Historical Jesus scholarship is a massive and complex field, which means that answering the question, “Are the Gospels historically reliable?” is not a simple task. Fully answering this question would require analyzing each part of each Gospel, and assessing whether it is an authentic saying or deed of Jesus. Engaging in this monumental task would be beyond the scope of this blog. So, in this post, I will merely provide some general reasons we should believe the Gospels to be basically historically reliable, and refute some common objections to their historical reliability.
The Writing of the Gospels
Many scholars doubt that the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were actually written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. But this does nothing to cast doubt on the historical reliability of the Gospels, since the Gospels themselves make no claims about their authorship; Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are just the figures they have been traditionally attributed to. There are good reasons, though, for believing that Mark at least was written by Mark. Very early Christian tradition tells us that Mark wrote it, and if a Gospel were going to be attributed to an authority figure, why would anyone attribute it to Mark, who was not even an apostle? The most reasonable explanation is that it was attributed to Mark because Mark did write it. Early Christian tradition tells us that Mark was an associate of the apostle Peter, so this means that one Gospel, at least, was written by someone who personally knew an eyewitness to Jesus’s ministry.
We do not know exactly when the Gospels were written, but most scholars believe that Mark was written in the 60s, John was written in the 90s, and Matthew and Luke (both of which used Mark as a source) were written sometime in between. The Gospels were thus probably written about thirty to sixty years after Jesus’s death and resurrection. It might seem like this is a long time, and that oral traditions about Jesus would thus have been distorted before they got written down. However, studies of oral cultures today show that oral cultures are able to transmit large amounts of oral text with a high degree of accuracy over long periods of time. To inhabitants of modern Western societies, it may seem hard to believe that oral traditions about Jesus could be accurately passed along over a period of thirty years or more, but that is only because we live in writing cultures, so our brains have not been shaped by the practices of oral cultures, which enable their inhabitants to remember oral traditions and to pass them along accurately over long periods of time. Since Jesus’s followers believed Him to be the Lord and Savior of the world, they would have been very careful to remember His sayings and deeds and to pass them along accurately.
Besides, we do not know that the Gospel of Mark was actually the first time that the sayings and deeds of Jesus were written down. According to Luke, “many” had previously written accounts of the sayings and deeds of Jesus prior to him writing his Gospel (Luke 1:1); some of these very well may have been written before Mark. In fact, most scholars believe that Matthew and Luke both used a written collection of sayings of Jesus (nicknamed “Q”) as a source, and that this source was written in the 40s or 50s. So, in addition to oral traditions about Jesus that would have been accurately handed down across the decades, the Gospel writers probably had access to earlier written documents about the sayings and deeds of Jesus that they could use as sources about Jesus.
The Content of the Gospels
Study of the content of the Gospels provides good reason for believing that they accurately tell us about the ministry of Jesus, rather than containing words put in Jesus’s mouth by late first century Christians. For example, outside of the Gospels and Acts, the sequel to the Gospel of Luke, the term “kingdom of God” occurs only eight times in Paul’s epistles and nowhere else in the New Testament, which shows that this was not a commonly used term in first century Christian churches. Yet, “kingdom of God” or its equivalent, “kingdom of heaven,” is found a total of 88 times in the Gospels and Acts. Clearly, the Gospel writers were not just taking the popular theological discourse of late first century churches and putting it into Jesus’s mouth; they were accurately recording the actual words of Jesus that had been accurately handed down to them.
Another striking fact is that we know from Acts and Paul’s epistles that the issue of circumcision and whether it was required in order to be a member of the Church was the biggest theological controversy in first century Christianity. It would have been a great temptation for Christians to attribute a statement about this topic to Jesus in an attempt to resolve this controversy. Yet, none of the Gospels contain a saying of Jesus about whether circumcision is necessary in order to be a member of the Church or not. Although the Gospel writers were probably to some extent influenced by the concerns of their own day in how they arranged and edited their material about Jesus, it is clear that they did not invent false sayings of Jesus, even to deal with the biggest theological controversies of their time.
There are two passages in the Gospel of Matthew in which Jesus speaks of the “church” (Matt 16:18, 18:17). Skeptics often argue that these obviously cannot be authentic sayings of Jesus, since the historical Jesus did not intend to found a church. However, the Greek word ekklesia just means “assembly.” In the book of Acts, it is even used to refer to an assembly of pagans who were angry with Paul (Acts 19:32, 39, 41). The word ekklesia appears numerous times in the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament which was used by Jews in the first century; it is used to translate the Hebrew qahal: the assembly of God’s people. While the historical Jesus may not have intended to found an institutional church with bishops, cathedrals, monasteries, etc., it is undeniable that He intended to form a community of followers who would assemble in His name. Therefore, there is no good reason to think that these sayings of Jesus which reference an ekklesia are not authentic sayings of Jesus.
