Eye-witnesses
From the Dean of St Paul's
Sir: Mr Nicolas Walter's courteous letter (April 19) calls for some reply from me. He suggests that my comparison between the evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus and that for the Moorgate train disaster was unsound. 1 wish now to take up his main points.
I. He asserts that my comparison is weak in terms of lapse of time and number of witnesses, and that the twenty years between the Resurrection and the earliest Epistles which I described as the equivalent of twenty minutes, is unworthy of a serious argument. But there was instant observation, and instant reporting, and this was contained in the oral tradition and doubtless in some written data, both of which later would be collected and edited. The time-lag would be equivalent in a World in which communications was unusually slow. 2. I report St Paul as "claiming that 500 people had seen the risen Jesus but failed to add that none of the surviving documents was written by them." Mr Walter has the advantage of me in his knowledge of the authorship of New Testament books. But even if none of these people wrote a word, that is in itself irrelevant. The Moorgate stories were not written by eye-witnesses, but by reporters to whom they spoke, and they were published after sub-editors had vetted them.
3. I did not say that "the evidence alone is not the ground of our unbelief" I wrote that it is not the"ground of our belief." I was speaking of the faith of Christians like myself.
Martin Sullivan
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