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(a) In questions as to matters of fact, the proper inquiry is not whether it is possible that the testimony may be false, but whether there is sufficient probability that it is true. It is unfair, therefore, to allow our examination of the Scripture witnesses to be prejudiced by suspicion, merely because their story is a sacred one.

There must be no prejudice against, there must be open-mindedness to, truth; there must be a normal aspiration after the signs of communication from God. Telepathy, forty days fasting, parthenogenesis, all these might once have seemed antecedently incredible. Now we see that it would have been more rational to admit their existence on presentation of appropriate evidence.

(b) A proposition of fact is proved when its truth is established by competent and satisfactory evidence. By competent evidence is meant such evidence as the nature of the thing to be proved admits. By satisfactory evidence is meant that amount of proof which ordinarily satisfies an unprejudiced mind beyond a reasonable doubt. Scripture facts are therefore proved when they are established by that kind and degree of evidence which would in the affairs of ordinary life satisfy the mind and conscience of a common man. When we have this kind and degree of evidence it is unreasonable to require more.

In matters of morals and religion competent evidence need not be mathematical or even logical. The majority of cases in criminal courts are decided upon evidence that is circumstantial. We do not determine our choice of friends or of partners in life by strict processes of reasoning. The heart as well as the head must be permitted a voice, and competent evidence includes considerations arising from the moral needs of the soul. The evidence, moreover, does not require to be demonstrative. Even a slight balance of probability, when nothing more certain is attainable, may suffice to constitute rational proof and to bind our moral action.

(c) In the absence of circumstances which generate suspicion, every witness is to be presumed credible, until the contrary is shown; the burden of impeaching his testimony lying upon the objector. The principle which leads men to give true witness to facts is stronger than that which leads them to give false witness. It is therefore unjust to compel the Christian to establish the credibility of his witnesses before proceeding to adduce their testimony, and it is equally unjust to allow the uncorroborated testimony of a profane writer to outweigh that of a Christian writer. Christian witnesses should not be considered interested, and therefore untrustworthy; for they became Christians against their worldly interests, and because they could not resist the force of testimony. Varying accounts among them should be estimated as we estimate the varying accounts of profane writers.

John's account of Jesus differs from that of the synoptic gospels; but in a very similar manner, and probably for a very similar reason, Plato's account of Socrates differs from that of Xenophon. Each saw and described that side of his subject which he was by nature best fitted to comprehend—compare the Venice of Canaletto with the Venice of Turner, the former the picture of an expert draughtsman, the latter the vision of a poet who sees the palaces of the Doges glorified by air and mist and distance. In Christ there was a “hiding of his power” (Hab. 3:4); “how small a whisper do we hear of him!” (Job 26:14); he, rather than Shakespeare, is “the myriad-minded”; no one evangelist can be expected to know or describe him except “in part” (1 Cor. 13:12). Frances Power Cobbe, Life, 2:402—“All of us human beings resemble diamonds, in having several distinct facets to our characters; and, as we always turn one of these to one person and another to another, there is generally some fresh side to be seen in a particularly brilliant gem.” E. P. Tenney, Coronation, 45—“The secret and powerful life he [the hero of the story] was leading was like certain solitary streams, deep, wide, and swift, which run unseen through vast and unfrequented forests. So wide and varied was this man's nature, that whole courses of life might thrive in its secret places—and his neighbors might touch him and know him only on that side on which he was like them.”

(d) A slight amount of positive testimony, so long as it is uncontradicted, outweighs a very great amount of testimony that is merely negative. The silence of a second witness, or his testimony that he did not see a certain alleged occurrence, cannot counterbalance the positive testimony of a first witness that he did see it. We should therefore estimate the silence of profane writers with regard to facts narrated in Scripture precisely as we should estimate it if the facts about which they are silent were narrated by other profane writers, instead of being narrated by the writers of Scripture.

Egyptian monuments make no mention of the destruction of Pharaoh and his army; but then, Napoleon's dispatches also make no mention of his defeat at Trafalgar. At the tomb of Napoleon in the Invalides of Paris, the walls are inscribed with names of a multitude of places where his battles were fought, but Waterloo, the scene of his great defeat, is not recorded there. So Sennacherib, in all his monuments, does not refer to the destruction of his army in the time of Hezekiah. Napoleon gathered 450,000 men at Dresden to invade Russia. At Moscow the soft-falling snow conquered him. In one night 20,000 horses perished with cold. Not without reason at Moscow, on the anniversary of the retreat of the French, the exultation of the prophet over the fall of Sennacherib is read in the churches. James Robertson, Early History of Israel, 395, note—“Whately, in his Historic Doubts, draws attention to the fact that the principal Parisian journal in 1814, on the very day on which the allied armies entered Paris as conquerors, makes no mention of any such event. The battle of Poictiers in 732, which effectually checked the spread of Mohammedanism across Europe, is not once referred to in the monastic annals of the period. Sir Thomas Browne lived through the Civil Wars and the Commonwealth, yet there is no syllable in his writings with regard to them. Sale says that circumcision is regarded by Mohammedans as an ancient divine institution, the rite having been in use many years before Mohammed, yet it is not so much as once mentioned in the Koran.”

Even though we should grant that Josephus does not mention Jesus, we should have a parallel in Thucydides, who never once mentions Socrates, the most important character of the twenty years embraced in his history. Wieseler, however, in Jahrbuch f. d. Theologie, 23:98, maintains the essential genuineness of the commonly rejected passage with regard to Jesus in Josephus, Antiq., 18:3:3, omitting, however, as interpolations, the phrases: “if it be right to call him man”; “this was the Christ”; “he appeared alive the third day according to prophecy”; for these, if genuine, would prove Josephus a Christian, which he, by all ancient accounts, was not. Josephus lived from AD 34 to possibly 114. He does elsewhere speak of Christ; for he records (20:9:1) that Albinus “assembled the Sanhedrim of judges, and brought before them the brother of Jesus who was called Christ, whose name was James, and some others … and delivered them to be stoned.” See Niese's new edition of Josephus; also a monograph on the subject by Gustav Adolph Müller, published at Innsbruck, 1890. Rush Rhees, Life of Jesus of Nazareth, 22—“To mention Jesus more fully would have required some approval of his life and teaching. This would have been a condemnation of his own people whom he desired to commend to Gentile regard, and he seems to have taken the cowardly course of silence concerning a matter more noteworthy, for that generation, than much else of which he writes very fully.”

(e) “The credit due to the testimony of witnesses depends upon: first, their ability; secondly, their honesty; thirdly, their number and the consistency of their testimony; fourthly, the conformity of their testimony with experience; and fifthly, the coincidence of their testimony with collateral circumstances.” We confidently submit the New Testament witnesses to each and all of these tests.

See Starkie on Evidence, 726.