Justified True Belief

(●) The Harvard professor who taught American courts what counts as proof, and then put the four evangelists in the witness box. + For most of the nineteenth century, an American lawyer who wanted to know whether a piece of testimony could be believed reached for the same book. It was called A Treatise on the Law of Evidence, it ran to three volumes, and by the time its author died nearly thirty thousand copies had been printed. Judges cited it, students carried it, and the man who wrote it held two of the oldest chairs at Harvard Law School, a chair being a professorship paid for out of a benefactor’s gift and carrying his name, without ever having attended a college in his life. In 1846, at the height of that reputation, Simon Greenleaf published a much smaller book. In it he took the four Gospels, treated Matthew, Mark, Luke and John as four witnesses who had come into court to testify about events they claimed to have seen, and ran them through the tests he had spent his life setting down: are they honest, are they able, are there enough of them, does their story hang together, does it square with what else we know? He was doing something that had not quite been done before, and lawyers have been doing it ever since. The fact that stays with a reader is one he never mentions anywhere in his own writing. He spent his working life on the question of when a person’s word may be believed, and he buried eleven of his fifteen children.

(●) 1783 AD: Born at Newburyport, and left behind with his grandfather when the family moved north, so that he could stay in the town’s Latin school. + Simon Greenleaf was born on 5 December 1783 in Newburyport, Massachusetts, a shipbuilding town at the mouth of the Merrimack. His people had been there for a century and a half: the first Greenleaf in America, Edmund, had come over from the parish of Brixham in Devon in 1635. The family held a tradition, recorded by Simon’s brother Jonathan in the family genealogy, that behind the English name lay a French one, Feuillevert, carried out of France by Huguenot ancestors who left for the sake of their religion. Huguenot was the name French Protestants went by, and a good many of them did leave. It is a family tradition, not a documented descent, and Jonathan sets it down as a thing believed. The two generations above Simon were the sort of men a shipbuilding town produces. His grandfather Jonathan Greenleaf began with nothing anyone would have wagered on: orphaned at five, apprenticed to a ship carpenter at seven. He ended as a member of the Provincial Congress and of the Massachusetts Senate and Council, and the town knew him, for the gentleness of his voice, as the silver-tongued Greenleaf. His father Moses went into the same trade, a ship carpenter too, and then into the Revolutionary army as a lieutenant, and he came out of it having served nearly the whole war. Afterward he and his father built twenty-two ships and brigs in nine years, which is a new vessel off the stocks every five months, the two of them working together. His mother was Lydia Parsons, the youngest daughter of the Reverend Jonathan Parsons, the Presbyterian minister of Newburyport. Thirteen years before Simon was born, in September 1770, the evangelist George Whitefield came to that town at the end of a preaching tour, spent his last night in Parsons’ parsonage, and died there in the morning. He was buried in a vault beneath the pulpit of Parsons’ church, where he lies still. Parsons himself died in 1776 and was laid in the same vault, seven years before his grandson’s birth, so Simon never met him. He grew up a few streets from the grave. When Moses moved the family to a farm at New Gloucester, up in the Maine district, in 1790, the six-year-old Simon was left behind with his grandfather so that he could keep going to the Latin school. It was worth staying for. Its master, Michael Walsh, wrote the Mercantile Arithmetic that half the counting-houses of New England, the back offices where merchants kept their accounts, had on the shelf. Simon came out of that school with a thorough hold on Latin and on English, and with no prospect at all of a university.

