Are The Gospels All Just Hearsay? Yes, thanks for asking

This is my reply to an article entitled 

Are The Gospels All Just Hearsay?

 Nathan  2 years ago Bible, Objections 

One of the more popular arguments at a lay-level against the reliability of the gospels is that the evidence for the life, death and resurrection of Jesus is all based on hearsay. While you won't find too many scholars or historians making this point, it is such a prevalent assertion among the masses that I think it's important to take a critical look at the argument and determine whether or not it impacts our ability to trust the content of the New Testament documents.

Most bible scholars believe the only two gospels allegedly claiming to be eyewitness accounts (Matthew and John) were not written by the eyewitnesses.  So while they might not explicitly say the gospels are mostly hearsay, this is the effect they create by denying eyewitness authorship.  Regardless, the testimonies to the resurrection of Jesus which come down to us in first hand form, generoulsy granting highly disputed apostolic authorship, would be Matthew, John and Paul.  Anything else in the NT asserting Jesus rose from the dead is either vision, second-hand, or something other than first-hand.

Courtroom One Gavel by Lambda Chi Alpha / CC-BY-NC-SA-2.0
So firstly we need to ask the question: What is hearsay? One atheist website I looked at defined hearsay as "information received from other people that one cannot adequately substantiate". Often when people use the word hearsay, they are referring to information that comes from a third-hand source. It's important to note that these are common usages of the term, because there is also a legal definition that is considerably different in meaning.
 Hearsay in the Legal Setting In a day and age of fictional legal dramas, everyone is familiar with the idea that hearsay is inadmissible as evidence in a court of law. In U.S. law, hearsay refers to a statement made out of court that is then used in court to assert the truth of a matter. Under the Federal Rules of Evidence, only statements made in a trial, under oath, by someone who can be cross-examined, can be used as evidence. In a simple example on the Wikipedia page for hearsay in US Law, if a witness makes a statement such as "Sally told me Tom was in town", this would be inadmissible evidence that Tom was in town, because it relies on a statement made by Sally outside the courtroom. To satisfy the requirements for evidence, Sally would need to make this statement herself in court. The hearsay rules are similar across most legal systems around the world. However the common misconception that hearsay is never permitted in court is factually incorrect. Under U.S. law there are nearly 30 exceptions to the hearsay rule, which mean that out-of-court evidence may be used if it falls into a particular category, such as business records, spontaneous or excited statements, recorded past recollections, or my personal favourite - statements in authentic ancient documents (more than 20 years old).

Correct, but a) the ancient documents rule wasn't intended to govern matters arising from documents authored 2,000 years ago, that's why they are called ancient at 20 years; b) the ancient documents rule requires that the hearsay copy be found in a place it likely would have been found it authentic, for example:

{¶ 59} Documents can be authenticated under the ancient documents rule contained in Evid.R. 901(B)(8) if, "[e]vidence that a document * * *, in any form, (a) is in such condition as to create no suspicion concerning its authenticity, (b) was in a place where it, if authentic, would likely be, and (c) has been in existence twenty years or more at the time it is offered."---Source

 (a) is in such condition as to create no suspicion concerning its authenticity,
Rule 1003. Admissibility of Duplicates------"A duplicate is admissible to the same extent as the original unless a genuine question is raised about the original’s authenticity or the circumstances make it unfair to admit the duplicate."  Of course, with most scholars and apologists being unwilling in assert that modern canonical Greek Matthew and John are accurately reflecting of what Matthew and John the apostles had to say, and with nobody being able to know to what degree, if any, these men gave freedom to their followers to do the writing, the question of the authenticity of the originals of Matthew and John is genuine, hence, you need the original if you wish to get them in under the ancient documents rule

 (b) was in a place where it, if authentic, would likely be,
This obviously cannot be fulfilled:  How could anybody pretend to know that the place they found an ancient copy of Matthew, was a place that, if authentic, the copy would likely be?  We have no reliable traditions on where Matthew was when he wrote a gospel.  This is to say nothing of the fact that the place our existing gospel ms. came from ("provenance") is often clouded in secrecy.  Exactly where Alexandrinus came from is hotly disputed.  The earliest gospel manuscripts are trifling scraps also plagued with unknown origin or origins not connectable to Matthew.  P1 contains Matt. 1:1-9, 12, 14-20, and it was found in a dig in Oxyrhynchus (now called El Bahnasa), a city in middle Egypt, and any church tradition that might have Matthew passing that way hardly qualifies as the place a Matthew gospel copy would "likely" be "if authentic".

