Clutch

I guess one needs to specify a cohort. Young-Earth Creationism is crackpot even though it goes "with the grain" of many, many people -- because the relevant cohort for assessing crackpottery is the scientific community.

Relative to the relevant cohort of at least minimally competent biblical scholars (Peter's point seems to be), it is crackpottery to dismiss all evidence pointing to a variety of other explanations of the passage.

Haran

The Greek letters also represent manuscripts. Generally, a list like Peter gave will start with early manuscripts in uncial (type of writing) on papyri and progress toward later manuscripts in miniscule (a type of cursive Greek).

If you want to learn more about exactly what each of these represent, I'd suggest visiting a library for or buying (I'd link to them if I had the time. You should be able to find them all on amazon.com):

The Text of the New Testament by Bruce Metzger
The Text of the New Testament by Kurt/Barbara Aland
Nestle-Aland 27th Greek New Testament
United Bible Societies 4th Greek New Testament

These and other introductions to the field of textual criticism will provide you with what manuscripts many/most of these symbols relate to.

For what it is worth, I have also read of reputable scholars who suggest that the "woman caught in adultery" pericope was probably a early, free-floating tradition about the historical Jesus that was somehow incorporated into John (I think I remember reading that it has been found in other locations in John and maybe even in other gospels, but I can't remember at the moment where I read this).

Lewis was not a crackpot and may not have been completely up to date on textual criticism. I assume he would have differentiated between literary and textual criticism...

B. H. Manners

"""""""""But, as I say, Augustine _does_ comment on this passage! And this is what he says,

[quote]

http://www.bibleword.org/john10.html

Augustine was aware of the fact that this passage was
missing from many manuscripts. He gave an opinion
explaining why. Here I quote The King James Version
Defended by Edward F. Hills:

"According to Augustine (c. 400), it was this
moralistic objection to the pericope de adultera
which was responsible for its omission in some of
the New Testament manuscripts known to him.
"Certain persons of little faith," he wrote, "or rather
enemies of the true faith, fearing, I suppose, lest
their wives should be given impunity in sinning,
removed from their manuscripts the Lord's act of
forgiveness toward the adulteress, as if He who had
said 'sin no more' had granted permission to sin."

[unquote; this was the passage from Augustine, De Adult. Conj., ii. 6, 7.]

So what we learn from Augustine is that this passage was _often_ censored by the Christian puritans of his time, for the reasons that he gives!""""""""""""""


BH: Augustine is embarrassed by the fact that there are passages missing from certain texts and that certain texts have stories not found in others. He goes on to blame "puritans" for "corrupting" the texts as a way to explain away this reality. How did Augustine know that the story was in the first copy of John? How did he know for a fact "puritans" were editing the adulterous woman out of John and Luke? The reason I ask is because I often am charged by Christians that I rejected Christ for atheism because I just want to be evil and live my own debauched life. They state it as an undisputable fact and serves as an example of where they and their preachers will think up something as fact when it suits their fancy, when it really isn't. This is not the true reason I am atheist and it is just conjecture on the believer's part . Yet Augustine could have done the same thing with the textual variants he found. He could have just thought up some reason and/or heard a case of someone having a hard time with the story of the woman caught in sin because she is "pardoned" and just assumed someone of that mentality edited it out.

Also, isn't it true that the so called church fathers have had their works redacted and changed somewhat over the years too?

Clutch

Why quibble over the semantics of crackpottery, anyhow? The man advanced Lord, Liar or Lunatic as a sound trilemma. Whether this means he was profoundly ignorant, profoundly dishonest, or profoundly deluded (there, a trilemma of my own!), the phrase "utterly unworthy of serious attention" will surely do all the work "crackpot" was ever meant to do.

Blake

Hear hear, Clutch. Never mind Lewis' blatant lack of qualifications in textual criticism; it seems to me that he makes extremely poor use of his actual qualifications in literary criticism as well. Taking it from the top:

This is, at the least, an idiosyncratic redefinition of "legend" on the basis of artistic merit, which requires some analysis rather than this breezy version of "take my word for it." The usual definition of legend simply involves the belief that at least a kernel of historical truth informs the story, and is in no way based on "clumsiness."

