“You only believe it because somebody told you.” That is true. It is also how you know almost everything else.
It gets said like a checkmate.
You were not there. You did not see the stone rolled away. You did not put a hand in his side. Everything you believe about that morning came to you through other people — people you never met, writing in a language you do not read, about events two thousand years gone. So what you call faith is really just hearsay with a hymnal.
And most Christians flinch, because the first part is accurate. We did not see it.
Do not flinch. Pick it up and look at it, because the objection has a hole in the bottom of it, and the hole is this: the man making it does not live that way for ten minutes.
Luke says it first — in the preface
Before any skeptic raised this, the man who wrote a quarter of the New Testament raised it himself, in his opening sentence, and told you exactly where he got his material.
Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to set forth in order a declaration of those things which are most surely believed among us, even as they delivered them unto us, which from the beginning were eyewitnesses, and ministers of the word; it seemed good to me also, having had perfect understanding of all things from the very first, to write unto thee in order, most excellent Theophilus, that thou mightest know the certainty of those things, wherein thou hast been instructed. (Luke 1:1–4, KJV)
Read what he admits and what he claims. He admits he is not an eyewitness — the material was “delivered unto us” by those who were. And he claims that this is enough to produce certainty, which in the King James carries the sense of firm, settled ground, not a feeling.
Luke is not embarrassed about the chain. He is handing you the chain and telling you to inspect the links. That is not what a man does when he is hoping you will not ask.
Take an inventory of your own head
Here is the exercise I would ask any honest skeptic to do. Write down ten things you are confident are true. Then mark the ones you verified yourself, from scratch, with your own eyes.
You do not know your own date of birth. You were told. You have no memory of the event, and you were in no condition to take notes. You know your blood type because a technician you never met read a result you did not see. You believe the heart pumps blood, that Antarctica is there, that your great-grandfather existed, that the food in your refrigerator will not kill you, that the bridge you drove over this morning was engineered by someone competent. You have never seen an atom. You have never personally confirmed that the earth is older than you are.
Nearly everything a human being knows, he knows because a trustworthy person told him. Philosophers call it testimony. It is not the poor relation of knowledge. It is the ordinary bulk of it. Strip it out and you do not get a careful man. You get a man who cannot function and does not actually exist.
So the rule “I accept only what I have verified myself” is never a rule anybody keeps. It is a rule produced on demand, for one subject, and retired immediately afterward.
Now give the skeptic his due
But do not run too fast, because there is something real underneath his objection, and if you trample it you will win an argument and lose the man.
Testimony is not automatically reliable. People lie. People misremember with total sincerity. People embellish a story a little more each year until the fish is a shark. And the history of religion is crowded with enormous claims that rest on one man’s private experience in a room by himself, with nothing a stranger could ever check. That instinct — I want to know whether this witness can be tested — is not unbelief. It is sanity. Scripture agrees with it:
At the mouth of two witnesses, or three witnesses, shall the matter be established. (Deuteronomy 19:15, KJV)
God wrote a corroboration requirement into Israel’s law courts. The Bible has never asked anyone to accept a single unverifiable voice.
So the answer to “why should I trust a witness?” is not “trust every witness.” It is: here are the things that make testimony worth weight, and let us apply them to this case without special pleading in either direction.
What makes testimony weigh something
Any courtroom, any historian, any insurance adjuster works from roughly the same list:
- Multiple and independent. Several sources that did not all copy one source.
- Early. Close enough to the event that people who were there could still object.
- Named and locatable. Witnesses you could go find, not anonymous voices.
- Costly. The witness lost something by testifying rather than gaining.
- Self-damaging detail. The account includes things the witness would plainly rather not report.
- Publicly checkable at the time. The claim was made where it could have been immediately disproved.
Now run the resurrection witnesses down that list.
Named and locatable. Paul does not say “some people saw him.” He files a list, and then does something a fabricator never does — he tells you most of them are still alive and available:
And that he was seen of Cephas, then of the twelve: after that, he was seen of above five hundred brethren at once; of whom the greater part remain unto this present, but some are fallen asleep. (1 Corinthians 15:5–6, KJV)
That sentence is an invitation to go ask them. You do not write it unless they will say what you said they will say.
Firsthand, and insistent about it. John stops his own narrative to put his hand up as a witness, and Peter rules out the category the skeptic suspects:
And he that saw it bare record, and his record is true: and he knoweth that he saith true, that ye might believe. (John 19:35, KJV)
For we have not followed cunningly devised fables, when we made known unto you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty. (2 Peter 1:16, KJV)
Physical and repeatable. John’s opening is a list of senses deliberately stacked up — heard, seen, looked upon, handled — which is the language of a man anticipating exactly this objection:
That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life. (1 John 1:1, KJV)
Self-damaging detail. This is the one that should stop a fair-minded critic. These documents were written and circulated by the movement’s own leadership, and they are unflattering to that leadership in ways no public-relations office would allow. The first witnesses at the tomb are women, whose testimony carried little legal weight in that world — a detail you invent only if it happens to be what occurred. The apostles are repeatedly slow, frightened, and wrong. Peter’s denial of Christ is preserved in detail in the gospel most closely associated with Peter’s own preaching. Thomas’s refusal to believe secondhand testimony is written down and kept, forever, in the book of a man who was there.
Publicly checkable. The first public proclamation of the resurrection was not made in a distant city a century later. It was made in Jerusalem, inside walking distance of the grave, to a crowd containing the men who had arranged the execution — and the one rebuttal that would have ended the matter in an afternoon was never produced.
Costly. Nobody in that list got comfortable. They got beaten, jailed, run out of cities, and killed, and none of them bought anything with the story but trouble. Men abandon a lie when it stops paying. These men kept to it when it had never paid at all.
The honest limit — and the real question
Let me say plainly what this does not do. It does not corner anybody. Testimony, however strong, can be refused. A man can look at six good witnesses and walk out. That is the nature of evidence that comes through persons rather than through a mathematical proof, and Scripture never pretends otherwise.
Which is why I will not tell you this argument converts anyone. It clears ground. It takes away one excuse — the pretense that believing on reliable testimony is something less than knowing. It leaves the actual question standing, and the actual question is not epistemology.
Jesus put it to Thomas, who had just refused secondhand testimony from men he had lived with for three years:
Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed. (John 20:29, KJV)
He is not scolding the use of eyes. He is pronouncing a blessing over everyone who would ever come in the ordinary human way — by being told, by weighing the teller, and by trusting what he found credible.
That is, by design, the channel God chose:
So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God. (Romans 10:17, KJV)
He did not write it across the sky, where it could be seen and argued about and never followed up. He put it in the mouths of witnesses — people who can be questioned, cross-examined, tracked down, mocked, imprisoned, and killed, and who can still decline to take it back.
So if you are the one saying you only believe what you have seen yourself: name one thing you live by under that rule. Your birthday. Your blood type. Your own father’s name. You will not find it, because no such man exists.
And if you are the believer who has quietly felt second-rate for not having been there — stop. You are not believing against the evidence. You are standing where Theophilus stood, holding a document written so that you “mightest know the certainty.” Go read the witnesses. They are not asking you to stop thinking. They are asking you to hear them out.
Teaching the Word. Watching the Times.
— SmithForChrist