What is the crux of your argument about the importÂance of eyewitnesses in the Gospel stories?
Richard Bauckham: The central idea is to put the eyewitnesses back into our thinking about how the Gospels originated. My argument is that they are not just people who started a long process of tradition that eventually took form in the written Gospels. They must have been people who had known Jesus and stayed around, who were well known in the Early Church ”” people you would go to if you wanted to learn about Jesus’s teachÂings or Jesus’s life.
If you think about the eyewitnesses in this way, it helps you to think differently about the process of oral tradition, and it becomes a great deal more likely the Gospel-writers would have been in a direct, or very close relationship, with the eyewitÂnesses.
–Richard Bauckham speaking about his Michael Ramsey award winning book in this week’s Church Times (it is subscription only so I cannot link until next week)
“They must have been . . . .” (Emphasis added.)
Mr. Bauckham appears to be strictly a theologian. His naivety about eyewitnesses is understandable but unmistakable. I’d give his views a bit more weight if he had ever been an investigative journalist, or a police detective, or a litigator.
I think the key thing about the assorted eye-witnesses is that they were obviously somewhat flawed as individuals, and the Bible presents them as such. No fabricated super-heroes here.
Most tellingly, the Bible offers as witnesses to the resurrection several women, who at that time were held completely unreliable as witnesses. That scripture presents it as such absolutely screams “this is the way it happened.” A fabricated account would most certainly not have presented women as witnesses.
D.C., I suggest you read his book before summarily passing judgment on it. Not that it answers everything in your evidenciary arguments (which are, as I’ve noted in our previous discussions, able to be critiqued from the critical realist position), but I have to admit that I had you in mind when reading his book. His arguments about eye-witness are not so naive as you might be inclined to think.
And the point is that it is eye witness testimony. The only (ONLY) evidence we have. So if DC is not happy with that then there is no evidence at all. You might as well refer to one of those empty (blank) page journals and write your own.
Br. Michael,
[blockquote]So if DC is not happy with that then there is no evidence at all. [/blockquote]
That’s quite the essential point on which the revisionists are hanging (no pun intended) their hats, isn’t it?
Greetings.
There is a very detailed, chapter-by-chapter critique of Bauckham [url=”http://vridar.wordpress.com/category/book-reviews/bauckham-jesus-and-the-eyewitnesses/page/4/”]here[/url], along with a great deal of other commentary on such issues. I have only just found the site myself, and make no claims other than it seems to make detailed and reasonable (not necessarily correct, just reasonable) criticisms of approaches such as Bauckam’s. I offer it only as grist for the mill for those interested, not as “proof” of any position.
I freely admit that I have not (yet?) read Bauckham’s book, though I have run across this question before in simpler terms. And only yesterday I read in C.B. Moss’ [i]The Christian Faith[/i] (London: SPCK, 1954, p. 74):
[quote]We cannot say “It must have been so, therefore it was so”; belief must be based on positive evidence.[/quote]
a position he takes on several issues (the cite above is from a discussion of the Perpetual Virginity). This seems quite reasonable to me, though of course questions of evidence can be rather difficult in practice.
regards,
JPB
PS: Interestingly, Moss also states (p. 17, same edition):
[quote]But though our belief is not founded upon argument, it is buttressed by arguments. We are quite willing to argue, and we believe that reason is on our side; bue we do not think that reason by itself will make any man a Christian.[/quote]
I need to rephrase my comment: Mr. Bauckham’s apparent naivety about eyewitness testimony, and about hearsay reports thereof written decades later in another language by anonymous authors, is understandable but unmistakable.
Obviously, first-hand eyewitness testimony can be perfectly good evidence. But we don’t automatically assume it to be so — we inquire • whether the witness was in a position to perceive that to which she testifies; • whether she had any impairments that might have made her perception unreliable (recall the movie My Cousin Vinnie, in which Joe Pesci’s character gently has the elderly lady witness remove her glasses, and establishes that she was highly unlikely to have actually seen what she claimed); • whether she had any preconceived notions that might have influenced her interpretation and memory of her perception.
As to hearsay: The more consequential the decision, the more cautious we are (or should be) about relying on hearsay. Imagine we’re at SHAEF headquarters on June 5, 1944, when Ike was deciding whether to give the go-ahead for the D-Day invasion of Normandy. Suppose Ike were told that his weather-guessers [an affectionate Navy nickname] had received a series of messages — written in English, by unidentified persons, and not entirely consistent in their content — that certain farmers in Iceland had reported weather conditions indicating that the storm in the Channel would let up by morning. We can safely assume Ike would not have ordered the invasion go-ahead on the basis of that evidence alone — especially when he had the viable (though less-appealing) alternative of waiting until the next time the tides would be right, when the weather might well be better.
The claims of orthodox Christianity are based on documentary evidence not unlike our imaginary Icelandic weather reports. Few reasserter theologians seem willing to acknowledge the difficulties this fact poses, or that declining to assent to those claims is frankly the better use of God’s gift of judgment.
Bauckham is not naive at all. He has a rather extensive discussion on the difference between courtroom testimony, and other kinds of testimony, and addresses in particular why courtroom testimony has very limited application to the problem of the kinds of issues raised by the gospels.
[i]My Cousin Vinnie[/i] provides just the kind of contrast that Bauckham focuses on. Vinnie is able to show that eyewitnesses are not all that good at establishing the details of the controverted testimony that courtrooms are concerned with. First, courtroom testimony is often concerned with fine and controverted details that, at the time they took place, were not particularly memorable to the persons being questioned.
To illustrate from examples in My Cousin Vinnie:
It was a green automobile? Can you say for certain that it was exactly this particular model of green automobile?
You say you saw two young men run out of the Sack of Suds convenience store? Can you be absolutely certain it was these two particular young men?
You say you were cooking grits for breakfast? Can you tell me exactly how long it takes you to make your grits? And does that fit with the timeline during which the young men were supposedly in the store?
That is, courtroom testimony often asks people to remember very specific details about trivial events.
However, Vinnie never tried to argue on the weakness of eyewitness testimony that the convenience store robbery never took place, that the clerk was not killed, or that the robbers were not two young men (of about the same age as the suspects) driving a green automobile. He argued rather for mistaken identity. There witnesses were correct about almost everything. They just identified the wrong suspects.
To the contrary, Bauckham shows that while people often fail in just these kinds of trivial details–“I distinctly remember he was wearing a red hat.” “I’m sorry, there was no red hat.”–their memories are quite exact when it comes to events that have significant importance in their lives.
To provide an example: I have had many phone calls with my father in my life. I remember few of them. However, I do remember some specific details of the last phone conversation I ever had with my father. Why? Because he told me he was having an operation the next week to prevent a stroke that had a 90% percent change of success, but that it could fail, and he wanted to talk to me one last time if the operation failed. It did fail, and he had an incapacitating stroke, and that phone call sticks out in my mind. I also remember in great detail the last time I saw my father alive, and the last words I spoke to him, although I do not remember the details of many other conversations I had with him on other occasions.
The gospels are stories of the latter kind, not the former. They do not concern trivial events, but events of great significant to the participants. There are indeed discrepancies as to the fine details of many of the events. Did the cleansing of the Temple take place (as in John) at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, or, as in the synoptics, at the end of his ministry? Were there six days (Matthew) or eight days (Luke) after Jesus’ sayings about taking up one’s cross and the transfiguration? Did Jesus say to the rich young man, “Why do you ask me about what is good?” (Matthew) or “Why do you call me good?” (Mark). Did Jesus heal a centurion’s servant (the synoptics) or a centurion’s son (John)? Were there one (Luke and John) or two events (Mark) of the multiplication of the loaves?
