How do we know the New Testament is reliable?

Answer 1

We can begin to determine how reliable the New Testament is by looking at the texts. In doing so, we find there are many historical errors and internal inconsistencies in the New Testament. There is clear evidence that the gospels and Acts of the Apostles were written decades after the events they describe, by anonymous authors who were not witnesses to those events and who were unlikely to have known any witnesses to the events.

Matthew, Mark and Luke are called the "synoptic Gospels" because they are much more similar to each other in their description of events than to the Gospel According to St John. This suggests that John's Gospel is less reliable than the others or, in the words of the early Church Father Origen (Commentary on John), "Although he does not always tell the truth literally, he always tells it spiritually." We could at least assume that the three synoptic gospels, being so similar, confirm each other - at least until we realise that the authors of Matthew and Lukeactually used Mark as their source for everything they told about the mission of Jesus.

Scholars have long remarked that Acts seems to contradict the Epistles of Paul in many fundamental areas. And, according to Acts: Jews from all the nations of the world, including proselytes, were confounded and amazed to hear the 12 disciples speaking in their own language; three thousand were converted that day. If true, a single miracle that gave the apostles competence in foreign languages, probably achieved more converts in a single day than Jesus was able to do in his entire ministry - yet this was not mentioned by Paul nor by the author of Hebrews.

Some of the epistles attributed to St Paul are clearly pseudonymous works written long after the time of St Paul. For example, it is reported that about ninety percent of scholars believe that 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus were written after 90 CE by an unknown author.

In summary, the New Testament is not historically reliable, nor is it an accurate record of the life and teachings of Jesus or his apostles. Perhaps the New Testament is more reliable as a foundation for religious belief, but there is no objective evidence of this and it remains a matter of faith.