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The Gospels actually appeared to be ancient eyewitness accounts.
I was eventually trained in Forensic Statement Analysis (FSA). By carefully employing this methodology and scrutinizing a suspect’s choice of pronouns, use of tensed language, compression or expansion of time (along with many other linguistic tendencies), I was typically able to determine if he or she committed the crime, and I could often establish the time of day when the crime actually occurred!
Within a month, and in spite of my deep skepticism and hesitation, I concluded that Mark’s gospel was the eyewitness account of the apostle Peter.
There are many similarities between investigating cold cases and investigating the claims of Christianity.
Cold-case homicides are events from the distant past for which there is often little or no forensic evidence. These kinds of cases are sometimes solved on the basis of eyewitness testimony,
Christianity makes a claim about an event from the distant past for which there is little or no forensic evidence.
Like cold cases, the truth about what happened can be discovered by examining the statements of eyewitnesses and comparing them with what little additional evidence is accessible to us. If the eyewitnesses can be evaluated (and their statements can be verified by what we have available), an equally strong circumstantial case can be made for the claims of the New Testament.
The answers are available; you don’t have to turn off your brain to be a believer. Yes, it is possible to become a Christian because of the evidence rather than in spite of the evidence. Many of us have done just that.
Philosophical naturalism rejects the existence of supernatural agents, powers, beings, or realities. It begins with the foundational premise that natural laws and forces alone can account for every phenomenon under examination. If
But many of these same historians simultaneously reject the historicity of any of the miracles described in the New Testament, in spite of the fact that these miracles are described alongside the events that scholars accept as historical. Why do they accept some events and reject others? Because they have a presuppositional bias against the supernatural.
While debating the evidence for the resurrection, Ehrman revealed a naturalistic presupposition that is common to many historians. He said, “The bottom line I think is one we haven’t even talked about, which is whether there can be such a thing as historical evidence for a miracle, and, I think, the answer is a clear ‘no,’ and I think virtually all historians agree with me on that.”
As a skeptic, I was slow to accept even the slightest possibility that miracles were possible. My commitment to naturalism prevented me from considering such nonsense.
failed to differentiate between science (the systematic, rational examination of phenomena) and scientism (the refusal to consider anything other than natural causes).
Now it’s time to apply this form of reasoning to a death scene that has been the topic of discussion for over two thousand years. What happened to Jesus of Nazareth? How can we explain His empty tomb? Did His disciples steal His body? Was He only injured on the cross and later recovered? Did He actually die and resurrect from the dead? We can approach these questions as detectives, using abductive reasoning.
1. Jesus died on the cross and was buried. 2. Jesus’s tomb was empty and no one ever produced His body. 3. Jesus’s disciples believed that they saw Jesus resurrected from the dead. 4. Jesus’s disciples were transformed following their alleged resurrection observations.
Many first-century and early second-century unfriendly Roman sources (i.e., Thallus, Tacitus, Mara Bar-Serapion, and Phlegon) and Jewish sources (i.e., Josephus and the Babylonian Talmud) affirmed and acknowledged that Jesus was crucified and died. 2. The Roman guards faced death if they allowed a prisoner to survive crucifixion. Would they really be careless enough to remove a living person from a cross? 3. Jesus would have to control His blood loss from the beatings, crucifixion, and stabbing in order to survive, yet was pinned to the cross and unable to do anything that might achieve this.
4. Jesus displayed wounds following the resurrection but was never observed to behave as though He was wounded, in spite of the fact that He appeared only days after His beating, crucifixion, and stabbing. 5. Jesus disappeared from the historical record following His reported resurrection and ascension and was never sighted again (as one might expect if He recovered from His wounds and lived much beyond the young age of thirty-three).
THE DISCIPLES LIED ABOUT THE RESURRECTION
Some non-Christians claim that the disciples stole the body from the grave and later fabricated the stories of Jesus’s resurrection appearances. THE PROBLEMS: While this explanation accounts for the empty tomb and the resurrection observations, it fails to account for the transformed lives of the apostles.
I am hesitant to embrace any theory that requires the conspiratorial effort of a large number of people, over a significant period of time, when there is personally little or nothing to gain by their effort.
