Summary
Without a reliable New Testament, we have no objective, historical way to know what Jesus said or did. We cannot establish whether he was God, what he taught, or what his followers did and taught.But there is ample evidence to show that we can know that the Christian manuscripts, today collated into what we call the New Testament, are reliable witnesses to the life and times of Jesus. We can know that they were written early enough to be faithful records of the events they describe and that what we have today has been passed down to us accurately.
Class Notes
Suggested Reading
Simon Greenleaf was an American lawyer and jurist that lived in the 19th century. His well known "Treatise on the Law of Evidence" is a classic among American jurisprudence and helped advance the field of law. He originally set out to disprove the claims in the New Testament, only to come away with the opposite result in his well known apologetic work titled "Testimony of the Evangelists".Additional books that cover related topics are:
- The Text of the New Testament (Metzger)
- The Historical Reliability of the Gospels (Blomberg)
- The Historical Jesus: Ancient Evidence for the Life of Christ (Habermas)
- The New Evidence That Demands a Verdict (McDowell)
