Evidence for the reliability of the gospels

The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God endures forever (Isaiah 40:8).

So are the gospels made up nonsense from people who should know better or is it like Chinese whispers where the facts get distorted and exaggerated along the way?  How do we know we have the true stories of Jesus and what he actually said and did?

When were the gospels written? 
The gospels are dated within living memory of Jesus.  Most scholars (Christian or otherwise) agree it was probably: Mark 65-70AD, then Matthew and Luke 80-85AD and finally John 90-100AD.  Remember Jesus died aged around 33 in something like 30-33AD so this means the first gospel account was written within 32-40 years after his death and the last gospel was done 57-70 years after. 

So not long for myth or legend to creep in.  It would be like someone writing a book now about John Lennon saying he walked on water, healed the sick and rose from the dead.  John Lennon’s family would sue the author and the book would be widely discredited and quickly forgotten.

How were they written?
Luke is a great one for taking a careful approach to writing his version down.  At the outset, he says:

Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. With this in mind, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I too decided to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught. (Luke 1:1-4)

Remember Luke was writing something like 47-55 years after Jesus died and he would have been able to interview eyewitnesses to get his facts straight.  He was clearly concerned that things could be exaggerated or made up completely, so he was out to write an accurate account that would stand up to scrutiny from Jesus’ family, friends and other witnesses who would have been still around at the time he was writing.

How do we know what we’ve got now is what they wrote in the first place?
We don't have the original copies of the gospels.  They're long lost.  What we do have is copies of copies of copies… you get the idea!  This is how people used to preserve important documents.  So how can we know that what we have is anything like the original stuff Matthew, Mark, Luke and John wrote 2000 years ago?  Chinese whispers, right?

Actually it’s the same kind of problem we have with lots of other historical writings like all the stuff we have about Julius Caesar, Augustus Caesar, Aristotle, Plato, Pliny the Younger and people like that.  It’s copies of copies of copies.  It’s a bit like a family tree.  There’s Luke’s original (which we don’t have) and then there’s tons of copies (most of which we don’t have either) but we do have a certain number of copies to look at.  It’s like a family tree of copies...

Historians (stick with it, we’re nearly there!) look at two things to test how reliable the copies we have actually are.  They look at how early the earliest copy is (the earlier the better) and they look at how many copies we have to see if they’re all pretty much the same (the more the better).  Using the diagram above, if we have the circled documents, L5 would be the earliest one and we’d also compare it with L10, L13, L17 and L18.  If they’re all the same, then we know they’re all pretty close to the original document.  That’s how historians do it!

So what’s the earliest copy of the gospels?  And how many do we have?  How does the evidence stack up compared to what we have for other historical writings?  The grid below shows the answers to all these questions and the evidence for the reliability of the gospel writings we have is overwhelmingly strong compared to other historical writings most people take for granted!

So, the evidence shows us that...

• The gospels were written with the clear intention of providing accurate and trustworthy accounts about Jesus so people could believe in him (Luke 1:1-4, John 20:31-31). 
• The original gospels were all written well within living memory of Jesus and this adds to their credibility. 
• We can be extraordinarily confident that the gospel accounts we have in our Bibles today are actually what was originally written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.  

Evidence for the resurrection of Jesus from the dead