(●) 1801 AD: He read law in a country office in Maine, and never spent a day in a college. + At about seventeen he went north to his family at last, walked into the office of Ezekiel Whitman at New Gloucester, and asked to be taken as a student. That was how nearly everyone became a lawyer in 1801. There were almost no law schools, so a young man boarded with an established attorney, copied out writs (the formal papers that start a lawsuit and fetch a defendant into court), ran the errands nobody else wanted, and read Blackstone and Coke in the evenings. Those two names carried most of an English legal education between them: Sir William Blackstone, whose Commentaries laid out the law of England in orderly modern prose, and Sir Edward Coke, the older and thornier authority a student had to fight his way through. After a set term of that, the young man was presented to the bar, meaning the body of admitted lawyers, and examined by them. Greenleaf boarded in the Whitman family and stayed until 1806. Whitman, who later became chief justice of Maine, remembered him exactly. "When he came to me in New Gloucester," he said, "he was an excellent English and Latin scholar, and became a very faithful and devoted student." He added something a young clerk would rather hear than any compliment on his Latin: "When business called me from home, I intrusted my office business to him, placing entire confidence in him, and was never disappointed or deceived." He was admitted to the bar of Cumberland County in 1806 and hung out his sign at Standish. Within a year he had moved to Gray, where he was the first and the only lawyer in the town, and there he stayed eleven years; being the only one, he soon had a considerable practice out of the wills, the boundary lines and the debts of a country town. In August of 1806 he married Hannah Kingman, a daughter of Captain Ezra Kingman of East Bridgewater. Of the fifteen children she bore him, eleven died in infancy. Two sons and two daughters lived; both daughters married Episcopal clergymen, and the elder son eventually became one. Stop on that number for a moment, because nothing else in the life is as hard. A man who would spend his years writing about what may be believed, and on what grounds, stood at eleven small graves before he was fifty. The record does not tell us what he said about it. His brother says only that he grew quieter and more given to God as the years went on.

(●) 1820 AD: Maine became a state, and he became the man who wrote down what its court decided. + In 1818 he moved his family to Portland, the biggest town in the district, at a moment when three of the leading men of the bar had been drawn off into Congress. The opening was real and he filled it. He was not a thunderer. What contemporaries remembered was a quiet voice, an unhurried manner, and cross-examinations that seemed to be going nowhere until they arrived. Here is one of them, as his brother told it. Greenleaf’s father had taught his boys to draft and build a vessel, and Simon had been the apt pupil. Years later he was defending an insurance company against a claim for a ship damaged, the owner said, on her bottom while lying at a wharf; the company said she had been damaged on her side through the owner’s own carelessness in failing to secure her. The owner’s witness was the master builder who had done the repair, and he had testified that the damage was to the bottom. Greenleaf did not contradict him. He simply walked him up the side of a ship, timber by timber, in the order a builder lays them, each question one course higher up the hull than the last: you lay the keel along the bottom, then the floor timbers across it, then the futtocks between them like the fingers of two hands, then the rising timber, then the naval timber, then the top timber. Yes. Yes. Yes. Now tell the jury, on your oath, which of those you supplied for the repair. "It was a naval timber," said the witness, and every man on the jury knew at once that the injury had been high on her side, nowhere near her bottom. That is cross-examination: not calling a witness a liar, but asking the questions that let his own knowledge answer for him. When Maine separated from Massachusetts and set up its own government, the act establishing the Supreme Judicial Court required the appointment of "some suitable person learned in the law" to report its decisions. Reporting them meant sitting through the arguments, taking down each judgment, writing up the facts and the reasoning in a form a stranger could follow, and publishing the result, so that a lawyer in any corner of the new state could find out what the law of Maine now was. Greenleaf was appointed at once and began at the August term at York in 1820. He held the post twelve years, through the July term of 1832, and the cases fill nine volumes still cited as Greenleaf’s Reports. He sat in the legislature for Portland in 1820 and 1821, in the sessions that put the new state’s laws together, and then left public office for good. His first book came out of an embarrassment. Early in practice he had given an opinion, and argued a case on it, resting on an English decision that seemed to settle the matter, and the court told him from the bench that the case had been overruled and was worth nothing. Most young men would have gone home and sulked. He went looking, instead, for every other apparently authoritative case that had quietly lost its force in the same way, and in 1821 he published the list. Nobody had done it before. It is the ancestor of every citation index a lawyer uses today: the tools that exist to tell you, before you stand up and rely on a case, whether that case is still good law.

