The separate and individual New Testament accounts of the life of Jesus were written 300 years before the Bible was assembled. And these separate and individual accounts of the life of Jesus didn't become reliable when there were placed in the collection of documents we call the Bible. These accounts of the life of Jesus were included in the Bible because they were considered accurate and reliable when they were written. And they were written by people who were alive at the time when the events that they were documenting were actually occurring, pretty much unlike nearly all of the other ancient historical texts that we have today regarding all of ancient history.
Here’s the point: these accounts, these first century accounts of the life of Jesus were considered accurate and valuable and true at the time they were written, and that’s why they were eventually placed in the collection of books that we call the Bible. So when people struggle with faith because of anything to do with the New Testament documents, they should know the true facts of the matter regarding these documents: that copies of the New Testament can be found in more ancient manuscripts than any other work of ancient literature in all of history; and that even atheist biblical scholars like Bart Ehrman conclude that we can have a high degree of confidence that we can reconstruct the original text of the New Testament…the text that is in the Bibles that we use today…because of the abundance of ancient textual evidence that we have to compare.
It’s never not funny, or surprising, when skeptics intentionally and selectively hold the writings of ancient New Testament history to clearly different standards than they do the writings of the entirety of all other ancient history.