The Infancy Narratives
The historical reliability of the infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke has often been called into question. The events surrounding Jesus’s birth are recorded in Matthew and Luke, but are not mentioned in the earlier Gospel of Mark, the later Gospel of John, or the rest of the New Testament. Many skeptics argue that this proves that these infancy narratives were made up by Matthew and Luke and are not historically reliable.
However, just because the content of the infancy narratives is found in Matthew and Luke and nowhere else in the New Testament, this does not mean that it is historically unreliable. Matthew and Luke contain many sayings and deeds of Jesus not mentioned in the rest of the New Testament which even very skeptical scholars believe to be historically reliable, being derived from Q, which predates the Gospel of Mark. Why couldn’t the infancy narratives be derived from historically reliable, pre-Markan sources as well?
It is sometimes argued that an incident recorded in the Gospel of Mark, in which Jesus’s family thinks “He is out of his mind” (Mark 3:21) would be unthinkable if Jesus really had a miraculous birth, as claimed by Matthew and Luke. But this is a tenuous argument. Just because Jesus’s family knew he was special and chosen by God, this does not mean that they could never have thought he was in certain cases acting a bit “crazy,” if that is what it seemed like from their perspective.
The genealogies of Jesus in Matthew (1:1-17) and Luke (3:23-38) differ substantially regarding the time period from David to Jesus, apparently contradicting one another. We do not know with certainty why this is the case, but the best explanation seems to be that Luke traces Jesus’s physical descent, while Matthew traces the line of royal succession. According to this theory, Joseph was physically the son of Heli (Luke 3:23), but legally the son of Jacob (Matt 1:16), due to a second marriage, possibly a levirate marriage (Deut 25:5-6). In either case, Joseph, the legal father of Jesus, was a descendant of David, making Jesus a descendant of David (Mary presumably was a descendant of David as well, but ancient genealogies only traced the male line).
We do not have corroborating historical evidence outside the New Testament for the details of the census Luke mentions (Luke 2:2), the star that led the Magi to Bethlehem (Matt 2:1-12), or Herod’s massacre of the infants of Bethlehem (Matt 2:16-18). But that does not prove that these things did not occur. Roman and Jewish historical records regarding first-century Israel are relatively fragmentary, rather than being exhaustive. It is likely that the star that led the magi to look for Jesus was not a supernatural entity shining a beam of light down into Bethlehem, but a natural astronomical event which they, being astrologers, interpreted as a sign of a special king of the Jews being born. This would explain why they had to ask where the king of the Jews was born when they came to Jerusalem (Matt 2:1-2). If the star that led the magi to Jesus was a natural astronomical event, then we would not expect it to occasion comment by historians of the day. And Bethlehem was a small town, so there were probably a relatively small number of children killed by Herod in his massacre. We know that perpetrating this massacre would be perfectly consistent with the character of Herod, and that this would have been a relatively small evil compared to other atrocities he committed. So, we should not necessarily expect that historians of the day would have mentioned it.
Skeptics often argue that there is a chronological contradiction between Martthew and Luke’s infancy narratives. According to Matthew, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem, the Magi came to see him there (Matt 2:1-12). Then, fearing Herod, Jesus’s family fled to Egypt until Herod died (Matt 2:13-15), after which they returned to Nazareth (Matt 2:19-23). However, according to Luke, forty days after Jesus’s birth, his parents took him to the temple (Luke 2:22), and then returned to live in Nazareth (Luke 2:39). At first glance, these timelines seem to contradict. However, it is not at all difficult to harmonize them. Matthew does not tell us how long after Jesus’s birth it was that the Magi arrived and found Jesus in Bethlehem. But it must have been a substantial period of time later; otherwise, Herod would not have ordered all boys 2 years and under killed (Matt 2:16), only newborns. This makes perfect sense, since it would have taken a long time for the Magi to travel all the way to Judea. Luke 2:22-40, then, takes place in between the first and second chapters of Matthew. After Jesus’s birth in Bethlehem, his family did return to Nazareth for a time, but, at some point, moved to Bethlehem. After the Magi visited them, they fled to Egypt for a time, before eventually returning back to Nazareth. There is thus no contradiction between the chronologies of Matthew and Luke’s infancy narratives.