But there are no differences about the key events themselves. Jesus did cleanse the temple. There was a transfiguration. A rich man did refuse to follow Jesus because the stakes were too high. Jesus did indeed do a long distance healing of a household member of a centurion. Jesus performed a miraculous multiplication of loaves and fishes, and fed a crowd on at least one occasions.
And, of course, most important, Jesus rose bodily from the dead, the tomb in which he was buried, was discovered empty, and Jesus appeared alive to, and spoke to his disciples after his death.
If these events took place at all, they are exactly the kinds of events that would be indelibly etched in the memories of those who witnessed them. If they did not take place, they are not the kinds of things that would be discredited by D.C’s quibblings about the reliability of courtroom eyewitness testimony. Rather, it would need to be shown that the authors of the gospels were “making it up” or that they depended on witnesses who were “making it up.” One could not get from “There is disagreement between the number of days until the transfiguration” to “The transfiguration never happened.”
The gospel narratives are either fairly accurate accounts of highly unusual events that really happened, or they are pious frauds.
And, as usual, please excuse my numerous typing errors.
Thank you, Dr Witt. Excellent points.
The more consequential the decision, the more cautious we are (or should be) about relying on hearsay.
Indeed, we should be cautious about decisions that have consequences, but the consequences of decisions have little if anything to do with the reliability of the witnesses who report them. The bombing of Pearl Harbor had tremendous consequences, but we do not immediately put on our skeptical eyeglasses when we read the firsthand accounts of witnesses who were there. “This event led to WWII; therefore we should not trust those who claim they were there.” We treat these eyewitnesses as we treat any others. And precisely because the event was so earth-shattering, the witnesses would find particular aspects of the event etched in their memory: “I remember it like it was yesterday!”
Just so with the gospels.
Bp. Robinson in Redating the NT has fun with scholars in whose world nothing happens. Everything is just someone’s version of someone else’s story. They would say the the world war narrative began to develope in the 3rd decade of the 20th century. They would look at the writings of events which occurred in the life time of the writer and note that there were traces of the primative tradition. You can hear this on the History Channel now.
Wm Witt [#11], you’e correct that we don’t put on our skeptical eyeglasses about the Pearl Harbor attack. But surely you’re joking if you mean to suggest that the quality of the NT evidence is in the same league as that of December 7.
Moreover, you misunderstand my point about consequences. The consequences of concern are not the already-known consequences of the historical event itself: they’re the unknown future consequences of the decisions we’re being told we should make on the premise that the event occurred. Few if any of us are ever asked to make a life-changing decision on the assumption that the stories about the Pearl Harbor attack are accurate. Yet orthodox Christians ask us to do that every day, with incomparably less evidentiary support.
—————
In your #8, you say “The gospel narratives are either fairly accurate accounts of highly unusual events that really happened, or they are pious frauds.”
Once again falling victim to the fallacy of the false dichotomy, you’ve left out one of the obvious other possibilities, namely that over the decades, the stories mutated in the retelling and acquired various “spins” — as stories are wont to do, especially in a contentious partisan environment like that of the early church. If we’re going to talk about pious frauds, perhaps we should examine traditionalists’ willful averting of their eyes from this possibility, in their insistence that the gospel accounts are sufficient to support the factual claims of the orthodox.
If eyewitness testimony was the only bit of evidence for the gospel, I too would have a hard time accepting it.
Part of the reality we ascribe to an account is how well it correlates with other events, with other facts.
Even better if the event testified to is not directly anticipated, but reflects meaning back into the preexisting facts; if it makes the things already known with confusion come into focus with meaning.
I think the accounts in the gospels are just such testimony that makes sense of the old testament accounts, the Law and the Prophets, the history of Israel, and even the thought of sages outside the Judeo/Christian tradition, and my own experience.
Just as with the idea of a heliocentric system, the new thought made all the inexplicable bits of planetary motion rational. We accept it not principally on the authority of Copernicus, but on its clarity and utility for explaining the rest. So the testimony of the four evangelists rests not so much on the authority of eyewitness accounts, but the centrality of that which they testify about, which is subject to analysis without reference to their reliability as eyewitnesses.
[blockquote]But surely you’re joking if you mean to suggest that the quality of the NT evidence is in the same league as that of December 7.[/blockquote]
I was not addressing the question of whether the NT evidence is in the same league as that of December 7. I was addressing the question you raised of whether one should gauge the credibility of an event based on its consequences. There is no logical connection between the two. Events with enormous consequences for one’s future, and about which one has to make a decision, may be based either on good or less than good historical testimony. The decision must still be made.
To use the example I already noted: My father was told by his surgeon that if he did not have a certain operation, a stroke was virtually certain. He was also told that the operation he would need to undergo had a 90% chance of success.
Without hesitation, my father decided to undergo the operation. He did not do a detailed investigation of his doctor’s medical credentials, or of the medical school from which he graduated; he did not undergo a detailed study of heart disease, its causes and consequences. Because he had previous reason to trust an authority who had not led him astray in the past, he made a decision involving great risk merely on the say so of one person.
And, in taking that risk, my father ended up being in the 10% for whom the operation was not a success. But the failure of the operation had nothing to do either with the physician’s reliability, or with my father’s need to do an extensive investigation. If he had done so, he would have discovered that the doctor’s credentials were good, and that indeed there was a 90% chance of success, and that at least in 10 cases out of a hundred there would be failure. Doing more extensive background work would not have lessened the risk.
[blockquote]Once again falling victim to the fallacy of the false dichotomy, you’ve left out one of the obvious other possibilities, namely that over the decades, the stories mutated in the retelling and acquired various “spins†— as stories are wont to do, especially in a contentious partisan environment like that of the early church.[/blockquote]
Even as I wrote the words, I anticipated that you would once again drag out this tired old “false dichotomy” claim. Sorry, the gospel writings are written too close to the events at hand, and provide too coherent of a picture, and can be cross checked against one another in too many different ways for them to have “mutated” in the way you suggest. The closest kind of parallel between Jesus and other ancient historical figures would be between Jesus and Socrates or Caesar (about whom there are also near contemporary records), not Jesus and Buddha, about whom there is a several hundred year gap between the events and the records.
Given the close correlation between Jesus’ words and deeds–the heart of Jesus’ preaching was the presence of the Kingdom; Jesus’ miracles and exorcisms were signs of the Kingdom, the consistent testimony about the kinds of things he said and did; the peculiar continuities and differences between Jesus’ preaching and both 2nd Temple Judaism and the early Church–we have every reason to believe that the gospels are fairly reliable accounts of actual historical events. The only reason to doubt the basic narrative is that one is unwilling to consider their central claims about Jesus’ identity and its consequences for our own lives. There is indeed a risk involved!
And, yet, if we reject the fundamental assertion about Jesus’ identity, the close connection between his words and deeds, and the coherence of the entire narrative, means that any other version of the events we come up with will be entirely a subjective creation of our own–which is why every generation that has attempted to reconstruct an alternative “historical Jesus” rather than the one witnessed to in the texts has come up with its own entirely different (and incompatible) version–from the humanist Jesus of Harnack, to the deluded apocalyptic prophet of Schweitzer, to the Preacher of existential decision of Bultmann and the 2nd Quest, to the warmed over 1960’s academic Cynic/Sage of the Jesus Seminar.
By the way, in introducing the “false dichotomy” claim, and in introducing the possibility that the gospels might be “spin,” DC contradicts himself.
