Faith on Trial (5 page)

Even modern versions of the Bible, with the possible exception of new thought-for-thought translations, evidence few variants from original texts. An example of this is shown by a fragment of a scroll written on beaten silver. This fragment, held in Jerusalem, is known as the “silver scroll.”
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Dated between 700 and 500
bc
, the silver scroll was found in 1981 in a gravesite in Jerusalem. In microscopic handwriting, this fragment contains words from the Old Testament book of Numbers:

The L
ord
bless you and keep you;

The L
ord
make His face shine on you,

And be gracious to you;

The L
ord
lift up His countenance on you,

And give you peace. (Num. 6:24–26)

The words are virtually identical to modern texts. This is an example of the “amazing fidelity of transmission” throughout a period of over twenty-five hundred years by generations of scribes responsible for making manuscript copies of the Old and New Testaments of the Bible.

It is also important to recognize that at the time copies of the original manuscripts of the four Gospels began to be created and circulated in the first century, the great interest of the Christian communities in the accurate preservation of the original language provided a natural monitor for the work of the scribes. The original manuscripts appear to have recorded oral teachings that were themselves public. It was well known that copies of the original manuscripts, incorporating the public teachings, were being made and circulated. The manuscripts themselves contained recitals of events that were not only of great interest to the general public at the time, but they also described events which happened before many witnesses. Inaccuracies in the manuscripts would have been subject to public criticism. Since no such contemporary criticism is on record, it can reasonably be assumed that the testimony in the manuscripts represented the consensus of the community.

Because of the public interest in these documents, Greenleaf concluded in his eighteenth-century treatise that the scribes will be regarded for legal purposes as the agents of the Christian communities, for whose use the copies were made. Copies made under these circumstances would be given great confidence in a court of law as evidence and would be
presumed
to be true copies until proven otherwise. This is particularly compelling, given the fact that these four Gospels have been universally accepted as true copies of the original narratives and have been consistently acted upon by the Christian community since the first century.
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The early manuscript copies of the four Gospels, together with the papyrus fragments, have now been authenticated and constitute relevant evidence that is fully admissible in a federal court of law. They are not hearsay. They are sufficient under the Federal Rules of Evidence and applicable common law for consideration by the jury in judging the truth or falsity of the facts that we have set out to examine and prove.

(The Legal Nature of the Testimony)

H
aving determined that the early manuscript copies of the Gospels are admissible as evidence for the jury’s consideration, we must now find out who wrote them. Of course the names Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are attributed to the Gospels in the New Testament. However many skeptics and academics believe these four books weren’t written until the second or third century. If they are right, it follows that the Gospel authors wrote only from secondhand information. That’s a problem. Remember the old telephone game? Who would trust a source that lived generations after the events occurred?

So let’s find out who really wrote the Gospel testimony. We will begin our review by looking at the relationship of the authors to the events reported. Are these reports presented as testimony of knowledgeable and credible witnesses? The authorship of the Gospels is a subject that has been studied continuously since the first century because the historical truth of the writings is the foundation of the Christian religion. This analysis will help us to discover whether each writer was in a position to have actually observed the events recorded. That is significant because, even though the Gospels as we have now authenticated them will be admitted as evidence over the hearsay objection, the normal requirement that a witness giving testimony should have firsthand knowledge remains an important standard for determining the credibility, or the actual value, the jury will give to that testimony. If the testimony is not based on personal observation, it will have to satisfy some other exception from the rule to be viewed as credible. The basic requirement is this:

A witness may testify to a matter only if evidence is introduced sufficient to support a finding that the witness has personal knowledge of the matter. Evidence to prove personal knowledge may consist of the witness’s own testimony. This rule does not apply to a witness’s expert testimony under Rule 703.
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Federal Rule of Evidence 602, quoted above, has been interpreted by courts with some flexibility to permit either a showing of specific firsthand knowledge, or alternatively, as we saw with the rule on ancient documents, a showing that circumstances were “sufficient to support a finding” that the witness had firsthand knowledge of the facts reported.
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In other words, if circumstances surrounding the facts lead you to conclude that the author had the opportunity to observe the events, for example, that he or she lived at that time and in that geographical place, and if their testimony can be corroborated, those findings are generally sufficient to meet the requirements of the rule. Courts have ruled that such things as evidence of a person’s lengthy experience with the subject,
3
expertise on a subject, and personal background;
4
inferences customarily drawn from particular circumstances or procedures;
5
and knowledge obtained from some acceptable source, such as a photograph,
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are all sufficient to meet the requirements of the rule in place of actual proof of firsthand observation. In a situation in which the evidence that the witness had an adequate opportunity to observe the facts is uncertain, the evidence will be admitted, and the jury will decide the issue.

