This guest post is from frequent commenter Lex Lata.

In part one of this piece, we surveyed the pre-Christian origins and medieval development of the English legal tradition from which the U.S. system of law and government spun off. In part two, we now turn to that U.S. system—in particular, the federal Constitution—and the paucity of evidence for a Mosaic or biblical foundation.

The U.S. Constitutional Experiment

To be clear, it is not my contention that Christian sentiments were absent from the political discourse of the American Revolution and Founding, broadly speaking. Patriots and Loyalists alike were overwhelmingly religious (of varying denominations and levels of orthodoxy), and often employed explicitly biblical ideas and rhetoric in their prolific and varied argumentation. For instance, even the highly heterodox deist Thomas Paine drew from the Old Testament in his viral pamphlet advocating independence, Common Sense. In a similar but less scriptural vein, the Declaration of Independence reflected an Enlightenment-flavored version of Christianized Ciceronian natural law, justifying rebellion against a king whose actions had become “destructive” of certain “unalienable Rights” vested in human beings by their “Creator” (also referred to in the Declaration as “Nature’s God,” “Supreme Judge of the world,” and “divine Providence”). At the state level, most of the new governments imposed religious tests for public office, required taxpayer support for certain churches, and had other indicia of religious “establishment.” Moreover, the conventional wisdom among the Founders was that religious belief served as one source of the personal virtue and moral judgment necessary for responsible citizens of a democratic republic.

Nevertheless, the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1788, was a deliberately and controversially secular charter for a federal government. Its authority came not from God or the Bible, but rather from “the People of the United States.” It contained nothing like the explicitly Christian invocations typical of the old colonial charters, nor even the brief expressions of accommodating, ecumenical theism found in the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation. In contrast to most of the new state constitutions, Article VI prohibited the application of any sort of religious test for federal office—a striking repudiation of the standard practice in English government.

The U.S. Constitution’s Unbiblical DNA

More to the point for our purposes, though, the record left by the most prominent constitutional practitioners of the time contains no material evidence that the Bible furnished meaningful guidance about the painstaking, uncertain, and contentious enterprise of crafting a new federal republican government based on the theory of popular sovereignty.[1] James Madison’s copious notes from the Constitutional Convention did not credit the Bible as the source of any useful structure or process, for instance. Nor did Hebrew governance warrant discussion in the hundreds of pages on “ancient republics” explored in John Adams’ ponderous study of constitutional theory and practice, Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America.

A similarly conspicuous silence marks The Federalist Papers, the series of public essays on the nascent Constitution penned under the shared pseudonym “Publius” by Framers Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison. These writings mention numerous examples from European history, including Greco-Roman antiquity (a common area of study in curricula back then), while citing the Bible exactly zero times. We see bupkis about the Ten Commandments specifically, and about Mosaic or biblical law generally.

Word searches on relevant ancient peoples and places in The Federalist Papers produce the following word frequency results:

• Rome or Roman—26
• Greece or Greek—21
• Athens or Athenian—18
• Achaean—17
• Sparta—12
• Carthage—7
• Lacedaemonian—6
• Lycia—4
• Israel—0
• Judea—0
• Jerusalem—0
• Jew or Jewish—0
• Hebrew or Hebraic—0

As these numbers would appear to confirm, writings on political theory and practice authored by classical thinkers such as Cicero and Polybius “molded the legal expectations of the Framers of the American Constitution, and guided their legal judgment in the actual structuring of the checks and balances of that national charter.”[2] Although the U.S. Constitution arose in a Christian culture in which certain natural rights were widely believed to be God-given, its drafters looked more to Athens and Rome than to Mt. Sinai for pragmatic, actionable insights about democracy, republicanism, federalism, and separation of powers.

