Читать книгу Getting Jesus Right: How Muslims Get Jesus and Islam Wrong - James A Beverley - Страница 8

All competent study of the historical Jesus begins with the four New Testament Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John). This is because they are the oldest sources and exhibit the features that historians expect of sources that are likely to provide reliable information. Of course, from time to time someone expresses skepticism about the New Testament Gospels. Sometimes Muslims express skepticism, especially when the Gospels and the Qur’an disagree. Therefore we begin our book by addressing the question of the reliability of the Gospels. Do these Gospels tell us the truth about Jesus, about what he taught, what he did, and what really happened to him?

One of the reasons it is good to begin with the Gospels is because they are biographies, based in part on eyewitness testimony. They were written 30 to 40 years after the time of Jesus, while some of his original followers were still living. The sources the Gospel writers drew upon circulated during this period, when the apostles of Jesus were active, teaching and giving leadership to the new movement. The Gospels are not biographies in the modern sense, but they are biographies as written in antiquity.¹ We have good reasons for believing that these Gospel biographies in fact provide us with a great deal of useful, reliable material.

We do not begin with the Qur’an, not only because it was written almost 600 years later than the New Testament Gospels, but because it really is not a historical narrative or a biography. There may well be historical and biographical data within it, the kind of data that historians can utilize, but the Qur’an as a whole is obviously not a historical work. Later in our book we shall look at what the Qur’an and other early Islamic sources have to say about Jesus.

In this chapter, we will treat two important questions that relate to the Gospels as potentially accurate and useful biographical histories concerning the life, teaching and activities of Jesus. The first question asks how close the New Testament Gospels are to the time of Jesus. The second question asks if the information in the Gospels is based on the testimony of eyewitnesses.