Some of the reasons that the gospels are accepted as trustworthy eyewitness accounts are as follows:

• The changed demeanor of the apostles from cowardly to bold witnesses to the resurrection after meeting the resurrected Jesus;
• The fact that they died horrible deaths, showing that they really saw the resurrected Jesus, as they had nothing to gain by doing so and everything to lose;
• The early dates of the gospels, thus not allowing time for a myth to start;
• The early church was Jewish and was based primarily in the immediate vicinity of the death of Jesus. All the Roman government or local officials needed was a body (or confession) to stop the insane claims of His followers;
• The fact that the early church fathers lived at the same time as these 500 [+] witnesses who saw the resurrected Christ and his ascension (believers: Clement of Rome, Ignatius, Papius, Polycarp, Quadratus.) (Non-believers [some were contemporaries]: Tacitus, Suetonius, Josephus, Thallus, Pliny the Younger, Emperor Trajan, Talmudic writings [A.D. 70-200], Lucian, Mara Bar-Serapion, the Gospel of Truth, the Acts of Pontius Pilate.)

Even if we did not have the New Testament or Christian writings, we would be able to conclude from such non-Christian writings as Josephus, the Talmud, Tacitus, and Pliny the Younger that: 1) Jesus was a Jewish teacher; 2) many people believed that he performed healings and exorcisms; 3) he was rejected by the Jewish leaders; 4) he was crucified under Pontius Pilot in the reign of Tiberius; 5) despite this shameful death, his followers, who believed that he was still alive, spread beyond Palestine so that there were multitudes of them in Rome by A.D. 64; 6) all kinds of people from the cities and countryside – men and women, slave and free – worshipped him as God by the beginning of the second century (100 A.D.) (Jesus Under Fire: Modern Scholarship Reinvents the Historical Jesus, by Michael J. Wilkins and J. P. Moreland [general editors], pp. 221-222)

• Every turn of the archaeologists spade confirms the Bible more and more – the New Testament alone has over twenty-five thousand archaeological sites alone. Persons, places, and things have been shown to be accurate in these documents… adding top the validity of their testimony as historical documents.
• The first witness’ to find Jesus rose were women. Women’s testimony on any issue was not admissible during this time in history and culture. If the apostles were to fabricate a story and want it to be taken as true, the last thing they would have done were use women as the bearers of this truth.

All these and other evidences prove that the New Testament is a reliable history of actual events… and the only reason to reject them is a commitment to a presupposed bias, such as philosophical naturalism.