To Whom Shall We Go?
Why the Witnesses Matter More Than the Timeline
Someone on Reddit posed what they thought was a devastating question about the Gospels. Paraphrasing: if you think they’re direct eyewitness testimony, why? And if you think they were written decades later, as historians suggest, why trust them?
My first instinct was to keep it simple. Peter already answered this one.
Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.” (John 6:68-69, ESV)
I trust the motivations of those who desired that others know His words of eternal life and directly experienced their power, enough so to give up their very lives in their proclamation, preservation, and defense.
That’s the short version. But the question deserves more, because buried inside it is a false choice that shapes how a lot of people think about the New Testament. And once you see the false choice, the whole framing collapses.
The question assumes two options: either the Gospels are raw eyewitness accounts written on the spot, or they were composed decades later and therefore can’t be trusted. Door A or Door B. Pick one.
The problem is that these aren’t the only doors, and Door B doesn’t lead where the questioner thinks it does.
Take Luke. He tells you what he’s doing. Right there in his opening verses, he says he carefully investigated everything from the beginning, drawing on eyewitness sources, and composed an orderly account so that Theophilus could have certainty about the things he’d been taught (Luke 1:1-4). That’s not a man scribbling down what he personally saw at the crucifixion. It’s also not a man inventing legends two centuries after the fact. It’s deliberate historiography rooted in living testimony. He names his method. He names his purpose. He names his standard.
And that’s the thing the Reddit framing misses entirely. “Written decades later” and “rooted in eyewitness testimony” are not in tension. They’re exactly how ancient historiography worked.
Consider the double standard. Tacitus wrote about Nero’s persecution of Christians roughly 50 years after the events. Thucydides composed his history of the Peloponnesian War well after many of the battles he describes. Plutarch’s biographies of Alexander the Great appeared over 400 years after Alexander’s death. Nobody in the academic world treats these time gaps as automatically discrediting. The sources are evaluated on their merits, their internal consistency, their corroboration by other evidence, and the plausibility of their transmission.
But when the subject is Jesus, suddenly “decades later” becomes a trump card. A 30-to-60-year gap between events and composition, with eyewitnesses still alive during much of that period, gets treated as though it were a fatal flaw. Meanwhile, we build entire histories of the ancient world on sources with gaps ten times larger and manuscript traditions a hundred times thinner.
Something other than historical methodology is driving that inconsistency.
The numbers are worth stating plainly because most people have never heard them.
The New Testament has over 5,800 Greek manuscripts, with the earliest fragments dating within decades of composition. Homer’s Iliad comes in a distant second at roughly 1,900 manuscripts with a 400-year gap. Caesar’s Gallic Wars? About 10 manuscripts, with the earliest copy arriving 950 years after the original. Tacitus’s Annals? Around 20 manuscripts, with a 1,000-year gap.
We accept Caesar and Tacitus as historically reliable without hesitation. If you apply the same standards to the New Testament, it’s the best-attested ancient document in existence. Period. The only way to reject its reliability is to invent a special standard that applies to no other ancient text. And at that point, you’re no longer doing history. You’re doing philosophy and calling it history.
But manuscript evidence, as impressive as it is, only tells you about transmission. Did the text survive intact? (Yes, to a remarkable degree. Textual scholars reconstruct the original with roughly 99.5% certainty, and the remaining variants affect no core doctrine.) The deeper question is whether the testimony itself is trustworthy. And that’s where cost enters the picture.
The earliest Christians didn’t have institutional power, social prestige, or financial incentive backing their claims. They had the opposite. Proclaiming a crucified Messiah in the ancient world was socially ruinous and physically dangerous. Crucifixion was Rome’s most shameful execution. Claiming that a crucified man was Lord of the universe wasn’t savvy marketing. It was, from a human standpoint, the worst possible pitch.
And yet they made it. And they kept making it while being beaten, imprisoned, exiled, and killed.
This matters for a specific reason. People die for things they believe are true all the time. That proves sincerity, not accuracy. But the apostolic claim is different. These weren’t people who heard a rumor and committed to it. These were people who claimed to have seen the risen Jesus, eaten with Him, touched Him, spoken with Him. They weren’t dying for a belief. They were dying for a claimed experience. And people do not endure torture and execution for experiences they know they fabricated.
Paul was a Pharisee who actively persecuted the church. James was Jesus’s brother who thought He was out of His mind during His ministry. Both reversed course completely. Both claimed they saw the risen Christ. Both paid with their lives. Whatever happened to these men, “they made it up” requires you to explain why they’d manufacture a lie and then die for it, when recanting would have restored everything they lost.
The questioner’s framing also implies that if the Gospels aren’t fully independent, that weakens the case. In reality, complete independence would be more suspicious. If four people witness a car accident, you expect overlapping details and some shared phrasing alongside different angles and emphases. Perfect agreement suggests collusion. Partial overlap with distinct perspectives suggests a shared event reported by different people. That’s exactly what we find in the Gospels.
Matthew and Luke both draw on material also found in Mark. They also contain material unique to each of them. John stands substantially independent, with a different chronological structure and theological emphasis, while confirming the core events. This pattern makes sense if multiple people in a community are preserving testimony about real events through different channels. It makes very little sense on any theory of invention.
So where does this leave us? I’d say roughly here:
The Gospels reflect eyewitness testimony transmitted through the early Christian community and composed into their final forms within living memory of the events. The transmission was careful, the documentation was early, and the manuscript tradition is unparalleled in the ancient world. The people who preserved and transmitted this testimony did so at extraordinary personal cost, including the cost of their lives. The internal evidence (embarrassing details, counterproductive content, precise historical and geographical accuracy) consistently points toward authentic reporting rather than legendary invention. And the external evidence (archaeological confirmation, enemy attestation, early non-Christian references) corroborates the picture.
You can reject all of this. But you should be honest about why you’re rejecting it. If the standard you’re applying to the New Testament would cause you to reject every other ancient document, you don’t have a historical objection. You have a philosophical commitment that’s overriding the evidence. And that’s worth examining.
Peter had it right. The question was never really about manuscript dates or source dependencies. The question is: where else would you go? What alternative account of reality handles the evidence better?
Two thousand years later, nobody’s produced one.