page_title: Historicity of Jesus
section_title: Synoptic Gospels
hierarchical_section_title: Historicity of Jesus / Sources / New Testament sources / Synoptic Gospels
context_page_description: The historicity of Jesus relates to whether Jesus of Nazareth was a historical figure. Virtually all scholars who have investigated the history of the Christian movement find that the historicity of Jesus is effectively certain, and standard historical criteria have aided in reconstructing his life. Scholars differ on the beliefs and teachings of Jesus as well as the accuracy of the details of his life that have been described in the gospels, but virtually all scholars support the historicity of Jesus and reject the Christ myth theory that Jesus never existed.
  The question of the historicity of Jesus is part of the study of the historical Jesus as undertaken in the quest for the historical Jesus and the scholarly reconstructions of the life of Jesus, based primarily on critical analysis of the gospel texts and applying the standard criteria of critical-historical investigation, and methodologies for analyzing the reliability of primary sources and other historical evidence.
context_section_description: The Synoptic Gospels are the primary sources of historical information about Jesus and of the religious movement he founded. These religious gospels–the Gospel of Matthew, the Gospel of Mark, and the Gospel of Luke–recount the life, ministry, crucifixion and resurrection of a Jew named Jesus who spoke Aramaic. There are different hypotheses regarding the origin of the texts because the gospels of the New Testament were written in Greek for Greek-speaking communities, and were later translated into Syriac, Latin, and Coptic. Historians often study the historical reliability of the Acts of the Apostles when studying the reliability of the gospels, as the Book of Acts was seemingly written by the same author as the Gospel of Luke.
caption: An 11th-century Byzantine manuscript containing the opening of the Gospel of Luke
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