gstafleu

In another thread Ben made some remarks about the general usefulness/validity of the argument from silence (AFS). I'm not sure if the discussion about that general point got anywhere, so I'd like to make some remarks on it.

And
So let us try to look at the Argument From Silence (AFS) in general, but in the context of Paul, since that is usually what we are talking about. Furthermore, just for the sake of this discussion, let us stipulate that Paul is indeed silent on historical facts about JC. That stipulation allows us to look more closely at the AFS per se rather than getting side-tracked into detail discussions about whether this or that verse does or does not break the silence.

The explanations for Paul's silence then logically divide into two:

A) Paul didn't know about the historical facts
B) Paul did know but, for whatever reason, does not mention them

It is probably clear that, at first blush, A is the more parsimonious explanation. It just takes the evidence at face value without postulating a hidden fact (Paul's undisclosed knowledge). That of course does not rule out B, but it does mean we have to come up with good evidence for it. Since we have agreed on Paul's silence, the evidence cannot come from him, so it has to come from somewhere else. Just pointing to the gospels doesn't work, as that would be begging the question. So what evidence is there?

That, I think, is the AFS in Paul an sich. Now let us look at the situation with a slightly broader view. What Paul is preaching is not unique in his time. Dying and rising godmen, saviours, had been seen before. These were not, AFAIK, seen as real human beings. Hence the most parsimonious explanation here is that Paul is preaching just another of these rising and dying saviour types. As these types were not seen as human, we should not expect, and certainly not postulate, human characteristics, or the mention thereof, without some pretty good evidence. Where is the evidence?

The most parsimonious explanation again seems to be that Paul did not know about historical facts. Not only is this parsimonious because (1) it simply follows the evidence as we have it without postulating something hidden, it also (2) follows our knowledge about dying and rising saviours in general. (1) is enough in and of itself, but (2) gives it added strength.

Specifically to Paul, the argument that it was only JC's salvific death that interested Paul doesn't cut it. Not because it isn't true, it may well be. The problem is that, without further evidence that Paul knew about HJ, we cannot just assume it, that would be begging the question. The fact that Paul points out that it is only JC's death that interests him adds force to the AFS (in fact in some sense it is the AFS), at least until evidence of Paul's awareness of an HJ is adduced. The gospels do not constitute that evidence, since the issue under discussion is the very question whether Paul knew about the gospel history.

In conclusion, if we agree that Paul is silent about HJ while only mentioning his salvific death, then we have to assume that is all he knew about. Until someone shows good evidence to the contrary. Anybody?

gstafleu

Just let me add something I should have included in the above. It is sometimes said that, if you can come up with an explanation for the silence, you have countered the AFS. That is not true in and of itself. It is only true if you first come up with evidence that Paul, in this case, knew about an HJ. Once you've done that, explanations for the silence are relevant. Until you've done that though, explanations for something of which there is no evidence it happened in the first place are not relevant (a form of begging the question, I suspect).

The Bishop

Where is the evidence that the other dying and rising saviour types were not seen as human? Only from the writings about them, presumably. So there would be no question about this, if Paul's writing about Jesus was comparable to the writings about dying and rising saviour types, ie clearly and distinctly referring to mythical characters. But it is not. The "evidence" for what it is is in the clearly implications at a number of points that Paul thought of Jesus as a real human being.

Your argument pretty much begs the whole question. By assuming that Paul is talking about a mythical creature, and obviously we have no hard physical evidence other than the writings, you can claim "where is the evidence that Jesus was real?" But that assumption ignores the writing itself, which does not imply a mythical being, but a real human man. Our knowledge of rising and dying saviours is also based on writings which were qualitatively sufficiently different to be plainly obviously mythical. The Jesus figure in Paul is not as plainly obviously mythical (as, say, Mithras) otherwise we would not even be having this argument.

gstafleu

Well of course, that is all we have.

