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Simon Greenleaf and the Atheist Professor Urban Legend

| March 15, 2025 | Kiosk Article
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I. Introduction
II. Evangelegends
     A. Greenleaf Legend
     B. Correction
     C. Hard Evidence about Greenleaf
III. No Perry Mason Moment
     A. Barry St. Clair—Published in 1991
     B. Gary Habermas—Unpublished Dissertation in 1976
     C. Josh McDowell—Speeches Before 1976
IV. My Pathetic Attempt to Kill an Urban Legend
     A. Honest Christians
     B. Dishonest Christians
V. Stake Inoculation for an Appeal to Authority
     A. Appeal to Authority
     B. Stake Inoculation
VI. My Speculation About a Motive
     A. Denial
     B. Faith Over Facts
     C. The End Justifies the Means
VII. Relevance to Apologetics
VIII. Conclusion

I. Introduction

Simon Greenleaf (1783-1853) was an eminent lawyer and professor at Harvard Law School who helped lay the foundations for state and federal rules of evidence. He also wrote the seminal work of modern legal apologetics, The Testimony of the Evangelists, published in 1846.

Numerous apologists tell variations of an inspiring story about how evidence for Jesus’ resurrection supposedly convinced this eminent professor to convert from atheism to Christianity. My investigation of this Christian urban legend uncovered examples of integrity and honesty by many Christians, as well as hypocrisy and dishonesty by others.

II. Evangelegends

Urban legends (or contemporary legends) are interesting, scary, or humorous stories that are contemporary to the teller and audience and are told as true even though they are mainly fictional.[1] They are a genre of folklore.

There is also a category of folklore called “evangelegends.” An evangelegend is a story that evangelicals and conservative Christians find inspiring or funny, but has no basis in fact. I discussed two evangelegends in a previous paper: The Well to Hell and The Missing Day. The story about Greenleaf having once been an atheist is another one.

A. Greenleaf Legend

I prepared the following composite story to include all of the key elements of the oft-told tale of Greenleaf’s supposed conversion:

Professor Greenleaf was an atheist or, in some versions of the story, a Jew. He mocked his Christian students at Harvard Law School.[2] He spoke openly and often in the classroom about how the resurrection of Jesus Christ was a made-up fairy tale, a hoax that could only be believed by ignorant, unenlightened fools.

Greenleaf wrote an authoritative three-volume treatise on evidence. Depending on who is telling the story, one, two, three, or “a group”[3] of his students challenged him to apply his own standards for courtroom evidence to the Resurrection account. After much prodding, Greenleaf accepted the challenge and set out to disprove Jesus’ resurrection.

However, Greenleaf was stunned by the powerful evidence that Jesus had indeed risen from the tomb. He could not explain away the dramatic change in Jesus’ disciples, and their subsequent willingness to suffer and die for their belief that Jesus had risen.

In a shocking reversal, Greenleaf accepted Jesus’ resurrection as the best explanation for all of the evidence. He then became a Christian and wrote his apologetic masterpiece, The Testimony of the Evangelists.

This story has all of the earmarks of a popular urban legend, the atheist professor legend. Evangelicals enjoy supposedly true accounts about plucky—and sometimes violent—students who humiliate atheist and/or evolutionist professors by proving God’s existence or disproving evolution. Such stories go back at least to 1972 when Jack T. Chick published the first version of Big Daddy?—the most widely distributed anti-evolution booklet in history.

The Greenleaf version of the atheist professor legend is merely one of many stories about skeptics setting out to disprove the Resurrection and then converting to Christianity in the process. Gilbert West and George (Lord) Lyttelton are historical examples, and many modern apologists, such as Lee Strobel and J. Warner Wallace, claim to be former atheists.

Intelligent Christians understand that these simplistic depictions of evangelical students schooling their atheist teachers give believers a false sense of security and superiority. Nonetheless, the 2014 Christian film God’s Not Dead devoted an entire movie to just such a conflict between an earnest evangelical student and an absurd caricature of an atheist professor.

B. Correction

This article updates and revises a series of posts that I wrote in 2019 on my former blog. In 2021 the Global Journal of Classic Theology published a posthumous paper[4] by law professor Philip Johnson, who criticized two aspects of one of my blog posts. I incorrectly (1) called the atheist professor legend a “meme” and (2) wrote that Greenleaf was a “lifelong” Episcopalian.

