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Veteran Member
Join Date: Sep 2005
Location: San Bernardino, Calif.
Posts: 5,435
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Originally Posted by Doug Shaver
With exceptions too few, and too obviously driven by ideology, to be worth commenting on, every expert with relevant qualifications agrees that the gospels were not written until sometime after Paul's death. From that datum, it follows that he could not have known anything about them. {emphasis avi}
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Originally Posted by avi
You confound data and facts with opinion.
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I don't think so.
In another forum a few months ago, I accepted someone's challenge to debate whether the gospels were fiction or history. As part of my argument, I had to demonstrate that they were probably written later than orthodoxy supposes. Here is my opening statement from that debate:
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By "gospels" I refer particularly to the four canonical writings called Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. In general my arguments will apply as well to most if not all similar noncanonical writings, such as the gospels attributed to Thomas and Peter, but I'm going to treat them as irrelevant unless they come up in counterarguments. (It will be incidentally relevant, though, that anything I say pertinent to Luke's gospel will usually apply as well to the canonical Acts of the Apostles.)
By "fiction" I mean a nonfactual narrative composed by someone knowing it to be nonfactual and without intending his readers to think otherwise. I thus exclude any kind of fraud or lies. I neither assume nor imply any deceitful intent on the part of any author.
Any attempt to assess the gospel authors' intentions is inseparable from an investigative analysis of the origins of Christianity. The gospels were written during Christianity's formative years and were declared authoritative by certain of the religion's early leaders. What we need to explain is why those leaders considered them authoritative. One possible explanation is that the leaders had good reason to think these documents presented reliable historical information about Christianity's founding. I propose to demonstrate that such an opinion, if they held it, was unsupported by any good evidence and so was probably in error.
The conventional thinking in our own time about Christianity's origins, even among secular historians, is what some scholars have called the "big bang" theory. In this scenario, one Jesus of Nazareth, a charismatic Jewish preacher, was executed by Judea's Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, around 30 CE. Soon afterward certain of his disciples, known as apostles, having become convinced that Jesus had risen from the dead, formed a religious sect based on his teachings and claiming that he was the son of God and fulfillment of Jewish messianic prophecies. The sect's original membership was predominantly Jewish. Shortly after the sect's founding, a Pharisee called Saul of Tarsus was converted and commenced a missionary campaign among gentiles under the new name of Paul. He was successful while the original apostles had little success in converting other Jews. After the First Jewish War, Christianity in effect severed its connection with Judaism while maintaining that it was the legitimate heir to its parent religion. As the sect's founders died off, numerous competing versions of Christianity arose and had to be resisted by adherents of the original apostolic teachings. The dissident sects were eventually suppressed and the apostolic teachings survived as the historic orthodoxy.
One problem is that this account is itself just the historic orthodoxy. We are getting our history from the winners, and the winners, for nearly a thousand years, were the sole custodians of the documentary record. With almost no exceptions, we have no writings from ancient times except those that the church regarded as worth preserving. The accusations of some skeptics that the church actively sought out and burned unorthodox writings is both unsupported and unmotivated. The church never needed to destroy those documents as long as no one took the trouble to copy them; time alone would have ensured their eventual disappearance.
In any case, for any historical investigation we can use no evidence except existing evidence. Hypothetical facts can never prove anything. The only facts we have are that certain manuscripts exist containing writings of a certain nature. They appear to be copies, several times removed, of certain original documents, concerning which the authors of certain other documents claim certain things about their provenance. It is not a fact, but only an inference based on presuppositions about the reliability of those claims, that the gospels' authors intended their works to be biographical sketches about the founder of their religion. It is a dogma originally propounded by some leaders of one particular sect of Christianity that happened by historical accident to become victorious over all other sects.
Precious few facts about Christianity's origins are truly uncontested by all competent authorities. However, a substantial fraction of the competent authorities are adherents of Christianity, and we are not committing the genetic fallacy if we take that into consideration when assessing their judgments. The handful of facts that actually are uncontested -- the data disputed by nobody -- are best explained by supposing the gospels to be fiction -- perhaps historical fiction, but fiction nonetheless. There could have been a real Jesus in the same sense that there was a real king of Scotland named Macbeth, successor of Duncan and succeeded by Duncan's son, Malcolm. Shakespeare's play Macbeth is still a work of pure fiction insofar as the real Macbeth never did or said anything that he is portrayed as doing or saying in the play. (That includes the assassination; the real Duncan died in battle, not in bed.)
For no ancient document is a presumption of historical reliability the correct default position. Evidence of the author's intention to write history must be adduced from other pertinent facts. Testimony may suffice, if we know the basis on which the witness gives such testimony. In the case of the gospels, not even their existence is clearly and unambiguously attested before Irenaeus, ca 180 CE. He tells us nothing about his source of information about two of the authors, and for the other two he simply construes a vague offhand comment by Papias as proof that Matthew and Mark wrote them. No other patristic writer adds a single fact that provides any additional support to the historical orthodoxy about the gospels' provenance. On that basis alone, a great deal of skepticism about their historical reliability would be justified.
