Historical reliability of the Gospels

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The historical reliability of the Gospels is evaluated by experts who have not reached complete consensus. While all four canonical gospels contain some sayings and events that may meet at least one of the five criteria for historical reliability used in biblical studies,[note 1] the assessment and evaluation of these elements is a matter of ongoing debate.[1][note 2]

Virtually all scholars of antiquity agree that Jesus of Nazareth existed in 1st-century Judaea in the Southern Levant[2][3][4] but scholars differ on the historicity of specific episodes described in the biblical accounts of him.[5] The only two events subject to "almost universal assent"[6] are that Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist and that he was crucified by order of the Roman Prefect Pontius Pilate.[7] There is no scholarly consensus about other elements of Jesus's life, including the two accounts of the Nativity of Jesus, the miraculous events such as the resurrection, and certain details of the crucifixion.[8][9]

According to the majority viewpoint, the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, collectively called the Synoptic Gospels, are the primary sources of historical information about Jesus[10] and the religious movement he founded.[11] The fourth gospel, John, differs greatly from the other three.[note 3] A growing majority of scholars consider the Gospels to be in the genre of Ancient Greco-Roman biographies,[12] the same genre as Plutarch's Life of Alexander and Life of Caesar. Typically, ancient biographies written shortly after the death of the subject and include substantial history.[13]

Historians analyze the Gospels critically, attempting to differentiate reliable information from possible inventions, exaggerations, and alterations.[14] Scholars use textual criticism to resolve questions arising from textual variations among the numerous extant manuscripts to decide the wording of a text closest to the "original".[15] Scholars seek to answer questions of authorship and date and purpose of composition, and they look at internal and external sources to determine the gospel traditions' reliability.[16] Historical reliability does not depend on a source's inerrancy or lack of agenda since some sources (e.g. Josephus) are considered generally reliable despite having such traits.[17]


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  1. ^ Grant 1963, ch. 10; Sanders 1995, p. 3; Leiva-Merikakis 1996; Blomberg 2007; Ehrman, Evans & Stewart 2020.
  2. ^ Ehrman 2011, pp. 256–257: "He certainly existed, as virtually every competent scholar of antiquity, Christian or non-Christian, agrees, based on certain and clear evidence."
  3. ^ Grant 2004, p. 200: "In recent years, 'no serious scholar has ventured to postulate the non-historicity of Jesus' or at any rate very few, and they have not succeeded in disposing of the much stronger, indeed very abundant, evidence to the contrary."
  4. ^ Burridge & Gould 2004, p. 34: "There are those who argue that Jesus is a figment of the Church's imagination, that there never was a Jesus at all. I have to say that I do not know any respectable critical scholar who says that any more."
  5. ^ Powell 1998, p. 181.
  6. ^ Dunn 2003, p. 339 states of baptism and crucifixion that these "two facts in the life of Jesus command almost universal assent".
  7. ^ Crossan, John Dominic (1995). Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography. HarperOne. p. 145. ISBN 978-0-06-061662-5. That he was crucified is as sure as anything historical can ever be, since both Josephus and Tacitus [...] agree with the Christian accounts on at least that basic fact.
  8. ^ James K. Beilby; Paul Rhodes Eddy, eds. (2009). "Introduction". The Historical Jesus: Five Views. IVP Academic. pp. 38–39. ISBN 978-0830838684. Contrary to previous times, virtually everyone in the field today acknowledges that Jesus was considered by his contemporaries to be an exorcist and a worker of miracles. However, when it comes to historical assessment of the miracles tradition itself, the consensus quickly shatters. Some, following in the footsteps of Bultmann, embrace an explicit methodological naturalism such that the very idea of a miracle is ruled out a priori. Others defend the logical possibility of miracle at the theoretical level, but, in practice, retain a functional methodological naturalism, maintaining that we could never be in possession of the type and/or amount of evidence that would justify a historical judgment in favor of the occurrence of a miracle. Still others, suspicious that an uncompromising methodological naturalism most likely reflects an unwarranted metaphysical naturalism, find such a priori skepticism unwarranted and either remain open to, or even explicitly defend, the historicity of miracles within the Jesus tradition.
  9. ^ Markus Bockmuehl (2001). "7. Resurrection". The Cambridge Companion to Jesus. Cambridge University Press. p. 103. ISBN 978-0521796781. Nevertheless, what is perhaps most surprising is the extent to which contemporary scholarly literature on the 'historical Jesus' has studiously ignored and downplayed the question of the resurrection...But even the more mainstream participants in the late twentieth-century 'historical Jesus' bonanza have tended to avoid the subject of the resurrection – usually on the pretext that this is solely a matter of 'faith' or of 'theology', about which no self-respecting historian could possibly have anything to say. Precisely that scholarly silence, however, renders a good many recent 'historical Jesus' studies methodologically hamstrung, and unable to deliver what they promise...In this respect, benign neglect ranks alongside dogmatic denial and naive credulity in guaranteeing the avoidance of historical truth.
  10. ^ Sanders, E. P. (2010). "Jesus Christ". Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Archived from the original on 2015-05-03. Retrieved 27 November 2010. The Synoptic Gospels, then, are the primary sources for knowledge of the historical Jesus.
  11. ^ Sanders 1995; Vermes 2004.
  12. ^ Licona, Michael R. (2016). Why Are There Differences in the Gospels? What We Can Learn from Ancient Biography. Oxford University Press. p. 3.
  13. ^ Keener, Craig S. (2011). "Otho: A Targeted Comparison of Suetonius's Biography and Tacitus's History, with Implications for the Gospels' Historical Reliability". Bulletin for Biblical Research. 21 (3). Penn State University Press: 331–355. doi:10.2307/26424373. JSTOR 26424373.
  14. ^ Sanders 1995.
  15. ^ Wegner 2006, pp. 23–24.
  16. ^ Cite error: The named reference Rhodes-Eddy08 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  17. ^ Ehrman, Evans & Stewart 2020, pp. 12–18.