Christianity stands or falls upon historical facts. If historians were to discover that Siddharta Gautama had never existed, Buddhists could carry on with their lives. If scholars concluded the same thing about Confucius (Kong Qiu), Confucianism would not miss a step. But Christianity stakes everything upon the historical person and work of Jesus Christ. As Paul reminded the Corinthians, “if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished” (1 Cor. 15:17–18). If there is no resurrection, there is no Christianity.
Few scholars today question that Jesus of Nazareth was a historical person.[1] Multiple, ancient, non-Christian sources outside the New Testament testify to the existence of Jesus.[2] Nevertheless, the truth of Christianity requires more than that Jesus of Nazareth existed in history. It demands that we have written records about Jesus that are historical and trustworthy.
1. Even the skeptical Rudolf Bultmann could declare, “Of course the doubt as to whether Jesus really existed is unfounded and not worth refutation. No sane person can doubt that Jesus stands as founder behind the historical movement whose first distinct stage is represented by the oldest Palestinian community,” Jesus and the Word, trans. Louise Pettibone Smith and Erminie Huntress Lantero (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), 13.
2. For example, the first-century Jewish historian, Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, 18.63–64; and the second-century Roman historians, Tacitus (Annals, 15.44) and Suetonius (Claudius, 25.4). For a fuller discussion of the evidence for Jesus outside the New Testament (and the complexities of its interpretation), see R. E. van Voorst, Jesus Outside the New Testament: An Introduction to the Ancient Evidence (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000).
The apostle Peter recognized this crucial point in his second epistle. He reminds believers, “we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty” (2 Pet. 1:16). Peter goes on to describe the Transfiguration of Jesus, to which he was an eye- and ear-witness (see 2 Pet. 1:17–18). The apostles knew the difference between myth and history. They understood themselves to be passing on to the church accurate accounts of the life and ministry of Jesus Christ as fully historical, eyewitness records.
Since the second century, Christians have acknowledged four such accounts—the Gospels according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.[3] They weighed and rejected what have come to be known as the Apocryphal Gospels (e.g., the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Peter)—Gospels that were often attached to the names of Jesus’s apostles and that claimed to contain the teachings and activities of Jesus.[4] These documents were “all parasitic on the canonical Gospels”—not only evidencing literary dependence upon them, but further “trying to use New Testament characters or events to give credence to their perspectives.”[5] As such, they “never commanded widespread credibility” within the early church.[6]
3. On the reception of the Four Gospels by the earliest Christians into what has been termed the canon of Scripture, see F. F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2003), 117–29; Bruce Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and Significance (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 39–73; and Lee Martin McDonald, The Biblical Canon: Its Origin, Transmission, and Authority (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2006), 384–6.
4. For recent surveys and analyses of the Apocryphal Gospels, see Simon J. Gathercole, The Gospel and the Gospels: Christian Proclamation and Early Jesus Books (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2022), and Simon J. Gathercole, The Genuine Jesus and the Counterfeit Christs: New Testament and Apocryphal Gospels (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2025).
5. Craig Blomberg, Jesus and the Gospels: An Introduction and Survey, 2d ed. (Nashville: B&H, 2009), 109.
6. Blomberg, Jesus and the Gospels, 109.
The judgment of the early church that the Four Gospels were historical and trustworthy accounts of the life and ministry of Jesus Christ was therefore an informed judgment, not blind or arbitrary. Today, the church receives the Four Gospels on the same basis that the early church received these documents.
In what follows, we are going to ask three basic questions about the Four Gospels. These questions will help us to review the evidence for, and to respond to some objections against, their historicity and reliability. First, we will take up the question of whether the Gospels are history or myth. Second, we will explore what has been called “The Synoptic Problem”—the fact that the first three Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) are similar to and different from one another in striking ways. Do these patterns of similarity and difference call into question their respective historical integrity as accounts of the life and ministry of Jesus Christ? Third, we will reflect on the Gospel according to John—the Gospel that stands apart in so many ways from Matthew, Mark, and Luke (the so-called “Synoptic Gospels”). Do John’s differences from the other three Gospels call into question its historicity? In each instance, we will see that the Gospels withstand the closest scrutiny and prove themselves to be the fully historical accounts that they are. They are, to borrow a phrase from the apostle Paul, “worthy of all acceptation” (1 Tim. 1:15, AV).
