THE NEW TESTAMENT

How we verify it — text, authors, dating, sources, canon

Four honest tests: Is the text what was written? · Who wrote it, and did they see it? · Is it early & corroborated? · Who chose the books? The verdict: the best-attested text of the ancient world, 1st-century, rooted in eyewitnesses, and confirmed on its core fact — the crucifixion — even by skeptics.

1Is the text what was originally written?

We don’t have the autographs (originals) of any ancient book. What matters is how many early copies exist to reconstruct from — and here the NT is in a class of its own.

Work	Earliest copy after writing	Surviving copies
Homer, Iliad	~400 years	~1,900 Greek
Caesar, Gallic War	~900 years	a few dozen
Tacitus, Annals	~750–900 years	~2 principal
New Testament	~40–100 years (fragments)	~5,800 Greek + ~15,000 other = ~25,000

The earliest witnesses: P52 (a fragment of John) ~AD 125; P46 (Paul’s letters) ~AD 200; P66 & P75 (Gospels) ~AD 200; Codex Sinaiticus & Vaticanus (the whole NT) ~AD 350.

The honest counter (Bart Ehrman’s point): there are ~400,000 textual variants — more than there are words in the NT. Why that’s less alarming than it sounds: there are so many variants only because there are so many copies, and ~99% are trivial (spelling, word order). The meaningful-and-viable ones are <1%, and no core doctrine hangs on a disputed reading — a point Ehrman himself concedes. Modern Bibles openly flag the few real ones: Mark 16:9–20, John 7:53–8:11 (the woman caught in adultery), and 1 John 5:7 (the “Comma”). Transparency, not cover-up.

Verdict: Solid — the text we read is, to ~99%, demonstrably what was written.

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2Who wrote the Gospels — and were they eyewitnesses?

Straight fact: the four Gospels are formally anonymous — no author signs the text. The names come from the titles (“according to Matthew…”), which appear on our earliest copies and in the earliest witnesses:

Papias (~AD 110–130) — Mark wrote down Peter’s preaching; Matthew compiled the sayings.
Irenaeus (~AD 180) & the Muratorian Fragment (~AD 180) — name all four, as we have them.

An argument for authenticity people miss: if the church were inventing prestige authors, it would have picked apostles — yet two Gospels are credited to non-apostles (Mark, Luke) and one to a despised tax-collector (Matthew). Forgers don’t choose unimpressive names. And there are no competing attributions anywhere in the record.

Do they claim eyewitness roots?

Luke 1:1–4 — he writes after “eyewitnesses… delivered them unto us,” having “had perfect understanding of all things from the very first.”
John 21:24 — “This is the disciple which testifieth of these things.” · 1 John 1:1 — “which we have seen with our eyes… and our hands have handled.” · 2 Peter 1:16 — “we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.”
1 Corinthians 15:3–8 — a creed Paul “received,” dated by scholars to the 30s AD, naming living witnesses (Peter, the Twelve, 500 at once, James).
Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (2006) — the named minor characters and the “living voice” of testimony point to eyewitness sources, not anonymous drift.

The honest limits: critics (Ehrman, form-critics) hold the Gospels rest on decades of oral tradition, not direct authorship; and Matthew’s apostolic authorship (he uses Mark) and John’s are genuinely contested. Mark and Luke are the more secure attributions.

Verdict: Mixed on exact authorship; Model that the material is rooted in the first generation of eyewitnesses.

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3Is it early & corroborated — and how do we know he was crucified?

Dating — all within living memory

Book	Critical date	The “early” case
Paul’s 7 undisputed letters	~AD 50–60	Undisputed — ~20 yrs after the cross
Mark	~AD 65–75	Some argue 50s–60s
Matthew / Luke	~AD 80–90	Acts ends ~62 (Paul still alive) → Luke earlier
John	~AD 90–100	—

Both camps agree: 1st century, within the lifetime of eyewitnesses. And it’s multiple independent streams — Mark, the “Q” source, Matthew’s & Luke’s own material, John, and Paul.

Paul — the earliest witness, anchored to the 50s

Paul’s genuine letters (~AD 50s) are our earliest Christian documents, and three independent, non-Christian anchors fix them to that decade — long before any 2nd-century “Marcion invented it” theory:

Anchor	What it fixes (and why a forger can’t fake it)
Gallio Inscription Delphi stone, AD 51–52	Dates Gallio’s proconsulship of Achaia; Acts 18:12 puts Paul before that Gallio in Corinth → Paul there ~AD 50–52. A pagan Roman artifact.
King Aretas IV died AD 40	2 Cor 11:32 has Aretas’s governor guarding Damascus at Paul’s escape → before AD 40 → conversion ~AD 33–36. Fixed by the king’s own coinage.
1 Clement Rome → Corinth, ~AD 96	Quotes Paul’s 1 Corinthians as authoritative — ~50 yrs before Marcion. The letters were already circulating.

