Given that the gospel accounts were written by BIASED Christians, their content can’t be accorded much legitimacy. Some sources had Al Gore inventing the ‘Internets’, too.

The writers were committed believers, and that is a fair thing to weigh. But bias is a factor to be assessed, not a verdict to be announced — otherwise no interested source could ever be believed, including the ones you trust.

1. Bias is not the same as falsehood. Historians work with interested sources constantly — letters, memoirs, partisan chronicles — and ask whether the reporting is accurate, not whether the reporter cared. A doctor who wants you to quit smoking is biased and still right. The question is correspondence to events.

2. They recorded what damaged them. Peter's threefold denial is preserved (Mark 14:66-72). The disciples abandon Jesus and flee. Women are the first witnesses of the resurrection (Mark 16:1-8) in a culture that did not accept female testimony in court. Propagandists burnish their heroes; these authors hand you the material to embarrass them.

3. Luke names his method. “It seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account... that you may have certainty” (Luke 1:1-4). That is the preface convention of ancient historiography — the claim to have consulted sources and eyewitnesses. It is a claim you can test, not an appeal to authority.

4. The creed is too early for legend. In 1 Corinthians 15:3-8 Paul hands on a formula he “received,” listing the appearances and noting that most of the five hundred witnesses were still alive. He writes around AD 50 and cites a tradition that predates him by years. Legends need generations to form; this one had no time.

5. The Gore analogy is a category mistake. A garbled quotation from a television interview is a claim about a private utterance that nobody present could check. The gospel claims were preached in Jerusalem, weeks after the events, to crowds who could have contradicted them: “as you yourselves know” (Acts 2:22). Public claims are falsifiable in a way misquotes are not.

6. There is hostile corroboration. Tacitus reports Christ's execution under Pilate and the movement's spread (Annals 15.44). Josephus mentions Jesus and the execution of James. Pliny describes Christians in Bithynia singing to Christ “as to a god.” None of these men was a Christian, and all of them are early.

7. The bias charge is symmetric. A skeptic writing about Christianity has commitments too, and every historian has a thesis. If prior commitment disqualified a source, it would disqualify the critic as surely as the evangelist. Bias is a reason to cross-check testimony, not a reason to exclude it.

8. Interested testimony is often the best. The eyewitness who cares most is usually the one who paid closest attention. We do not discard a mother's account of her child's death because she is grieving. We ask whether she was in a position to know and whether she has a motive to distort — which is exactly how the Gospels should be examined.

9. They left their disagreements in. Four accounts with different emphases, different orderings, and differing resurrection-witness lists. An editor harmonizing a fiction would have smoothed the seams. The variations are what independent sourcing looks like, and the early church preserved them rather than flattening them.

10. They had nothing to gain. Flogging, imprisonment, and execution were the likely returns on this testimony. People do die for what they sincerely believe, so this proves sincerity rather than truth — but it rules out the picture of men inventing a story for profit. Liars calculate; these men did not.

“Written by Christians” tells you they were invested. It does not tell you they lied — and the details they kept, the denials and the cowardice and the women at the tomb, are exactly the details a liar would have cut. The question is worth asking, and it has an answer.

Sources: Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses; Craig Keener, The Historical Jesus of the Gospels; Michael Licona, The Resurrection of Jesus.

Related challenges:
• How can you take the gospels as inspired when they don't even make that claim for themselves?
• Miracle stories were crafted AFTER Jesus died, and then included just to make Jesus look like a Jewish wonder working messianic figure. It’s called messianic fiction.
• There’s no evidence outside of the Bible that indicates the miracle stories about Jesus are authentic!