That does not yet rule out the possibility that the authors intended to write history, and I don't claim that anything rules it out altogether. All things considered, though, I think there is sufficient evidence to establish reasonable doubt.
We can begin by looking at the earliest Christian document that all modern scholars agree was meant by its author to be read as history: Eusebius's Ecclesiastical History, which he finished writing apparently around the year 320. Opinion about his reliability is divided, but as far as we know, nobody before him even tried to get the facts of Christianity's story straight. And we can see why just by reading him. More on that point in a moment.
It seems to be from Eusebius himself that we get the big bang version of Christianity's origin. The basic story is all there in the first two chapters, obviously based primarily on the canonical gospels and Acts but supplemented with material from other sources. Some of those other sources are documents that he has read, but he often is clearly relying solely on stories he has heard from people he sees no need to identify. He introduces several factoids with no more attribution than "they say," "it is said," "tradition says," or some equivalent.
The Ecclesiastical History was written mostly if not entirely after the conversion of Emperor Constantine. The Roman version of Christianity, with which Eusebius was aligned, was calling the shots now: from this time forward, orthodoxy was whatever the church in Rome said it was. And according to the church in Rome, its authority was derived from the apostles' authority. More than once in his history, Eusebius identifies orthodox belief with apostolic belief -- not "Jesus said X" but "the apostles taught X." Christians are supposed to believe whatever the apostles believed, but if you then want to know what the apostles believed, you have to ask the church in Rome.
I'm not suggesting that Eusebius or any other Christian of the time was indifferent to Jesus' actual words, but he was clearly of the opinion that the words had to be understood as the authorities of the orthodox church said they were to be understood, because the authorities claimed that they, and they alone, understood Jesus' words the same way the apostles understood them. Orthodox Christianity, then, was all about the preservation of apostolic teaching (or rather, what the orthodox church believed the apostolic teaching to have been).
Heresy, according to Eusebius, was no big thing as long as the apostles were still around to keep everyone in line. Simon Magus was one apparent exception, but by and large everyone was singing from the same hymnal up until the last of the apostles died off, and then it all started to come apart. Heresies sprang up right and left and the defenders of orthodoxy were obliged to battle them constantly. But, in due course, . . . the splendor of the catholic and only true Church, which is always the same, grew in magnitude and power, and reflected its piety and simplicity and freedom, and the modesty and purity of its inspired life and philosophy to every nation both of Greeks and of Barbarians. At the same time the slanderous accusations which had been brought against the whole Church also vanished, and there remained our teaching alone, which has prevailed over all, and which is acknowledged to be superior to all in dignity and temperance, and in divine and philosophical doctrines. (Ecclesiastical History, 4.7.13-14.)
And so the doctrinal wars did end. Eusebius got that part right. But the story doesn't seem to have begun the way he said it began. Paul himself complained about how many people were preaching gospels other than his own, and several modern scholars he had good reason to complain. According to Bart Ehrman, there was a multitude of sects calling themselves Christian "as far back in fact as our earliest sources go, and we have no clear evidence that any one of them had a better claim than the others to be the real thing. A list of scholars whose research provides data supporting Ehrman's position would include F.C. Baur, Walter Bauer, Walter Schmithals, James M. Robinson, Helmut Koester, J.D.G. Dunn, Robert K. Price, and Burton Mack.
Most conveniently for the sect that eventually triumphed, its founders seem to have had an aversion to writing. Here is how Eusebius himself tells it:Those great and truly divine men, I mean the apostles of Christ, were purified in their life, and were adorned with every virtue of the soul, but were uncultivated in speech. They were confident indeed in their trust in the divine and wonder-working power which was granted unto them by the Saviour, but they did not know how, nor did they attempt to proclaim the doctrines of their teacher in studied and artistic language . . . paying little attention to the composition of written works. . . .
And the rest of the followers of our Saviour, the twelve apostles, the seventy disciples, and countless others besides, were not ignorant of these things. Nevertheless, of all the disciples of the Lord, only Matthew and John have left us written memorials, and they, tradition says, were led to write only under the pressure of necessity. (Ecclesiastical History, III.24.3, 5.)
As for how he came to know any of this, Eusebius offers not a clue. So far as we can tell, it was just the only explanation he could conjure up that seemed plausible to him. It is interesting, too, that in this passage, he says that only two of the "twelve apostles . . . and countless others" who knew Jesus ever wrote anything about him, although elsewhere in his history he endorses the authority of I Peter. Maybe he noticed that whoever wrote it didn't give any indication of having known Jesus. Whatever . . . .
Of course, as everyone in this forum knows, by Eusebius's time there were lots of gospels and other writings floating around that lots of people believed had been written by one or another apostle besides Matthew or John. But, by his time, the church's consensus was against the authenticity of those documents. Now, Eusebius reports the consensus, but he doesn't explain how it was reached or, more to our point, on what it was based. What did the church authorities actually know for a fact about any of those documents? In particular, what did they know about the provenance of the canonical documents?
