Witness

A witness in Scripture is a person who has seen or known something and attests to it, above all in a legal setting where testimony is what establishes a matter as true.

The Hebrew word is ʿed (with the verb ʿud, "to testify") and the Greek is martys; linguistically, both are ordinary forensic terms for one who gives evidence, not originally religious vocabulary. The text says that testimony could be compelled: if a person "hears a public adjuration to testify, he being a witness, whether he has seen or known," and "doesn't report it, then he shall bear his iniquity" (Leviticus 5:1). It also says that testimony was limited in weight: "One witness shall not rise up against a man for any iniquity, or for any sin that he sins. At the mouth of two witnesses, or at the mouth of three witnesses, shall a matter be established" (Deuteronomy 19:15). In capital cases the witnesses were to act first — "The hands of the witnesses shall be first on him to put him to death" (Deuteronomy 17:7) — which is the procedure visible in Acts 7:58, where "the witnesses placed their garments at the feet of a young man named Saul," and in the "false witnesses" of Acts 6:13.

Witnessing was not only judicial. The text records public, communal attestation of transactions and pledges: the people and elders at the gate say "We are witnesses" to Boaz's redemption (Ruth 4:11), and Jeremiah promises a day when men will "buy fields for money, sign the deeds, seal them, and call witnesses" (Jeremiah 32:44). Psalm 15:4 commends the person who "keeps an oath even when it hurts, and doesn't change" — one interpretive suggestion is that this is the moral substrate of credible witness, reliability in speech before it is ever tested in court. In the New Testament the Mosaic rule is carried directly into community life: Jesus applies it to a brother who will not listen, "that at the mouth of two or three witnesses every word may be established" (Matthew 18:16), Paul cites the same words of his forthcoming visit (2 Corinthians 13:1), and Hebrews uses it for the gravity of apostasy, where a man "dies without compassion on the word of two or three witnesses" (Hebrews 10:28). Revelation 11:3 presents "my two witnesses" who "will prophesy one thousand two hundred sixty days, clothed in sackcloth" — witness here as prophetic testimony under suffering. Historically, the Greek martys came to be applied to those who died for their testimony, and it is from that usage that the English word "martyr" derives.

Traditions read the concept differently. In this tradition — broadly, churches with a strong disciplinary or juridical inheritance — the two-or-three rule of Matthew 18:16 is treated as a constitutional principle for adjudication and church discipline, and the courtroom sense of witness dominates. Other traditions emphasize witness as testimony to God's acts rather than as evidence in a dispute, and read the two witnesses of Revelation 11:3 as literal eschatological prophets (often Moses and Elijah), as the church's prophetic voice under persecution, or as epochs in a historicist scheme. One way to read the whole range is that Scripture uses one word for both the courtroom and the martyr's death because both involve stating what one has seen at cost; the traditions differ mainly on which pole should organize the rest.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.