For the sake of this argument, we are assuming that Paul is indeed silent about historical facts. The idea behind that is to find out where that gets us. Ben, I think, makes the argument that even if you stipulate Paul's silence, you still don't get very far. That's what I want to explore. So the evidence you mention would have to be something that is not interpreted as a historical fact about JC. It seems to me that the way Paul treats JC is generally consistent with a mythical being (even if at times you can maybe also give it a human interpretation). Parsimony requires that we go with the (established) mythical being interpretation rather than the (novel) human one in those cases that both interpretations are possible.

The writing is what at issue here. My claim is that it does not contradict a mythical being (and that therefore parsimony requires we go with that). Just saying that the writing implies a human doesn't do much, because that is what we are discussing!

Ben C Smith

Gilbert J. Garraghan, A Guide to Historical Method, page 162:

The argument from silence aims to prove the non-reality of an alleged fact from the circumstance that contemporary or later sources of information fail to say anything about it. It is sometimes misleadingly called the negative argument; but this can easily be taken to mean something false, namely, that the argument rests on an explicit denial of some fact.

Garraghan goes on to offer two conditions that an argument from silence must fulfill in order to be used in an historical argument:

1. The author withholding the alleged information was in a position to have that information.
2. The author withholding the alleged information would have certainly made mention of it had he or she known of it.

I think the burden of proof is on whoever is asserting the argument from silence. First, show that Paul should have known the alleged datum. Second, show that Paul should have used the alleged datum had he known it.

The first is too often taken for granted. No one claims that Paul was an eyewitness of Jesus. There are some things that he should certainly know (how Jesus died, for example), but there are others that he would not necessarily know (what Jesus said to the synagogue ruler after healing his child, for example). It is up to the asserter to connect these dots and inform us how he or she knows Paul would have known about this or that detail.

The second is the one that my argument based on 1 Corinthians 15 and 1 Thessalonians 4.15-17 was meant to counter. Just because Paul knows something does not mean he is forced to use it. We know that Paul knows a dominical resurrection saying (1 Thessalonians 4.15-17), but he fails to use it in 1 Corinthians 15, where it would seem quite appropriate.

That said, I think that the argument from silence can be useful at times. For example, I doubt that Paul knew of any virgin birth tradition, and that is one of the things he probably should have known, based on his contact with James the pillar. And he probably should have mentioned it in Galatians 4.4 instead of implying a perfectly ordinary birth.

But even here I feel the constraints of the argument from silence. What if the virgin birth was, at that time, an intentionally silenced tradition, seeing as how believing the tradition but doubting the miracle would make the mother of Jesus into a fornicator? What if Paul, then, did not know the tradition, or himself helped to keep it under raps?

Note well: I do not hold to that scenario. But the argument from silence is not very powerful against it. What means more to me is the wording of Galatians 4.4, where the birth sounds perfectly normal, and the more plausible trajectories of such a tradition in the early church.

Other possibly kosher uses of the argument from silence in Paul are similar. Did Paul know about Judas, since he fails to mention the betrayal? Even here the silence is bolstered by the mention of the twelve, not the eleven, in 1 Corinthians 15, and there may yet be good reasons for Paul to have glossed over Judas. Did Paul know about the baptismal voice claiming Jesus as the son of God? Again the silence is bolstered by the declaration in Romans 1.1-4 that Jesus was declared to be the son of God with power by the resurrection, not by the baptism (which Paul nowhere mentions).

Some silences that I have seen adduced just fall to the ground on the very spot they were first uttered. Wells himself thinks, IIRC, that Paul should have mentioned the Petrine denials in Galatians 1-2, but what a bad move that would have been for Paul, who admits that he himself once persecuted the church! Those who live in glass houses cannot afford to throw stones. Again, I am not defending the Petrine denials here; I just do not think the argument from silence sheds any light on their historicity.

