It is a commonplace among lawyers that eyewitnesses disagree but that this doesn’t mean nothing happened. It is more remarkable that disagreement happens when the witnesses are all extremely erudite and professionally concerned with knowledge and truth. But there it is. And the Christian gospel affirms, as the central fact without which there would be no gospel at all, that something happened, perhaps fifty years before our most detailed records of it, about which those records don’t exactly agree.
