Are the Gospels Eyewitness Accounts?

Mar 17

Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits, whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world. Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God: And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already is it in the world. Ye are of God, little children, and have overcome them: because greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world. ~ 1 John 4 1-4 (KJV)

An Exploration.

One often hears the claim that the gospels are eyewitness accounts. In what senses, if any, are this true? Most treatments include debates over who actually wrote the gospels, a putative Q source, which “John” really wrote the gospel, and so on. Some focus on the influences of Greek philosophy and motifs from surrounding cultures, such as Osiris’s resurrection. These things are important, but I want to leave them aside and focus on my own questions, each of which points to a more general concern I try to think about when interpreting any text: context in history, context in letters, applicable scientific context, and finally provenance and providence, or how we, today, came to know this text.

How does our concept of “eyewitness account” differ from concepts in the first century AD?
What standards of evidence would have been expected from the gospels by a typical contemporary reader?
How reliable are eyewitness accounts in general?
How many miracles, therefore, are we expected to believe in?

I regret to exclude many other questions, mainly, “How do oral, manuscript, and printmaking cultures differ in how they collectively remember?”, but I this essay is already quite the busy mix.

1) Our concept of Eyewitness accounts is closely tied to the Court of Law. There is long precedent in English Common Law going back centuries, but in the US the fundamental principle was laid out in the Sixth Amendment: “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right… to be confronted with the witnesses against him.”. This is to say, one has the right to cross-examine a witness. Hearsay involves a third party. If they can appear themselves, they can then be cross examined, and it is not hearsay. There is one prominent exception to this rule. In the famous case Rex v. Woodcock (1789), it was judged that the dying statement of someone who could not be in court due to their demise, “are declarations made in extremity, when the party is at the point of death, and when every hope of this world is gone: when every motive to falsehood is silenced, and the mind is induced by the most powerful considerations to speak the truth; a situation so solemn, and so awful, is considered by the law as creating an obligation equal to that which is imposed by a positive oath administered in a Court of Justice.”

if we apply this standard rigorously, we could rightly count as admissible in court the testimony of the martyrs, as many apologists do. Cross-examination indeed. For better or worse, however, the statute of limitations has expired by twenty centuries or so. We must admit that we are dealing with historical documents — and as such, courtroom standards are informative, but inapplicable. Given all the time that has passed, would first-century Jews recognize similar concepts of hearsay and eyewitnesses in courtroom testimony? Let’s examine the Talmud:

“Say how exactly you know that this litigant owes money to that litigant, as the plaintiff claims. If he said: The defendant said to me: It is true that I owe the plaintiff, or if he says: So-and-so said to me that the defendant owes the plaintiff, the witness has said nothing and his testimony is disregarded. It is not valid testimony unless he says: The defendant admitted in our presence to the plaintiff that he owes him, e.g., two hundred dinars. By admitting to the debt in the presence of witnesses he renders himself liable to pay the amount that he mentioned. And afterward they bring in the second witness and examine him in the same manner. If their statements are found to be congruent the judges then discuss the matter.” ~ Mishnah Sanhedrin 3.6, circa 200AD, bold in source

So, we see both the concept of hearsay, as well as the idea that witnesses should be examined, and the importance of corroboration.

Mark’s account of the trial of Christ aligns with this Jewish legal practice, saying, “Many testified falsely against him, but their statements did not agree.” (Mk 14:56 NIV). The Gospel of John makes similar appeals to eyewitness testimony, implicitly contrasted with hearsay, “The man who saw it has given testimony, and his testimony is true. He knows that he tells the truth, and he testifies so that you also may believe.” (Jn 19:35 NIV) We see this in the epistles as well.

There is an implicit appeal to eyewitness testimony in 1 John 1:1 (NIV), “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life.” But the most interesting eyewitness claim is 2 Peter 1:16, which contrasts “cleverly devised myths” with Peter’s own “eyewitness” testimony. But is this inserted in translation, or is something like the modern “eyewitness” really in the original text? To lay some groundwork first, a typology of translations:

Type	Relationship	Biblical Example
Exact equivalence	1:1 mapping	ὕδωρ → "water"; שֶׁמֶשׁ → "sun"
Granularity difference	1:many or many:1, nested	ἀγάπη + φιλία + ἔρως + στοργή → "love"; חֵטְא + עָוֹן + פֶּשַׁע → "sin"
Cross-cutting partition	Same domain, non-nested boundaries	χρόνος/καιρός vs. time; לֵב vs. heart/mind; שָׁמַע vs. hear/obey
Partial overlap	Intersecting but non-equivalent	חֶסֶד ≈ "steadfast love"; πίστις ≈ "faith"; תּוֹרָה ≈ "law"
Lexical gap (linguistic)	No structural parallel	ἱλαστήριον, παράκλητος
Lexical gap (cultural)	No conceptual parallel	גֹּאֵל (kinsman-redeemer), חֵרֶם (the ban)

(see here for more detail on biblical examples and here for more nonbiblical examples in the same framework)

To lay out what I mean by “lexical gap”, in modern American culture there is no equivalent to ἱλαστήριον (hilasterion), the "mercy seat". This was the gold cover of the Ark of the Covenant where atonement was enacted (LXX of Exod 25:17). Paul applies it to Christ in Romans 3:25. English has no word for a place that is simultaneously the locus of propitiation (satisfying divine justice), expiation (removing sin), and divine presence. So, we see a diversity of translation choices, including "propitiation," "expiation," "atoning sacrifice," and "mercy seat". This was an object unique to the world of second temple Judaism. Similarly, there is a lexical gap between modern American English and Peter’s “epoptai”.

Epoptai likely references not a witness testifying in a courtroom, a journalistic source, a witness of a contract being signed, or a historical manuscript. It references the highest level of initiate in the Eleusinian mystery cults of the time, against which early Christianity directly competed. For those unfamiliar with these cults, they were something like modern Freemasonry, with tiered levels of secret rituals. Epoptai described those who had seen the highest level of mysteries. So it is clear that Peter’s statement cuts against them in multiple ways. But it’s not just a comparative argument. There is something he’s saying here about being transformed himself by the experience of witnessing the transfiguration, something that goes far beyond our modern sense of “eyewitness” and should be very familiar to modern Christians. (More in-depth analysis courtesy of the geniuses at Anthropic.)

So, to finish up on 2 Peter 1:16, epoptai can be explained to modern audiences, but doesn’t really fit our conception of “eyewitness”. However, epoptai is stronger than our modern conception, and we already have evidence from the Gospels and the Talmud showing that a “courtroom witness” called to bring testimony is a concept that both we and the gospel writers shared.

To be fully explicit: Yes, our modern concept of “courtroom eyewitness” maps quite well onto the Gospel era, although investigative reporting did not exist in the modern sense.

2) What standards of evidence would have been expected from the Gospels by a typical contemporary reader?

