Eyewitness – How do we know?!

Last week I wrote that Christianity is the only world religion based upon knowable facts. That is, it’s the only one for which witnesses have left written testimony that crucial events on which the religion is based actually occurred. In the case of Christian beliefs, these are the life, death, and–especially–the resurrection of Jesus. I’m referring to the four Gospels in the New Testament, the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And those three facts are fundamental to Christianity.

 But the real question is, how do we know that we can rely on that testimony? Were Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John really written by people who knew Jesus, people who followed him and wrote down what they saw? Were they who they claimed to be?

Now, I’m a lawyer and here’s how a lawyer looks at a question like this. The first thing you want to know is whether the authors of the Gospels were eye witnesses, or were these just stories passed along from one person to another over the years? Because stories passed along aren’t really reliable. Remember the old telephone game we played when we were children? You sit in a circle and one person tells something to the next, and to the next, and the next, and when the statement gets to the last person in the circle, it sounds nothing like the original!

Scholars often state that these Gospels were written by people centuries after Jesus lived. I believe that isn’t true. My research for Faith On Trail tells me that the people who wrote those four Gospels were who they said they were, and that they had personal knowledge of their testimony. How can you know such a thing? By checking their stories against independent evidence–archeology, writings preserved from that period, forensic evidence, history, science, medical…yes, even medical evidence.

The stories hold up under testing. They are credible. In the next few months, I’ll go through this with you step by step. But for now, here’s an example of what I mean. This is how you test the credibility of a witness–step by step. Point by point.

The Gospel of Luke is believed to have been written by a physician. Luke’s Gospel is very precise, very detailed and direct, as you’d expect from a physician. In his description of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane the night before he was arrested and crucified, Luke described the agony of Jesus, who knew what was to come. He writes that ‘His sweat fell like drops of blood upon the ground’.

Medical experts today know that this apparent sweating of blood is real. It is a medical condition called ‘hematidrosis’ which is triggered by extreme stress. In this state the subcutaneous blood vessels rupture into the exocrine sweat glands, causing the sweat to look like drops of blood. But here’s the significant point. This condition was unknown in the first century. This story could not have been made up. The description could not have been invented–it had to have been actually witnessed in order to be described in the Gospel.

This is an example of proof that someone is writing with ‘personal knowledge.’ This person is a credible witness because it’s clear that he had to be in that place, at that time, in order to relay what he saw.

Luke also introduced a psychological aspect into the testimony of his Gospel by suggesting that the sleep of the apostles in the Garden of Gethsemane the night before Jesus was arrested was induced by a state of extreme sorrow. Now, none of this proves that Jesus died and rose from the grave three days later, but it is one small link in the chain of proof that we need to develop to prove the case.

Next posting I’ll start at the beginning. Over time we’ll examine an almost overwhelming amount of evidence preserved for us for almost two thousand years to prove the cornerstone facts of Christianity.

Talk to you soon!