ABSTRACT
The challenge to Christianity posed by contemporary historical Jesus studies has two parts. One is that on the basis of historical evidence alone, ordinary people can know little about what Jesus said and did, and even less about what he meant by what he said and did. This chapter shows that historians agree that many of the words attributed to Jesus in the New Testament are not actually his words but rather the invention of the Gospel writers or later scribal additions to the text. Virtually all secular New Testament scholars have concurred that it is too hard to explain the great many verbatim similarities among the New Testament Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke on the supposition that they were written independently. In the eighteenth century G. E. Lessing and J. G. von Herder, among others, argued that there had been extensive copying among the authors of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
