Читать книгу Getting Jesus Right: How Muslims Get Jesus and Islam Wrong - James A Beverley - Страница 12

Historians and archaeologists make use of the New Testament Gospels and book of Acts because they exhibit verisimilitude, a verisimilitude that is often confirmed through the discovery of new data. Further, historians believe they can recover a realistic and reliable portrait of Jesus from the New Testament Gospels because many of the events and sayings they record are found in two or more early, independent sources. Historians by and large trust the Gospels because they were written early enough to overlap with the lifetime of eyewitnesses—the people who knew Jesus and his original followers.

In the next chapter, we look at the oldest manuscripts of the Gospels and ask if they have been copied faithfully and accurately. After all, if the copies of the Gospels were poorly executed and if scribes made major changes, omitting stories and sayings and adding new stories and sayings, the copies might not say what the originals said. This important question must be addressed if we are to have full confidence in the Gospels as reliable witnesses of the historical Jesus.