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Repeating an accusation doesn’t make it true. Critics of Christianity have made the same false claims for years—for example, that the New Testament manuscripts were radically corrupted and that powerful people wrongly suppressed other valid Gospels. Yet despite these repeated claims, historical evidence doesn’t support the charges.

Scholars Don Carson and Mike Kruger have spent their careers studying the New Testament manuscripts. Responding to the claims of Bart Ehrman and others that early Gospels were suppressed in the name of orthodoxy, Carson says, “The actual evidence we have runs exactly in the opposite direction.” He explains that the first-century church had a strong confessional consensus and that proto-Gnostic gospels didn’t start to proliferate until the second century. Both Carson and Kruger believe we have many reasons to trust the New Testament manuscripts that have been passed down to us, including the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Listen to this episode of The Gospel Coalition Podcast or watch a video.

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Transcript

Is there enough evidence for us to believe the Gospels?

In an age of faith deconstruction and skepticism about the Bible’s authority, it’s common to hear claims that the Gospels are unreliable propaganda. And if the Gospels are shown to be historically unreliable, the whole foundation of Christianity begins to crumble.
But the Gospels are historically reliable. And the evidence for this is vast.
To learn about the evidence for the historical reliability of the four Gospels, click below to access a FREE eBook of Can We Trust the Gospels? written by New Testament scholar Peter J. Williams.

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