(●) 1833 AD: Joseph Story brought him to Harvard, and the two of them built a law school. + Joseph Story was a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States and the head of the law school at Cambridge, and in the early 1830s he had a vacancy to fill. The story his colleague Theophilus Parsons passed on is that Story, holding federal court at Portland, had before him a difficult case in admiralty, the law of ships and the sea, at that time a specialty known only in the big ports and not to many lawyers even there. Greenleaf argued it, and Story was surprised to find that this Maine reporter had the whole of it at his fingers’ ends. He determined on the spot to get him to Cambridge if he could. Greenleaf accepted the Royall Professorship in 1833 and took up the teaching that autumn, and on 26 August of the following year he delivered his inaugural discourse. Harvard gave him an honorary doctorate of laws in 1834, which was the first academic degree he ever held. For twelve years he and Story taught side by side, and Parsons, who watched them do it, thought they worked well together precisely because they were nothing alike. "Greenleaf was singularly calm, finding strength in his very stillness, always cautious, and therefore always exact," he wrote, while Story "was as vivid and impulsive as man could be. His words flowed like a flood." What the two of them built together is easiest to see in the numbers. There were about fifty students in the school when Greenleaf arrived and about a hundred and fifty when he left, so the room he first walked into would not have held the class he handed on. Thirteen hundred and five men passed through the school during his connection with it, which is a generation of the American bar. Meanwhile more than ten thousand volumes were added to the library, at a cost of over twenty-six thousand dollars, and there is no quicker way to tell what a school intends to become than to watch what it spends on its books. A place that had been one professor and a room became the model American law school. Greenleaf’s share in that was the unglamorous half: the steady teaching, the exact statement, the books.

(●) 1842 AD: His treatise on evidence became the book every American lawyer had to own. + The law of evidence is the set of rules a court uses to decide what a jury is allowed to hear and how much weight it may carry: who may testify, when a document may be read, what makes a confession admissible, when hearsay is barred and why. In 1842 Greenleaf published the first volume of A Treatise on the Law of Evidence. The second followed in 1846 and the third in 1853, the year he died. He had meant it, at first, as a manual for students. The profession took it away from him. Edition followed edition, the book grew under his hands, and by his death something not far short of thirty thousand copies of the three volumes had been printed in America alone. For the rest of the century "Greenleaf on Evidence" was simply what an American lawyer meant by the authority on the subject. Its opening page states the conviction that governs everything he wrote afterward, in his church as much as in his classroom. Mathematics can be demonstrated, and nothing else can. "Matters of fact are proved by moral evidence alone," he wrote, meaning by moral evidence not evidence about right and wrong but every kind of proof that is neither a direct sight of the thing nor a mathematical demonstration of it. Whether your ship sank in a storm or was scuttled, whether the prisoner fired the shot, whether your grandmother signed the will: none of that admits of proof in the geometer’s sense, and to demand it would stop the courts within a week. In 1845 Story died, and in 1846 Greenleaf succeeded him in the Dane Professorship, taking up his colleague’s chair as well as his own work. He did not hold it long. He resigned the active chair in 1848 with his health broken by the work, and was made professor emeritus, the honorary title that lets a worn-out teacher keep the name of his post without its duties. He kept it until he died.