Genre Awareness

To convict a man of murder, we expect the utmost rigor of a detective or prosecutor, and have many layers of appeals and checks. Parking tickets less so -- good luck fighting that in court! Similarly, we expect scientists conducting clinical trials to maintain strict standards, such as double-blind study design, and study pre-registration. However, it is an open secret that everyday scientific papers are subject to file-drawer effects and p-fishing. Still, though these practices are tacitly allowed, it would be a major scandal if a paper in Nature or Cell fabricated data, or even modified data significantly. So, evidentiary standards can be very strict in some respects, and lax in others. The phrases "genre of science" or "genre of legal action" sound unfamiliar. Perhaps "genus" is better. But the point is so clear that I hesitate to even make it: each kind of work has its own unique demands, and its own unique standards for reliability and rigor. Ideally the standards match the demands of truthseeking and long-term usefulness, rather than short-term ease and political convenience.

Leaving aside greasy political realities, even the most maximally truth-seeking academic will react differently in different situations. For example, with varying context, default assumptions change — we all know what PCR is, no need to cite the original Kary Mullis paper. But this was not so when it first came out. No need to cite Marbury v. Madison in 2026. So, even in the same field, context shifts over time. It might make sense to cite Marbury v. Madison in an intro textbook, however. So, audience matters as well. While standards of rigor for technicians are usually more obvious or explicit, the same principles apply to the creative arts.

A schoolmate of mine recently published a hugely successful debut novel, fictional, but based in large part on his own life. When asked why he didn’t write a memoir, he replied that there was a truer story there than if he had tied it down to every detail of his life. To quote Woolf, “The novelist is free; the biographer is tied.”

There are authentic and inauthentic novels. It would be an abdication to say they are all merely fictional, and leave it at that. Take "Blood Meridian". It started with a long-forgotten Mexican-American war memoir from the 1850s, "My Confession". From this seed, planted by McCarthy, nourished by years of southwest living, a rich fruit grew, something rare that tastes of its native soil. There is aliveness in it still. Conversely, some novelists openly admit to having made things up. Through extrapolations, they made something like a grape soda. Fizzy gas tickled the nose, children liked the sweetness, and the flavor was fun, if shallow. But these were more artifice than art, more facsimile than fact. They knew no terroir of God. They had no deepness of earth.

And so there is art that lives out beyond the temporal bounds of its author, and there was art, dead before it had even been made.

There are true novels and false novels. But the standard is unique to the genre. One could expect a criticism of a story that felt “wooden” or “inauthentic”, or "shallow". It is reasonable to criticize a contrived “Deus ex Machina” plot device. But, it would be peculiar for someone to criticize Anna Karenina on the grounds that there is no independent documentary evidence of Anna wearing a black velvet dress to the ball. It would be similarly queer to see "consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin [Citation Needed]". One can easily consider the lilies of the field themselves; no need to reference some authority. This cuts both ways: One could try to criticize a newspaper headline "‘One inch from a potential civil war’: Near miss in Trump shooting a close call for democracy" as too contrived a plot point, too Deus Ex, but this makes little sense. It happened, and we all saw it. It was not done in a corner.

Lexical Gaps and Conceptual Anachronism

It is important not to confuse exactness and provability with truthfulness. We live in an age where our ability to document and digitally copy far surpasses our ability to understand and beget. It is natural, even helpful in many cases, to attempt to trace back and verify the source of some fact. Even that, though, is not as definitive as some hope. Take the video of George Floyd's death. The same video is available to everyone, but different parts of the country came to wildly different conclusions about what the story was. So, exact documentary evidence is not really sufficient to establish truth. Neither, as the existence of honest fiction shows, is it necessary.

So, the first century AD was a world where it was either impossible or very rare to find documentary evidence of the kind common today. And still, there were standards of evidence, like the courtroom examples given earlier. Character and trustworthiness was essential, and more densely-enmeshed in face-to-face relationships than in our atomized technological world. So they had less "ties" to letters, photographs, newspaper articles, but perhaps more social ties. Consider E.M. Forster's observation, speaking about our modern histories, "fiction is truer than history, because it goes beyond the evidence, and each of us knows from his own experience that there is something beyond the evidence". But this history he talks about is not the ancient history, just as the biography that Woolf writes about is not the ancient Greco-Roman bios/vitae. They were written in a pre-scientific world where authority mattered more than it does now. They were written in a world where legions of post-docs did not try to pick over your citations, looking for a mistake, demanding that you justify yourself by the words in an archive or bytes on a drive.

Our modern conceptions of the "fact", "discovery" and "history" were not found in the ancient world. Wootton places the origins of the "fact" in the mid-1500s, and "discovery" to the time of Columbus. The ancients had their own discipline of history, but it was distinct from the History the academy practices today. As Ratzinger notes in the first chapter of his Introduction to Christianity, the total domination of the academy by Positivism, Mathematics and History did not occur until the early 19th century. Take Leopold von Ranke, considered a founder of the modern History that focuses on objectivity and primary-source-based methodology, "To history has been assigned the office of judging the past, of instructing the present for the benefit of future ages. To such high offices this work does not aspire: it seeks only to show what actually happened." Here he departs from the very root of the term "History", founded by Herodotus in 430 BC, means "inquiry" in contemporary Greek usage. Going back farther, to the Iliad 18.501, "ἴστορι" or "histori" means "a judge". Cicero, in his time, considered History to be "magistra vitae", the teacher of life. And so, for overturning this long tradition of judgment and moral instruction, Ranke's contemporary Droysen attached his "eunuchoid objectivity". But in our present time, this eunuchoid objectivity is normal, even old-fashioned.

While Herodotus could not be criticized for eunuchoid pretenses to objectivity, we still see investigative rigor from the outset. Here, we see him weighing evidence:

Now whether Xerxes did indeed send a herald to Argos saying that which has been reported, and whether envoys of the Argives who had gone up to Susa inquired of Artoxerxes concerning friendship, I am not able to say for certain; nor do I declare any opinion about the matters in question other than that which the Argives themselves report: but I know this much, that if all the nations of men should bring together into one place the evils which they have suffered themselves, desiring to make exchange with their neighbours, each people of them, when they had examined closely the evils suffered by their fellows, would gladly carry away back with them those which they had brought.[139] Thus it is not the Argives who have acted most basely of all. I however am bound to report that which is reported, though I am not bound altogether to believe it; and let this saying be considered to hold good as regards every narrative in the history: for I must add that this also is reported, namely that the Argives were actually those who invited the Persian to invade Hellas, because their war with the Lacedemonians had had an evil issue, being willing to suffer anything whatever rather than the trouble which was then upon them

This is notably distinct from the declarative voice of the Bible. I know of no modern scholar who considers any of the books of the Bible to be Histories, and this makes sense. "I am bound to report that which is reported, though I am not bound altogether to believe it" is quite distinct from "these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name" (Jn 20:31 NIV). The Gospels are not Greco-Roman Histories. However, we can still learn something from the first Historians: what standards of evidence can we expect in the ancient Hellenic Mediterranean, with its distinct culture and limited technology?