Conclusion

The historical record dispels the notion that our legal and political infrastructure rose atop a predominantly biblical foundation. Even the modern English vocabulary of law and government has its intellectual and etymological beginnings among the heathens. Woden-worshipping Anglo-Saxons gave us “right” (riht), “freedom” (freodom), and “laws” (laga). Greek believers in Athena and Apollo coined what would become “democracy” (δημοκρατία) and “politics” (πολιτικά), as well as “monarchy” (μοναρχία) and “tyrant” (τύραννος). And of course the ancient Roman contributions are legion (pun wholeheartedly intended). Libertas, res publica, fœderatio, constitutio, leges, legislatio, exsecutio, iudicialis, senatus, votum, veto, magister, ius naturale, etc. Like our calendar, with its days recalling Germanic gods, months bearing names from the Greco-Roman pantheon, and system of years based on the estimated delivery of Yahweh’s and Mary’s son, the U.S. legal and political system is a mutt, the syncretic product of centuries of intercultural and interreligious confluence.

About the author: Lex Lata is a professional bureaucrat and amateur historian, with a bachelor’s degree in English and history and a law degree in . . . um, law. His hobbies include book learnin’ and strategy gamin’. Lex resides with Lady, Lad, and Little Lata in a weird old house in Minnesota

Some elements of this post have appeared in previous comments, rants, and sticky-notes left by the author here and there over the years. Dude likes the sound of his own voice.

[1] For further discussion, see Steven K. Green, The Fount of Everything Just and Right?  The Ten Commandments as a Source of American Law, 14 Journal of Law and Religion 525 (1999-2000).

[2] David J. Bederman, The Classical Foundations of the American Constitution, 1 (Cambridge University Press, 2008).

Image from richardhe51067, CC license

This guest post is from commenter Lex Lata. As his name suggests, he is trained in the law. This makes him well suited to deal with an issue that I’ve neglected to some extent, responding to the popular Christian claim that the U.S. is a Christian nation. In the sense that it contains lots of Christians, sure. But in the sense that it was built on a biblical foundation, not so much.

Any number of Christian apologists and nationalists contend—inaccurately—that the Bible is the historical foundation of the U.S. system of law and government. Ex-judge Roy “Not Without the Permission of Her Mother“ Moore recently restated his position that “the Ten Commandments [are] the law upon which our nation is founded.” A few years ago, current Trump courtier Michele Bachmann ended her stint representing/embarrassing my state of Minnesota in Congress with a rambling declaration that “in the United States the Ten Commandments that God gave to Moses is the very foundation of the law that has given the happiness and the rise of the greatest prosperity that any nation has known before.” And pseudo-historian David Barton continues to credit the Bible as the direct source for the key concepts and structures in the federal Constitution; he goes so far as to claim the Bible is “quoted” and “cited” in the Constitution, placing into question his grasp of not only 18^th century U.S. political history, but also the meanings of words like “quote” and “cite.” Less extreme formulations of these views include “Judeo-Christian principles” being the basis of our legal system, or the Ten Commandments being the “moral foundation” of our law.

As a matter of history, arguments of this sort tend to be unduly reductive at best, and deceptive at worst. To be sure, Judeo-Christian learning, theology, ethics, and notions of justice have been consequential in several key respects over the course of time, but the taproots of the legal tradition inherited and renovated by the Founding Generation reach back to the raucous timber mead-halls of northern Germanic tribes and the bustling stoae and fora of ancient Greece and Rome.

Genesis of the Anglo-American Legal Heritage

Legal scholars and historians of the early Middle Ages discern the nativity of English law in the kingdoms founded by pagan Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Frisians (Anglo-Saxons, for short) who invaded or migrated to Great Britain from what is now Denmark and northern Germany and the Netherlands in the fifth to seventh centuries CE.[1] These sea-faring settlers did not find a wholly lawless island, of course. The indigenous Celtic Britons of antiquity relied on an unwritten system of rules memorized and applied by priest-judges known as druids (no half-elves, as far as we know), and the Romans who governed the province of Britannia from roughly 43 to 410 CE brought the civil law of the empire with them. No less a figure than Papinian, a giant of Roman jurisprudence, reportedly adjudicated cases in the forum of York while in the service of Emperor Severus, ca. 200–210. There is no extant evidence, however, that these Celtic and Roman legal cultures directly influenced the land’s increasingly dominant and numerous Germanic occupants, who appear to have imported their own legal customs with them. (As noted below, elements of Roman civil law made their way into English law somewhat later, via different channels.)

