Here’s the link to this article by Bart Ehrman.
June 7, 2023
It is flat-out amazing to me how many New Testament scholars talk about the importance of eyewitness testimony to the life of Jesus without having read a single piece of scholarship on what experts know about eyewitness testimony. Some (well-known) scholars in recent years have written entire books on the topic, basing their views on an exceedingly paltry amount of research into the matter. Quite astounding, really. But they appear to have gone into their work confident that they know about how eyewitness testimony works, and didn’t read the masses of scholarship that shows they simply aren’t right about it.
Here’s how I begin to talk about eyewitness scholarship in my book Jesus Before the Gospels (HarperOne, 2016).
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In the history of memory studies an important event occurred in 1902.[1] In Berlin, a well-known criminologist named von Liszt was delivering a lecture when an argument broke out. One student stood up and shouted that he wanted to show how the topic was related to Christian ethics. Another got up and yelled that he would not put up with that. The first one replied that he had been insulted. A fight ensued and a gun was drawn. Prof. Liszt tried to separate the two when the gun went off.
The rest of the students were aghast. But Prof. von Liszt informed them that the event had been staged.
He chose a group of the students to write down an exact account of what they had just seen. The next day, other students were instructed to write down what they recalled, others a week later. The results of these written reports were surprising and eye-opening. This was one of the first empirical studies of eyewitness testimony.
Prof. Liszt broke down the sequence of events, which had been carefully planned in advance, into a number of stages. He then calculated how accurately the students reported the sequence, step-by-step. The most accurate accounts were in error in 26% of the details the reported. Others were in error in as many as 80%.
As you might expect, research on the reliability of eyewitness testimony has developed significantly over the years since this first rather crude attempt to establish whether it can be trusted to be reliable. Scholarship in the field has avalanched in recent decades. But the findings are consistent in one particularly important respect. A report is not necessarily accurate because it is delivered by an eyewitness. On the contrary, eyewitnesses are notoriously inaccurate.
There have been many books written about whether the Gospels were written by eyewitnesses or by authors relying on eyewitnesses. Some of these books are written by very smart people. It is very odd indeed that many of them do not appear to be particularly concerned with knowing what experts have told us about eyewitness testimony.[2]
This chapter is focused on two questions. Are the Gospels based on stories about Jesus that had been passed around, changed, and possibly invented by Christian storytellers for decades before being written down, or were they written by eyewitnesses? If they were written by eyewitnesses , would that guarantee their essential accuracy? We will deal with the second question first.
Research on Eyewitness Testimony
Psychological studies of eyewitness testimony began to proliferate in the 1980s, in part because of two important phenomena related to criminal investigations. The first is that people started recalling ugly, painful, and criminal instances of sexual abuse when they were children.[3] These recollections typically surfaced during the process of therapy, especially under hypnosis. Both those who suddenly remembered these instances and the therapists treating them often maintained that these repressed memories explained why the patients had experienced subsequent psychological damage. Some of these reports involved incest committed by relatives, especially parents; others involved abuse by other adults, for example in child care centers. As reports of such memories began to proliferate, some psychologists started to wonder if they could all be true. Some were obviously real memories of real events. But was it possible that others were not true memories at all, but false memories that had been unconsciously implanted during the process of therapy? It turns out that the answer is a resounding yes, which creates enormous complexities and problems for all parties: the victim or alleged victim, the therapist, the accused adults, and the judges and juries of the legal system.
The other phenomenon involved the use of DNA evidence to overturn criminal convictions. Once DNA became a reliable indicator of an accused person’s direct involvement in serious crimes, such as murder or rape, a large number of previous convictions were brought back for reconsideration. Numerous convictions were overturned. As Harvard psychologist Daniel Schacter has recently indicated, in about 75% of these reversed judgments, the person charged with the crime was convicted solely on the basis of eyewitness testimony.[4] What is one to make of such findings? In the words of a seminal article in the field: “Reports by eyewitnesses are among the most important types of evidence in criminal as well as in civil law cases… It is therefore disturbing that such testimony is often inaccurate or even entirely wrong.”[5]
This particular indictment emerged out of a study unrelated to DNA evidence. It involves an interesting but tragic case. On October 4, 1992, an El Al Boeing 707 that had just taken off from Schipfol Airport in Amsterdam lost power in two engines. The pilot tried to return to the airport but couldn’t make it. The plane crashed into an eleven-story apartment building in the Amsterdam suburb of Bijlmermeer. The four crew members and thirty-nine people in the building were killed. The crash was, understandably, the leading news story in the Netherlands for days.
Ten months later, in August 1993, Dutch psychology professor Hans Crombag and two colleagues gave a survey to 193 university professors, staff, and students in the country. Among the questions was the following: “Did you see the television film of the moment the plane hit the apartment building?” In their responses 107 of those surveyed (55%) said Yes, they had seen the film. Sometime later the researchers gave a similar survey with the same question to 93 law school students. In this instance, 62 (66%) of the respondents indicated that they had seen the film. There was just one problem. There was no film.
These striking results obviously puzzled the researchers, in part because basic common sense should have told anyone that there could not have been a film. Remember, this is 1992, before cell phone cameras. The only way to have a film of the event would have been for a television camera crew to have trained a camera on this particular apartment building in a suburb of Amsterdam at this exact time, in expectation of an imminent crash. And yet, between half and two-thirds of the people surveyed – most of them graduate students and professors – indicated they had seen the non-existent film. Why would they think they had seen something that didn’t exist?
Even more puzzling were the detailed answers that some of those interviewed said about what they actually saw on the film, for example, whether the plane crashed into the building horizontally or at vertical and whether the fire caused by the plane started at impact or only later. None of that information could have been known from a film, because there was no film. So why did these people remember, not only seeing the crash but also details about how it happened and what happened immediately afterward?
Obviously they were imagining it, based on logical inferences (the fire must have started right away) and on what they had been told by others (the plane crashed into the building as it was heading straight down). The psychologists argued that these people’s imaginations became so vivid, and were repeated so many times, that they eventually did not realize they were imagining something. They thought they were remembering it. They really thought that. In fact they did remember it. But it was a false memory. Not just a false memory one of them had. A false memory most of them had.
The researchers concluded: “It is difficult for us to distinguish between what we have actually witnessed, and what common sense inference tells us that must also have been the case.” In fact, commonsense inference, along with information we get by hearsay from others, together “conspire in distorting an eyewitness’s memory.” Indeed “this is particularly easy when, as in our studies, the event is of a highly dramatic nature, which almost by necessity evokes strong and detailed visual imagery.”[6]
The witnesses to the life of Jesus certainly were recalling events “of a highly dramatic nature” – Jesus’ walking on the water, calming the storm with a word, casting out a demon, raising a young girl back to life. Moreover, these stories certainly evoked “strong and detailed visual imagery.” Even if such stories were told by eyewitnesses, could we trust that they were necessarily accurate memories?
[1] This episode is recounted in Elizabeth F. Loftus, Eyewitness Testimony, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1996) pp. 20-21.
[2] The best known and very large study is Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006).
[3] See Richard J. McNally, Remembering Trauma (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2003).
[4] Daniel L. Schacter, “Constructive Memory: Past and Future,” Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience 14 (2012) 7-18.
[5] Hans F. M. Crombag, Willem A. Wagenaar, Peter J. Van Koppen, “Crashing Memories and the Problem of ‘Source Monitoring,’” Applied Cognitive Psychology 1 (1996) p. 95.
[6] “Crashing Memories,” p. 103.
The Pencil Driven Life 