How the Bible Demonstrates the Problem of Witness Testimony

The problem of witness testimony is of biblical proportions. Truly. We can see this in more than one place in the scriptures. There were at least two possible ways witness testimony was considered an essential activity in the commerce of ancient Judea, and there are two problems with testimony that bear a striking resemblance to the problems we still face today. Among the ways, testimony was considered vital can be seen in two examples in the New Testament.

In the first case, Jesus asserts that in the presence of two or more people gathered in his name, he is present (Matt 18:20). One may surmise that it was almost holy practice to have multiple witness attestation. We can look to the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus affirms that proper conduct among individuals who have a quarrel includes the intermediation of two or more witness to support or refute the credibility of a suspect’s charge (Matt 18:16).

A second case was that testimony later served an apologetic purpose and could be considered a kind of holy activity because witnesses were so vital in establishing the truth of a claim, even one claimed from heaven. Paul suggests that over 500 people who could testify to the veracity of Jesus’ resurrection were still living. (1 Corinthians 15:6) The apologetic of Jesus’ resurrection was therefore bolstered under these conditions because a witness was only as good as his word.

On the other end of the dynamic, the New Testament demonstrates two problems that continue to be of major concern for modern judiciaries. These are the number of witnesses and the memory of those witnesses. The first example comes from the crucifixion of Christ. It reads: So the crowd of people who stood by and heard it were saying that it had thundered; others were saying, "An angel has spoken to Him." (John 12:29) The nature of witness testimony is inconsistency.

Experts have long known that two people watching the same event transpire can conclude different accounts, sometimes radically different. This was made clear to me this past week as I watched the Michael Brown trial. Witness testimony has changed multiple times and in the collective of witnesses, no two testimonies are the same. These “small details” can affect larger ones, especially where the prosecution of details is concerned. Finally, there is the problem of memory. Consider the account attributed to Paul in the Book of Acts that changes. The men who were traveling with him stood speechless because they heard the voice but saw no one. (Acts 9:7) Now those who were with me saw a light but did not hear the voice of the one who was speaking to me. (Acts 22:9) In this case, Paul testifies first that the individuals at first heard a voice from heaven but later tells a crowd that they saw a light only.

All of this shows us that even among the most credible witnesses, small details can shift in one’s story over time. Even an author writing down his words is subject to this problem! And so such examples continue to show the problematic venture of infallibility and divine inspiration as it concerns good biblical exegesis. But I think this makes the biblical story more real to me. It remains a human compendium fraught with problems. We are linked not by its claim to heavenly living, but by its human character.

Free Will as a Moral Good and the Reality of Infant Baptism

Here's a thought, something I've been thinking about as I am considering theodicy in the context of the Holocaust. I put it out there for reflection, contemplation, and feedback.

The premise that free will is a moral good is a well-known feature in Western thinking about theodicy (the justification of God's action/inaction in the world). This is an important understanding in mainline Christianity, yet many Christians still baptize infants against their will claiming something to the effect that infants haven't yet the ability to decide for themselves.

If infants only have a kind of "potential" free will that hasn't yet manifest, so that forced baptism is not considered a violation of their actual free will, how is this qualitatively distinct from situations in which Christians do not support abortion because the fetus is a potential human? On the one hand, free will is denied when it is potential, but a fetus is not denied because its humanity is potential.

HIs Blood Be Upon Us - An Alternate Reading of Jewish Responsa

Recently as I worked on research relating to theological themes in the Holocaust, I came to an all-important verse used in the polemic literature against Jews. As I considered this question more broadly to the Jewish response to their own extermination, the reaction of the Jews clarified a bit and helped me think about the problem in a way that was more genuinely Jewish than Christian.

A typical Jewish response to Jesus that is exploited in the literature comes immediately prior to Jesus’ passion. As the Sanhedrin battled over the person of Jesus, the high priest Caiaphas is reported to have said: "You do not understand that it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed.” (John 11:50). And so through the lens of two thousand years of Christian exegesis, this verse has been interpreted as a way of punishing Jewish malevolence towards Christians. Most notoriously, it was impetus in charging the Jews with an admission of cowardice, as neglecting their own, and as a result setting the sword between Jews and Christians. Though ancients approximated this idea, it found violent new life beginning with Martin Luther, until it crested into an evil that was used as justification in the Holocaust for the extermination of 6 million Jews. An important reevaluation of this verse, however, is helpful in light of what I call a Jewish ethics of survival.

Unlike the theological interpretation that sees Jews as cowering in an antagonistic role, one possible alternate explanation was the Jews’ own keen awareness of their covenant with God, a point that had nothing to do with Jesus. In their own narrative framework, acts of disobedience had a way of punishing the entire people and putting everyone at risk. The placing of Jewish halakhic thinking above an ethics of survival may have been ideologically implausible given historical circumstances. When one considers that martyrdom among Jews for the sake of higher ideals was rare and was opposed by such figures as Maimonides during Almohad rule or by Buber who confronted Gandhi on non-violent resistance, dying for one’s ideals hardly ever became a single, solitary act by one pious Jew, but was an unwelcomed event often extended to all Jews in the form of massacres. The Jewish understanding that God is a god of history meant acting within history as a means of personal preservation that honored this covenant relationship.

Persisting in this covenant required living in this world. Life in the world to come is hardly emphasized in Jewish theology the way it has come to be understood in Christian theology and one might surmise this is a direct result of the Jews being a people constantly threatened by extinction so that life itself and the fight for life become
acts of faith.