The Historical Reliability of the
New Testament Text -- Part One
by Dr John Ankerberg and Dr. John Weldon

Who is right in this debate, the Christians who claim that the New Testament is historically accurate or the critics of the New Testament who claim otherwise? The latter group, which includes the Jesus Seminar authors, usually approaches the Bible from a thoroughgoing rationalistic materialistic viewpoint, discounting the Bible’s supernatural elements, employing higher critical methods and maintaining that it wasn’t even written until the late first or early second century.

The skeptics’ argument, usually based on the use of higher critical methods such as source, form and redaction criticism,* is often given as follows: by a number of criteria the reliability of the New Testament text may be reasonably doubted. This includes a number of features, such as its dominant "mythological" (supernatural) character; the "findings" of the "criteria of dissimilarity" of tradition criticism and of higher criticism in general such as the probability of textual corruption through either the early church (oral tradition, source or form criticism) or a later editor or redactor (redaction criticism); the fabrication of a fictitious view of Jesus on the basis of erroneous Messianic expectation; the hundreds of thousands of variants in extant texts; the dubious theological embellishments of the Apostle Paul, such as in his view of salvation through Jesus Christ; and the invention of most of the teachings of Christ to suit the spiritual or other needs of the early church, or even the removal of the actual teachings of Christ in later church councils for the purpose of political expediency or theological bias. The Jesus Seminar, for example, widely employs the "dissimilarity principle" to supposedly determine what Jesus actually said. Here, a text or saying is reliable only when it contrasts with the thinking of the early Christians. Odd or unusual sayings are unlikely to have been invented by the Gospel writers and probably are authentic.

Thomas C. Oden provides a common view of Jesus held by most modern scholars:

James W. Sire, who cites this view, remarks,

The conservative view of Scripture takes quite another approach. It maintains that, on the basis of accepted bibliographic, internal, external and other criteria, the New Testament text can be established to be reliable history in spite of the novel and sometimes ingenious speculations of critics who, while often familiar with the facts, refuse to accept them due to a preexisting bias. Textually, there is simply no legitimate basis upon which to doubt the credibility and accuracy of the New Testament writers. Further, the methods used by the critics (higher critical methods) have been weighed in the balance even of secular scholarship and been found wanting. Their use in biblical analysis is therefore unjustified. Even in a positive sense, the fruit they have born is minuscule while, negatively, they are responsible for a tremendous weight of destruction relative to people’s confusion over biblical authority and their confidence in the Bible.

In this sense, the critics conform to the warnings of Chauncey Sanders, associate professor of military history at The Air University, Maxwell Air Force Base, Montgomery, Alabama. In his book An Introduction to Research in English Literary History, Sanders warns the literary critic to be certain that he is also careful to examine the evidence against his case:

In order to resolve the issue of New Testament reliability, over the coming months we will present ten facts which cannot logically be denied. (continued next time)