Brilliant. Use this next time you’re talking to an idiot atheist about the historicity of Jesus and the New Testament.
John Dickson is a top class Bible teacher and historian – taken seriously in both spheres. In fact, the only reason I don’t take him seriously sometimes is that he still includes “musician” in his bio – even though his days in the band “In the Silence” are long gone. It’s Bonoesque. But his stuff is still worth reading.
“The so-called religious nature of Christian writings in no way diminishes their value as historical sources. Historians take the Christian agenda into account when they analyze the New Testament, just as they take the imperial bias into account when studying Tacitus or the Jewish bias when reading Josephus. But historians do not place the New Testament in a special category called “religious literature.” Indeed, in Australia’s largest public university ancient history department (Macquarie) you will find undergraduate and postgraduate courses like “The New Testament in Its Times” and “The Historical Jesus.””
Good article on the Gospel Coalition. Read it.