If the gospels are indeed the kind of “spin” DC suggests they are, then they are not reliable historical accounts. In which case, the false dichotomy is not a “false” dichotomy at all. If the gospels are “spin,” then they are not (as I put it), “fairly reliable accounts of highly unusual events that actually happened.” They are, rather, fairly unreliable accounts of highly unusual events that actually did not happen.
What DC calls the “mutation” and “retelling” that acquires “various spins,” as such stories are “wont to do” in a “especially in a contentious partisan environment like the early church,” is simply a more convoluted and polite way of saying “pious fraud.”
Wm. Witt [#15] writes:
First off, heartfelt condolences about your father. I sort of understand how you feel: My mother died recently, in circumstances not too dissimilar to those you recount, and my own father is slowly being killed by a rare and incurable form of leukemia, after having been made dangerously ill by an experimental (and apparently-unsuccessful) chemotherapy treatment.
Your analogy isn’t a bad one. I’ll bet your dad, and/or you, did at least some investigation into your dad’s condition, the available treatments, and the possible alternative outcomes if he had elected not to have the surgery. If you had discovered that the surgery was a bit more controversial than his surgeon said, I imagine that could have made a difference in his treatment decision.
By analogy, each person has to decide for him- or herself whether to embrace the claims of orthodoxy. I don’t fault those (like my wife and daughter) who, after careful consideration of the ‘contra-indications’ and the possible outcomes, decide that on balance it’s for them.
I do, however, harshly fault those reasserters who simply ignore or wave away the glaring contra-indications and insist that anyone who makes a different decision than they did is necessarily mistaken. In my view, such people are insulting not just our intelligence but their own.
Just a quick look at the Manuscript (MS) evidence should dispel the idea that too long of a time elapsed from the recording of the events to ‘tradition’ re-writing the story. We have more manuscripts and fragments of manuscripts as well as lectionaries of NT readings dating back closer to the events (some say the earliest fragments or the Gospels may date back to 50AD), over 5,600 manuscripts dating from the second to the 15th century, etc. with only minor discrepancies in the texts (less than .05% differences — for a 99.5% compatibility in texts).
The early authorship, reliability and authority of the texts has not been in dispute for many years.
Compare the MS of the NT with the next most numerous ancient text, with which there is no question of reliability) and you see a glaring gap —
Homer’s Iliad boasts some 643 ms most of which are 500 years (at earliest) from the writing. Yet few scholars question the accuracy of these ms from the ‘original’ (claiming 95% compatibility in texts).
Yet with the NT, in a period of 50 – 150 years (depending on which MS you reference) between MS and event, there is no end of ‘scholars’ such as DC saying we cannot trust them. IMO it is not about reliability, but about being willing to admit there may be something higher then their own scholarship to which they may be held accountable.
For a more detailed examination of MS evidence, [url=http://www.carm.org/questions/about-bible/manuscript-evidence-superior-new-testament-reliability]this site[/url] offers a good overview, as does [url=http://www.ntcanon.org/]New Testament Canon (dot) org[/url].
I’m convinced, based on my research of over 30 years, that the NT details the life, death and resurrection of Jesus with a degree of accuracy unparalleled in the ancient record.
Jim Elliott <>< Florida
DC #17
Your compassion to Bill’s situation is appreciated from this reader. However, your silence regarding Dr. Witt’s posts (15 and 16) is much more revealing than that to which you chose to respond. Do you not have an answer to him? The “contra-indications” are most certainly about you, not the texts. I pray the Lord will show you that soon. Blessings.
Kevin Maney+ [#19], I’ve responded here on several occasions to the points Wm Witt made in his #15 and 16. I’ll recap briefly.
Wm Witt writes:
This is unadulterated nonsense.
• It’s beyond peradventure that stories can mutate in very short times. See the discussion and illustrative examples (and consideration of common counterarguments) in a blog posting I did a few years ago, Reasons to Question the Reliability of Scripture.
• The NT evidence gives us ample reason to suspect its stories were the subjects of mutation See, e.g., Six Reasons for Skepticism About the New Testament Accounts.
—————
Wm Witt [#19] writes:
The conventional definition of ‘fraud’ includes intentional deception. I make no such accusation about the NT stories.
For an everyday example of unintentional (and therefore non-fraudulent) story distortion, consider a conversation my wife and I had at dinner last night. We thought we disagreed intensely about something. We discovered, though, that what I thought I had said, which had started the argument, was materially different from ‘what she heard’; in reality, we were in complete agreement. Now suppose we had stopped talking after our initial disagreement, and that my wife had retold ‘what I said’ to someone else. In all likelihood, her retelling would have been a material distortion of what I actually had in mind — not because of any intent to deceive, but purely because of run-of-the-mill human fallibility.
—————
LibraryJim [#18], the fundamental problem with the NT isn’t the manuscript evidence per se, it’s the statements made in the manuscripts.
The comparison with Homer isn’t helpful, because no one is asking all the people in the world to radically reorder their lives on the premise that the Homeric accounts are accurate.
(This returns to my point in #7 and 13: The more consequential the decision, the more convinced we want to be of the reliability of the information on which we must base the decision.)
I respect those who, after due consideration, conclude that the factual claims made by orthodox Christianity ring true, and that they are called to organize their lives accordingly. Unfortunately, some such folks then insist that this is the only plausible choice in the matter; those folks are seriously ill-informed, and/or intellectually arrogant.
(If the factual claims of orthodox Christianity were so obviously true, it’s reasonable to think that in 2,000 years most of the world would have assented to them. What we have instead, though, is a world in which only 1/3 of the population are Christians of any sort; and who knows how many of them actually believe the assertions made in the Nicene Creed.)
[blockquote] It’s beyond peradventure that stories can mutate in very short times.[/blockquote]
Let us be clear about exactly what DC is claiming. The agreed consensus of NT critical scholarship is that Mark’s gospel was written sometime between the mid-50’s and 70 AD. Mark’s gospel contains all those stories of healings, exorcisms, and nature miracles that make the Jesus story problematic for modern skeptics like DC–multiplication of the loaves and fishes, walking on water, calming a storm, raising of a dead girl, healing of a woman with a hermorrhage, healing of a man with a withered hand, healing by long distance, healing of blind and deaf people, cursing a fig tree, the transfiguration.
In all three of the synoptic gospels, the miracles are so closely connected with the teaching that to disregard one demands disregarding the other. Jesus indicates that his miracles are signs of the eschatological Kingdom, and the Pharisees turn against Jesus because he heals on the Sabbath. In the unquestionably historic passage in which John the Baptist questions whether Jesus is the “One to come,” Jesus responds to John by pointing to his miracles as evidence that John need look no further.
If these events did not happen–and while DC might admit something like psychological healings, past discussion indicates that he does not at all believe in any of the nature miracles–then the early Christian community was telling not just a few, but many extraordinary stories about Jesus, well within the lifetime and memory of those who could (and would have) challenged them. I can remember events that happened twenty or thirty years ago as if they happened yesterday. If someone began telling stories about an acquaintance of mine from twenty or thirty years ago that suggested this person regularly performed miracles, I think I could remember whether they happened.
The gospel miracles are not like the game of “gossip” where someone whispers something into someone’s ear, and it is heard slightly differently later. They are not like the kinds of misunderstandings DC might have about a conversation with his wife over dinner last night. There is no comparison between “I thought you said such and such.” “No, I said something else” and “I thought you said we should share our lunch.” “No, I created a miraculous lunch and fed five thousand people with a few loaves and fishes.”
