Are the Gospels Historically Reliable?

(Why this question is so difficult to answer)

For the layperson interested in the gospels, there are few topics more tantalising than the gospels' historicity. How accurately do the gospels convey Jesus and his times?

In tackling this question, there is a temptation to rely upon apologetics and polemics. The crudest apologists assure us that the gospels are four sources close up to the facts, capturing the past as it actually played out. Meanwhile, their sceptical counterparts inform us that the gospels bear almost no connection to the historical Jesus – if there was a historical Jesus at all.

In my view, neither project is trustworthy. It is not that the question of reliability has no value. It is that it cannot be answered honestly in black-or-white terms.

In this post, I explore seven reasons why the question of historical reliability of the gospels is so difficult to answer. My ambition is not to provide you with clear resolutions to the historicity or lack thereof in any particular passage. Rather, it is to persuade you precisely why the historical task is so difficult in the case of the gospels.

#1 The Gospels are of uncertain provenance

When ascertaining the reliability of an ancient source, it is generally helpful to know something about their provenance: who wrote the texts, where and when. Which brings us to our first difficulty in assessing the gospels’ reliability: the provenance of the gospels is highly contested.

Traditionally, the titles of the gospels are attributed to Matthew and John (eyewitnesses and disciples of Jesus) and Mark and Luke (followers of eyewitnesses). Yet as I have unpacked elsewhere, there are good reasons to think that the gospels were originally anonymous, like many Jewish texts.

In the view of most scholars, these titles were attached later, when the gospels came together as a four-fold collection. This would explain why they each have the same formulaic title – ‘The Gospel according to X’ – and why they are not referred to as the work of a particular disciple until Irenaeus in the late second century.

What then are we to make of the names we now find them? One early tradition, found in the writings of Papias, is that Mark knew Peter, and that Matthew composed something in Hebrew or Aramaic. Yet Matthew probably did not write our present Greek Gospel, and the Petrine association with Mark is similarly contested.

The situation with Luke is also somewhat muddied. There is no clear attestation that Luke specifically wrote his gospel – in fact, we know that Marcion knew a version of the text without one. Given this lack of clarity, it may be that Luke was inferred as the author from his missionary journeys as an associate of Paul.

Meanwhile, the author of John hides behind the moniker of ‘the disciple whom Jesus loved’. Yet the quest for the beloved disciple has not yielded clear results. Though it may look like an eyewitness stands behind some of the gospel, the fact that the sons of Zebedee are referred to in the narrative (21:2) makes this attribution unlikely.

Other aspects of the gospels’ provenance are similarly shrouded. For example, the jury is still out on when and where the gospels emerged. Some common dates (70-110 CE) and locations recur in the literature. Mark, for example, is often said to have been written in Rome shortly after Jerusalem’s destruction. Yet it is difficult to pin the gospels to any specific place, and a minority of scholars prefer earlier dates.

I always keep in mind what a Professor once said to me regarding the gospels’ dating: that these really all are guesses – our best attempt to work out what was going on. Without a clearer image of the gospels’ provenance, we are not afforded some of the context about an author which we would like to gain insight to their reliability.

#2 The Gospels are ancient biographies

A second problem is that the gospels are ancient ‘lives’ (bíoi). For some scholars, this fact is somewhat consoling. Many ancient biographers saw their life-writing as something adjacent to history. This meant that they would not generally invent scenes, but relied upon source material to compose their biographies.

The difficulty is that biography was a fluid genre, perhaps especially prone to blur the lines between fact and fiction. Some biographies, such as the Life of Aesop, written around the time of the Gospels in a similar style, were almost entirely fictional. Though drawing upon earlier material and believed to reflect a historical figure, the narrative itself was fictional and bore little connection to the actual past.

The gospels are not about a character of the mythical past, and claim a more direct connection to history (see Lk. 1:1-4). Yet knowing this about their genre tells us little about their historicity, for the value of historical biographies, like modern ones, often varied. A classicist today might recognise the general value of Plutarch’s Cicero, while also cataloguing a host of errors.¹ Biography did not always guarantee historicity.

Perhaps more problematically, historically-minded biographers often worked with different conventions to their modern counterparts. The late Tomas Hagg, a world expert on ancient biography, summarised it in this way:

“Ancient life-writers did not encounter among their contemporaries the same demands for documentary truth as their modern colleagues do, nor did for that matter ancient historiographers… Conversations are allowed to be fictitious, and insight is readily granted into the acting characters’ feelings, thoughts, and motives, as long as some kind of verisimilitude is maintained. The establishment of any form of higher truth – be it poetic, psychological, philosophical, or religious – overrules demands for the truth of facts.’²