity-claims, ministry, death, resurrection, and impact on the earliest church’s worship and proclamation.

• Mark probably was the earliest gospel, serving as primary source material for Matthew and Luke. (Luke 1:1–4 mentions how “many have undertaken to draw up an account” concerning Jesus of Nazareth.)

• Matthew and Luke follow Mark independently, drawing from other traditions/material (sometimes called “M” [Matthew] and “L” [Luke; cf. 1:1–4’s mention of sources]); many scholars suggest that Matthew and Luke (though not Mark) used another possible source (“Q,” German Quelle, “source”), perhaps a collection consisting primarily of Jesus’ sayings. In lieu of this “literary dependence” view, others very plausibly argue for rich, reliable oral traditions about Jesus faithfully passed on and available throughout the early Christian community. While some variation on details was allowed (e.g., disciples being more valuable than ravens vs. sparrows), central features critical to the particular oral tradition must remain in place; otherwise, shame is heaped upon the storyteller who even slightly alters it. Here we have “informal control” of oral tradition. The preservation of the Jesus-tradition captures Jesus’ very voice (ipsissima vox)—even if it doesn’t necessarily capture his very words (ipsissima verba). That Jesus taught in Aramaic, not Greek (the New Testament’s language), reinforces the point.

• Another Jesus source is John’s Jerusalem-based gospel tradition, different from (and more theologically developed than) the Galilee tradition of the Synoptic Gospels. According to some reputable scholars, this is “John the Elder,” not John the fisherman son of Zebedee and one of the Twelve. He was a close Jerusalem disciple who, according to reliable church tradition, had at some point also served as a temple high priest and thus had access to the high priestly family (as suggested by John 19:35; Acts 4:6).

• We have the writings of Paul (ranging from twenty to thirty years after Jesus’ death), James, and other writers, which corroborate the Gospels.

Critics have been especially hard on the historicity of the Scriptures. Not surprising. The Bible’s portrayal of an unsafe, untamable Jesus, who reaches out from its pages to make personal demands on the reader, reveals that it’s not an ordinary book. For perspective, consider two assessments. Harvard’s Helmut Koester—not your average conservative scholar—points out that New Testament “textual criticism possesses a base which is far more advantageous than that for the textual criticism of classical authors.”12 Greco-Roman historian A. N. Sherwin-White notes: “It is astonishing that while Greco-Roman historians have been growing in confidence, the twentieth-century study of Gospel narratives, starting from no less promising material, has taken so gloomy a turn.”

Summary

• We don’t have to assume the New Testament is “sacred” to claim that it’s generally and historically reliable.

• We should ask why a person rejects the New Testament’s historical reliability. Many embrace the ungrounded, flawed claims of the Da Vinci Code while forsaking the historically verifiable facts, including the firm foundations of orthodox Christianity.

• If we can’t trust the New Testament’s textual integrity, then we’ll have to reject all other ancient works, which don’t have the abundance of manuscripts and relatively close proximity to the time the original writings were penned.

• Critics are much more severe with the New Testament than other ancient writings. Usually, historical documents are presumed reliable unless there’s good reason to doubt them. Why reverse procedures on the Scriptures?

• The New Testament is multiple sources reinforcing the common gospel proclamation of Jesus.

Further Reading

Blomberg, Craig. Jesus and the Gospels. 2nd ed. Nashville: B&H Academic, 2009. Parts 2 and 5.

Copan, Paul. “How Do You Know You’re Not Wrong?” Grand Rapids: Baker, 2005. Chapters 16–17.

Wallace, Daniel B. “How Badly Did the Early Scribes Corrupt the New Testament? An Examination of Bart Ehrman’s Claims,” in Contending With Christianity’s Critics: Answering the New Atheists and Other Objectors, eds. Paul Copan and William Lane Craig. Nashville: B&H Academic, 2009.