(●) 1846 AD: He turned his own rules of evidence on the four Gospels. + The book was called An Examination of the Testimony of the Four Evangelists, by the Rules of Evidence Administered in Courts of Justice, and it came out in Boston in 1846 and in London the next year. The essay that opens it runs to only forty-eight numbered paragraphs, which is an afternoon’s reading. Behind it sit the four Gospels laid out as a harmony, which is what scholars call the four accounts printed side by side in parallel columns, so that one episode can be read straight across in all four versions at once, with notes attached. A reader who suspects the argument of glossing over a discrepancy can look across at the columns and do the comparing himself. Greenleaf says plainly at the start what he is not doing. He is not arguing that God has spoken, or that Christianity is the true religion; others had written on that, and he refers his readers to them. He is asking one lawyer’s question about four documents: if these men had given this testimony on oath in a court, would it be believed? Everything else in the book follows from keeping to that question. There is a story told about him constantly, and it is not true. In the retelling, Greenleaf is a skeptic, sometimes an outright atheist, goaded by his students into examining the resurrection in order to demolish it, and converted against his will by what he found. It is a good story. You can see why it spread, and you will meet it in sermons and on the backs of paperbacks to this day. Nothing in the book says any such thing, and nothing in the accounts written by the people who knew him says it either. His brother Jonathan, who knew him as well as anyone alive, wrote that for the last thirty years of his life he was one of the most spiritually minded men, evidently intent on walking humbly with God, which puts the settled center of his faith somewhere in the early 1820s, twenty years before the book. The real story is less dramatic and more interesting: a working Christian lawyer, president for many years of the Massachusetts Bible Society, who thought his own trade had something to contribute and sat down to contribute it. The same years produced his smaller Christian pieces, and both of them are the work of a lawyer talking to the people he actually knew: a book of counsel to Christians on how to dispose of their property by will, and a tract addressed to his own profession, which the American Tract Society printed and gave away.

(●) 1853 AD: He died at seventy in the middle of the work, and the lawyers of two counties met within days to say what he had been. + Simon Greenleaf died at Cambridge on 6 October 1853, in the middle of his work, with the third volume of the Treatise just out and a new edition of it already going through the press. He was seventy. William Willis, who knew him and wrote the standard account of the Maine bar, said he had given no margin of his life to recreation except the move from one field of mental work to another, and that he fell exhausted by life’s toil. The bars of Suffolk County in Massachusetts and Cumberland County in Maine both met within days, each of them the working lawyers of a whole county gathered in one room to pass resolutions on a colleague. The Suffolk resolutions put him with Story, Kent and Wheaton among the American legal authors known abroad, which is the compliment one lawyer pays another. The Cumberland resolutions did something rarer: they named what he had been after. It had been the aim of his instructions and writings, the Cumberland bar resolved, to raise the standard of professional morality as well as the scale of legal excellence, "and that he sought to sustain the solemn sanctions of the divine law, by exhibiting confirmed grounds of evidence in attestation of Christian truth." That is a strange thing for a county bar association to say about a colleague. It is also, from the evidence, exactly right.

What He Taught

(T1) Documents kept where they belong come into court as genuine, and whoever calls them forgeries must prove it. + Suppose a farm changes hands after two hundred years and somebody questions the title. The deed is produced from the strongbox in the solicitor’s office where that family’s papers have always been kept. Nobody in court knows the man who drew it up; every witness to the signing is long dead. Yet no judge asks the owner to prove the deed genuine before it may be read. The law calls this coming from the proper custody or the proper repository: a document found in the place where such a document would naturally be kept, bearing no visible marks of forgery, is taken as genuine, and the man who says it is a forgery carries the burden of showing it. That rule is doing real work, and it is not laziness. Requiring every ancient paper to be proved from scratch would destroy titles, pensions and pedigrees by the thousand, because the proof died with the witnesses. So the law extends what Greenleaf calls the judgment of charity: it presumes a man innocent until he is proved guilty, presumes a transaction fairly done until it is shown otherwise, and presumes a document genuine until it is impeached. Apply that, he says, to the Gospels. They have been in the keeping of the churches from the time they were written; they are found precisely where such writings ought to be found; there is no story of gold plates dug out of a hillside or of a book let down from heaven, only four narratives published under the names of men who lived at the time. English courts of his day received on exactly these terms both Domesday Book, the great survey of English landholding compiled for William the Conqueror, and the ancient statutes of Wales, and continental courts received the entire Roman civil law on weaker evidence of its genuineness than that. He adds a shrewd point about the copies. Christians of rival parties, opposed on nearly everything, all appealed to the same text and all watched each other’s handling of it, and that mutual jealousy is a better guarantee against corruption than the quiet consent that preserved the Roman law. You might be thinking: hold on, a deed in a strongbox is one thing, but a deed does not claim that a dead man walked out of his grave. That is the right objection, and it lands. Greenleaf’s presumption goes only to whether these are the writings of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, which is a question about who wrote them, not to whether everything written in them happened. He knew the difference perfectly well. The rest of the essay is his attempt to close the gap, and how far he closes it is a fair thing to argue about.

