How do we know the gospels are true

There are several missing historical events in Acts, including the destruction of the Temple c. The absence of these events is reasonable if the Book of Acts was written no later than 60AD. The only question is, how much earlier did he write the Gospel?

These early dates for both Luke and Mark make it highly unlikely they could have been written without vetting from those who were there and saw the truth about Jesus. The early dates for both Luke and Mark make it highly unlikely they could have been written without vetting from those who were there and saw the truth about Jesus. Few events either historical or criminal are documented this well, however.

Instead, eyewitness claims are typically corroborated by limited pieces of evidence verifying only a portion of the larger account. Imagine, for example, a witness testifies a robbery suspect approached a bank teller, pointed a gun at her using his right hand , began to climb up onto the counter using his left hand , screamed at the teller, and demanded she give him the money from the cash drawer.

Prosecutors may introduce fingerprint or shoeprint evidence from the counter in an effort to corroborate the witness. In a similar way, abundant touch-point corroboration exists to verify the New Testament accounts, even though this evidence is unsurprisingly fractional.

From archaeology , to fulfilled prophecy , to the ancient statements of early non-Christian authors , to the internal evidence of language , proper nouns and cultural details, the New Testament Gospels are corroborated better than any other ancient text. From archaeology, to fulfilled prophecy, to the ancient statements of non-Christians, to the internal evidence of language, names and cultural details, the Gospels are corroborated better than any other ancient text.

How do we know the Gospels we have today are the same as the Gospels originally written by the eyewitnesses? When an original witness is caught changing his or her story, jurors are allowed to consider this change as a sign of deception. From the first officer who reported a particular piece of evidence, to the detectives who next handled it, to the criminalists who then examined it in the lab, to the detectives who eventually delivered it into the courtroom, I want to know what each and every one of them had to say about the evidence under question.

Did they write about it? Did they take a picture of it? The Gospel of John, for example, can be traced from John to his three personal students Ignatius, Polycarp and Papias to their personal student Irenaeus to his personal student Hippolytus. These men in the chain of custody wrote their own letters and documents describing what they had been taught by their predecessors. These letters survive to this day and allow us to evaluate whether or not the New Testament narratives have been changed over the years.

The evidence is clear, the foundational claims related to Jesus have not changed at all from the first record to the last. But what would motivate someone to tell a lie in the first place?

In my experience as a homicide detective, there are only three motives behind any homicide, criminal act, or lesser moral impropriety. All sins are caused by only one of three motivations: 1 financial greed, 2 sexual or relational lust, and 3 the pursuit of power. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are the four books of the Bible that provide everything we need to know about Jesus.

The ancient texts are believed to be written by eyewitnesses or people who spoke during with one of the men during the first century. The word gospel is an old English word meaning good news. The gospels can be summed up as historical narrative motivation by theological concerns. Their intention is to identify accurate historical material about Jesus and also explain and interpret these salvation bringing events.

The gospels were written by evangelists, who are proclaimers of good news, announcing the good news of Jesus Christ and asking people to believe in him. The proof of the gospels lies within the four books — Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

Their relationship with Jesus portrays different perspectives. What are the different views? The four gospels provide us with a deeper understanding of who Jesus is and what he did.

Moreover, the four different gospel accounts display how God keeps his own word. The prophetic witnesses of the gospels uphold the truth that God is speaking himself. Ultimately, the consistent documentation provides a verifiable history — that is not secluded to the privacy of one individual. Another important element to remember is that the four gospels do not contradict each other. Studies on oral tradition and memory play a significant role in discussions about the formation of the gospels.

Certainly it is very reasonable. Just as biographers could frame accounts in their own words and with their own emphases, so did prior traditions. Simply comparing one gospel with another over the span of several parallel passages should disabuse us of expecting verbatim agreement. But then, ancient readers did not expect verbatim agreement. In fact, the synoptic gospels actually come closer to verbatim agreement than was common in ancient biography and historiography.

Short aphorisms, or proverb-like sayings, can be preserved close to verbatim, and ancient disciples often rehearsed them to this end. Parables and other similar material, however, could be paraphrased so long as the essential story line remained the same.

Early twentieth-century form critics attempted to compare material in the gospels to folk tales passed on for centuries, but that model cannot fit first-century gospels.

Oral historians distinguish between oral history, which depends on reports from within living memory—while some of those who knew the eyewitnesses remain alive—and oral tradition.

Oral tradition can preserve a historical core of events, but oral history preserves more than subsequent tradition does. On any first-century date for the gospels, we are dealing with oral history. Some, including myself, support a somewhat earlier date, and others a somewhat later date. But just to work from the average, some eyewitnesses of events that Mark reports on were probably still alive at the time. Peter was probably still alive ten years earlier.

By way of illustration, I ask my students how many of them remember some events from four decades ago.

A few do. A larger number were not yet born. Then I ask how many of them know reliable witnesses who can remember events from four decades ago. All of them do. Then philosophic schools, schools of Torah teachers, and so on, often propagated those teachings from one generation to the next. Of course, those who passed on the teachings had their own interpretive grids, but these grids were often also shaped to a great extent by what they learned from their teachers.

The skepticism with which many scholars approach the gospels appears less persuasive when we consider analogies in the real world outside it, from antiquity or sometimes even from today. If the gospels are comparable to other biographies in the Greco-Roman world of the first century, what does that tell us about their reliability as historical sources? If we apply these genre expectations to the Gospels, we should affirm that, at least on average, most accounts in the Gospels reflect actual events in the life of Jesus.

Now, those of us with theological commitments to the text may believe more than that, and those with ideological commitments against the text may affirm less than that, but at least this approach can get us all into the same historiographic ballpark. Most events and themes in the Gospels reflect relatively recent memory of Jesus. Thus the figure that we meet in the Gospels, despite different emphases from one Gospel to another, is the figure of Jesus.

Novels and collections of mythography did not deal with real persons of the past generation or two. Most ancient novels are purely fictitious romances; the minority of novels that use historical characters are set in the distant past. Moreover, they do not cleave closely to their sources the way Matthew and Luke obviously do.