No. The three objections that unsettle people most are the late dating of the Gospels, the idea that a council voted the books in, and the differences between Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Each depends on an assumption that sounds obvious and turns out to be doubtful. The most important of these concerns the differences. The skeptic assumes that reliable witnesses should agree in every detail. Real testimony rarely works that way. Accounts that match word for word are usually the ones we have reason to suspect.
That is the argument New Testament scholar Dr. Dennis Edwards makes, and it deserves to be examined slowly. A good argument for the Gospels should not just reverse the skeptic’s verdict. It should show where the skeptic’s reasoning goes wrong, and it should admit what the evidence cannot settle.
What is the skeptic’s argument, exactly?
The strongest version runs something like this. The Gospels were written decades after Jesus. During those decades the stories passed from mouth to mouth, and stories passed that way change. Later, church authorities decided which books counted, so what we have reflects their preferences. And when you set the Gospels side by side, they disagree. Taken together, these facts suggest a record shaped more by later belief than by what happened.
Each step contains a premise that usually goes unstated. The dating step assumes that time alone produces distortion. The canon step assumes that selection means invention. The comparison step assumes that variation means error. None of these premises is absurd. But none of them follows automatically, and the third is the one most people never think to question.
Should reliable witnesses agree on everything?
Start with the hidden premise. If four people really saw the same events, the thinking goes, their accounts should line up. Where they do not line up, at least one is wrong, and if one is wrong, why trust any of them?
Edwards turns this around. He notes that even the label “synoptic problem” already leans toward suspicion. Synoptic means the first three Gospels look alike when you set them together. They follow much the same order, yet they differ in places. A cynical reader concludes that someone made the story up. Edwards draws the opposite conclusion: “I think it’s better that they don’t match.” His reason is a counterexample from ordinary life. Perfect agreement, he says, “would be like somebody who did a crime and turns to their friend and say, look, let’s get our story straight so we can tell the exact same story.”
The counterexample works because we already reason this way outside of religion. When two suspects give identical statements down to the phrasing, investigators do not conclude that both are honest. They conclude that the two talked first. Identical accounts point to a shared script. Edwards puts the principle plainly: “when you have everything line up exactly the same, there’s more skepticism than things that vary in spaces.” Variation in detail is the ordinary mark of separate tellers, each remembering and stressing what mattered to them.
Lisa Fields offers an example from her own speaking. She tells similar stories to very different audiences, and she frames them differently depending on who is listening. She has also retold the story of her first New Testament class and placed it in her freshman year at one point and her sophomore year at another. Two recordings could be set side by side to make her look inconsistent. Her response is simple: “I’m not trying to deceive.” The event happened. The detail of which year it happened is the kind of thing honest memory blurs. Edwards called it a great illustration, and it is, because it separates two questions the skeptic tends to merge: whether an account varies, and whether the teller is lying.
What do the differences actually look like?
Abstract talk about “differences” can make them sound larger than they are, so it helps to look at one. Edwards points to the healing of a centurion’s servant, told in Matthew 8:5-13 and Luke 7:1-10. Both accounts follow the same arc. A Roman officer asks Jesus to heal his servant, tells him he need not come to the house, and explains that he understands how authority works: Jesus only has to say the word. In Matthew the centurion comes to Jesus directly. In Luke he works through intermediaries; Luke 7:3 says “he sent unto him the elders of the Jews” to make the request.
That is a real difference, and an honest reader should not pretend otherwise. But consider what kind of difference it is. The core claim is the same in both: a Gentile officer trusts Jesus’s word to heal at a distance, and the servant is healed. The variation concerns how the request reached Jesus. Edwards explains it as a matter of emphasis. The story was being told in different communities, and certain parts were highlighted in Matthew’s setting and others in Luke’s.
The birth narratives are a larger case. Matthew and Luke both tell of Jesus’s birth, but they tell different parts of it, and Mark leaves the birth out entirely. Edwards’s explanation turns on context, which he says New Testament scholars would all repeat if they came on the podcast. Every Gospel was written for particular people facing particular circumstances. The writers had aims, though not propaganda aims; they were trying to show who Jesus was. Matthew, for instance, presents the life of Jesus in ways tied to his reading of the Old Testament. Mark has another point to make. On this account, the “problem” exists only because the Gospels are not identical, and they were never meant to be. Edwards adds that the early church chose to keep four accounts instead of one, precisely because each emphasized different aspects of the same Jesus.
