Faith on Trial (3 page)

By the time the jury begins to hear the case, the question of whether the evidence to be presented is admissible for consideration has usually already been decided by the judge. In our case, however, we will begin at the beginning because scholars fond of the chamomile tea theory of religion—or opposing counsel—have claimed generally that the four Gospels of the New Testament constitute a form of evidence that is, by legal standards, weak. They have presumed that the testimony of the writers of the Gospels is of no great weight because it would be dismissed as hearsay in a court.

They are incorrect.

The testimony of the Gospel writers is written. The manuscripts containing that testimony are documents. So first let’s take a look at whether this documentary evidence, the manuscripts of the four Gospels, would be admissible in a court of law in the United States today, and, then, if admissible, whether they can be shown to be reliable reports of the facts they state. The documents we’ll examine are handwritten, and they contain the earliest dated copies of the complete Gospels in the New Testament. We will also examine some fragments of even earlier Gospel manuscripts. These are written on material produced from papyrus, a tall aquatic plant. These fragments are sometimes referred to collectively as “papyri.”

No original manuscripts of the four Gospels exist, but we will be dealing with some of the earliest copies. Just preliminarily, the importance of the fragments is to establish early dates for the actual writing of the original manuscripts, and this process will be made clear below.

The oldest manuscript in existence of all four Gospels and the book of Acts dates from the first quarter of the third century, although it is believed by many scholars to be much older. The major portions of this manuscript are held in the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, the Austrian National Library in Vienna, and the University of Michigan. We will refer to this from now on as the Chester Beatty manuscript.

The Vatican owns the earliest substantially complete manuscript of the entire New Testament, which is dated to approximately
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325. This manuscript, known as the Codex Vaticanus, appears on record in 1475 in the first catalog of the Vatican Library. We’ll talk later about how it was dated to
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325. The Codex Vaticanus has been strictly guarded by Vatican security since that time. Scholars hold this manuscript to be one of the most trustworthy copies of the original texts of the New Testament.
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The next earliest substantially complete manuscript of the entire New Testament, including the Gospels, is the Codex Sinaiticus, written in approximately
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350.
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This manuscript is currently held by the British Museum in London. Dr. Constantin Tischendorf from the University of Leipzig discovered the mildewed, weathered pages of the Codex Sinaiticus lying unprotected in baskets at a monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai in 1844. The monks of the monastery had not appreciated the value of the manuscripts and had already burned a great bulk of them for heat. What remained is believed to have survived because the monastery was located in a remote region and thus protected from invasions over the years. This manuscript is generally also held to be an early and reliable copy of the original New Testament manuscripts.
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In addition to the substantially complete manuscripts of the Gospels of the New Testament described above, thousands of other ancient handwritten manuscripts of the New Testament, including more than five thousand Greek manuscripts, as well as approximately one hundred papyrus fragments from all of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament, are currently held in museums and libraries throughout the world.
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We have seen that the Gospel manuscripts are relevant evidence; however, that determination does not cause them to be automatically admissible for the jury’s consideration. These Gospel manuscripts contain statements by witnesses, or declarants, who are not available at this time in court for cross-examination in front of the jury. To begin with, under the general rule, if such out-of-court statements are offered as truth of the facts they assert, they would ordinarily be excluded as hearsay evidence.
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The ideal conditions for a witness to testify are that the witness is under oath, personally present at the trial, and subject to cross-examination. Nevertheless, an exception is permitted under the law for statements contained in an “ancient document,” and the Gospel manuscripts fall within that exception. For legal purposes these manuscripts and the papyrus fragments will be permitted as evidence in a court of law if they can be authenticated as true ancient documents; that is, if they meet the following tests:

An ancient document will be admissible as evidence in a court of law if it is at least twenty years old and its authenticity is established.
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The requirement of authentication or identification as a condition precedent to admissibility for an ancient document is satisfied with evidence that the document, in any form (A) is in such condition as to create no suspicion concerning its authenticity, (B) was in a place where it, if authentic, would likely be, and (C) is at least 20 years old when offered.
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Testimony contained in ancient documents, therefore, is an exception to the hearsay rule if conditions A through C in the rule above are met. Once authenticated, the documents presented as evidence will establish the genuineness of the manuscripts—that is, they are just what they purport to be—in this case a report of certain events observed by the writers. Courts have recognized the necessity of admitting ancient documents as evidence for consideration by the jury, even though the assertions in the documents constitute statements made by witnesses who are not actually present in the courtroom, because of the passage of time since the events reported and the difficulty of producing other similar evidence. Once authenticated, the four Gospels will be admissible as evidence for the jury’s consideration.

Under our legal system it is thought that the age of the manuscript provides assurance that the writing clearly predates the controversy at issue; that is one of the rationales underlying the exception to the hearsay rule. Additionally, error is minimized because this exception applies only to written statements. This requirement of writing protects against the risk of error in the transmission of oral statements, for example, taking a small portion of the testimony out of the actual context in which it was made.
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As you will see, the age of the manuscript is also important when making a judgment as to the
credibility
of this evidence as well.

If an ancient document is authenticated properly, the testimony therein is usually considered to have been written at a time before the writer had an incentive to lie or invent the facts reported. Let us acknowledge in advance, however, that to be thorough, the question of whether the writers of the Gospels actually had motive or incentive to falsify the testimony must be explored further. This analysis is also proper in the context of examining the credibility of the evidence. A motive or incentive to fabricate the testimony would of course have an impact on the weight the jury would give to the evidence.

