Can We Trust the Gospels?

Recently I read Can We Trust the Gospels? (Crossway 2018) by Peter Williams, a NT scholar and textual critic. 

Chap. 1 reviews the non-Christian sources. 

Chap. 2 provides an overview of the canonical Gospels.

Chap. 3 marshals a battery of evidence to demonstrate that the canonical Gospels reflect intimate knowledge of the time and place of Jesus, based on place names, proper names, bodies of water, roads, gardens, botanical terms, finance, local languages, Jewishness, and usual customs. 

It also compares the canonical gospels with apocryphal gospels to illustrate the dearth of such information in gospels from a later time and different place. 

Chap. 4 summarizes the argument from undesigned coincidences, drawing on Lydia McGrew's monograph.

Chap. 5 addresses the question of whether we have the actual words of Jesus, as well as harmonizing the Resurrection accounts of Matthew and John.

Chap. 6 debunks the textual skepticism of Bart Ehrman. 

Chap. 7 addresses the allegation that the Gospels are contradictory, appealing to literary paradox in John's Gospel. 

Chap. 8 applies the criterion of embarrassment, defends and sketches the argument from miracles, defends and sketches the argument from prophecy, as well as making a case for the Resurrection.

Despite the book's brevity, it's a fact-filled treatment. Highly recommended. Here's a sample:

Faith is seen as non-rational belief–something not based on evidence. However, that is not what faith originally meant for Christians. Coming from the Latin word fides, the word faith used to mean something closer to our word trust. Trust of course, can be based on evidence….We place qualified trust in news sources, both for information that affects our lives and  for information that does not. It is a version of that everyday sort of trust that we are going to consider in this book…

The four Gospels were not chosen as a result of political power, but rather they became accepted by early Christians as the best sources for information about Jesus's life without any central authority pressuring others to accept them.

It is rarely appreciated that for us to have four Gospels about Jesus is remarkable. That is an abundance of material to have about any individual of that period. In fact, even though Jesus was on the periphery of the Roman Empire, we have as many early sources about his life and teaching as we have about activities and conversations of Tiberius, emperor during Jesus's public activities. 

If the traditional view of authorship of the Gospels is correct, Matthew and John were written by people already active as disciples of Jesus no later than AD 33. Mark was by someone who was able to be an assistant to Barnabas and Paul no later than about 50, and Luke was by someone who accompanied Paul in the 50s and 60s on journeys to Turkey , Greece, Judaea, and Rome. For a defense of the traditional authorship of the Gospels, see Brant Pitre, The Case for Jesus: The Biblical and Historical Evidence for Christ (New York: Image, 2016), 12-54.

Although we live in an age when we have easy access to advance information about anywhere we go, we still tend to be surprised by aspects of geography and culture whenever we travel. Now imagine if someone asked you to write a story about events in a distant place you had never visited, and you were not allowed to use the Internet for research. Even with the wonderful libraries we have today, you would struggle to get all the information together to write a detailed story that fitted what a local person would know. This is because of the many aspects of your destination you would haven to get right, and getting only most of them right would not make a story sound authentic. You would have to investigate its architecture, culture, economics, geography, language, law, politics, religion, social stratification, weather, and much more. You would even need to ensure that the characters in your tale were given names that were plausible for the historical and geographical setting of  your narrative. 

The information in the lists…would be extremely surprising if we were to think of the Gospels writers as having lived in other countries, such as Egypt, Italy, Greece, or Turkey, and having made up stories about Jesus…It is worth reflecting on how such knowledge could be obtained. In principle, one might get it through personal experience, reading, or hearing. However, it does not seem that the Gospel writers could have simply obtained their information from reading. No known sources hold together the particular set of information they have; and, besides, we would have to suppose that they undertook a level of literary research quite unparalleled in ancient history. If these pieces of information result from hearing, then the reports they heard must have been fairly precise–concerned with stories not merely for their message but also for specific details. Thus, it seems that the authors received the information either from their experience or from detailed hearing. 

If anyone were inserting geographical details to make the story look authentic, he would have had to be very thorough. This is not at all the behavior we would expect from four different authors writing independently…A striking thing is that all four Gospels, despite their differences, have a similar frequency with which they mention contemporary geography…It is impractical to argue that the similarity of frequency arose in the Gospels because they were trying to present such details with a certain frequency.  After all, we see variation within the types of geographical names they mention. It is a pattern more likely to reflect the fact that the Gospel writers were not trying to insert place names to make their stories look authentic. The even distribution of place names in the four Gospels is unlikely to be the result of each of the four writers making a deliberate effort to spread names out, but is exactly the sort of pattern that might occur through unconscious behavior, recording places naturally when relevant to their stories. 

These later [apocryphal] Gospels do…provide us with an excellent control sample. They show that sometimes people wrote about Jesus without close knowledge of what he did.