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The Value of Eyewitnesses Given that the accounts claim to be eyewitness testimony or derived from eyewitness testimony, the fact that many of the accounts clearly date well within the lifetimes of the eyewitnesses, and the fact that the reporting of facts are tied to real people, real locations, at real times provides good evidence to believe that these accounts are indeed genuine eyewitness testimony. Now, it’s possible that the eyewitnesses were lying. Eyewitnesses do in fact lie from time to time. But people do not tend to lie unless they stand to gain something from lying. More important, people almost never lie if they stand to lose something, and especially if they stand to lose their lives. We know from history that the early eyewitnesses gained little in terms of wealth or other material goods. Moreover, most of them went to their deaths precisely for the claims of the gospel. But should we trust these testimonies? Richard Bauckham has argued, “An irreducible feature of testimony as a form of human utterance is that it asks to be trusted.” Bauckham makes the point that testimony is, all by itself, evidence for the claims that it makes. If we can independently confirm the testimony, then this is better, but the point is that independent confirmation is not necessary for testimony to have significant evidential value. Again, there may be further evidence to suggest that the testimony is untrustworthy. But when there isn’t, then testimony is just good evidence. Bauckham says, “Trusting testimony is not an irrational act of faith that leaves critical rationality aside; it is, on the contrary, the rationally appropriate way of responding to authentic testimony.” So though it is possible that they were lying, it is not plausible in light of the evidence. Thus, it seems that we are on good grounds for believing the original accounts of the NT are historically trustworthy.

Paul Gould, Travis Dickinson, and Keith Loftin, Stand Firm: Apologetics and the Brilliance of the Gospel (Nashville, TN: B&H Academic, 2018), 80–81.