Skeptical Challenge: How Do We Know the Content of Jesus and Pilate’s Tête-à-Tête?

Some people attempt to justify their unbelief of Christianity on the grounds that the Bible contains irreconcilable difficulties and contradictions. One important role Christians serve in an apologetics-evangelism context is to try to remove obstacles that people have to believing in the truth of Scripture and thus in the truth of historic Christianity.

I once heard an atheist ask how the Gospel writers could conceivably know the nature of the private conversation between Jesus and Pontius Pilate before his condemnation and crucifixion (e.g., John 18:28–40). After all, the apostles—the proposed authors of the four Gospels—were not privy to this confidential dialogue.

This is a reasonable question. So, how can the Christian respond? There are two explanations to this objection, one purely natural and the other supernatural (or theological), but the two are not mutually exclusive.

First, given the nature of the controversy in Jerusalem surrounding Jesus of Nazareth and…