Do we have reliable accounts of Jesus’s life?
According to some people, Jesus Christ was the inventor of Christianity. Whilst that is a fair statement, Christianity is not a mere invention, but it is something that was born out of Jesus’s life achievements! The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are astonishing accounts of the life of Jesus. They are biographies that overlap at times and were told and recorded by authors who didn’t dodge the difficult bits in Jesus’s story or theirs. The writers simply wanted to give a true account! Whilst Jesus did not write a word of the Gospels, most historical scholars today, agree that the Jesus in the bible existed around 2000 years ago, as do Christians. However, how do we know so much about His life? What makes Jesus a historically credible figure is the amount of or manuscripts we have. In fact, we have friendly and non-bias historians that lived in the first and second century that confirm that Jesus was real.
We can examine how reliable the accounts of Jesus’s life are by examining the three sub-headings below:
The Historical Reliability evidence,
Internal Evidence and
External Evidence.
The Historical Reliability Evidence
The historical reliability evidence of the life of Jesus and the Gospels deals with the amount of historical data or the amount of New Testament manuscripts in existence, the time frame they were first written down and their accuracy when cross-referenced against each other. While we do not have the original manuscripts, we do have countless reproductions. There are a stunning 5,656 partial or complete manuscripts of the New Testament in the Greek language that exists today that make up the 25,000 copies of the New Testament. In fact, the manuscripts that make up the New Testament have been copied and circulated more times than any other book in antiquity ever.
When you put this information into context it begins to unravel something unique. Throw in the fact that the bible is the all-time Number one best-selling book ever, then we have strong reason to believe that it has a special message and it has been preserved and copied so many times because of its importance to humanity.
A friend of mine only recently believed that the Gospels were just a collection of books that spoke about a mythological character called Jesus and were only written down 500 years ago. We know this not to be the case. The writings about Jesus were written down early, within only 1–2 generations after Jesus’ ascension to heaven. That’s a mere 20–50 years after He lived here on earth.
According to experts, because we have the narrative records so close to that time, it’s not possible to consider Jesus as just some mythological character as not enough time had elapsed for him to be categorised as a myth.
The Internal Evidence
One of the Gospels, the Gospel of Luke was written down by a historian and Physician who claims that he set out to write a truthful account and he would have used the eyewitness statements of the very people who had seen Christ after His resurrection. He wrote at the beginning of his Gospel in Luke that:
“Inasmuch as many have taken in hand to set in order a narrative of those things which have been fulfilled among us, just as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word delivered them to us, it seemed good to me also, having had perfect understanding of all things from the very first, to write to you an orderly account, most excellent Theophilus, that you may know the certainty of those things in which you were instructed.” (Luke 1 v 1- 4 NKJV)
What is incredible about Luke’s statement is that he was going to tell the story “warts and all.” There was not going to be any stone unturned because Luke was passionate about the truth. Evidence of this is clear. In fact, the Gospels are infamous for re-telling embarrassing stories about Jesus’s disciples. For instance, when Jesus called Peter, Satan.
“But He turned and said to Peter, “Get behind Me, Satan! You are an offense to Me, for you are not mindful of the things of God, but the things of men.” (Matthew 16 v 23 NKJV)
Another embarrassing and uncertainly unheroic incident happened when Peter denied he knew Jesus three times after Jesus was arrested, as recorded in the book of Luke, chapter 22, verses 54–62.
Furthermore, where were all his disciples at the Crucifixion of Jesus? From the accounts of the Gospels only James was in attendance with the women; had all the others ran away? What’s more, when Jesus had risen from his tomb, from the earliest account in the book of Mark, it was the women that went and spread the word that Jesus was not there on the third day. This was quite something in those days as female witnesses were usually discredited in first-century Palestine.
So, it seems reasonable to conclude that if the disciples had fraudulently written the Gospels for their own benefit, why didn’t they create extraordinary accounts of heroism and anecdotes that were more favourable, not countless embarrassing tales about when they had failed?
In the book of Acts, we learn that after Christ’s ascension to Heaven, the disciples lived, to quote the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, rather “nasty, brutish and short lives.” Ten of his disciples are believed to have been martyred for spreading Christianity across the known world. From the outset their deaths seem like a catastrophe but when we reflect upon the manner in which they died, it only further backs up the firm belief that each apostle had about who Jesus really was.
If Jesus was not the Son of God, then why bother following him only to be killed for a lie? It’s one thing to be told a lie and die for it, but quite something else to see first-hand the perpetrator of all the lies and knowingly go to your deaths.
After the death of Jesus and the death of the disciples, Christianity still spread like wildfire even though the religion was declared illegal in many places throughout the world. Today, the lives of billions have been transformed by Jesus and despite skepticism, the amount of people turning to Christ is growing. The accounts of Jesus are so compelling because they question what normal reason and logic is! Why write about things that were uncomfortable and embarrassing for all the disciples, when making up lies seems much more appealing.
Remember, the disciples could have hired a PR agency to tell a better, more heroic story, but they didn’t, because they believed that when the truth matters…it’s far better to live with the awkward truth than with comfortable lies. This is called integrity and a very good reason to believe that the accounts of Jesus’s life in the Gospels can be trusted.
The External Evidence
Christian Apologetics it is not merely an exercise to find all the answers in the Bible alone. There is a great deal of detective work involved to gather further evidence from sources outside of the bible; in order to present a more reasoned and balanced argument. The Gospels were written by historians who wrote honest accounts for their audience of that day, however, we also have external records about Jesus’s life from Roman and Jewish Historians confirming things about Jesus. So called non-bias writers who lived in and around the first century wrote about the life of Jesus too.
This corroborative evidence doesn’t just fill in the missing pieces to the life of Jesus — as the Gospels give a fuller account — but they uphold the events described in the gospels and this makes them trustworthy.
In the first century, there was a Jew called Josephus who turned traitor and cooperated with the Romans. Born in AD.37, Josephus wrote a book about the History of the Jews and in his account, he mentions Jesus and His brother, James. Some of Josephus’s writings also make references to how Jesus grew a strong following and was crucified by the Romans.
Another important first-century Historian called Tacitus wrote about the early Christians that were persecuted under Emperor Nero. Tacitus was a Roman and wrote that the origin of the early Christians came from a man known as Christos, who “suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius, at the hands of…Pontius Pilate.”
The testimonies of Tacitus and Josephus are important because they are unsympathetic accounts about the success and spread of Christianity based on a historical figure — Jesus. They confirm many of the things that Christians know about Jesus through the bible. Many people have tried to deny that He ever existed, but the historical reliability of how the New Testament came about, the internal (friendly) and external (non-bias) evidence considered by scholars provide evidence that Jesus did live 2000 years ago.
There are many more credible and early accounts of Jesus that are not even mentioned here. But suffice to say there are more things written about the life of Jesus than Julius Caesar, but no skeptic would ever deny that the Roman leader never existed. Why is that?
