The Historic Reliability of Scripture – Part 1

Excerpted and slightly modified from our Ready With An Answer (Eugene, OR: Harvest House Publishers, 1997) 

Every year just before Christmas and Easter, mainstream media begins to air programming aimed at explaining why Jesus can’t really be divine; that we can’t really know anything about Him; and we certainly can’t trust our primary source of the information we do have about Him, the four Gospels in our New Testament. After all, the New Testament was written by “friends,” by His “inner circle,” and therefore it is biased and unreliable.

But are those charges true? In the information that follows we will look at ten “facts,” or tests, if you will, to help you determine whether the Gospels can indeed be trusted. We will discover that the writers were eyewitnesses (or close associates of eyewitness) to the events they wrote about. We will also see that there is strong external, extrabiblical evidence that confirms what has been recorded in the Gospels.

This material was written several years ago and included in our book, Ready With An Answer (now out of print), but the information and the documentation are solid. You can believe; you can trust. In fact, the apostle John was so confident in the information in his Gospel (and, by extension, in the entirety of Scripture) that he declared, “These are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name” (John 20:31).

The Reliability of the New Testament

There is, I imagine, no body of literature in the world that has been exposed to the stringent analytical study that the four gospels have sustained for the past 200 years… scholars today who treat the gospels as credible historical documents do so in the full light of this analytical study. – F.F. Bruce

Christians and skeptical non-Christians, including members of religious cults, have different views concerning the credibility of the Gospels and the other New Testament documents. For the Christian, nothing is more vital than the very words of Jesus Himself who promised, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away” (Matthew 24:35). Jesus’ promise is of no small import. In essence, if His words were not accurately recorded, how can anyone know what He really taught? The truth is we couldn’t know. Further, if the remainder of the New Testament cannot be established to be historically reliable, then little can be known about what true Christianity really is, teaches, or means.

Who is right in this debate—the Christians who claim the Bible is historically accurate, or the critics of the New Testament who claim otherwise? The latter group usually approach the Bible from a materialistic viewpoint, discounting its supernatural elements, employing higher critical methods, and maintaining it wasn’t even written until the late first or early second century. In a brief point-by-point format we offer the following analysis designed to show why the New Testament is historically reliable.

The Critical View

The skeptics’ argument, characteristically based on the use of higher critical methods such as source, form and redaction criticism, is often given as follows: by a number of criteria the reliability of the New Testament text may be reasonably doubted. This includes its dominant “mythological” (supernatural) character; the fabrication of a fictitious view of Jesus on the basis of erroneous Messianic expectation; the hundreds of thousands of variants in extant texts; the dubious theological embellishments of the Apostle Paul (e.g., in his view of salvation and Jesus Christ); and finally, the invention of most of the teachings of Christ to suit the spiritual or other needs of the early church—or the removal of the actual teachings of Christ in later church councils for the purpose of political expediency or theological bias. The Jesus Seminar, for example, widely employed higher critical methods, especially form criticism, to supposedly determine what Jesus actually said. They concluded that less than 18% of Jesus’ sayings recorded in the New Testament are original. The remainder are inventions by the early church.

Thomas C. Oden provides a common view of Jesus held by most modern scholars, 

“Jesus was an eschatological prophet who proclaimed God’s coming kingdom and called his hearers to decide now for or against that kingdom. After he was condemned to death and died, the belief emerged gradually that he had risen. Only after some extended period of time did the remembering community develop the idea that Jesus would return as the Messiah, Son of Man. Eventually this community came to project its eschatological expectation back upon the historical Jesus, inserting in his mouth the eschatological hopes that it had subsequently developed but now deftly had to rearrange so as to make it seem as if Jesus Himself had understood himself as Messiah. Only much later did the Hellenistic idea of the God-man, the virgin birth, and incarnation emerge in the minds of the remembering church, who again misremembered Jesus according to its revised eschatological expectation.” 

James W. Sire, who cites the above, remarks, “Oden in the following eight pages shows how and why this ‘modern view’ is seriously at odds with reason.” For example, 

“How such a vacuous implausible interpretation could have come to be widely accepted is itself perplexing enough. Even harder to understand is the thought that the earliest rememberers would actually suffer martyrdom for such a flimsy cause. One wonders how those deluded believers of early centuries gained the courage to risk passage into an unknown world to proclaim this message that came from an imagined revolution of a fantasized Mediator. The ‘critical’ premise itself requires a high degree of gullibility.”^[1]

The Conservative View

The conservative view takes quite another approach. It maintains as fact, that, on the basis of accepted bibliographic, internal and external criteria, the New Testament text can be established to be reliable history in spite of the novel and sometimes ingenious speculations of critics who, while often familiar with the facts, refuse to accept them due to a pre-existing bias. Textually, we have restored over 99 percent of the autographs and there is simply no legitimate basis upon which to doubt the credibility and accuracy of the New Testament writers. Further, higher critical methods have been weighed in the balance of secular scholarship and been found wanting. Their use in biblical analysis is unjustified. Even in a positive sense, the fruit they have born is minuscule while, negatively, they are responsible for a tremendous weight of destruction relative to people’s confusion over biblical authority and their confidence in the Bible.

In this sense, the critics conform to the warnings of Chauncey Sanders, associate professor of military history, The Air University, Maxwell Air Force Base, Montgomery, Alabama. In his An Introduction to Research in English Literary History, he warns literary critics to be certain they are also careful to examine the evidence against their case: 

“He must be as careful to collect evidence against his theory as for it. It may go against the grain to be very assiduous in searching for ammunition to destroy one’s own case; but it must be remembered that the overlooking of a single detail may be fatal to one’s whole argument. Moreover, it is the business of the scholar to seek the truth, and the satisfaction of having found it should be ample recompense for having to give up a cherished but untenable theory.”^[2]

What allows us to resolve this issue, and logically demonstrate the credibility of the conservative view is the following ten facts:

Fact One: The existence of 5,300 extant Greek manuscripts and portions, 10,000 Latin Vulgate and 9,300 other versions, with the papyri and early uncials dating much closer to the originals than for any other ancient literature;

Fact Two: The lack of proven fraud or error on the part of any New Testament author;

Fact Three: The writings of church fathers who extensively cite the New Testament;

Fact Four: The existence of a number of Jewish and secular accounts about Jesus;

Fact Five: Detailed archeological data concerning the New Testament;

Fact Six: The existence of many powerful enemies of Jesus and the apostolic church who would have proven fraud or pointed out other problems if they could;

Fact Seven: The presence of living eyewitnesses to the events recorded;

Fact Eight: The positive appraisals by conservative and even some liberal authorities bearing on the issue of the genuineness of traditional authorship and the early date of the New Testament books; 

Fact Nine: The consistent scholarly, factual reversals of the conclusions of higher criticism which undermine its own foundations and credibility.

Fact Ten: Legal and other testimony as to New Testament reliability.

In Part 2 we will begin to examine each of these facts in more detail.

Endnotes

1. James W. Sire, Why Should Anyone Believe Anything At All? (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1994), p. 221, citing Thomas C. Oden, The Word of Life, Systemic Theology, 2 (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989), from Sire, pp. 223-24.↑
2. Chauncey Sanders, An Introduction to Research in English Literary History (NY: MacMillan, 1952), p. 160. His comments were specifically in reference to the authenticity or authorship of a given text.↑