(Q) "It is quite erroneous to suppose that the Christian is bound to offer any further proof of their genuineness or authenticity. It is for the objector to show them spurious; for on him, by the plainest rules of law, lies the burden of proof." + Source: Simon Greenleaf, An Examination of the Testimony of the Four Evangelists, § 10 (London edition, 1847). He has just finished tracing how the copies of the Scriptures were kept in use by churches that disagreed with each other about almost everything else, and concludes that a Christian producing them in court would be under no more obligation to prove them than the holder of an ancient charter (T1).

(T2) A fact is proved when the evidence would satisfy a careful person deciding something that mattered to him. + A house is broken into. The burglar has forced the window with a knife, the blade has snapped, and the broken piece is left in the frame. In the pocket of the man arrested is the handle, with the stump of the blade still in it, and the two pieces fit. Nobody saw him do it. He offers no account of how the knife came to be in that state. Greenleaf uses this case, and one in which the wadding of a murderer’s pistol turned out to be part of a letter whose other half was in the prisoner’s pocket, to make a point about the kind of certainty human beings actually live on. In neither case is guilt strictly impossible to doubt. In both, a juror who convicted would sleep soundly. The technical word for this is moral certainty, and it is easy to hear it wrongly. It has nothing to do with morality. It is the name for the highest assurance available about matters of fact, as distinct from the demonstration available in mathematics, where a proof shuts the door on error completely. In every question about what actually happened, Greenleaf says, the most that can be asserted is that the account is more likely to be true than false. It may be so overwhelmingly more likely that no sane person hesitates. It will still not be a theorem. So when a skeptic says the evidence for the resurrection falls short of proof, the honest answer is to ask what kind of proof he has in mind. If he means demonstration, he is right, and he is also asking for something no historical claim of any sort can supply, including the ones he acts on every day. If he means the standard on which men are hanged and estates are settled, that is a standard the evidence can meet or fail to meet, and Greenleaf wants it applied without fear or favor. A juror, he notes drily, would violate his oath if he refused to convict or acquit on this measure of proof.

(Q) "By competent evidence, is meant such as the nature of the thing to be proved requires; and by satisfactory evidence, is meant that amount of proof, which ordinarily satisfies an unprejudiced mind, beyond any reasonable doubt." + Source: Simon Greenleaf, An Examination of the Testimony of the Four Evangelists, § 27 (London edition, 1847). His definition of what it means to call a thing proved. The same conviction opens his legal treatise, where he writes that none but mathematical truth admits of demonstration, and that "matters of fact are proved by moral evidence alone" (A Treatise on the Law of Evidence, vol. 1, § 1).

(T3) The men who told the story had every reason on earth to take it back, and not one of them did. + Courts assume that people tell the truth unless they have a reason not to, and the first thing an advocate looks for in a witness is the motive to lie: money, revenge, a reputation to protect, a sentence to avoid. Greenleaf goes looking for the apostles’ motive and cannot find one. Their master had just been executed as a criminal by a public court. Their message set itself against the religion of every nation on earth, the laws were against them, the rulers were against them, and the fashion of the world was against them. What the work paid, in his list, was contempt, opposition, revilings, bitter persecution, stripes, imprisonments, torments and cruel deaths. His argument is not that sincerity proves a belief true; people die for mistaken beliefs in every generation. It is narrower and harder to get around. These men were not in a position to be honestly mistaken about the thing they were dying for. They did not claim an inward persuasion that Jesus lived; they claimed to have eaten with him. Either they knew that was so, or they knew it was not. And a man who knows it is not, and who watches his friends killed one at a time for saying it, and who then says it more loudly, has bought himself every evil the world can do to him plus a guilty conscience, and has bought nothing at all. Paul saw the same fork and named it in the same terms a generation after the events: "We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified about God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised." (1 Corinthians 15:15) Either they are witnesses or they are perjurers, and there is no comfortable third thing.