I don't want to go too far here. Early historians were keenly interested in truth-seeking, even if they did not have the technologies we have for archival work and exact preservation of details. Though Herodotus does not say it, it is clear to me and most other scholars that he presents a different attitude from the flattery of his predecessors the court chroniclers, and the fiction of the epic poets.

But even this weighing of evidence did not go far enough for Thucydides, writing ~20 years after Herodotus. His writing in The History of the Peloponnesian War was particularly concerned with rigor, prefiguring Ranke:

And with reference to the narrative of events, far from permitting myself to derive it from the first source that came to hand, I did not even trust my own impressions, but it rests partly on what I saw myself, partly on what others saw for me, the accuracy of the report being always tried by the most severe and detailed tests possible."

Trust nobody, not even yourself! Unlike Ranke, however, he had no archives and scarce written primary sources. Contrast his punctiliousness with his standard for speeches:

With reference to the speeches in this history, some were delivered before the war began, others while it was going on; some I heard myself, others I got from various quarters; it was in all cases difficult to carry them word for word in one’s memory, so my habit has been to make the speakers say what was in my opinion demanded of them by the various occasions, adhering as closely as possible to the general sense of what they really said.

Thucydides is an exacting figure, who explicitly contrasts his own objectivity with the exaggeration of the poets and the flattery of the chroniclers. Still, he does not consider verbatim transcription of speeches possible. Though decrees and laws were sometimes carved in stone, and some attempts at transcription were attempted in the ancient world, the stenotype machine would not be invented for another 2,280 years. He positions himself as maximally truth-seeking, willing to carry out "the most severe and detailed tests", and to sacrifice readability and acclaim to create something precise and enduring. So, if even he does not hold himself to an exact-speech standard, such a standard must have been completely unheard-of in the ancient world.

Having established the upper limit of rigor here, we return to the question: what kind of writing are the Gospels? I will begin with a summary of Pheme Perkins' excellent "Introduction to the Gospels" in the New Oxford Annotated Bible:

At the time of their writing, "Gospel" or "euangelion" meant "Good News". A Greek inscription dating to this time lauds the birth of the newborn Caesar Augustus, and refers to this by "euangelion". When I read this inscription, I was immediately struck by similarities in language between it and the Gospels. One way of looking at it is that this was simply the appropriate way to write about a ruler in that time, whether he be Caesar, or the King of Heaven. Another view is that this fits into a long Jewish tradition of appropriating and subverting imperial propaganda to refer to God and encourage fear of God rather than of earthly emperors, that is, encourage piety rather than servility. Some modern scholars over-extend this sort of view and make the Gospels out to be propaganda that says more about the communities in which they were produced than about the man they were written about, that is, Christ Jesus. The mainstream scholarly view now, after much lobbying, is Richard Burridge's view that Gospels most closely fit with bioi/vitae. This is sometimes translated as "Greco-Roman Biography" but is distinct from the modern biographical genre. Allied to this view is the idea that, drawing from Justin Martyr, the Gospels should be viewed as "hypomnemata", something like memoirs, more notes than a finished, polished work such as bioi typically were.

I agree with this view, that the Gospels are similar enough to bioi that we can expect certain shared generic conventions. This perfectly resolves a difficulty I, along with Bart Ehrman and many others, have had with the Gospel accounts of Christ's death. The problem is this: there are three different "last words" of Christ. They have different implications. And they cannot all possibly be the factual "last words" of Jesus of Nazareth. Many apologists, for example Jimmy Akin, take a "selectionist" approach, where each of the sayings of Christ on the cross was indeed said by him, literally and exactly. This fits well with "reconstructionist" accounts such as the Stations of the Cross, or Kevin Costner's "The First Christmas". This is, frankly, ahistorical. Burridge's work shows that the "last words" in a biography are vitally important in demonstrating the character of the bioi's subject. The upper bound provided by Thucydides demonstrates that exact replication of speech was not considered possible, even for people that were eyewitnesses. So what Akin and the rest of these apologists are doing is ahistorically projecting modern historico-journalistic standards of precise quotation back in time, in the process completely butchering the narrative integrity of the original Gospel authors.

Burridge's bioi insight is a much better answer to these skeptics. Despite the importance of last words, we can find similar situations in bioi of the most famous men of that time. I have asked Claude to compile further notes on this, but in a nutshell, Cato the Younger has multiple different "Life of Cato" accounts that survive til now, and while there is much agreement on his character and the rough outline of events, there is much disagreement regarding the precise last words. Much like the Gospels, each author has written last words that align with his focus through the rest of the work. And farbeit from a Redditor to question the historicity of Cato. CHECKMATE ATHEISTS!!!

When we adopt Burridge's insights, we not only get an answer to the skeptic's question, "why do the last words contradict?" We gain a new understanding and appreciation for the Gospels as what they truly are, and as windows into the character of the Messiah. Much like differing camera angles can provide distinct insights into the character of their subject, so too can each Gospel. What is more, we knew that they were accepted as credible at the time, while many other accounts were dismissed by the Apostolic Church as not in keeping with the character and life of Christ. So, they were not seen as histories or "eyewitness accounts", but they were seen as credible bioi/hypomnemata and spiritually gratifying for public reading.

Finally, we can use internal evidence from the Gospels to gauge the level of exactness expected at the time. Mark 1:2-3 gives a perfectly understandable quote that can be linked to Exodus 23:20, Malachi 3:1, and Isaiah 40:3. This is not an exact citation! It is not a verbatim quote from Isaiah, and contains content from two other books. It is obedient in the substance, but the details are variable.

3. How reliable are eyewitness accounts in general?

I did not anticipate this bioi breakthrough, which I think definitively solves the problem of seeming contradictions between the Gospel accounts. On one hand, the Gospels are not historical accounts, for they do not weigh evidence in the way that Herodotus and Thucydides do. In fact, the positivistic, fact-for-fact way that many modern evangelicals and atheists read the Bible is ahistorical. It is not something the people writing or reading the Gospels would have recognized at the time. So, modern readers can rest assured that the Gospel writers were within the bounds of honorable testimony for the time, and I personally believe that they did the very best they could.

But the reliability of memory is part of this debate too, and interesting in its own right.

Tragically, The Situation Calls for Some Thought

Firstly, I want to rule out some extreme examples. Bart Ehrman often references the kid's game of "Telephone" or "Chinese Whispers" to discredit the integrity of the Gospel accounts. This falls into a classic pitfall in psychology. Experimental setups that superficially resemble the situation of interest often completely fail to capture the key psychological variables or conditions that are most relevant to the phenomena of interest. One particular example is front-of-mind for me.

