Can We Trust the Bible on the Historical Jesus?

Stewart (The Reliability of the New Testament), professor at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, provides an accessible but uneven overview of the ways scholars have evaluated the Christian gospels as evidence of the life of Jesus. The centerpiece is a transcription of a 2011 public dialogue between New Testament experts Ehrman and Evans, in which Ehrman argues that variations between gospel accounts—such as the healing of Jairus’s daughter or of Jesus’s self-description—make it impossible for the texts to be historically accurate. Evans contends that discrepancies between accounts are consistent with nonfiction writing of the same era and compares the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke favorably with “biographies” of the period. Playing the part of a moderator, Stewart supplements the dialogue with extensive footnotes, an introduction describing how historians study texts, and a historiography of Jesus as an historical figure, in which he concludes that the gospels “may be more than historical documents but cannot be less.” Unfortunately, Stewart leaves Ehrman’s rejection of the gospels as sources of historical information without the background he adds to Evans’s acceptance of them. There’s much food for thought here, but many readers will be disappointed that the debate doesn’t have the feel of one conducted on a level playing field. (Sept.)