Isn’t variation also what fabrication looks like?
Here is the strongest objection, and it should be stated fairly. If identical accounts can signal collusion, varied accounts can signal invention. Four writers making things up independently would also disagree. So variation, by itself, does not prove that any account is true.
That is correct, and it limits what the argument can claim. The point about variation is defensive. It removes one bad inference, the move from “they differ” to “they are unreliable.” It does not, on its own, establish that the Gospels are accurate. For that, other evidence has to carry weight.
Two distinctions help here. The first separates variation in detail from contradiction at the core. Fabricated accounts tend to diverge on the substance, because there is no shared event anchoring them. The centurion stories differ on the route of a message and agree on everything the story is about. That pattern fits shared memory told from different angles better than it fits independent invention.
The second distinction concerns independence itself. Matthew, Mark and Luke are not wholly independent of one another. They share so much order and wording that scholars have long debated how they relate, and that debate is part of what the label “synoptic problem” names. Lisa Fields mentions one theory, the proposed Q source, in passing. This cuts in an interesting direction. Even where the writers clearly drew on common material, they did not flatten it into a single approved version. They kept their own emphases. Writers working from shared tradition who still felt free to tell it their own way were not acting like people coordinating a cover story.
What variation cannot do is settle every individual difference. Some apparent tensions in the Gospels take real work to understand, and a responsible reader should do that work case by case instead of assuming either a contradiction or an easy harmony.
Does a gap of decades mean the story drifted?
The dating objection usually comes with an image. Lisa Fields remembers it from her first New Testament class at the University of North Florida, where the textbook was by Bart Ehrman: the telephone game, in which a message whispered around a room comes out garbled at the end. If the faith was passed along orally, the question goes, how can we trust what was finally written down?
The telephone game carries its own hidden premise. It assumes a single chain of private retellings, each passed to one listener, with no one able to check the result against the source. Edwards argues that early Christian memory did not work like that. When the Gospels were being written, he notes, apostles were still alive, though some were near the end of their lives, which is one reason to write things down at all. The stories had circulated for years among communities, and they had “a certain coherence to them” by the time they were recorded. A message repeated publicly, among people who knew the original tellers, behaves very differently from a whisper passed down a row of desks.
Edwards also offers a comparison. If the original Declaration of Independence were lost, it could be rebuilt easily, because copies are everywhere and some people know it by heart, even after more than two centuries. By his reckoning, Paul’s letters begin around the 50s and the Gospels follow roughly twenty years later, around 70. His conclusion: “not a lot of time passed for people’s memories and the reality of the experience to be written down in the gospels.” He also reports an argument from scholar Craig Evans, that original manuscripts could have lasted a long time, so originals and copies likely existed side by side for a while. That is Evans’s claim as Edwards describes it, and it bears on how quickly a text could have drifted.
Edwards is candid about why scholars disagree on dates. Many questions turn on Jesus’s prediction of the temple’s destruction, which happened around 70. “If you think Jesus predicted it, then those gospels could have been written before 70.” If you think the Gospels are looking back on the event, you will date them later. This exposes something important: the date a scholar assigns can depend partly on a prior judgment about whether prediction is possible. “If I’m cynical from the start, then I’m gonna say, well, this can’t be reliable,” Edwards says, even though “I have the same data in front of me that somebody else has.”
He does not let this become a cheap win. He points out that other factors shape dating too. Even conservative scholars commonly place John later than the other three Gospels, because John presents Jesus’s divinity so starkly. In his words, “it’s not merely a question of do I believe in the supernatural.” The honest conclusion is narrower than either side sometimes wants. Dating involves hypotheses, because no Gospel arrives with a date in the corner. But on the dating Edwards describes, even a Gospel written around 70 sits about forty years after the death and resurrection of Jesus, within the lifetime of people who knew him.
One more piece of evidence belongs here. Edwards notes that the apostles never presented themselves as trying to deceive anyone, and that they put their lives on the line for their message. The logic of this point should be stated carefully. Willingness to suffer for a claim shows that a person believes it. It does not show the belief is correct. What it does rule out is the theory of deliberate fabrication by the people closest to the events.
