JESUS CHRIST: GOD-MAN - Vital Christianity

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"Whether by giving the gospels the benefit of the doubt which all narratives of
purportedly historical events merit or by approaching them with an initial
suspicion in which every detail must satisfy the criteria of authenticity, the verdict
should remain the same. The gospels may be accepted as trustworthy accounts of
what Jesus did and said. One cannot hope to prove the accuracy of every detail on
purely historical grounds alone; there is simply not enough data available for that.
But as investigation proceeds, the evidence becomes sufficient for one to declare
that what can be checked is accurate, so that it is entirely proper to believe that
what cannot be checked is probably accurate as well."34
The "Gospel Perspective" series (Gospels Research Project), on which Blomberg's study
has heavily drawn, is commended with widespread approval among more than 500 members of
two international societies of biblical and theological scholars—the British based Tyndale
Fellowship, Cambridge, and its counterpart in North America, the Institute for Biblical Research.
These scholars resolutely affirm that the greater scrutiny the gospel record is put to, the firmer
their conviction becomes that the gospels are accurate and thus trustworthy.
The evidence is compelling that the portrait of Jesus presented in the gospels is as New
Testament scholar R. T. France put it,
". . . a portrait of a real man in the real world of first-century Palestine, and yet
one who so far transcends his environment that his followers soon learned to
see him as more than a man."35
There is sufficient reason to be fully confident that the gospels not only claim to be
presenting fact rather than fiction, but can, in fact, be checked in numerous places as to their
historical accuracy. Thus they are the work of responsible and well-informed writers.
Textual Evidence
Bibliography
Our acceptance of the central claim made by Jesus that He is God the Son is dependent
on whether the New Testament documents are reliable historical sources about Jesus.
Bibliography addresses this issue of the historicity of the New Testament as it deals with the
accuracy of transmission of the New Testament documents over the centuries. The argument
holds that the twentieth century Bible that we have today is an accurate reproduction of the first
century Greek New Testament. To make the determination that the historicity of the New
Testament is so substantial that it is completely authoritative for us today, biblical scholars
examine three areas of textual evidence: the number of manuscripts, the dating of manuscripts,
and the accuracy of the copying.