"Come on now, we cant trust anything that happened 2000 years ago"

  The other day I was on the bus and decided to start up a conversation with the guy sitting next to me.  I asked him, "if your favourite dog was drowning and your nasty neighbour was drowning who would you rescue?"  He has a good laugh, said it was actually a really hard question but he would save his nasty neighbour because of the value of human life.  I asked him why he felt that way and we started a conversation. 

   After a few minutes I told him I was a christian and he has another good laugh.  I asked him why he thought that was funny and he said "because you believe in things that might have happened 2000 years ago.  We cant trust anything that happened 2000 years ago"

  So is this true?  Can we not trust historical events or that historical people existed so long ago? 

I asked him if he believed Alexander the Great was a real person and if he actually did the things that were attributed to him.  He laughed and said of course.  I asked why and he explained that Alexander the Great was a historical person and the historical records prove that.  So I explained that the first records about Alexander the Great were written by Arrian and Plutarch 400 years after his death, yet historians consider these records very reliable and accurate regarding this Greek conqueror.

  In history the time gap that is the most important is the gap between the events and when they were recorded, not how long ago they were recorded.  When we weigh evidence what matters is the time gap between the events and the recording of that evidence.  Good evidence does not become bad evidence because it was recorded a long time ago.

When it comes to the life of Jesus and the events of the New Testament these records were written down within the lives of the eyewitnesses.  The New Testament was written while the eyewitnesses were still alive.  The New Testament was not recorded like much of the history in the time of Antiquity some hundreds of years after the events.  This is what sets the New Testament apart, it was written by eyewitnesses, and recorded from the testimony of eye witnesses.  Not some 400 years later.  The famous legends about Alexander the Great did not come around till centuries after Arrian and Plutarch's records.

So can we trust that certain detailed events occurred some 2000 years ago? The answer is it depends on the quality of the evidence.  In regard to the New Testament, the evidence is overwhelming from a historical point of view.