Craig Keener on Why the Gospels Hold Up as History

The case that the gospels can be trusted as historical sources has rarely been made by someone better positioned to make it. Craig Keener is the F. M. and Ada Thompson Professor of New Testament at Asbury Theological Seminary, author of more than thirty books, and one of the most cited New Testament scholars alive. His four-volume commentary on Acts cites roughly 45,000 ancient sources. He has spent decades inside the Greco-Roman world the gospels were written into. He started his career as an outspoken atheist.

In a recent Faith Lab conversation, Keener laid out what the historical case for the gospels actually looks like in 2026: why the popular skepticism about them gets the genre wrong, how the same kind of careful work historians apply to other ancient texts applies here, and why a Christianity built on evidence has more room for honest doubt than most Christians have been told.

A Scholar Who Wasn’t Always One

Keener tells his own conversion story without drama. He was a “smug atheist” with a layman’s interest in philosophy, the kind of person who thought religion was a category error. Plato eventually got him asking questions about whether immortality required something or someone infinite behind it. A roadside conversation with two fundamentalist Christians, who (when he asked them about dinosaur bones) told him the devil put them there to fool us, handed him the gospel. He got home, felt what he could only describe as the unmistakable presence of God, and decided to start reading the Bible.

The reason that story matters is not its theological tidiness. It’s that the man telling it ended up devoting his life to checking whether what he believed actually held up under historical scrutiny. He became one of the people most qualified to answer the question.

The Gospels Belong to a Specific Ancient Genre

The most consequential shift in gospel scholarship over the last fifty years isn’t theological. It’s about genre. For most of the twentieth century, the gospels were treated as a peculiar form of religious literature, related to history but not really historical. That has changed.

The current scholarly consensus, built largely on the work of people like Richard Burridge and Keener himself, is that the four canonical gospels fit the genre of Greco-Roman bios, or ancient biography. And ancient biography in the first century wasn’t a free-form genre. It was a form of historical writing.

The test is straightforward. If you want to see whether ancient biographers were trying to get things right, you compare biographies of the same person written by different authors. If the overlap is high, the authors were drawing on real information. If the overlap is low, they were making it up. Keener has done that comparison with Roman figures like the emperor Otho. His doctoral students have extended it to Plutarch, Suetonius, Tacitus’ Agricola, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and Diogenes Laertius.

The result, documented at length in Christobiography, is that the early Roman empire was the apex of historical care in ancient biography. The four canonical gospels sit squarely inside that period. They behave like the rest of the genre. They are information-based.

Why Living Memory Changes Everything

There’s a comparison Keener returns to that should reset the conversation for anyone who thinks the gospels are too late to be trustworthy.

“Arrian is writing in the mid to late second century about Alexander the Great who died in 323 BC, that’s like 450 years later. But the normal critical dating of the Gospel of Mark is about 40 years later. So like one-tenth of the length and time. And yet many people will just accept the substance of what Arrian says about Alexander. And then when it comes to Mark, oh no, no, no, that’s a religious text.” – Craig Keener

Arrian’s biography of Alexander the Great is still treated as our most reliable source on Alexander. It was written more than four centuries after Alexander died. The Gospel of Mark, on the most common critical dating, was written within four decades of Jesus.

Oral historians use a specific phrase for that early window: living memory. It’s the period when eyewitnesses or people who knew eyewitnesses are still alive. It typically lasts 60 to 80 years. Material composed inside that window is, on average, more reliable than material composed outside it. There are still mistakes. But the floor is higher because witnesses can correct the record.

All four canonical gospels were composed inside that window. Every so-called lost gospel, Thomas, Judas, and the rest, was composed outside it. That’s one of the reasons the mainstream early church focused on the four. It wasn’t censorship. It was historical judgment.

Luke Writes Like a Historian

Read the opening four verses of Luke’s gospel the way you would the preface of an ancient historian, and what you find is striking. Luke isn’t appealing to private inspiration. He’s claiming investigation, witness consultation, and careful arrangement. He’s writing to a specific reader, Theophilus, so that reader can have certainty about what he already partly knows.

Keener pointed to a detail many readers miss. The Greek verb often translated “investigated” in Luke 1:3, according to research by David Moessner, frequently implies thorough acquaintance through participation in other ancient historical works. That fits Luke’s later use of “we” in Acts, where the most natural reading is that the author was actually there for parts of what he describes.