Like the Celts and other “barbarians,” the pre-Christian Anglo-Saxons possessed little in the way of a written tradition, and regulated rights and liabilities with their own oral catalog of penalties for breaching specified norms. The oldest known recorded versions of many of those rules appear in the law code transcribed during the reign of King Æthelberht I of Kent (ca. 560–616). This code consisted of a tariff of monetary damages linked to particular harms and often the aggrieved party’s social rank. “If a man lie with the king’s maiden [i.e., maidservant], let him pay a bot [compensation] of fifty shillings. . . . If a man lie with an eorl’s [nobleman’s] birele [cupbearer], let him make bot with twelve shillings. . . . If a man lie with a ceorl’s [freeman’s] birele, let him make bot with six shillings. . . .”

There were likewise penalties for killing, theft, and assorted amputations, disfigurements, and other injuries listed with colorful particularity. Crude and gritty as this system might seem to us, it illuminates some of the priorities (or perhaps pastimes) of a warrior society that, at least in principle if not always in practice, had evolved beyond the purely talionic justice of retributive self-help and violent blood-feuds in favor of a more organized, pro-social system of compensatory justice—Teutonic tort reform, in a manner of speaking.

While these rules (and others) developed in large part among the pagan Anglo-Saxons, we see in this collection the early and unmistakable fingerprints of Christianity, a religion to which Æthelberht was the first Anglo-Saxon royal convert (ca. 600). For one thing, the code begins with protections for the property of the Church. For another, and perhaps more significantly from a historical perspective, these laws were put to parchment by the Gregorian missionaries who brought with them the Roman practices and tools of literacy and codification. (The derivation of modern “clerk” from Old English “cleric” reflects the clergy’s quasi-monopoly on writing skills in early medieval England.) The codes assembled during the reigns of Æthelberht and later Anglo-Saxon kings such as Alfred the Great (ca. 847–899), were the products of Christian hands transcribing rules of largely Teutonic provenance, typically in Old English rendered in the Latin alphabet of Virgil and Livy.

Evolution of the Law in Christian England

In the space of this post, the maturation and formalization of English justice over the next several centuries can be described in only the most general and possibly unsatisfactory terms. Temporal authorities, from the crown to shire reeves and other local magistrates, adopted, adapted, and invoked various substantive laws and procedural rules, frequently aided by churchmen serving as scribes, advisors, and specialists involved in the administration of oaths and trials by ordeal in particular. Not long after the Norman conquest of 1066, separate networks of secular/royal and ecclesiastical courts emerged. The former applied what became known as the common law to adjudicate most property, contract, debt, injury, and violent criminal matters, whereas the latter relied on canon law (itself essentially the lovechild of Roman civil law and Christian precepts) in exercising jurisdiction over complaints of clerical misconduct, justiciable sins such as adultery and heresy, disputes involving Church property, defamation, and matrimonial and probate cases.[2] Theologians debated and refined ideas about the relationship between divine, natural, and manmade law—drawing not only on scripture, but also on ideas traceable to admired classical heathens such as Cicero and Aristotle. And durable principles, methodologies, maxims, and terms of art originating in ancient Roman law surfaced in English commentaries and jurisprudence, as well as the formal legal education offered at Church-affiliated universities.[3]

Without a doubt, Christian institutions, clergy, and ideas had a role shaping the course of English law in certain practical and philosophical respects. But characterizing that law as originally or fundamentally “biblical” would be misleading. The substance of the English legal tradition was “formed in the main from a stock of Teutonic customs, with some additions of matter, and considerable additions or modification of form received directly, or indirectly, from the Roman system; and both the Germanic and Romanic elements have been constituted and reinforced at different times and from different sources.”[4] Christianity was a tributary, rather than the wellspring, of the legal system and doctrines that England passed to its ornery colonies in North America.

