Review: Can We Trust the Gospels?

Peter Williams. Can We Trust the Gospels?  Wheaton, IL: Crossway, November 30, 2018.  153 pp

5 out of 5

Purchase: Amazon

Want a good book that summarize the apologetics for the Gospels being trustworthy by a reputable New Testament scholar?  Consider picking up Peter Williams’ book Can We Trust the Gospels?  The author is a principle of Tyndale House at Cambridge that leads in biblical research.  The publisher Crossway has provided Christians a great resource and the author was able to summarize the case for the Gospels within the one hundred fifty page range and still gives us readers great food for thoughts and summary of new arguments by other apologists, and scholars.

This book consists of eight chapters, each with a title that is in the form of a question.  Chapter one is titled “What do Non-Christians Sources Say?” and covers the extra biblical sources for the historicity of Jesus.  I really enjoyed this chapter.  Chapter two is on the question of what are the four Gospels and is followed by a chapter on whether the authors of the Gospels knew what they were talking about.  Chapter four discusses “undersigned coincidences” that is based upon the research and observation of Lydia McGrew to argue for telltale signs of detecting unintentional clues that the Gospels are historically reliable.  Chapter fives answer the question “Do we have Jesus’s actual words?” while chapter six is on whether the Gospel texts have chapter and chapter seven briefly discussed whether the Gospels have contradictions.  The final chapters explore the question of whether or not the Gospel writers would have made things up in the Gospels.

I love this book and there were some new arguments given here that I haven’t heard of before and certainly shows how Christians scholars have researched and implemented other fields of studies to defend the historicity of the Gospels and New Testament.  For example I really enjoyed chapter three’s discussion of popular names of Jews were different in different parts of the world during the first century and how the Gospels account shows familiarity with the common names of Jewish men in the area of Israel that would not have been popular among Jews in other areas such as Egypt, Turkey or Rome.  The statistical data is huge and must have been a massive research that spanned years.  I also appreciate the author’s discussion in the same chapters of the Gospel writer’s amazing familiarity with Israel’s geography both in terms of names of small towns and typological features.  There’s so many things to learn from this book.  I thought the discussion about whether Jesus knew Greek was also compelling and it does make me want to look more into it.

I wish the chapter on contradiction could have been longer.  Also I did wish in the final chapter when he talked about the naturalism biases of atheists that reject the Gospels historicity he could have gone one more step to refute naturalism; but that might be more philosophical than a New Testament scholar might be comfortable with.  I think these constructive criticism are minor and still the strength of the book outweighs areas it can be improved.  I recommend this resource.

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