Suffice it say that there is too much scholarly disagreement on the authenticity authorship of the canonical gospels, to pretend they could possibly fulfill these tests of admissibility.

Update: December 29, 2017
See my latest comments criticizing J. Warner Wallace of "Cold-Case Christianity" for studiously avoiding that rule of evidence that would toss his cold case out the window.

So it's not enough to say that hearsay is unreliable evidence - such a blanket statement doesn't accord with the reality of the legal courts, where precision in the use of evidence is sometimes literally a matter of life and death. The truth is that certain kinds of hearsay evidence are used to prove the innocence or guilt of a defendant on a regular basis.

It is equally true that lawyers and judges disagree with each other and the lower and higher appeallate courts on whether circumstances had justified characterizing some testimony as qualifying as non-hearsay.

This is a great system for determining truth in contemporary legal matters, where we can examine witnesses directly in a court setting and compare their claims to the evidence provided by the prosecution and defense attorneys. Here only the strictest rules for evidence apply.\
  Hearsay in Historical Inquiry
 But is such a high standard of proof logical or even workable when it comes to determining the truth of past events in which all the witnesses are no longer alive? Under such circumstances, documentary evidence is all we have. While this would be considered hearsay in a court of law, historians have developed more appropriate methods for establishing historical truth.

By examining primary and secondary source documents, and cross-checking these with external sources such as archaeological evidence, historians formulate hypotheses about what happened in the past and determine the probability of an event having occurred.

Correct, and since the case for eyewitness authorship of Matthew and John sucks like a Hoover vacuum, you don't have any "primary" records of the life of Jesus by which to ascertain the likely level of truth/falsity in the hearsay sources like Mark and Luke.  Paul could not be considered a primary source because he characterized his experience on the road to Damascus as a vision (Acts 26:19).  Visions are are even more inadmissible than hearsay.

Using this process, professional historians have come almost unanimously to the conclusion that Jesus was a real person who actually existed, on the basis of the New Testament documents, along with some brief external evidence from the historians Tacitus and Josephus.  As fiercely critical atheist scholar Bart Ehrman puts it:
  “He certainly existed, as virtually every competent scholar of antiquity, Christian or non-Christian, agrees.”
 Beyond this, historians use criterion of authenticity to sift through statements in the New Testament writings to determine their historicity. Rather than deciding on the reliability of the books as a whole, individual sentences are compared to the criterion to determine their historical credibility one-by-one.

I don't see the point: the authorship nand literary interdependence of the Synoptics is so complex that we cannot know which statements constitute first-hand reports and which constitute second-hand, so the job of preparing argument to the court for admissibility cannot even be done.

As for ancient historians, the vast majority of what they have recorded for us must be considered hearsay by the consistent critic.

We only accept their hearsay reliability in tentative fashion, forever open to the possibility that the historian's remark was misleading or false.  There is no confirming the truth to such a point that we find it just as reliable as the report from the school principle that our daughter just died in a school shooting.

Given the limits of technology in early times, what alternative did historians have other than to record their own testimony concerning the statements they had heard from eyewitnesses?

Maybe god could have convinced the gospel authors to record their orignals in stone, the way the Eyptians and Sumerians did, so there would be no doubts about what the originals said?  Does there come a point where the "god's mysterious ways" excuse can be abused, or does that excuse just always infallibly work whenever you need it to?