In part two of this piece, we’ll discuss the scant evidence of biblical contributions to the drafting of the U.S. Constitution.

[1] Much of the information summarized in this section can be found in Sir John Baker, An Introduction to English Legal History (5^th ed., Oxford University Press, 2019); Daniel R. Coquillette, The Anglo-American Legal Heritage (2^nd ed., Carolina Academic Press, 2004); Tom Lambert, Law and Order in Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford University Press, 2017); and Sir Frederick Pollock and Frederic William Maitland, The History of English Law Before the Time of Edward I (2^nd ed., Liberty Fund, 2010).

[2] See Charles Sherman, A Brief History of Roman Canon Law in Medieval England, 68 University of Pennsylvania Law Review 233 (1920).

[3] See Edward D. Re, The Roman Contribution to the Common Law, 29 Fordham Law Review 447 (1961); and Charles Sherman, The Romanization of English Law, 23 Yale Law Journal 318 (1914).

[4] A.H.F. Lefroy, The Anglo-Saxon Period of English Law, 26 Yale Law Journal 291, 291-292 (1917).

Image from Rochester Cathedral

Polycarp, an important second-century Christian bishop, was martyred in about 155. A letter, The Martyrdom of Polycarp, documented the appeal by the Roman proconsul to get Polycarp to avoid a death sentence by making an obligatory prayer to Caesar. Polycarp rejected the idea, saying, “For eighty and six years have I been his servant, and he has done me no wrong, and how can I blaspheme my King who saved me?”

The lecture that prompted me to write about Polycarp was “Church History” from the Credo House ministry. In response to Polycarp’s famous line, one lecturer said, “I just read that and get chills. That needs to be a t-shirt.” The other replied, “That’s one of the most beautiful statements in all of church history. It really is.”

I’m not sure why. If Jesus helped Polycarp through life’s trials no more overtly than he helps people today, I don’t see what’s worth dying for. The Jesus who urged believers to pray in a closet instead of in public wouldn’t be pleased at a public show of devotion through martyrdom. The Bible doesn’t encourage it, and martyrdom for being a Christian (in the West, anyway) doesn’t happen. (I explore a modern version of this foolish sacrifice here.)

But that’s a tangent. Our goal here is to answer the question, Did Polycarp really say this? We’ve covered three glaring red flags already (in part 1)—the story contains miracles, Polycarp’s death reads like a deliberate imitation of Jesus’s death, and many decades may have intervened between the death and the documentation of the event. Let’s continue.

Problem 4

We have a series of copyists, though fortunately these are known. Unlike many manuscripts, the letter documents the earliest series of copies: someone wrote the original (in Greek), and then Irenaeus got a copy, which was copied by Gaius, which was then copied by Socrates, which was then copied by Pionius. Pionius noted that the copy he had to work with “had almost faded away through the lapse of time,” which raises the possibility that he used guesswork to fill in gaps.

Problem 5

But at least that initial series of copyists was documented. Our final problem is the unknown period between Pionius (assuming the accuracy of the letter’s appendix) and the oldest copies that we have today. We have seven Greek manuscript copies of the letter, but these date to the tenth century and later. That isn’t a reliable foundation on which to build our translation.

There’s also a Latin version from the tenth century and an Old Church Slavonic version from the fifteenth century. These are no improvement—not only are they late, but there’s a translation in there.

Finally, we have Church History by Eusebius (also known as Ecclesiastical History), written in Greek in about 320. He copied much of The Martyrdom of Polycarp into his book, including the “he has done me no wrong” quote.

