Freethought & Rationalism Archive

maryhelena · 12-19-2009, 11:19 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ApostateAbe

Quote:

Originally Posted by maryhelena

I think that if there was strong evidence for your position - or mine for that matter - that we would all call it a day and move on to something else....
But we are all here - for the illusive evidence has bewitched us all

Yeah, that is sort of an optimistic outlook, that people like us know good evidence when we see it. I don't have the same sort of optimism--I know, or maybe just believe, that intelligent people like me and you can be misled by false theories even when the evidence is strongly against it.

Let me give you an example to illustrate what I am talking about. I am not asking you to accept the New Testament argument; I am only trying to illustrate the psychological principle. It is the evidence from Galatians 1:19, where Paul mentions of meeting James, the Lord's brother, in Jerusalem.

To me, that closes the case that Jesus existed. The Epistle to the Galatians is an authentic letter of Paul, James is listed as one of the four brothers of Jesus in two of the earliest gospels (Mark and Matthew), and James is again mentioned as a brother of Jesus in the writings of Josephus. If Paul thought that James was the brother of Jesus, whom he personally met, then that is conclusive evidence that Jesus existed.

But, to MJ advocates, the case remains open. They claim that "the Lord's brother" could be a metaphorical religious brother, like a religious brotherhood. And they have what they take as solid evidence for their claim: in every other time that Paul writes of a "brother" or "brothers," he is clearly using it in exactly that sense.

Saved! they think. Well, not so fast. The primary rule in determining the meaning of words is the context. "James" was one of the most common names in the time and place. In the synoptic gospels, two of Jesus' twelve-or-so disciples were named James, not including his own brother. Paul seemed to write the phrase "the Lord's brother" after "James" with the intent to specifically identify the man, and the Lord's religious metaphorical brother simply does not do the job. It would leave the reader wondering.

Moreover, if Paul ever needed to use a word for the flesh-and-blood sibling, he would have no choice but to use the same word for brother (ἀδελφός).

But the MJ advocates have their line of evidence to sever the connection to Jesus, and it seems good enough to them, so they stick to it. To them, the evidence of the way Paul uses the word every other time seems to be sufficient to at least instill doubt. How is Abe's reasoning better than theirs? They don't seem to significantly debate the exchange beyond that. They may also claim that gMark and gMatthew were based on Paul's epistles, who misinterpreted "the Lord's brother" as a literal sibling, and they falsely listed "James" as one of the brothers, which spread the myth, which affected Josephus' account. These are a few of many unlikely propositions in dire need of evidence.

When lay people get involved in these sorts of debates, especially about history or Biblical scholarship, one argument can seem as good as another, or a bad argument can seem better than a good one. That is why I respect the secular experts so much, who make a living studying this stuff day-in-and-day-out. They tend to have the experience to know a good argument from a bad one. To them, the context is the primary indicator of the meaning of a word when two or more definitions can apply, and the usage patterns of the author are merely secondary. The rest of us tend to lack a sufficient ability to make a good judgment, even if we do this sort of thing as a hobby. That is how lay people find or create fringe theories in historical scholarship that seem to make so much sense, even if they really don't.

Are there really any experts in Biblical understanding? Sure, we have experts in ancient languages, ancient history, ancient mythology, ancient documents - but experts in understanding the big picture? Experts in prophetic interpretations. Experts in understanding how every aspect of their respective discipline interacts with the expertise of another expert. With so much diversity, so much specialization, who are the experts in understanding the whole - experts who are not looking at the trees but are experts on the forest? Somewhere along the line, experts - and particular in Biblical interpretation - have to give way to the irrational elements - how the heck does it all fit together. That 'how' can't be expertly determined - simply because its not always a question of adding two and two together.

And this is not just the case with Biblical interpretations. Einstein is reported to have said, in regard to his discovery: "There are no logical paths to such natural laws, only intuition can reach them". Karl Popper would agree:
"There is no such thing as a logical method of having new ideas, or a logical reconstruction of this process. Every great discovery contains an irrational element or a creative intuition".

