Evan Minton's Blog, page 7

The Case For The Reliability Of The Gospels – Part 8: Can We Really Believe In Miracles?

This is part 8 in a 9-part series on the case for the historical reliability of the gospels, and as an extension, of the historic Christian truth claims to which the gospels attest. [1]Although I suppose it’s a 10-part blog post series if you include the introduction post. We’ve seen a ton of evidence for the trustworthiness of the gospels. In part 1, we looked at the traditional history of the New Testament manuscripts and saw that textual critics like Dan Wallace can reconstruct the original t...

The Case For The Reliability Of The Gospels – Part 7: What About Contradictions?

So far in this series, I have been making a positive case for the historical trustworthiness of the gospels. However, before we continue, it is important to look at one major issue that always comes up in any conversation or debate regarding the historicity of Jesus’ comings and goings. That is the issue of contradictions. Skeptics allege that the four gospels are hopelessly contradictory. If the gospels really are contradictory in a plethora of places, then how can we consider them to be histor...

The Case For The Reliability Of The Gospels – Part 6: Even More Internal Evidence

We’ve now come to the kind of internal evidence that are my personal favorites to read about and talk about. This evidence is actually pretty old, being defended by pre-20th century apologists like William Paley and J.J Blunt. None of these arguments have been truly refuted, but rather, they have fallen out of fashion. But the written and video works of Dr. Lydia McGrew and Erik Manning of Testify are causing these old internal evidences for the gospels to make a comeback. This blog post, though...

The Case For The Reliability Of The Gospels – Part 5: Some Internal Evidence

At this point, we’ve seen a mounting cumulative case for the reliability of the gospels. The copies we have today are identical to the ones originally written down with 99.99% accuracy, the gospels were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John who were eyewitnesses and close associates of eyewitnesses, the gospels were written down very soon after the events they describe, and extra-biblical authors and archeological evidence confirms them at multiple points.

As impressive as the external ev...

The Case For The Reliability Of The Gospels – Part 4: The External Evidence

So far in this series, we’ve looked at a variety of subjects; the textual transmission of the gospels, authorship, and early dating. We saw that the evidence from textual criticism shows that we can have certainty that The New Testament documents we read today were what the original documents said to a certainty of 99.99% accuracy and that 00.01% uncertainty that remains contains certain words or phrases that really don’t affect any major Christian doctrine. This is important to the issue of gos...

The Case For The Reliability Of The Gospels – Part 3: The Dating Of The Gospels

This is part 3 in a multi-part blog post series making the case for the historical reliability of the gospels (unless, of course, you count the Introduction as the first part, then that would make this part 4, but I digress). The purpose of this blog post series is to show the reader that the gospels that we find in The New Testament – Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John – are historically trustworthy sources. So, if we want to know what the historical Jesus said, and did, we should have no qualms abo...

The Case For The Reliability Of The Gospels – Part 2: The Case For Traditional Authorship

According to the prolific New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman, “Some books, such as the Gospels… had been written anonymously, only later to be ascribed to certain authors who probably did not write them (apostles and friends of the apostles).” [1]Bart Ehrman, Jesus Interrupted (2011), pp. 101-102 Technically, Ehrman is right that the gospels are “anonymous”, but only in the sense that the authors didn’t identify themselves in the main body of text. Nowhere in the main body of text do the authors...

The Case For The Reliability Of The Gospels – Part 1: The Reliability Of The Manuscript Transmission

This is part 1 in a series of articles defending the historical reliability of the Gospels (unless you count the Introduction as part 1, of course). Before we even examine whether we can trust what the gospels tell us about the life, teachings, miracles, and especially, the death and resurrection of Jesus, we need to know what what they’re telling us is what the original authors originally wrote down. The way that The New Testament came to us was through a transmission process. First, had the or...

The Case For The Reliability Of The Gospels – Introduction

In his book “God and The Dock”, the famous British thinker C.S Lewis once wrote “As a literary historian, I am perfectly convinced that whatever else the gospels are, they are not legends. I have read a great deal of legend, and I am quite clear that they are not the same sort of thing.” [1]C.S Lewis, “God In The Dock”, HarperOne, 2014 edition Yet many in our culture today regard the gospel stories of Jesus as just that; legends, mythologies, some would even go so far as to call the stories of J...

The Women At Jesus’ Empty Tomb Revisited

Image by Lumo Project.

The Argument From The Criterion Of Embarrassment

A common argument for the historicity of the empty tomb of Jesus is that all four gospels feature women as witnesses to the empty tomb, and women were (A) considered second class citizens in both first century Jewish and pagan circles, and (B) they were considered unreliable witnesses. We know this, for example, from Talmud Sotah 19a which says “Sooner let the words of the law be burnt than delivered to women“! The Ta...