Are the Gospels History or Myth?
In the last two centuries, skeptical scholars have argued that the Four Gospels should not be read as conventionally historical accounts. Some have opted to understand the Gospels as “myth.”[7] By “myth,” many scholars do not mean fanciful stories about the supernatural told to amuse or instruct people. They have more often had in mind truths that the church came to believe about Jesus—truths that were set in the garb of historical narrative. The Gospels, therefore, are said to be early windows into what followers of Jesus confessed about Jesus. However, according to these scholars, they should not be understood to be accounts that accurately and verifiably relate the teachings, works, and movements of the first-century man, Jesus.[8] That, it is said, is to misunderstand the nature of the Gospels and the purpose for which they were written.
7. An early and influential voice in this respect is that of David F. Strauss, trans. George Eliot, ed. Peter C. Hodgson, The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined (1835; repr. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972).
8. One of the most influential critical New Testament scholars of the last century, Rudolf Bultmann, presses this understanding of the Gospels to its skeptical limits. He famously declared that “I do indeed think that we can now know almost nothing concerning the life and personality of Jesus,” Jesus and the Word, 8. In other words, according to Bultmann, the historical Jesus is inaccessible to modern people.
In reply, we should first register the unfortunate dichotomy that some scholars draw between history and meaning. The Gospels, as scholars in the last century have especially recognized, are profoundly theological documents—they make pointed and profound claims about Jesus Christ, not least in relation to the Scriptures of the Old Testament. This dimension of the Gospels is neither accidental nor ancillary to them; rather, it is reflective of the intention and plan of each of the Gospel authors (see, for instance, John 20:30–31). That the Gospels are theological in no way sets limits upon or compromises their historicity and reliability. On the contrary, each Gospel is fully historical and fully theological (but in no way mythical). The Gospels present accounts that faithfully correspond to the events that they narrate, and they do so precisely in order to call our attention to the theological significance of those events.[9]
9. That historical events carry theological meaning is not a construct of the biblical author’s imagination. It is, rather, ordered by the eternal, sovereign, and all-wise purpose of God. The meaning of the events of the life and ministry of Jesus Christ has been established by God in those events according to his own purpose.
Two considerations help us to see that the Gospels intend themselves to be read as works of history. The first is that each Gospel presents itself as a historical narrative. They relate the life of Jesus chronologically—the antecedents to his conception and birth; his birth and infancy; his youth; his public ministry; the antecedents to his death; his death, burial, and resurrection from the dead. They call readers’ attention to the passage of time—Jesus was circumcised when he was eight days old (Luke 2:21), visited the Temple at age twelve (Luke 2:41–52), and commenced his ministry at around age thirty (Luke 3:23). Matthew, Mark, and Luke document a Galilean ministry that preceded a final journey to Jerusalem (Matt. 19:1; Mark 10:1; Luke 9:51). John makes a point of highlighting Jesus’s activities in Jerusalem at various annual Jewish feasts. Each Gospel tells us that Jesus died at Passover, even pinpointing the hours within which Jesus suffered on the cross (Mark 15:33). Each Gospel furthermore tells us that Jesus was raised from the dead on the first day of the week.
The Four Gospels also present the events of Jesus’s life in their broader historical context. Both Matthew and Luke trace Jesus’s ancestry to Abraham and Adam, respectively (Matt. 1:1–17; Luke 3:23–38). Luke links Jesus’s birth to a census ordered by Caesar Augustus and conducted under Quirinius, governor of Syria (Luke 2:1), and the commencement of Jesus’ ministry to the reigns of Tiberius Caesar, Herod, Philip, Lysanias, as well as the Jewish High Priests, Annas and Caiaphas (Luke 3:1–2). Each Gospel tells us that Jesus was tried and condemned by the Roman procurator, Pontius Pilate. Situating Jesus within Jewish and Roman history as they do, the Gospels intend for us to understand what they record about Jesus to be equally historical events. There can be little doubt that ancient readers of the Four Gospels would have understood these books precisely along those lines.[10]
10. We set to the side whether the Gospels should be categorized in the genre of the ancient bios (Plutarch, Suetonius) or of ancient history (Polybius, Tacitus). In either case, ancient readers would have understood the Four Gospels to be documenting events that had transpired in human history and to be representing them in that light.