I admit these two mistakes, as well as another one that Johnson apparently did not notice. Calling the atheist professor legend a meme was a poor choice of words. Likewise, I have no evidence that Greenleaf was raised an Episcopalian. However, neither of these errors is significant. Johnson still considers my concerns to be “legitimate” and the atheist professor legend to be “bogus.” I will incorporate into this article information from Johnson’s exhaustively researched paper.

C. Hard Evidence about Greenleaf

The atheist professor legend has three essential elements: (1) an atheist professor; (2) a challenge by a student or students; and (3) the conversion or humiliation of the professor. Embellishments to the story—such as Greenleaf’s alleged mockery of Christian students—are nonessential, and disproving them would not contradict the central story. Likewise, Christians brag that Greenleaf was an eminent legal scholar and that he firmly believed that evidence proved Jesus’ resurrection. These two facts are quite true, but neither of these facts is relevant to whether Greenleaf was ever an atheist or the claim that he converted from atheism to Christianity.

Greenleaf never had reason to deny being an atheist because he was long dead before anyone claimed that he was one. Therefore, my best opportunity to disprove the legend that students challenged his atheism is prove that he was already a Christian before he began teaching.

I am a lawyer, not a historian. The Internet provides my most practical means to research nonlegal topics like urban legends, and I never cease to be amazed at what I can find with Google and a bit of persistence. I located copies of original documents that show that Greenleaf was an Episcopalian long before he taught at Harvard. I also found Philip Johnson’s article on the Internet. The following timeline summarizes the relevant evidence.

1783

Greenleaf was born on December 5, 1783.

1804

Greenleaf joined the Freemasons when he was 21.[5] Freemasons must affirm belief in a Supreme Being—the Grand Architect of the Universe.

1816-1818  

Sources disagree on the exact date, but Greenleaf joined St. Stephan’s Protestant Episcopal Church in Portland when he was 33 to 35 years old—at least seventeen years before he began teaching.[6] Greenleaf could not be both an atheist and an Episcopalian, and there is no evidence that he ever abandoned his faith.

1817

Greenleaf began writing The Testimony of the Evangelists sixteen years before he began teaching.[7] Greenleaf could not have begun writing the book because of a student challenge, as he then had no students.

1827

Greenleaf was on the Standing Committee for the Episcopal Diocese of Maine six years before he began teaching.

1831

Greenleaf attended the Episcopalian convention of 1831 two years before he began teaching.

1833

Greenleaf began teaching at Harvard Law School in 1833.[8]

The plain fact is that there is no evidence that professor Greenleaf was ever an atheist, and the apologetic stories about him trying to disprove Jesus’ resurrection are pure fabrication. This made me wonder if I could discover who concocted the story.

III. No Perry Mason Moment

A “Perry Mason moment” happens when a lawyer introduces surprising and dramatic evidence that can win a case. In the original Perry Mason television series, the titular lawyer (played by Raymond Burr) won most of his cases by cross-examining the true culprits until they confessed on the witness stand. That is the ultimate Perry Mason moment—the brilliant trial lawyer forcing the guilty party to admit “Yes! I did it! I killed him!” Such perfect Perry Mason moments rarely occur in real life—in court or anywhere else.

I dreamed of achieving something similar to a Perry Mason moment while investigating Simon Greenleaf. I wanted to (1) track down the origin of the story and (2) force the original storyteller to admit that it was fake.

Researchers rarely find the origin of any urban legend. Nonetheless, it is sometimes possible to identify specific sources for urban legends. For example, researchers traced The Missing Day from its origin in the 1890s to its most recent version in the computer age.[9]

A. Barry St. Clair—Published in 1991

So far as I have been able to determine, Barry St. Clair was the first writer to publish a version of the Greenleaf/atheist story. St. Clair wrote in his 1991 book The Big Man on Campus:

Simon Greenleaf was a great professor of law at Harvard. His books are still studied in law schools today. Two students challenged Greenleaf concerning whether or not the Resurrection would stand in a court of law. He took the challenge. His conclusion was that the Resurrection would stand in a court of law. He said, “The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the most established fact of history.”[10]

St. Clair included a footnote for this claim: “Simon Greenleaf, Testimony of the Evangelists, Examined by the Rules of Evidence Administered in Courts of Justice (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1965, reprinted from the 1847 ed.), pp. 28-30.” However, you can fact-check St. Clair’s citation against the 1847 edition of the Testimony of the Evangelists available online. It says nothing about a student challenge.

