Let me begin November by asking and briefly answering this question: What would Christian apologists want to find in purported early biographies of Jesus?
Well, we’d want the authorship to be early (that is, close to the time of Jesus’ birth, ministry, crucifixion, and Resurrection), for the evidence of authorship to be reliable, for the authors themselves to have been in a position to write credible biographies, for there to be consistency among the various biographies (assuming there is more than one), for there to be consistency between those biographies and other ancient history we have, for there to be evidence that people back then found the biographies to be reliable and believable, for competing narratives to be unsatisfactory for one reason or another, and for there to have been a lack of incentive for the purported authors to have lied. And, of course, we would want the biographies to contain no internal inconsistencies and to show the divinity of Jesus without generally dismissing or challenging natural reality.
I think that’s a pretty complete list. And I think that the Gospels meet those hopes rather well, do they not? Add to this the point that Blaise Pascal was right to argue that the rational person (a) must approach this question and (b) should approach it with the hope of cultivating belief rather than rejecting it.
The reader might want to consider, relatedly and for starters, two other posts on this blogsite: “What Do You Do with This Old Manuscript?” and “Who Should Have Written the Gospels?”
Have a good month!