The Errant New Testament
by Paul Archer
To clarify the question of, "Are the gospels reliable historical documents?" one has to determine what "reliable" and "historical" mean. Namely, did everything in the Gospels happen as it was written? For example, did all the tombs of Jerusalem open and did the dead walk around as recorded in Matthew? Did Jesus create food out of thin air and walk on water? Did those events happen or not? Miracles in the Gospels are routine, but scant evidence supports them. Arguing for the historical reliability of the Gospels' by corroborating a topographical fact, like the “five-sided pool of Bethsaida” described in them, is a piecemeal approach pretending to be a feast. Just because the Gospels contain historical places, events, and people, doesn't mean that the more fantastic claims are true. There is sufficient reason to question The New Testament's historical reliability because there's no way to verify its' authorship, the effects of its' incipient oral culture, and the persisting differences among ancient manuscripts.
The Synoptic Gospels were anonymous and make no claim that they were eye-witness accounts. The assignations, “According to Mark" and such, were added about 100 years after the earliest records. They were not signed by the original authors. Matthew and Mark's authorship is first identified by Irenaeus, writing 180 years later. One can debate that Irenaeus had a better perspective and more authority in his claim, but the fact remains that the books are anonymous. There are good reasons to think that the apostles did not write the Synoptic Gospels. Look at how similar the text reads from Mathew to Mark to Luke. They all share the same voice with no distinction in style or tone. They say nothing of themselves or their qualifications. If they were educated enough to produce the works, they should have the scholarly imperative to identify themselves. Separated from the life of Jesus by 35 to 65 years and written in highly literate Greek, they bear no the mark of translation. Although Greek was a common tongue, it's doubtful all the apostles were educated enough to produce the quality of work in such a uniform way. “Most of the other books of the New Testament identify their authors (Paul, Peter, James, Jude, etc.). And most of the later Gospels have names attached to them (The Gospel of Peter; the Gospel of Thomas; the Gospel of Philip; the Gospel of Nicodemus; etc.). Those authors were not afraid of having their person get in the way of the message. So why were the Gospel writers?” Interpretations aside, the authorship of Mathew, Mark, and Luke is unverifiable. It's plausible that The Synoptic Gospels result from, “Stories that had been in circulation year after year by word of mouth, not by Jesus' disciples, but by people who had been converted to believe in Jesus and who were then trying to convert others." Even if The Synoptic Gospels did contain eye-witness accounts, that would not guarantee that they were accurate. The Gospel of Mark is translated from Aramaic into Greek and then translated again into English. There are ample opportunities to veer from an original meaning and there is no way to know if the original meaning was ever accurate.
If you take the fact alone that stories were circulated by word of mouth, for decades before being recorded, then there is a lot of room for error. "The people passing on the story of Jesus were just people who happened to be in the Mediterranean, who had memories that were no better or worse than ours. Look at what we know about oral cultures... In oral societies, they don't have the concern to preserve things verbatim like we have in written cultures... The very idea to preserve a story without changing it comes from a written culture, not an oral one. The eye-witness research shows what happens, we forget things, we distort things... We have tons of stories about Jesus that were being told, but that obviously didn't happen. Where did they come from? If it's all based on eye-witness testimony, where did they come from?" Take the story of Jesus saving the adulterer in John. This story doesn't appear in older manuscripts. It is a fabrication that found its' way into a historical document. In response to, "In the very first years it would have been oral rather than written history, but at the very beginning many of the listeners would have been people who had actually witnessed the events being reported." By sheer math it's obvious that converts of Jesus would quickly outnumber eye-witnesses. Even a popular miracle like the conjuring of 5,000 fish reached countless more ears than mouths. The popularity of stories do not amount to evidence. To suppose that, "since the New Testament is better documented than any other book from the ancient world, therefore we can trust it,"is a leap in logic. "Even if we somehow knew Plato's exact wording of The Republic, it does not mean that we can trust the work any more than we already do. It just means that we know what Plato wrote. Simply because The New Testament is better attested does not mean it is true or authentic." Yes, the historical Jesus probably existed, but the mythological Christ is probably an invention. While there are facts embedded in the Gospels, those facts are not extraordinary evidence for larger claims. The proselytism of Christianity depends on incredible miracles, not that a Jewish High Priest and a Roman Prefect were real people, as has been evidenced by archaeology. If you compound the fact that we don't have the original words of Gospel writers, but copies of copies, their authenticity becomes more problematic. Even if we started with pure, unadulterated eye-witness accounts, the errancy among ancient manuscripts inspires more doubt than faith.
Regarding the point that, "There was no point at which someone could have gotten away with changing what was being reported." The Gospels are sensationalized oral stories reported to distant locations, decades later, and there is no guarantee they began as authentic accounts. Manuscripts were copied by hand and underwent changes big and small. In 2 Luke , Mary says to Jesus, "Your Father and I have been upset looking all over for you?" Scribes thought this was peculiar and changed the text to, "Joseph and I," or, "We have been looking all over for you," to avoiding naming Joseph as a father. The final issue with no one, "changing what was being reported," goes back to translation, guesswork, and interpretation. Changes could have been made early on that we are unaware of and changes certainly were made later on that there are lists of in great detail. The argument from tradition that, "Masses have been happening daily or weekly from that time 2000 years ago to now," does not qualify the content of the Gospels. For example, in response to the Christian apologist, Arnold Lunn, who said, "But once we admit the necessity for Gospels in the primitive Church, we have gone a long way to prove that the Gospels which we now possess are the Gospels which were in use in the early years of the Church, for it is impossible to introduce a plausible explanation for any substantial alteration of or addition to these Gospels. Nobody has explained how a forger could have obtained credence for a forgery." In contrast, Kurt Rudolph, another Christian apologist, notes, "the “Gnostic sects” enjoyed “complete immunity” from the Roman persecution of Christians….No doubt more manuscripts will continue to turn up – even some that are not forgeries... " One states that a forgery is inconceivable and the other readily concedes the possibility.
