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Reliability of New Testament Sources
Obviously the most important sources of information on Jesus are in the New Testament. The Gospels are evidently faith documents written from a Christian viewpoint. But are they reliable historical documents?
There are several reasons to consider these documents as historically reliable.--they are close in time to the actual life of Jesus; ancient manuscripts are abundant; chronological information from Luke further indicates their historical accuracy; and archaeological discoveries corroborate information provided in the Gospels. Finally, the effects of the Gospels must also be considered.
The Gospels--proximity of authors to the events.
The texts of Matthew, Mark, and Luke do not name their authors whereas in John 21:24, John himself is claimed to be the author of the fourth gospel.
Matthew and John were both apostles, eye witnesses to the events narrated. Mark may have been the young man who fled naked the night that Jesus was arrested (Mark 14:51-52); he was later involved with Paul in missionary work (Acts 15:37), with Barnabas (Acts 15:39), and with Peter (1 Peter 5:13). Luke was Paul's traveling companion (Col. 4:12; 2 Tim 4:11) and was also the generally accepted author of Acts.
Earliest tradition vouches for Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as the authors of their Gospels. For Matthew, information derives from Papias of Hierapolis around A.D. 140. About Mark, Papias states that he was "Peter's interpreter," who wrote down Peter's story of Jesus.
About A.D.185 Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyon in France, wrote that Luke, Paul's fellow apostle, had written a Gospel which provided the story of Jesus not given in the other three Gospels. While there is uncertainty concerning the chronology for writing of the Gospels, there is no doubt all were written within a generation of actual events.
References to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus occur frequently in the Pauline Epistles that can be dated with reasonable precision to the middle of the first century and may even pre-date the Gospels themselves. In 1 Corinthians 11:23-26, Paul cites a tradition he had received, the celebration of the Lord's Supper. This letter was written from Ephesus (1 Cor. 16:8) towards the end of Paul's third journey, the generally accepted date being A.D. 57.
In the same epistle Paul passes on another "tradition"--the death and resurrection of Christ (1 Cor. 15:3-9). In these verses he lists people who had seen Jesus after his resurrection, "most of whom were still alive" at the time of Paul's writing (more than 500 according to both Paul in 1 Cor. 15:6 and The Urantia Book p. 2042). The survival of eye witnesses some twenty-five years after the events was, for Paul, clear evidence that Jesus had indeed come back to life.
Manuscripts that testify to the accuracy of the Gospels
The John Rylands papyrus is the oldest extant fragment of the Gospel of John. Found in Egypt, it dates from the first half of the second century, thus confirming the composition of the Gospel of John by the end of the first century A.D.
Most of the Gospel of John also appears in the Bodmer Papyrus 11 from the same period. The Chester Beatty papyri, also found in Egypt, are a collection of codices, three of which contain major portions of the New Testament. Of the discovery of these papyri in 1930, Sir Frederick Kenyon wrote:
"No other extant manuscripts of ancient works come from so near the time of their original writing."
The number of ancient New Testament manuscripts is also remarkable. In Greek alone there are at least 5,686.
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