If this is the case - then my money would be on those, experts or not, who are striving to think 'outside the box'.

How would I, an amateur and not an expert, know the difference - know what bits and pieces from the experts are going to produce the best possible picture? Trial and error - until one is satisfied, in ones own mind, that the picture makes sense. (Luther again.....here I stand.....)

Biblical, NT, interpretations are not static - as is no other area of knowledge. Staying with the status quo might be comforting but the excitement, the exhilaration, is to be found with those willing to mount the intellectual barricades...Indeed there are dangers on the barricades - but the point to remember about being on the barricades is not that any idea has ultimate value and is therefore worth fighting and dying for - but that its the fighter not the idea that is demonstrating greatness. Or to put that perhaps clearer - consider this quote from Ayn Rand (OK - been there, done that and moved on.......) - remarking on the writings of Victor Hugo:

Quote:

"The emphasis he projects is not: 'What great values men are fighting for!' but "What greatness men are capable of, when they fight for their values!"
The Romantic Manifesto

And, if you think about it, challenging ideas has always been part of Christianity, from the very beginning. Unity in diversity - except that the mother of heretics soon became their inquisitor. Thus, one could very well say that challenging the status quo, challenging the experts, is a very Christian thing to be doing.....

Hans Kung again.

Quote:

The question of the relationship between the Church and heretics is one that remains with us, because heretics have continued and will continue, because every Christian is potentially not only a heretic, but also an inquisitor. As Paul knew, heresies were born with the Church, and the whole life and teaching of the Church are influenced by the question of how the Church should confront heresy.

Much more startling than the fact that the young Church was regarded as a 'heresy' is the fact that from the very beginning there were heresies within the Church. This shows that heresy is not a chance historical phenomenon, but something that is bound up with the nature of the Church .

The real hallmark of Christianity? Heresy - the challenging of ideas that can ignite the spark plug of intellectual evolution. What other belief system demonstrates such a clarion call to dissent?

spin · 12-19-2009, 11:25 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ApostateAbe

The clause, "James, the Lord's brother," is determined to be genuine

While this may be true, you don't know what the phrase¹ means, despite your beliefs.

spin

1. Clauses have verbs in them.

neilgodfrey · 12-20-2009, 12:01 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ApostateAbe

It occurred to me that you may think that it has not been established that Paul wrote the epistle to the Galatians. Is that your meaning? I may have barked up the wrong tree.

Ah, we are talking past each other. Will shift lanes here.

No, I'm not talking about interpolations. One can argue about those details at will. My point is more basic. We do not know who wrote the gospels, when or where or for whom. Yet "biblical historians" treat their narratives as sources of historical data. I know of no other historical studies that would ever contemplate using such "unsourced" documents as evidence in this way. What court of law would ever allow a witness to testify anonymously, with no knowledge of his background, location in relation to the events, etc?

As for Paul's epistles, Doherty is very conservative. He accepts the broad scholarly view about their provenance. Yet in fact there is no secure external evidence for anyone even knowing of Paul's letters till well into the second century. And given the culture of literary imitations, fictions etc at the time -- including training in writing letters with authentic detail as if from other characters and times -- and the sudden appearance of a range of fictional literature about Paul at the same time as these letters are first reported, and add to this the fact that the themes in Paul's letters are frequently of immediate interest to second century theologians, and we have little reason to be so confident about "the scholarly consensus".

I am not saying such documents are worthless as sources of historical information. A romance about King Arthur can tell us a lot about the culture and people from the time it was written, but it will tell us nothing about an historical King Arthur. Genesis tells us nothing about how the world or humans came into being, but it tells us a lot about ancient peoples and cultures nonetheless.

Similarly the gospels can tell us a lot -- but we cannot assume that their self-witness, or self-testimony, is valid. No historian in any other field I am aware of makes such assumptions about source documents. Provenance needs to be established by external references and tools.