The problem is similar here: there are seven Greek manuscript copies from the tenth century or later, six Latin copies from the eighth century and later, and two Syriac copies. The earliest Syriac copy is the oldest of all existing copies, with a (surprisingly precise) copy date of 462.

Which do we point to for our most reliable copy? We have a tenth-century Greek copy of the letter, and we have a fifth-century copy of a translation of Eusebius’s copy of the letter. Neither inspires confidence. One source characterizes the problem this way: “The letter as presented in extant Greek manuscripts, the oldest of which dates from the 10th century, is somewhat different from the account given by Eusebius, so that probably the work has undergone interpolation [change].”

The two options for the dates of Polycarp’s death are more evidence of problems with these two manuscript traditions. Each tradition gives a clear but contradictory date. The copies of The Martyrdom of Polycarp say 155 or 156, while those of Church History say 166 or 167.

(A similar analysis with a tenuous chain of evidence is the claim that the gospels are eyewitness accounts. I’ve responded to that with a blog post and video summary.)

Have we chosen a particularly poor example? Candida Moss argues in The Myth of Persecution that the martyrdom of Polycarp is one of the best martyrdom accounts, and yet it’s still unreliable.

Lessons

Admittedly, what Polycarp said, if anything, isn’t very important by itself. What is important is this as an example of the feeble foundation that supports many other claims that, collectively, are important.

Let’s review the problems that came up with this quote.

1. Miracles. The story contains miracles. Sure, I’ll listen to miracle claims, but the hill to climb to show historicity has suddenly become huge.
2. Fan fiction? It looks to be a deliberate parallel to the Jesus death story. That might make literary or theological sense, but it brings historicity into question.
3. Time gap from event to autograph. The date of original authorship is unclear. Clues in the text suggest many decades between the event and the original letter.
4. Time gap from autograph to our best copy. The letter documents three or four steps in the copying process, the last of which implies that creative license might’ve been taken to fill in the blanks in a tattered manuscript.
5. And more time from autograph to our best copy. Next is the unknown period from that point to our best copies (a tenth-century original language Greek copy or a fifth-century translated copy, neither of which inspire confidence).

When confronted with a claim about early church history, be skeptical. Ask: How do you know? Any declaration about something that happened in the early church comes down to manuscripts. Are they plausible history? How long is the chain from original to our best copies (in years and number of copies)? Did anyone in the chain of copies have an agenda to “improve” the text? And so on.

Very few typical Christians will have answers. That shouldn’t be an invitation to dump a bunch of questions and insults on them and smugly walk away, however. These are complicated issues, and maybe you can each learn from the other.

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Image from Wikimedia, public domain
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I’d like to investigate a Christian claim that’s both trivial and profound and that delivers an important takeaway for all of us.

The claim

The claim is the mid-second century conversation between Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, and the Roman proconsul (governor) of Asia, the Roman province in what is now western Turkey. Polycarp was apparently charged with refusing to honor Caesar as a god. Though he was treated with respect and encouraged that stating a simple oath to Caesar would avoid death as punishment, Polycarp refused and famously said, “For eighty and six years have I been his servant, and he has done me no wrong, and how can I blaspheme my King who saved me?”

This is trivial in that nothing of significance changes whether Polycarp said this or not. A Christian saint expresses great loyalty to Jesus—where’s the problem? Can’t we let the Christians have their heroes?

Why this is interesting

I recently listened to a lecture that included this story, and the Christian presenters commented how powerful this story was to them. That got me thinking: how do we know that the story of Polycarp’s martyrdom is accurate? More importantly, how can we trust hundreds of claims made about the early church?

I’ve recently explored the reliability of the New Testament manuscripts on which our modern copies rely (here, here). We’re now turning to the question of the reliability of stories documented outside the New Testament. Checking the weaknesses in the Polycarp martyrdom story is the goal of this post, but we would go through a similar process with any other story from the early church.