If the miraculous deeds that the gospels tell about Jesus did not really happen, they are what honest people call “whoppers.” Such stories do not grow up know historical figures in a matter of twenty or thirty years. It takes centuries–as it did with the stories about Gautama Buddha.
[blockquote]The conventional definition of ‘fraud’ includes intentional deception. I make no such accusation about the NT stories.[/blockquote]
If people were telling stories of miraculous deeds performed by Jesus within twenty or thirty years of his life, and such deeds did not happen, then someone who knew better made them up. If that someone told them to others, expecting them to be believed when the someone knew that they did not happen, that is intentional deception. Moroever, given the large number of miraculous stories told about Jesus from a very early period, there was not just one someone, but numerous parties, all collaborating to create an account of Jesus that had no correspondence to reality. That is not just fraud, but conspiracy to fraud.
Well, this rather begs the question. DC claims that he bases his decisions on evidence. It appears rather that he appeals to popular consensus. Based on this logic, those who condemned Socrates to death and supported Hitler’s Nazism during the Third Reich just had to be right.
Wm Witt [#21] writes:
It’s touching how much trust you put in the supposed ability — and motivation — of the various factions of the early Christian community to correct factual errors in the oral tradition.
Even with today’s instantaneous communication, stories that have a ring of truth to them — because they fit into the audience’s biases, preconceived notions, agendas, and life experiences — can be “sticky.” Such stories can remain in circulation long after their factual falsity has been demonstrated. (Any seasoned political operative will confirm this, which is why campaigns so often go negative.) We have no reason to think human nature was significantly different in first-century Palestine.
———–
Wm Witt writes:
I have a little more charitable view than that: I’ve seen first-hand that people can form an inaccurate idea about what happened and seize on that idea as the truth” because, to them, “it just seems right.”
EXAMPLE: Twenty-plus years ago I was a juror in a capital murder case. As we were deliberating in the jury room, one woman juror said, “well, IÂ think what happened is [X].” The problem was, we had exactly zero evidence that X had actually happened. The foreman, who was also a lawyer, and I had to gently remind the woman of the judge’s instructions that we were to base our decision solely on the evidence. Another juror later did essentially the same thing on a different issue (this time, though, the foreman and I didn’t have to correct him, because other jurors did so).
EXAMPLE: I regularly receive emails, forwarded by some of my relatives, whose originators are absolutely convinced that President Obama is secretly a Muslim.
EXAMPLE: In the aftermath of OJ Simpson’s 1994 murder trial, legal experts agreed that the mostly-minority jurors were perfectly willing to believe the defense’s argument that the L.A.P.D. quit looking for the real killer after they decided they could make a case against Simpson, because that belief was a good fit for their preconceived notions, biases, and life experiences.
(That’s why litigators work so hard to craft stories that will be a good fit in this way.)
—————-
Wm. Witt writes:
Leaving aside your reductio ad Hitlerum argument, Bill, you need to re-read my statement more carefully.
I wasn’t appealing to consensus as a positive refutation of the traditionalist view, as you seem to think.
My point instead was that, in view of Christianity’s mixed track record, during 2,000 years of getting humanity to accept the traditionalist view, our traditionalist friends don’t exactly come across as credible when they insist that such acceptance is a sine qua non to being a right-thinking person.
Sigh. From an historian’s perspective, the relilability of an ancient document depends on 1) how many MS there are in existence, 2) how close they are to the original writings, 3) the consensus of documentary texts (i.e., differences in the text itself).
In this context, the comparison to Homer is valid. It speaks directly to the overwhelming evidence that a) the text documents ARE reliable and b) the contents of the earliest are not contradicted by the later document.
Thus we have very good supportive, historical evidence for the accurate transmittal of the NT MS documents from the original autographs (no longer in existence) to the latest MS, based on comparative textual analysis.
#22 writes:[blockquote]EXAMPLE: In the aftermath of OJ Simpson’s 1994 murder trial, legal experts agreed that the mostly-minority jurors were perfectly willing to believe the defense’s argument that the L.A.P.D. quit looking for the real killer after they decided they could make a case against Simpson, because that belief was a good fit for their preconceived notions, biases, and life experiences.[/blockquote]But this appears to fit his own position, rather than undermining it. He does not want to believe all this stuff about miracles and empty tombs, and so finds lots of reasons not to.
There were in fact many flaky stories about Jesus circulating in ancient times, in various heretical writings, some of which we knew about only in the Fathers’ refutations of them until the documents surfaced in modern times. This is additional evidence that the early Church knew what the real story about Jesus was and defended it against inventions and distortions.
If you reject out of hand a supernatural explanition for historical events it kind of limits your understanding of a supernatural (I know this is redundent) God who acts in history doesn’t it.
23, DC is insisting on evidence that one could produce in trial, with the wintesses subject to cross-examination and all the panoply of a adversary proceeding. But that sort of evidence no longers exists today. You cannot put the apostles on the stand and get direct and in court testimony from them about the events that they witnessed. All we have is what they wrote. Thus he requires an impossible standard, one that no historian uses, and under his standard there is no evidence that is, was or ever will be that will be able to satisfy him.
LibraryJim [#23], your sigh is misplaced.
I would probably be willing to stipulate that any given MS of a NT document is a serviceably-accurate reproduction of the original autograph.
That’s not the point.
The question is: On what basis do we conclude that the factual assertions made in the original autograph are correct?
Oversimplifying the question: How do we know the author knew what s/he was talking about?
To use an obvious example: Why should we accept the factual accuracy of the Prologue of the Fourth Gospel?
—————-
Katherine [#24], like Bill Witt, you have a touching faith that the early church was interested in seeking out and proclaiming the truth, no matter where the search for truth led. The NT materials themselves (e.g., Acts; Galatians) indicate that might not have been exactly the case.
Br. Michael [#25], I’m not trying to force all historical inquiry onto a Procrustean bed of litigation practice. What I am interested in, however, is applying basic truth-seeking principles, of a kind seen most often in litigation and in the scientific method, but also used in other areas of life.
When we apply those principles to the NT evidence and other things we know about human nature, it’s clear that the NT evidence simply isn’t sufficient to support traditionalist conceptions of christology and soteriology.
DC,
That depends largely on your experience as the key authority in this issue.
I can call witnesses who have experienced miracles who would refute your statements.
As to human nature, I offer the GK Chesterton quote:
“Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved,” (Orthodoxy, chap. 2).
I think we can trust the Church Fathers who have verified that the Gospels were written by eyewitnesses, many of whom taught the Church Fathers and called them to ministry! If those closest to the events verified the validity of the writings, I don’t think we, 2000 years later, have much of a case to nullify them.
DC, you can protest all you want to, but your prior statements and arguments are to the contrary.
D.C., you don’t believe, and that’s certainly a choice you are entitled to make. This discussion demonstrates once again that traditional believers and modern Episcopalians are not playing on the same team. I’m honored to be on Dr. Witt’s team.
LibraryJim [#28], my experience isn’t just personal or anecdotal. It’s based in part on 25+ years of practicing law. I’ve spent much of my career as a technology litigator, struggling to piece together a coherent picture of past events from fragmentary and often-inconsistent witness testimony and documentary evidence.
Any competent police detective, investigative journalist, or litigator will confirm my factual assertions about story mutation.
I too trust the Church Fathers to have done what they regarded as the “right” thing. I’m not nearly as willing as you, though, to rely on their ability to distinguish between what was factually accurate and what they wanted to be true.