I have heard it complained that we have to use the gospels and epistles this way because they are all we have. But we can't change our standards or methods of historical enquiry just because we don't have the evidence we would like to answer the questions we want to ask. We have to start with our evidence and determine the sorts of questions it can yield, given its limitations. If that means having to ditch the orthodox view of Christian origins, then that's fine -- at least we will be true to consistent and defensible historical enquiry.

Neil

neilgodfrey · 12-20-2009, 12:31 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chaucer

Quote:

Originally Posted by neilgodfrey

Go back and have a look at the posts between Doherty and others when the JM position was first raised on Crosstalk2 (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/crosstalk2/) -- do a count of the posts "with attitude" and those without, and then compare their positions on the argument. You will see my point demonstrated easily.

Well, I'm frankly non-plussed. I've been a member of Crosstalk2 now for about a year, and even after using their Search engine, I am still totally unable to come up with any direct exchange between "Doherty and others". Please, could you give a more direct link to some exchange directly involving Doherty -- preferably, his very first posts to that board, if you can find them.

Thanks,

Chaucer

How time flies! It seems the Doherty exchanges must have been a part of the first Crosstalk -- can't believe they were that long ago. I think Crosstalk2 replaced the original when there was a server meltdown or something. Apologies -- I just assumed they were there.

(I have not been back to Crosstalk2 for years -- I was surprised to see it has really fallen off in activity. Has it been replaced by another discussion group elsewhere?)

lpetrich · 12-20-2009, 03:32 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Toto

From what I read online, Van Voorst's primary evidence against mythicism seems to be that the academy has dismissed it.

I've seen that elsewhere, that this somehow proves that Jesus mythicism is crackpottery that we ought not to waste our time on.

However, some historical-Jesus advocates get remarkably close to Jesus mythicism, like one who made a comparison between him and Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia. The Rastafarian sect turned him into a semidivine messiah figure, despite it being easy to discover that he had been 100% human and something other than a messiah.

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His evidence in favor of historicity - the usual, starting with Thallius.

Richard Carrier in Thallus: an Analysis notes

Quote:

That a solar eclipse should mark the death of a king was common lore among Greeks and other Mediterranean peoples (Herodotus 7.37, Plutarch Pelopidas 31.3 and Aemilius Paulus 17.7-11, Dio Cassius 55.29.3, John Lydus De Ostentis 70.a), and that such events corresponded with earthquakes was also a scientific superstition (Aristotle Meteorology 367.b.2, Pliny Natural History 2.195, Virgil Georgics 2.47.478-80). It was also typical to assimilate eclipses to major historic events, even when they did not originally correspond, or to invent eclipses for this purpose (Préaux claims to have counted 200 examples in extant literature; Boeuffle and Newton have also remarked on this tendency). The gospel stories also make a solar eclipse impossible: the crucifixion passover happened during a full moon, and the darkness supposedly lasted three hours (indeed, Julius Africanus claimed it covered the whole world). Such an impossible event would not fail to be recorded in the works of Seneca, Pliny, Josephus or other historians, yet it is not mentioned anywhere else outside of Christian rhetoric, so we can probably dismiss the idea of this being a real event.

In fact, Pliny the Elder was around 9 years old at the time, so he might have remembered it if it happened. And not only him, but also Daddy Pliny and Mommy Pliny and other family members.

Let's see what local times it would have happened at in various places. I'm including Milan, because Pliny grew up near Lake Como, which is near there.

Beijing: 5:25 pm - 8:25 pm
Yerevan: 12:40 pm - 3:40 pm
Jerusalem: 12 pm - 3 pm
Cairo: 11:45 am - 2:45 pm
Athens: 11:15 am - 2:15 pm
Rome: 10:30 am - 1:30 pm
Milan: 10:15 am - 1:15 pm
Lisbon: 9:05 am - 12:05 pm

So it would have been seen all across the Roman Empire, and its beginning in China. If that darkness had included seeing no twilight or stars, then the Chinese would have seen that also.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Steven Carr

Voorst actually comes up with Mara bar Serapion, who does not even mention Jesus!

