Testimony of the Evangelists
by Dr. Simon Greenleaf
(1783-1853)

Dr. Simon Greenleaf, one of the principle founders of the Harvard Law
School, originally set out to disprove the biblical testimony concerning the
resurrection of Jesus Christ.  He was certain that a careful examination of
the internal witness of the Gospels would dispel all the myths at the heart
of Christianity.  But this legal scholar came to the conclusion that the
witnesses were reliable, and that the resurrection did in fact happen.

Proceeding further, to inquire whether the facts related by the Four
Evangelists are proved by competent and satisfactory evidence, we are led,
first, to consider on which side lies the burden of establishing the
credibility of the witnesses. On this point the municipal law furnishes a
rule, which is of constant application in all trials by jury, and is indeed
the dictate of that charity which thinketh no evil.

In the absence of circumstances which generate suspicion, every witness is
to be presumed credible, until the contrary is shown; the burden of
impeaching his credibility lying on the objector.

This rule serves to show the injustice with which the writers of the Gospels
have ever been treated by infidels; and injustice silently acquiesced in
even by Christians; in requiring the Christian affirmatively, and by
positive evidence, aliunde, to establish the credibility of his witnesses
above all others, before their testimony is entitled to be considered, and
in permitting the testimony of a single profane writer, alone and
uncorroborated, to outweigh that of any single Christian.

This is not the
course in courts of chancery, where the testimony of a single witness is
never permitted to outweigh the oath even of the defendant himself,
interested as he is in the cause; but, on the contrary, if the plaintiff,
after having required the oath of his adversary, cannot overthrow it by
something more than the oath of one witness, however credible, it must stand
as evidence against him. But the Christian writer seems, by the usual course
of the argument, to have been deprived of the common presumption of charity
in his favor; and reversing the ordinary rule of administering justice in
human tribunals, his testimony is unjustly presumed to be false, until it is
proved to be true.

This treatment, moreover, has been applied to them all in
a body; and, without due regard to the fact, that, being independent
historians, writing at different periods, they are entitled to the support
of each other: they have been treated, in the argument, almost as if the New
Testament were the entire production, at once, of a body of men, conspiring
by a joint fabrication, to impose a false religion upon the world. It is
time that this injustice should cease; that the testimony of the evangelists
should be admitted to be true, until it can be disproved by those who would
impugn it; that the silence of one sacred writer on any point, should no
more detract from his own veracity or that of the other historians, than the
like circumstance is permitted to do among profane writers; and that the
Four Evangelists should be admitted in corroboration of each other, as
readily as Josephus and Tacitus, or Polybius and Livy.