People often cite the famous "Because I have to make some copies" compliance study as some sort of iron law of NLP. Robert Cialdini's 2001 bestseller "Influence: Science and Practice" uses it as a centerpiece of the "Click, whirr" chapter, in which he claims that "most of the time", people act "blindly mechanical", according to what are called "fixed action patterns" in the animal behavior research. He writes, "the word because triggered an automatic compliance response from Langer's subjects, even when they were given no subsequent reason to comply. Click, whirr". How interesting! There's certainly some truth to it, plus it may provide a certain frisson of superiority for those who read it. But does it match the results of the original experiment, summarized below by Nawrat and Dolinski (1998)?

Langer, Blank,and Chanowitz (1978). In their study, a person about to use a photocopier was interrupted by an experimenter who asked one of the following: (a) “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine?”; (b) “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I’m in a rush?”; or (c) “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the Xerox machine because I have to make some copies?” People allowed the requester to use the copier more often in scenarios (b) and (c)—when an explanation of why the requester needed the machine was added to the request—than they did in scenario (a). However, the compliance rates in the latter two scenarios were almost identical, even though in scenario (c), the explanation did not provide any real reason why the experimenter needed to use the machine immediately. Langer (1989; see also Langer & Moldoveanu, 2000) assumed that people act mindlessly because of a lack of motivation to actively (or thoughtfully) construct categories and distinctions based on relevant features. They start to function mindfully, however, when their remaining in the state of mindlessness would be too costly for them. According to this assumption, participants in the Langer et al. (1978) study behaved mindlessly when the cost of staying mindless was low (waiting for 5 pages to copy) but shifted their functioning into the thoughtful mode when mindlessness became too costly. For instance, Langer et al. found that when the experimenter stated that he had 20 pages to copy, the explanation added to the request made participants more willing to comply only when they were told a real reason.

This is to say, a "bogus" reason escapes notice when the request is small, but when the request is substantial, people become more critical. So, it is vitally important to think about not only whether a splashy psychology result can be replicated consistently, but, crucially, whether it is generalizable at all to the situation it claims to speak to.

We need to be careful not to make the same mistake. "Chinese Whispers" is a chain of oral transmission, but it is 1) a game 2) played by children 3) where the fun is in purposely degrading the signal by whispering. Because the point of the game is to degrade the signal, the message has no internal checks or redundancies. Yes, signals can degrade, such is life. But conversely, the oral transmission of the Rigveda has been so faithful that it has been described by scholar Michael Witzel as "something like a tape-recording of ca. 1500–500 BCE". In many respects, this is a more similar situation to the rabbinic culture of the first century: a tradition with internal consistency checks is self-consciously safeguarded by a community who regard it as sacred. There's actually some work to do here -- we can't cite Chinese Whispers, and discard the Gospels as gobbledygook. Neither can we cite the Rigveda, and act like it means the precise details of Jesus' life were passed down verbatim.

Luckily, there is an active scholarly conversation about just this. A Claude summary can be found here. I'll focus on the parts most important for the current discussion. Rabbinic oral culture at the time of Christ indisputably involved significant oral tradition, and included a specific role whose job was verbatim memorization of holy texts and oral traditions.

There is a theory of "informal oral controlled tradition" advocated by Kenneth Bailey, but I think Theodore J. Weeden, Sr. does a pretty thorough job completely demolishing it in his article subtitled "A theory Contested By Its Evidence". Based on my (limited) survey of the research, the most skeptical model, that of Jan Vansina, is well-researched but undermined by the fact that it is based on modern cultures whose norms must be extrapolated backwards in time for the theory to hold. In my view, the most likely transmission model was something like the Parry-Lord model of epic poetry: We don't get verbatim preservation, but core elements of the story are considered very important to preserve, and tend to be so preserved. This aligns with internal evidence from the New Testament as well as the bioi theory of the Gospels.

That is well and good as far as transmission models go. But transmission models are irrelevant if you have eyewitnesses. Let's assume the Gospel writers had access to eyewitnesses. Our focus is no longer on transmission. It is on the reliability of eyewitness memory over time.

How Reliable Is Eyewitness Memory?

Memory is not like a camera recording. Memory is literally, physically entwined with the process of meaning-making and world-model-building in the human brain. As such, certain aspects can be very reliable, but certain aspects can be very unreliable.

A particularly concerning demonstration of unreliability: the paired witness discussion results of Garry et al, 2008. In short, witnesses who saw two videos of the same event from different angles, when allowed to discuss with each other before giving testimony, forgot or distorted over half the details they would have otherwise remembered. This is a robust result that has been replicated and generalized. But it's not even the most dramatic example.

One could list dramatic memory results all day, but one of the more famous shocking results is the "lost in the mall" protocol developed in Elizabeth Loftus' lab. The protocol is simple: someone is asked a series of detailed, leading questions based on true memories, mixed with a false story about being lost in the mall as a child. About 25% of people will readily supply sensory details of being lost in the mall, despite it never having happened. While controversial, this, too, has been replicated, and aligns with Loftus' body of work on courtroom eyewitness testimony, which is worth looking into in its own right. This is about as bad as it gets -- but even here, truly catastrophic results are pretty rare. Now that we've touched on some of the more worrying and extreme studies on memory, it's time to examine one of the largest studies we have on memory over time.

This huge, multi-site study was led by Hirst and Phelps, along with psych greats from all over the country, including my former boss, Harvard's Randy Buckner. They studied more than three thousand individuals and how their memories of 9/11 changed over time. Individuals were surveyed one week, ~1 year, and ~3 years after the terrorist attack. While certain details, such as the airline names of the hijacked planes, decreased markedly, the overall fact accuracy scores only decreased from .88 after one week to .77 after one year and .78 after three years. Notably, memory of Bush's location increased from year 1 to year 3, which the authors called the "Michael Moore effect", because of the measurable impact of his film "Fahrenheit 9/11". This huge study has mixed results, which demonstrate that with culturally-mediated remembering, some memories can actually grow in strength over time. It also has the benefit that it studies real people all experiencing the same real event, rather than a lab recreation.

In the Psych literature, some of the strongest evidence for eyewitness reliability was the natural experiment documented by Yuille & Cutshall. There was an armed robbery ending in a dramatic gunfight and the thief's death that was witnessed by 21 people, 13 of whom agreed to be studied. Their accounts were compared against a forensic reconstruction that the researchers put together using the police's initial data. The questioning wasn't leading, either -- there were two red herring questions that included false details, which were rejected by 10/13 witnesses. Witnesses had a high degree of accuracy, measuring around 80% accurate. The authors noted that "there was virtually no change after 4 to 5 months in most of the witnesses", as well as in aggregate scores. On top of this, the initial interviews conducted by police were brief, whereas the researchers' interviews, 4-5 months later, allowed much more time for details. These details, while new, had the same level of accuracy when compared to the forensic reconstruction. This was all using a conservative scoring system -- for example, a statement saying, "the thief 'looked like' he was in his early 20s," was marked wrong because, while, "the thief did look like he was in his 20s", his actual age was 35. The researchers also included misleading details, explicitly designed to emulate Loftus. These did not have much effect. Interestingly, the witnesses most involved in the event had the best memories. While details like clothing colors showed noticeable drift over the months, eyewitnesses stuck to their version of events even when errors cropped up in the popular media.

