Do you ever question whether the Bible is true? If not, you ought to; everything hinges on it. To be sure, I don’t mean to stir up doubt, but any truth worth believing should stand up to scrutiny. When it does stand, we can confidently stake our life on it. Can We Trust the Gospels? by Peter J. Williams, gives some faith-strengthening scrutiny to the Gospel accounts.
As one of the leading authorities on the New Testament, Williams could write a tome on this subject. Instead, this short book makes one powerful argument—the simplest explanation for the Gospel accounts is that they report the truth. Notably, Williams doesn’t attempt to prove this beyond doubt. He doesn’t deal with every objection, nor bring out every piece of evidence. His argument sacrifices exhaustive detail, but in exchange gains clarity: anyone who discounts the Gospels as fictional, corrupted, or biased argues against the evidence.
Williams begins by establishing some basic facts from non-Christian records. We can confirm that Jesus was executed by Pontius Pilate, that his followers worshipped him as God, and that this sect spread rapidly throughout the Roman Empire despite fierce persecution. The rapid early spread of Christianity makes it very implausible that anyone could change or make up the details of Jesus’s life even a few decades after his death.
He then turns to the Gospel writers, demonstrating their intimate familiarity with roads, villages, and even elevations (one goes up to Jerusalem, but goes down to Capernaum) of Jesus’ day. Williams shows how the names of people in the Gospels match the relative frequency of names in the historical record of 1st century Israel. Furthermore, the most common names all come with nicknames (Simon Peter, Judas Iscariot, Mary Magdalene) while less common names (e.g. Thomas, Bartholomew, Thaddeus) do not. “It is quite unlikely,” says Williams, “that any of the writers, if living outside the land, would have been able simply to research local naming patterns and thereby write a plausible narrative” (76).
These details matter for several reasons. First, they demonstrate that the Gospel writers knew what they were talking about. These accounts can’t be explained away as fan fiction written by Gentile Christians in Asia Minor. Second, if the Gospel authors “correctly remembered the less memorable details—the names of individuals—then they should have had no difficulty in remembering the more memorable outline of events” (77).
Based on the evidence Williams lays out, it’s hard to imagine an alternative explanation for the Gospels. If they were faked, how could the authors have gotten so many inconsequential details exactly right? If they exaggerated or changed the facts, then why include embarrassing accounts of the disciples denying Jesus or women reporting the resurrection? If scribes corrupted the manuscripts in transmission, how could those same changes have happened simultaneously to every manuscript spreading across the Roman Empire? In the end, we are left with the simple, but astounding explanation that Jesus really is who he said he is and that the Gospel accounts really happened.
Today more than ever, it’s easy to doubt. We live in a world of “fake news,” “do your own research,” and “that’s your truth.” People contrive all kinds of convoluted explanations to discredit the Gospels. But Williams’s argument cuts through all this fog like morning sunlight: “the simplest explanation is that these reports are true” (129).