The gospel writers as eyewitnesses

According to a recent survery 50% of young people think that there is no evidence for the historical Jesus, no doubt, in part, as a result of the doubt and confusion generated by everything from the Da Vinci Code to the supposed discovery of the Jesus family tomb last year. In the light of this, CS Lewis gives us the following helpful reminder of the fact that the gospels are eyewitness accounts. This is from his essay "Fern-seed and elephants",

"I have been reading poems, romances, vision-literature, legends, myths, all my life. I know what they are like. I know that not one of them is like this. Of this text there are only two possible views. Either this is reportage, though it may contain errors. or else, some unknown writer in the second century, without known predecessors, or successors, suddenly anticipated the whole technique of modern novelistic, realistic narrative. If it is untrue it must be narrative of that kind. The reader who doesn't see this has simply not learned to read."

Lewis is saying that we have a choice. Either we believe that the gospels are eyewitness accounts. Or we believe that the writers were able to make up a writing style that didn't appear in Western Europe for another 1,500 years. His point is that either they are eyewitness accounts or they were written to look like it - even although that would anticipate a way of writing that was not yet present. It might be argued that to believe the latter actually takes a great deal more faith than to believe the former.