I’m debating someone on another board about his supposed evidence that God exists. He’s using eyewitness testimony as evidence:
Since I don’t know much about the Bible, I figured I’d come here for the straight dope. Any good info I could give regarding why these Gospels are unreliable?
I’d consider the eyewitness accounts to be hearsay, unless your opponent is able to produce the witnesses for cross examination.
Matthew, Mark and Luke were not disciples of Jesus. They wrote their accounts more than 30 years after the death of Christ, which is far long enough for details to change and events to get blown out of proportion.
By the way, don’t expect to ever change a Christian’s mind about the Bible’s divinity. You could have sworn, signed affidavits from Jesus Christ himself claiming he made it all up and was just a crazy Israeli with sunstroke, and your “friend” won’t believe you. All Christians are bonafide nutjobs, things like “logic” and “proof” are meaningless to them.
Statements like that are just obnoxious, and add no value to the discussion. Also exposes your own bigotry. Many Christians are decent, smart, and generally pleasant people. Like Barack Obama, as an example.
My question would be, what do we know about Mark and Luke to consider them trustworthy? And where does that information come from?
There is also the well-known problem that the alleged eyewitnesses contradict each other repeatedly, including on the miracles they are supposed to have witnessed.
The Resurrection Story in Matthew
The Resurrection Story in Mark
The Resurrection Story in Luke and Acts.
The Resurrection Story in John. (The last chapter of John looks to be a couple of passages that should have appeared earlier in the story–especially 21:15-25–but have either gotten detached from their proper place in the narrative, or alternatively were added later on. Textual corruption being another issue with the reliability of the Bible.)
Matthew: The empty tomb discovered by Mary Magdalene and “the other Mary”. A single angel in the tomb. Jesus himself appears to the women while they’re on the way to tell the others; Jesus then meets up with everyone at a mountain in Galilee.
Mark: The empty tomb discovered by Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome. A single “young man” (possibly an angel) appears in the tomb. Some textual corruption here–the earliest manuscripts just cut off at 16:8; the remaining verses indicate that Jesus appeared to Mary Magdalene; then to “two of them”, then to “the Eleven” at dinner. No mention of everyone taking a road trip back up to Galilee.
Luke: The empty tomb found by “the women”. Two men (angels) are in the tomb. The women go and tell the others; in the meantime, Jesus appears to “two of them”, who don’t recognize him. He has dinner with these people, who still don’t recognize him until Jesus gives them bread; Jesus then vanishes. Jesus appears to everyone in Jerusalem, before ascending to heaven in Bethany. No mention of anyone schlepping back up to Galilee. In Acts it’s stated that Jesus remained with the disciples for forty days following his resurrection.
John: Mary Magdalene alone finds the empty tomb. She tells Peter “and the other disciple”. Peter and the other disciple inspect the tomb, but see no angels. Mary Magdalene then goes inside and sees two angels, then Jesus, whom she doesn’t recognize. Jesus appears to the disciples (indoors, not on a mountain in Galilee). Thomas misses out on this and doesn’t believe the rest, until Jesus appears to him a week later. And, as previously mentioned, some textual corruption.
The gospels vary widely on exactly who found what, precisely what they saw, and the subsequent events. Much of this variation is too great to just be a question of “Well, this is what happened to Matthew, but of course Luke had a different set of experiences”. Some of the various writers must at minimum be factually mistaken about some of these events. Also–bearing in mind Mark is generally believed to be the oldest gospel–note that the later gospels seem to have more elaborate stories than the oldest account. If this were eyewitness testimony, one would expect the testimony given soonest after the events to be most detailed, but if this is a case of people “telling stories” (not necessarily consciously lying, of course), it’s perfectly natural that things get more embellished as time passes.
There are plenty of other contradictions in the gospels, especially concerning Jesus’ birth and childhood (as mentioned in this post from several years back).