As Steven Carr has already pointed out, this is simply wrong.

That's a sweeping statement, one that I am also unwilling to simply accept on the basis of Lewis' actual expertise. For one thing, the initial conversation in John directly echoes Old Testament prophecy; for Jesus' conversations, is Lewis telling me that in the totality of ancient literature, there are *no* other conversations between, say, a cryptic teacher and students? I suspect Lewis here contented himself with his knowledge of traditional Greek & Latin classics, without actually immersing himself in the more directly relevant surviving contemporary Near Eastern literature. (Perhaps someone one these boards has actual expertise in this field?)

This, of course, is the laughable capstone to Lewis' argument. Hardly thinking about it, livius drusus recalled a famous parallel example from Dante's Inferno, when a series of demons "made trumpets" of their asses. (I suppose the irrelevance of this example likewise confirms the veracity of Dante's account?) Moreover, the irrelevance of the detail is merely asserted, not argued; Geoff Hudson raises the possibility that the scribbling in the dust was to provide a cover of deniability. Personally, I just think Jesus needed a little time to do some quick thinking; in any case, explanations of relevance are obviously not hard to advance.

Speaking of relevance, what on earth is the point of stating that no one has ever based any doctrine on this detail?

So: C.S. Lewis is no textual critic, and it turns out, not much of a literary critic either--at least where his thinking is colored by his religious prejudices.

Peter Kirby

Thank you Blake. That gives me an idea for an article--I could call it "The Ancient Art of Fiction." Maybe I could make it a collaborative effort. The idea that novelistic fiction is a nineteenth century invention needs to be exposed as foolishness.

best,
Peter Kirby

Boro Nut

I'm not sure, but surely it couldn't predate the invention of the submarine?

Boro MNut

Tharmas

I was inspired along similar lines to do a short article on whether there are any independent tests we can apply to help us reliably distinguish if a text is history or fiction.

I am hoping to take it into a discussion of the so-called “embarrassment criterion,” which, as far as I can tell, is used strictly in New Testament studies. The embarrassment criterion is perhaps the most formal statement of Lewis’ class of argument that “they wouldn’t have said such-and-such about Jesus if it hadn’t been true,” and I for one have long felt it was worth a closer examination.

On another note, the attached article lists many of the early textual witnesses that lack the pericope in question; it’s really quite a few: article by Sarah Wagner

Wagner's conclusion:

Altogether, the antiquity of the adultera pericope itself is maintained. The tradition of the story itself may be early and it was probably circulated among the churches before it was included in the Gospel of John. The pericope has all the trappings of historical veracity and it was most likely a piece of oral tradition that circulated in parts of the Western church. It most likely began to be inserted into the Gospels in the second century when there was greater freedom with the text. However, this insertion obviously did not spread to all already existing text families, thus the confusion as to its actual place in the canon.

In other words, the story may be old, but what we’re getting in GJohn is certainly not reporting.

I looked up the adultera pericope in my Metzger (The Text of the New Testament) and it had the interesting observation that we know many early copies lacked it because we know how many lines GJohn was supposed to contain – the information was disseminated so clerks could check themselves after they had completed copies. The “official” line count of GJohn shows it lacked the pericope.

the_cave

Utterly? But surely you don't even mean "utterly". I assume you would defer to his judgment when it came to, for example, the history of Renaissance literature in English.

Maybe it would simply be better to say "We don't always need to take C.S. Lewis seriously," or even, "We rarely need to take C.S. Lewis seriously as a Biblical scholar." You could even say "We rarely need to take C.S. Lewis seriously as an apologist," and that would be a legitimate claim (one that I might disagree with). Or you could even just say "Sometimes C.S. Lewis has some crackpot ideas." Now that I might simply accept.

Geoff Hudson

He who has no crackpot ideas probably has no ideas.

Geoff