Edmund H. Bennett - Religious Beliefs

Religious Beliefs

Bennett was a lifelong Episcopalian. During his residency in Taunton, Massachusetts Bennett served as a warden at St. Thomas's Episcopal church. He also served as a delegate to the Episcopal church's Diocesan Convention in 1874, 1877, 1880 and 1883, and he was a member of Diocesan Board of Trustees. He was one of the trustees of the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and served as the school's president from 1895-1898.

Bennett also delivered talks about his faith. One of his lectures was in the field of Christian apologetics. His apologetic work, which was published posthumously, was The Four Gospels from a Lawyer's Standpoint. In this text Bennett argued that the New Testament gospels were trustworthy sources for the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. He accepted the traditional authorship of the gospels - Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John - and applied legal principles of reasoning in examining their accounts about Christ. Bennett opened his lecture by stating:

"It is, as you know, a part of the lawyer's profession to examine and cross-examine witnesses, to detect their errors, and expose their falsehoods; or, on the other hand, to reconcile their conflicting statements, and from seeming discord to evolve and make manifest the real truth. And this paper is the result of an effort, on my own part, to ascertain whether or not, independently of divine revelation, independently of the exercise of a devout Christian faith, independently of any appeal to our religious sentiments, the truth of the story told in the four Gospels could be satisfactorily established by a mere reasoning process, and by applying the same principles and the same tests to the Gospel narratives that we observe in determining the truth or falsity of any other documents, or any other historical accounts." (pp 1-2)>

Bennett believed that the distinctive content and perspectives about Jesus that appear in the four gospels points to the independence of each writer. He held to the common literary and juridical principle of harmonization when looking at the differences and apparent discrepancies in details as recounted in parallel accounts. Bennett was convinced that the gospels were not forged documents but rather could be depended on as primary sources.

In the late twentieth century Bennett's book was reprinted in the inaugural edition of The Simon Greenleaf School of Law Review (1981–82). His work was also appraised in Ross Clifford's Leading Lawyers' Case for the Resurrection (1996). Bennett's apologetic text is now categorized as belonging to the "juridical" or "legal" school of thought in Christian apologetics.