But the Gospels do more than present the life and ministry of Jesus historically and within their immediate historical context. A second consideration to help us grasp the historicity of the Gospels is that each of them comes to us as an eyewitness account of the events that they record.[11] Matthew’s Gospel and John’s Gospel are themselves eyewitness accounts, authored by two of Jesus’s disciples who traveled with Jesus and observed his teachings, miracles, and interactions with other people.[12] The apostle Peter has long been identified as the “main eyewitness source” of Mark’s Gospel.[13] And Luke tells us that he explicitly consulted eyewitnesses to Jesus’s life and ministry in the composition of his own Gospel (Luke 1:1–4). Each Gospel, then, presents itself not only as a historical account, but as a historical account based upon credible eyewitness testimony.
11. On the Gospels as eyewitness accounts, see the magisterial work of Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006).
12. On Matthean authorship of Matthew, see David L. Turner, Matthew, BECNT (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008), 11–13. On Johannine authorship of John, see D. A. Carson, John, PNTC (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990), 68–81.
13. On which, see Bauckham, The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony, 124–7, 155–81.
What About the Synoptic Problem?
But it is just at this point that a second question arises. Are the striking patterns of similarity (and dissimilarity) among Matthew, Mark, and Luke evidence that these Gospels are not independent eyewitness testimonies to the events that they relate? Since antiquity, readers of the Synoptic Gospels have observed significant overlaps of content and sequence and have asked whether there might be some relationship of dependence among them.
One explanation is that the authors of the Synoptic Gospels employed one another (as written sources) and other (now lost) sources in the composition of their own Gospels. A common theory is that Matthew and Luke used both Mark and a hypothetical source (“Q”) in order to draft their own respective Gospels. There are, of course, any number of permutations on this theory of origins, and other scholars have proposed reconstructions that prioritize Matthew in the composition of the Synoptic Gospels.[14]
14. For surveys of leading source-critical theories, see E. P. Sanders and Margaret Davies, Studying the Synoptic Gospels (London: SCM / Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1989), and Robert H. Stein, The Synoptic Problem: An Introduction (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1987).
Other scholars have argued that the transmission that ultimately produced the Gospels was not literary but oral. An influential set of proposals in the modern period stipulates that the material ultimately included in the Gospels had circulated communally in what have been called “forms.” Examples of forms include miracle accounts, parables, and short pithy sayings of Jesus (apophthegms). The Gospel materials were transmitted according to certain laws that were said to govern each form.
Some scholars who understand the materials that make up the Gospels to have been transmitted orally argue that the Gospels were authored by redactors who arranged, edited, and transformed the materials available to them. Particular interpretative commitments governed these redactors’ choices and account for the final, distinctive shape of each Synoptic Gospel.
What are we to make of each of these proposals? Some process of oral transmission is the likeliest way to account for the way in which the words and deeds of Jesus were preserved, transmitted, and ultimately committed to writing. But such transmission would hardly have been unmonitored or uncontrolled. As Bauckham has noted, the “transmission process of the Jesus traditions [was] a formal controlled tradition in which the eyewitnesses played an important part.”[15] That these eyewitnesses substantially overlapped with disciples of Jesus who would serve as apostles in the church confirms the point. Exercising the unique and foundational authority that Christ had entrusted to them, the apostles wielded that authority in the early church to ensure the integrity of the transmission of eyewitness testimony to Jesus.[16] Thus, however we are to explain the particular similarities and differences that obtain among the Synoptic Gospels, apostolically-governed oral transmission of eyewitness testimony to the words and deeds of Jesus is the best available historically contextual explanation to account for the development of those Gospels.
15. Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 264. Compare the proposal of Birger Gerhardsson, The Reliability of the Gospel Tradition (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2001). Gerhardsson contends that the disciples transmitted Jesus’s teachings carefully and faithfully, in the manner that the disciples of an ancient rabbi would have transmitted his teachings.
