Jeffrey: You’ve gone through the Ph.D. program in New Testament at Harvard, and you still trust and defend the reliability of the gospels. Have you always felt that they were reliable? How did you come to the certainty you have now? 

Roberts: When I first became exposed to critical scholarship in college, I went through a period in which I doubted the reliability of the Gospels. But as I began to examine the philosophical and methodological assumptions of academic scholarship (such as the assumption that historians should reject the possibility of miracles in their scholarship), I began to see how negative evaluations of the Gospels often had more to do with the scholar's presuppositions than the facts of the Gospels themselves. Over the years, the Gospels have shown themselves to be reliable as historical sources for Jesus.

Jeffrey: Can you explain how you came to write this book? 

Roberts: This book began as a part of my blog (www.markdroberts.com). I had written a series debunking the Jesus Seminar. Given all the peculiarities of this group, showing their weaknesses wasn't too hard. But it occurred to me that I should do more than debunk the critics of the Gospels. I needed to make a positive case for believing in their reliability. So I wrote an extended blog series, Are the New Testament Gospels Reliable? (http://www.markdroberts.com/htmfiles/resources/gospelsreliable.htm). Someone at Crossway Books saw this series and thought it would make a good book. Eventually I edited what I had put up on my blog, added some new material, and voilà, a book (or as they say, a "blook," a book from a blog). 

Jeffrey: How is your book’s origins as a blog reflected in the final product?  

Roberts: When I blog, I am writing, not for academicians, but for a popular audience. Can We Trust the Gospels? continues to have this audience in mind. Moreover, I've constructed the book as a F.A.Q., a list of "frequently asked questions." This way a person can use the book to find answers to a specific question, such as "What sources did the Gospel writers use?" without reading through the whole book. Finally, because I began this book by publishing it online, I was able to get lots of feedback from readers, which enabled me to clarify or correct things I had original written. 

Jeffrey: Can We Trust the Gospels? is very readable. Those who have no knowledge of New Testament text criticism will not have any problem going through it. With your credentials, you obviously could have made this a more scholarly work. Why did you choose to write a book that is accessible to the layman?  

Roberts: Though I did a PhD in New Testament, and though I've taught New Testament in seminary settings for many years, I am, at heart, a pastor. I care about what real people think and experience. I wanted to write a book that was available to the average reader, both Christian and non-Christian. Plus, there are some fine New Testament scholars who are defending the reliability of the Gospels within the academic world. But much of this excellent scholarship is not readily available to non-experts. I wanted ordinary folk to discover what many of us in the field of New Testament studies understand about the Gospels and their trustworthiness. 

Jeffrey: In the second chapter, you spend some time addressing Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus. Ehrman estimates that there are 200,000 to 400,000 variants within the New Testament manuscripts; a fact he uses to cast doubt on their reliability. You don’t seem to think that the amount of variants undermines the reliability of the Gospels at all. Can you explain? 

Roberts: Sure. For one thing, the vast majority of the variants (differences among the manuscripts) are utterly trivial (spelling variations, missing letters, etc.). But, more importantly, when you consider that we have thousands of ancient manuscripts of the Gospels, and that each manuscripts contains, on average, tens of thousands of characters, and that these were all copied by hand, then the existence of 200,000 to 400,000 variants becomes an amazingly small number. There could be more than a billion variants, literally. So the Gospel manuscripts are, in fact, a highly reliable guide to what was in the original documents (autographs). Ironically, Ehrman himself proves this point in his book, because he is almost never uncertain about what the original document actually said. He shows that some changes were made by scribes, indeed. But this very argument assumes the ability to know what was earlier. So Ehrman actually shows that his insinuations about the Gospels are misleading. He is a fine example of a brilliant scholar who needs to examine his philosophical and methodological approaches more carefully.  

Jeffrey: I like your description of the Gospel accounts of Jesus as four different “inspired paintings.”  How does this affect the way we should view the Gospels and each of their differences?   

Roberts: A painting of something, in the book I use the example of paintings of Half Dome in Yosemite National Park, can represent that thing accurately and insightfully without being a precise photographic image. In fact, a painting can often reveal something about an object that is not seen in a photo. The Gospels are like this, in that they are not so much snapshots or video clips of Jesus's ministry so much as inspired paintings. Thus differences among the Gospels should be seen, not as contradictions, but as varying insights and emphases. So, for example, the fact that Luke has shepherds visit the baby Jesus and Matthew has Magi isn't a contradition, but a variation in presentation. Both Luke's and Matthews "paintings" are reliable, but they are clearly different.  

Jeffrey: Why do you think that the Christian, who already basically trusts the Gospel accounts of Jesus, should read your book? 

Roberts: There are two main reasons. First, it's inevitable that Christians will face challenges to their confidence in the Gospels. Some of these come from pop culture. The Da Vinci Code is an obvious example. Some come from scholars, like Bart Ehrman, who write seemingly authoritative books for lay readers, and who get lots of attention from the secular press. Christians need to be prepared to fend off attacks on the trustworthiness of the Gospels. 

Second, Christians need to be ready to help their friends, Christians or otherwise, who aren't so confident in the Gospels, and who might easily be influenced by popular attacks. Though I might be able to satisfy myself by saying, "I believe the Bible is God's Word, and therefore trustworthy," I need to be able to deal with the actual historical questions of others who don't share my convictions.  

Jeffrey: You seem to be wearing two hats: that of the historian, and of the Christian who believes in Jesus. How did you balance those two roles as you wrote the book? 

Roberts: In writing Can We Trust the Gospels? I mostly wore my historian hat. But I admitted up front my Christian conviction, because it surely impacts the way I do history. Scholars on the other side who pretend as if their scholarship is somehow purely objective are fooling themselves. Any scholar of the Gospels, for example, needs to decide how to deal with miracles, and this decision is not objective and neutral, but reflects the scholar's worldview, which is strongly impacted by matters of faith.  

Jeffrey: If the Gospels are reliable historical documents, does it then follow that they are reliable for faith?