ABSTRACT
Assessing the truthfulness of testimony about supernatural and impossible acts is especially challenging, and it became a much-debated issue in the context of witch trials. Competence and credibility are two legal measures aimed at obtaining truthful testimony. Increase Mather argued that the self-interest of accomplices rendered their testimony not credible. Gifford explicitly expressed the worry that sworn testimony was not necessarily true. Both Bernard and Cotta aimed to determine the genuineness of the testimony at the pre-trial stage. According to their arguments, the grand jurors should have been able to evaluate the witnesses before deciding whether the case should proceed to trial. It is clear that, starting from the last decades of the seventeenth century, lawyers, doctors and divines alike began to use the language of credibility. Because of the religious significance of the oath, we might have expected the divines to demonstrate some difficulty in abandoning the epistemology of oaths and shifting to credibility.
