Craig Keener: Why the gospels hold up as history

Can the gospels be trusted as history? Craig Keener has spent his career testing that question against the rest of ancient literature, and his answer is yes, for reasons most people have never heard. The four gospels belong to a genre ancient readers recognized as historical writing. They were composed while eyewitnesses were still alive to correct them. And when you hold them to the same standard historians use for every other ancient source, they perform remarkably well.

Keener is in a good position to make that case. He is the F. M. and Ada Thompson Professor of New Testament at Asbury Theological Seminary, the 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 also started out as an outspoken atheist.

In this Faith Lab conversation, Keener walks through what the historical case for the gospels actually looks like: why popular skepticism gets the genre wrong, what living memory does for reliability, and why a faith built on evidence has more room for honest doubt than most Christians have been told.

From atheist to New Testament scholar

Keener tells his own conversion story without drama. He was a self-described “smug atheist” with a layman’s interest in philosophy, the kind of person who thought religion was a category error. Plato got him wondering whether immortality required something, or someone, infinite behind it. Then came a roadside conversation with two fundamentalist Christians who, when he asked about dinosaur bones, told him the devil put them there to fool us. Somehow they still managed to hand him the gospel. He went home, felt what he could only describe as the unmistakable presence of God, and started reading the Bible.

The story matters because of what came next. Keener spent the rest of his life checking whether what he believed could survive historical scrutiny, and he became one of the people most qualified on earth to answer the question.

The gospels are ancient biography

The most consequential shift in gospel scholarship over the last fifty years has nothing to do with theology. It has to do with 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 consensus, built largely on the work of Richard Burridge and Keener himself, is that the four canonical gospels fit the genre of Greco-Roman bios, or ancient biography. In the first century that was not a free-form genre. It was a form of historical writing.

There is a straightforward way to test whether ancient biographers were trying to get things right: compare biographies of the same person written by different authors. High overlap means the authors were drawing on real information. Low overlap means they were making things up. Keener ran that comparison on Roman figures like the emperor Otho, and his doctoral students extended it to Plutarch, Suetonius, Tacitus, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and Diogenes Laertius.

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

Written within living memory

Keener keeps returning to one comparison, and it should reset the conversation for anyone who assumes the gospels came 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.”

Arrian’s biography of Alexander is still treated as our most reliable source on Alexander, and it was written more than four centuries after his death. Mark, on the most common critical dating, was written within four decades of Jesus.

Oral historians have a name for that early window: living memory. It is the period when eyewitnesses, or the people who knew them, are still alive, and it typically lasts 60 to 80 years. Material composed inside the window is more reliable on average, because witnesses can still correct the record. All four canonical gospels were composed inside it. Every so-called lost gospel, Thomas, Judas, and the rest, came later. That is a big part of why the early church settled on the four. Not censorship. Historical judgment.

Luke writes like a historian

Read the first four verses of Luke the way you would read the preface of an ancient historian and something jumps out. Luke never appeals to private inspiration. He claims investigation, consultation of eyewitnesses, and careful arrangement, all addressed to a named reader, Theophilus, so that reader can have certainty about what he already partly knows.

Keener points to a detail most readers miss. According to research by David Moessner, the Greek verb usually translated “investigated” in Luke 1:3 often implies thorough acquaintance through participation. That fits the “we” passages in Acts, where the most natural reading is that the author was personally present for part of what he describes.

This is the same move Herodotus and Thucydides made when they invented critical history. They set themselves apart from Homer, who appealed to the muse, by appealing to investigation. Luke follows that playbook in plain view of his reader.

Ask many Christians today why they trust the gospels and the answer sounds more like Homer than Luke: because it’s God’s word. Both answers can be true at once. But losing the historical one leaves believers flat-footed when serious questions show up.

What about miracles?

Even if the texts are reliable, the events they report include miracles, and the modern objection says miracles don’t happen. Keener has spent more time on this question than almost anyone. His two-volume Miracles and the shorter Miracles Today document hundreds of attested healing claims from around the world, many with medical records, some reviewed through the Global Medical Research Institute. People healed of deafness, of blindness, of conditions with no other plausible explanation. The witnesses exist. The records exist. The question is what we do with them.

Keener reframes the standard skeptical move with a story:

“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.”

We accept testimony for nearly everything else we believe. Antarctica exists because people who have been there say so. Refusing to let testimony count for miracles is not a higher evidential standard. It is a worldview decision made before the evidence comes in.

Doubt, suffering, and a kingdom not yet finished

The hardest version of the question is not about evidence at all. It is about pain. Bart Ehrman, who has done more than anyone alive to popularize skepticism about the gospels, has said plainly that what pushed him out of Christianity was not manuscript evidence. It was suffering and unanswered prayer.

Keener takes that seriously. He is an active charismatic who prays for healing, and he can also walk you through Paul leaving Trophimus sick at Miletus, Epaphroditus nearly dying in faithful service, and Paul’s own thorn that never went away. The framework he works inside is what theologians call the already and the not yet. Jesus inaugurated the kingdom but did not complete it. The healings and the resurrection are a foretaste, evidence that God has not forgotten what he promised, while sickness and silence remain real. The kingdom is here in seed form.

“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.”

Even John the Baptist, sitting in prison, sent his disciples to ask Jesus whether he was really the one. Jesus didn’t scold him for the question. He pointed to evidence, the things the prophets said the Messiah would do, happening where John’s disciples could watch. A faith that can survive real doubt has to be built on more than feeling, and the historical case for the gospels is one of the sturdier 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 accessible version of his work on documented miracle claims. Suffering: Its Meaning for the Spirit-Filled Life sits behind the second half of this conversation. His website collects shorter pieces, sermons, and teaching videos.

If you want the next step on gospel reliability, Caleb Friedeman’s work on the birth narratives, covered in a previous Faith Lab episode, is the natural companion.

Common questions

Are the gospels considered historical documents?

Increasingly, yes. The scholarly consensus is that the four gospels belong to the genre of Greco-Roman biography, which in the first century was a form of historical writing. Comparative studies show that biographers of that era were unusually careful with their information.

How soon after Jesus were the gospels written?

On standard critical dating, Mark was written about four decades after Jesus, and all four gospels fall inside the 60 to 80 year window historians call living memory. For comparison, our best source on Alexander the Great was written more than 400 years after his death and historians still rely on it.

Why aren’t the lost gospels treated the same way?

Thomas, Judas, and the other noncanonical gospels were composed after living memory had passed. That is a major reason the early church never ranked them with the four, and it was a historical judgment rather than an act of suppression.

Was Craig Keener always a Christian?

No. He was an outspoken atheist before his conversion, and he has spent his academic career testing whether what he came to believe survives the same scrutiny historians apply to any ancient source.