by Paul Price
Published: 10 November 2020 (GMT+10)Wikimedia Commons
In our opinion, the cause of justice is not served by suggesting otherwise.”The majority of the focus for the many articles and papers documenting the alleged unreliability of eyewitness testimony is on cherry-picked examples where the witnesses have been tampered with and/or memories have been contaminated.
What you miss are the study's admissions that justify skepticism toward the resurrection narratives in the gospels, for example:
A good illustration of how contamination can reduce the reliability of information obtained from a police interview comes from an archival police study of 29 people who witnessed the murder of Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh (Granhag, Ask, Rebelius, Öhman, & Giolla, 2013). In this case, only 58% of the reported attributes were correct, as corroborated by CCTV. According to the authors, the most likely explanation for the poor performance was memory contamination that occurred because the witnesses were gathered together before being interviewed, and they discussed the event. These findings underscore the fact that our claims about the surprisingly high reliability of eyewitness memory pertain to tests of memory that are conducted before memory contamination... (Wixted, Laura, et al, pp. 330-331)
Did the original eyewitnesses to Jesus' resurrection discuss it with each other before they reported it in the canonical gospels? Obviously yes. So your own source-study would require that the resurrection narratives, including Paul's "eyewitness" testimony, constitute "contaminated" testimony.
What is it to be a "witness"? The term may denote a formal setting, with the person claiming to have seen x or y making a declaration that they will tell the truth and nothing but to some qualified examiner. I have been such a witness once in my life, of a minor car accident; and in between the event and being called on to testify, the colour of one of the vehicles had changed in my memory! That was a salutary experience and taught me to be very wary of "eyewitnesses" even when they have no possible reason to twist or cherry pick the facts. Human beings are fallible, who knew?
ReplyDeleteTo use the word "witness" in the context of Christian apologetics is deeply misleading, carrying as it does overtones of a forensic setting in which the person giving testimony is doing their best to recall accurately what occurred to an impartial recorder. I doubt anyone claims that is what the sources behind the gospels were seeking to do or were capable of doing. They are ambassadors, champions for beliefs they may hold for reasons that have little to do with what they (think they) saw; and as we all know, our beliefs colour what we experience and how we later describe it. That goes for you, of course.
Gospels: file under electioneering. This is a party theological broadcast on behalf of the Jesus movement. Read them like that and they make much more sense.
Thanks for your input, but my main point at this blog is to refute fundamentalist Christians who constantly push bible inerrancy and the resurrection of Jesus as the only reasonable hypothesis, as such things constitute an insult to my intelligence.
ReplyDeleteI have no beef with liberal or courteous Christians.