16. Consider the way in which Jesus, in the Upper Room, promised the Spirit to “teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you” (John 14:26). Among other things, Jesus’s words identify the apostles as the body of men who will be responsible for preserving and transmitting Jesus’s teaching in his earthly ministry.
What About John’s Gospel?
These reflections on the origin and development of the Synoptic Gospels raise, in turn, a final question. How are we to account for John’s Gospel? The Fourth Gospel is in many respects an outlier among the Four Gospels. Its outline, style, form, and contents differ significantly from those of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Matthew, Mark, and Luke have far more in common with one another than John does to any one of them. John appears to be, as one influential academic treatment of the Gospel characterized it, “the maverick Gospel.”[17]
To conclude, however, that John’s differences from the other Synoptic Gospels signify disinterest in presenting a historical account of the life and ministry of Jesus would be a profound mistake. John himself, after all, emphasizes his own role as eyewitness to the events that he relates in the Gospel (John 21:24–25; compare John 19:35).[18] For all of its singularity and theological richness, John’s Gospel remains an eyewitness account that follows the same narrative trajectory as its counterparts.
17. Robert Kysar, John: The Maverick Gospel, 3rd ed. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007).
18. See further the discussion at Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 358–83. Compare Bauckham, The Testimony of the Beloved Disciple: Narrative, History, and Theology in the Gospel of John (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2007), 93–112.
Why, then, is John so different from the other three Gospels? One compelling explanation was proposed in the early centuries of the church’s history. Clement of Alexandria, active in the late second and early third centuries, and the historian Eusebius of Caesarea, writing in the fourth century, observed that John’s Gospel was supplemental to Matthew, Mark, and Luke.[19] John is, in other words, not replicating what is in the Synoptic Gospels, but presenting what is not in them. He assumes his reader is already familiar with the Synoptic Gospels.
19. Clement is cited by Eusebius at Hist. eccl. 6.14.7. For Eusebius himself, see Hist. eccl., 3.24.7f.
This understanding of John makes good sense of the data. It explains why so much of John is unattested in the Synoptic Gospels (and vice versa). It explains why John can make a parenthetical comment about John the Baptist’s arrest at John 3:24—the Synoptic Gospels have already furnished that account at great length, and John relies on his readers’ familiarity with those accounts. Similarly, a passing reference to “the Twelve” (John 6:67) references Jesus’s calling of the Twelve early in his Galilean ministry—nowhere documented in John but mentioned by each of the Synoptic Gospels. Conversely, the Synoptics’ description of a suborned witness accusing Jesus at trial of “destroy[ing] this temple that is made with hands, and in three days I will build another, not made with hands” (Mark 14:58) is given background only in John’s account of Jesus’s Temple action (John 2:13–22).
Seen in this light, John provides a fourth eyewitness account of the life and ministry of Jesus Christ. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John provide distinct witnesses to Jesus Christ. But they, no less, provide four, “interlocking,” historical accounts of Jesus, the Son of God.[20]
20. The term is that of Blomberg, Jesus and the Gospels, 179.
Conclusions
The historicity of the Four Gospels is a question of enduring importance to the church. We cannot truly appreciate what the Gospels say until we understand what the Gospels are. If the Gospels are anything less than the fully trustworthy, eyewitness historical accounts that they purport to be, then our faith rests on a foundation of sand. Thankfully, the Gospels that we possess are uncompromisingly historical documents and do not shrink from being subjected to the most careful analysis and examination. While we have hardly touched upon all the questions about and objections to the Gospels’ historicity, our study nevertheless confirms the conclusion that the Gospels are what they purport to be—reliable, eyewitness testimonies to Jesus Christ.
After two millennia of scrutiny from friend and foe alike, the Gospels stand as strong as they did the moment that they were authored. Knowing, then, that they are true, the challenge for us now is to take up Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and meet the Jesus whom they present to us on their pages. As B. B. Warfield observed over a century ago, “we must begin by knowing each [Gospel] separately in its individuality and point of view, that we may end by knowing the Jesus of all [Gospels] alike to be the one divine Savior of the world.”[21] For to know Jesus, as the Gospels present him to us, and, in this way, to know the Father through the Son, is nothing less than eternal life (John 17:3; cf. John 14:6, Matt 11:27).