I theorized that St. Clair might be my patient zero—the original storyteller who concocted the story from scratch. Barry St. Clair is still alive and operating a youth ministry in Georgia. Could I cross-examine him and determine whether he originated the Greenleaf evangelegend now found in numerous apologetic books and websites?

However, I figured that, if I simply called up St. Clair and asked him about something that he wrote twenty-six years ago, his natural response would be that he needed to refresh his memory. Therefore, I decided to begin our conversation with an email. I sent an email to St. Clair’s youth ministry asking for his email address. I received a courteous reply from Mr. St. Clair’s wife saying that he was unavailable, but she would try to help.

Mrs. St. Clair checked her records and replied by email, saying that the source of the story was The Encyclopedia of Religious Quotations, edited by Frank Mead (Baker Book House, 1965). I purchased a copy of this book. It is, as the title indicates, a book of quotations. It has no anecdotes remotely like the one about a student challenging professor Greenleaf. I asked Mrs. St. Clair whether I could talk with her husband to see if he could remember anything about where he got his information. She replied by email:

Morning, Bob. So sorry you were unable to pinpoint that direct quote—I asked Barry about it. He said it is possible he made an honest mistake about that quote. However, since it’s been quite some time since he looked it up, he cannot recall. So we can’t be of further help on this exact thing. I have noted (for the next edition purposes) the nebulous quote in order to change the footnote or delete the quote.

Barry St. Clair may have made an honest mistake—not much of a Perry Mason moment.

B. Gary Habermas—Unpublished Dissertation in 1976

Although I had believed that St. Clair was my “patient zero,” after additional research I eventually proved myself wrong. Instead of Googling, I searched individual apologetic websites for any reference to professor Greenleaf. I hit pay dirt when I used the “Search this site” function on the right-hand sidebar of Gary Habermas’ website.

Habermas’ website includes a copy of his 1976 doctoral dissertation, which tells the following story:

The late Simon Greenleaf, past Harvard professor of law and one of the greatest legal minds that America has ever produced, was a religious skeptic. Challenged by his students to apply the techniques of his legal masterpiece A Treatise on the Law of Evidence to the resurrection of Jesus, Greenleaf became a believer. He later wrote a book, the long title of which is An Examination of the Testimony of the Four Evangelists by the Rules of Evidence Administered in the Courts of Justice. In this work he defends the resurrection and explains how, when judged by the laws of legal evidence, the event can be demonstrated to have actually occurred.[11]

This disproves my initial hypothesis that St. Clair originated the Greenleaf/atheist story in 1991: Habermas told the story in 1976. Habermas’ dissertation cited his sources for the story as:

See Josh McDowell, Evidence that Demands a Verdict (San Bernardino: Published by Campus Crusade for Christ International, no date), especially pp. 199-200. See also the tape by McDowell distributed by this same organization, entitled “Resurrection: Fact or Fallacy?”

I obtained a copy of the 1972 edition of Evidence that Demands a Verdict (the edition that Habermas would have had in 1976). In that book McDowell discusses professor Greenleaf, but he does not mention anything about a student challenge or Greenleaf’s conversion. I have been unable to obtain a copy the tape titled “Resurrection: Fact or Fallacy?”

I contacted Habermas to see if he could provide any further information regarding the source of the story in his dissertation. He was most courteous and helpful, but cannot remember everything that he read, heard, or wrote almost fifty years ago. Habermas thinks that he might have learned the Greenleaf story from one of McDowell’s tapes, but he cannot say with any certainty.

C. Josh McDowell—Speeches Before 1976

I have no reason to doubt Habermas’ dissertation footnote attributing the Greenleaf legend to Josh McDowell. The question that remains is whether McDowell heard the story from someone else, or made it up himself.

A recording and transcription of a video by McDowell titled The Resurrection Factor, Part 1, Jesus Christ—Fact or Fallacy? is available online. Philip Johnson theorizes that this video by McDowell “may echo his 1970s lectures on the resurrection.”[12] That makes sense to me for a couple of reasons. First, the titles are almost the same. Second, Habermas’ 1976 version agrees with McDowell’s current version in all material ways. For example, both Habermas and McDowell write that students (plural) challenged Greenleaf, as opposed to the lone student in most other versions.

