Eye witnesses
Sir: Martin Sullivan compares the evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus with that for the Moorgate train crash (April 5). But the documents about the latter were written within a few hours or days of the event they describe, and were based on the testimony of hundreds of eye-witnesses; whereas the documents about the former were written probably between twenty and ninety years after the events they describe, and were based on no known first-hand testimony at all. Mr Sullivan's comparison is particularly weak in terms of the lapse of time and the numbers of witnesses. He calls the twenty years between the Resurrection and the earliest Epistles "the equivalent one might say of twenty minutes today", but such a description is surely unworthy of a serious argument. He reports the claim in the Epistle to the Corinthians that over 500 people had seen the risen Jesus, but fails to add that none of the surviving documents were written by any of them. He states that "the evidence alone is not the ground of our unbelief'; but, while this may be true of Christians, it is not true of non-Christians, for whom the lack of evidence is the ground of unbelief in the Resurrection — or perhaps even the life — of Jesus.
Nicolas Walter Rationalist Press Association, 88 Islington High Street, London Ni
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