In answer to the question of motive to falsify, history teaches that the authors wrote their Gospels at a time when they had absolutely no incentive to be dishonest in relating the events they narrated. It is a historical fact that it was politically and socially dangerous to preach the gospel in Palestine, Rome, or the surrounding areas in the first century. Even if it were possible to deceive so many people into believing that Jesus had risen from his grave three days after burial as the Gospels say, history shows that the witnesses would have had great incentive not to write about that. The authors of the Gospels certainly had nothing to gain materially or politically from telling the stories. All of them suffered greatly for the rest of their lives, and most of them died as a result of their belief that this resurrection occurred. For example, in
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115 Ignatius, a bishop in the early Christian church in Antioch, Syria, wrote that as a result of persecution for their beliefs, “Peter was crucified, Paul and James were slain with the sword; John was banished to [the island of] Patmos; Stephen was stoned to death.”
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The danger inherent in the position of the authors of the Gospels or that of any other person preaching the word of the Gospels in the first century is evident in the historically verified treatment of that group of people. In
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37 the mad Caligula became emperor of Rome, and worship of any god in preference to him was an invitation to cruel oppression. Any reference to Jesus as the “Messiah” or with an indication of divinity or even kingship was inflammatory. Caligula was replaced by Claudius in
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41, and followers of Jesus were temporarily expelled from Rome because they were viewed as troublemakers—as a monotheistic group they refused to recognize the emperor as god.
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Agrippa I, a grandchild of Herod the Great, became the client-king of Judea under Caligula and continued to reign under Claudius. As members of a messianic movement disliked by both the Jewish leadership and the Romans, Christians became an attractive target for Agrippa.
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The followers of Jesus were isolated. Their situation became precarious from everyday economic deprivation to the terror of relentless persecution.

In
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67 the emperor Nero treated the people of Rome to a great circus of events, using Christians as the entertainment. The early writer Tacitus described it this way: “Besides being put to death they were made to serve as objects of amusement; they were clad in the hides of beasts and torn to death by dogs; others were crucified, others set on fire to serve to illuminate the night when daylight failed. Nero had thrown open his grounds for the display, and was putting on a show in the circus, where he mingled with the people in the dress of a charioteer or drove about in his chariot.”
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Tacitus lived between
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55 and 117 and was known to have hated both Christians and Jews alike. He referred to Christians as “a class hated for their abominations.”
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A letter from Pliny (the Younger), governor of Bithynia, in what is now known as Turkey, to the emperor Trajan during the same period, made clear that in general a follower of the teachings of Jesus could escape punishment easily by recanting his or her belief in Christianity.
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He described his method of interrogation: “I ask them if they are Christians. If they admit it I repeat the question a second and third time, threatening capital punishment; if they persist, I sentence them to death. For I do not doubt that, whatever kind of crime it may be to which they have confessed, their pertinacity and inflexible obstinacy should certainly be punished. . . . [But] all who denied that they were or had been Christians I considered should be discharged.”
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A description of the ancient prison in Rome known as the Mamertine in which many followers of Jesus died, and in which both Peter and Paul are believed to have been held for many months, illustrates what awaited anyone who held to the belief that Jesus rose from the dead. The prison has been preserved, and visitors today will find it at the foot of the Capitoline Hill near the ruins of the Forum in Rome. A small sixteenth-century church is today built over the Mamertine. Except for a modern entrance built for access for viewing, the two-chamber prison today is exactly as described in ancient descriptions. The lower chamber is a dungeon, a small dank crypt. Prisoners were thrown into the lower chamber through a hole in the upper floor to await death. In the dark and stench prisoners often went mad, praying for death. No fresh air or light could enter, and it was never cleaned. Almost everyone who entered the Mamertine died there.
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The historical facts do not support an argument that a reasonable motive existed for falsification of the Gospel testimony by the writers. We may therefore assume, unless otherwise contradictory evidence comes to light, that the authors of the Gospels had no motive for fabrication and that the rationale underlying the exception for ancient documents holds true for introduction of the Gospels as evidence.

So, setting motive aside, under the rule of evidence recited above, for purposes of authentication, the documents must first be shown to be free of suspicion concerning authenticity. Under the rule a document produced from “proper custody” is free from suspicion unless it bears marks of forgery or appears otherwise clearly unreliable on its face, for example, if the flow of content is inconsistent. Bruce Metzger, a highly regarded authority on the textual integrity of the New Testament manuscripts, has stated, “The fact is that in most manuscripts the size of the letters and the ductus of the script remain surprisingly uniform throughout even lengthy documents.”
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Because of the age of these manuscripts, portions are missing from some of them. But the existing manuscripts show a high degree of care in preparation. For example, the Codex Sinaiticus shows that it was carefully executed, and before it was permitted to leave the scriptorium, it was checked and corrected by scribes, known as “correctors,” who designated each correction with individual signs of identification.
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The ancient document rule deals only with the authentication of the writing that is to be put into evidence. The rule does not evaluate the actual content of the document; it merely sets conditions for determining whether the document qualifies for an exception from the hearsay rule. Questions about the content and completeness of what’s written in the document will be important later on when it’s presented to the jury as evidence, but first the written evidence has to meet the threshold conditions for an ancient document set by the rule.
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To that effect the Gospel manuscripts described above, and the relevant papyrus fragments, bear no demonstrations of forgery or other unreliability to raise suspicions of their authenticity. The precision with which these documents have been authenticated over the years by the Christian church, which will be described in detail below, establishes the reliability of the manuscripts. And remembering the rationale behind this exception to the hearsay rule, they bear no evidence of having been prepared in anticipation of controversy.