On page 117 of his 2012 autobiography Undaunted, McDowell says that he read The Testimony of the Evangelists in the 1960s and then tells a version of the Greenleaf/atheist story. However, McDowell does not specifically say that he first learned of the Greenleaf/atheist story in the 1960s. He might have read Greenleaf’s book in the 1960s, and then heard the Greenleaf/atheist story years later. I contacted McDowell through his website seeking clarification on this point, but he did not respond to my inquiries.

This ended my attempt to locate the original storyteller of the Greenleaf atheist professor legend. Maybe Josh McDowell invented it. I don’t know because he won’t talk to me, which really should not surprise me. Whether he concocted the story himself or got it from someone else, he is still using it today. He must find the legend useful, even though it is bogus. On the other hand, I would soon find other Christians more dedicated to the truth.

IV. My Pathetic Attempt to Kill an Urban Legend

Having solid evidence that the Greenleaf atheist professor legend was pure BS, I decided to share that information with people currently spreading the misinformation that it is historical.

Although I did my best to contact every apologist spreading this fictitious story, I certainly failed to find them all. I was able to contact twenty-three persons or organizations who were using the story. I challenged these apologists to go beyond merely eliminating the misinformation from their respective books and websites. I suggested that they could help stamp out the false story if they would explain the falsehood and warn Christians against falling for such urban legends.

A. Honest Christians

Twelve apologists thanked me for bringing the matter to their attention and eliminated the misinformation from their respective websites, or, in Barry St. Clair’s case, his wife said that they would correct the “honest mistake” in any future edition of The Big Man on Campus.

The first six of these either cut the entire web page or excised all reference to Greenleaf. The next three kept a discussion of Greenleaf (an eminent legal scholar who concluded that evidence supported the Resurrection), but eliminated the misinformation about Greenleaf being an atheist challenged by his students.

Only one apologist, Greg Holt at Inspirational Christian Blogs, accepted my challenge to go beyond merely eliminating the misinformation and try to stamp out the false story. Greg originally published the story about Greenleaf in a guest post. He deleted the guest post and replaced it with a draft of my article.

B. Dishonest Christians

To date eleven apologists continue to spread the false story. I have not included Habermas in this list because, to the best of my knowledge, he has never published the Greenleaf story or any similar urban legend outside of his dissertation:

In sum, twelve apologists deleted the misinformation, but eleven continue to spread the Greenleaf/atheist legend. Only Greg Holt at Inspirational Christian Blogs accepted my challenge to explain to his readers that the Greenleaf story is an urban legend and caution Christians to suspect such obvious hogwash.

V. Stake Inoculation for an Appeal to Authority

The Greenleaf evangelegend combines two rhetorical devices: (1) appeal to authority and (2) stake inoculation. Nether technique is necessarily fallacious, but (1) the appeal to authority is not persuasive and (2) the stake inoculation is based on misinformation.

A. Appeal to Authority

An appeal to authority argues that a claim is true because an authority figure says that it is true. Greenleaf is a legal expert on evidence, and he says that legal evidence supports the Resurrection. That is quite true, but it does not end the inquiry.

A judge considers two issues when evaluating expert opinion. First, does the expert base his opinion on sufficient evidence?[15] Second, does the expert’s specialized knowledge help you understand the evidence?[16] Greenleaf does not satisfy either guideline.

Greenleaf relies on the persecution of the apostles to establish their credibility, claiming that they proclaimed the Gospel “in the face of the most appalling terrors that can be presented to the mind of man.”[17] However, he cites no specific evidence of that persecution. Instead he writes: “This subject has been so fully treated by Paley, in his view of the Evidences of Christianity, Part 1, Prop. 1, that it is unnecessary to pursue it farther in this place.”[18]

William Paley (1743-1805) was an Anglican clergyman who is best known today for his watchmaker argument for the existence of God. Paley was not a lawyer, and he never claimed to use legal standards for evidence. From a legal standpoint, most of his arguments are inadmissible speculation.[19] One example will make my point.

Paley argued that Jesus was crucified and then, thirty-one years later under Nero, many Christians “suffered the greatest extremities for their profession” of faith. Those two facts are almost certain, but Paley then claims that “it is hardly credible, that those who came between the two, who were companions of the Author of the institution during his life, and the teachers and propagators of the institution after his death, could go about their undertaking with ease and safety.”[20] This is a claim of circumstantial evidence similar to the “nobody dies for a lie” argument so dear to modern apologists, and it fails for the same reasons.

Greenleaf does not help you understand the evidence. Instead, he just passes the buck to Paley and leaves the reader to figure out the facts from Paley’s turgid prose.

