You Asked: How Can We Trust the Gospels Accurately Recorded Jesus?

Jesus vs. America

In this episode, we respond to one of your comments about why we believe that Jesus’s life and teachings are accurately recorded in the New Testament biographies and the letters authored by his apostles. While acknowledging that there is no way to adequately answer this question in a short episode, our goal is to provide some of the reasons that our faith confidently rests on the answers available from scholarly resources that have addressed this question over the long history of the church. We also contrast the ways historical narratives were written and transmitted in the first century, and we caution about relying on our own cultural biases to discredit the writings authored in another time and place. Our hope is that our discussion models a form of engagement with this topic that remains open to opposing views, while reminding that we should be prepared to do the hard work of researching this issue further if this particular question is important to the way we view the claims of Jesus.