The crime scene/car crash analogy is a poor defense to the contradictions in the Gospels
Thesis: The crime scene/car crash analogy is a poor defense to the contradictions in the Gospels
Lately, I've seen many posts and videos arguing that the apparent contradictions in the gospels can be harmonized by using the crime scene analogy (see example here, timestamped). This video talks about the contradictory nature of Jesus' birth/early childhood in Mt and Lk. The apologetic argues that the differences in Mt/Lk are not contradictions but rather different tellings of the same event, similarly to how different eyewitnesses to a crime can give varying account but don't qualify as contradictions. Dan doesn't address this part specifically so I feel the need to explain.
My argument: It is true that in a crime, there can be many eyewitnesses and these eyewitnesses can give differing accounts of what happened. The apologetic in the video gives a misleading example of the analogy where he argues "one person would note the color of the car, another the clothing of the driver, the third where the car ended up." Therefore, even though all these accounts are different, they are not conflicting and therefore are reliable indicators of the events they describe. However, that's not how eyewitness accounts work.
If witness1 can only report the color of the car, and nothing else, that would not be a great testimony at all. We would think there's something wrong with his memory if he can only recall the color but no other detail. This similarly goes for witness2 and 3. If we collate the report of these 3 witnesses, their reports in whole would not be usable to reconstruct the accident since none of their reports corroborate each other. Arguing that "as long as the testimonies don't conflict" is surely a low bar to set.
Conclusion: To accurately describe an event, it is necessary but not sufficient that the differing accounts not conflict with each other. They must also corroborate each other. Back to the infancy narrative, the two gospel stories violated both rules: they not only conflicted with each other, but also do not corroborate each other.