We shall attempt to prove this only of the writers of the gospels; for if they are credible witnesses, the credibility of the Old Testament, to which they bore testimony, follows as a matter of course.
1. They are capable or competent witnesses,—that is, they possessed actual knowledge with regard to the facts they professed to relate. (a) They had opportunities of observation and inquiry. (b) They were men of sobriety and discernment, and could not have been themselves deceived. (c) Their circumstances were such as to impress deeply upon their minds the events of which they were witnesses.
2. They are honest witnesses. This is evident when we consider that: (a) Their testimony imperiled all their worldly interests. (b) The moral elevation of their writings, and their manifest reverence for truth and constant inculcation of it, show that they were not wilful deceivers, but good [pg 173] men. (c) There are minor indications of the honesty of these writers in the circumstantiality of their story, in the absence of any expectation that their narratives would be questioned, in their freedom from all disposition to screen themselves or the apostles from censure.
Lessing says that Homer never calls Helen beautiful, but he gives the reader an impression of her surpassing loveliness by portraying the effect produced by her presence. So the evangelists do not describe Jesus' appearance or character, but lead us to conceive the cause that could produce such effects. Gore, Incarnation, 77—“Pilate, Caiaphas, Herod, Judas, are not abused,—they are photographed. The sin of a Judas and a Peter is told with equal simplicity. Such fairness, wherever you find it, belongs to a trustworthy witness.”
3. The writings of the evangelists mutually support each other. We argue their credibility upon the ground of their number and of the consistency of their testimony. While there is enough of discrepancy to show that there has been no collusion between them, there is concurrence enough to make the falsehood of them all infinitely improbable. Four points under this head deserve mention: (a) The evangelists are independent witnesses. This is sufficiently shown by the futility of the attempts to prove that any one of them has abridged or transcribed another. (b) The discrepancies between them are none of them irreconcilable with the truth of the recorded facts, but only present those facts in new lights or with additional detail. (c) That these witnesses were friends of Christ does not lessen the value of their united testimony, since they followed Christ only because they were convinced that these facts were true. (d) While one witness to the facts of Christianity might establish its truth, the combined evidence of four witnesses gives us a warrant for faith in the facts of the gospel such as we possess for no other facts in ancient history whatsoever. The same rule which would refuse belief in the events recorded in the gospels “would throw doubt on any event in history.”
No man does or can write his own signature twice precisely alike. When two signatures, therefore, purporting to be written by the same person, are precisely alike, it is safe to conclude that one of them is a forgery. Compare the combined testimony of the evangelists with the combined testimony of our five senses. “Let us assume,”says Dr. C. E. Rider, “that the chances of deception are as one to ten when we use our eyes alone, one to twenty when we use our ears alone, and one to forty when we use our sense of touch alone; what are the chances of mistake when we use all these senses simultaneously? The true result is obtained by multiplying these proportions together. This gives one to eight thousand.”
4. The conformity of the gospel testimony with experience. We have already shown that, granting the fact of sin and the need of an attested revelation from God, miracles can furnish no presumption against the testimony of those who record such a revelation, but, as essentially belonging to such a revelation, miracles may be proved by the same kind and degree of evidence as is required in proof of any other extraordinary facts. We may assert, then, that in the New Testament histories there is no record of facts contrary to experience, but only a record of facts not witnessed in ordinary experience—of facts, therefore, in which we may believe, if the evidence in other respects is sufficient.
5. Coincidence of this testimony with collateral facts and circumstances. Under this head we may refer to (a) the numberless correspondences [pg 174] between the narratives of the evangelists and contemporary history; (b) the failure of every attempt thus far to show that the sacred history is contradicted by any single fact derived from other trustworthy sources; (c) the infinite improbability that this minute and complete harmony should ever have been secured in fictitious narratives.
6. Conclusion from the argument for the credibility of the writers of the gospels. These writers having been proved to be credible witnesses, their narratives, including the accounts of the miracles and prophecies of Christ and his apostles, must be accepted as true. But God would not work miracles or reveal the future to attest the claims of false teachers. Christ and his apostles must, therefore, have been what they claimed to be, teachers sent from God, and their doctrine must be what they claimed it to be, a revelation from God to men.
On the whole subject, see Ebrard, Wissensch. Kritik der evang. Geschichte; Greenleaf, Testimony of the Evangelists, 30, 31; Starkie on Evidence, 734; Whately, Historic Doubts as to Napoleon Buonaparte; Haley, Examination of Alleged Discrepancies; Smith's Voyage and Shipwreck of St. Paul; Paley, Horse Paulinæ; Birks, in Strivings for the Faith, 37-72—“Discrepancies are like the slight diversities of the different pictures of the stereoscope.” Renan calls the land of Palestine a fifth gospel. Weiss contrasts the Apocryphal Gospels, where there is no historical setting and all is in the air, with the evangelists, where time and place are always stated.