Book Review: Can We Trust The Gospels? by Peter J. Williams

If you’re anything like me, you find the study of textual criticism fascinating. But, most folks in the pews today do not. They instinctively or subconsciously trust the translators down through the centuries that the Bible they have is God’s Word. Moreover, they trust the Lord that He has given them His Word. And that’s OK. However, what about the man on the street who struggles with questions of the age, transmission, accuracy, and therefore the truthfulness of the Bible. Can We Trust the Gospels? by Peter J. Williams seeks to answer those questions and does so successfully.

I have personally encountered these objections from people who reject Christianity based almost solely on the rejection of Scripture and therefore they reject God. This is one area that we who accept Scripture as God’s Word must have a basic understanding in order to defend what we believe. I was drawn to this book as soon as I read the title.

At 160 pages, it is not an in depth study of the Gospels or their defense and was not intended to be so. This work offers a basic understanding for evidence to believe the Gospels are worth trusting. It is, however, also more than just a cursory walk through of the evidence. Each chapter is written to enable the reader to have confidence that what they are reading in their Gospels is not superfluous nonsense written long ago.

Chapter Titles

1 What Do Non-Christian Sources Say?

2 What Are the Four Gospels?

3 Did the Gospel Authors Know Their Stuff?

4 Undesigned Coincidences

5 Do We Have Jesus’s Actual Words?

6 Has the Text Changed?

7 What about Contradictions?

8 Who Would Make All This Up?

What stood out, among many, many things, is why we have four Gospels. What was the focus of each one? Why do they seemingly disagree at times (chapter 2 & 7)? How the Gospels authors were aware of people, places, names, and culture (chapter 3). Where the Four Gospels differ from the later non-canonical gospels and why. Contradictions – are they really contradictions (chapter 7)?  How it would be impossible for four independent authors, at different geographic locations, at different times within the first century, be able to relate the same accounts in the life of Jesus. Chapter 4 is uniquely interesting. It demonstrates how small details that may appear in one Gospel account but not in another Gospel, such as the feeding of the 5000, corroborate the accounts as accurate and true and impossible to coordinate between the independent authors if they were not true. Thus authenticating the accuracy of the individual accounts and the Gospels themselves.

This is a five-star work. Easy to read, easy to digest and easy to enjoy. Well worth your time and effort.

Crossway has provided a complimentary copy of this book through Beyond the Page. Thoughts and opinions are my own.

Brush Up on Your Knowledge of the Bible

In light of the recent Newsweek article which misrepresents Scripture, below are a few suggestions to brush up on your knowledge of the Bible, its history and transmission.

The Question of Canon
Product Description
2013 Preaching Survey of the Year's Best Books for Preachers Did the New Testament canon arise naturally from within the early Christian faith? Were the books written as Scripture, or did they become Scripture by a decision of the second-century church? Why did early Christians have a canon at all? These are the types of questions that led Michael J. Kruger to pick apart modern scholarship’s dominant view that the New Testament is a late creation of the church imposed on books originally written for another purpose. Calling into question this commonly held "extrinsic" view, Kruger here tackles the five most prevalent objections to the classic understanding of a quickly emerging, self-authenticating collection of authoritative scriptures. Already a noted author on the subject of the New Testament canon, Kruger addresses foundational and paradigmatic assumptions of the extrinsic model as he provides powerful rebuttals and further support for the classic, "intrinsic" view. This framework recognizes the canon as the product of internal forces evolving out of the historical essence of Christianity, not a development retroactively imposed by the church upon books written hundreds of years before. Unlike many books written on the emergence of the New Testament canon that ask "when?" or "how?" Kruger focuses this work on the "why?"—exposing weaknesses in the five major tenets of the extrinsic model as he goes. While The Question of Canon scrutinizes today’s popular scholastic view, it also offers an alternative concept to lay a better empirical foundation for biblical canon studies.

Fabricating Jesus
Product Description
Modern historical study of the Gospels seems to give us a new portrait of Jesus every spring--just in time for Easter. The more unusual the portrait, the more it departs from the traditional view of Jesus, the more attention it gets in the popular media. Why are scholars so prone to fabricate a new Jesus? Why is the public so eager to accept such claims without question? What methods and assumptions predispose scholars to distort the record? Is there a more sober approach to finding the real Jesus? Commenting on such recent releases as Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus, James Tabor's The Jesus Dynasty, Michael Baigent's The Jesus Papers and the Gospel of Judas, for which he served as an advisory board member to the National Geographic Society, Craig Evans offers a sane approach to examining the sources for understanding the historical Jesus.

The Historical Reliability of the Gospels
Product Description
For over twenty years, Craig Blomberg's The Historical Reliability of the Gospels has provided a useful antidote to many of the toxic effects of skeptical criticism of the Gospels. Offering a calm, balanced overview of the history of Gospel criticism, especially that of the late twentieth century, Blomberg introduces readers to the methods employed by New Testament scholars and shows both the values and limits of those methods. He then delves more deeply into the question of miracles, Synoptic discrepancies and the differences between the Synoptics and John. After an assessment of noncanonical Jesus tradition, he addresses issues of historical method directly. This new edition has been thoroughly updated in light of new developments with numerous additions to the footnotes and two added appendixes. Readers will find that over the past twenty years, the case for the historical trustworthiness of the Gospels has grown vastly stronger.

You can find these and other associated titles in this genre here.

"The Early Text of the New Testament" edited by Michael Kruger - A Book Discussion

This work is a bit pricey, ok, it is pricey, but it may be worth the investment. A great discussion with the editor can be found here at Reformed Forum. The Early Text of the New Testament delves deeply into many questions of the New Testament texts and is not for the faint of heart. A serious academic work it is and has been penned in scholarly form. But if you're a pastor, seminary student or the serious lay person, this may be right up your alley.

The Early Text of the New Testament aims to examine and assess from our earliest extant sources the most primitive state of the New Testament text now known. What sort of changes did scribes make to the text? What is the quality of the text now at our disposal? What can we learn about the nature of textual transmission in the earliest centuries? In addition to exploring the textual and scribal culture of early Christianity, this volume explores the textual evidence for all the sections of the New Testament. It also examines the evidence from the earliest translations of New Testament writings and the citations or allusions to New Testament texts in other early Christian writers. 

 More from the editor on this fascinating subject can be found at his blog, Canon Fodder.