◉ Eyewitness Compression: Authorship, Transmission Chains, and the Misclassification of Gospel Testimony

Popular defenses of Gospel reliability often compress several distinct propositions into one label: people who witnessed Jesus existed; their memories entered early Christian tradition; the canonical texts preserve some of that tradition; the traditional names attached to the texts are historically meaningful; therefore the four Gospels are four independent eyewitness accounts. The conclusion is stronger than the premises. This paper reconstructs the inference and supplies a document-level and claim-level test. Direct eyewitness classification requires evidence connecting a witness to the final compositional agent, tracing the relevant material through its mediating stages, and accounting for literary dependence. These conditions are not met merely by early dating, traditional attribution, vivid detail, or proximity to a witness. The canonical texts themselves illustrate why the categories must remain separate. Luke's preface distinguishes prior eyewitness transmitters from the narrator's investigated account. John 21:24 places a witness claim beside an attesting 'we,' leaving the relation among witness, writer, and validating group open to interpretation. Mark and Matthew do not identify their narrators within their narratives, while their external attributions remain genuine evidence that must be weighed rather than either assumed or dismissed. Extensive Synoptic agreement, however, also shows that multiple texts can transmit one literary route; agreement caused by source use is not independent corroboration of the underlying event. Memory research, ancient biography, and early testimony support neither a simple telephone-game model nor unmediated transcription. The conclusion is deliberately limited. The paper does not show that the Gospels contain no eyewitness material, that mediated testimony is unreliable, or that particular historical and theological claims are false. It shows that evidential status does not automatically pass unchanged along a transmission chain. Historical confidence must be assigned to particular claims in light of source relation, genre, memory, composition, dependence, and rival explanations.