The actual historical Jesus

Are the gospel accounts historically accurate? The power of the Christian faith depends on the reliability of what we are told in the gospels about what Jesus did and said, what happened to him, and the significance of it all. An interview, at Christianity Today, with Richard Bauckham, author of Jesus and the Eyewitnesses:

Has your study of eyewitnesses and tradition affected your confidence in the historical accuracy of the New Testament? Are critical scholars too quick to dismiss the "reporting" in Gospel accounts?

Yes, it certainly has! Most Gospel scholars, including some conservative ones, have been locked into a picture of how Gospel traditions reached Gospel writers that we owe to form critics at the beginning of the last century. I think the form critics were wrong in almost every respect, and we need a new model. I propose one in which the Gospels were much closer to the eyewitnesses and the way the eyewitnesses told their stories than has been envisaged by the dominant scholarly tradition. My proposals need to be debated, and some of my arguments may be proven wrong. We shall see. But that we need a new model is certain.

How would the new model you're proposing affect average believers' devotional lives? Would it make any real difference for them?

The most important point is we can be confident that in the Gospels we find the real Jesus. We don't have to try to get behind the Gospels to "the historical Jesus," as the Jesus Seminar tells us we must. Instead, we can find in the Gospels "the Jesus of testimony," Jesus as he was understood by those in the best position to know him. [more]

The Evangelical Outpost reviews Can We Trust the Gospels?: Investigating the Reliability of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John by Mark D. Roberts, and says:

Can We Trust the Gospels? caught me completely by surprise. While I knew a scholar of Mark Roberts' caliber could convince skeptics the Gospels are reliable, I never expected to have my own preconceptions uprooted and replaced with a more solid trust in these biblical texts. This book not only makes a compelling case for trusting the Gospels, it illuminates the creative ways in which God worked to bring us His word.

They Really Saw Him | Christianity Today | A Magazine of Evangelical Conviction,
Can We Trust the Gospels | The Evangelical Outpost