Nothing against religion, but people who truly believe the Bible is the word of God and everything is 100% true are confusing to me. Like, I told you that I wrote a book that is entirely second and third hand accounts about events that I wasn’t even alive to witness AND you should believe every word of it, you’d (rightfully) laugh in my face. But once someone slaps “because Jesus” on top of it, suddenly, we’re not supposed to question it and doing so is even considered to be blasphemous by some. I just don’t get it. -Reddit User

"To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and 'improved' by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries." -Richard Dawkins

"You and I would understand that to some degree, because we would say if you’re writing a history of a battle and you found out there were three surviving eyewitnesses to that battle, you would not feel you’d written a good history unless you talked to all three of them. You would check out everything else you’d heard by their eyewitnesses.” -Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, Richard Bauckham

Reasons we can trust the gospels:
- Manuscript evidence
- Written too early
- Not flattering
- Too detailed

"I have been reading poems, romances, vision-literature, legends, myths all my life. I know what they are like. I know that not one of them is like this. Of this text there are only two possible views. Either this is reportage … Or else, some unknown writer in the second century, without known predecessors or successors, suddenly anticipated the whole technique of modern, novelistic, realistic narrative. […] The reader who doesn’t see this has simply not learned to read.”

All I am in private life is a literary critic and historian, that’s my job. And I am prepared to say on that basis if anyone thinks the Gospels are either legend or novels, then that person is simply showing his incompetence as a literary critic. I’ve read a great many novels and I know a fair amount about the legends that grew up among early people, and I know perfectly well the Gospels are not that kind of stuff. (Christian Reflections, 209)

Now, as a literary historian, I am perfectly convinced that whatever else the Gospels are they are not legends. I have read a great deal of legend and I am quite clear that they are not the same sort of thing. They are not artistic enough to be legends. From an imaginative point of view they are clumsy; they don’t work up to things properly. (God in the Dock, 169)

Reasons we can trust the gospels:
- Manuscript evidence
- Written too early
- Not flattering
- Too detailed
- Resurrection

Three Questions:
- Is it beautiful?
- Is it good? Does it work?
- Is it true?

Three Questions:
- Is this the Jesus I think I know?
- How does Jesus challenge the way I view the world?
- Am I living like I actually believe what I am reading?