B. Stake Inoculation

“Stake inoculation” is a rhetorical technique through which people deny or downplay having any stake or interest in the matter at hand.[21] If Greenleaf were a Christian, then he would have a stake in proving the Resurrection. Christian apologists make the bogus claim that Greenleaf was an atheist in order to deny that stake and also claim that Greenleaf had to overcome a bias against Christianity.

However, Greenleaf was not an atheist or a Jew. The facts do not support this attempt at stake inoculation.

VI. My Speculation About a Motive

Based on my email conversations with the people who eliminated the false Greenleaf story from their websites, these sincere and honorable people feel that they do not need to rely on falsehoods to spread the Gospel. These apologists care about facts and will not knowingly spread misinformation.

However, even these honest Christians evidently felt no obligation to verify the story before publishing it. Barry St. Clair and Gary Habermas (in his dissertation) were the only ones who cited any sources for the story, and, as discussed above, their sources were dead ends.

What about the other apologists who continue to spread the false story to this day? I can only speculate as to their motivations, as they have not responded to my inquiries. Nonetheless, I don’t think that I can assume that anyone who fails to respond to my email inquiries must necessarily be a black-hearted liar. See Hanlon’s razor. Incompetence, laziness, denial and a feeling that the end justifies the means might contribute more to their inaction.

A. Denial

I can sympathize with denial. I might have preferred to have ignored Philip Johnson’s article, for it exposed my mistaken assertion that Greenleaf was a “lifelong” Episcopalian. Mine was not a critical error, but the irony of spreading misinformation in an article that condemns spreading misinformation is not lost on me. Turning a blind eye to my previous error would be hypocritical.

However, hypocrisy apparently doesn’t bother some apologists—especially some of the more prominent ones. McDowell, Strobel, Geisler, and Turek are four of the most popular and influential evangelical apologists working today, and they are still misrepresenting the facts.

B. Faith Over Facts

So far as I can tell, Billy Graham never used the Greenleaf legend or any other evidential argument. Even so, Graham may shed light on the mindset of evidentialists like McDowell, Strobel, Geisler, and Turek.

Charles Templeton wrote of a conversation in which Graham explained his rationale for disregarding facts that contradict the Bible. Templeton tried to discuss how scientific facts contradict the Genesis account of creation, but Graham explained why facts didn’t matter. Graham said:

But that’s not the point. I believe the Genesis account of creation because it is in the Bible. I’ve discovered something in my ministry: when I take the Bible literally, when I proclaim it as the Word of God, my preaching has power. When I stand on the platform and say, “God says,” or “the Holy Bible says,” the Holy Spirit uses me. There are results.[22]

Graham proudly proclaimed the Holy Bible to be the ultimate Truth, and all alleged facts or evidence must yield to the higher biblical truth in which Graham has absolute faith. Facts are simply irrelevant, and they impede results.

Some apologists may not limit Graham’s faith-over-fact reasoning to the Holy Bible. Once they decide to believe the Greenleaf evangelegend, their faith in the legend is as unshakable as their faith in the Resurrection itself. The legend supposedly shows the strength of the evidence for the Resurrection, and yet leading apologists ignore the evidence that clearly shows the story to be bogus. The irony of this hypocrisy should not be lost on anyone.

C. The End Justifies the Means

Anna Clark Benninghofer, a reformed medium, explained why she faked spirit manifestations: “I really believed in Spiritualism all the time I was practicing it, but I thought I was justified in helping the spirits out…. I thought I was justified in trickery because through trickery I could get more converts to what I thought was a good and beautiful religion.”[23] Some apologists might take the same attitude about a little white lie helping to save converts’ immortal souls.

VII. Relevance to Apologetics

Apologists often argue that the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ resurrection must be true because opponents of Christianity would have exposed any falsehoods. For example, Gary Habermas argues that “enemies in Jewish leadership” could have nipped Christianity in the bud by producing the body of Jesus.[24] John Warwick Montgomery claims that testimony to Christ’s resurrection was “presented contemporaneously in the synagogues—in the very teeth of opposition, among hostile cross examiners who would certainly have destroyed the case for Christianity had the facts been otherwise.”[25]

This argument fails because—among other reasons—apologists falsely assume that believers will abandon their faith when presented with contrary evidence. Like many other people, leading apologists don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.