Two of the three are pagan objects no Christian could forge. And the knockout: even Richard Carrier — the leading Jesus-mythicist — accepts Paul’s letters are genuine and from the 50s.

And Paul describes an EARTHLY Jesus, not a “celestial” one (this is the direct answer to the “Christ Before Jesus” / Carrier thesis that the first Jesus was a sky-being):

He met the brother. Paul stayed with Peter and met “James the Lord’s brother” (Gal 1:18–19; cf. “the brothers of the Lord,” 1 Cor 9:5) — and Josephus independently calls James “the brother of Jesus who was called Christ” (Ant. 20.200). You do not have a flesh-and-blood brother of a myth.
Human killers, in Judea — “the Jews, who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets” (1 Thess 2:14–15): earthly agents, not demons in the sky.
An earthly, datable meal — “the Lord Jesus, the same night in which he was betrayed, took bread” (1 Cor 11:23).
Born, Jewish, of David’s line — “born of a woman, born under the law” (Gal 4:4); “descended from David according to the flesh” (Rom 1:3 — kata sarka, ordinary physical descent, cf. Rom 9:5).
He taught & lived — Jesus’ command on divorce (1 Cor 7:10); “a servant to the circumcised” (Rom 15:8); the creed naming eyewitnesses (1 Cor 15:3–8).

Paul — writing within ~20 years, having met the people who knew Jesus — already has a real, Jewish, crucified, earthly Jesus with a named brother. The “celestial-only” reading collapses on Paul’s own words.

Non-Christian & hostile sources — the validity of the outside record

Source	Date	What it confirms
Josephus, Ant. 20.200	~AD 93	“James, the brother of Jesus who was called Christ” — near-universally accepted as authentic.
Josephus, Ant. 18.63 (Testimonium)	~AD 93	An authentic core — a wise teacher crucified by Pilate — beneath later Christian edits.
Tacitus, Annals 15.44	~AD 116	“Christus… suffered the extreme penalty… by… Pontius Pilatus” under Tiberius.
Lucian, Peregrinus 11	~AD 165	“the man who was crucified in Palestine” — a mocking pagan aside.
Pliny · Suetonius · Mara bar Serapion · Talmud	~AD 112+	Christians “sang to Christ as a god”; a “Chrestus”; a wise executed king; “Yeshu” hanged on Passover eve.

The honest limits (say them out loud): none of these is a contemporary eyewitness — all were born after the crucifixion (Josephus c.37, Tacitus c.56) and wrote 60–90 yrs later; the Josephus Testimonium was partially interpolated by later Christians; and the surviving Josephus manuscripts are medieval. But “contemporary lifetime memoir” is the wrong yardstick for antiquity — the biographies of the emperor Tiberius (d. AD 37) were written ~80 yrs after him too. As near-contemporary, independent, and often hostile witnesses, they converge on the thing that matters: a real Jesus, executed under Pilate.

How we know he was crucified — the bedrock. This is the most secure fact in all of Jesus studies; even the most skeptical scholars grant it (Ehrman: “one of the most certain things we know”). Five converging reasons:

No one would invent it. A crucified messiah was a contradiction — “cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree” (Deut 21:23), a “stumbling block” (1 Cor 1:23). The criterion of embarrassment.
Multiple independent attestation — all four Gospels, Paul, Acts, Hebrews.
Hostile confirmation — Tacitus and Josephus, above.
The earliest creed — “Christ died for our sins… and was buried” (1 Cor 15:3–4, 30s AD).
Archaeology — the Pilate Stone (1961) confirms the governor; the Yehohanan heel-bone (1968, Jerusalem) is a crucified 1st-century Jew with the iron nail still through the heel — proof the method was used on Jews exactly as described. (A 1986 JAMA study details the physiology of the death.)

Verdict: Solid — that Jesus was crucified under Pilate is bedrock history, believer and atheist alike.

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4Eyewitness fingerprints — the details only a witness includes

The strongest evidence isn’t the big claims — it’s the incidental, “unnecessary” details a later forger in another country wouldn’t know or bother to invent. Each Gospel carries its own.

