Does the multiple-witness rule explain New Testament mysteries?

From the study (available here):

What the New Testament community referred to as Scripture provided laws of testimony: for example, not to give false testimony (Exod 20:16; 23:1-2; Deut 5:20), and that testimony had legal force only with multiple, confirming witnesses (Deut 19:15; 17:6; Num 35:30). Then, did these laws of testimony work as governing rules for the historians and letter authors of the NT?

If such laws were important, that would help to answer many questions that readers of the NT struggle with. Why do accounts of Jesus’s life and teachings sometimes vary? Why is Paul so quiet about Jesus’s biography? How did Jesus’s followers gather the material that became the Gospels? In fact, NT testimony rules could change how many of the most basic, vital questions about the New Testament are answered: questions of its historical authenticity, of relationships among its texts, about how people gathered and preserved what became the NT. 

Please let me encourage you to join in evaluating whether testimony rules can help to answer these and other questions – and provide new appreciations of the New Testament texts. 

The present study, "Tell John what you hear and see: a multiple witness requirement in dominical statements and the NT", takes just a couple of the needed steps. We consider evidence available from already published studies. We search for new evidence by examining two sets of records of Jesus’s words, drawn from all four Gospels. Then we try to draw conclusions based on all the evidence we have found about an NT requirement for multiple witnesses, what could be termed an NT standard of verification.   

How might you answer this question: Is Jesus the all-powerful rescuer for all people? That is, is Jesus the Messiah, God’s promised saviour for all nations?

In this study, we look at how Jesus answered that question – among friends, or with strangers, or challenged in hostile situations. It may surprise you that Jesus’s way of answering focused on the evidence, much as a good scientist of today might. As we will see, according to the New Testament Jesus appears to have been careful to observe and to explain the conditions for accurate knowledge.

One of the reasons we study Jesus’s answers is to learn more about the standard of verification that the New Testament follows. We will review a lot of evidence in the NT that an Old Testament law that required multiple, confirming witnesses for a claim to have force, also functioned as a governing rule for the NT community.