Book Review: Can We Trust the Gospels?

by Peter J. Williams

The four Gospels found in the New Testament tell the life story of the central figure of Christianity—Jesus of Nazareth. If the history recorded in Gospels isn’t reliable history, then it’s game over for Christians, because outside of the Gospel accounts we know only the barest facts about Jesus’s life.So are the Gospel’s trustworthy? Is the information they contain actual history? Or are they fiction? Are they accurate reports of Jesus’s life or collections of fanciful stories made up by Jesus’s followers after he died?

These are some of the questions Peter J. Williams answers in his little book, Can We Trust the Gospels? He “seeks to present a case for the reliability of the Gospels to those who are thinking about the subject for the first time.” As we might expect, then, this book is short and easy to understand, but still, there is an incredible amount of information and argumentation supporting the basic trustworthiness of the New Testament gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And the information and arguments Williams chooses to include give the careful reader a blueprint for how to approach other specific objections to the reliability of the gospel accounts of Jesus.

The strongest chapter is the one that looks at the Gospel authors’ familiarity with the details of life in Palestine during the time of Jesus. The Gospel writers, Williams shows, “knew their stuff.” The place names are right, both the well-known and not-so-well-known. Altogether, twenty-six towns are mentioned—Jerusalem, of course, but also many small villages. The bodies of water and other geographical features mentioned in the Gospels are described exactly as we would expect.

And when the names used for the characters in the Gospels are compared to those we now know were used most frequently in first century Palestine, we find that they are right, too. What’s more, the cultural and religious details are accurate.

How did the writers of the Gospels know all these details of life in Palestine during Jesus’s lifetime? They couldn’t google them. There weren’t reference books for an author who lived far away or later in time to use to find out these sorts of things. No, the authors of the Gospels had to know these things from their own experience living in Palestine during the time of Jesus, or by hearing the details from someone who lived there.[1]This doesn’t, as Williams writes, “on its own demonstrate that all of what they wrote is true.” But it does show that they were not “too distant from events to be trusted.”

The weakest chapter, in my opinion, is the one dealing with contradictions in the gospels. Williams chose to focus on the kind of supposed contradictions that I would suggest most people find least troubling—the paradoxical language John uses in his Gospel (or in his other New Testament writings). For instance, in John 8, John records Jesus as saying,

You judge according to the flesh; I judge no one. Yet even if I do judge, my judgment is true, for it is not I alone who judge, but I and the Father who sent me.

I have much to say about you and much to judge, but he who sent me is true, and I declare to the world what I have heard from him.” (John 8:15-16, 26 ESV)

So which is it? Does Jesus judge or not? Any fair reader—one who assumes Jesus (or John) isn’t crazy—ought to be able to see that Jesus speaks this way as a teaching tool to make his hearers think: In what way doesn’t Jesus judge anyone? In what way does he judge them? Jesus wants those listening to him to puzzle over his words and come to a better understanding of who he is and what he came to accomplish.

These aren’t the kinds of seeming contradictions I hear mentioned as objections to the truthfulness of the Gospels. Rather, I think most people are more troubled by apparent discrepancies in the differing Gospel narratives of a singular event, like when, for instance, Luke says there were two angels at the tomb and Mark says there was one (Luke 24:4 and Mark 16:5).

But then Williams is arguing for the basic historical reliability of the Gospels, and not necessarily their inerrancy. A few minor conflicts in eyewitness accounts don’t affect the general historical trustworthiness of the gospels much as long as the basic information about Jesus’s life they contain is similar. But if one of the Gospels has Jesus spouting nonsense, then there’s a real problem with that Gospel’s trustworthiness—or with Jesus’s. Perhaps this is the reason for William’s choice of material in this chapter.

One of the most important points Williams makes is that main reason people don’t accept the Gospels as trustworthy historical records is that there are miracles in the Gospel accounts. This is a problem that can’t be overcome by simply accumulating more evidence.

If you are overwhelmingly convinced of materialist atheism, then it is hard to imagine what amounts of evidence would persuade you to believe in a random and meaningless miracle, a mere anomaly to your worldview.

Every argument in this book can be explained away if one is determined to do so, although it would require many different and complicated arguments. “A far easier position,” Williams writes,

is to make a single supposition, that all of history hangs on Jesus. It is a single and simple supposition, but I am not claiming that it is a small one. It does have huge explanatory power as it accounts for the signs in the Gospels that would normally be taken as signs of reliability, for the genius of Jesus’s character and teaching, for the evidence for the resurrection, and for the correspondence of Jesus’s life with the Old Testament.

This book would be good to give an unbeliever who doubts the credibility of the gospels. It will probably be most useful, however, to a believer who wants to know how to respond to specific questions from a skeptic. It made me cherish the Gospels more as the amazing documents they are. They bear the marks of God-breathed (and thus absolutely true) historical accounts.

[1]The apocryphal Gospels, which were written much later than the biblical Gospels, don’t contain many of these sorts of details, and when they do, they tend to get them wrong.