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Can we believe the Gospels?
The Gospels claim to be based on eye-witness accounts of the events in Jesus' life. This raises two questions. Firsty, how close to the events they claim to record were the original gospels written? Secondly, given that we do not have the original documents, how reliable are the copies that exist today?
Research this century has confirmed that the Gospels by Matthew, Mark.and Luke were likely to have been written within 30 or 40 years of the events they record. People still remembered Jesus very clearly at this time and would not have swallowed a lot of exaggerated claims.
There are over 24,000 existing manuscripts which contain the whole or part of the New Testament and a number were copies very near to the time of the events they describe.
This contrasts with Caesar's 'Gallic Wars', for example, for which the oldest copy surviving today was made over 900 years after the original was written. This is typical of ancient manuscripts. In fact, the manuscript evidence for the Gospels and the rest of the New Testamentis far more plentiful than for any other ancient book. Because of the wealth of the evidence and its early date, modern scholars have no doubts about the basic reliability of the transmission of the New Testament documents. In this way we can check the accuracy of the text of our modern translations and see that it has remained unchanged through history.
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