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An Examination of the Testimony of the Four Evangelists
1846 · 606 pages
An Examination of the Testimony of the Four Evangelists
by Simon Greenleaf
Why our edition. The free text is a proofread transcription from Project Gutenberg rather than a page scan, so there is no scanning damage to report. What ours adds is the typesetting: one clean file, in three formats, without the boilerplate. The full text is public domain and free — linked below.
Worth knowing about this scan: A transcription, not a scan: no recognition damage in the text. The Harmony is printed in parallel columns. In this edition each Gospel is given under its own heading, because columns cannot reflow on a screen.
On this page: a summary of An Examination of the Testimony of the Four Evangelists, and our clean edition as a PDF or EPUB.
Greenleaf wrote the American standard work on evidence, the book courts used to decide what testimony may be believed. Then he applied his own rules to the four Gospels: who the witnesses were, what they had to gain, whether they agree in the way honest witnesses agree rather than rehearsed ones. The method is the interesting part, and it is the method Lee Strobel would use again a century and a half later.
Summary
Greenleaf wrote the American standard treatise on evidence — the book courts used to decide what testimony may be believed — and then applied his own rules to the four Gospels. The question he asks is the one a court asks of any witness: were they competent, had they the means of knowing, what had they to gain, and do they agree in the way honest witnesses agree rather than the way rehearsed ones do.
His answer to the discrepancies is the lawyer's answer. Witnesses who agree in every particular are suspected of collusion; real testimony differs in detail and coheres in substance, and that is exactly the pattern the Gospels show. He also presses the point that the evangelists record what no forger would invent — their own cowardice, their misunderstandings, the women at the tomb.
The Harmony that follows sets the Gospels side by side, episode by episode, in a hundred and seventy-two sections across nine Parts, with his notes on the points a cross-examiner would press. Three appendices on the trial of Jesus close the book, including a Jewish account of the trial by M. Salvador printed in full and then answered.
Who was Simon Greenleaf?
Simon Greenleaf (1783-1853) was Royall Professor of Law at Harvard and, with Joseph Story, built its law school into the first of its kind in America. His Treatise on the Law of Evidence was the standard authority in American courts for most of the nineteenth century.
He came to this book late, and by his own account as an exercise in his own discipline rather than in apologetics. The method — examine the witnesses rather than argue the doctrine — is the one Lee Strobel would use again a century and a half later.
Which edition of An Examination of the Testimony of the Four Evangelists is this?
The text is free at Project Gutenberg, transcribed from Greenleaf's own revised edition of 1847, and that transcription is the source of ours. What our edition adds is navigation: the book's 232 numbered sections grouped into his own twelve divisions, each section linked individually from the contents, and the Harmony's parallel columns stacked so they can be read on a screen.
This edition of Simon Greenleaf’s An Examination of the Testimony of the Four Evangelists follows his own revised text of 1847, as transcribed for Project Gutenberg. The book first appeared at Boston in 1846.
THERE IS NO SCAN BEHIND IT. A transcription is typed and proofread from the page rather than photographed, so there is no recognition damage to repair. The work here was all structure, and this book needed more of it than most.
WHAT THE PRINTED BOOK IS. It has no chapters. It is a lawyer’s treatise and it is numbered like one, in two hundred and thirty-two divisions across four movements: the Dissertation in forty-eight sections, the Harmony in a hundred and seventy-two, the Note on the Resurrection in eight, and three appendices on the trial of Jesus. Greenleaf gathered the Harmony’s sections into nine Parts and gave each a title, and those Parts are the chapters of this edition. They are his, not ours.
EVERY SECTION CAN BE REACHED FROM THE CONTENTS, which is the one thing this edition can do that the printed book cannot. The table of contents nests: the nine Parts, and under each of them a link to every section inside it, by number and title. A reader who wants “§ 107. Jesus a third time foretels his Death and Resurrection” goes there in one tap. The book of 1846 offers a page number in a synopsis forty pages away.
THE GOSPELS ARE STACKED, NOT SET IN COLUMNS, and this is a change we have made deliberately. A harmony is printed in parallel columns so that the eye can run across the page — Matthew here, Mark beside him, Luke below. A column cannot reflow. On a phone, at any size a reader would choose, two columns of a plain-text transcription interleave into nonsense: every line of the file carries half of one sentence and half of another. So each Gospel is given under its own heading instead, in the order Greenleaf set them, inside the section he assigned them to. Nothing is lost but the alignment, which was a convenience of paper; the parallel itself is his section, and that is intact. Not one word of the book was dropped in the rearranging — 91,350 words of the Harmony went in and 91,350 came out.
WHAT IS NOT HERE. Project Gutenberg’s licence, several thousand words of modern legal English bolted onto both ends, which is not part of the book. The publisher’s tabular synopsis of the Harmony is also gone: it is a table of page numbers for a printing this reader does not have, and its work is done here by the contents itself.
The spelling is Greenleaf’s and his century’s — “forefathers”, “shew”, “connexion” — and stands as he set it. His own Advertisement to the edition of 1847 explains what he revised, and is printed with the text.
Prepared by T.S. Baker Books, 2026.
Common questions
- Do I need to read the Harmony as well as the Dissertation?
- No. The Dissertation is the argument and stands alone — forty-eight sections, about 14,000 words. The Harmony is the evidence it rests on, arranged for reference, and most readers dip into it rather than read it through.
- Why are the Gospels not in parallel columns here?
- Because columns cannot reflow on a screen, and on a phone two columns of text interleave into nonsense. Each Gospel is given under its own heading inside the section Greenleaf assigned it to, so the parallel is preserved and the text is readable at any size.
A note on the text. An Examination of the Testimony of the Four Evangelists is in the public domain. What you’re buying is our edition: the careful typesetting and correction. The original text is also available free here.
That free text is already well proofread — we measure about 0.6 errors per 1,000 characters. What our edition adds is the typesetting, not a rescue: one clean file, in the formats above, without the archive boilerplate.
Related reading
The same kind of story
Mere Christianity
C. S. Lewis · 1952
Also filed under dramatic conversions & evangelists.
The same kind of story
The Reason for God
Timothy Keller · 2008
Also filed under dramatic conversions & evangelists.
The same tradition
Questions of the Soul
Isaac Hecker · 1855
Also among american on the apologetics shelf.
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