Introduction

In a popular novel, recently made into a television film,

Irving Wallace invents a plot which includes the attempts
of a worldwide Christian conspiracy to keep secret the
discovery of ancient docu-ments that allegedly disprove the
gospel accounts, of Jesus life. The story is entirely
fictitious, but it does reflect the fact that sane spectacular
archaeological finds have emerged from the Middle East in
the last forty years. The Dead Sea Scrolls have supplied
copies of major portions of the Hebrew texts of the Old
Testament nearly 1,000 years older than any previously
existing copies. Docu-ments found at Nag Hammadi in
Egypt, dating from perhaps as early as the mid-second
century, include a fifth gospel, falsely ascribed to the
apostle Thomas, which contains 114 alleged sayings of
Jesus, some similar to those in the New Testament and
some quite different. None of these finds has destroyed the
credibility of Christianity, or of the biblical narratives, and
in many ways they have enhanced it. But Wallaces novel,
like real-life history and archaeology, demonstrates one
incontrovertible fact: the only completely convincing way to
confirm or deny historical testimony is by comparison with
other historical testimony, which of course will also stand in
need of confirmation or denial.*
When one applies this principle to the New Testament
gospels, a curious result emerges. Two somewhat opposite
problems con-front historians. On the one hand, they
discover much less independent testimony to the life of
Jesus than they might have expected concerning one who

founded such a major world religion. On the other

hand, when they look just at Matthew, Mark, Luke and
John, it seems as though there is too much testimony.
Many of the details of Christs life are repeated in two
When all the evidence is in, not a few scholars would
endorse this commonly used textbook summary of all that
can be known about Jesus from historical research:

He was baptized by John the Baptist, and the beginning

of his ministry was in some way linked with that of the
Baptist. In his own ministry Jesus was above all the one
who proclaimed the Kingdom of God and who challenged
his hearers to respond to the reality he was proclaiming.
The authority and effectiveness of Jesus as proclaimer of
the Kingdom of God was reinforced by an apparently
deserved reputation as an exorcist. In a world that
believed in gods, in powers of good and evil, and in
demons, he was able, in the name of God and his
Kingdom, to help those who believed themselves to be
possessed by demons.
A fundamental concern of Jesus was to bring together
into a unified group those who responded to his
proclamation of the Kingdom of God irrespective of their
sex, previous background or history. A central feature of
the life of this group was eating together, sharing a
common meal that celebrated their unity in the new
relationship with God, which they enjoyed on the basis of
their response to Jesus proclamation of the Kingdom. In
this concern for the unity of the group of those who
responded to the proclamation, Jesus challenged the
tendency of the Jewish com-munity of his day to
fragment itself and in the name of God to reject certain
of its own members. This aroused a deep-rooted

or more of the gospels, sometimes even with identical

wording, while in other places apparent discrepancies and
contradictions cast doubts on the trustworthiness of the
information supplied.
opposition to him, which reached a climax during a
Passover celebration in Jerusalem when he was
arrested, tried by the Jewish authorities on a charge of
blasphemy and by the Remans on a charge of sedition,
and crucified. During his lifetime he had chosen from
among his followers a small group of disciples who had
exhibited in their work in his name something of his
power and authority.
That, or something very like it, is all that we can
know; it is enough.

This summary accepts many of the broad contours of the

gospel narratives and a few specific details. Yet scholars
and laity alike would often deny that this is enough. If,
they would argue, out of all of the wealth of information
supplied by the four gospels, only this small percentage is
reliable, then Christianity is not worth anyones allegiance.
Jesus has been reduced to a mere human teacher, and not
such an extraordinary one at that, whose ministry and
message the four evangelists have largely distorted.
In fact, the true nature of the evidence is not nearly so
bleak. Much scepticism about the gospels reliability stems
from faulty methods used in analyzing the gospels or from
faulty presuppasi-tions on which those methods depend.
The hard data actually yield very positive results. This
study will begin, therefore, by examining the various
methods of historical criticism that have been applied to
the gospels. Chapter one surveys the main approaches
employed throughout the history of the church. Chap-ter
two turns to the distinctive developments of the last half-

ings of previous chapters and outlines a method for dealing

with the details of the gospel tradition which have not
been discussed.

