Beyond the earliest days of the religion, early Christians were believers because they'd been converted, not because they were witnesses to supernatural events, just like today. The 911 hijackers believed in Paradise for martyrs, but that doesn't mean that that's true. We have no good reason to imagine that eyewitnesses wrote the gospels rather than someone simply documenting the Jesus story as it had developed within their church community.
One of my great experiences in life was to be interviewed on a late-night talk show by a guy named Tom Snyder. He was interviewing me on a book I had written on the New Testament of the Bible called Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, and we talked about the dating of the books of the New Testament, and I said, "Well, the consensus is that the gospels were written some forty to seventy years after the crucifixion. " And he stopped me and said, "Wait a minute, Bishop, that means they couldn't have been written by eyewitnesses. "
I am an eyewitness to the ways in which people relate to themselves and to each other, and my work is a way of scooping and ladling that experience.
Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable.
There are plenty of eyewitness accounts, just because you're so narrow-minded you need to have everything shoved under your nose before you-
