The Big Questions About the BibleSample

Is the New Testament Untrustworthy Due to Its Bias?

This question is one of the objections against the Bible I hear the most from people who argue against Christianity. They say you can’t trust what the Bible says about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus because his followers wrote the New Testament. Therefore, the authors were biased, and you can’t trust a bar of what they say. This statement sounds somewhat right at face value, doesn’t it? Let’s dig a little deeper.

Unless you’re a completely objective robot, everyone has an opinion about everything. Someone writes all history, and everyone has some bias.

If you win the lottery, you’ll be biased when you talk to someone about it, won’t you? That doesn’t mean it never happened, or it wasn’t a good thing?

If you’re going to throw away every document in the world that has some bias, you’d have to do away with writing and knowledge as a whole. You’d have to throw away the entire discipline of history.

Because the New Testament writers had an opinion about what they were writing doesn’t necessarily discount what they wrote or make it any less reliable. Because they were very positive about Jesus doesn’t mean what they said about him wasn’t true. You need to do what every reasonable person would do, which is to evaluate what they wrote on its own merits.

For example, take Julius Caesar, another famous person from ancient history. He was an author, too, and he left us some writings. Most of what we know about him is from people who were very favorable to him. I’ve never heard anyone say Julius Caesar didn’t exist or the events he was part of never happened. Instead, what historians do is evaluate the evidence on its own merits.

Some people seem to treat the New Testament very differently because the claims are about Jesus and the implications these would have on your life if you’re prepared to consider them.

The New Testament can be corroborated at many points by other external historical sources, so we have a starting point. So the question shouldn’t be, “Do I toss it out or not?” but instead, “What do I do about it?”

– Eliezer Gonzalez