In the words of Polybius, one of the founders of Roman historiography:
  "For since many events occur at the same time in different place, and one man cannot be in several places at one time, nor is it possible for a single man to have seen with his own eyes every place in the world and all the peculiar features of different places, the only thing left for a historian is to inquire from as many people as possible, to believe those worthy of belief and to be an adequate critic of the reports that reach him." (The Histories 12.4C.4-5)
 Neither modern scholars or ancient historians reject indirect evidence as hearsay, instead they probe the sources they have to determine their reliability.

Again, this is mooted by how weak the case for eyewitness authorship of Matthew and John are, and the hearsay in Mark and Luke has never ceased to be subjected to widespread disagreement among Christian scholars.  We also know that the gospel authors felt free to create copies which changed and modified what was asserted in their source material.

Hearsay Can Communicate Truth
 The reliance of historical investigations on documents and recorded testimony to determine the truth of history proves an important point - hearsay can communicate truth. This becomes obvious as soon as we imagine a simple scenario. I was born too late to meet any of my great-grandparents. The only information I have about them comes from my parents, who knew them and could provide eyewitness testimony about them. But as soon as I tell my friends about my great-grandparents, repeating the things my parents told me, that information becomes hearsay.

Which is precisely why your friends' choice to believe or reject what you say about your great-grandparents will be decided by how trustworthy they think the messenger is.  But neither the NT nor church history gives us enough information upon which to decide what type of men the gospel authors were at the time they allegedly wrote or dictated.  Benny Hinn might be considered an honest person if the only info you had on him came from the first two years after he was ordained.  Notice then the gargantuan pitfalls that potentially open when we pretend some sketchy info here and a blurb over there in 2,000 year old sources tell us all we need to know to form a reasonable judgment on the general credibility of the NT authors.

Provided the testimony of my parents is true, the hearsay I pass on is also true. The fact that a statement is hearsay doesn't make it false, it just means that the truth factor needs to be investigated in order to be established as fact - which is exactly what historians do.

And its precisely at the investigation level where NT hearsay breaks down.

In the meantime, should my friends be automatically skeptical about the details I give them about my great-grandparents?

If you were capable of levitating using only their mental powers alone, yes.

Should they reject my claims until I provide further evidence?

If you were capable of levitating using only their mental powers alone, yes.  If you were only asserting your great-grandparents owned some farmland, then no...unless there is reason to believe you assert such a thing to gain some type of benefit or advantage.

If we presume that all hearsay is untrustworthy, then we should reject any kind of indirect news reporting out of hand - yet nearly everybody believes that there is a basis of truth to current events news stories that they hear from a reporter who was not an eyewitness to the actual events.

No, the problem is not that hearsay is typically untrustworthy, but that it often cannot be determined with any reasonable degree of confidence whether it is, in fact, trustworthy, especially where the hearsay is sourced in documents authored more than 2,000 years ago.

This kind of hyper-skepticism is unworkable and impractical.

No it isn't.  I say 99% of the gospels, as well as any other sources for equally ancient religion, are a hopelessly tangled mess of hearsay and exaggeration.  I do not see whatever ill-effect you think this skepticism should have in my life.  If you can depend on your own presupposition of Christanity being true to justify you in avoiding investigation into the Muslim version of hell, then you cannot find fault in others who depend on their presuppositions to justify avoiding investigation into the Christian versions of hell.  In fact, you'd probably say Christian scholars cannot even agree on it, so if spiritually alive people cannot figure it out, spiritually dead atheists will only fumble even worse.  A perfect reason for spiritually dead people to say "fuck you" to all biblical theology.

By all means critically examine the New Testament texts to see if they tell the truth - but don't reject them because they contain hearsay. This is a historical investigation, not a criminal trial.

Which means you probably shouldn't have brought up the fact that American courts sometimes allow hearsay. This is a historical investigation, not a criminal trial.

