Are the Gospels Accounts Reliable If Written by Eyewitnesses 60 Years Afterwards?

Quite often in the writings or debates of atheists a particular motif will occur. Using a debate as the illustration, a Christian will have stated that the resurrection of Jesus was viewed by witnesses. The reply commonly returned is, “The gospels were not written by witnesses. The accounts in the gospels were not written until 60 or more years after the events. There is no way they can be used as evidence.”

If a retort is given to the atheist, it is typically one in which textual criticism is used.[i] There are two difficulties with textual criticism: 1) it is not understood by the majority of listeners and 2) it does not prove that the “original text” is true or false, extrapolated from false witnesses, a compilation of history and imagination, etc. The best that textual criticism can do is to substantiate WHAT was written.

Other replies to the atheist are logical ones. 1) If Jesus were still dead, why wasn’t His body produced? That would have silenced all the critics. 2) If the disciples knew Jesus was still dead, why would they willingly spread a lie and then suffer prison and death? Though I am a Christian who believes in the physical resurrection of Jesus, I do not find those two replies to be compelling. The problem with logical rebuttals is that they can be refuted by logical rebuttal.

In regard to the first one of producing the body, why couldn’t the soldiers have been bribed more by the Pharisees, taken the body out of the tomb, and buried it in an unknown location or tossed it in geenna (the Jerusalem trash dump)? The tomb would have been empty and there would have been no way to produce the body.

In regard to the second one of dying for a lie, what if the disciples did not believe it was a lie? Let’s say the guards disposed of the body as in the previous paragraphs. No one knows of this except the guards. They would have believed it and have died for what they believed was the truth.[ii]

Logical arguments have a use in hypotheticals, but it seems to me that these arguments “win” only because the listeners aren’t clever enough to give a counter-argument. The lack of a counter-arguments does not mean that the hypothetical is true. Another approach is needed.

The texts are reliable in the sense that they are genuine per textual criticism. The question now is whether the accounts are true or false or doubtful. What would make them more likely to be true is if they were written by eyewitnesses.

There are two immediate rejections of the report of eyewitnesses by atheists: 1) eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable as court testimony has proven as well as scientific experiments, and 2) even if the gospels were written by eyewitnesses, 60 years had passed; they would not be reliable because of fading memory.

Let’s consider the unreliability of the eyewitnesses. This is probably the strongest objection by the atheists. I would like to submit for consideration that there are two types of eyewitnesses: accidental and deliberate.

An accidental eyewitness is a person who encounters an incident without any forethought, preparation, or emotional involvement. A deliberate eyewitness is a person who encounters an incident with forethought and/or preparation and/or emotional involvement. Let’s consider a legal illustration, then a social one, and then an individual one.

Assume you have been selected for jury duty. The case involves a person who was robbed in an alley, severely beaten, and witnessed by three people at various times during the incident. There is only one deliberate witness, the mugger. He had probably planned on robbing someone in an alley, perhaps the very person he did beat. Most likely he was “pumped up” to do the mugging. If he were put on the witness and stand and did not lie, his account would be precise and exact. In contrast, the accidental witnesses will not be so. There will be some confusion because they were not expecting to experience the mugging or to witness it. They were not mentally prepared for it. If someone were watching from a window above, saw the mugger approach the victim, anticipate what was going to happen, his account would be much different than the others.

Naturally a response might be, “Are you saying that muggers and robbers remember everyone they hurt?” Probably not, but I suspect they remember the first one very well. There is something about a dramatic event occurring the first time. For instance (excuse the touch of vulgarity here), most people can remember their first sexual encounter, even if it were 60 years earlier. Most can remember their first girlfriend or boyfriend. Most can remember their first job. A “rite of passage” or a deliberate, original, emotional event seals and reinforces the memory much more so that an accidental one.

Continuing from the last paragraph, let’s consider a non-criminal event … like a wedding. Who remembers a wedding the best: the official, the wedding party, the guests, or the bride and groom? All of these are witnesses. All of them made plans and deliberate decisions to attend. Assuming this is a first marriage and they have remained married and all the witnesses are still alive, whose account would you be likely to believe if the wedding were recounted by someone fifty years later? Do you automatically say, “You must be kidding! That was 50 years ago, 50 years! Memories fade, eyewitnesses are known for getting facts confused. Whatever is said here is suspect and cannot be counted upon factually whatsoever.” If a reader is struggling over this, then that proves there are absolute skeptics and solipsism does exist; and this paragraph has been for the remainder of 99.99% of humanity.

Consider a personal event, a solitary one. There are many incidents from the past. My memory has never faded or adjusted on any of them. I remember an incident when I was four years old. Not a detail has faded. I was in the car behind the car that hit and killed my brother right in front of our house. I can vividly describe certain details. Why do I remember that one so well, but I fail to remember thousands of others?

I had not planned on seeing this incident. Though I was in the backseat, I was alerted to what was happening by the screams. Evidently my mother and her parents foresaw what was going to happen, for, when I looked the car had just hit him and was going to the berm of the road. There was an emotional atmosphere that reinforced for me what happened. I do not doubt that there would have been minor details that would have differed. The same would have been true of the driver of the other car. I would have missed things, possibly even jumbled them up; yet, those my images have not changed over 60 years. Without question, I witnessed the death of my brother with my family behind the car that hit him. It was not a dream, an illusion, a story told me that I have internalized.

There is one more incident that I wish to pass on. A few years ago while a minister I was sitting in a bench swing in the backyard of an elderly man. He told me a story when he was a young boy, @1930. He had sat in that same back yard and had talked with a veteran of the Civil War, who was 80-90 years old at that time. Though I knew that theoretically it was possible to talk with someone who had talked to someone who had talked to someone and only 30 people would be needed to get to Jesus, this was my first significant experience of such a backward step into history.