Obligatory Cecil/Staff link
An eyewitness testimony can only be as trustworthy as the evidence that confirms that it is an eyewitness testimony. If you only have the Bible to back up that claim, the argument is effectively “IF (the Bible is accurate) THEN (the Bible is accurate)”, which is meaningless.
I think the bigger issue would be that if miracles are proof of the Christian god, then why is there claims of miracles from all over the world, for every religion?
People who believe in Scientology seem to truly believe that their auditing works, the people who suicided to go through Heaven’s Gate and meet the aliens (or whatever) obviously believed what they had been told. You tell these people to write a book about their beliefs and they’ll write their beliefs as fact.
Perhaps you might suggest that eyewitnesses are not a very reliable source.
You might point out the traditions around the miracles of Mohammed, for instance:
“Muhammad’s great miracles were witnessed by thousands of believers and skeptics, following which verses of the Quran were revealed mentioning the supernatural events.” http://www.islamreligion.com/articles/150/
One of them is a nice moon-split miracle with many eyewitnesses: “The splitting of the moon is confirmed through eye-witness testimony transmitted through an unbroken chain of reliable scholars so many that is it impossible that it could be false (hadith mutawatir).”
Will he accept that?
Wrong. Matthew was a disciple of Jesus. Mark and Luke were close friends of the apostles and lived side by side with them for several years.
This is an obvious violation of the rules of the forum, and you should apologize for it. In any case, I will assume that you are descending into nasty insults because you’re unable to provide any facts to back up your claims.
What we know may not be entirely satisfactory by 21st century standards, but compared to what we know about other ancient world figures it is actually quite good. The very latest datings that anybody gives to either of those gospels is at 80 A.D., and most scholars put it much earlier, some as early as 60 A.D. By all accounts, those two gospels were written within living memory of 33 A.D., the likely date of Jesus’s death and resurrection.
Can we prove authorship, and definitively say that the authors actually were Mark and Luke as claimed? Not in a a way that would stand up in court, but then again we can’t prove such authorship for any book from the ancient world. What we can say is that there is no evidence of any person in the early church having any doubt about the legitimacy of the Gospels of Mark or Luke (or Matthew or John, for that matter.)
Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ has a good overview of what we know about the authorship of the New Testament along with many other issues relating to the life of Jesus.
As many people have pointed out before, the Gospel authors are in a lose-lose situation. When they say exactly the same things, skeptics take it as proof that they copied from each other and thus they don’t count as separate corroborating accounts. When they present differing accounts, skeptics take it as proof that they’re unreliable, that exaggerations and bits of fiction are getting mixed in. In short, there’s nothing that they could have written which would convince the doubters.
Let’s ask ourselves this. Suppose that Jesus Christ did live his life according to what mainstream Christians believe, die, and rise from the dead in 33 A.D. Let’s supose further that four of his followers chose to put their memories in writing roughly 30-50 years after the fact. What would we reasonably expect to find if we read those accounts? We would expect that the accounts would agree on the major points about his life: where he lived, when he lived, the circumstances surrounding his birth, his general principles and attitute, and the circumstances surrounding his death and resurrection. We would also expect that at some of the most intense and memorable events in his life, we’d find close agreement about what happened down to exact words. But we would also expect that some of the details would diverge . Details diverge on almost any event witnessed by multiple people.
It’s perfectly reasonable to imagine one of the gospel authors other than Matthew asking one of the apostles to explain who found the empty tomb and getting an answer that does not specifically list the entire group of women by name. If you were to ask me who about things I did last weekend, I probably would not list every person I talked to by name, but rather would saying that I hung out with “some friends”, or something like that.
I’m sorry, but I’m having trouble believing that skeptics have brought up the argument that when Gospel authors say exactly the same things it must be proof that they copied from one another. First, I can’t find examples of skeptics making this point. Second (and probably more important), I can’t find any examples in the Bible of different Gospel writers saying exactly the same thing.