(Q) "It was therefore impossible that they could have persisted in affirming the truths they have narrated, had not Jesus actually risen from the dead, and had they not known this fact as certainly as they knew any other fact." + Source: Simon Greenleaf, An Examination of the Testimony of the Four Evangelists, § 30 (London edition, 1847). The close of his argument on the first test he applies to any witness, honesty. He has been listing what the apostles could expect from the world for their trouble, and observes that every human motive they had pushed them toward discovering and admitting an error, if there had been one to find (T3).

(T4) Four accounts that agree in substance and differ in detail are what truthful independent witnesses always produce. + Any judge who has taken evidence from four people about the same road accident knows the shape of it. They agree on what happened. They differ on the color of the second car, on whether the light had changed, on who shouted first. If all four gave word-for-word identical accounts, the judge would not be reassured; he would start wondering who had coached them. Greenleaf borrows William Paley’s phrase for the pattern: substantial truth under circumstantial variety. He is willing to be concrete about the cost of the opposite rule, and his two examples are both from history no one dreams of doubting. Take the death of Strafford, the minister Charles I gave up to his enemies. Lord Clarendon, who wrote the great royalist history of those years, says Strafford was condemned to be hanged and executed the same day; Burnet and others say he was sentenced to the block on a Saturday and beheaded on the Monday. Or take the flight to Varennes, the night the French royal family tried to slip out of revolutionary France in disguise and were stopped at a village short of the frontier. Ten of them wrote accounts of that journey, all of them eyewitnesses and participants, and they contradict each other on small points and large ones. Nobody proposes to disbelieve that Strafford died or that the flight happened. Where the accounts agree we accept them, where they differ we reconcile them as best we can, and where we cannot we follow the clearest light. Apply the skeptic’s rule about the Gospels consistently, Greenleaf says, and most of the history on the shelf goes out with them. Then he adds an observation from the mathematics of testimony, quoting an earlier writer on the point. When several witnesses who have had no opportunity to concert their stories, that is, no chance to sit down together and agree on what to say, nevertheless tell the same story, the agreement carries a weight of its own, over and above whatever credit each of them has separately. Chance does not produce that kind of match. So there are two ways it can happen: either they arranged it beforehand, or they are all describing something that really occurred. And the variations, the very differences a skeptic points to, are the evidence that they did not arrange it.

(Q) "If these different accounts of the same transactions were in strict verbal conformity with each other, the argument against their credibility would be much stronger." + Source: Simon Greenleaf, An Examination of the Testimony of the Four Evangelists, § 35 (London edition, 1847). He is answering the objection that the discrepancies between the evangelists destroy their testimony, and turns it over: perfect verbal agreement among four independent accounts is the thing a lawyer would find suspicious (T4).

(T5) Neither of the two proceedings that condemned Jesus kept the forms of its own law. + Having finished with the witnesses, the last section of the book turns to the case itself. Jesus went before two benches on that Friday, and Greenleaf takes them in order: first the Jerusalem council, the Sanhedrin, made up of the chief priests, the elders and the scribes, which was the supreme Jewish court in matters of the law of Moses, and then Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, who alone could order a man crucified. Of each, Greenleaf asks the one question a lawyer knows how to ask: were that court’s own rules followed? Before Pilate the answer is on the face of the Gospels. The charge laid there was not blasphemy, which no Roman officer would have troubled himself with, but treason: that this man forbade tribute to Caesar and set himself up as king. Pilate examined him, found the kingdom he spoke of was not a kingdom of this world, and pronounced him innocent. Then, with the crowd pressing, he sent the case to Herod as a Galilean matter, and Herod sent it back with the same finding. Pilate called the chief priests and rulers together and acquitted him a second time in open court, and then, on the same evidence, without any claim of error in the proceedings, gave sentence as the crowd required. A judgment of acquittal, Greenleaf points out, is irreversible except by a higher court on appeal. Two of them were reversed here by a nervous provincial officer who was afraid of losing his position under the dark and unrelenting Tiberius, the emperor he served. The placard nailed over the cross, naming him king of the Jews, records what he was executed for, because that was the Roman custom. For the earlier proceeding, before Caiaphas and the council, he defers to the French advocate André Dupin, whose tract on the subject he printed in the same volume. Dupin ran the night’s events against the rules of Jewish criminal procedure and found them broken at nearly every step: an arrest after dark, a prisoner struck before he was charged, a hearing held on a feast day and before sunrise, a defendant put on his oath to convict himself, and sentence passed the same day as conviction. Christians have always had a word for what happened that night, and it is not primarily a legal one. Preaching at Pentecost, within a few weeks and a few streets of the event, Peter charged the crowd in Jerusalem with the deed the council and the governor had carried through: "this Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men." (Acts 2:23) That is the deeper account of it, and no courtroom finding replaces it. Still, it is worth having the legal fact clearly alongside, because the legal fact takes away one particular line of defense. Somebody will always say that whatever else may be argued, at least the forms were observed and the man had his day in court. He did not.