The Gnostic gospels of early “Christians” occur, “After the first century of Christianity, [when] two primary divisions developed - the orthodox and the Gnostics. The orthodox Christians held to books we now have in the Bible... The Gnostic Christians, if they can truly be described as Christians, held a distinctly different view of the Bible, of Jesus Christ, of salvation, and of virtually every other major Christian doctrine... they did not have any writings by the Apostles to give legitimacy to their beliefs." This seems to disprove Lunn's claim of "the necessity for Gospels in the primitive church." Yes, these were heresies, but they fueled a religion early on despite their inerrancy. People organized into religious cohorts regardless of specific teachings. A good example is that, "It is not clear how much Paul used scripture (i.e., the writings of the Jewish Bible) in trying to persuade his potential converts of the truth of his message; but in one of his key summaries of his preaching he indicates that what he preached was that "Christ died, in accordance with the scriptures . . . and that he was raised, in accordance with the scriptures" (1 Cor. 15:3-4). Evidently Paul correlated the events of Christ's death and resurrection with his interpretation of key passages of the Jewish Bible, which he, as a highly educated Jew, obviously could read for himself, and which he interpreted for his hearers in an often successful attempt to convert them."
The contentious beginning of Christianity undermines church traditions as evidence to authenticate The Gospels. "In the second and third centuries there were, of course, Christians who believed that there was only one God, the Creator of all there is. Other people who called themselves Christian, however, insisted that there were two different gods — one of the Old Testament (a God of wrath) and one of the New Testament (a God of love and mercy)... there were lots of other books as well, also claiming to be by Jesus's own apostles — other gospels, acts, epistles, and apocalypses having very different perspectives from those found in the books that eventually came to be called the New Testament. The New Testament itself emerged out of these conflicts over God (or the gods), as one group of believers acquired more converts than all the others and decided which books should be included in the canon of scripture. During the second and third centuries, however, there was no agreed-upon canon — and no agreed-upon theology. Instead, there was a wide range of diversity: diverse groups asserting diverse theologies based on diverse written texts, all claiming to be written by apostles of Jesus... Only one group eventually "won out" in these debates. It was this group that decided what the Christian creeds would be: the creeds would affirm that there is only one God, the Creator; that Jesus his Son is both human and divine; and that salvation came by his death and resurrection. This was also the group that decided which books would be included in the canon of scripture. By the end of the fourth century, most Christians agreed that the canon was to include the four Gospels, Acts, the letters of Paul, and a group of other letters such as 1 John and 1 Peter, along with the Apocalypse of John. And who had been copying these texts? Christians from the congregations themselves who were intimately aware of and involved in the debates over the identity of God, the status of the Jewish scriptures, the nature of Christ, and the effects of his death. The group that established itself as "orthodox" (meaning that it held what it considered to be the "right belief) then determined what future Christian generations would believe and read as scripture. " Perhaps I'm straying from The Gospels' as historically unreliable, but I'm also illustrating a battle over doctrine that spurned the need for later changes in the manuscripts.
The main point is that, The New Testament is not an unbiased description of past events. It may be historical, but it's not reliable or factual. To clarify, The Gospels' historical unreliability stems from anonymous authorship, the unreliability of oral tradition, and the succeeding generations of demonstrably spurious copies. Using textual analysis and biblical scholarship, the "evidence" supporting The New Testament is beyond insufficient. There are discrepancies, errors, contradictions, and changes in The Gospels, but apologists maintain this errata is not significant to the main message. What is, "Historically reliable,” apparently, "doesn’t mean flawless or inerrant." It may be true that, "Historians often consider two reports of the same event as historically reliable even if they seem to contradict each other in minor ways." But what about the profound evidence of tampering, adding details, and skewing stories? "It is the view of every major New Testament scholar that the earlier the manuscripts, the more differences you find. The earliest copies have the most mistakes. What would happen if we had earlier manuscripts to analyze?" To be totally clear, we don't have any original manuscripts. No argument from early Christian tradition can reconcile the differences among the manuscripts that we do have. The Synoptic Gospels make no claim that they were eye-witness accounts or that they were authored by the apostles. The stories changed from word of mouth to scribal intervention. The false assumption of eye-witness testimony and the differences in the text present huge problems for The New Testament as an authentic and historical document. If we look at the manuscripts through time, we see a cobbled together narrative that has radical inconsistencies. The New Testament is historically unreliable because we don't know who wrote it, we can't be sure of what they actually wrote, and finally, even if we could somehow know both of those things, we can't be sure that the stories have been faithfully passed on.
[All of my quotes from are exclusively from Barth Ehrman talks and his book "Misquoting Jesus", so I recognize that I'm just parroting his arguments.]