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.
