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Also, multiple witness reports are only more reliable than single reports inasmuch as each witness does not talk to each other, the interviewer does not ask them leading or biased questions, etc.
Of course. Or the kind of situation when only Palestinians witness to the actions of the Israelis or vice versa.
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Many dozens of independent witnesses gave consistent testimony of the "monkey man" in India, and the Loch Ness Monster in Scotland, but there's not a shred of evidence to suggest that either is real.
DNA is certainly not going to help in those cases either.
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Besides being wrong, witnesses may lie, and it's also possible for multiple witnesses to lie, as they did in the trial of Jesus Christ.
Yes, they did lie in that story, and in real trials it is certainly possible for all the participants to lie.
...which means that you have contradicted your original point; that multiple witnesses should be taken as reliable evidence of an event.
No, what I said was that multiple witnesses are better than one witness, and that this was the standard given in the Bible, and that has remained true despite everything you've said. Nobody said it was foolproof, certainly not I as I have volunteered the examples where a whole bevy of witnesses may lie. You have misattributed the idea of total reliability to me.
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But in that case DNA couldn't prove whether he claimed he was going to destroy and raise the temple or not, now could it? In other words, some cases can't be decided by any means OTHER than witnesses.
Look, either you are talking about Bible stories, OR you are talking about our modern criminal justice system.
Any testimony about what another person said can't be decided by any means OTHER than witnesses (except surveillance equipment of course but I hope we haven't reached the point where every word everyone says is caught on tape), and certainly such situations exist in our modern criminal justice system as well as in Biblical times.
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In our modern times, unless there is good physical, forensic evidence, people suspected of crimes are often not prosecuted due to insufficient evidence.
Yes, this is kind of what I was getting at about our degenerated times where witnesses are either less trustworthy or less trusted and the wisdom it takes to determine trustworthiness seems to be in shorter supply, but that's just my own private musing.
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There have been many cases of people being exonerated by DNA evidence even though the witnesses are ABSOLUTELY POSITIVE that they correctly identified their rapist or mugger.
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Again, such unreliability is implied in the Biblical requirement of two or more.
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...except it assumes that witnesses are reliable at all (they are demonstrated to be very unreliable), and makes no mention of physical evidence being more reliable, or important at all.
Yes it does assume that witnesses CAN be reliable, and to assume the opposite, that they are always UNreliable, which seems to be the current position, or at least your position, is awfully cynical and strange too. If nobody is to be trusted at all, civilization might as well give up.
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IN other words, DNA evidence changes nothing about the Biblical rule. It's a great tool that wasn't available to previous generations, but it doesn't change the fact that three witnesses are better than one in a situation where all you have is witness evidence. DNA may disqualify some witnesses and agree with others in any case -- witnesses are not ALWAYS wrong after all.
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But if ALL you have is witness evidence, it is unlikely that you really have a good grasp of what happened, and I certainly wouldn't want to make a decision about someone's future based upon only that.
I would venture the guess that if this had always been the attitude, no legal system could ever have arisen in the entire world until modern forensics came about, as witnesses have always been the mainstay of law.
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