This is exactly the move Herodotus and Thucydides made when they invented critical history. They contrasted themselves with Homer, who appealed to the muse. They appealed to investigation. Luke is following that playbook in plain view of his reader.

A lot of contemporary Christians, asked why they trust the gospels, answer in a more Homeric register than a Lukan one. They say because it’s God’s word, without ever appealing to the careful historiographic work Luke is doing on the page. Both answers can be true. But losing the historical answer leaves Christians flat-footed when serious questions show up.

Miracles and the Standard We Apply

The historical case for the gospels eventually runs into a different objection. Even if the texts are reliable, the events they report include miracles. And miracles, the modern objection goes, don’t happen. Keener has spent more time on this question than most.

His two-volume Miracles and the shorter Miracles Today document hundreds of cases of attested healings from around the world, many with medical records, some peer-reviewed through the Global Medical Research Institute. The cases include people healed of deafness, blindness, and conditions with no other plausible explanation. The witnesses exist. The records exist. The question is what we do with them.

Keener’s reframing of the standard skeptical move is sharp:

“You’ve come across a traffic accident and the officer is interviewing witnesses and then somebody comes up and says, wait, don’t listen to them. That’s not what happened. And the officer says, well, tell me what you saw happen. I didn’t see anything happen. I wasn’t there. That’s why I know it didn’t happen. We wouldn’t take that seriously. But when it comes to miracles, people do that.” – Craig Keener

We accept testimony as evidence for almost everything else we believe. Antarctica exists because people who have been there report it. Electricity exists because of the demonstrated effects in our lives and the testimony of physicists about what’s actually happening. The objection to miracles isn’t really an objection to evidence. It’s a worldview that won’t let miracles count as evidence no matter how the witnesses come in.

Faith, Doubt, and the Already / Not Yet

The hardest version of the question isn’t about evidence. It’s about pain. Bart Ehrman, the New Testament scholar who has done more than anyone alive to popularize skepticism about the gospels, has been clear that the thing that drove him out of Christianity wasn’t manuscript evidence. It was suffering. Unanswered prayer. The brutal fact that the world doesn’t behave the way a benevolent God ought to make it behave.

Keener takes that seriously. He’s an active charismatic. He prays for healing. He has also documented Paul leaving Trophimus sick at Miletus, Epaphroditus nearly dying despite faithful service, and the apostle himself never being relieved of the thorn in his flesh.

The framework Keener works inside is what theologians call the already / not yet nature of the kingdom of God. Jesus inaugurated the kingdom but did not complete it. His healings, his exorcisms, his resurrection: these are a foretaste, evidence that God hasn’t forgotten what he promised, but they are not the completion. Sickness and death still happen. Prayer is still sometimes met with silence. The kingdom is here in seed form, not in full.

“Jesus doesn’t throw us away because we entertain doubt, we ask questions. But ultimately, is there enough evidence? Is there a preponderance of evidence? Is there enough to invite us to trust? And I think there is.” – Craig Keener

That’s the conclusion Keener keeps arriving at. Even John the Baptist, sitting in prison, sent his disciples to ask Jesus whether he was really the one. Jesus didn’t rebuke him for the question. He pointed to evidence: the things the prophets had said the Messiah would do, the things John’s disciples were watching happen.

A faith that can survive real doubt has to be a faith built on more than feeling. The historical case for the gospels, the case Keener has spent decades on, is one of the better foundations available.

Where to Go From Here

Keener’s own work is the most direct way in. Christobiography is the technical case for the gospels as ancient biography. Miracles Today is the shorter, accessible version of his work on documented miracle claims. Suffering: Its Meaning for the Spirit-Filled Life sits behind the second half of his Faith Lab conversation. His website collects shorter pieces, sermons, and teaching videos for a general audience.

For readers who want the next step on gospel reliability specifically, Caleb Friedeman’s work on the birth narratives, covered in a previous Faith Lab episode, is the natural companion piece.

The case for the gospels isn’t a brittle one. It survives serious scrutiny, holds up under comparison to the rest of ancient history, and rewards anyone willing to look at it honestly. That’s worth knowing.