Book Review of The Case For Christ by Lee Strobel Part 3: My Rebuttal Argument That, Even if the Gospels Were Based on Eyewitnesses Evidence, That Would Not, Ipso Facto, Mean That They Were 100% Reliable.

(Book Review)

See Part 1: General Comments

Part 2: An Overview of Lee Strobel’s Argument that the Gospels are Based on Eyewitness Evidence

            Lee Strobel devotes the first couple of his chapters to attempting to prove that the Gospels are based on eyewitness testimony.

            Once Lee Strobel considers this proved, the whole rest of the book takes it as a given that the Gospels must be accurate in every detail.  (In chapter 8, Lee Strobel and Dr. Gary Collins actually go so far as to determine Jesus’s sanity based on the descriptions of Jesus written in the Gospels!)

          One of the difficulties that Lee Strobel ignores in his book is the idea that you can have eyewitness testimony that is unreliable.  (In fact, as Bart Ehrman points out in Jesus, Interrupted, our entire legal system is predicated on the assumption that eyewitness testimony is not always reliable.)

When attempting to prove the validity of a religion based on eyewitness testimony, a number of points can be made in response:

I. People Claim to be Eyewitnesses to Crazy Things All the Time, and We Are Not Always Obligated to Believe Them

II. Throughout History, Messianic Figures Have Captivated Millions of Eyewitnesses

III. The Majority of Eyewitness to Jesus in First Century Palestine Did Not Actually Become Believers

IV. All That Being Said, Let Me Admit the Obvious: An Identifiable Eyewitness Source is better than an Anonymous Second Hand Source

I. People Claim to be Eyewitnesses to Crazy Things All the Time, and We Are Not Always Obligated to Believe Them

            In fact, if we were slaves to every eyewitness who claimed to see something supernatural, then we would have to believe in every UFO story, every person who saw Jesus in their tortilla, every Elvis sighting, and every bigfoot sighting.

            I’m currently living in Cambodia, where the superstitious Cambodian people believe in regular occurrences of the supernatural, and one is constantly hearing stories of demon possession, sorcery, miracles, and ghosts.  Walter Mason comments on this extensively in his book about Cambodia, but I’ve experienced it plenty enough myself.  In areas of the world like Cambodia where people have a world view that allows them to turn to the supernatural for explanation of events, it’s amazing how often the supernatural is invoked.

            Often one hears testimony first hand from Cambodian friends who swore that they once saw a ghost, or that there was black magic in their village.  Or, you hear about these stories and rumors and superstitions second hand (what Lee Strobel would call “indirect eyewitness testimony”) where Cambodian friends claimed to know from very reliable sources that miraculous supernatural events occurred.

            Often, these supernatural rumors get large enough to make the papers, such as Spirit Possessions Mark End to Chinese New Year, Sorcerers, Magic Coconut Trees .  And then there were all the miracles that were attributed to King Sihanouk after his death, which thousands of Cambodians swore they saw

            Given how much importance Lee Strobel places on eyewitness testimony, one gets the impression that were he living in Cambodia, he would have no choice but to believe all of these stories.

          As for me, however, I did not personally witness any of these miraculous events myself, and so I consider myself under no obligation to believe them, no matter the number of eyewitnesses.  So, although thousands of Cambodians believe they saw King Sihanouk after he died, I am under no obligation to believe it myself.  In my experience of the world, I do not consider it likely that black magic and ghosts exist, nor are these phenomena accounted for by science.  On the other hand, I have enough experience of the world to know that sometimes people lie, sometimes people are deceived, sometimes people see what they want to see, and often rumours can get out of control very quickly.

II. Throughout History, Messianic Figures Have Captivated Millions of Eyewitnesses

            Throughout history there have been plenty of Messianic movements, in which those claiming to be chosen by God have captivated thousands of eyewitnesses.  There was the Mahdi (W) who fought Gordon in Khartoum, who attracted thousands of followers.  Millions  of Chinese peasants joined the Taiping rebellion when Hong Xiuquan (W) claimed to be the half-brother of Jesus Christ.  Others were attracted by Jim Jones (W) and David Koresh (W). 

III. The Majority of Eyewitness to Jesus in First Century Palestine Did Not Actually Become Believers

          Lee Strobel tries to make much out of the fact that no 1st Century Jew every left a document disproving that Jesus did all the miraculous things attributed to him.

            In fact, this is actually not so surprising.  Given how low literacy rates were throughout history at any point before the industrial revolution, it is highly unlikely any of the people who had witnessed Jesus in person would have been able to write such a document, even assuming it had been a priority for them.  (This same reason is why scholars find it highly unlikely that the highly stylized Greek found in the Gospels could have been written by Jesus’s uneducated Aramaic speaking followers—but I’ll get to that in part 8.)

            Secondly, even if the majority of First Century Jews could read and write, it would have been almost impossible for them to witness a negative.  I mean, unless someone had made it their life’s mission to watch Jesus 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, then how could you prove that he never did any miracles ever?

            As for Jesus’s resurrection, although all 4 Gospels give contradictory accounts, in no account of Jesus’s resurrection does he ever make public appearances after he rose from the dead.  Jesus only appeared in resurrected form to the disciples in secret.  A first century Jewish skeptic, even if he could read or write, is not going to be able to say that he witnessed Jesus not appearing to his disciples in secret.

            However, despite the fact that we don’t have any people explicitly writing down that they witnessed Jesus not doing something, we can infer a lot from the conversion rates among the Jews in first century Palestine.  And we can infer that the majority of eyewitnesses to Jesus were not impressed.

            Jesus had a handful of loyal followers, but the vast majority of eyewitnesses in Galilee and Jerusalem did not convert to Christianity.  If the people who actually witnessed Jesus had found him actually convincing, then there would never have been a split between Judaism and Christianity.  And this is to be weighed against the handful of eye-witness documents Lee Strobel thinks he has.

IV. All That Being Said, Let Me Admit the Obvious: An Identifiable Eyewitness Source is better than an Anonymous Second Hand Source

            It is true, however, that eye-witness accounts are better than anonymous accounts.  So the case for the Gospels is going to get even worse for Lee Strobel when (as we will see later) we don’t even know who wrote the Gospels.  But even if they were written by the apostles, as Lee Strobel claims, this doesn’t mean we are under any obligation to believe something which contradicts our common sense. 

            As Thomas Paine said: When also I am told that a woman called the Virgin Mary, said, or gave out, that she was with child without any cohabitation with a man, and that her betrothed husband, Joseph, said that an angel told him so, I have a right to believe them or not; such circumstance requires a much stronger evidence than their bare word for it; but we have not even this—for neither Joseph nor Mary wrote any such matter themselves; it is only reported by others that they said so—it is hearsay upon hearsay, and I do not choose to rest my belief upon such evidence.

Tomorrow Part 4: Even if Lee Strobel Were Able to Prove that the Church Tradition about the Gospels Was Correct, Most of the Gospel Stories Still Would Not Be Based on Eyewitness Testimony

Update October 20, 2015: This video here is a great explanation of all the problems with eye witness testimony.  It's about the problems with eye witness testimony in regards to UFO sightings, but much of this also applies to Lee Strobel's over-reliance on eye-witness testimony as well.



Update 2: February 9, 2017
The Problem with Miracles (Sam Harris).