NEWS FEATURE: Do the Gospels Meet the Legal Test of Evidence

c. 2000 Religion News Service HOUSTON _ Pamela Binnings Ewen was a true child of the `60s. She read Ayn Rand, the ultra-libertarian author of”The Fountainhead.”She hung out with people who argued philosophies with names like objectivism and existentialism. She remembers the famous Time magazine cover early in that decade which asked: “Is God dead?” […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

HOUSTON _ Pamela Binnings Ewen was a true child of the `60s.

She read Ayn Rand, the ultra-libertarian author of”The Fountainhead.”She hung out with people who argued philosophies with names like objectivism and existentialism. She remembers the famous Time magazine cover early in that decade which asked: “Is God dead?”


Try as she might, she couldn’t hold onto her childhood faith. Only now, in her fifties and after years of painstaking research, has she returned to church _ St. Christopher’s Episcopal in League City, Texas, where she lives. Only now is she comfortable calling herself a Christian.”Faith is a wonderful gift, but it was not given to me,”she says.”At the point when one begins to wonder what life is really all about and when the music will stop, this becomes an unacceptable state of affairs.” An attorney with a major law firm, a happy marriage and a successful grown son, Ewen is the last woman you would expect to be so spiritually restless. She is a partner in Houston with the international law firm of Baker & Botts with which she practices corporate law, brokering the legal side of financial deals between large companies.

In a new book, however, she shows how the legal expert and the determined spiritual seeker have come together. The reader can feel the energy of her 10 years of research and religious questing in the book,”Faith On Trial”(Broadman and Holman).

She set out to find everything she could offer as evidence of the death and resurrection of Jesus. Her book treats the four Gospels of the New Testament as eyewitness testimony of his life, ministry, crucifixion and resurrection.

Would those accounts “stand up in court?”she asked.

The book is aptly subtitled:”An Attorney Analyzes the Evidence for the Death and Resurrection of Jesus.”Drawing on her expertise in legal procedure, she covers archaeological, scientific and scholarly material.

For the purposes of her case, Ewen speculates on whether standard legal criteria can be applied to the Gospels. Her question is: If the testimony of the Gospels were held to the same standards as any other testimony within an American court of law, could a jury accept the death and resurrection of Jesus as fact?

She places the reader in the jury box.

Then as though a standard civil case were unfolding, she examines the four Gospels’ eyewitness accounts. The reliability of the testimony in explored in light of the Federal Rules of Evidence (legal standards applied by attorneys) and common law principles. Ewen assumes the burden of proof.

To examine the credibility of the four evangelists known as Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, Ewen uses the standards first outlined by Simon Greenleaf, famous in the 19th century as a professor of evidence at Harvard University. She concludes the four evangelists _ whom she treats as witnesses _ were honest men with honest motives who offered reliable testimonies to evidence they witnessed.”She made a very, very convincing case to me,”said her husband, John Ewen, a research chemist.

Until he read her book, Ewen said, he didn’t realize there were many points in the Bible that he “had prejudices about.””Reading her book and reading some of the references she had, they were real eye openers. Probably one of the most interesting things I read was about the book by Robert Shapiro. There were a lot of things (in that book) about the origins of life that I didn’t know. I was fascinated by the historical information that she took up. Shapiro says God was probably a synthetic chemist, but had to be an absolutely incredible one. I thought that was a great point because it had a parallel to my life.” (BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM)


His wife, who talks about her book as a rational laywoman’s exploration of a faith issue, spoke recently to an adult Sunday School class at St. Luke’s United Methodist Church, a 4,000-member congregation in southwest Houston. The invitation to speak came through her law partner, Charles Szalkowski.”I had spoken to her several times in the course of her writing the book and knew what she was working on. My particular class at St. Luke’s has been studying the historical Jesus. We’ve had a number of people come and talk about different aspects,”he said.

The book’s rational approach, based in legal procedure, piqued Szalkowski’s interest.”In some ways, law is the religion of America these days. … I think that’s probably why this book strikes a chord. We’re used to hearing about lawyers. And even though they’re denigrated so often, we’re used to hearing that the law is what protects the rights that we have and helps us resolve disputes,”he said.”So it’s very interesting to see it applied”to such concepts as religious beliefs.

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Her approach, Ewen said, comes naturally to a trained attorney, even one whose professional life today involves more behind-the-scenes negotiating than courtroom work.”The process is something you learn in law school and you keep it with you. You change your way of thinking when you go through law school,”she said.”The process is sort of like if you’re going to build a house and you have somebody dump a lot of bricks and mortar and a whole lot of wood and cement on your property. You look at it, it’s just a pile of bricks and mortar and cement.”But if you have an architect and a plan and you build a foundation and then you build a frame and then you pile one brick on top of the other, pretty soon you step back and you see a house.”This is like that. It’s the cumulative affect of the information. It’s not any one thing here or one thing there. Which is probably why I couldn’t get an answer when I (first) asked the question.”That question dates to her youth: Why should I believe Jesus lived, died and rose from the dead?

As she tells her story, she returns to the 1960s, where her quest began.”I had a very religious upbringing,”Ewen said, perched on the crisp linen-like white couch of her law office.

But she didn’t pray much. She called herself an agnostic, meaning to her a”person who doesn’t know if there’s a God or not, someone who doesn’t have the answers.” Today her perspective is different. Her faith is something she cherishes. But she respects other peoples’ religion, and the constant questioning of so many would-be Christians in her own age group. Let them search, she said.

And let the evidence speak for itself.

DEA END HOLMES

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