Your contemporary worldview is clouding your discussion. You stated: '
My assertion is that eyewitness testimony is not a good judge of these things'. It is nothing more than your assertion, which proves nothing. I've provided evidence of the importance of eyewitness testimony in first century culture, but you don't seem to be able to grapple with the evidence from that century. We are NOT discussing eyewitnesses in the American or Australian court system. We are discussing eyewitnesses in first century society - which were extremely important. So important that scholar, Dr Richard Bauckham, has devoted an entire book of 538pp to
Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Eerdmans 2006). His conclusion was:
'The burden of this book is that the category of testimony is the one that does most justice to the Gospels both as history and as theology. As a form of historiography testimony offers a unique access to historical reality that cannot be had without an element of trust in the credibility of the witness and what he or she has to report. Testimony is irreducible; we cannot, at least in some of its most distinctive and valuable claims, go behind it and make our own autonomous verification of them; we cannot establish the truth of testimony for ourselves as though we stood where the witnesses uniquely stood. Eyewitness testimony offers us insider knowledge from involved participants' (Bauckham 2006:505).
I don't expect you to be convinced because you have a bias against eyewitness testimony, but the NT does not. Neither did first century bishop of Hierapolis, Papias, in his major work,
Exposition of the Logia of the Lord [in
Fragments of Papias, http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/papias.html] that he wrote in 5 books.
Oz