The reliability of the New Testament

If you do not accept the Bible as Scripture but want to know whether its account of Jesus is worth taking seriously as history, this page is for you. It does not ask you to believe the New Testament is inspired, or that miracles happen. It asks what these documents are and what they can show.

There are real reasons for caution. The writers were followers of Jesus who wanted their readers to believe. The Gospels were written decades after his death, not during his life. Their authors do not sign their names in the text. And they report miracles, which historical method by itself cannot confirm.

Each of those is a reason to read carefully. None is a reason to set the documents aside. Historians work with partisan sources all the time. The Roman historian Tacitus despised Christianity and called it a superstition, and historians still use what he reports. Historians do not ask whether a writer had a point of view. They ask whether the testimony shows signs of reaching back to the events.

The earliest documents in the New Testament are not the Gospels but the letters of Paul, written in the AD 50s. Even scholars who doubt much of the New Testament accept that Paul wrote at least seven of them.

In one, Paul quotes a short summary of belief that he says he “received” and “passed on”: that Christ died, was buried, was raised on the third day, and appeared to Peter, to the Twelve, to more than five hundred at once, “most of whom are still living,” and to others (1 Corinthians 15:3-8). “Received” and “passed on” were the ordinary words for handing on fixed teaching. Scholars across a wide range of belief date this summary to within a few years of the crucifixion.

Paul also says where he got his information. About three years after he became a follower of Jesus, he went to Jerusalem, stayed with Peter for fifteen days, and met James, the brother of Jesus (Galatians 1:18-19). That places him in direct contact with two of the people named in the summary.

So the central Christian claims did not develop over generations. They were being taught within a few years of the events, by people who said they had seen them, while many of those people were still alive to be asked.

Most scholars date the Gospels to roughly AD 65 to 100, thirty to seventy years after Jesus’ death. By the standards of ancient history that is close. The earliest surviving biographies of Alexander the Great, by contrast, were written about four centuries after he died, and historians still use them.

Luke opens his Gospel by saying he wrote from accounts “handed down to us by the initial eyewitnesses and servants of the word” (Luke 1:2). That is a claim, not a proof, but it is the kind of claim ancient historians made when they wanted to be checked.

Richard Bauckham, a New Testament scholar, argues in Jesus and the Eyewitnesses that the Gospels carry marks of that testimony. They name people who seem to have been known sources. Mark, for example, calls the man who carried Jesus’ cross “Simon of Cyrene, the father of Alexander and Rufus” (Mark 15:21), a detail that only helps if readers knew the sons.

The Gospels do not name their authors inside the text. That is common for ancient books, and the scholar Simon Gathercole has argued that it does not mean they circulated without names. By about AD 180, Irenaeus attributes them to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Many scholars doubt some of those attributions, and nothing here rests on them. The date and the sources carry the weight.

People who invent stories to win followers tend to leave out what embarrasses them. The Gospels keep a great deal of it.

• Jesus is executed by crucifixion, a death Rome reserved for slaves and rebels, and that Jewish law treated as a sign of God’s curse.
• His leading disciple, Peter, denies knowing him, and the rest run away.
• His own family thinks he is “out of His mind” (Mark 3:21).
• Jesus says that even he does not know the day or hour of the end (Mark 13:32).
• Women are the first witnesses to the empty tomb, at a time when women’s testimony carried less weight than men’s.

Historians call this the criterion of embarrassment. It does not prove any single account. It does show writers who were bound by what they had received, rather than free to shape the story as they liked.

The best-attested of these details is the crucifixion itself, which non-Christian Roman and Jewish writers also record; the evidence is set out in the crucifixion of Jesus.

Early documents are only useful if we know what they said. Here the New Testament is unusually well placed. Several thousand Greek manuscripts survive, along with early translations and quotations in early Christian writers. Codex Sinaiticus, a fourth-century manuscript, contains the entire New Testament, and fragments such as P52 are earlier still.

The manuscripts do differ in places, and a few passages were added later. Scholars catalogue those differences openly, and the abundance of copies lets them identify the earlier wording. The standard handbook on the subject, by Bruce Metzger and Bart Ehrman, treats the earliest text as recoverable. The details, including the variants that matter, are set out in the reliability of the Bible.

Other gospels, such as the Gospel of Thomas or the Gospel of Judas, are sometimes presented as a hidden, earlier version of the story. Most scholars date them to the second century or later, after the four Gospels, and they are evidence for later movements rather than for an earlier, suppressed account.

Bart Ehrman, an agnostic who rejects Christian belief, argues in Did Jesus Exist? that the evidence for a real Jesus who was crucified under Pontius Pilate is solid, and that historians do not seriously doubt it. That is where the scholarly middle ground lies: the New Testament is early evidence about a real man and about what his first followers proclaimed. The case against the view that he never lived is set out in Jesus never existed.

This page does not show that the New Testament is free of error, that its miracle accounts are true, or that Jesus rose from the dead. Historians who agree on everything above still disagree about those questions.

It does show that the New Testament cannot be set aside as late legend. Its central claims were being made within a few years of the events, in public, by people who said they were there. If those claims are false, you need an account of why they arose so early and spread so widely.