By Clement Harrold

December 18, 2025

Skeptics will sometimes claim that the canonical Gospels are mythical accounts with little or no basis in historical fact. According to their logic, we shouldn’t trust what Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John said about the life of Jesus any more than we should trust what Homer said about the fall of Troy or what Virgil said about the founding of Rome. In this article we’ll explore the reasons why the skeptics are almost entirely wrong, as well as one way in which their theory actually highlights the beauty of Christianity.
 

The Gospels Are Historical Accounts

Something that immediately sets the Gospels apart from the ancient myths is the way that they portray Jesus as a recent historical figure. As Paul Eddy and Gregory Boyd explain in their book The Jesus Legend, the myths tended to tell stories which happened at no particular time in history. In this respect, they were akin to our modern fairy tales which begin with the words “Once upon a time,” or to the Star Wars saga with its famous opening line “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.”

Now contrast this approach with the following statements from Luke’s Gospel:

In the days of Herod, king of Judea, there was a priest named Zechariah, of the division of Abijah; and he had a wife of the daughters of Aaron, and her name was Elizabeth. (Luke 1:5)

In those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be enrolled. This was the first enrollment, when Quirinius was governor of Syria. (Luke 2:1-2)

In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip tetrarch of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene, in the high-priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John the son of Zechari′ah in the wilderness (Luke 3:1-2)

Clearly Luke’s concrete historical account is light years away from the vague, timeless myths of the ancient world, not to mention the fictional tales of George Lucas and the Brothers Grimm.

Scholars agree that all four Gospels fit largely within the genre of Greco-Roman biographies. In other words, these are accounts which set out to provide the key facts of Jesus’s life and teaching. Even if the skeptic wants to argue that these accounts are embellished or mistaken in some respects, that doesn’t change the fact that the four Gospels were written as historical biographies, not idealized folktales.

In terms of the identities of the four biographers, the most ancient traditions describe the Gospels as being the fruit of eyewitness testimony. This makes sense to anyone who has actually read the Gospels (see, e.g., John 12:3). John’s Gospel explicitly claims to be the product of an eyewitness (see 19:35), while Luke says that he is composing his “orderly account” based on what he has received from eyewitnesses (see 1:2-3). Moreover, the earliest records we possess tell us that Mark was a companion of Peter, and that Matthew was one of the twelve apostles.

As for the common skeptical claim that the four Gospels are formally anonymous and therefore unreliable, Cambridge University New Testament Simon Gathercole has conclusively shown that this claim is, ironically, a myth.

The Gospels Were Written Very Early

Reinforcing the historical credibility of the four Gospels is their proximity to the events which they describe. While the debate over when the Gospels were written is ongoing, even skeptical scholars tend to admit that all four were penned within living memory of Jesus’s public ministry. This makes it much harder to argue that the Gospels are nothing but a bunch of legends which cropped up long after Jesus’s death. Moreover, a review of the arguments shows that there’s solid evidence to suggest that the Gospels were written even earlier than many skeptics care to admit.

A central part of this evidence is the fact that none of the Gospels ever describe the Romans’ destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. as a past event. Given how cataclysmic this event was for Jewish people living in the first century, it almost beggars belief to say the four evangelists would never once comment on it light of Christ’s teaching, or point to it as proof that the Old Covenant had reached its fulfilment in the person of Jesus. It also seems unlikely that Matthew would bother recounting Jesus’s commitment to paying the Temple tax if the Temple now lay in a trampled ruin (see Matt 17:24-27).

On top of this, we have the intriguing description in John 5:2 about the pool with five porticos which “is” in Jerusalem. As Cambridge University New Testament scholar George van Kooten has forcefully argued, the fact that this verse uses the present tense to describe a structure which almost certainly would have been destroyed in 70 A.D. is strong evidence that John’s Gospel was written before that date. But if John is, as most scholars believe, the last of the four Gospels, then the other three must have also been written before the year 70.

Another powerful piece of evidence comes from the relationship between the Gospel of Luke and the book of Acts, which Luke wrote as its sequel. The fact that Acts never mentions the execution of Paul, which took place in 64/65 A.D., strongly suggests that it was written before that date. Why would Luke make the bizarre literary decision to end his book with Paul hanging out in Rome, rather than with an account of his glorious martyrdom?

In addition to providing the early Church a superb example of radical discipleship, an account of Paul’s death would also have offered a dramatic literary parallel with the martyrdom of Stephen which occurs early on in Acts—a martyrdom which Paul was complicit in prior to his conversion to Christianity. The fact that Luke doesn’t do this provides compelling evidence that Acts was written no later than the early 60s A.D., which means his Gospel was written before that, from which it follows that Matthew and Mark’s Gospels (which scholars agree came before Luke) were written earlier still.

Given the foregoing considerations, it should come as little surprise that the only two book-length scholarly treatments of the dating of the books of the New Testament—John A.T. Robinson’s Redating the New Testament (1976) and Jonathan Bernier’s Rethinking the Dates of the New Testament (2022)—both conclude that all four Gospels were written before 70 A.D. According to Bernier, Matthew was likely written around the years 45-59 A.D., Mark around 42-45 A.D., Luke around 59 A.D., and John around 60-70 A.D.