In 1943, Professor F. F. Bruce, who is today one of the

most widely respected evangelical biblical scholars,
produced his first book-length work, entitled The New
Testament Documents: Are They R&/de? This book has
undergone five revisions, the most recent in 1960, and has
faithfully served a generation of students and interested
lay people. In many ways the present study seeks to
function as an expanded and more amply annotated
supplement to Bruces work, though limiting the focus of

century which are often equated with modern scholarship.

Chap-ter three addresses the unique problems associated
with the study of the miracle stories in the gospels. While
focusing primarily on the issues raised by the application
of historical criticism to these narratives, it also briefly
considers the scientific and philosophical questions
surrounding the concept of the supernatural. The next
three chapters turn to the two problems of too much and
too little historical testimony. Chapters four and five
consider some of the most significant apparent
contradictions among the gospel paral-lels, first by looking
at several of the seeming discrepancies among the three
Synoptis Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke), and then by
examining the distinctive questions raised by the Gospel of
John. Chapter six deals with the evidence for Jesus life
and teachings outside the gospel tradition: in the rest of
the New Testament writings, in other early Christian
literature, and in contemporary Jewish and Graeco-Roman
sources. Finally, the question suggested by the title of this
book is raised again-are the gospels reliable history?
Chapter seven thus consolidates the findattention to the gospels. It is no coincidence that its title
resembles Bruces title but the word historical has been
added to make clear that it is the question of historical
reliability and not just theological trustworthiness
which is being investigated.2
A comparison of tables of contents discloses important
simi-larities and differences between this work and
Bruces, Bruce devotes a chapter to the gospel miracles just
as this study does. He uses three chapters to survey the
evidence for the Jesus-tradition outside the gospels; here
the topic has been condensed into one chapter. He dwells at
some length on the archaeological evidence which confirms
the accuracy of details in the New Testament and on the
early dating of the documents, which brings them into

relatively close proximity with the events they narrate. He

also emphasizes the New Testaments abundant textual
attestation, that is, the number and nature of ancient
manuscripts which have been copied and preserved from
the Greek originals. These issues have not been explored
further here, because their relevance for the gospels is
more limited than for some of the other sections of the New
Testament. Most of the events of Jesus life have left no
physical traces for archaeologists to unearth. Even a
conservative dating of the gospels places them about thirty
years after Jesus

death, a sufficient period of time for errors and distortions

to creep into their accounts, if other factors conducive to
such changes were present. And almost no one denies that
highly accurate texts of what the four evangelists originally
wrote have been preserved; the controversy today centres
on whether or not what they wrote was true, that is, a valid
or faithful record of the events.
At the same time, new challenges to the gospels
trustworthiness have arisen which played little or no
role in the scholarly debates of past generations. Biblical
critics have begun to draw much more heavily on the
insights of literary criticism, hence,the survey of the
new methods of gospel study in chapter two. The
distinctives of John lead virtually all commentators to
treat him quite differently from the Synoptists, so his
gospel has been given special consider-ation.
Nevertheless, even though a wide range of topics has
been surveyed, there are still gaps and omissions. Much
of what has been chosen for discussion has been dictated
by the direction of recent evangelical research in general
and of the Gospel Perspec-tives series in particular (see
preface). For the most part this survey makes no
attempt to break fresh ground, but instead seeks to
make the terrain traversed by recent scholarship
familiar to a wider audience.
Lack of space has clearly prohibited the kind of detailed
treat-ment which each individual topic requires if it is
properly to be substantiated. A non-technical work of this
nature risks two pit-falls. On the one hand, theological
students may complain that its discussion is too brief and
simplistic. On the other hand, lay people who are
unaccustomed to the complexities of modern scholarship
may wish that the issues were less intricate. Neverthe-less,

the book reflects the sincere hope that it may find a welcoming readership among both groups of people, for it is
intended for student and lay person alike. For those who
require more detail, there are frequent footnotes and the
works to which they refer. The abundance of in-depth, well-

reasoned conservative scholarship produced in the last two

decades deserves more ser-ious attention than it has often
received. For those. who find the discussion complex, a
careful checking of the scriptural references provided
throughout should offer much illumination. The issues