It states that the Jews had killed their "wise king", someone he did not name. However, he stated that after executing Socrates, the Athenians had suffered famine and plague, and that after executing Pythagoras, the Samians had suffered their island becoming covered with sand.

Let's check Mara's track record.

Athenians executed Socrates: yes
Athenians suffered famine and plague soon after: no, though they suffered from a plague some years earlier, during the Peloponnesian War.
Samians executed Pythagoras: no, though he fled the island's one-time leader, Polycrates.
Samos got covered by sand: no

One event that happened as described, two that are gross misstatements of actual events, and one that clearly did not happen.

His score on what can be checked: 1 out of 4.

So Mara's "wise king" of the Jews was most likely some grotesque mangling of history, one that says nothing about Jesus Christ.

Quote:

Originally Posted by ApostateAbe

Quote:

Originally Posted by dog-on

Please tell me that this is a joke.

It is not a joke, but neither is it an appeal to the authority of every good student of history. I found the full passage typed out, so you can fully understand the meanings of what Van Voorst thinks of the arguments by Wells.

Quote:

* “First, Wells misinterprets Paul's relative silence about some details in the life of Jesus: the exact time of his life, the exact places of his ministry, that Pontius Pilate condemned him, and so forth. As every good student of history knows, it is wrong to suppose that what is unmentioned or undetailed did not exist. ...

Arguments from silence are sometimes legitimate, however. If I claimed that some 100-foot-tall giant robot had walked through Van Voorst's hometown at noon some recent day, then would Van Voorst dismiss the non-observation of that giant robot as a non-argument?

Quote:

* Second, Wells argues that Christians invented the figure of Jesus when they wrote gospels outside Palestine around 100. Not only is this dating far too late for Mark (which was probably written around the year 70), Matthew, and Luke (both of which probably date to the 80s), it cannot explain why the Gospel references to details about Palestine are so plentiful and mostly accurate.

If that's what Wells had argued, then he was either mistaken or else using a very approximate summary date.

I can name oodles of fictional works that get lots of factual details correct, so that's a bad argument on another score.

Quote:

* Third, Wells claims that the development of the Gospel traditions and historical difficulties within them show that Jesus did not exist. However, development does not necessarily mean wholesale invention, and difficulties do not prove nonexistence.

But that means that later biographers could have invented a lot of unhistorical details, which suggests that much of what we have on Jesus Christ is just plain unhistorical.

Quote:

* Fourth, Wells cannot explain to the satisfaction of historians why, if Christians invented the historical Jesus around the year 100, no pagans and Jews who opposed Christianity denied Jesus' historicity or even questioned it.

They weren't as skeptical as modern people often are. Ancient historians accepted the existence of lots of people that we nowadays dismiss as mythical.

For instance, historians like Livy and Plutarch described Romulus as if there had been a real historical Romulus who had founded Rome, and not a myth.

I also note that Romulus was described as the son of a god and a virgin who briefly reappeared to his followers after his death. Now where have we heard that before?

Quote:

* Fifth, Wells and his predecessors have been far too skeptical about the value of non-Christian witnesses to Jesus, especially Tacitus and Josephus. They point to well-known text-critical and source-critical problems in these witnesses and argue that these problems rule out the entire value of these passages, ignoring the strong consensus that most of these passages are basically trustworthy.

What consensus?

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* Sixth, Wells and others seem to have advanced the nonhistoricity hypothesis not for objective reasons, but for highly tendentious, anti-religious purposes.

Does Van Voorst have any direct evidence of that?

And such arguments from ulterior motives go both ways.

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* Finally, Wells and his predecessors have failed to advance other, credible hypotheses to account for the birth of Christianity and the fashioning of a historical Christ.

Earl Doherty has gone into detail about that, proposing that Jesus Christ had originally been a sort-of god, and that Mark was an extended allegory about this entity that was later interpreted as a literal biography.