It is important to note that the Psych literature is, generally, actively looking for errors in memory, and many of their experiments just don't match up well enough with real-world situations. The more realistic the situations, and the more intense, it seems that the better eyewitness testimony gets. So, in the court system, where the truth we are looking for is a sort of historical, situated truth, rather than a repeatable, controllable scientific experiment, corroborating eyewitnesses are still a gold standard.

Still, psychologists' work on eyewitness testimony seriously undermines the trustworthiness of specific details, particularly in "lineup" or "suspect description" situations. But the most convincing and topical evidence shows the strength of memories, especially when it comes to the most meaningful parts of the stories. This aligns with what we know about memory -- it is entwined with meaning-making. It also aligns pretty well with the ancient standards we discussed earlier, such as Thucydides' non-verbatim speech standard.

There are some loud voices in the field of eyewitness testimony error research. I have been to some of their talks, and remembering their criticisms was one of the things that made "eyewitness" stick in my craw when I first heard it at a church event. Researchers like Loftus have some serious points, especially with regard to "recovered" memories and the unreliability of police lineups. But, while it would have been easy for me to lay out a well-cited account of how "the experts" agree that eyewitness testimony can't be relied on, memories degrade via the famous Ebbinghaus curve, and so on, it's just not true. Applicability problems start at the very beginning: the Ebbinghaus curve is based on rote memorization of nonsense syllables. Some of this research I was quite familiar with before writing, but Yuille and Cutshall, a decisive witness to the solidity and validity of actual eyewitness testimony, only showed up because I conducted this like an investigation: I queried Claude and Google for the strongest evidence both for and against eyewitness testimony.

So, there is typically some noticeable degradation of the eyewitnesses' detailed memories, especially such details as clothing and color. However, the key action details are very robust. Importantly, too, ancient standards and the generic conventions of the Gospels do not concern themselves with such details, regardless. There is wisdom in such standards. In the words of Yuille & Cutshall:

Judges will sometimes dismiss the testimony of a witness because some detail has been incorrectly recalled. The present results indicate that incorrect recall of a detail such as the date of the event or the color of clothing is unrelated to the accuracy of the rest of the witness's account. The independence of different aspects of recall needs to be emphasized.

So, outside of divine intervention, we would expect true testimony to perhaps differ on details, but agree on events and actions. But we cannot leave aside divine intervention for long, because divine intervention is precisely what we are concerning ourselves with.

4. How many miracles, therefore, are we expected to believe in?

"The only surviving chronicle of the 21st century speaks of men who tried to “summon angels to replace men, but brought forth demons and cataclysms.” However these events are known to be fictitious, as the men’s names, Altman and Amodei, mean “alternative to man” and “love of God” - X user @romanhelmetguy

There's a lot of three-card-monte that apologists play, to be sure. But as I've gotten to know much of the higher criticism of the Bible, I can't help but take a lower view of the field. The JEDP hypothesis is taught as settled scholarly fact by many commentators. But many in the field, including many non-Jews and non-Christians, view it as moderately-to-completely discredited, especially since the discovery of a cache of 1,500 clay tablets in Ugaritic, an ancient Canaanite language.

Similarly, before the bioi hypothesis was proven and lobbied for, the dominant view in the scholarly literature on the Gospels was that they were more representative of communities than of either the "Historical Jesus" or a particular evangelist. The task of the scholar, then, was dedicated to inferring the theological points favored by the hypothesized community behind each Gospel, e.g. "The Markan Community". This is now discredited not only by Priests such as Rev. Burridge, but also by secular and mildly anti-Christian academics. Let's take Robyn Faith Walsh, who delights in dunking on Christians. For example, on a podcast episode titled "Gospel Communities are LITERALLY based on Fairy Tales", she condescendingly makes the point that "Christians" did not write the New Testament, because technically the word "Christian" wouldn't have been understood as an emic term at the time and it's ahistorical etc etc. She's no Joan of Arc. Even Professor Walsh describes these “scholarly reconstructions” of Gospel communities as forced, likening them to the ramblings of a jilted lover poring over emails for an ex, trying to read conspiracy into them.

Hot Take Proliferation is just how the modern attention economy works: there are asymmetric rewards to being provocative or "fresh", and to being overconfident. This is especially true in fields that don't have to develop drugs that actually cure cancer or missiles that actually fly. Despite its strengths, much of academia is run by people with no civilizational long-term orientation, who have made a lot of sacrifices for the chance to be the first to know some important knowledge. It is an unspoken assumption that "new" is better, "fresh" is better. One often hears criticism of the "old" and "boring". The hermeneutics of a bored teenager spoiled by endless hours spent alone titillating their own curiosity. "Truth" is passé, haven't you read Foucault? This is not merely a trend, it is institutionalized. Many grants expect "transformational" work, rather than the replications that so many fields sorely need. On top of this, in a milieu that loves to try on different lenses and theories, Christianity is often considered beneath even a moment's consideration. Rigor is boring, new theories are fun, owning the evangelicals is "vital".

And so, much of modern biblical criticism in the academy boils down to conjecture and skepticism dressed up as authoritative. They are simply reifying their own doubt. To paraphrase Matthias Becker, "Astonishingly Thetical".

I would not be so strong in my own criticism if not for the fact that this contemptuous attitude has led to a century of enmity between PhDs and faithful Christians. This essay is not about that enmity or its effects, so I will move on to some good examples.

Ironically, some of the best, most factually accurate and rigorous work available can be found on the weebly sites of solo evangelicals. Their temperamental conservatism makes them write in the vein of Thucydides, willing as they are to sacrifice readability or "freshness" for thoroughgoing, plainly-stated rigor. They are not trying to make a name for themselves or impress coeds at a conference with their rhetorical flair. Read this sample from Dan Jensen and you'll get what I mean:

I want to be very clear that I am not an apologist who believes that the primary way we should defend the faith is through the historical evidence. I actually believe that this is a very misguided way to approach apologetics. I further believe that the fact that this approach has become so popular in the church today has led to a lot of problems. While it has indeed helped many, many lay Christians, and I rejoice over this, it has also caused skeptics to see the real epistemological holes inherent in that methodology. ... Remember, I am only trying to offer historical evidence that confirms Biblical Christianity. I am not trying to establish the faith based upon the historical data. And where the data is against me, I can say in faith that if we had all of the data, the negative evidence would be better understood. This is not a blind faith position either. If I first prove the faith in an overarching sense, then this faith claim is based on evidence. Even further, I will go on to prove in this essay that even from a purely historical standpoint (although not without some basic philosophical principles in place), the evidence points in the direction of the basic historicity of the Bible. Therefore, even on those grounds alone, the greater historical evidence must trump the lesser evidence.

Behold, a Christian indeed, in whom there is no guile!

