Is the New Testament reliable

Answer 1

If you accept the Biblical Doctrine of Preservation, then yes you can rely on it. The Doctrine of Preservation states that it was a promise of God to preserve the word of God for all generations, and that it is kept by His divine power. Psalm 12:6-7 is but one example of this promise. Generations are measurements of time are bound to earth. Preservation is the act of protecting or preserving something from harm or contamination, and since there is nothing in Heaven to contaminate the Word, that also fixes the place of this preservation on Earth. That means that we must in fact have the preserved Word of God, an incorruptable word. Are there inconsistencies? Yes. But God also answer why they are there: God chose the foolish things of this world to confound the wise. The Word of God must be approached by faith, not science or intellect. The carnal (natural) mind is emnity (at warfare) with God and will always find fault with His word. Eyewitness Testimony:Luke says he gathered eyewitness testimony and "carefully investigated everything" (Luke 1:1-4). John testifies to his firsthand experience with the resurrected Christ. John says "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched this we proclaim concerning the Word of Life." Peter said " We did not follow cleverly invented stories when we told you about the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty (2 Peter 1:16),

Says Dr. Simon Greenleafe in his work A Treatise on the Law of Evidence, "The great truths which the apostles declared were that Christ had risen from the dead, and that only through repentance from sin, and faith in Him, could men hope for salvation. This doctrine they asserted with one voice, everywhere, not only under the greatest discouragements, but in the face of the most appalling terror than can be presented to the mind of man." Based on these statements we should conclude that the New Testament is reliable.

Answer 2

The traditional view is that, since the New Testament was written by eyewitnesses and their contemporaries, it is inherently reliable. In spite of this, there are many historical errors and internal inconsistencies in the New Testament. Biblical scholars now say there is clear evidence that the gospels and Acts of the Apostles were written decades after the events they describe, by anonymous authors who were not witnesses to those events and who were unlikely to have known any witnesses to the events. At best, the authors were relying on hearsay stories about Jesus and the early church.

Matthew, Mark and Luke are called the "synoptic Gospels" because when placed in parallel and read synoptically ('with the same eye') in the original Greek language, it is clear there is a literary dependency among them . As a result, it can no longer be said that, as independent accounts, they confirm each other.

Scholars have long remarked that Acts seems to contradict the Epistles of St Paul in many fundamental areas. And, according to Acts: Jews from all the nations of the world, including proselytes, were confounded and amazed to hear the 12 disciples speaking in their own language; three thousand were converted that day. If true, a single miracle that gave the apostles competence in foreign languages, probably achieved more converts in a single day than Jesus was able to do in his entire ministry - yet this was not mentioned by Paul nor by the author of Hebrews.

Some of the epistles attributed to St Paul are clearly pseudonymous works written long after the time of St Paul. For example, it is reported that about ninety percent of scholars believe that 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus were written in the second century by an unknown author.

In summary, the New Testament is not historically reliable, nor is it an accurate record of the life and teachings of Jesus or his apostles.