Here is an exercise I recommend for anyone inclined to use an argument from Pauline silence: Read 1 Thessalonians 4.15-17, then read 1 Corinthians 15. Compile a list of reasons why Paul may have failed to use 1 Thessalonians 4.15-17 as evidence of a future resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15. Steven Carr has already helpfully started such a list: Paul may have forgotten; he may have thought his argument from nature was even better than using a dominical saying. Whatever reasons you compile on your list, they are very likely to be speculative in some measure. Such a list will give you a rough rule of thumb for how intangible the arguments against an argument from silence can be... and still work.

Ben.

EarlDoherty

Ben,

Your "exercise" is guilty of one glaring fallacy (sorry, I don't have a name for it at the moment). Any one "silence" in one writer may have one or more feasible explanations for it, but when a silence of that nature occurs literally hundreds of times in dozens of documents by a dozen different writers over many decades, the exercise collapses under its own weight.

Suppose a lawyer were to go before a judge and say: "Yes, Your Honor, I know the evidence looks bad, but things are not really the way they seem. You see, such-and-such, and this-and-that, and the upshot is, Your Honor, that my client was framed." Well, perhaps the judge on one occasion would accept the laywer's explanation and give the accused the benefit of the doubt. But if in trial after trial, that same lawyer came before the same judge with the same client and appealed to a variant (often remote or unlikely) of that same defense, the plea "Your Honor, my client was framed" would soon get short shrift and the lawyer along with it. I would say that no string of unlikely argumentation such as scholarship regularly indulges in can be judged adequate in the face of the overall stultifying silence on Jesus of Nazareth found in the New Testament epistles and other non-canonical documents, no defense even distantly sufficient for the utter void in the early Christian writings which should be filled by the Gospel Jesus.

And considering that much of these "silences" are positive in nature, which I continually try to emphasize: that they portray the faith movement in ways that exclude an historical Jesus and make him completely unnecessary, makes the AfS much stronger. Indeed, it lifts it out of the category of the simple "Argument from Silence." It is much more than that. Even in dealing with Garrigan's definition and its application to the NT situation, people like yourself, Ben, unjustifiably downplay the expectation we ought to have for Paul and others to know and to use references to an HJ.

I note that Kevin Rosero's recent review of The Jesus Puzzle on Amazon, while adopting as fair a tone as one could expect from a 'non-sympathizer' (he even gave me two stars out of five!), completely overlooks this "positive silence" aspect of the debate

All the best,
EArl Doherty

Ben C Smith

I would really have to see what you mean by a silence repeated hundreds of times in dozens of documents in order to evaluate the argument. I myself would certainly not count 1 Corinthians and Galatians among those dozens of silent documents. But on this thread I am stipulating, as per the OP, that Paul is indeed mute.

As a hypothetical matter, yes, silences can certainly pile up so intensely that the argument from silence becomes a very viable argument. My question would be whether or not we see that in early Christian literature. You obviously think you see it in spades. Perhaps your book (which I do intend to read someday) outlines such a massive conspiracy of silence as to elevate the argument to that pristine level.

But I plead innocent of any fallacy here. I simply never intended my comparison of 1 Thessalonians 4 and 1 Corinthians 15 to overturn that massive degree of silence. The original argument that sparked the comparison was a local one, and it was that kind of argument (Paul really should have mentioned datum X in this passage, had he known it) that I intended to counter.

Ben.

gstafleu

In the case of Paul, I cannot agree with that. Just taking his writings as presented, we have a simple and parsimonious explanation: he didn't know about it. The BOP would seem to be on the person who wants to introduce the extra bit: Paul's (hidden) knowledge.

Part of the problem is here is probably what Earl was pointing to, that is that the MJ case is much more than just silence. Silence clearly plays a role, but has to be seen against the background of other knowledge. For example, we do know about all these other godmen, what Paul is preaching looks a lot like that, so why assume it is anything else? We know these were not seen as historical, so why is Paul's version the exception?