Can you provide examples of either of these things, or is this a “strawman” argument?
*Sooooo *going to Hell. CYA.
“So then these six dudes came storming into the bank, waving their guns around–they all had, like, shotguns–and firing into the air, yelling for everyone to get down on the ground like RIGHT NOW! and not show our faces or they’d kill us all.”
“There were six gunmen; all of them I saw–before I got down on the floor–were armed with pump-action shotguns. They fired off about half-a-dozen rounds into the ceiling and ordered everyone to lie down on the floor face down. They were very clear about threatening anyone who didn’t comply with violence.”
Two independent accounts which agree with each other in all factual particulars.
“So then the six men with the guns came into the bank, shooting up into the air, telling everyone to lie down and not show our faces or we would be killed. This one woman, who was pregnant, burst into tears. We were all very much afraid for our lives.”
“Six men with guns came into the bank, shooting into the air, telling everyone to lie down and not to show our faces or we would be killed. A pregnant woman burst into tears. We were all very much afraid for our lives.”
Two accounts which agree which each other in all factual particulars, but give evidence of not being indepedent–they use very close to the same phrasing and structure. Perhaps the witnesses were coached or discussed what they saw with each other before giving their accounts (which may or may not mean the witnesses are inaccurate).
“Three or four guys with big guns came into the bank–they just started shooting at random, it sounded like ten or twenty big BANGS!. They were screaming at everybody to lie down. This one pregnant lady starting crying and they told her to shut up or they’d kill her.”
“There were six gunmen; all of them I saw–before I got down on the floor–were armed with pump-action shotguns. They fired off about half-a-dozen rounds into the ceiling and ordered everyone to lie down on the floor face down. They were very clear about threatening anyone who didn’t comply with violence.”
Two accounts which differ in detail, the sort of differences which frankly you’d expect from flesh-and-blood human beings. Logically, at least one of the witnesses is wrong about the number of gunmen and the number of shots fired, and possibly the direction the shots were fired in. Also, the second witness doesn’t mention the pregnant lady, although of course that doesn’t mean she wasn’t there–he may just not have mentioned her, or perhaps she was on the other side of the bank lobby and he missed her interaction with the robbers, being busy keeping his head down. The differences in detail if anything serve to indicate the independence of the two witnesses from each other; the “mistakes” of at least one of the witnesses would only be important if someone were asserting that the testimony of these people was literally inerrant–something which some (but not all) Christians assert about the gospels.
“Two guys walked into the bank brandishing handguns. They told everyone to lie down, face down, or they’d kill us. This one lady who was pregnant said she had trouble lying on her belly, so they told her to just turn around and face the wall.”
“There were six gunmen; all of them I saw–before I got down on the floor–were armed with pump-action shotguns. They fired off about half-a-dozen rounds into the ceiling and ordered everyone to lie down on the floor face down. They were very clear about threatening anyone who didn’t comply with violence.”
Two accounts which are independent, but which frankly can no longer be easily reconciled. There are both flat contradictions and omissons of things (shots fired) that presumably any witness would have noticed and mentioned. Perhaps there were two robberies. Maybe one of these witnesses, or possibly both of them, wasn’t even there and is reporting things second or third-hand, or long after the fact.
With the gospels, it’s maybe more like this:
“So then the six men with the guns came into the bank, shooting up into the air, telling everyone to lie down and not show our faces or we would be killed. This one woman, who was pregnant, burst into tears. We were all very much afraid for our lives. They took all the money from the tellers, then left, telling us to stay down on the floor, or they would kill us. They threatened to take the pregnant woman with them as a hostage, but one of the tellers pleaded with them not to, and they decided hostages would be more trouble than they would be worth, so they left.”
“Six men with guns came into the bank, shooting into the air, telling everyone to lie down and not to show our faces or we would be killed. A pregnant woman burst into tears. We were all very much afraid for our lives. They took all the money from the tellers; then told the branch manager to open the vault. When he said he didn’t have the combination, they pistol-whipped him, then left with one of the tellers as a hostage.”
