Australian scholar John Dickson has had an article posted at The Gospel Coalition in which he deals with the reliability of the New Testament texts as historical documents.
I was recently speaking to a highly intelligent woman who asked me about the sources of our knowledge of Jesus. I briefly took her through the Graeco-Roman references (in Mara bar Serpapion, Thallos, and Tacitus) and those in Jewish writings (Josephus, in particular)—references that, for most of my colleagues in secular ancient history departments, put Jesus’ existence beyond doubt. I then started to list the Christian ones, the Gospels, Paul, and so on, at which point she stopped me and said, “But surely you can’t use those. They were all written by religious believers.” She somehow got it into her head that religious devotion disqualified Christian texts from being considered by historians as historical texts also. A long (and happy) conversation followed as I tried to clear up some common misunderstandings about the writings of the New Testament.
The so-called religious nature of Christian writings in no way diminishes their value as historical sources. Historians take the Christian agenda into account when they analyze the New Testament, just as they take the imperial bias into account when studying Tacitus or the Jewish bias when reading Josephus. But historians do not place the New Testament in a special category called “religious literature.” Indeed, in Australia’s largest public university ancient history department (Macquarie) you will find undergraduate and postgraduate courses like “The New Testament in Its Times” and “The Historical Jesus.”
Read the rest of Dickson’s post here.
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