The Benefit of Multiple Witnesses
On the most obvious level, the fact that we have four early witnesses to the ministry of Jesus increases our confidence that we can know what Jesus actually did and said. This is a matter of common sense.
Several years ago I served on a jury in a criminal case. The defendant was accused of possessing controlled substances (illegal drugs, including cocaine). He, not surprisingly, claimed that he was innocent, that the drugs found in his car were not his, and that he had no idea how they got there. But the prosecution presented several witnesses to contradict this man's story. One of the police officers who arrested him explained how he saw the defendant scurry to hide the drugs when pulled over for a traffic violation. Others bore witnesses to his having full awareness of the drugs in his possession.
When it came time for the jury to deliberate, we reviewed the evidence that had been presented to us. The fact that multiple witnesses testified to the defendant's guilt was persuasive. Without too much effort, we found him guilty as charged.
If we want to know something about Jesus, we're better off with four gospels than if we had only one. And we're better off having the distinct perspectives of the evangelists rather than one blended Diatessaron, even if this gets untidy sometimes.
Our situation is trying to find out about Jesus from multiple sources is similar to that of scholars trying to discover something about the real Socrates. The famous fifth-century Greek philosopher didn't write anything down, or at least none of his writings has survived. Almost everything we know about Socrates comes from three writers: Plato, Xenophon, and Aristophanes. The first two were disciples of Socrates who, after the death of their master, wrote dialogues in which Socrates played a major role. Aristophanes was a comic playwright who, in his drama The Clouds, made Socrates out to be a buffoon. Most scholars consider Plato and Xenophon to be more reliable sources than Aristophanes for information about the historical Socrates, though their tendency to idolize their master may be balanced by Aristophanes's more critical albeit exaggerated picture. Nevertheless, the existence of three perspectives on the life of Socrates allows scholars to determine with greater confidence what he was really like and what he really taught.
In the case of Jesus, we have four different portraits, a situation that puts us in a better position than those who are seeking the real Socrates. Yet we do not have a contrary picture, like that of Aristophanes. To our knowledge, no writer in the first century wrote a satire of Jesus. We have to wait until the second century for open criticism of Jesus. The most famous of these critics was Celsus, who said of Jesus that he "invented his birth from a virgin." Celsus accused Jesus of being
born in a certain Jewish village, of a poor woman of the country, who gained her subsistence by spinning, and who was turned out of doors by her husband, a carpenter by trade, because she was convicted of adultery; that after being driven away by her husband, and wandering about for a time, she disgracefully gave birth to Jesus, an illegitimate child, who having hired himself out as a servant in Egypt on account of his poverty, and having there acquired some miraculous powers, on which the Egyptians greatly pride themselves, returned to his own country, highly elated on account of them, and by means of these proclaimed himself a God. (Celsus is quoted in Origen, Against Celsus, 1.28. The translation is from Alexander Roberts and Jams Donaldson, eds., The Ante-Nicene Fathers [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978-1980])
Note: it would be unwise to consider Celsus a reliable, independent witness to Jesus. In Chapter 12 I'll examine in much greater detail the evidence for Jesus outside of the New Testament gospels.