Solo · 12-20-2009, 05:59 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by spin

Quote:

Originally Posted by ApostateAbe

The clause, "James, the Lord's brother," is determined to be genuine

While this may be true, you don't know what the phrase¹ means, despite your beliefs.

spin

1. Clauses have verbs in them.

This would be one of those occasions when spin and I would be in a violent agreement. Paul's Gal 1:19, if genuine - and there are some who don't believe it is - would not be referring to Jesus as Lord. The term, in Jerusalem, would almost certainly not be deployed to denote kinship with Jesus. This would not be Jewish at all. Besides, we know from the later church accounts of the Ebionites (likely evolved from the original Nazarene congregation) they considered Jesus a simple, righteous, man without status of divinity.

If Paul wrote Gal 1:19 then his reference is parallel to 1 Cor 9:5, which suggests a designation, an inner circle of church brothers who had some priestly functions vis-a-vis the Lord (meaning Lord God). I suggested that the term is probably a corrupted locution rendered into Greek as οἱ ἀδελφοὶ ἐν τῇ διακονίᾳ τοῦ κυρίου, brothers in the service of the Lord, which then became simply brothers of the Lord in the colloquial shorthand .

Regards,
Jiri

ApostateAbe · 12-20-2009, 08:57 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by maryhelena

Quote:

Originally Posted by ApostateAbe

Yeah, that is sort of an optimistic outlook, that people like us know good evidence when we see it. I don't have the same sort of optimism--I know, or maybe just believe, that intelligent people like me and you can be misled by false theories even when the evidence is strongly against it.

Let me give you an example to illustrate what I am talking about. I am not asking you to accept the New Testament argument; I am only trying to illustrate the psychological principle. It is the evidence from Galatians 1:19, where Paul mentions of meeting James, the Lord's brother, in Jerusalem.

To me, that closes the case that Jesus existed. The Epistle to the Galatians is an authentic letter of Paul, James is listed as one of the four brothers of Jesus in two of the earliest gospels (Mark and Matthew), and James is again mentioned as a brother of Jesus in the writings of Josephus. If Paul thought that James was the brother of Jesus, whom he personally met, then that is conclusive evidence that Jesus existed.

But, to MJ advocates, the case remains open. They claim that "the Lord's brother" could be a metaphorical religious brother, like a religious brotherhood. And they have what they take as solid evidence for their claim: in every other time that Paul writes of a "brother" or "brothers," he is clearly using it in exactly that sense.

Saved! they think. Well, not so fast. The primary rule in determining the meaning of words is the context. "James" was one of the most common names in the time and place. In the synoptic gospels, two of Jesus' twelve-or-so disciples were named James, not including his own brother. Paul seemed to write the phrase "the Lord's brother" after "James" with the intent to specifically identify the man, and the Lord's religious metaphorical brother simply does not do the job. It would leave the reader wondering.

Moreover, if Paul ever needed to use a word for the flesh-and-blood sibling, he would have no choice but to use the same word for brother (ἀδελφός).

But the MJ advocates have their line of evidence to sever the connection to Jesus, and it seems good enough to them, so they stick to it. To them, the evidence of the way Paul uses the word every other time seems to be sufficient to at least instill doubt. How is Abe's reasoning better than theirs? They don't seem to significantly debate the exchange beyond that. They may also claim that gMark and gMatthew were based on Paul's epistles, who misinterpreted "the Lord's brother" as a literal sibling, and they falsely listed "James" as one of the brothers, which spread the myth, which affected Josephus' account. These are a few of many unlikely propositions in dire need of evidence.

When lay people get involved in these sorts of debates, especially about history or Biblical scholarship, one argument can seem as good as another, or a bad argument can seem better than a good one. That is why I respect the secular experts so much, who make a living studying this stuff day-in-and-day-out. They tend to have the experience to know a good argument from a bad one. To them, the context is the primary indicator of the meaning of a word when two or more definitions can apply, and the usage patterns of the author are merely secondary. The rest of us tend to lack a sufficient ability to make a good judgment, even if we do this sort of thing as a hobby. That is how lay people find or create fringe theories in historical scholarship that seem to make so much sense, even if they really don't.