Are The Gospels Even Hearsay? The last consideration we need to make is whether or not the gospels, along with Acts and the letters of Paul, are even products of hearsay in the first place.
 Using the common definitions in regards to hearsay, we want to determine how many mouths each gospel passed through to determine whether it is second or third-hand. We also want to decide whether or not the information within the gospels can be adequately substantiated.
 In the case of John and Matthew, much of what occurs in their gospels is their own eyewitness testimony.

No, most scholars agree the author of alleged eyewitness Matthew borrowed extensively from non-eyewitnes Mark's earlier text, which is not what we'd expect an eyewitness to do, even if you could trifle that an eyewitness might possibly rely on hearsay to report something he saw himself.

The gospel of John has very high christological sayings of Jesus that the Synoptic authors never mention, which they surely would have had they believed Jesus said such things.  Clement of Alexandria says John wrote a spiritual gospel in the sense of writing for a reason other than to relay the external facts about Jesus as the Synoptics did, which warrants us in supposing John's gospel presents Jesus as doing and saying more than he actually did in real life.

Both men were members of the inner circle of Jesus and were positioned to hear and record statements directly from other eyewitness as well.

So are those with front row seats to Benny Hinn healing crusades, but you are singularly unimpressed with their eyewitness testimony explaining how many people were healed.

 In addition to multiple secondary sources that link Mark's gospel to the eyewitness testimony of the apostle Peter, notable scholar Richard Bauckham points out internal evidences within Mark that support this claim.

So?  The apostles are often unspeakably dense and stupid throughout the gospels, including after they "experience" the resurrected Christ.

An inclusio device bookends Peter's involvement as a disciple and witness of Jesus, indicating that he is the original source of the material.

Indicating that Peter never preached that Jesus was born of a virgin.

There is also a literal framing device throughout Mark that records events initially from a plural perspective ("we went there", "we did this") that moves to a singular perspective as the action gets underway. This is as clear an indication of eyewitness testimony as we can get from a writing system that didn't have a mechanism like speech marks for indicating quotations. At worst, Mark's gospel is secondary reporting of Peter's eyewitness testimony, and on par with anything recorded by Polybius.

Please quote the section of Mark where he uses the first person plurals.

Luke seems more vulnerable to the claim that his gospel is hearsay. While the evidence shows he was closely connected with Paul, there aren't too many links to the original disciples who were eyewitnesses of the life of Jesus. Nevertheless, the material he shares fits with the things established in the other gospels, and in fact Luke often uses portions of Matthew and Mark directly and unabridged.

Which means Luke gave a misleading view to the reader by revealing he relied on eyewitnesses, but kept silent about his reliance on hearsay, which was great, since he too incorporates much of Mark.

He explains in the prologue to his work that he has carefully interviewed eyewitnesses and is connected enough within the early church to plausibly gain access to them.

Josephus similarly says he carefully checked his facts, but that hardly means you trust him when he reports miracles not already found in the bible.  Do you seriously think a cow gave birth to a lamb?  Are modern skeptics "stupid" for rejecting this ridiculous nonsense?

Luke benefits more than the other gospel writers from the corroborative historical evidence that has validated him as an outstanding and accurate recorder, so even though he is further from the inner circle of Jesus than the others, we can be confident that he has carefully recorded the events as they took place.

In Acts 15 he limits his representation of the Judaizers with a single summary position statement once repeated, while he takes about 40 verses to tell all about the apostles, their arguments, what they actually said, what they did afterward, and how their views were conveyed to their followers afterward.  Some would say Luke isn't a whole lot different than Fox News.  Does he tell the truth?  Yes.  Does he do it in a misleading prejudicial way?  Yes.

The gospels are a mixture of direct eyewitness testimony, along with secondary reports from eyewitnesses.

You cannot show which parts of the gospels are direct eyewitness testimony.

While some of this would not be admitted as evidence in an actual court, this is no problem for the Christian, since this is not a legal matter but a historical one. The fact that there are four separate accounts of the life of Jesus, each of which contains original material not found in the others, mean that the accounts can be substantiated.

No, most of John cannot be found in the Synoptics.  That hardly "substantiates" John's version.