I won’t be publishing posts on our Lent Blobble Study on the weekends, but I will try to post some other articles for you to read which will enhance your understanding of the Bible. Here’s a post on how we determine that the gospels are historically reliable documents.

It is easy to exchange convinced assertions: “The gospels are 100% God’s holy Word and every bit is historically accurate!” or “The gospels are fairy tales!” However there is a discipline called “Biblical scholarship” in which scholars do some very interesting work determining just which parts of the gospels they think are reliable and which they think are not. Their conclusions are, of course, debated. That’s what scholars do. Their work is fascinating, and continuing the discussion here of the historicity of the gospels it is worth taking some time to look at just a smidgen of their work and their methodology.

Bible scholars are most interested in trying to determine whether the original gospels record eyewitness accounts, and whether those original versions have been transmitted accurately. To do this scholars consider several factors. 1) authorship and date of composition, 2) intention and genre, 3) gospel sources and oral tradition, 4) textual criticism, 5) historical authenticity of specific sayings and narrative events.

One of the difficult aspects for modern people to understand is just what kind of document the gospels are.

Read the whole post here.