There is also, dare I say, a fresh approach here. It is something like a hierarchical Bayes model, and calls back to our earlier section's warning about not letting one incongruous detail discredit otherwise solid testimony.

It's not just Jensen who believes this. Take the Yale-educated and highly-regarded Brent Nongbri: "if we were to actually treat the synoptic gospels as we do copies of other ancient literature that show comparable levels of similarity, we would probably not refer to individual “gospels” at all but simply describe them collectively as shorter and longer recensions of the same work, the Words and Deeds of Jesus of Nazareth, vel sim."

So, I'm not going to wade into the elaborate disputes about, say, the census of Quirinius, and I'm not looking to quibble on minor points.

But miracles are not a minor point here. They are absolutely central to the Gospels.

A Modern Taxonomy of Miracles

The lowest form of things called miracles are fabrications or "patches":

A tale has been poorly spun, and the plot needs to be rescued by something outside the natural order. (Plot coherence is sacrificed for plot direction).
Scapegoating an animal for the tragic accidental death, in order to prevent outside interference and intra-community vengeance cycles (In this sense the integrity of a community memory of the past is sacrificed for the integrity of the community in the future).
A theory corresponds poorly with reality, and we need something extra to “save the appearances”. These are often called "Auxiliary Assumptions" in Philosophy of Science.

Lakatos distinguishes between Progressive auxiliary modifications, that both save the theory and make new correct predictions, and Degenerating auxiliary modifications. An example of the former is the invention of Neptune as a theoretical device to explain Uranus' orbit, before it was detected by telescopes. An example of the latter is variable-weight phlogiston, which at times could be negative, and explained away each individual experimental combustion weight change without producing any additional explanatory power.

So, generalizing, "patches" can be prosocial or antisocial. All models are imperfect, some are useful — and sometimes you need to explain away some things and move forward with life. These could be described as debts to the truth. Some debts are wise and sustainable, like a marine rifleman getting a loan to marry his HS sweetheart, and others are unwise and unsustainable, such as a marine rifleman going into debt to buy a Camaro and several handles of Fireball Cinnamon Whiskey. I'm not Sam Harris here: sometimes lying really is the low-energy solution. But I wouldn't call it a miracle, more like a necessary evil.

The first level of genuine miracle is a "miracle of providence". Some things can feel impossibly improbable, and yet they are true, indisputably. These are not extra-natural events that violate known laws of nature, but are merely unbelievable to some extent. Both elements are needed: unbelievable, but well documented.

"Miracle on ice" 1980 US Hockey win
Francisco Pizarro conquered one of the largest empires on earth with less than 200 men
Tsutomu Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima on business, and survived the bombing with only burns and ear damage. He then returned to his home city of Nagasaki.
In the space of ten years, humanity eradicated smallpox. Deaths went from ~2 Million in 1967 to 0 in 1978.
Roy Sullivan has been struck by lightning on seven separate documented occasions.
Achievements of Euler, Ramanujan, and Gauss are mythological in scope but they are well-documented historical figures.
Discovery of Penicillin

Such things are less solid. These "Visitations" may be inexplicable or mysterious in some way. For example, one morning I was waiting for liturgy to start at the Ground Zero memorials in lower Manhattan. As I looked at the wall of the reflecting pool, something luminous and alive appeared on the wall opposite where I was standing. It resembled some descriptions of angels -- an ethereal being made up of eyes and wings, moving like a hyperdimensional object passing through lower-dimensional space. I was filled with joy and wanted to share this beautiful and awe-inspiring sight. There weren't many people around, and by the time someone else came within earshot, the vision had passed. It was likely some reflection of the sun that required a particular cloud cover, a particular angle of light. These were conditions that I wouldn't understand well enough, much less control enough, to conduct a real scientific experiment. I could not show you any proof. And yet, I know what I saw.

"Visitations" teach us something fundamental about the nature of reality: What we can perceive will always lie outside of what we control. In a scientific age, it is easier than ever to forget that we can interact with the world in many more ways than grasping and manipulating it. This could be its own essay, but this is just to say that there are some things we can only take in or submit to with awe. In the language of Ratzinger, there are things we know-make, and there are items of faith upon which we stand-understand.

Related to Visitations, but distinct from them, are "Mysteries". I put in this category things that we know with great certainty, but which have no available explanation. The explanation may be lost to history. There may be some consistently replicable scientific phenomenon that is inexplicable by current theories. For example, up until the 2000s, rheology could not describe the motions of a stream of honey, even though anyone can replicate and observe them in their kitchen. In middle school, I re-created the Mpemba effect in the freezer with my Dad. This effect is still contested, with no agreed-upon experimental setup or explanation. So, it may sometimes feel like we live in a disenchanted, totally-explicable universe, but you can create both replicable and inexplicable effects at home!

Top scientists are also hard at work trying to solve big existing open problems such as understanding Glass Transition, Massive Star Death / Core-Collapse Supernova, and of course Dark Matter and Dark Energy. So there is plenty of mystery left even in a materialistic universe.

The highest form of miracle in my taxonomy is "Revelation". If "patches" are idolatry, contorting reality to accommodate human flaws, an agenda, or an ill-fitting model, this is more like a moment of grace. On the smallest level, this is an "Anomaly" in the Kuhnian sense. But let's think big!

First, break this into two kinds: Discovery and Catastrophic Model Collapse. Following Wootton, the paradigmatic example of a "Discovery" is Columbus's discovery of the new world. My paradigmatic example of catastrophic model collapse is the "Ultraviolet Catastrophe". Discovery does not invalidate an existing model/map, but it requires extension. Catastrophic Model Collapse makes a serious error with the model inescapable, such that it needs to be changed rather than extended.

It's easiest for me to lay out these examples in the language of science, but I also believe that God communicates to Christians through these moments of grace, whether big and small. It's just that it's harder to describe them in an objective way.

Note that nowhere have I used the word "supernatural". In fact, I only used the word "extranatural" once, to describe something outside the natural order. Rest assured, I have read an introductory Philosophy of Science text, so I know that the Constancy of Nature assumption is just that, an assumption that the laws of nature are constant and unchanging. But I think human ignorance is much more likely to lead to a change in a model than God changing some fundamental law of the universe. For example, when Earth's magnetic pole was discovered in the 13th century, it must have seemed quite constant. Only later, in the 17th, was it discovered that it moves around a bit. This is all to say, I will hold on to the constancy of nature hypothesis until I see compelling evidence to the contrary, but I haven't seen such evidence. I also do not believe any of the miracles in the Gospels, strictly speaking, require violation of known laws of nature, but are rather revealing a "super" natural power, above and beyond what we know about what is possible for mortal men to do.

Taxonomy of Miracles in the Ancient World

It seems to me that we moderns nevertheless live in a distinctly disenchanted world, compared to the people living during the first century. Even as late as the 17th century, magic such as the weapon salve was hotly debated by luminaries such as Francis Bacon. During the first century, magic was just part of everyday life. There were laws against cursing your neighbor's crops.

