Reliability of Eyewitness Accounts in the Gospels (Book Notes: Apocalyptic Prophet)

Most Christians seem to place a lot of emphasis on the gospels as a basis for their religious beliefs. They appear to be convinced that these texts are reliable, accurate descriptions of things which occurred millennia ago and, therefore, they are rationally justified in adopting the supernatural, religious beliefs derived from these texts. That is a serious mistake on at least two fundamental levels.

In Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet, Bart D. Ehrman explains what those errors are. First is the simple fact that eyewitness testimony isn’t very reliable in principle, even when it comes to modern circumstances:

For many people, who possibly haven’t thought much about it, such a claim — that a story is based on an eyewitness account — provides a kind of guarantee of its accuracy. A moment’s reflection, though, shows that nothing could be farther from the truth. Simply consider any two eyewitness accounts of a particular event. Are they ever the same? Not exactly. Sometimes they differ in what they include and exclude, often they disagree on minor details, often they are at odds on issues of major importance (did she scream at him before he threatened her with a knife or afterward?), sometimes they flat out contradict each other; never do they tell the story in the same words.

If eyewitnesses were always completely accurate in what they say, we’d have no need for trials by jury. We could just ask someone what happened.

In point of fact, eyewitness testimony is generally regarded as the least reliable of any sort of evidence that might be submitted during a criminal trial — at least by experts. Juries place a lot of weight on eyewitness testimony, but this is because people place a lot more emphasis on personal stories than impersonal scientific data as a general rule. It’s unfortunate that people can be convicted solely on the basis of eyewitness testimony and without any corroborating evidence, but it has happened.

People don’t like to reject the testimony of others, especially those who claim to have suffered through some crime, because doing so seems like it might be the same as accusing someone of lying. This is not so, and realizing how and why it is not so may be a first step towards accepting the unreliability of eyewitness testimony. The problem isn’t so much that people lie (though this does happen) but that people don’t perceive what they think they perceive and, even worse, that their memories are very unreliable.

People’s memories of what occurred in the past are not recordings; instead, they are shaped by their experiences that happened since then — especially others’ reports of the same events. This is why eyewitnesses to the same crime are not allowed to compare notes or to read reports in the newspapers. In the rest of the world, however, such precautions do not exist and this leads to all sorts of contamination of people’s memories about what’s happened to them.

All of these problems, by the way, are inherent in eyewitness testimony under ideal conditions. Too often, we read or learn testimony under less than ideal conditions:

Now, suppose we knew of eyewitness accounts that no one had bothered to write down right away. Suppose they had waited, say, twenty or thirty years, until the ends of their lives. Or even worse, suppose that the people who had seen the episode were not the ones who wrote the story, but other people living much later did — that is, not people who had been there, but people who had heard about it from others who had heard it from, not eyewitnesses, but again, from others? What would the story be like, even if it ultimately went back to an eyewitness?

My point is that even stories based on eyewitness accounts are not necessarily reliable, and the same is true a hundredfold for accounts that — even if ultimately stemming from reports of eyewitnesses — have been in oral circulation long after the fact.

Scholarly studies of the gospels make it quite clear that they could not have been written by eyewitnesses to the events they purport to describe. Even if they were, though, they were not written down until decades after those events supposedly happen. During these decades, the witnesses would have swapped stories with others, pondered the events, heard about similar events, studies other tales, and so forth. All of these things would have contaminated the original memories immeasurably, making them completely unreliable under even the best circumstances.

We don’t have those “best” circumstances, though. What we have are stories written down decades after the events supposedly happened, but by people who were not actually there at the time. The authors heard these stories from someone else — maybe the original witnesses, but then again maybe not. We don’t know how many links in the chain there might have been, but each one increases the problems already described exponentially. In the end, the stories we have simply cannot be trusted as accurate or reliable representations of something that might have happened; even worse, we can’t necessarily know which parts may still be reliable and which aren’t.

Every attempt to examine them is ultimately just a guessing game where people read into the texts whatever it is they want to find. It’s no coincidence that the Jesus which many people “discover” in the gospels looks just like the person doing the reading, holding pretty much the same religious, political, and personal philosophies. Why, though, don’t more Christians notice this and derive the obvious conclusions from it?

 

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