DC,
your choice, and your spiritual loss. 🙁
Perhaps I’ve lost the argument along the way, D.C., but please explain the logical consistency of this:
[blockquote]I don’t fault those (like my wife and daughter) who, after careful consideration of the ‘contra-indications’ and the possible outcomes, decide that on balance it’s for them…I do, however, harshly fault those reasserters who simply ignore or wave away the glaring contra-indications and insist that anyone who makes a different decision than they did is necessarily mistaken. In my view, such people are insulting not just our intelligence but their own.[/blockquote]
and this:
[blockquote]When we apply those principles to the NT evidence and other things we know about human nature, it’s clear that the NT evidence simply isn’t sufficient to support traditionalist conceptions of christology and soteriology.[/blockquote]
It seems to be that you are saying that anyone who accepts the reliability of the NT witness for accepting “traditionalist conceptions of christology and soteriology” (and that would describe not only Protestants and Anglicans but Catholics and the Orthodox) is, in a word, wrong. That assertion strangely mirrors the “intelligence-insulting” view you criticize in the first paragraph I lifted from one of your comments.
Is epistemological humility necessary only for those who accept and believe the NT witness?
I wish I could say that it was touching that DC is so committed to naturalist rationalism and the Cartestian methodology of doubt that rather than address the issues raised in a discussion he repeatedly changes to another subject, hoping that no one will notice.
DC continues to ignore the central claim of Bauckham’s book–which I have made repeatedly above. There were numerous eye witnesses to Jesus’ ministry who would still have been alive at the time that the gospels were written. Certainly at least a handful of those who were not eyewitnesses would have been somewhat interested in consulting with those eyewitnesses to ask about what really happened? Certainly some of the eyewitnesses who knew what really happened would have wanted to correct a story that had gone seriously wrong?
DC is correct about one thing. The New Testament records lots of disagreements–primarily about such issues as circumcision or eating meat sacrificed to idols. There were also in existence by the time of the second century alternative versions of Christianity than thte orthodoxy which we find in the gospels. There were Ebionites, who endorsed a Jewish version of Christianity. There were Gnostics, who embraced a dualist version of Christianity.
What is oddly lacking is any evidence whatsoever that there was ever anything like a liberal Protestant version of Christianity in the early church–a version of Christianity that understood Jesus to be a wise moral teacher, who performed no miracles, and made no Messianic claims, the kind of Jesus that DC could believe in. It is quite odd that for all the NT’s honesty about the early church’s real disagreements, there is nary a word about this non-supernatural Christianity that must surely have existed somewhere if Jesus was the kind of person DC says that he is. There were alternative versions of Christianity besides orthodoxy that survived. The only one that did not, and disappeared so completely that it left no evidence that it had ever even existed, was the group that, if DC is correct, would have been the only one with something like the truth.
It is almost as if DC believes there was some kind of very selective neutron bomb that hit the early church, destroying only those eyewitnesses who would have known what really happened, and leaving alive instead a group of people who for some bizarre reason insisted on making up numerous creative stories about miraculous events that never happened, at the same time apparently convinced that these events that they had invented out of whole cloth really had happened, because, as DC informs us, these folks were sincere and did not intend to deceive.
I find DC’s version of the history of the early church to be quite creative–but far more unbelievable than the version one actually reads about in the gospels.
Todd Granger [#33], epistemological humility is an appropriate standard for judging affirmative assertions of fact, not for judging the act of epistemological assessment itself.
(It would seem to be incoherent [or maybe circular, or recursive; I can’t decide which] to claim that the assessment itself must be subject to an epistemological-humility standard; that way lies a post-modern “true for you but not for me,” I suspect.)
I flatter myself that my own assertions of theological-, christological-, and soteriological fact — which are few, and provisional — more or less meet this standard.
______________
Wm. Witt [#34], I do indeed believe there was a “very selective neutron bomb” of sorts. It definitely took the form of the ravages of time, on papyrus and other writing materials. In some cases, it may have taken the form of book-burning.
Re-read some of the works of the early church fathers. Several of them refer to, and a few of them extensively quote, ‘heretical’ works that have not otherwise survived because (at best) no one recopied them and the writing materials eventually disintegrated.
The fact that the author of Luke found it necessary to make a careful investigation suggests that there were more stories floating around, or variations thereof, than the ones he chose to record. God only knows what evidence was lost that might have helped later scholars make an independent assessment of what actually happened.
BTW, I will be traveling starting at oh-dark-thirty tomorrow and won’t have access to my computer for a day or so; if anyone continues this conversation, please don’t interpret my silence as anything other than that.
Todd Granger [#33], I need to supplement my response: Epistemological humility may indeed be appropriate in judging the methodology by which we judge assertions of fact. I’m pretty comfortable that (what we could call) an evidence-based methodology would stand up to scrutiny on that score, as long as the evidence we consider includes the meta-evidence, if you will, of the fallibility of human perception, memory, and thinking.
Suppose there was, as William Witt says, “a version of Christianity that understood Jesus to be a wise moral teacher, who performed no miracles, and made no Messianic claims, the kind of Jesus that DC could believe in.” D.C. says that this Jesus existed but disappeared in Christian literature. But wouldn’t there be some record of such a Jesus in Jewish traditions? This would be the kind of Jesus they also could believe in. It doesn’t seem, if that’s who he was, that the Jewish leaders would have bothered to have him condemned — and the crucifixion is one historical fact referred to by non-Christians, both Roman and Jewish.
I noticed that DC danced all around the issue, but never addressed Todd’s pointing out DC’s double standard of proudly professing himself right while condemning others who also claim to be right.
Katherine [#38], Paula Frederiksen’s conjecture makes a lot of sense to me — that the Romans executed Jesus because they were concerned that the crowds thought he was the Messiah and might get out of hand. Had Jesus himself proclaimed that he was the Messiah, chances are the Romans would have executed not just him but his followers too, which they didn’t.
—————-
LibraryJim [#39], I wouldn’t call it dancing around Todd’s point, nor do I proudly profess myself right. I do think you guys are flat-out wrong both in your results and in your approach. But I can take no credit for my own approach to these matters, which is simply that evidence trumps inspiration — and thus sometimes “we just don’t know” is the only defensible answer — but we each have to make our own individual bets in life, and sometimes we have to do that on the basis of incomplete information.
You folks obviously are comfortable making your bets, for your own lives, on the tenets of orthodox Christianity. Fine — but frankly you make yourselves look foolish when you insist that only those who are willing to make that same bet can be characterized as true followers of Jesus.
(As I’ve said here before, a corollary of the First Commandment is “Face the facts — live in the reality wrought by the Creator, not in the one created in your imagination or by your wishful thinking.”)
————
I’ve got access briefly to the Internet and will now be offline again for a couple of days. I’ll check back, but I imagine this thread has played itself out. As always, it’s been enjoyable; thanks to all.
D.C., the Romans very likely did execute Jesus to avoid a political explosion. This doesn’t explain, though, why the Jewish authorities delivered him to the Romans, unless you discount that part of the story also.
Safe travels.
[blockquote]But I can take no credit for my own approach to these matters, which is simply that evidence trumps inspiration — and thus sometimes “we just don’t know†is the only defensible answer — but we each have to make our own individual bets in life, and sometimes we have to do that on the basis of incomplete information.[/blockquote]
It is nothing but ironic that someone who would claim the above consistently dismisses the only evidence that is available, and which gives a consistent and coherent account of Jesus’ deeds and actions–the canonical gospels–based not on argument but supposition; because it is possible that stories “can mutate over time” means that in the case of the gospels, they must have done so–this claimed based on mere assertion.
