Mike Heap's Blog

5. The Authenticity of the Gospels

Written on Nov 13, 2025

As I said in my previous post, I have been revisiting the Christian Bible, which I studied in my schooldays. I am especially interested in the accounts of the life of Jesus. When I read them, I approach them as one would any work of history, anticipating that they provide an accurate description of real events. There are other ways that people approach these writings, and I shall return to this theme in a later post.

I am aware that there have been centuries of unresolved disagreement about the historical authenticity of these texts. However, scholars are in the main satisfied that there is good evidence from non-biblical sources that at the material time, there lived a man called Jesus, a charismatic spiritual leader whose devoted followers believed, before and after his death, that he was the Messiah as prophesied by Jewish scriptures and who was crucified on the orders of the Romans. But for Christians, the accepted accounts (i.e. non-apocryphal) of what Jesus said and did are almost exclusively confined to the four Gospels of the New Testament. Are these accounts authentic?

A scholarly assessment of the accuracy of any work of history requires a rational and critical mindset, judging the quality and extent of the evidence provided by the writer, the reliability of their sources of evidence, and the reasoning behind their conclusions based upon that evidence. I am no biblical scholar, but this is how I try to approach the historical books of the Bible. These books were written in the decades after Jesus's death, and it is unclear what sources of evidence the writers relied on (scholars speak of the 'oral tradition')

In sum, nothing persuades me that the accounts of the life of Jesus in the New Testament are necessarily reliable and accurate. They may be, but my impression is that this question can never be resolved (unless some miraculous event occurs, such as 'the second coming').

Now, I am not so concerned with whether what Jesus is reported as saying and his teachings are indeed those of this one person. The Gospels are clear that they are and there is nothing unreasonable about accepting that that is indeed the case. And in any event, I can personally gain much by reading and interpreting Jesus's reported sayings, parables and sermons without any need to question their real source.

So where is the problem? The problem is the fundamental claim that Jesus was (and believers would say 'is') the Mesiah promised by God to the people of Israel, or more generally 'the son of God'. And as proof of this, in the Gospels we two claims are repeatedly made. The first is that Jesus performed many miracles, accomplishments well beyond the capabilities of any person (and which Jesus himself, as well as his followers, interprets to others as signs of his divine nature). The second is the claim that many details of his life fulfil the messianic prophesies documented in the Hebrew scriptures hundreds of years previously (which, if true, would again be miraculous in nature).

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