Skip to contentWillowOne's PositionsTagsWhat’s newMediaStatisticsSearch
WillowOne's Positions

Eyewitness Testimony Argument

Form

As presented by Josh McDowell, Lee Strobel (The Case for Christ, 1998), and, in scholarly form, Richard Bauckham (Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 2006):

  1. The gospels are, or rest directly on, eyewitness testimony: John claims it (21:24), Luke claims to have consulted eyewitnesses (1:2), Paul cites five hundred witnesses to the risen Jesus (1 Corinthians 15:6), and Papias (c. 120) reports that Mark wrote down Peter's recollections.
  2. Eyewitness testimony is reliable evidence; courts convict on it.
  3. Multiple independent witnesses attest the miracles and the Resurrection.
  4. Therefore the events happened.

Islamic apologetics makes the same move with the isnad, the chain of named transmitters attached to each hadith; Mormonism with the signed statements of the Three and Eight Witnesses to the golden plates.

My Positions

  1. We have no eyewitness testimony. The gospels are anonymous; the names were attached in the second century. They are written in literary Greek, decades after the events, by authors who were not Galilean fishermen, and Matthew and Luke copy Mark, sometimes word for word. Paul's five hundred are a number he was told; none is named, none wrote anything, and Paul himself never met Jesus. Papias is a late and credulous source who also reports that Judas swelled up until he was wider than a chariot. The argument assumes the thing it was meant to show (Circular Reasoning, Historical Reliability of the New Testament).
  2. Eyewitness testimony is among the least reliable evidence courts admit. Mistaken identification is the leading cause of wrongful conviction in cases later overturned by DNA, around seventy per cent of them. Memory is reconstructed at each recall, is shaped by suggestion and by retelling, and feels most certain when it is most rehearsed (Elizabeth Loftus's work since the 1970s). And no court accepts testimony to a miracle at all; a witness who said the defendant walked through the wall would be disbelieved, not cross-examined.
  3. The witnesses are not independent. "Multiple attestation" requires sources that do not derive from one another. The synoptics form a chain, not a fan, and John is at the far end of a tradition that had been told and retold for sixty years. Four copies of a story are one story.
  4. Testimony to the extraordinary is testimony to the extraordinary, whoever gives it. David Hume's standard applies. Seventy thousand people at Fatima in 1917 testified that the Sun danced; living witnesses, on film, attest the materialisations of Sathya Sai Baba; thousands report alien abduction. The apologist rejects all of these, correctly, by the reasoning I apply to his (Argument from Miracles).
  5. The Mormon witnesses signed their names. Eleven men put their signatures to statements that they saw the golden plates, and some that they saw the angel. Their statements are printed in every copy of the Book of Mormon. The Christian apologist does not believe them, and his reasons are mine.
  6. The isnad proves that someone said that someone said. The hadith collections were compiled two centuries after the events, by scholars who rejected most of what they were offered as forged; a chain of names attached to a report in the ninth century is a claim about transmission, not a record of it (Preservation of the Quran).

Sources

  • Bauckham, R., Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (2006), the best scholarly case for premise 1
  • Ehrman, B., Jesus Before the Gospels: How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior (2016)
  • Loftus, E., Eyewitness Testimony (1979; 2nd ed., 1996)
  • Wells, G. L. and Olson, E. A., "Eyewitness Testimony", Annual Review of Psychology 54 (2003)
  • Innocence Project, "Eyewitness Misidentification" — https://innocenceproject.org/eyewitness-identification-reform/
  • Hume, D., An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), Section X

Also see