At the same time, this same person who exercises almost complete skepticism with regard to the gospels we have, places absolute faith in the accuracy of imaginary gospels for which we have no evidence whatsoever:
[blockquote]The fact that the author of Luke found it necessary to make a careful investigation suggests that there were more stories floating around, or variations thereof, than the ones he chose to record. God only knows what evidence was lost that might have helped later scholars make an independent assessment of what actually happened. [/blockquote]
We know what these “missing gospels” were like because we now have copies of a good number of them–the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Peter, the infancy gospels of the 2nd century. As Craig Evans suggests in his Fabricating Jesus, those who are curious as to whether these gospels provide us with better historical information about Jesus can simply read them.
While DC’s imagination is certainly creative, his approach to the gospels is not that of someone who follows the principle that “evidence trumps inspiration.” There has been no concern whatsoever about evidence in DC’s comments above. His entire argument rests on silence and supposition. Because something could have happened; it must have. Because the gospels writers might have been mistaken, they definitely were. Because people can be sincerely in error, they obviously were. Because alternative gospels might have existed that accords more with DC’s wishes, they definitely did. Since no actual copies of these missing gospels are known to exist, they were obviously suppressed.
This is the reasoning of “grassy knoll” conspiracies.
Well said, William. Well said.
Gentlemen, I’m not at all sure your argument is persuasive you say of D.C., that
[blockquote] His entire argument rests on silence and supposition. Because something could have happened; it must have. Because the gospels writers might have been mistaken, they definitely were. Because people can be sincerely in error, they obviously were. [/blockquote]
But isn’t that overstating his point? He is not asserting that the witness WERE wrong, but that they MIGHT HAVE BEEN wrong. We, on the other hand, are the ones making a definitive claim, that the witnesses were right, not that they MIGHT have been right.
He is claiming only the possibility of error, and that possibility is all that is needed to undermine the authority of the books. And in this, I think he is right. The reliability of scripture can be support a great deal by analysis of the text, and by reason, but not thereby proved. At the very end, it comes down, as always, to “taste and see, that the Lord is good†and “come and see…†humbly asking God “are these things so? I want to know You as You areâ€
God alone is the one who authenticates what He has said. As has been said before, by an authority I accept, “He who is willing to do the will of the Father will know of the doctrineâ€
We do our cause no favor by getting sloppy with our arguments.
R.E.
If there were not so many books that have been written that show the margin of validity of the NT documents to be close to 99.5% in favor of accuracy, you might be on track. But there are. Which is why I bring up textual witness so often, where the evidence shows that the transmission of the Apostle’s writings was done with great care to preserve the teachings as given, and when witnesses were still available for questioning as early as 50 years from the events described.
And why he dismisses it every time, because it shows his arguments are based on thin air.
For DC to attempt to invalidate the texts based on supposition and declare everyone who believes based on them (and the evidence supporting their view) to be incontrovertibly WRONG when the evidence is with us IS the issue.
Don’t forget, for every document from the ancient world, accuracy of transmission is vital for determining how closely the copies match what is presumed to be the autographs. The more MS copies, and the closest to the events described, the greater the accuracy of the text. For the NT, we have over 5,000 Greek MS and close to 20,000 MS in other languages (10,000 of the Latin Vulgate). The earliest fragmnet of a NT document, the Gospel of Matthew at Magdeline College, England, has been tentatively dated to around 60 AD, less than 30 years from the resurrection. Other fragments date to 125 AD (“John Rylands fragment” of John — if you accept the late date of John at 95 AD, this puts the fragment at only 29 years from the original!) and more complete books to the end of the 1st century, early 2nd Century. Of course you can click on the links I have provided above for a list of the MS and their dates. As one scholar states “The Christian has substantially superior criteria for affirming the New Testament documents than he does for any other ancient writing”.
Thus there is very little evidence to suggest that the texts were corrupted with ‘stories’ and ‘fables’ as DC suggests.
I don’t need to get defending D.C., he has no problem speaking on his on behalf.
Besides, I disagree with him on this and many points. I don’t read him as saying we are “incontrovertibly wrong†as saying that the issue is not proven.
I quite understand your support of the veracity of the extant manuscripts, and how they can be shown to reflect the original autographs with a high degree of reliability. But at least as I understand him, that is hardly the point. If we had the original handwriting of Paul, or Luke, or John, confirmed by handwriting analysis and a videotape of those writers swearing to their authorship, it would not meet his point: that the initial reporting, not just the copies printed, is suspect. As with a newspaper, I can doubt the story because I think errors creep in the printing room, or I can suspect the editors of changing a story around to fit their own view of the world, or I can accuse the reporter of not getting all the facts right, or I can wonder if the people he interviewed actually saw what they think they saw.
Most of those errors have nothing to do with the reliability of subsequent copies of the paper.
By focusing on the one error that DC does not allege, you leave unaddressed the issues he does bring up. When I face someone in debate, I assume that the reason he is answering the question I did not ask is because the question I [i] did[/i] ask is unanswerable. I think that tragic, because I think him very answerable. Since my own posts above struck no fire, I assume that others are not as impressed as I am with the answers that work for me, so I won’t repeat them. But I think it very possible to believe with assurance of heart and mind that the scriptures of both old and new testament are given to us by the power of God, and profitable for all the reasons He sent it forth.
which question is that? That the originals were flawed? But the evidence of the witnesses other than the writers, that is the church fathers such as Ireneus, Origen, etc. bear witness that the writers were correct in their statements. The intro to Luke states that he took great pains to make sure his report was accurate.
No, I don’t think that the evidence shows that DC’s assertion that the originals are flawed stands up.
Oh, and that point HAS been addressed in this thread, most notably by William Witt.
Permit me to post one more thing,
four separate writers report essentially the same events with minor details over a period of years (Gospels)
another witness describes through letters the development of the early church in various parts of the ancient world, based on those same events, and proclaims them forceably (the last supper, the crucifixion, the importance of resurrection) from shortly after the events described in the Gospels (Paul, of course)
Several of the Gospel writers (Peter, John) and other disciples also wrote letters encouraging the early church to believe their report and continue in those truths.
The followers of the apostles (Church Fathers) supported and accurately quoted the writings and teachings of the apostles in letters, lectionaries, and other writings.
So we have many different writers who over a period of time, attest that the Gospels and NT letters were accurate portrayals of what actually happened during the ministry of Jesus.
I most assuredly agree with you LJ, and particularly from the affirmation of so many extra biblical authors to the same things. That is of course subject to an argument that one particular point of view won the day, and selected the text from their favorites, etc, etc, [i]ad nausium.[/i] That is part of the reason I believe that a a purely intellectual defense of the authority of scripture will fall short. Reason alone will not save. Faith is required, but Faith can be invested in that to which faith is a reasonable response. I think the gospel accounts are just that. For all the reasons you name, it is reasonable to act in accordance with them, even if they cannot be 100% proved. Then, AFTER faith has been applied, they become illuminated so that we can trust them utterly.
The more we trust what God has told us, the more we see that He, and what He has told us, is to be trusted.
At least that has been my experience, and I think it a reliable road. There may be other ways to get there.
Eric Sawyer, thanks for jumping in in my absence. (I’m briefly on the Internet again.)
You’ve nicely summed up one of my concerns with orthodoxy: no matter how accurate the manuscript copies are, the reporting embodied in the manuscripts is suspect.
I’m not just speculating about the hypothetical possibility of story mutation or -corruption. The evidence affirmatively suggests that it may have happened — see the six specific points I discuss in the blog posting cited in my comment #20 above.