Writer	First-hand markers (with refs)
Mark Peter’s interpreter (Papias)	Simon of Cyrene named with his sons Alexander & Rufus (15:21 — checkable men; cf. Rom 16:13) · the crowd on the “green grass” (6:39 — spring) · Aramaic kept & glossed: Talitha cumi (5:41) · Jesus asleep on the cushion in the stern (4:38) · unsparing of Peter (denial told in full, 14:66–72).
Matthew the ex-tax-collector	The temple-tax coin in the fish — the stater = exactly two half-shekels for two men (17:24–27, only in Matthew) · calls himself “Matthew the publican” (10:3, a self-abasement Mark & Luke omit) · a money/accounting vocabulary throughout (talents, denarii, reckonings).
Luke historian, Paul’s companion	A historian’s preface naming eyewitness sources (1:1–4) · the “we” passages where the author joins Paul (Acts 16:10) · era-exact official titles verified by inscriptions — politarchs at Thessalonica (17:6), Gallio proconsul of Achaia (18:12; the Delphi inscription) — dozens, right first time (Hemer) · Joanna, wife of Chuza, Herod’s steward (8:3): an inside source at court.
John the Jerusalem eyewitness	The Pool of Bethesda “having five porches” (5:2 — long thought symbolic, then excavated exactly so) · the Pool of Siloam (9:7 — uncovered 2004) · “it was winter” (10:22) · remembered clock-times (1:39; 4:6) · the 153 fish counted (21:11) · blood and water from the side with a first-person oath: “he that saw it bare record” (19:34–35).

Undesigned coincidences — one Gospel casually answers a question another raises

How did anyone know Herod’s private words? Matthew reports Herod talking “unto his servants” (14:1–2) but never says how he knows — Luke, unconnected, names Joanna, wife of Herod’s steward among the followers (8:3). The channel is supplied offhand.
Why ask Philip about bread? (John 6:5) — because an unrelated aside says Philip was of Bethsaida (1:44), right where it happened (Luke 9:10). The local man.
Why the mocking “who hit you?” (Matt 26:68) makes no sense until Luke notes they blindfolded him first (22:64).
Why did the leaders need Rome to execute? John’s throwaway “it is not lawful for us to put any man to death” (18:31) quietly explains why it was crucifixion (Roman) not stoning (Jewish).

Bauckham’s name-frequency fingerprint. The personal names in the Gospels statistically match the real distribution of Jewish names in 1st-century Palestine (from ossuaries, Josephus, the DSS): the commonest names were Simon and Mary — exactly the Gospel pattern — and the texts disambiguate the common names (Simon Peter, Simon the Zealot, Simon of Cyrene, Simon the leper…) while leaving rare names bare (Zacchaeus, Nathanael). A writer inventing stories later or in another country could not reverse-engineer the right statistics. (R. Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, using Tal Ilan’s name lexicon.)

Verdict: Model (strong) — a dense, cross-checking web of incidental accuracy that oral legend or distant forgery does not produce.

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5The crucifixion up close — first-hand tells & every debate resolved

The passion accounts are packed with physically specific, self-damaging particulars that read as remembered, not invented — and Paul corroborates the core within a few years, having met the witnesses.

First-hand tell	Why it reads as eyewitness, not forgery
Blood and water from the pierced side, with an oath (John 19:34–35)	A physiologically odd detail (serum separating from clot post-mortem — JAMA 1986) the writer reports without a theory; he stakes his testimony on it.
Simon of Cyrene & sons Alexander & Rufus (Mark 15:21)	Named, checkable men — a hostage to fortune a forger gains nothing from.
Four parts + seamless tunic, lots cast (John 19:23–24)	“Four parts” incidentally fixes the Roman squad size (a quaternion); the soldiers’ reasoning is reported as overheard.
Legs NOT broken — already dead (John 19:32–33)	A contingent, could-have-gone-otherwise fact; Scripture-fulfilment noted only after (v36) — memory-then-meaning.
Trilingual titulus — Hebrew, Greek, Latin (John 19:19–20)	Accurate Roman provincial procedure + the multilingual reality of Jerusalem; no doctrinal payload.
Aramaic cry “Eloi, Eloi…” misheard as Elijah (Mark 15:34–36)	A bilingual pun that only works in the actual spoken Aramaic (Eloi/Eliyya) — unfakeable by a later Greek author.
Joseph of Arimathea, a named Sanhedrist (Mark 15:43)	Naming a council member from the very body that condemned Jesus is embarrassing — and checkable.
Named women as the watching witnesses (Mark 15:40–41)	In a culture that discounted women’s testimony, no forger courting credibility invents this.
Paul: “the night he was betrayed” + the received creed (1 Cor 11:23; 15:3–8; Gal 1:18–19)	External, mid-50s, names living witnesses; the creed dates to within a few years (even Lüdemann agrees); Paul met Peter & James.