1. The Jewish authorities took many precautions to make sure the tomb was guarded and sealed, knowing that the removal of the body would allow the disciples to claim that Jesus had risen (Matt. 27:62–66).
The disciples’ transformation following the alleged resurrection is inconsistent with the claim that the appearances were only a lie. How could their own lies transform them into courageous evangelists?
THE DISCIPLES WERE DELUSIONAL Some skeptics believe that the disciples, as a result of their intense grief and sorrow, only imagined seeing Jesus alive after His death on the cross. These critics claim that the appearances were simply hallucinations that resulted from wishful thinking.
Based on these experiences as a detective, there are other reasonable concerns when considering the explanation that the disciples hallucinated or imagined the resurrection: 1. While individuals have hallucinations, there are no examples of large groups of people having the exact same hallucination. 2. While a short, momentary group hallucination may seem reasonable, long, sustained, and detailed hallucinations are unsupported historically and intuitively unreasonable. 3. The risen Christ was reportedly seen on more than one occasion and by a number of different groups (and subsets of groups).
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THE DISCIPLES WERE FOOLED BY AN IMPOSTER
1. The impersonator would have to be familiar enough with Jesus’s mannerisms and statements to convince the disciples. The disciples knew the topic of the con better than anyone who might con them. 2. Many of the disciples were skeptical and displayed none of the necessary naïveté that would be required for the con artist to succeed. Thomas, for example, was openly skeptical from the beginning. 3. The impersonator would need to possess miraculous powers; the disciples reported that the resurrected Jesus performed many miracles and “convincing proofs” (Acts 1:2–3).
THE DISCIPLES’ OBSERVATIONS WERE DISTORTED LATER Some unbelievers claim the original observations of the disciples were amplified and distorted as the legend of Jesus grew over time. These skeptics believe that Jesus may have been a wise teacher, but argue that the resurrection is a legendary and historically late exaggeration.
Like other nonbelievers in our world today, I used to think of faith as the opposite of reason.
As I began to read through the Bible as a skeptic, I came to understand that the biblical definition of faith is a well-placed and reasonable inference based on evidence.
encounter devoted, committed Christians who are hesitant to embrace an evidential faith. In many Christian circles, faith that requires evidential support is seen as weak and inferior. For many, blind faith (a faith that simply trusts without question) is the truest, most sincere, and most valuable form of faith that we can offer God. Yet Jesus seemed to have a high regard for evidence. In John 14:11, He told those watching Him to examine “the evidence of the miracles” (NIV) if they did not believe what He said about His identity. Even after the resurrection, Jesus stayed with His disciples
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Objective morality must be rooted in something bigger than the evolutionary development of any one species. If God exists, He would certainly transcend all species, cultures, locations, and moments in time. For
the circumstantial evidence in our universe is consistent with God’s existence and involvement as the uncaused first cause, the fine-tuner, the designer, and the moral lawgiver required to account for all the evidence we observe.
When defending our belief in the existence of God, the resurrection of Jesus, or the validity of the Christian worldview, we may need to take some time to explain the nature, role, and power of circumstantial evidence. It’s time well spent, because most of our friends, family members, and coworkers have not given this much thought. We need to help people understand the depth and quantity of the evidence that supports our view. Remember, circumstantial cases are powerful when they are cumulative.
Growing up as a skeptic, I never thought of the biblical narrative as an eyewitness account.
As the apostles began to write out their eyewitness observations, early Christians gave these accounts great authority and respect. In fact, as the “canon” of emerging New Testament Scripture was examined by the church fathers (the early leaders of the growing Christian community), the issue of apostolic authority was the first and foremost criterion for whether or not a particular writing made it into the collection. Was the text written by an apostolic eyewitness (Matthew, John, Peter, Paul, James, Jude, et al.) or by someone who at least had meaningful access to one or more of these
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Only the accounts of the original eyewitnesses were given serious consideration, and the Gospels have always been understood as a set of eyewitness accounts.
The question, of course, is whether or not they can be trusted, and that’s the focus of the second section of this book. We’ll investigate the Gospels as eyewitness accounts, asking the same kinds of questions that judges encourage jurors to ask of witnesses in criminal proceedings. We’ll ask if the ...
