Here is a simple test of fairness that I like to put to anyone who tells me the New Testament cannot be trusted as a historical document. Would you apply the same rule to every other book from the ancient world? Almost no one will, and the reason is revealing.
How Historians Treat Caesar
Consider Caesar’s Gallic Wars. We have about ten manuscripts of it, and the earliest was copied roughly nine hundred years after Caesar wrote. Nine centuries of copying by hand, with nothing earlier to check it against. Historians accept it without a second thought. It is taught as history, quoted as history, and footnoted as history, and no one is laughed out of a classroom for believing it.
How the Same People Treat the New Testament
Now look at the New Testament. Thousands of Greek manuscripts. Fragments reaching back to within a few generations of the events they describe. By the ordinary standards historians use for every other ancient text, no ancient book comes close.
Yet this is the one book that gets told it cannot be trusted. The documents with the thinnest support are waved through. The document with the richest support is stopped at the door.
Apply the Rule to Everyone
Suppose we took the skeptic seriously and applied his standard consistently. The first casualties would not be the Gospels. They would be Caesar, Plato, Aristotle, and Tacitus. Most of what we know about the ancient world would be gone by lunchtime. Ancient history class would be canceled.
Nobody does that. Nobody is willing to lose Caesar in order to be rid of Christ. So the rules quietly change for one book only.
And that tells you what is really going on. When someone needs a special rule just to reject your evidence, what you are looking at is not skepticism. Skepticism applies one standard to everything and follows it wherever it goes. What you are looking at is a verdict in search of an excuse.
I am not asking for special treatment for the Bible. I am asking for the opposite. Judge it exactly as you judge Caesar, Plato, and Tacitus, by the number of manuscripts and by how early they are. Apply the same rules to every book, and the Bible wins that contest going away.
So the question I leave with the skeptic is not whether he believes. It is why one book, and one book only, gets a different set of rules.
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