Parts of these accounts seem to have been copied from a common source, or were influenced by or coached by the same third party; but there are also substantive differences between the accounts which are hard to reconcile and go beyond confusing the number of shots fired or how many gunmen there were.
Well, for “the circumstances surrounding his birth”, they can’t agree at all. Granted, more of a problem for an inerrantist; none of his disciples or the close associates of his disciples would have known him in childhood; presumably when it came to Jesus’ birth and childhood, they were just repeating stories from who knows where.
When I read them, I definitely see contradictions in the gospels, even concerning the resurrection, and not just differences in detail or emphasis. This could be four eyewitnesses with quite faulty memories writing things down years after the fact–or it could be four stories compiled from oral traditions handed down for several decades after whatever events there were had taken place.
Actually, it is commonly argued that at least the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) show evidence of copying; as indicated above, this is not just because they tell the same story, but they tell the same story in such a very similar way.
Of course, where the synoptics are independent of each other, they wind up not agreeing at all (as in the two almost completely different and even contradictory accounts of Jesus’ birth and childhood found in Matthew and Luke).
:dubious: Were these signed after his death? That could be a problem.
Oh, you mean the death was made up too?
On the question of why believe the Gospels but not the miraculous claims of all religions, I am of course willing to look at any claim, but I have to consider them in light of the circumstances. Joseph Smith derived obvious benefits from the things he claimed, most famously he used them as an excuse to marry many attractive young women. For the Scientologists, it’s no secret that the leaders of the movement financially exploit their followers. And the same is true for other cults, more or less by definition.
By contrast, what were the early Christians getting? When you joined the early church you were signing up for poverty and for sharing your meager resources with others, and either for chastity or strict marital fidelity without the possibility of divorce. Certainly no early Christians had a motivation to make up fake stories for financial or sexual gain.
In Islam we know that Muslims were already using violence within Mohammed’s lifetime as a means of conversion. It’s not too difficult to get someone to testify to anything when you’re pointing a sword at them. For early Christians the situation was exactly the other way around. Becoming a Christian brought a high probability of causing early death, torture, or imprisonment. Those who witnessed the miracles of Jesus would have strong motivation to deny and cover up what they saw.
But only tradition names him as the author of Matthew. It’s generally believed that if there’s any connection to Matthew directly, it was written by those to whom Matthew preached.
To the OP, there are numerous eyewitnesses to other miracles and miracle workers in history, even in historical times. For example, numerous Mormons swore that they saw Brigham Young briefly transform into Joseph Smith (visibly and vocally) when he took leadership of the LDS Church after Smith’s murder, tens of thousands of people supposedly witnessed the sun dancing at Fatima on 13 October 1917, many people claimed to have been healed by Rasputin or to have witnessed the Tsarevich practically brought back from certain death by the man, and many Hindu holy men have had people who claimed they witnessed their levitation or other miracles. For that matter Simon Magus supposedly had witnesses to his levitation, and there were all manner of other miracle working holy men throughout the Middle East, and beyond for that matter. It would be interesting, assuming he’s not Mormon or Catholic or Hindu, to see whether he accepts these claims (and why not).
Champ, you’re using different definitions of “early.” The four gospels were written ~50+ years after the events described–that’s two human generations. By comparison, Smith wrote a lot of stuff in his lifetime that we still have.
This isn’t a reason not to join. They weren’t all poor, & Paul encouraged his followers to work & support the community. The Christians held property in common, which offered a certain security. Look how many people have joined communes without a Messiah myth, & how many would kill for communism.
Besides, if Scientology can gain followers on its money-grubbing model, it’s probably not that hard to convert people to believe a false religion. In fact, if Christianity couldn’t draw followers, how is Scientology doing it?