(Q) "He was arrested in the night, bound as a malefactor, beaten before his arraignment, and struck in open court during the trial; he was tried on a feast day, and before sunrise; he was compelled to criminate himself, and this, under an oath or solemn judicial adjuration; and he was sentenced on the same day of the conviction. In all these particulars the law was wholly disregarded." + Source: Simon Greenleaf, An Account of the Trial of Jesus, printed with An Examination of the Testimony of the Four Evangelists (London edition, 1847). Greenleaf is summarizing the findings of M. Dupin’s tract on the trial before the Sanhedrin, which is translated in full later in the same volume. To criminate oneself is the older English for what a modern lawyer calls self-incrimination (T5).

(Q) "Either the men of Galilee were men of superlative wisdom, of extensive knowledge and experience, and of deeper skill in the arts of deception, than any and all others, before or after them, or they have truly stated the astonishing things which they saw and heard." + Source: Simon Greenleaf, An Examination of the Testimony of the Four Evangelists, § 48 (London edition, 1847). The last sentence of the essay, and the one most often quoted from him. He has just argued that the character the evangelists portray is one no writer of fiction had ever managed to conceive, not even for a god, and that four provincial men could not have invented it between them.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) He gave the lawyer’s defense of the faith its method and its handbook, and it has not lapsed since. + There had been Christian lawyers before him who wrote in defense of the faith; Hugo Grotius, the Dutch jurist of the seventeenth century, is the usual ancestor. What Greenleaf added was the machinery of his own courtroom, applied openly and at length: the rules about custody of documents, about burden of proof, about the credit due to witnesses, about the difference between demonstration and moral certainty. After him the approach had a name and a handbook, and it is generally called juridical apologetics, the defense of the Christian claims by the standards a court uses to decide what happened. The line runs unbroken to the present. In the twentieth century John Warwick Montgomery, a theologian who was also a practicing lawyer, took Greenleaf’s method up again in books like History and Christianity and Faith Founded on Fact, arguing the case for the resurrection the way one argues from documentary and testimonial evidence at trial. In 1980 Montgomery and others founded a school in California and named it the Simon Greenleaf School of Law; it later became Simon Greenleaf University, and in 1997 joined Trinity International University as Trinity Law School. His little book has never gone out of print for long, and it still turns up in the hands of lawyers who want to know whether their day job has anything to say about the Gospels.

