The historical reliability of the Gospels

the long version

The search for the historical Jesus has had a long and complicated history. Nineteenth-century scholars, employing the tools of the historical-critical method, supplied a host of novel and contradictory interpretations of the Gospel materials. With the publication of Albert Schweitzer's The Quest of the Historical Jesus nearly all hopes of producing a "scientific" life of Jesus vanished. Twentieth-century researchers, while gaining a new appreciation of the Gospel writers as theologians, have largely remained skeptical of them as historians. Applying stringent "criteria of authenticity" to the sayings of Jesus, they have often left us with a Jesus who was merely human. Is such skepticism justified? Or can we trust the New Testament to give us accurate information about the nature and character of Jesus? What is the current state of Gospels research? Craig Blomberg summarizes the work of contemporary evangelical scholars sponsored by the Gospels Research Project of Tyndale House, Cambridge, and published in the six-volume Gospel Perspectives series. - Back cover.