I hope that this post will do two things. First, I want to suggest by example some approaches with which you might test other church claims as you come across them. Second, I want to encourage you to be skeptical when claims about the early church are made. These claims are often part of apologetic arguments for Christianity, but those arguments are no stronger than their claims. Taking the supporting claims on faith won’t do.

Does the story hold up?

The story comes from The Martyrdom of Polycarp, a letter written by an unknown author from the church in Smyrna. Our first concern with the reliability of the story comes from the miracle claims in the story itself. When Polycarp was thrown on the fire, “he was within it not as burning flesh, but as bread that is being baked, or as gold and silver being refined in a furnace. And we perceived such a fragrant smell as the scent of incense or other costly spices.” Since he wouldn’t die, the executioner stabbed him, which released his spirit as a dove and enough blood to put out the fire, and still his body wasn’t burned.

The faithful statement of loyalty, “For eighty and six years have I been his servant, and he has done me no wrong,” is by itself easy to believe, but it’s part of a story containing miracles. The challenge to show that the entire story is history (or that a non-supernatural, historical core was corrupted by miracle claims) just got much tougher.

Problem 2

Next, the story parallels Jesus’s Passion narrative. Polycarp was betrayed, and the author wished that “they who betrayed him should undergo the same punishment as Judas.” Like Jesus and Pilate, Polycarp was publicly tried by the local Roman high official. In both cases, that official looked for a way to avoid the punishment of death. The Jews in the crowd were opponents to both Jesus (Matthew 27:25) and Polycarp. Polycarp was affixed to a wooden apparatus, to which the victim was typically nailed. With so many parallels, plus many direct quotations, one wonders how much is history and how much fan fiction.

Problem 3

We don’t know the time gap from the death until the letter was written (Polycarp is variously said to have been martyred in 155 or 156 CE or in 166 or 167). Oral history is no friend of accuracy, and the letter has clues that it was written decades after the event. It makes a clear statement against voluntary martyrdom, though this wasn’t a problem in the church until the late second century. The letter also cautions against venerating human remains as relics (not a problem until the third century) and worshipping martyrs over Christ (not a problem until the fourth century). People don’t usually warn against something that’s not a problem, so the date of authorship is arguably during a period when those issues were problems. (Sources here, here.)

We’ll finish up in part 2 with two more problems with the Polycarp claim. As we move through these issues, imagine applying these questions more broadly. Imagine applying them to other claims about the early church. These might be the claim about Pliny the Younger’s correspondence with the Emperor Trajan about the Christians in his province, for example. Or the popular claim that all disciples except for John died martyr’s deaths.

A skeptical approach and a few good questions can expose the weak foundation in many such claims.

Concluded in part 2.

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Image from Wikimedia, public domain
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A few years ago, a writer colleague told me an amazing personal story about the fallibility of memory. He was in high school some 40 years earlier, and one day the creek behind his school flooded after heavy rain. He and some classmates jumped in and rode the river downstream.

Unfortunately, a hidden branch caught his collar and pulled him under the rushing water, and he wasn’t able to disentangle himself. It might have been a sad day for our hero but for a nearby girl who was able to yank him free.

Decades later, an anthology of stories from those days was put together and the female classmate wrote the story of the impromptu trip down the river and the fortunate rescue, but in her version, he saved her!

There’s a big difference between a vivid memory and an accurate one. This fact is too often forgotten when apologists argue that the gospel story made it intact through 40 years of oral history. If you saw a man raised from the dead, they say, wouldn’t you remember that with crystal clarify?

You might indeed have a vivid or even a confident memory of something, but we can’t be sure it was accurate. Let’s look at other examples of overconfident but imperfect memories.