So perhaps just discussing the AFS per se does not get us very far (even though I maintain that if you claim Paul knew something he isn't saying, the BOP is on you). As far as I can tell, a consistent model of what Paul is talking about can be built without the necessity of an HJ, that is what I think Earl means by a "positive silence." If such a non-HJ model can be built, than introducing an HJ into the mix violates Occam's razor. I don't think that the few dominical teachings you mention really outweigh that.

That "positive silence" BTW is what I was getting at with my remarks about "appeared" in 1 Cor 15:3-8. It looks to me as if Paul is explicitly saying there that everybody knew about JC only via the mechanism as revelation.

EarlDoherty

Try my website feature: "The Sound of Silence"
200 Missing References to the Gospel Jesus in the New Testament Epistles, which leads to this series of articles. (There is also a brief discussion of the AfS in that Introductory article.)

The entire feature is book-length, and includes a 'balancing' discussion of "20 Arguable References to the Gospel Jesus in the New Testament Epistles" as well as a "Postscript" which answers J. P. Holding's very lame response to the feature.

Some will remember that "TedM" posted a rebuttal to my opening "Top 20 Silences", but this epitomized the strained and ad hoc nature of seeking to explain each silence, as well as my "Your Honor, my client was framed" analogy of the earlier post.

All the best,
Earl Doherty

EarlDoherty

(I think you said at one point your name was "Gerard" or "Gerald"? I would like to suggest that people with indecipherable bylines should sign their posts with an identifiable name.)

Gerald's statement is not quite accurate. My positive silences are more direct, not relying on background knowledge. I have said that they include "exclusions" of an historical Jesus, and statements about the faith movement which are self-sufficient without an historical Jesus, the latter making it unnecessary to postulate a figure who would even be an intrusion on the idea being expressed. As a corrollary to the latter, we would have to recognize that it is highly unlikely that the writer would make a statement which would provide such a self-sufficiency, rather than to provide the more reasonable and expected reference in that context to an HJ.

One example I can give contains and illustrates all three of those elements:

Titus 1:3 - "Yes, it is eternal life that God, who cannot lie, promised long ages ago, and now in his own good time he has openly declared himself in the proclamation which was entrusted to me by ordinance of God our Saviour."

- Exclusion of an historical Jesus: In the past lie God's promises, in the present lies his acting upon them through the missionary movement represented by Paul (the writer speaking as Paul, as the Pastorals are generally dated by critical scholars as belonging to the early 2century). No insertion of an historical Jesus between the two 'events'. This is a blatant, and unexplainable, exclusion.

- God declares himself through the missionary movement (which by other contexts is identified as a 'declaration' through scripture and the Holy Spirit). This identifies the early Christian movement as one that arose and operates through revelation to apostles like Paul, rather than through Jesus' own ministry and life on earth. We thus understand that movement through other means than the career of an HJ.

- If an author like this is going to identify how God acted on his promises, it is a virtual guarantee (indeed, how could anyone get their mind around anything else?) that he would speak of such action of God as having taken place through the life and death of Jesus. That would be such a compelling idea that he would hardly pass it up in favor of speaking of the missionary movement instead, completely ignoring Jesus' role in the matter. Note that this does not require the writer (and even if it were Paul) to know anything about the details of the life and death of Jesus. It would simply be the fact itself.

This kind of positive silence, on all levels, is what saturates the epistles and other early documents, and I claim that there is no way around it, despite all apologetic efforts which fill NT commentaries--and I've seen them all! And I remark on many, many of them in my website articles and in my book. It is one thing that justifies me saying to people like Kevin that historicist scholarship has a predisposition which governs everything they interpret and conclude--and indeed 'cook' (to borrow Jeffrey's term)--about the evidence that is staring them in the face. And it is this kind of positive silence, backed up with so much else of a background nature, which justifies regarding the evidence for the MJ position as "overwhelming". And once we understand the content and construction of the Gospels (together with the fact that they all essentially proceed from one initial author), there is very little that can stand against it. (Certainly not "the brother of the Lord" or "genomenon ek gunaikos" which enjoy other explanations.)

All the best,
Earl Doherty