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WillowOne's Positions

Historical Reliability of the New Testament

Form

  1. The New Testament documents were written early, by eyewitnesses or their associates.
  2. They have been transmitted accurately; we have thousands of manuscripts, more than for any other ancient text.
  3. They are corroborated by archaeology and by non-Christian sources (Josephus, Tacitus).
  4. Therefore the New Testament is historically reliable, and its central claims, including the miracles and the Resurrection, should be accepted.

My Positions

  1. The New Testament is a collection of religious texts, written by believers, for believers, to promote belief. It is a primary source for what early Christians believed. It is not independent evidence that what they believed was true.
  2. The conclusion does not follow from the premises. Even if the texts were early, accurately transmitted, and archaeologically corroborated in their incidental details, none of that would be evidence for the supernatural claims. The Iliad correctly describes Troy; this is not evidence for Athena.

Notes

  1. Authorship and dating. The gospels are anonymous. The names Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were attached in the second century. Mainstream scholarship dates Mark to around 70 AD, Matthew and Luke to 80–90 AD, and John to 90–110 AD, that is, forty to eighty years after the events, in Greek, by authors who were almost certainly not eyewitnesses. Paul's letters are earlier (50s AD) but Paul never met Jesus and says almost nothing about his life.
  2. Manuscript count is irrelevant to truth. That we have many copies tells us the text was copied often. It tells us what the text said; not whether what it said happened. Having five thousand copies of a claim does not make it five thousand times more likely to be true. (The manuscripts also disagree with one another in hundreds of thousands of places, and the earliest complete copies date from the fourth century.)
  3. The texts contradict one another. The genealogies of Jesus in Matthew and Luke are incompatible. The birth narratives place it under Herod (died 4 BC) and during the census of Quirinius (6 AD). The day of the crucifixion differs between the synoptics and John. The resurrection accounts disagree on who went to the tomb, what they found, and where the disciples went afterwards. Apologists reconcile these with ingenuity, but a reliable set of documents should not require it.
  4. Non-Christian corroboration is thin. Josephus (c. 93 AD) and Tacitus (c. 116 AD) confirm, at most, that Christians existed and that their founder was executed under Pilate. The famous Josephus passage (the Testimonium Flavianum) is at least partly a later Christian interpolation. Neither source is independent of what Christians themselves were saying by that time.
  5. Archaeology corroborates geography, not miracles. That Nazareth, Capernaum, and the pool of Bethesda existed is evidence that the authors knew the region. It is not evidence that a man walked on the lake.
  6. The reasonable position is that a Jewish apocalyptic preacher named Jesus probably existed, was baptised by John, preached in Galilee, and was crucified by the Romans in around 30 AD. Beyond that, the texts tell us about the development of a movement, not about events. See Bart Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus (2005) and Jesus, Interrupted (2009).

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