Oddly, I don’t even remember the details of what were said to me. I was more overwhelmed with the event. If I had taken notes, I would have an eyewitness report of an eyewitness report. The events repeated by the veteran would have been unquestioned in my mind as authentic. The impression of man I was visiting was indeed a sense of wonder too. He too marveled that he spoke to someone in that great conflict.

I am well aware that critics will still say, “That cannot be relied upon.” But such a criticism is too broad; it includes too much. It simply is not probable when we consider the impact of our memories which are based on deliberate and emotionally meaningful events. If I were to ask one of these older critics, “You don’t remember your first girlfriend, your first kiss, your first act of sex, your first job, your first marriage” and his reply was, “Of course not, and neither does anyone else. If they say they do, they are mistaken,” then I would not believe ANYTHING this critic would say.

To recap: a deliberate witness will remember correctly more details. An accidental witness will confuse details. Depending on the emotional intensity and uniqueness of the incident, details (not all, but significant ones) can be recalled decades after the fact. Let’s take this to the gospel accounts.

What were the disciples witnessing? If they were seeing miracles, these would have faded in memory? Such stupendous, mind-boggling events were confused? Even the critics know they can’t pull that off. So, the gospel writers made it up instead. They weren’t eyewitnesses at all. They were writers who made it all up later.[iii]

Even the skeptics agree that miracles as described were not routine events. They also agree that with the disciples being directly participants (deliberate witnesses), then their memories would be more reliable. To participate in a miracle such as the feeding of the 5000 would not be jumbled or confused in the same way as one who watched a car run a stop sign. The disciples had to get the people to sit in groups of fifty, distribute the baskets of food, and regather them at the end. There were thousands of people, the smell of fish, people calling out, “Over here,” and on and on.

There are events that are so significant that the memory loses them at death and not any time before. Do we believe, when we read the accounts of the gospels, that the three years with Jesus were routine, merely a job adjustment, a mix of new ideas?

What does 60 minutes, 60 days, 60 months, or 60 years have to do with such staggering events in which one participated? Of course no one (except Jesus) would remember EVERYTHING, but they would remember what shook them up emotionally. The gospels writers are not unique here.

Critics have scathed the gospel writers for differing accounts. The best illustration of this are the events following the resurrection. The only way they can be put into any sort of chronological order is by making assumptions. The actual testimony is confusing in places.

Candidly, it is the confusion in non-essential details that lends evidence that these men did write the stories. In a criminal issue, it is important to distinguish and know for a certainty if a man or a woman stabbed another person or if the killer was 5’1” versus 6’1.” But, if 60 years after an event, a person writes there was one angel in the tomb of Jesus and another writes that there were two angels in the tomb, are we truly in some hopeless muddle?[iv] Of course, we aren’t.

In sharp, distinct contrast to this would be the investigation of 12 witnesses, and they agreed in every detail! What is the first suspicion? This is a cover-up, and they have rehearsed their stories to tell the police. The issue isn’t fading memory, for that happens to everyone. The issue isn’t conflicting testimony, for that occurs with everyone. The issue is what was unanimous and how deliberate, significant, and emotionally charged were the events.

What is the conclusion of this essay? What is the “So what?”

The charge that the gospels cannot be used as reliable evidence because they were written 40-60 years after the events described is bogus and exaggerated. Eyewitnesses are extremely reliable if there were deliberate participation, emotional significance, and unanimity with other eyewitnesses of the same event. Anyone of the three factors would be sufficient, and in regard to the miracles and resurrection all three are involved.

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[i] Textual criticism is the science of comparing manuscripts in order to determine what was originally written. Using a simple illustration, consider this metaphor: “He was happier than a hot dog about to dive into a pool of mustard.” I doubt that you’ve seen that phrase before since I made it up. Assume six months from now you read that phrase in a book. The author of that book is not VL Vawter. You will probably assume one of three positions: 1) I originated the phrase, and the author copied from me; 2) the author originated the phrase, and I copied from him; 3) both of us copied from someone else. (Yes, of course, both of us could have been original, but the possibility of that is so remote. Using Occam’s razor, let’s not multiply unnecessary contingencies.) Until the printing press, books were copied by hand. It is very easy to skip lines, copy lines out of order, glance and write an incorrect word, etc. The gospels, when compared, are filled with examples like this. Textual criticism attempts to sort this out and refine the texts to the original text.

[ii] This simply creates new problems. How are all the post-resurrection appearances explained? What about the 500 witnesses that Paul mentions? Then there is that nasty “mass hallucination” of the ascension.

[iii] Whether the gospel writers lied is a different subject that their having unreliable memories. This essay is focused on the memory issue. The issue of lying, non-witnesses being the gospel writers will be discussed in a different essay.

[iv] Could one angel have been there at one time, and two at another? Could one writer have been impressed with the one talking, whereas another writer simply noticed both of them? Reasonable assumptions can be made to explain what happened in reference to the muddle. Furthermore, what if one simply forgot the second angel. He saw it, but 60 years later he couldn’t remember it. Is he to be discounted? Of course not, the body of Jesus (the agreed up detail) was still gone. Agreed upon details in old memory recounts are far more important than non-agreed upon ones. I’ve been to 50th wedding anniversaries before. I always ask the couple about their wedding day. There will be minor disagreements: “We had two witnesses … No, there were three … The cake was two layer … The cake was three layer.” As a listener I cannot be sure which it was. Now, what is agreed upon? They were married!!! What was the most important event of the day: the layers of the cake or the ceremony itself? Even in a criminal case, the investigators are frustrated over conflicting evidence, but they jump for joy over unanimous testimony. Conflicting testimony does not mean a crime has not been committed.