In the prologue of his Gospel, Luke indicates that he wrote to Theophilus to give him “certainty” concerning things he had already been informed about (Lk 1:4). This, of course, implies that stories of Jesus had already been circulating at the time of Luke’s writing, just as the author himself admits in the first two verses when he says that many had already compiled narratives of “the things fulfilled among us.” Theophilus, however, appears to have had doubts of some kind, at least when it came to Luke’s version of the story. It was perhaps this “uncertainty” that motivated Luke to write his narrative about Jesus, which he anchored in eyewitness testimony (Lk 1:2).

This emphasis on external evidence inevitably leads to questions like, “How do we know that Luke’s narrative—or any of the Gospels for that matter—can be trusted as real history?” Nate Hanson, recently asked me to join him for a Faith Lab conversation of these issues with New Testament scholar Craig Keener.