And don’t forget that the orthodox are asking us to make life decisions of tremendous consequence on the basis of their claims. (The more consequential the decision, the more confident we want to be about the evidence on which we’re relying; recall the prohibition in Deut. 17.6 against putting a man to death on the testimony of only one witness.)
It simply cannot be said that the NT evidence provides even persuasive support, let alone compelling support, for premising such a consequential life decision on orthodoxy’s claims.
There are those who choose to make their bets that way, but they’re doing it on the basis of intuition (read: wishful thinking), not evidence.
Question 1: Can I accept, as an academic matter, the claim that Jesus was executed by the Romans? Yes.
Question 2: Can I accept, as an academic matter, the claim that some of Jesus’ followers believed they encountered him after his death? Yes.
Question 3: Can I accept, as an academic matter, the claim that Jesus was in fact raised from the dead? Not really — there are too many other possible explanations of equal or greater plausibility, including but not limited to story mutation. See my blog posting from a couple of years ago, Resurrection Appearances: What Did the Disciples Really Experience?
Question 4: Would I premise a major change in my life on the truth of any of the foregoing claims, without more? Not a chance; while I try to follow Jesus, it’s for reasons entirely different than those put forth by the orthodox.
Rejecting the Resurrection and its consequences is a choice you are entitled to make, D.C., and a choice many others before you have made. What you don’t provide is compelling evidence for the Jesus you do believe in and follow, since this Jesus is constructed by picking and choosing among the pieces of evidence in the body of the New Testament produced by the early believers. You give evidence for not believing the Jesus of the Church, but no coherent historically-grounded thesis for the Jesus in whom you do believe. Which pieces of evidence you choose are determined by what you want to believe. External to the NT, we don’t see your Jesus anywhere. Romans considered him a political problem. Jews (those who rejected him) considered him a heretic and madman whose miracles, if any, were the work of the Evil One. Gnostics had stories of secret knowledge of him which revealed the “real” Jesus, a dualist seer. Six hundred years later, Arabs accepted a Jesus who was born of a Virgin and did all the miracles for reasons unknown. Where is the wise and good teacher who did no miracles? Nowhere but in your wishes.
I find myself in the position of agreeing in part with both sides of this discussion.
There is, as William Witt and “libraryjim” have observed, ample reason to believe the NT accounts to be as accurate as one could possibly expect any historical document of that era to be.
There is also, as DC has pointed out, significant reason to doubt that any account, ancient or modern, is a strictly accurate depiction of what really happened. If anyone doubts this, all they have to do is read a newspaper account of some event they witnessed themselves, and count the inaccuracies — and the newspaper article will be written under far more ideal conditions than even the NT apologists will claim for the gospels.
I think at least part (not all) of this argument is the two sides talking past each other about what they think an accurate historical record really represents. For instance, up in comment #8, William Witt says:
He apparently feels that it is a largely irrelevant detail whether there were two miracles of feeding the thousands with fish and loaves, or only one. For what it’s worth, I would agree with that. But more to the point, this is exactly the kind of inaccuracy that DC is suggesting that the gospel accounts are likely to contain — in this case perhaps a single incident mutated into two in the telling of it, or perhaps two similar incidents were conflated into one. Both of these processes are things that happen to stories as they’re told and re-told, and we know that something like this has happened in this case because the gospels contain both versions.
It must also be said: William Witt describes this as a “fine detail,” in which a minor discrepancy doesn’t alter the main point of the story. But I would wager money that if we polled even just those people who read T19, we would find a not-insignificant number who would consider this quite an important detail; and indeed would feel very uncomfortable if they did not have a way of reconciling the two versions of the story.
So part of the dispute arises from, on the one hand, people who determine that the gospels are remarkably good as historical documents go (true) but then proceed to ascribe to them a level of detailed accuracy that no historical document could ever have… and on the other hand people who determine that there are inevitably distortions, omissions, exaggerations, agendas, and so on in any account, including the gospels (also true) and use that to discredit the gospel story to an unnecessary degree.
No historian takes Herodotus’ account of the battle of Thermopylae completely at face value. His numbers for the Persian army, for instance, are absurd. And yet most people are comfortable assuming that the event happened more or less as he described. But when it’s the gospels in question, that “more or less” suddenly becomes a very touchy area indeed.
For the record, I think that the gospels are more than ample evidence of the general outline of Jesus’ ministry. I’m confident that the gospels capture many things Jesus really did say, with at least as much accuracy as a modern newspaper. I’m also confident that the gospels contain many things that Jesus did not say, or did not say in quite those words, or which are summaries or paraphrases of things he said, or just sounded like the sort of thing he would say. Can I tell which words are which? No, but I don’t think it matters: take the account as a whole and it’s clear enough what the thrust of his message was.
I also think — and I have argued with DC on this site — that the gospels provide strong evidence that the Resurrection really happened. Something clearly happened that had a profound effect on Jesus’ followers in the days after his death, and they all seem to have been unanimous in saying that it was talking to the risen Jesus.
To return once again to the newspaper analogy — every intelligent person knows that any story in a newspaper is going to contain some inaccuracies, if not outright errors; at worst it will be slanted to the point of being deliberately misleading. Most of us read newspapers (or other news sources) anyway, and believe that we can get useful information from them, because we read critically and with a certain amount of suspicion. It would perhaps be a good idea to read a 2,000-year-old report with at least as much caution as we would use when perusing the local daily rag… but also with at least as much faith that we can nevertheless figure out what’s really going on in the world.
Katherine [#52] writes:
Katherine, you don’t seem to grasp that I don’t “believe in” any particular Jesus.
As a point for academic discussion, I see no reason to disbelieve the broad-brush picture we read in the gospels.
On the other hand, I would not premise any kind of significant life decision on a supposition about what Jesus was really like, first because the available evidence isn’t sufficiently persuasive, and second because I don’t see any need to do so.
———–
Ross [#53], imagine yourself in the shoes of someone attending Pons’s and Fleischman’s 1989 announcement about cold fusion.
Then ask yourself this: Without more, would you invest 100% of your net worth, all you had in the world, in their endeavors?
Now change the hypothetical: Would you make this bet if you had little or no evidence on point except for decades-old hearsay stories originally told by people who spoke the language of a backwater region?
That’s what the orthodox assert that the rest of us should do in response to their claims about Jesus.
Ross [#53], I forgot to add that I appreciate the points you make about arguing past each other.
Thank you for your clarification, D.C. If I could not believe in the Jesus of the Church (whom I see in Scripture, Creed, and Tradition), I wouldn’t bother at all, myself.
D.C., for the record, I will readily admit that I, and the entire Christian tradition that may broadly be characterized as catholic and orthodox (at least on christological matters), could be wrong.
But your own epistemology complete ignores (or seems to ignore – I am open to correction on this point) the notion that all knowledge – [i]all[/i] knowledge – involves a personal decision to commit oneself to an epistemological framework [b]in the absence of compelling [i]a priori[/i] evidence to make the decision[/b]. There is no Cartesian point of objectivity from which one may serenely decide between frameworks. The dictum credo ut intelligam applies not only to theological knowledge, but to scientific, legal, philosophical knowledge; in short, to the entire human endeavor of knowing.
This is actually what I mean by “epistemological humility”. And the proponents of the personalist character of knowledge are not postmodernists. See the writings of Polanyi or of his principal theological interpreter, Newbigin. Neither of them could in any way be characterized as postmodernist relativists or epistemological nihilists.
Todd Granger [#57] writes:
This might be true if our knowledge of the universe were like a single photograph, one that each of us had to examine alone and in a vacuum, with no information about the scene depicted except as shown in the picture.
