Steven Carr

http://www.bethinking.org/whatsnew.php?ID=9



Copan writes 'Many of the controversial issues in the Epistles aren’t even mentioned in the Gospels (circumcision, speaking in tongues, eating meat offered to idols, etc.). '

Isn't this a pure argument from silence?

Surely not even the most anachronistic of would-be Gospel writers would have a Jewish Jesus suggest that Jews should not be circumcised.

What should we make of the Epistle's lack of mention of Mary , Joseph, any miracle of Jesus, the Virgin Birth etc etc?

gurugeorge

Well, the argument from silence works if you'd reasonably expect something to be mentioned, and it isn't.

You wouldn't reasonably expect later concerns to be mentioned in earlier texts, but you would reasonably expect earlier concerns to be mentioned in later texts.

So your first example isn't a good argument from silence, but your last example is.

As many people have pointed out, Paul occasionally talks in the Epistles about things about which Jesus, in the Gospels, is reported to have had opinions, so you could reasonably expect Paul to have quoted Jesus' words; the absence of such quotes in the Epistles is suspicious.

Mr. Aardvark

>>circumcision, speaking in tongues, eating meat offered to idols, etc.)<<

Excepting the tongues talking example, couldn't one argue that Gospel doesn't mention the others because they were such fundaments of the culture they were simply assumed? Therefore, to make anything of their omission is to argue from silence?

sodium

Are there any good examples of the Gospels having Jesus make pronouncements on things that we suspect were controversial within a community that wrote a Gospel. He certainly makes pronouncements on things that were concerns of such people, but it's less clear to me that he deals with active controversies. Copan kind of mixes the idea of concerns and controversies, but really, they are quite different things.

Further, there is an assumption that the interests and controversies of the Epistle writers would be the same as those of the Gospel writers. But the Gospels were written quite a bit later, and very likely by quite different communities.

I tend to think the Gospels were written for theological and devotional purposes, and therefore, if there was a battle raging over circumcision, for example, there would have been a temptation to avoid addressing it, to avoid unnecessarily alienating part of the community.

Jaguar Prince

Anything theologically significant in Jesus' life should be mentioned by Paul
Virgin birth is not mentioned by Paul
Therefore virgin birth is not a significant element of the Jesus story for Paul.

But how could virgin birth be theologically insignificant for Paul? Virgin birth is hugely important for Christology and soteriology. Therefore failure to mention virgin birth in the Pauline epistle shows that Paul either didn't know about it (which means that the Luke he talks about is not the Luke who wrote the gospel of Luke) or rejected it.

There is of course a third possibility, namely that he mentioned it in a now lost epistle, but considering the considerable importance of virgin birth for Xtian theology it is highly improbable that he would have failed to mention it in his extant correspondence.

Arguments from silence do speak sometimes.

Toto

Chili digression