Are the Gospels historically reliable?

Yes, because the Gospels were written by eyewitnesses or by men who took their account directly from eyewitnesses, most of them before the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD, and because the whole scholarly project built to prove otherwise collapsed on its own terms. Ask yourself first why the dating question is fought so bitterly. Liberal critics insist that all four Gospels were written well after 70 AD, most likely into the second century. Why does that matter so much to them? Because if they were to admit the Gospels were written before 70 AD, they would have to admit their historical reliability, and then there is no escape from the truths contained in them. The late dating is not a conclusion, it is a requirement. The traditional dating is the defensible one. Matthew, Mark, Luke and Paul were living and writing in the fifties and sixties. John is the exception: his Gospel around 80 AD and the Apocalypse around 95. That means the accounts were circulating while the people who were there could still contradict them. The real foundation is eyewitness testimony. Saint Peter states the principle himself: "we have not by following clever fables made known to you the power and presence of our Lord Jesus Christ: but we were eyewitnesses of his greatness" (2 Peter 1:16). The word is epoptai, men who saw with their own eyes. In a court of law eyewitness testimony is among the strongest evidence there is. Various witnesses will sometimes produce varying reports, but all of them reproduce the major and most important aspects of the event. In the case of our Lord, only eyewitness experience would be sufficient to authenticate his time and work on earth. If the recording of those events had been left to second or third generation redactors, little if anything could be certified as true. And that is precisely what the liberals propose. Redaction criticism says the text we hold was edited by some second-century Christian. Think about what that costs you. If a man fifty years removed, who never met Jesus or any apostle, is doing the editing, then he is inserting material out of his own head, because he was never there to witness anything. And you have no way of knowing which parts he touched and which he did not. You do not have a Gospel anymore. You have bits and pieces. The "Q" theory, the two-source hypothesis behind Matthew and Luke, was invented for exactly this purpose. It was proposed by historical critics in an effort to keep the Gospels from being understood as actual eyewitness accounts, as they had always been understood. Fashion the Gospels into second or third generation redactions of an oral tradition and the odds of fiction creeping in become high, and the documents become historically unreliable. That was the point. Against all this stands the unbroken external testimony. Papias tells us Mark was the disciple and interpreter of Peter, who wrote down what Peter preached, and that Mark committed no error, because he was careful of one thing, not to omit anything he had heard and not to state any of it falsely. Eusebius reports the same, adding that Matthew published his Gospel among the Hebrews while Peter and Paul were preaching at Rome. Irenaeus says the same of Matthew. And Saint Augustine put it to the Manichaean Faustus exactly as I would put it to a modern skeptic: you deny that Matthew wrote this narrative, "though this is affirmed by the continuous testimony of the whole Church, from the days of apostolic presidency to the bishops of our own time. What authority will you quote against this?" Believe that Matthew wrote it, Augustine says, "since it has been handed down from the days of Matthew in the Church, without any break in the connection between that time and the present." The critic has a theory. The Church has a chain of custody. What about the alleged contradictions? Most of them dissolve the moment you pay careful attention to the detail, and the rest are simply the ordinary result of four men each recording certain things and no one recording everything. Two examples. Matthew 28:1 says "late on the sabbath" while Mark and Luke say very early on the first day of the week, which sounds like a conflict until you notice that the Greek opse can mean either "late" or "long after." No contradiction. Or take Herod and John the Baptist: Mark 6:14 has Herod himself saying John is risen, while Luke 9:7 says he heard it from others. Luke is clarifying that Herod first heard the supposition and then repeated it. No contradiction there either. That is the pattern across the board. The last piece of evidence is the fate of the enterprise itself. For a hundred years scholars poured out books trying to extract a natural Jesus from a supernatural record. They failed, and they admitted it. The history and the supernatural were so intertwined, so meticulously interwoven and overlapped, that to subtract the miracles was to erase the history. Albert Schweitzer surveyed the whole century and pronounced its obituary, and New Testament scholarship now generally concedes that it is impossible to write a life of Jesus. That admission is worth more than any apologetic argument I could make, because it comes from the other side.