The New Testament Writers Trustworthyness Part 4

6. The New Testament Writers Include More Than Thirty Historically Confirmed People In Their Writings


This is a critical point that bears repeating. The New Testament documents cannot have been invented because they contain too many historically confirmed characters. The N.T. writers would have blown their credibility with their contemporary audiences by implicating real people in a fictional story,especially people of great notority and power. There is no way the N.T. writers could have gotten away with writing outright lies about Pilate,Caiaphas,Fetus,Felix,and the entire Herodian bloodline. Somebody would have exposed them for falsely implicating these people in events that never occured. The N.T. writers knew this,and would not have included so many prominate real people in a fictional story that was intended to deceive. Again,the best explanation is that the N.T writers accurately recorded what they saw.


7. The New Testament Writers Include Divergent Details


Critics are quick to cite the apparently contradictory Gospel accounts as evidence that the Gospels can't be trusted for accurate information. For example,Matthew says there was one angel at the tomb of Jesus while John mentions two. Isn't this a contradiction that blows the credibility of these accounts? No, exactly the opposite is true: divergent details actually strengthen the case that these are eyewitness accounts. How so?

First,let's point out that the angel accounts are not contradictory. Matthew does not say there was "only" one angel at the tomb. The critic has to add a word to Matthew's account to make it contradict John's. But why did Matthew mention one angel if two angels were really there?

For the same reason two different newspaper reporters covering the same event choose to include different details in their stories. Two independent eyewitnesses rarely see all the same details and will never describe an event in exactly the same words. They'll record the same major event (i.e.,Jesus rose from the dead),but may differ on the details(i.e.,how many angels were at his tomb). In fact,when a judge hears two eyewitnesses giving exactly the same word-for-word testimony,what does that judge rightly assume? Collusion-the witnesses got together beforehand to make their stories agree.

So it's perfectly reasonable that Matthew and John differ-they are both recording eyewitness testimony. Maybe Matthew mentioned only the angel that spoke(Matt.28:5)while John described how many angels Mary saw(John 20:12). Or maybe one angel was more prominate than the other. We don't know for sure. We just know that such differences are common among eyewitnesses.

In light of the numerous divergent details in the New Testament,it's clear that the N.T. writers didn't get together to smooth out their testimonies. This means they certainly were not trying to pass off a lie as the truth. For if they were making up the New Testament story,they would have gotten together to make sure they were consistent in every detail. Such harmonization clearly didn't happen,and this confirms the genuine eyewitness nature of the New Testament and the independence of each writer.


Simon Greenleaf,the Harvard law professor who wrote the standard study on what constitutes legal evidence,credited his own conversion to Christianity as having come from his careful examination of the Gospel witnesses. If anyone knew the characteristics of genuine eyewitness testimony,it was Greenleaf. He concluded that the four Gospels "would have been received in evidence in any court of justice,without the slightest hesitation"(Simon Greenleaf, Testimony of the Evangelists 9-10).

The bottomline is: agreement on the major points and divergence on the minor details is the nature of eyewitness testimony,and this is the very nature of the New Testament documents.


I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist by Norman Gesiler


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