The Gospel writers recorded the truth.
How reliable are the Gospels in the Bible?
Quick-read this article:
There are many reasons that confirm the reliabilty and truth of the
Gospel accounts in the Bible.
By James I. Nienhuis
SOME skeptics claim that the Gospels were written long after the Crucifixion, and so are unreliable.
However, Rome destroyed Jerusalem in A.D. 70, and no mention of that destruction is in the Gospels (although around A.D. 30 Jesus did predict the destruction). Therefore, the Gospels must have been written before A.D. 70 (within a few decades of the Crucifixion in A.D. 32).
The spread of the Gospel message was rapid after the Crucifixion, no doubt aided by these written Gospels and letters from the Apostles. Translations into other languages were early and often, with no discrepancies of facts. This demonstrates that the Gospels were consistent and written shortly after Christ's Crucifixion.
As the written Gospels were circulated in the decades after Jesus' incarnation, it is obvious that many people who witnessed the works, words, and Crucifixion of Jesus were still alive, and none of them objected to the accuracy of the circulating Gospels.
Confirmed by secular sources
Roman historians Suetonius and Tacitus confirm the historicity of Christ and the faith that He fostered, as does the Hebrew Talmud, which confirms that Jesus performed miracles.
Roman historian Thallus recorded that the sun went dark at midday during the time of the Crucifixion in A.D. 32, as the Bible describes. Thallus said that the darkness was due to a solar eclipse, however the Passover (when Christ was crucified) always occurs during full moons (when solar eclipses cannot happen). And the Bible describes three hours of darkness, whereas solar eclipses last only minutes. Therefore, the pagan Thallus accurately recorded the midday darkening, but not the cause. (The mechanism for the sky's darkening at the Crucifixion remains a mystery.)
Skeptics say that the Apostles may have conspired to fake the resurrection of Jesus, and that they deceitfully sought believers who would gullibly embrace a resurrection charade. This notion is illogical, because the Apostles would never die for what they knew to be a lie. Eleven of the 12 Apostles suffered violent martyrdoms for their public proclamations about the resurrected Christ — why then would they send themselves to a life of persecution and eventual martyrdom for something they could easily have disavowed?
Jewish officials who wanted the death of Jesus hadn't any motivation to fake Christ's resurrection, for that would have only confirmed the claims of the One that they wanted to dispatch. The Roman officials also hadn't any motivation for essentially the same reasons. Were the Roman sentries guarding the tomb of Jesus to blame for a faked resurrection? No, the sentries faced execution if they worked with the Apostles in a charade of defiance against Roman hegemony.
Life and death of Jesus are well documented
The Jews were expecting the Messiah at that time, but most were expecting a military hero who would throw off the yoke of Rome. Daniel 9 predicted that the “Anointed One” would be cut off (killed) four hundred and eighty-three years after the command to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem (which was decreed by Cyrus of Persia around 450 B.C.). Therefore some Jews realized that Jesus truly is the Messiah.
Many Jews also realized that the circumstances of Christ's incarnation fulfilled the centuries-old prophecies about the Messiah in minute detail.
The life and physical death of Jesus Christ are historically well documented, and there are no logical reasons to think that any of the factions involved in the Crucifixion would have been motivated to fake the Resurrection. So we can safely say that Christ's Resurrection is a fact because there were hundreds of eyewitnesses of Jesus' resurrected body (and remember, the Gospels were not considered to be inaccurate by the Apostles' contemporaries in the decades after the Crucifixion).
— James I. Nienhuis is the author of “Old Earth? Why Not!” (www.GenesisVeracity.com)
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