Lesson 7. Reading the Gospels as Testimony

Luke opens by telling the reader exactly what he takes himself to be doing: many have undertaken accounts, he has investigated carefully, and he is drawing on those who were eyewitnesses from the beginning (Luke 1:1–4). That is a claim about method, stated up front. It does not prove itself — anyone can claim to have investigated — but it tells us the genre the author thought he was writing in.

That matters because a common move in popular scepticism is to treat the Gospels as myth or legend by category, without argument. The documents themselves present as ordered accounts of events in living memory, name checkable officials and places, and situate themselves in datable reigns. Whether they succeed is a separate question from what they were attempting.

Three points have to be held together, and dropping any one of them produces a bad argument.

Dependence is real. Matthew, Mark and Luke share so much material, sometimes word for word, that literary dependence is the standard explanation. Do not claim four independent witnesses.

Difference is normal. The accounts vary in details — order of events, how many figures are named at a scene, the exact wording of a saying. Independent testimony to a single event almost always varies at that level, while collusion produces suspiciously smooth agreement.

Some agreements are unforced. There is a class of small correspondences scholars call undesigned coincidences: one account mentions in passing a detail that explains something left unexplained in another, with no sign that either writer was tidying up after the other. These are hard to manufacture and easy to miss.

The Gospel writers were believers writing for readers they hoped would believe. No serious case denies this. The question is what follows.

If testimony only counted when the witness was indifferent, we would discard most of ancient history. The historian's response to an interested witness is cross-examination, and on each of these tests the Gospels do better than their reputation among people who have not read them closely:

• Material against interest. Women as the first at the empty tomb, in a setting where their testimony carried little formal weight. The disciples' repeated failures to understand. Peter's denial. A movement shaping a story purely to persuade does not keep these.
• Checkable detail. Named governors, tetrarchs, high priests, towns, customs — the kind of thing an audience could have refuted.
• Unforced variation. Differences from their own sources that look like independent memory rather than smoothing.

1. State, in one sentence each, the three points about the Gospels that must be held together.

2. Give two examples of material in the Gospel accounts that works against the writers' own interest, and explain why that is evidentially interesting.

3. A friend says the accounts contradict each other on details, so none can be trusted. Write a reply.

4. Narration. Explain what cross-examining an interested witness involves, using three tests from this lesson.

1. Dependence among the first three is real; variation in detail is normal for real testimony; some agreements are unforced and hard to fabricate.

2. Women as first witnesses; the disciples' failures to understand; Peter's denial. Material against interest is unlikely to have been invented by the person reporting it.

3. Should distinguish difference in detail from contradiction in substance, note that independent testimony normally varies at the level of detail, and concede honestly that some tensions remain open rather than forcing a harmonisation.

4. Look for material against interest; check names, places and offices against what else is known; watch whether variation looks like independent memory or like tidying.