What is more, those four canonical gospels must all have been written by about AD 90 at the very latest. (I am inclined to think they are probably a lot earlier than that, but they cannot be later.) They are known and referred to by Christian writers in the first half of the second century, long before anyone begins to discuss the material we now know from Nag Hammadi. And they incorporate, and are based on, sources both oral and written which go back a lot earlier, sources from the time when not only most of Jesus's followers were still alive and active within the early Christian movement, but when plenty of others--bystanders, opponents, officials--were still around, aware of the new movement as it was growing, and ready to challenge or contradict tales that were gaining currency. Palestine is a small country. In a world without print and electronic media, people were eager to hear and eager to pass on stories about anyone and anything out of the ordinary. The chances are, as John suggests at the end of his gospel, that there was in fact far more material available about Jesus than any one of the gospel writers had space to put down. Source material must have been plentiful. The central features of Jesus's life and work must have been well known. As one of the early preachers says, these things were not done in a corner.
Is the Gospels' Portrait of Jesus Reliable?
It is not as easy to reconstruct the sources of the gospels as has sometimes been imagined. In particular, I have never shared the enthusiasm for a source widely referred to as "Q," which many suppose lies behind Matthew and Luke. If such a source ever existed, it is tenuous in the extreme (though this hasn't stopped intrepid souls from making the attempt first to reconstruct it and then to use that reconstruction as a measuring stick over against Matthew and Luke themselves). It is even more shaky to suggest, as some have done in recent times, that such a source represents an entire strand of early Christianity, with its own beliefs and way of life. It is much more likely, in my judgment, that the gospel writers were able to draw on a bewildering variety of sources, many of them oral (in a world where oral reports were prized more highly than written ones), and many of them from eyewitnesses.
This doesn't mean, of course, that everything the gospels say is thereby automatically validated. Assessing their historical worth can be done, if at all, only by the kind of painstaking historical work which I and others have attempted at some length. I simply record it as my conviction that the four canonical gospels, broadly speaking, present a portrait of Jesus of Nazareth which is firmly grounded in real history. As the late historian John Roberts, author of a monumental History of the World (1980), sums it up, "the gospels need not be rejected; much more inadequate evidence about far more intractable subjects has often to be employed [in writing history]." The portrait of Jesus we find in the canonical gospels makes sense within the world of Palestine in the 20s and 30s of the first century. Above all, it makes coherent sense in itself. The Jesus who emerges is thoroughly believable as a figure of history, even though the more we look at him, the more we feel once more that we may be staring into the sun.