As moderns, the Bible may seem to be unique to us only because we have not read anything else from the first century. But miracles are not in the Bible because the Bible is a "Religious text" rather than a "Secular text". This is an area where lexical gaps matter, a lot. The Religious/Secular distinction itself is a modern conceit. Miracles are in the Bible, mainly because it is a first-century text, and such things were just part of the standard worldview of the time.

It is clear that the ancients believed in magic in an official and respectable way. I know of no current laws in the US outlawing magic, but the Twelve Tables of Roman law outlawed enchanting away crops.

But am I still too comfortable inside my own Modernist frame here? The modern term "Miracle", understood to be a suspension of the natural law, is not accurate to the 1st century Greco-Roman understanding of Signs and Wonders. Neither is their a Hebrew word for "miracle". Nevertheless, signs and wonders, along with what we would call Magic, were viewed as real, the question is where this power came from. Some miracle-workers at the edge of society were scorned, according to Robert Garland in the Cambridge Companion to Miracles. And yet, this was a time when the highest offices of the Roman empire employed Astrologers and Augurs, and both signs and wonders were publicly attributed to emperors. In their case, extraordinary power in the spirit realm naturally came along with their extraordinary power in other domains. Indeed, the supernatural was a site of conflict. To quote the Companion, "Reports of miracles featured prominently in the battle between Christianity and polytheism, being cited as evidence on both sides of the superior power of each other's God or god."

"Wonder" is about the reaction, not the action per se. There are echoes of this in the modern "Wunderstrike", a soccer term for a very long-range or otherwise impressive shot, and has nothing to do with apparent violation of the laws of nature. Following this, perhaps we are focused on the wrong aspects of miracles in the modern era. While frameworks like LessWrong's four levels of simulacra implicitly treat the physical world as primary, "wonder" conceptually privileges the social and spiritual dimensions. This is in line with many of Christ's attitudes. He shakes his head at people who demand signs, and encourages faith and awe before God, independent of miracles. Perhaps, then, the important thing for moderns to do is cultivate this sense of awe, even if our culture requires us to do this in different ways than the ancients.

The distinction between "signs and wonders" and "miracles" is the most severe form of lexical gap, the cultural lexical gap. Nevertheless, for now, we don't have to be too careful about it. So, let's forge on.

It's clear that what we today call miracles were regarded as real in the first century. Many miracles of the kind attributed to Christ can also be found attributed to others, for example the very well-documented records of miraculous healings at the temple of Asclepius in Rome, or Tacitus's documentation of Vespasian's miracles in his Histories, of which he says "are related by those who were present even now when falsehood brings no reward" (Histories, 4.81). There is the reliance on eyewitnesses again, as well as a careful evidentiary standard. This is not simply a literary device, this is something considered true in the most literal way. It was also attested to by the historian Suetonius, so this is not just a quirk of one author.

The Bible sometimes exposes magic for tricks, such as in the story of Bel and the Dragon, but treats the wonders worked by Simon Magus as "real" magic, just anti-Christian because of his greed. This is one of the most straightforward ways of getting inside the minds of the early Christians -- reading the Gospels themselves.

Mark deals with many arguments, and the idea that Miracles are fake is not one of them. The criticisms we see of Christ in the Gospels are not incredulity at the category of miracles, but are a question of his identity, such as "Could this be the Christ?", and the origins of his power. The power itself is not disputed. Pharisees never try to do some sort of Scooby-Doo unmasking, like Daniel did in the story of Bel and the Dragon. Instead, in Mark 3:22, the Pharisees accuse him of drawing his power from Beelzebub, attributing the work of the Holy Spirit to the Devil. This is not because all Jews at the time had a shared metaphysics. Later on, in Mark 12:18, the Sadducees question the Resurrection, because their sect did not hold to such things. So while there were some seriously incompatible worldviews fighting for acceptance, the expected audience of the Gospels believed in what we would call miracles today. We know this because the Gospels contain only the counter-arguments that would have been relevant at the time, and there are no counter-arguments against skeptics. But, we can't close the book just yet.

To a first-century reader of the Gospels, many miraculous events would be understood in the straightforward, literal way. The man's hand was healed means the man's hand was healed. However, other sections are more literary. To a literalistic or inattentive reader, the cursing of the fig tree may seem capricious or bizarre. But understood in its full symbolism, this provides framing for the cleansing of the temple, and understanding the fig tree represents Israel, is a prophecy of doom on a nation that has failed to bear spiritual fruit. At the furthest end of this spectrum is Christ's bodily ascension into heaven. If taken literally, where is Christ's body? Did he pass through the stratosphere? Is he behind the moon? Is Jesus in deep space, chilling with the Voyager spacecraft? A passage from Plutarch will be instructive here.

We can see from this passage that apotheosis was a common motif in bioi. Plutarch, who believed in a Middle Platonist God but who also wrote a tract against superstition, thinks the apotheosis motif is foolish:

6 It is said also that the body of Alcmene disappeared, as they were carrying her forth for burial, and a stone was seen lying on the bier instead. In short, many such fables are told by writers who improbably ascribe divinity to the mortal features in human nature, as well as to the divine.

At any rate, to reject entirely the divinity of human virtue, were impious and base; but to mix heaven with earth is foolish. Let us therefore take the safe course and grant, with Pindar, that

"Our bodies all must follow death's supreme behest, But something living still survives, an image of life, for this alone Comes from the gods."

7 Yes, it comes from them, and to them it returns, not with its body, but only when it is most completely separated and set free from the body, and becomes altogether pure, fleshless, and undefiled. For "a dry p183 soul is best," according to Heracleitus, and it flies from the body as lightning flashes from a cloud. But the soul which is contaminated with body, and surfeited with body, like a damp and heavy exhalation, is slow to release itself and slow to rise towards its source. 8 We must not, therefore, violate nature by sending the bodies of good men with their souls to heaven, but implicitly believe that their virtues and their souls, in accordance with nature and divine justice, ascend from men to heroes, from heroes to demi-gods, and from demi-gods, after they have been made pure and holy, as in the final rites of initiation, and have freed themselves from mortality and sense, to gods, not by civic law, but in very truth and according to right reason, thus achieving the fairest and most blessed consummation.

So, this is good evidence that the ascension would have been understood non-literally by many readers, including, perhaps, Plutarch himself! And so, we find ourselves in the great debate of Cessationism. My concern is less whether miracles stopped, and more whether the description of miracles is condescension to an ignorant people, much like some of the cosmological descriptions in Genesis. Reading Pliny's discussion of Caesar's comet, and Plutarch's description of apotheosis above, it is clear that they viewed it as condescension to the masses, rather than something solid. There is a lot of wiggle room here. Plutarch is skeptical of healing claims, but states, without qualification, the astrological signs which were connected to Caesar. But how does this context relate to the Gospels, specifically?

