Historical Evidence for Jesus’ Message and Miracles (Apologetics for Teens Part 8)

If Jesus’ miracles are good evidence to believe His message was from God, how do we know that Jesus performed miracles in the first place? The New Testament contains evidence of Jesus’ miracles, but can we trust the New Testament? Does the text we have today accurately represent the original New Testament? Are the accounts historically reliable? Bart Ehrman, a non-Christian scholar, has laid out the criteria that both Christians and non-Christians affirm by which historical sources are evaluated. These include having multiple, independent, corroborating sources which are early, extensive, and non-biased. Historical sources that meet each of these criteria can be considered reliable and increase our certainty that the events they record actually happened. Additionally, when looking at the accuracy of the text of ancient documents, the number of copies we have and the length of time between the original and the copies that survived are considered. When we look at the sources that mention Jesus and His message, we find that they meet these historical criteria, and, when compared with other ancient sources, the New Testament exceeds all others in number of copies and closeness to the events it records.

To go into much more detail about all the historical sources pertaining to Jesus, see here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTEkXbr4qlVPGF3Qa2td7jZtRQhhIkcha

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0:00 Are Miracles Possible?
3:13 Most Miracle Claims Are Fakes or Mistakes
5:00 How Do We Know if a Miracle Happened?
7:51 Using Christian Scholars vs. Non-Christian Scholars
12:33 Bart Ehrman's Book "Did Jesus Exist?"
14:47 Absolute Certainty Can't Be Achieved
19:13 How Do Historians Evaluate Evidence?
21:20 Criterion #1: Multiple Sources
23:54 Criterion #2: Independent Sources
24:40 Criterion #3: Corroborating Sources
26:25 Criterion #4: Early Sources
27:21 Criterion #5: Extensive Sources
28:09 Criterion #6: Non-biased Sources
29:42 Ancient Sources About Jesus
33:28 What Are the Basic Facts about Jesus?
36:29 Objection #1: You Can't Use the Bible to Prove the Bible
41:25 Objection #2: The Bible Was Written by Christians, so It's Biased
44:30 Objection #3: The Bible Has Been Corrupted by Errors
49:40 Length of Time Between Originals and Copies
53:21 Number of Copies We Still Have
59:33 We Can Have Confidence in the Text of the Bible
1:05:24 The Bible Is Not Like Telephone