The question of whether the Gospels were written by witnesses who had personal knowledge—or who had the opportunity to have personal knowledge—of the events reported depends in large part on the dates that can be assigned to the earliest manuscripts containing testimony of those facts. As you know, the challenge is that the Gospels are not eyewitness testimony but merely myths and legends, in some cases reflecting tradition or political agenda that arose gradually over a long period following the death of Jesus. This view is essentially based on an assumption that the Gospels themselves were not actually written in complete form until several generations after the death of Jesus—at the earliest, near the end of the first century.
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Scholars have spent entire careers dating the earliest manuscripts of the New Testament and, more recently, the papyrus fragments. To begin to create the time frame for dating, we know that the earliest date the Gospels could have been written is the year of the crucifixion of Jesus, commonly accepted to be between
ad
30 and 33. Dating of documents by comparison to other texts with a known end date and referring to mutual related events is one way to determine how long after an event occurred a document was written. Or sometimes a document can be dated merely by the actual occurrence of an event. For example, a manuscript discovered within the caves at Qumran, known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, would have an outside date of
ad
68, the year the caves were abandoned as the inhabitants fled before an invasion of the Tenth Roman Legion. That end date for the Dead Sea Scrolls was also confirmed by radiocarbon dating in 1991.
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The invasion of Roman soldiers mentioned above foretold one of the most important events in Jewish history, and it provides another possible end date for the Gospel manuscripts. In
ad
68 the drumbeat of Rome reverberated throughout Palestine as the soldiers of Nero’s general Titus marched to Jerusalem. After a long siege, the city was completely sealed off from the outside world. The Romans built a massive wall of earth around Jerusalem, and famine soon conquered the inhabitants. Jerusalem was destroyed, sacked, and burned to the ground in
ad
70. The Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, born circa
ad
37, wrote
Wars of the Jews
in
ad
77 or 78, and thereafter a monumental history called
Antiquities of the Jews
. He described the wrath of the Romans as they nailed the Jews on crosses in front of the walls of the city, “one after one way, and another after another, to the crosses, by way of jest; when their multitude was so great, that room was wanting for the crosses, and crosses wanting for the bodies.”
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When the Romans entered the city, they found streets and houses full of dying women, children, and elderly people, “and the young men wandered about the market-places like shadows, all swelled with famine.”
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The city was plundered. Blood and fire desecrated the landscape. The temple was destroyed in the conflagration and with it the entire institutional system of Judaism that was centered on the temple. Josephus reports that so many children, old men, profane persons, and priests were slain that the ground beneath them was no longer visible. Desolation reigned throughout Judea. And here’s the point: every historical writing from
ad
70 through the second century reflected this dramatic circumstance—the change in the Jewish system and its relationship with Rome—except the four Gospels.

The silence of the Gospels with respect to the complete destruction of Jerusalem and the temple is strong circumstantial evidence that they were written before, not after,
ad
70. The Gospels reflect the social, cultural, and economic background of the period prior to the destruction of Jerusalem and the Jewish Levitical system, not after. They reflect a delicate but still tolerable relationship with Rome, not the hostile servility of a nation enslaved and broken. Logic does not permit a conclusion that the Gospels could have been written after the year
ad
70 without mention of the Jewish revolt and the resulting destruction of the city, the temple, the Jewish culture, and the new hostility with Rome. That reasoning alone provides a rational basis for belief by many knowledgeable scholars that
ad
70 should be viewed as an end date for the writing of the Gospels.

In addition to the end date of
ad
70, internal references in the narratives of the various Gospels, and perhaps more important, silence as to other major historical events, provide further evidence of an early date. The Gospels contain no hint of the persecution of Christians by Nero in
ad
67, even though the facts were well known and Tacitus stated that the excesses of that period gained great public sympathy for the victims at the time.
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Neither do any of the Gospels contain a reference to the stoning death of James, the brother of Jesus and a leader of the early Christian church, at approximately the same time, though that event was reported by Josephus in his “Antiquities of the Jews.”
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The Gospels do not contain any reference to the death of the apostle Peter or of Paul, another follower of Jesus after his crucifixion.

On the other hand, the Gospels affirmatively reflect the need to distinguish the new message of Jesus from Jewish law as it existed prior to
ad
70 on such subjects as fasting, the relationship to the temple, and the requirement of sacrifices, all of which disappeared after the destruction of Jerusalem. John A. T. Robinson, a well-known biblical scholar, gave the example, among others, that the Gospel of Matthew seven times warns against the influence of the Sadducees, a group whose power totally disappeared after the destruction of the temple. The Gospel of Matthew also reflects a continued need to coexist with a Jewish culture that was no longer in existence after the destruction of the temple in
ad
70.
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Historians have recognized that after
ad
70 Christians and Jews separated into two completely different camps, and that fact is reflected in many Jewish and Christian writings. Based on this reasoning, the situation described in the Gospels corresponds to what is known about Christianity in Palestine prior to
ad
70.
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The facts and analysis described above are completely inconsistent with a theory that the Gospels were written at or near the end of the first century or in the early second century. Reason requires a date prior to
ad
70 for the writing of the four Gospels on that basis alone. Additionally, through corroboration of the incidental details of all of the Gospel narratives, recent archaeological discoveries that will be presented to the jury also support this early date for the four Gospels. Robinson believed, based on the aforementioned reasoning, that all of the Gospels were completed during the forty years that passed between the death of Jesus and the destruction of Jerusalem.
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Forensic evidence of an even earlier date for some of the Gospels is also available, however, further eroding the theory that the four Gospels were written at a date too late to permit the authors to have been alive at the time of the events reported. When this news was first announced, headlines around the world described this as the most stunning breakthrough in biblical research since the Dead Sea Scrolls. Papyrus fragments of the Gospel of Matthew, and possibly those of the Gospels of Mark and Luke and the New Testament book of Acts, can now be shown to have been written by people of the same generation as Jesus—people who were alive at the time Jesus lived. These fragments containing random selections from the Gospels have recently been matched word for word against the related portions of the later complete manuscripts of those books, providing evidence not only of the early date of those Gospels but also that the actual Gospels
in their entirety
were written at the earlier dates.
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