Did a vote create the New Testament?
The council objection assumes that the books became authoritative at the moment someone decided they were. Edwards rejects that picture of how the collection formed. Canon, he explains, means a rule or standard: the books held as the measure of faith. “I’m glad you used the word process, because some people think of canon as an event,” he says. “There was certainly some deliberation, but think of it as a process.”
According to Edwards, early Christians weighed three questions. Was a writing connected to the apostles? Was it widely accepted and used in churches across the Roman world? And did it fit the rule of faith, the way the Christian faith had been taught and practiced from the start? The last question became pressing when other writings, including Gnostic ones, began to compete with what had come down through the oral tradition about Christ.
Here Edwards concedes something many defenders would avoid. The early church did not merely ignore texts like the Gospel of Thomas. In his view it probably worked actively to destroy them. Some of these texts surfaced only in the 1940s and 1950s, in the Nag Hammadi find. Edwards says they were not written by the people whose names they carry; Thomas, he says, would have been way too late. The church rejected them because they offered “a picture of Jesus that was not consistent with what had been revealed” through the apostles.
Does rejection prove a cover-up? Only if one assumes that any community guarding its teaching is hiding the truth. Edwards compares the early church’s concern to a catechism: when new ideas appear, a community says, this is not what we have been teaching, so let us hold up what we have been teaching. He connects it to the verse this ministry is named for, where Jude urges readers to “earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints” (Jude 1:3). Keeping later writings out of the collection reflects a judgment that the original testimony should set the standard. Whether that judgment was right depends on the dating and origin of those texts, not on the bare fact that a choice was made.
What does Luke’s own preface add?
The skeptic’s case sometimes assumes that Christians must treat the Gospels as if they dropped from heaven, so any sign of human authorship counts against them. Luke does not make that claim. He opens by noting that “many have taken in hand to set forth in order a declaration of those things which are most surely believed among us” (Luke 1:1). Then he explains his own decision: “It seemed good to me also” (Luke 1:3) to write an orderly account for Theophilus.
Edwards draws attention to the wording. Luke does not say God told him to write. He says it seemed good to him. He checked his sources and chose to write. Edwards holds this human agency together with the conviction that God’s Spirit was superintending the work: “we have a human document written by human hands under the push of the Holy Spirit.” On this view, finding human choices in the Gospels, such as selection, emphasis and attention to a particular reader, is exactly what the documents lead us to expect. It is not an embarrassment uncovered by critics.
Jude 3 teaches that Scripture is fully trustworthy in all it intends to teach. Luke’s preface shows what one Gospel writer intended: an orderly, sourced account meant to give a reader confidence. Differences of emphasis between such accounts do not count against that intention. They are evidence that real people did the work.
What follows, and what does not?
The skeptic’s three objections do not undermine the New Testament the way they first appear to. The gap between the events and the writing is short by ancient standards and spans the lives of the first witnesses. The canon formed through a long process of recognizing writings already in wide use. The Gospels’ differences in detail, set against their agreement on substance, are the pattern we expect from separate tellers of real events.
What does not follow is that every question is closed. Dates remain hypotheses. Some differences require careful study. Variation clears away a false argument, but it does not prove the resurrection on its own. The case for trusting the Gospels rests on several lines of evidence together. The claim worth carrying away is more specific than “the Bible is reliable.” It is this: the objection that sounds most damaging, that the Gospels do not agree perfectly, rests on a standard no honest group of witnesses would meet.
Quick answers
- Do the differences between the Gospels mean they are unreliable? No. Identical accounts would suggest coordination. The Gospels agree on substance and vary in detail and emphasis, which fits separate tellers addressing different audiences.
- Weren’t the Gospels written too late to be accurate? On the dating Edwards describes, Paul writes around the 50s and the Gospels follow around 70, while people who knew Jesus were still alive.
- Why do scholars disagree about the dates? Partly because of how they read Jesus’s prediction of the temple’s fall, and partly because of other factors, such as how each Gospel presents Jesus.
- Did a council vote on the books? Edwards describes a process with some deliberation, guided by apostolic connection, wide use in the churches and fit with the faith already taught.
- Why was the Gospel of Thomas left out? In Edwards’s view it came too late to be written by Thomas and presented a Jesus inconsistent with the apostolic teaching.