Are there really any experts in Biblical understanding? Sure, we have experts in ancient languages, ancient history, ancient mythology, ancient documents - but experts in understanding the big picture? Experts in prophetic interpretations. Experts in understanding how every aspect of their respective discipline interacts with the expertise of another expert. With so much diversity, so much specialization, who are the experts in understanding the whole - experts who are not looking at the trees but are experts on the forest? Somewhere along the line, experts - and particular in Biblical interpretation - have to give way to the irrational elements - how the heck does it all fit together. That 'how' can't be expertly determined - simply because its not always a question of adding two and two together.

And this is not just the case with Biblical interpretations. Einstein is reported to have said, in regard to his discovery: "There are no logical paths to such natural laws, only intuition can reach them". Karl Popper would agree:
"There is no such thing as a logical method of having new ideas, or a logical reconstruction of this process. Every great discovery contains an irrational element or a creative intuition".

If this is the case - then my money would be on those, experts or not, who are striving to think 'outside the box'.

How would I, an amateur and not an expert, know the difference - know what bits and pieces from the experts are going to produce the best possible picture? Trial and error - until one is satisfied, in ones own mind, that the picture makes sense. (Luther again.....here I stand.....)

Biblical, NT, interpretations are not static - as is no other area of knowledge. Staying with the status quo might be comforting but the excitement, the exhilaration, is to be found with those willing to mount the intellectual barricades...Indeed there are dangers on the barricades - but the point to remember about being on the barricades is not that any idea has ultimate value and is therefore worth fighting and dying for - but that its the fighter not the idea that is demonstrating greatness. Or to put that perhaps clearer - consider this quote from Ayn Rand (OK - been there, done that and moved on.......) - remarking on the writings of Victor Hugo:

And, if you think about it, challenging ideas has always been part of Christianity, from the very beginning. Unity in diversity - except that the mother of heretics soon became their inquisitor. Thus, one could very well say that challenging the status quo, challenging the experts, is a very Christian thing to be doing.....

Hans Kung again.

Quote:

The question of the relationship between the Church and heretics is one that remains with us, because heretics have continued and will continue, because every Christian is potentially not only a heretic, but also an inquisitor. As Paul knew, heresies were born with the Church, and the whole life and teaching of the Church are influenced by the question of how the Church should confront heresy.

Much more startling than the fact that the young Church was regarded as a 'heresy' is the fact that from the very beginning there were heresies within the Church. This shows that heresy is not a chance historical phenomenon, but something that is bound up with the nature of the Church .

The real hallmark of Christianity? Heresy - the challenging of ideas that can ignite the spark plug of intellectual evolution. What other belief system demonstrates such a clarion call to dissent?

maryhelena, I respect that. If one values primarily the evolution of ideas to advance more quickly toward the truth, then all of the most peculiar and "fringe" theories should be fully developed, put on the table, and debated. If one is just trying to find the immediate truth, then, well, the positions of the present intellectual establishment are simply your best bet.

My concern may be that there hasn't seem to have been much advancement in the MJ position over the last 100 years. It has been debated, MJ lost, so maybe it is time to make room to develop and debate other fringe theories. There has been some new stuff, yes, but the arguments don't seem to get any better.

Another concern is that the development and debate of MJ seems to lead the advocates to a postmodernist position, where the advocates claim that we just can't trust the data, we don't really know who wrote something where or when, despite what may be the most probable. That is not progress--it is only a dead end.

Before I argued so much about the historicity of Jesus, I argued about creationism vs. the rest of science (such as evolution). That is why I keep bringing up those analogies, and they are offensive, but I know that the creationist model has the same two problems.

ApostateAbe · 12-20-2009, 09:11 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Solo

Quote:

Originally Posted by spin

While this may be true, you don't know what the phrase¹ means, despite your beliefs.

spin

1. Clauses have verbs in them.

This would be one of those occasions when spin and I would be in a violent agreement. Paul's Gal 1:19, if genuine - and there are some who don't believe it is - would not be referring to Jesus as Lord. The term, in Jerusalem, would almost certainly not be deployed to denote kinship with Jesus. This would not be Jewish at all. Besides, we know from the later church accounts of the Ebionites (likely evolved from the original Nazarene congregation) they considered Jesus a simple, righteous, man without status of divinity.