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THE EXPECTATIONS FROM EXPERIENCE Before I ever examined the reliability of the gospel accounts, I had a reasonable expectation about what a dependable set of eyewitness statements might look like, given my experience as a detective. When more than one witness observes a crime, I expect to see the following characteristics in their statements: THEIR STATEMENTS WILL BE PERSPECTIVAL Each eyewitness will describe the event from his or her spatial and emotional perspective. Not everyone will be in the same position to see the same series of events or the same details. I will have to puzzle together
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THEIR STATEMENTS MAY CONTAIN AREAS OF COMPLETE AGREEMENT Some aspects of each eyewitness statement may be completely identical. This is particularly true when witnesses describe aspects of the crime that were dramatic or important to the sequence of events. It’s also true when later witnesses are aware of what others have offered and simply affirm the prior description by telling me, “The rest occurred just the way he said.” LATER STATEMENTS MAY FILL IN THE GAPS Finally, as described earlier, I expect late witnesses who are aware of prior statements to simply fill in what has not been said
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As a Christian, I recognize that the Bible is God’s Word, but I also recognize that it was delivered to us through the observations and recollections of human eyewitnesses. Before I share that the Bible has something important to offer, I typically take the time to make a case for why the Bible has something important to offer. It’s
THE ART OF FORENSIC STATEMENT ANALYSIS In my first years as an investigator, my department sent me to a number of classes, seminars, and training exercises to improve my skills. One of these classes was a course in Forensic Statement Analysis (FSA). There
What Is the Forensic Statement Analyst Trying to Achieve? Forensic Statement Analysts carefully examine the words offered by witnesses and suspects in an effort to determine the following: 1. Is the writer (or speaker) more involved in the event than he or she might like us to believe? 2. Are there relational problems between the writer (or speaker) and the victim who is the subject of the case? 3. What are the hidden difficulties between the writer (or speaker) and the victim in the investigation? 4. Was the writer (or speaker) actually doing what he or she claimed to be doing at the time of
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I approached the Gospels like I would any other forensic statement.
The small details interested me and forced me to dig deeper. As an example, the fact that John never mentioned the proper name of Jesus’s mother (Mary) was curious to me. In his gospel, John repeatedly referred to Mary as “Jesus’s mother” or “the mother of Jesus” but never referred to her by name (as did the other gospel writers). Why would this be the case?
The answer might be found in the nineteenth chapter of John’s gospel when Jesus entrusted Mary to John at the crucifixion. Jesus told John that Mary was now his mother, and He told Mary that John was now her son. John took Mary and cared for her (as he would his own mother) from this point on. Writing the gospel of John many years later, it just may be that John was uncomfortable calling his own mother by her formal name. I’m sure by this time in his life, John was referring to Mary as...
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One of my Christian friends told me that Mark’s gospel was really the eyewitness account of the apostle Peter. The early church seemed to agree. Papias (ca. AD 70–ca. 163), the ancient bishop of Hierapolis (located in western Turkey), claimed that Mark penned his gospel in Rome as Peter’s scribe. He reported that “Mark, having become the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately, though not indeed in order, whatsoever he remembered of the things said or done by Christ.”21 Irenaeus (ca. AD 115–ca. 202), a student of Ignatius and Polycarp (two students of the apostle John) and the eventual
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They repeatedly and uniformly claimed that Mark’s gospel was a record of Peter’s eyewitness observations. But could a forensic statement analysis of the gospel of Mark verify these claims?
MARK MENTIONED PETER WITH PROMINENCE Peter is featured frequently in Mark’s gospel. As an example, Mark referred to Peter twenty-six times in his short account, compared to Matthew, who mentioned Peter only three additional times in his much longer gospel.
MARK USED PETER AS A SET OF “BOOKENDS”
Most of us are familiar with the biblical story in the gospel of John in which Jesus was presented with a woman who had been accused of committing adultery (John 8:1–11). The Jewish men who brought the woman to Jesus wanted her to be stoned, but Jesus refused to condemn her and told the men, “He who is without sin among you, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.” When the men leave, Jesus tells the woman, “I do not condemn you, either. Go. From now on sin no more.” This story is one of my favorite passages in all of Scripture. Too bad that it appears to be an artifact.