They knew nothing that Eusebius didn't know, and Eusebius didn't know anything, so far as we can tell, beyond what he had read in Irenaeus. All we get in turn from Irenaeus is the four names that have come down to us. For Luke and John he cites no source at all and for Matthew and Mark we get the Papias story. And what do we know about Papias's sources? What he tells us is that he knew some men who told him that they had known some of the apostles.
Well, isn't that enough? Sure, if you presuppose that the orthodox church leadership was more or less infallible throughout the first few centuries of its existence, which seems to be about what Eusebius thought. Only heretics can be wrong, and Irenaeus hated heretics, so whatever he said had to be the truth. If he said he believed Papias, then by golly we'd better believe Papias, too. And if he said the Acts of the Apostles was written by a good buddy of Paul's, then a good buddy of Paul's had to be the guy who really wrote it.
We ourselves know practically nothing about Papias besides his name. He is not mentioned by anyone who could have been a contemporary of his, and we get very little from later writers who had heard anything about him. He was apparently a bishop of Hierapolis, wrote a five-volume work called something like Interpretations of the Sayings of the Lord, and died sometime around 130 CE. Irenaeus believed, for reasons he does not state, that Papias was "a hearer of John, and companion of Polycarp" (Adversus Haereses,V.33.4). Nothing from his work survives except a handful of quotations in Irenaeus and Eusebius. So far as we can tell from those quotations, he never actually saw either of those two books that he was told Matthew and Mark had written. We may infer from those quotations that he although he claimed to know someone known as Presbyter John, this was not likely to have been the apostle called John. His only unambiguous testimony is that he had some occasions to talk with some men who claimed to have known some apostles.
Speaking of Polycarp, though . . . . We're to believe that he knew the apostle John, because Irenaeus said so. Funny thing is, though, we don't have Polycarp's own word for that. Some of his writings survive, but he doesn't say anything in them about having met John. Of course, we wouldn't expect him to mention that in everything he wrote, and we know he wrote some other stuff that did not survive. Now, it is surely reasonable to think that he if he had met one of the original 12 apostles, he would have said so in at least one of his writings. But if he did, how come that document was not preserved? It surely would have been widely circulated and copied many times. And even if all those copies had somehow perished, surely somebody would have mentioned having read the document. The extant literature is filled with references to documents that we no longer have, but there is not a single comment about anything Polycarp wrote about his acquaintance with John. That is highly improbable on the assumption that there ever was such a meeting.
Irenaeus makes his claim about Polycarp's acquaintance with John in Adversus Haereses (III.3.4), which he wrote at around the age of 50. He tells of meeting Polycarp during his "early youth," presumably meaning late adolescence, certainly not after his early 20s. It's a pretty impressionable time of anyone's life, and Polycarp would have been, as Irenaeus says he was, very old by that time. So here is Irenaeus, himself approaching old age, recalling a conversation he had during his early youth with an old man reminiscing about his younger years. That is a mighty tenuous basis on which to pin a fact that we should expect to be, but is not, otherwise corroborated.
That leaves us with no direct contact between the writer of any extant Christian document and any of Jesus' apostles -- no actual witness to the existence of a single person who is supposed to have known Jesus in person. Someone will ask: But what about Paul? He testifies to having met three of Jesus' disciples: Cephas (Peter), James, and John. Yes, he says he knew three men who had those names -- but he does not corroborate their discipleship. Paul never says that any man he ever met was ever personally acquainted with Jesus of Nazareth during Jesus' lifetime. We have to go to the gospels to make that connection.
And so we have no reason except 1800 years of church dogma to think the gospels record anything factual about Jesus of Nazareth. There is not a single uncontested fact contradicting the supposition that they are works of pure fiction. There is no undisputed evidence that the authors, whoever they were, had access to any primary source about Jesus, nor even any good evidence that they were likely to have used any secondary sources. For the uncontested evidence that we have in hand, the most parsimonious explanation is that, no matter when they might have been written, the gospels' existence was practically unknown to the Christian community at large before the middle of the second century, by which time nobody had any idea who the authors actually were. They came to be regarded as authoritative within one of the numerous Christian sects that existed at that time for one reason alone: They supported that sect's teachings. How the authors' names were chosen is anybody's guess, but then whoever picked them was just guessing, too. All it took to make the names stick was for someone in authority to endorse them, and that someone happened to be Irenaeus.
This is not an argument against Jesus' historicity, because under this scenario his historicity is irrelevant. Even assuming that the man existed, we have no good reason to suppose the gospel authors intended to write a true story about him, any more than Shakespeare was trying to write a true story about Macbeth -- or, perhaps more analogously, a true story about Caesar's assassination. Caesar actually was assassinated, sure, but it didn't happen like Shakespeare said it happened. And so it was, most likely, with Jesus' execution by Pilate.
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03-17-2011, 11:24 PM