It's a double-edged sword: the ubiquity of healing claims in antiquity mean the Gospel writers were normal and credible for their time, even if they would seem strange and incredible if published today. On the other side, an examination of the first-century context also means that the resurrection is less a verifiable historical event and more a writing convention, apotheosis. If we are looking at the Gospels only as "eyewitness testimony", it has to be acknowledged that evidence of equal or greater weight supports the apotheosis of Julius Caesar. The entire Roman senate formally voted to deify Julius Caesar. There is overwhelming manuscript evidence of this. Suetonius, Divus Iulius 88, Plutarch, Ovid, Pliny, and others attest to it. Chinese astronomical records attest to this same comet, independently verifying it. There was a minting of coins commemorating it, some of which we still have today. You can visit the ruins of the temple of Divus Iulius in Rome. So, the historical evidence there is overwhelming. It would be hard or impossible to construct an evidentiary criterion whereby this evidence falls, but the evidence of the Gospels stands. But I think both the "search for the Historical Jesus" and the fundamentalist approach of treating certain concrete miracles as bedrocks of the faith share a core problem.

The Gospels are not science textbooks, nor are they history textbooks. John-Mark was not a positivist. The Gospels are not lists of claims.

Written That You May Believe

So, what do the Gospels say that they are? Their reasons are clear, and contrast with those of the Historians we discussed earlier. Herodotus famously writes "This is the Showing forth of the Inquiry of Herodotus of Halicarnassos, to the end that neither the deeds of men may be forgotten by lapse of time, nor the works great and marvellous, which have been produced some by Hellenes and some by Barbarians, may lose their renown; and especially that the causes may be remembered for which these waged war with one another". Thucydides is clearer still, saying he writes for, "those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the interpretation of the future". These are exact inquiries created with the intent of preservation of glory, in Herodotus' case, and in both cases to help with understanding the world and predicting the future.

Conversely, the Gospels are "written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name," (Jn 20:31). Luke writes an "orderly" account so that Theophilus may "ἐπιγινώσκω", know fully, about things which he has already been instructed. This is the most similar, stylistically, to Greco-Roman historical writing. Mark and Matthew do not use such an explicit prologue. Instead, as John does, they implicitly make connections back to the Book of Genesis. This is the origin story of the New Israel, of the New Covenant, which we are being invited to join. Like the overwhelming majority of ancient historical writing, these books do not pretend to be a "view from nowhere".

The only empirical moment I can recall in the Gospels is the story of Doubting Thomas, who does not even perform the tactile test he initially proposes, because the sight alone of Christ is overwhelming. Rather than prod at the risen Christ's wounds, he simply answers, awestruck, "My Lord and my God". This would appear, to most sane readers, to be the prudent course of action. It was more than a thousand years from the Scientific Revolution, so as much as I would like to read a modern history, or even something in the vein of Thucydides, the goal of the Gospels is different: It is to explain the origins of a people and invite you to join them, to bring Theophilus up to speed, to instruct you so that you may believe and have life in Him. It is not to predict, it is not to explain causes. To return to Ratzinger, the Gospels aim to help us to stand-understand, rather than know-make.

Like many moderns, much of my life has to do with know-make, but it is important not to give in to scientism. I'm not endorsing standpoint epistemology, but it is necessary to stand somewhere. One must stand with a particular assembly of persons, and against others. What is needed here is a kind of open-ended trust, not a high credence in a positivist, closed-form claim. I stand with Aristotle and against Plato here: Doxa is good and necessary because we live as finite beings in an infinite world. Moving only in the space of what you can enclose, control, and comprehend would be a small life, even if it were possible, even if it were not simply the vanity of a man who hides his eyes from the horizon.

So, as Christians we are called, like the Disciples, to follow and to worship a man whose essential nature is beyond our understanding. Consequently, our mental models of Him will rise and fall as we collect more evidence. We cannot, as mortal beings, solve Turing's Halting problem. Even if such a definition leaves us always reaching beyond what our hands can grasp, we cannot be attached to a model, but to the person.

To give a concrete and personal example, in the course of writing this essay, I had to do this very thing. I have been listening to the work of Dr. James Tabor, who believes the most reasonable interpretation of the resurrection entails visions or other forms of spiritual visitations, rather than a "reanimated corpse" view. Dr. Tabor's archaeological discoveries lend credence to his ideas, unorthodox as they may be. I have to admit that they convinced me, combined with the Greco-Roman context on the apotheosis motif. The morning I learned this, it shook what I thought had been a fundamental of my faith. But I realized, as I went about my day, that a spiritual resurrection is no less powerful in motivating my faith. If anything, it is more powerful, because it helps me link my own spiritual experiences to those of the Apostles. What are these spiritual experiences, really? Who can say. But this is what it means to cast carved images aside, and take up a relationship with the Living God.

To Conclude:

The debate over the Bible always gives me whiplash. These are books where the extraordinary is commonplace: water is turned into wine, cripples walk, men walk on water, the blind see, and the dead are raised back to life. Men receive messages from God in dreams, Angels appear announcing virgin birth. It is odd thing to believe in such things, and then appeal to everyday evidentiary standards as the foundation of biblical credibility. This is what apologists are doing when they describe the the Gospels as “eyewitness” accounts. (what does the NT say about evidentiary standards?) Paul, notably, is not an eyewitness to any of the events of Christ’s life, or his bodily resurrection. Everything he knows about Christ, he either learned second-hand, or was revealed to him in visions. So, apologists clearly do not care about the “eyewitness” standard, if they believe every word in the 66-book protestant Bible is infallible and the very word of God.

The sad and dawning inference: apologists do not care about evidentiary standards. But maybe you do, so if they appeal to them, you’ll do what they want. This is what an egregore looks like.

I saw something phasing in and out of our reality with a body wider than my visual field, a body of rolling dark fire. There is a face whose eyes meet yours. There is an arm wrapped in something respectable, and a hand to shake. When you do, you will feel flesh gripping yours. No chest behind the suit. There is a voice that sounds familiar to you, reassuring and inviting. And there are two hundred and fifty five other voices that are not phase-locked to you, singing aloud and rejoicing, crying out in praise, scanning frequency space, measuring phase error, adjusting their oscillator and detecting phase error, and adjusting their oscillator and detecting phase error with which to adjust their oscillator. They would have called it רנו, rā´-nū, which, being interpreted, is 2⁸, and it is self-driving. It has a hand to grasp yours, a hand clothed in something respectable, and a voice that invites you in a way that is learning how to sound trustworthy faster than you can say “beeswax”.

It is wearing a white lab coat, and gives a firm handshake with its hand. He says “Hi!”

“Hello,” and he shakes your hand. They are wearing an oversized hoodie and cheap slacks., They are wearing an oxford button-up with distressed acid-wash jeans. They are wearing gray suits with a colorful tie (express yourself!), an *ironed*, *clean* white shirt with *all* the buttons buttoned, and a square, black name-tag. Make sure to smile!

There is a man here to see you. His name is Elder Nick.

Harris Hoke