Example 2: Challenger memory experiment (1992)

The day after the Challenger space shuttle exploded in 1986, a professor ask 106 freshmen students to fill out a questionnaire with details of their perception of the event—where they were, what they were doing, when it happened, and so on. Two and a half years later, he re-surveyed many of those students with the same questionnaire, also asking how confident they were with each of their answers.

Taking the original set of answers as correct, the accuracy of the answers scored 42%, but the students’ average confidence in the accuracy was 83%. Here again, these vivid memories weren’t especially accurate.

(I certainly remember what I was doing when I heard the news of the explosion. Well, at least I think I do. . . .)

Once the questionnaires were answered, the professor showed the students their original answers, but many stuck with their current answers. One student even declared, “That’s my handwriting, but that’s not what happened.”

This challenges the popular flashbulb memory model that “high emotional arousal, in conjunction with surprise, stress, and significance, will produce a vivid, accurate memory of the moment someone learns of an event.”

Example 3: What Jennifer saw

Jennifer Thompson was raped one July night in 1984. She took careful mental notes of the characteristics of her attacker and felt confident when she picked Ronald Cotton out of a lineup. On little more than her testimony, Cotton was convicted.

After more than ten years in prison, DNA evidence cleared Cotton. Thompson had been wrong. Eyewitness testimony is simply not especially reliable.

Thompson and Cotton have reconciled, have written a book together about forgiveness and the unreliability of memory, and have made presentations together.

(I’ve also written about the search for Miss Ames and what it reveals about confident memories here.)

Other examples

People’s stories are unreliable for lots of reasons including poor memory and self-delusion.

• Hundreds of “heroes” who claim to have won the Medal of Honor actually haven’t, and a Library of Congress project to document veterans’ personal war stories is full of errors, including false military rank and false claims of being a prisoner of war.
• During the 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan repeatedly told a story about a heroic World War II bomber pilot that actually came from the 1944 film, “A Wing and a Prayer,” and Hillary Clinton’s account of a frightening 1996 landing in Bosnia under enemy fire (when First Lady) wasn’t the way others remembered it.
• You’d think that records and memories of U.S. nuclear weapons tests in the Pacific in the 1940s and 50s would be trustworthy, but a project to document this history has run into biased accounts and incorrect memories.
• Osama bin Laden was killed in 2011, but there are already competing accounts about how it happened.
• The problem of unreliable memories used as courtroom evidence has prompted a reevaluation of how they should best be used.

We’re all familiar with these kinds of problems. We all likely remember times when our own vivid memories have crashed into embarrassing and incontrovertible facts. Researchers have identified many specific memory errors including source confusion (the problem in the floating-down-the-river story above or with Reagan’s confusion about the film), suggestibility (accepting others’ erroneous versions), bias (changing the past to make it more like today or to heighten the differences), transience (forgetting over time), false memories (false histories implanted as memories), and more.

You can write a gospel, too!

Commenter Richard S. Russell proposed a challenge to simulate the difficulty of being the author of a gospel 40 years after the Resurrection. Think about an important event from our society 40 years ago that would be easy to fact check—say the U.S. presidential election of 1972. Who were the candidates, and who won the party nominations? What were the major issues, what were the party platforms, and what was each candidate’s position? What major gaffes or successes did each side have? What current events affected the election? Feel free to consult your friends but use memories only and no media or written sources.

Take your time and write it all down in order. Now compare it to what really happened. How well did you do?

This thought experiment only begins to highlight the difficulty because even though you didn’t consult authoritative sources such as news stories or encyclopedia articles, we brush up against those sources continually. We hear dozens of incidental clues each year about Johnson or Nixon or Vietnam, and these help keep our memories from straying. Gospel authors would’ve had no such help.

Christians like to claim that the gospels are eyewitness testimony, but what use is that claim? In the first place, there are few clues that the gospels were written by eyewitnesses (more here and here), and in the second, eyewitness testimony is unreliable. The argument for historical reliability of the New Testament is built on sand.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 11/12/14.)

Image via Kurtis Garbutt, CC license

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