What can historians learn from the Gospels ?

The historian is not only interested in documents written by professional historians, but he gathers information from every source possible and assesses the reliability of these sources professionally and compares what he finds with what he knows from other disciplines an areas of research–all of which give him many pieces of the puzzle to build up the complete picture.

So what do professional, classical historians make of the documents of the New Testament? The question has been answered pretty comprehensively over at the ChristianCADRE blog. Here are some excerpts from the excellent article:

Michael Grant, a leading classical historian in his day, took the Gospels seriously as historical sources…concluding that from them “the main lines of [Jesus’] career and thinking and teaching can to some considerable extent be reconstructed.” Grant, The History of Rome, page 337. Grant also discusses Acts, stating that while it is not as reliable as Paul’s letters, “facts can also be derived from the Acts of the Apostles” and “the rest of the book contains a good deal of by no means unreliable historical material.” Ibid., page 344.

Grant also wrote a book entitled Jesus, An Historian’s Review of the Gospels. It is an interesting insight into how a respected classical historian treated the Gospels. While Grant finds reason to doubt some details in the Gospel narratives, he accepts them as useful historical sources about the historical Jesus. Ibid., page 199-200. He had scorn for the Jesus Myth idea, writing, “if we apply to the New Testament, as we should, the same sort of criteria as we should apply to other ancient writings containing historical material, we can no more reject Jesus’ existence than we can reject the existence of a mass of pagan personages whose reality as historical figures is never questioned.”

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