The embarrassment running through it all: the disciples flee (Mark 14:50), Peter denies him, women are the key witnesses, and a crucified Messiah was a public scandal (“a stumblingblock,” 1 Cor 1:23; “cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree,” Gal 3:13). Inventing a religion around a crucified founder is the last thing a fabricator would do — which is why the core is so widely granted (Hengel, Crucifixion, 1977).

The debates, resolved

Objection	The honest resolution
Swoon (he only fainted)	Roman squads reliably killed; the flogging + spear (blood & water) confirm death. Even the skeptic D.F. Strauss (1865) demolished it: a half-dead invalid creeping out inspires pity, not worship.
Substitution (someone else died; Qur’an 4:157)	The idea descends from 2nd-c. Gnosticism (Basilides, per Irenaeus 1.24.4), ~600 yrs after the event, with no 1st-century evidence — against the Gospels, Paul’s creed, Tacitus & Josephus.
Mythicism (no Jesus to crucify)	No working ancient historian holds it; Tacitus, Josephus, the Talmud + the criterion of embarrassment. Ehrman: the crucifixion is “as certain as anything historical ever can be.”
“Just theology, not history”	The mundane, non-theological particulars (quaternion, seamless tunic, Simon’s sons, the Aramaic pun) are the residue history leaves and theology doesn’t need. It’s theology and history.
“Body dumped in a pit” (Crossan)	Jewish law (Deut 21:22–23) & Josephus (War 4.5.2) required same-day burial; and the Yehohanan heel-bone (1968) is a crucified Jew given a normal rock-tomb burial — hard proof against the pit.
“Invented from Psalm 22 / Isaiah 53”	Key details have no OT template (Simon’s sons, seamless tunic, trilingual titulus, the Elijah mishearing); and no Jewish author would invent a cursed crucified Messiah as a proof-text. Event first, Scripture second.

Verdict: Solid — the crucifixion is bedrock, and every alternative theory is later, motivated, or evidence-free.

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6Who chose the 27 books? — the canon

A common myth: a council “voted” the Bible into existence. What actually happened is recognition, not invention — the churches gradually acknowledged the books already functioning as authoritative, by three tests:

Apostolicity — written by an apostle or their close associate.
Catholicity — received and used widely across the churches.
Orthodoxy — consistent with the received “rule of faith.”

Marker	Date	What it shows
Marcion’s cut-down canon	~AD 144	The catalyst — forced the church to define what it already received
Muratorian Fragment	~AD 180	Lists most of the NT already
Core settled in practice	~AD 200	4 Gospels, Acts, Paul’s 13, 1 Peter, 1 John — undisputed
Athanasius’ Festal Letter	AD 367	First list of exactly our 27
Councils of Hippo / Carthage	393 / 397	Confirmed the list — did not create it

Honest note: a handful of books (Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, 2–3 John, Jude, Revelation) were debated longer — the church was careful, not cavalier. Contested gospels (Thomas, etc.) were excluded as late (2nd c.+) and out of step with the apostolic core.

7The honest bottom line

Question	Verdict
Is the text reliable?	Solid best-attested ancient text; ~99% secure
Are the Gospels early?	Model 1st-century, within living memory
Eyewitness-rooted?	Model traceable to the first generation
Exact authorship (Matthew/John)?	Mixed genuinely contested
Was Jesus crucified?	Solid bedrock — even skeptics agree
The resurrection?	The real question — where the case is won or lost

In one breath: the New Testament is early, abundantly preserved, rooted in eyewitness testimony, and confirmed by hostile sources on its central fact. Its authorship details and its miracles are debated — but the crucifixion is beyond serious doubt, and the whole case ultimately turns on one thing: whether the tomb was empty and the disciples really met the risen Jesus.

Go deeper: each Gospel writer verified (Mark/Matthew/Luke/John) · the Critical vs Traditional side-by-side (12 questions) · the case for Jesus & the Resurrection · the prophecy & design case.

THE NEW TESTAMENT · 6 of 6 · honest, graded, local-only