(†) His question, "would a court believe these witnesses," became one of the standard ways of putting the case. + Greenleaf was not working alone, and he says so. He leans on William Paley, the English apologist whose Evidences of Christianity and Horae Paulinae had already argued the case from the conduct of the witnesses and from the small, unforced agreements between the letters of Paul and the book of Acts; he leans on Thomas Chalmers, the Scottish minister, for the argument that liars do not scatter checkable details through a story the way the evangelists do. What he gave the tradition was a frame that non-specialists could hold in their heads: five tests for a witness, and a burden of proof that sits where the law puts it. One part of that frame has proved durable in a way its author would not have predicted. In his forty-second paragraph he points at a family of arguments that has since been given a name: undesigned coincidences. The idea is easier to see than to define. Two people describe the same evening without comparing notes. Your sister mentions, for no particular reason, that she drove you home from the party. Your friend never mentions a car at all, but does remember that you had your ankle strapped up that week. Neither detail explains anything where it sits, and each of them answers the small question the other leaves hanging, and neither of them was trying to back the other up. Nobody arranges that. Paley’s Horae Paulinae is a whole book of them, gathered between Paul’s letters and the book of Acts, and Greenleaf expected honest testimony to throw such things off as a matter of course. The argument then went quiet for most of the twentieth century, and it has been taken up again in our own time by Lydia McGrew, whose work on the Gospels turns on exactly that kind of small, unarranged agreement. The Gospel writers themselves invite the treatment. Luke opens by telling Theophilus, the man for whom he wrote, that he has gone over everything carefully, from those who were eyewitnesses from the beginning, so that he may know the certainty of what he has been taught (Luke 1:1-4); Peter insists that the apostles did not follow cleverly devised myths (2 Peter 1:16); Luke says of the risen Christ that he presented himself alive by many proofs (Acts 1:3). Greenleaf took them at their word and asked what the proofs were worth.

(†) His presumption of genuineness could not carry the miracles, and he defended the rule that kept atheists out of the witness box. + Two things in his own record deserve to be said plainly, and a third that is smaller but not nothing. - The burden of proof does more work than it can carry. Establishing that the Gospels are genuine writings of the men whose names they bear is one thing; establishing that the events they report occurred is another, and the presumption Greenleaf borrows was designed for the first. An ancient deed is admitted without proof of its execution, but nobody concludes from its admission that everything recited in it is true. He is aware of the gap, and the five tests are his attempt to bridge it, but when he reaches the miracles the argument thins: the full discussion of miracles, he says, forms no part of his present design, and he sends the reader elsewhere. Think of who is likely to be reading. A skeptic arrives at Greenleaf having come from David Hume, whose famous essay on miracles argues that no testimony establishes one unless the falsehood of that testimony would be a greater marvel than the event it reports, and who held that no testimony has ever met that bar. That reader has one question, and at the one place he most wanted an argument he is handed a promissory note, which is to say an IOU. - He defended a rule that shut atheists out of the witness box. American and English courts of his day held that a witness who did not believe in a God who punishes falsehood could not be sworn at all, and so could not testify, whatever the case and whatever he had seen. Greenleaf stated the rule in his treatise without dissent and defended it in print, arguing that to require the mere formality of an oath from a man who "avowedly despises, or is incapable of feeling, its peculiar sanction, would be but a mockery of justice." The consequences of the rule fell on real people. A man beaten in an alley in front of one neighbour had, for legal purposes, no witness at all if that neighbour happened to be an unbeliever, and property and liberty turned on testimony the court would not let anyone give. Legislatures were already chipping away at it while he wrote, his own Maine among them, which in 1833 made belief in a Supreme Being enough and dropped the older requirement that a witness believe in rewards and punishments to come. He recorded those statutes in his footnotes without joining them. There is an irony here he seems not to have felt. The book that asks unbelievers to weigh the Christian evidence fairly was written by a man whose courts would not have let those unbelievers speak. - His pen could be harsh where it did not need to be. Introducing the chapter by Joseph Salvador, the French Jewish physician and historian whose account of the trial he wished to answer, he describes it as the language of an enemy of our Saviour and in justification of his murderers. Salvador had made an argument about legal procedure, and an argument is answered by an argument; Dupin, whose reply Greenleaf printed, knew Salvador personally, thought well of his talents, and said openly that he took the subject up at Salvador’s own request and not from any spirit of hostility. The difference between the two men’s tone is instructive, and it does not favor Greenleaf. None of this touches the thing he did well, which was to ask a question nobody of his standing had asked so carefully, and to refuse to let the answer depend on whether the subject was sacred. He wanted the Gospels examined as if they were evidence in a hard case, by a hostile cross-examiner, and he believed they would survive it. That invitation is still open, and it is still the most useful thing he left.