A Fresh Look at the Reliability of the Gospels

C. S. Lewis once remarked that the biblical “accounts of the ‘miracles’ in first-century Palestine are either lies, or legends, or history. And if all, or the most important, of them are lies or legends then the claim which Christianity has been making for the last two thousand years is simply false” (Miracles). Much the same, of course, could be said about other matters in the Gospels, including Jesus’ claims and teaching. What if it really was Paul who first suggested that Jesus was God and not Jesus himself (as claimed, e.g., here)? There’s been a good bit of recent scholarship pointing out the rock-solid historical reliability of the Gospels (see here). One particularly helpful line of research focuses on the Gospels’ eyewitness character, demonstrating that the authors were or, at least, relied on eyewitnesses of Jesus’ life and ministry. For a fast-paced and faith-building look at this line of work, let me recommend the following talk given by Peter Williams titled “New Evidences that the Gospels were based on Eyewitness Accounts.”