The Gospels Were Reliably Handed Down to Us

Further adding to our confidence in the Gospels as reliable historical accounts is their exceptional manuscript record. This gives us a high degree of certainty that the Gospels we read today remain largely unchanged from when they were first written. In fact, scholars are able to reconstruct the New Testament with roughly 99% accuracy, meaning there’s only around 1,300 words which are subject to textual variants. Of these, the great majority are trivial differences. For example, some manuscripts render 1 John 1:4 as “And we are writing this that our joy may be complete,” while others render it as “And we are writing this that your joy may be complete.”

All told, there are around 5,800 full or partial extant New Testament manuscripts. The oldest of these, a fragment known as P52, dates to the mid-second century, while the oldest complete copy of the New Testament, Codex Sinaiticus, dates to the mid-fourth century. In addition to this, we have countless references to the New Testament in the writings of the Church Fathers. In their book A General Introduction to the Bible, scholars Norman Geisler and William Nix estimate that within the writings of the ante-Nicene Fathers alone (meaning Church Fathers who lived prior to the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D.) there exist some 32,000 quotes and allusions drawn from the New Testament.

Compare all this with what possess from other ancient writings, and the contrast is stark. The Roman historian Tacitus’s Annals, for example, is known to us through just two incomplete manuscripts dating from the ninth and eleventh centuries. Julius Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic War fares little better: of the dozen manuscripts that we possess, the oldest dates back to the ninth century—some 900 years after the original text was written! Plutarch’s Parallel Lives is a similar story; despite its tremendous historical importance, the oldest manuscript in existence comes from the tenth century, and even that is incomplete.

The Gospels Contain Signs of Authenticity

Eddy and Boyd point out that the Gospels also contain a number of internal elements which point to their being historical documents. These include:

• Multiple & independent attestation of key claims: in this respect, minor differences between the Gospels actually increase authenticity, since it shows they are drawing on different sources to describe the same event.
• Inclusion of surprising or self-damaging details: examples include Jesus getting baptized, or His family questioning His sanity.
• Inclusion of embarrassing details: examples include having Joseph of Arimathea (a member of the Sanhedrin which persecuted the early Christians) assist at Jesus’s burial, and having all the first witnesses to the Resurrection be women (who couldn’t even testify in a court of law in the first century).
• Omission of relevant issues: if the evangelists were making up stories, you would expect their Gospels to address questions such as how Jewish new Gentile converts needed to be.
• Inclusion of incidental details / casual information: for example, when Mark 4:36 remarks that “other boats were with him,” this provides evidence that we’re dealing with an eyewitness account, not a made-up story.
• Presence of Aramaisms in the text: the fact that the evangelists leave certain phrases in Aramaic helps us to pinpoint when and where the Gospels were written.
• Inclusion of personal names: unlike the extracanonical gospels which invent new names, the later canonical Gospels tend to eliminate personal names, suggesting these were real people but people who had since died.

In addition to these internal elements, Eddy and Boyd also extensively catalog some of the external evidence that supports key aspects of the Gospel narratives. These include ancient figures like Pliny and Josephus attesting to the crucifixion of Jesus, as well as archeological discoveries such as a stone bearing the name of Pontius Pilate, the home of Peter in Caparnaeum, and even the actual tomb of Jesus.

The Gospels Fulfil the Ancient Myths

Before concluding, it is worth recognizing one point which the skeptics get right, albeit unwittingly. According to some of the great Christian thinkers of the twentieth century, the four Gospels do retain a mythical quality, insofar as they offer an archetypal story about what it means to be human, and how humans ought to relate to God.

Yet the key difference with the Gospels, as C.S. Lewis came to realize through his conversion to Christianity, is they are not just myths; they are also history. They are, as Lewis put it, the myth which became fact:

But Christians also need to be reminded . . . that what became Fact was a Myth, that it carries with it into the world of Fact all the properties of a Myth. God is more than a god, not less; Christ is more than Balder, not lessWe must not be ashamed of the mythical radiance resting on our theology. We must not be nervous about ‘parallels’ and ‘Pagan Christs’: they ought to be there—it would be a stumbling block if they weren’t. We must not, in false spirituality, withhold our imaginative welcome. If God chooses to be mythopoeic—and is not the sky itself a myth—shall we refuse to be mythopathic? For this is the marriage of heaven and earth: Perfect Myth and Perfect Fact: claiming not only our love and our obedience, but also our wonder and delight, addressed to the savage, the child, and the poet in each one of us no less than to the moralist, the scholar, and the philosopher. (“Myth Became Fact”)

The Gospels show us that the deep yearnings that humans expressed through their myths for millenia and across different cultures were grounded in something real. Through their stories, these human beings were seeking the divine, even if their search was very imperfect.

In this respect, all of the ancient myths were building up to Christ: He is the true face of the divine who came to earth in the fullness of time, bringing fulfillment to the deepest longings of the human heart. For this reason, His story as told in the four Gospels is truly the greatest story—and more than that, the greatest history—ever told.

Further Reading

Paul Rhodes Eddy and Gregory A. Boyd, The Jesus Legend: A Case for the Historical Reliability of the Synoptic Jesus Tradition (Baker Academic, 2007)

Brant Pitre, The Case for Jesus: The Biblical and Historical Evidence for Christ (Image, 2016)

Lee Strobel, The Case for Christ: A Journalist's Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus (Zondervan, updated edition 2016)

About Clement Harrold

Clement Harrold earned his master’s degree in theology from the University of Notre Dame in 2024, and his bachelor’s from Franciscan University of Steubenville in 2021. His writings have appeared in First Things, Church Life Journal, Crisis Magazine, and the Washington Examiner.