The Historical Reliability of the New Testament

[abaris]

Which is why textual criticism becomes so useful...not just with regard to the gospels but also for EVERY ancient work. If you reject the validity of TC for the New Testament, you'll have to be equally harsh on just about every written work of man prior to...what? 1900?

So, the tiresome routine again of explaining how texts, any text, is evaluated by historical science.

If you study history, one of the first tasks you are presented with is a text. You don't get the author, the timeframe or the region where it originated. You have to read it and to make your own judgment based on the text.

So there are three big questions:

WHEN

WHERE

WHY

And to answer you're rather smug comment about other texts being held to the same scrutiny as the bible - suprise, surprise, they are. But usually they don't feature the equivalent of unicorns and fairies, unless they are ancient works of legend and fiction. Which is what makes the bible one of the least believable works of it's period.