Over the past couple of months, major British TV companies have produced a series of documentaries on the apocryphal gospels of the early Christian period.

The New Testament gospels - the word 'gospel' literally means 'good news' - are our primary source of factual information about the life of the most remarkable and influential human being in history.

This man who, in his entire adult life, travelled no more than 80 miles from his home town of just a few hundred people, had little or no formal education and no formally recognized religious position.

Yet his public work and teaching, spread over just three years, changed the world more than that of any individual in history. Now, 2000 years after his birth and ignominious death, even people who say they have no time for him will often quote him or refer to the principles he espoused - often without admitting it and sometimes without realising it.

His name, of course, was Jesus of Nazareth. He founded what has become the largest faith community in the world, with one third of the human race claiming to subscribe to it.

The gospels give us eyewitness accounts of Jesus' ministry. Many historians agree that the last of them was completed by the late 60s or early 70s AD - certainly no later than 100 AD. Relative to other ancient works of historical literature, the gospels were written remarkably soon after the events they describe.

The earliest extant copies or fragments date from as early as the middle of the first century - for example, the small fragment of St. Mark found in the caves at Qumran. Larger numbers of copies are available from the second and third centuries. In historical terms, our earliest copies are unusually close to the time of the originals, which lends weight to their accuracy.

Some authorities have noted that there is more textual and historical evidence to support the accuracy of the four gospels than there is for any other works of antiquity: including Caesar's Commentaries and the works of Homer, Aristotle and Plato (which, by the way, hardly anybody bothers to question, including TV producers).

By the end of the fourth century, the rapidly growing Christian church had agreed on a list of New Testament books which it considered to be divinely inspired.

The four gospels seem to have been widely accepted even before then. They were first refered to in other literature by people like Papias, a church bishop, who died in 130 AD and Justin Martyr in his 1 Apology, written around 155 AD.

Left out of the approved New Testament were a group of other writings which were considered spurious for various reasons. They were not written by eyewitnesses, or contained teachings which were at variance with the principles on which the church had been founded and by which it had grown to fill the known world.

Watching some of the recent documentaries, you're left with the impression that choosing the right books for the New Testament had been a hit and miss affair. The gospels, they suggest, were selected on the whim of an elitist group of bishops, for self-serving political reasons.

Actually, the gospels we have in our Bibles were the ones widely accepted by the general Christian population; the everyday people who made up the fast-growing early church.

They had had proven their worth in changing lives for the better and helping Christians survive and thrive under the fiercest persecution. The message they contained had been carried far and wide by the first missionaries, whose preaching often transformed whole cities.

The gospels were valued not only because they contained genuine eye-witness material, but because the claims they made about Christ and the power of his message had been proven repeatedly in the experiences of real people.