Would Paul and other first-century Christian apologists have told inaccurate stories about Jesus and ignored contrary evidence? I don’t know, but I imagine that early Christians—being mere mortals—were no better or worse than McDowell, Strobel, and Geisler. They might have told false stories and persisted in telling them in the face of contrary information.

VIII. Conclusion

You might think that I am taking this urban legend (and myself) a bit too seriously. Everybody likes a good story, so where’s the harm? In my opinion, the harm lies in the fact that popular Christian apologists claim that the story is true and use it to make converts and keep followers.

Consider what Voltaire wrote in Questions sur les Miracles:

Once your faith, sir, persuades you to believe what your intelligence declares to be absurd, beware lest you likewise sacrifice your reason in the conduct of your life…. Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.[26]

I cannot help but compare the Greenleaf story to accusations that Haitian immigrants are eating their neighbors’ cats and dogs. J. D. Vance claimed that he was entitled to “create” such stories and it was up to the media to fact-check him.

Notes

[1] Jan Harold Brunvand, The Choking Doberman and Other “New” Urban Legends (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 1984), p. ix.

[2] Norman L. Geisler and Patty Tunnicliffe, Reasons for Belief: Easy-to-Understand Answers to 10 Essential Questions (Grand Rapids, MI: Bethany House Publishers, 2013), p. 109.

[3] Geisler and Tunnicliffe, Reasons for Belief, p. 109.

[4] Philip E. Johnson, “Simon Greenleaf (Part One): Conversion of A Juridical Apologist,” Global Journal of Classical Theology: An Online Journal of Evangelical Theology Vol. 18, No. 2 (November 2021): 1-16.

[5] Johnson, “Simon Greenleaf (Part One): Conversion of A Juridical Apologist,” p. 7n32.

[6] Johnson, “Simon Greenleaf (Part One): Conversion of A Juridical Apologist,” p. 8n37.

[7] Johnson, “Simon Greenleaf (Part One): Conversion of A Juridical Apologist,” p. 8n41.

[8] Johnson, “Simon Greenleaf (Part One): Conversion of A Juridical Apologist,” p. 6n31.

[9] Jan Harold Brunvand, The Truth Never Stands in the Way a Good Story (Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2001), pp. 137-148.

[10] Barry St. Clair, The Big Man on Campus (Wheaton, IL: Victor Books, 1991), p. 42.

[11] Gary Robert Habermas, “The Resurrection of Jesus: A Rational Inquiry” (PhD Dissertation, Michigan State University, 1976), pp. 327-328.

[12] Johnson, “Simon Greenleaf (Part One): Conversion of A Juridical Apologist,” p. 10n50.

[13] Lee Strobel, Inside the Mind of Unchurched Harry & Mary: How to Reach Friends and Family Who Avoid God and Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1993), p. 38.

[14] Turek related the story in the influential apologetic book that he coauthored with Norman Geisler: Norman L. Geisler and Frank Turek, I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2004), p. 286.

[15] Federal Rule of Evidence 702.

[16] Cayuga Indian Nation of New York v. Pataki, 165 F. Supp. 2d 266, 303-304 (N.D.N.Y. 2001) rev’d on other grounds 413 F.3d 266 (2nd Cir. 2005).

[17] Simon Greenleaf, Testimony of the Evangelists, Examined by the Rules of Evidence Administered in Courts of Justice (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1965), p. 91 [a reprint of the 1847 edition].

[18] Greenleaf, Testimony of the Evangelists, Examined by the Rules of Evidence Administered in Courts of Justice, p. 93n54.

[19] Burroughs v. Commonwealth, 673 N.E.2d 1217, 1218 (Mass. 1996).

[20] William Paley, Evidences of Christianity (New York, NY: S. King, 1824), p. 54.

[21] Peter Lamont, “Paranormal Belief and the Avowal of Prior Skepticism,” Theory & Psychology Vol. 17, No. 5 (October 2007): 681-696, p. 681, 684.

[22] Charles Templeton, Farewell to God (Toronto, Canada: McClelland & Stewart, 1996), p. 70.

[23] Massimo Polidoro, Final Séance: The Strange Friendship Between Houdini and Conan Doyle (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2001), p. 187.

[24] Gary Habermas and Michael Licona, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications, 2004), p. 70.

[25] John Warwick Montgomery, Law Above the Law (Minneapolis, MN: Bethany House Publishers, 1975), pp. 88-89.

[26] This may be an appeal to authority, but Voltaire has only the authority you choose to give to him.

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