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“To dismiss the Gospels from the historical record is neither fair nor scholarly.” (1)

I have chosen the quote above, from atheist Princeton-trained New Testament scholar Dr. Bart Ehrman, as the theme of this post.

I mentioned this topic in post #11 (see link in series outline above), but as I’ve continued to write on the historicity of the resurrection, I decided it was time to dedicate a whole post to it.

The rule that was made to be broken

If you haven’t spent much time studying this topic, I understand if you have this objection: “You can’t use Scripture references when trying to prove the historicity of the resurrection, because that is circular reasoning.”

In fact, before I recently learned how the average New Testament scholar (not people on Quora, or the Internet Infidels, or Richard Dawkins) approaches the New Testament, I would have yielded to said prohibition. In an apologetics context, nothing in the Bible can be used to prove anything else in the Bible!

And even today, if you applied this prohibition to a verse that said “Yea verily, Jesus rose from the dead”, I would still agree with you.

But what about the non-miraculous statements in the Bible? How reliable are they, according to secular New Testament scholars? Read on to find out…

The gospels as history??

These quotes from Wikipedia may surprise you…they certainly surprised me.

“Although not without critics, the position that the Gospels are a type of ancient biography is the consensus among scholars today.” (2)

“According to a broad scholarly consensus, the Synoptic Gospels (the first three—Matthew, Mark, and Luke) are the most reliable sources of information about Jesus.” (2)

Yes, it turns out that many of the non-miraculous statements in the gospels are considered to be accurate by New Testament scholars, whether they are atheists, Christians, or somewhere in between. In addition, as I wrote in post #13 (link in series outline above), the gospels were not written hundreds of years later, but rather, within the lifetimes of at least some of the people involved in the accounts.

But let’s move from generalities to a concrete example; this section in my previous post discusses what we can learn about the “stolen body hypothesis” from…you guessed it…the gospels. 

But wait, there’s more!

What about a source outside Wikipedia? And what about the rest of the New Testament? I got ya covered!

The aforementioned Dr. Ehrman, an atheist, believes that Jesus was in fact a real historical figure (there is a very tiny faction of scholars who deny this…see post #2 in linked outline above). And one of his evidences is, drum roll please, the Bible: “Paul knew Jesus’ brother, James, and he knew his closest disciple, Peter, and he tells us [in his letter to the Galatians] that he did. If Jesus didn’t exist, you would think that his brother would know about it, so I think Paul is probably pretty good evidence that Jesus at least existed.” (3)

So, yes, we can learn things about Biblical characters, who by the way were real historical figures, by reading the stuff they wrote, which is, in fact, still in our possession today.

In summary, the reliability of the New Testament as ancient history is a critical consideration in studying the historicity of the resurrection. You might want to bookmark this one!

God bless, and thanks for reading.

TFOTF

Links:

(1) Bart Ehrman on Evidence Unseen

(2) The most important article on Wikipedia

(3) Ehrman on NPR

TFOTF