Is the Bible historically reliable?

You believe a great deal about the ancient world without having seen any of it. You believe a volcano buried Pompeii, that Rome was ruled by emperors, that a wall runs across the north of England because Roman soldiers built it there. You believe these things because people who were present wrote them down, and because what they wrote matches what has since been dug out of the ground. Nobody thinks this is credulous. It is how everything we know about the past is known.

The Bible asks to be tested the same way. So set aside for a moment the question of whether it is God's word, and ask the narrower one: when it reports an event, did the event happen? The question presses hardest on the New Testament, because that is where the central claims sit and that is where the objection is normally aimed.

Start with when the documents were written. The bulk of the New Testament was finished before AD 70, and the last of it before the first century closed. That means these accounts were circulating while the people in them were still alive — including people with every reason to contradict them. The men who arrested Jesus, the officials who condemned Him, the soldiers who guarded the tomb: all of them were walking around Jerusalem while Christians were publicly announcing what had happened there. Writing a false account in those conditions is not difficult; it is pointless. Anyone could have walked down the road and asked.

Paul relies on exactly that. Writing to Corinth about the resurrection appearances, he lists the witnesses and then adds a detail no inventor would include.

1 Corinthians 15:6 (NKJV)

After that He was seen by over five hundred brethren at once, of whom the greater part remain to the present, but some have fallen asleep.

Most of them are still alive, he says. He is inviting his readers to go and check, and he names the number so they know how many doors to knock on. A man fabricating a story does not hand out addresses.

The writers also tell you plainly what kind of book they are producing. Luke opens his Gospel with a statement of method that would not be out of place in a modern historian's preface.

Luke 1:1–4 (NKJV)

Inasmuch as many have taken in hand to set in order a narrative of those things which have been fulfilled among us, just as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word delivered them to us, it seemed good to me also, having had perfect understanding of all things from the very first, to write to you an orderly account, most excellent Theophilus, that you may know the certainty of those things in which you were instructed.

Luke is not claiming a vision. He is claiming to have collected testimony from people who were there and to have arranged it carefully so that his reader can be sure of it. That is the language of investigation, and it can be assessed like any other investigation.

So assess it. Here is how Luke dates the start of John the Baptist's ministry:

Luke 3:1–2 (NKJV)

Now in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, Herod being tetrarch of Galilee, his brother Philip tetrarch of Iturea and the region of Trachonitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene, while Annas and Caiaphas were high priests, the word of God came to John the son of Zacharias in the wilderness.

Seven public figures in one sentence, each tied to a named office and a named territory, and the whole thing pinned to a particular year of a particular emperor. Every one of those names could be checked by Luke's first readers. All of them can still be checked now. Tiberius is on the coins, Pilate's name and office are cut into a stone found at Caesarea, and the rest appear in Josephus. That is not how legends are written. Legends stay vague about dates and quiet about officials, because names and dates are where a story gets caught.

Then there is the sort of material nobody invents. The disciples argue about which of them is greatest, and Jesus rebukes them for it. Peter, the leading apostle, denies Him three times, and Peter's own preaching is very likely the source behind Mark's Gospel. When Jesus is arrested His men run. And the first witnesses at the empty tomb are women, in a culture where a woman's testimony carried little weight in court — which is precisely why an invented account would have put Peter and John there instead. If you are constructing a story to build a movement, you do not begin by recording your leaders at their worst and resting your central claim on witnesses your audience is inclined to dismiss. These details are in the Gospels for one plausible reason: they happened, and the writers were not free to leave them out.

The men who told this story also proved willing to die for it. That needs stating carefully. We have solid early evidence for some of them: James the son of Zebedee, executed by Herod in Acts; James the brother of Jesus, whose death Josephus records; Peter and Paul, whose deaths are attested by Clement of Rome writing while men who had known them were still living. Later accounts of the others vary in quality. But the argument does not depend on the number. It depends on what they were dying for. People die for beliefs handed to them by someone else all the time, and their sincerity proves only that they believed it. These men were not dying for something they had been told. They were dying for something they said they had seen with their own eyes, in a place they could name, within their own lifetime. A man may die for a mistake. He does not die for something he knows he invented.

Finally, the story is not confined to Christian sources. Tacitus, a Roman historian with no sympathy for the movement, records that a man he calls Christus was executed under Pontius Pilate during the reign of Tiberius, and that the movement — he calls it a destructive superstition — broke out again afterwards. Josephus, a Jewish historian writing for a Roman audience, mentions both Jesus and the execution of His brother James. Pliny the Younger, governing a province around AD 112, wrote to the emperor for instructions about Christians and described what they did when they met: they gathered before dawn and sang to Christ as to a god. Suetonius, Lucian and the Jewish rabbinic writings add further fragments.

Take the Bible off the table entirely and those hostile and indifferent writers still leave you with this: a Jewish teacher executed by a Roman governor under Tiberius, and within eighty years, people across the empire meeting before sunrise to worship Him as God. Not one of those authors was trying to help the church.