gstafleu

But anyway, however you read that sentence of Doherty's, the main point is unaffected. Van Voorst's statement that "we should not expect to find exact historical references in early Christian literature, which was not written for primarily historical purposes" does not refute the claim of Paul's silence. At best it tries to give an explanation for the silence by simply, and conveniently, postulating that Paul's episteles are not the kind of literature in which we should expect historical facts. Agrument-wise that is a bit of a deus ex machina, isn't it?

Ben C Smith

No sooner said than done (well, maybe a little sooner).

The new thread is up.

Ben.

Ben C Smith

His question is: On what basis is it to be considered that only documents written for primarily historical purposes should contain historical information?

The underlined portion is rephrasing Van Voorst in order to object to his judgment. It is, however, rephrasing him poorly. It is basically a strawman argument: Van Voorst never said that only documents written primarily for historical purposes should contain historical information. At least not in the statement that Doherty quotes.

Ben.

Ben C Smith

Correct. The fact remains that Paul is silent on a lot of things.

Correct. In order to explain why Paul does not recite many historical facts, all Van Voorst has to do is to note that Paul is not writing historical documents.

No, of course not.

Ben.

gstafleu

OK, so maybe the rephrasing is poor. But:
1) It is not true that Doherty's statement "implies that no document for unhistorical purposes should ever contain historical statements" as, I think, you said.
2) It does not affect the point Doherty is making. In other words it may be an error of form (anybody wants to casts some ink blots?) but not one of substance.

gstafleu

But that is what is at issue here: should we expect Paul to mention certain historical facts? The MJers make the point that, for various reasons, we should. Just saying "well, this is not the kind of document where you would expect that" is not a refutation. In other words, the MJers are making the point that, for various reasons, one should in fact expect some historical facts in exactly these documents. Just saying "it ain't so" doesn't refute that.

Ben C Smith

Correct. Doherty is not himself saying that only documents written for primarily historical purposes should contain historical information. He is writing against such a view. That is not the problem.

The problem is that Doherty has passed off the italicized phrase above as if it represented Van Voorst. Then he is able to quite justifiably shoot the phrase down. In shooting down this decoy, however, he has failed to even aim at the real duck.

Everybody agrees on the bare fact that the extant Pauline epistles are silent on a lot of historical points. What people disagree about is what that Pauline silence means.

In order for the Pauline silences to work against an historical Jesus (or any other theory, for that matter), one has to interpret them as egregious in some way. Van Voorst gave a reason why the Pauline silences are not egregious. Doherty could have tried to prove that reason unfounded, but instead he misphrased what Van Voorst actually wrote. I have no idea if the misphrasing was intentional or not, so in the absence of evidence to the contrary I presume it was inadvertent.

If that is what you mean by error of form but not of substance, then I agree. But if what you meant to say is that Doherty answered Van Voorst anyway, I disagree. He answered a straw man.

Ben.

Clivedurdle

From Doherty link.

I actually think it is worse than that - a historical jesus was invented in the nineteenth century, what you have throughout the history of xianity to the present day is a supreme godman - and because believers believe in a real historical god, satan, angels etc they also believe in the real existence of this god with human features.

My evidence? All the creeds!

Xians have never and do not believe in a historical jesus! They do believe in fully god fully man. Catholics with reason have called historicism a heresy. They might say they do, but that to me feels like an evangelical ploy.

Ben C Smith

Sorry, I did not mean to say that the argument was over before it began. What I meant is that this is all Van Voorst was trying to do.

My answer and yours may differ.

Sure it is, unless those reasons you mentioned are sterling.

(BTW, if you are saying that Van Voorst did not go into enough detail in refuting theories of a mythical Jesus, I concur. I am always underwhelmed by self-conscious refutations of that theory; the discussion usually stays on the ground floor. For me, the devil is in the details, and it is in the detailed work that is not even trying to prove an historical Jesus that I find the most support for an historical Jesus.)

Here is an argument from silence for you to ponder.

In one of his recent posts Doherty quoted Bart Ehrman, The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, as follows:

The verse [Galatians 4.4] was used by the orthodox to oppose the Gnostic claim that Christ came through Mary "as water through a pipe," taking nothing of its conduit into itself; for here the apostle states that Christ was "made from a woman" (so Irenaeus... and Tertullian...). It should strike us as odd that Tertullian never quotes the verse against Marcion, despite his lengthy demonstration that Christ was actually "born." This can scarcely be attributed to oversight, and so is more likely due to the circumstance that the generally received Latin text of the verse does not speak of Christ’s birth per se, but of his "having been made" (factum ex muliere).

Ehrman has here used his own argument from silence. Tertullian never cites Galatians 4.4 against Marcion, even when Galatians 4.4 would have supported his point that Jesus had really been born. Ehrman takes this silence to mean that the Latin text of Galatians 4.4 which Tertullian used had, like many of our extant manuscripts, the word made instead of born.

But Doherty wished to press this argument from silence a bit further. He wished to argue that the Latin text of Galatians 4.4 used by Tertullian lacked the entire phrase made from a woman altogether:

It is true that Irenaeus finds the phrase made from a woman (instead of born from a woman) in Galatians 4.4 useful in its own right (refer to Against Heresies 3.16.3; 3.22.1). So Doherty argues that Tertullian would have found it useful, too; his failure to use the Latin version of this phrase against Marcion indicates that his Latin text of Galatians 4.4 lacked the phrase altogether.

Or does it? Tertullian does use the phrase factum ex muliere, but not against Marcion. He uses it in On the Flesh of Christ 20:

Sed et Paulus grammaticis istis silentium imponit: Misit, inquit, deus filium suum, factum ex muliere.

But even Paul imposes silence upon these grammarians. He says: God sent his son, made from a woman.

IOW, this argument from silence on the part of Doherty (Tertullian failed to use Galatians 4.4 against Marcion because his Latin copy of Galatians 4.4 lacked the crucial phrase) failed.

It turns out that Bart Ehrman himself knew, as we might expect, of this line in On the Flesh of Christ 20. So, while Ehrman was certainly employing an argument from silence (Tertullian failed to use Galatians 4.4 against Marcion) to show that Tertullian did not know the natum ex muliere variant, he was merely using that argument from silence to support a much more substantial argument, the argument from On the Flesh of Christ 20, in which Tertullian actually uses the factum ex muliere variant.

This is, in fact, how I recommend using the argument from silence, to wit, as support only. It can only rarely stand by itself. The historian leans upon it at his own peril.

Ben.

Clivedurdle

Why is there a problem about born of a woman? Hercules was!

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/Herakles/bio.html