If Paul wrote Gal 1:19 then his reference is parallel to 1 Cor 9:5, which suggests a designation, an inner circle of church brothers who had some priestly functions vis-a-vis the Lord (meaning Lord God). I suggested that the term is probably a corrupted locution rendered into Greek as οἱ ἀδελφοὶ ἐν τῇ διακονίᾳ τοῦ κυρίου, brothers in the service of the Lord, which then became simply brothers of the Lord in the colloquial shorthand .

Regards,
Jiri

That is interesting. Jiri, you say,

"Paul's Gal 1:19 ... would not be referring to Jesus as Lord. The term, in Jerusalem, would almost certainly not be deployed to denote kinship with Jesus. This would not be Jewish at all. Besides, we know from the later church accounts of the Ebionites (likely evolved from the original Nazarene congregation) they considered Jesus a simple, righteous, man without status of divinity."

Do you happen to know of the evidence that a "Lord" would not have an "adelphos" (brother)? It is OK if you do not, I am not challenging you--I am only a student who is trying to investigate. Also, do you think Paul was something like an Ebionite?

Johnny Skeptic · 12-20-2009, 09:14 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ApostateAbe

Another concern is that the development and debate of MJ seems to lead the advocates to a postmodernist position, where the advocates claim that we just can't trust the data, we don't really know who wrote something where or when, despite what may be the most probable. That is not progress--it is only a dead end.

I am not arguing for or against a historical Jesus, but regarding general Bible apologetics, I believe that it is reasonable for skeptics to question who wrote what, where, and when, and what sources the writers used.

ApostateAbe · 12-20-2009, 09:15 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by neilgodfrey

Quote:

Originally Posted by ApostateAbe

It occurred to me that you may think that it has not been established that Paul wrote the epistle to the Galatians. Is that your meaning? I may have barked up the wrong tree.

Ah, we are talking past each other. Will shift lanes here.

No, I'm not talking about interpolations. One can argue about those details at will. My point is more basic. We do not know who wrote the gospels, when or where or for whom. Yet "biblical historians" treat their narratives as sources of historical data. I know of no other historical studies that would ever contemplate using such "unsourced" documents as evidence in this way. What court of law would ever allow a witness to testify anonymously, with no knowledge of his background, location in relation to the events, etc?

As for Paul's epistles, Doherty is very conservative. He accepts the broad scholarly view about their provenance. Yet in fact there is no secure external evidence for anyone even knowing of Paul's letters till well into the second century. And given the culture of literary imitations, fictions etc at the time -- including training in writing letters with authentic detail as if from other characters and times -- and the sudden appearance of a range of fictional literature about Paul at the same time as these letters are first reported, and add to this the fact that the themes in Paul's letters are frequently of immediate interest to second century theologians, and we have little reason to be so confident about "the scholarly consensus".

I am not saying such documents are worthless as sources of historical information. A romance about King Arthur can tell us a lot about the culture and people from the time it was written, but it will tell us nothing about an historical King Arthur. Genesis tells us nothing about how the world or humans came into being, but it tells us a lot about ancient peoples and cultures nonetheless.

Similarly the gospels can tell us a lot -- but we cannot assume that their self-witness, or self-testimony, is valid. No historian in any other field I am aware of makes such assumptions about source documents. Provenance needs to be established by external references and tools.

I have heard it complained that we have to use the gospels and epistles this way because they are all we have. But we can't change our standards or methods of historical enquiry just because we don't have the evidence we would like to answer the questions we want to ask. We have to start with our evidence and determine the sorts of questions it can yield, given its limitations. If that means having to ditch the orthodox view of Christian origins, then that's fine -- at least we will be true to consistent and defensible historical enquiry.

Neil

OK, I think I get what you are saying, thank you, and my apologies. I think probably the lack of data for the lineage of ownership would be the biggest problem. Would you at least take probability estimates for the provenance of texts as legitimate?

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