Here is the abstract for the paper that I’ll be presenting at the Annual ISCA Conference in Wichita on 11–12 September 2026 (https://isca-apologetics.org/):
Inerrancy, Patterns of Behavior, and the Implications on Early Gospel Publication
The New Testament portrays the earliest Christians as being reliant on Scripture—as recognizing that God spoke through Scripture, as seeing Jesus through the eyes of these Scriptures, as producing their own Scriptures as the foundation of the expanding Church, and as encouraging believers everywhere to publicly read, teach, guard, and conform to these Christian Scriptures. Yet despite this portrayal of scriptural reliance, there are scholars who portray the early Church as hesitating for thirty or more years after the resurrection before producing the earliest published accounts of the life and teachings of Jesus. Accordingly, they visualize the Gospel accounts as being based on accumulated oral traditions, passed down over decades, though guided perhaps by the memories of aging witnesses. These conflicting portrayals strike at an aspect of the Chicago Statement’s doctrine of inerrancy that warrants more attention. As an alternative to theories involving delayed publications, a minority of scholars have argued that Matthew was published within a decade of the resurrection, in support of Jewish Christians who had been scattered across the eastern Mediterranean due to persecution. In this paper, I argue that our acceptance of the truthfulness of the New Testament’s portrayal of the historical context of the early church, namely the early church’s reliance on Scripture as an established pattern of behavior, should implicitly lead one to favor a belief in the early publication of Gospels.