But that’s not the case. Thanks to our gifts of “memory, reason, and skill” (Eucharistic Prayer C, if memory serves) — especially the skill of communicating with each other — our knowledge base is more like a movie: Our past experience, individual and collective, allows us to know more about any given scene than could ever be depicted in a single still photograph.
Consider that over millennia, humanity has accumulated gazillions of observations of the Creation. Individually, each observation is subject to error in perception, recordation, transmission, and/or interpretation. Collectively, though, our accumulated observations — including meta-observations about how we make and use observations — can give us something like a serviceable facsimile, within its limitations, of the Cartesian point of objectivity you describe.
In The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki tells of a surprising observation by statistician Francis Galton; as explained by an Amazon.com reviewer:
(Emphasis and extra paragraphing added.)
Surowiecki gives several other examples — including how the sunken submarine USS SCORPION was located — to illustrate the point: If each of a (sufficiently-large) number of ‘observations’ includes a randomly-distributed error component, and the observations are mashed together, e.g., by averaging them, then the error components tend to cancel each other out, and the resulting collective picture can be a serviceable representation of the underlying reality.
I’m now bumping up against the limits of my (scant) knowledge of epistemology. It seems to me, though, that Galton’s story of guessing the weight of an ox is a useful metaphor for how our collective experience helps us compensate for the lack of an a priori frame of reference.
(If I’m not mistaken, what I’ve described above is a crude summary of the notion of critical realism.)
Forgive me for jumping in since I’ve not been participating in this conversation but I have followed several of the comments with interest when I’ve seen them in the recent comments list.
I confess to knowing virtually nothing about epistemology, but D.C. I don’t understand your comment about the cow and the average weight. Isn’t the example meaningless except for the fact that there is a scale, and thus an “objective” standard against which to compare the individual guesses and the average of all the guesses. Yes, the fact that the average of all the guesses is so close to the true weight is interesting. But there IS a true weight. It seems to me you’ve missed and overlooked that point.
Karen B. [#59], I probably did a bad job of articulating my argument. I understood Todd to say that each of us must choose his or her epistemological framework. That strikes me as saying we must each choose our own truth. I don’t think either claim is defensible.
It seems to me that, so far as we can tell, there’s a single reality, wrought by the Creator, though sometimes different people perceive that reality in different slices, or from different perspectives.
Likewise, there’s a single epistemology: Face the facts of that reality as they become ‘known’ to us — which facts include the limitations of our abilities to perceive, remember, correlate, and communicate.
D.C., once again you’ve misread me. The personal character of knowledge is exercised within a corporate framework, much like what you summarize in Surowiecki’s examples above. The personal decision implicit in “buying into” an epistemological framework – it is less often exercised in an actual moment of decision that in being formed into a particular way of appropriating knowledge – is made easier (or very often, made possible?) by the prior decisions of the community.
This in no way means that we each choose our own truth. What we’re making decisions about is how we apprehend the truth – the single reality that is the creation. What you choose to believe – yes, believe – about reality and knowledge radically determines what you’re willing to accept as evidence. In fact, it radically determines what you’re even willing to accept as being real.
As for there being a single epistemology – well, I think that most philosophers would have something to say about that. That there is a single one, and that one along the lines of what you articulate in your doctrinal minimalist “rejectionalism”, is not so very different from the sort of naive scientism that imperialistically asserted itself against every other “way of knowing” for a couple of centuries.
Todd Granger [#61] writes:
Todd, I suspect we’re talking past each other. I’m also conscious of my lack of fluency in the vocabulary of philosophy, let alone of epistemology.
But when you speak of a ‘decision’ to accept X or Y as being real, it comes across as though what counts are individual autonomy and personal choice. I know you know the world doesn’t work that way: If I ‘decide’ not to accept, say, the germ theory of disease, and then elect to drink dirty water where typhoid is rampant, it’s likely I’ll soon be dealing with the consequences of my belief ‘decision.’
That’s why I say, perhaps inexpertly, that there’s a single true epistemology: Face the facts — including the fact of the limitations of our knowledge and abilities. (Again, my understanding is that this is what critical realism boils down to.)
On a slightly-divergent subject, Face-the-Facts is only one third of what we could think of as a serviceable general-purpose algorithm for a reasonably-happy life. The other two parts are: Seek the best for others, not just for yourself, because life tends to go better when we do that; and, conduct yourself as though, over the long term, things will work out pretty well. (Funny thing about this general algorithm: it’s really just a paraphrase of the Summary of the Law and trust in the Creator that Jesus stressed.)
[i]That’s why I say, perhaps inexpertly, that there’s a single true epistemology: Face the facts [/i]
And that, D.C., is the very gist of our disagreement: what is a “fact”?
In [i]The Gospel in a Pluralist Society[/i] the late missiologist, apologist and South India bishop Lesslie Newbigin (no relativist postmodernist he) writes,
[blockquote]The concept of facts as simply raw data presented to us apart from any conceptual framework within which they are understood, is – as we have seen – on the characteristic illusions of a secular culture. All facts are interpreted facts and the interpretation depends upon a whole range of social and personal factors rooted in the tradition of the society in question. The decision as to what are the significant facts in relation to a given problem is one which, plainly, cannot be decided on the basis of “facts” which are prior to any decision about importance. And the decision about importance will be related to the world of beliefs, aims, purposes, values….(p. 219)[/blockquote]
Or, as critical realism would insist, “There are no uninterpreted data.” The conceptual framework, the epistemological framework, or what sociologist Peter Berger calls the “plausibility structure” determines what is, and what is not, a datum. This does not mean that data do not exist, data that can be apprehended by human beings in all their fallibility and inability to comprehend the whole. But it does mean that, within any given plausibility structure or conceptual framework, there will be events and observations that count as “facts”, and there will be events and observations that are overlooked because they do not fit the framework’s definition of what a “fact” is.
Earlier in the book, Newbigin writes,
[blockquote]All experience is interpreted experience. The empiricist concept of experience as simply bare uninterpreted sense data was, say [Alasdair] MacIntyre, a cultural invention of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries designed to bridge the gap which had opened up between “seems to be” and “is.” (p. 58)[/blockquote]
How do our various conceptual frameworks, our plausibility structures, whether they follow the axioms of catholic Christianity or the dogmas of empirical materialism, work? Again, Newbigin:
[blockquote]It is rather a set of concepts [i]through[/i] which people see the world. The world looks like that because these are the lenses through which it is seen. The lenses themselves are not seen. We do not look at them but through them…I shall suggest that the Christian story provides us with such a set of lenses, not something for us to look [i]at[/i], but for us to look [i]through[/i]. Using [Michael] Polanyi’s terminology [of epistemology], I shall suggest that the Christian community is invited to [i]indwell[/i] the story, [i]tacitly[/i] aware of it as shaping the way we understand, but [i]focally[/i] attending to the world we live in so that we are able confidently, though not infallibly, to increase our understanding of it and out ability to cope with it…And I shall suggest…that this calls for a more radical kind of conversion than has often been thought, a conversion not only of the will but of the mind, a transformation by the renewing of the mind so as not to be conformed to this world, not to see things as our culture sees them, but – with new lenses – to see things in a radically different way (p. 38).[/blockquote]
This sort of conversion is not so very different from the sorts of paradigm shifts that Thomas Kuhn described in his ground-breaking book, [i]The Structure of Scientific Revolutions[/i].
Not really diverging (because it’s still all about conceptual lenses, isn’t it?), and not meaning merely to be argumentative, but your algorithm, while bearing perhaps some superficial resemblance, isn’t a paraphrase of our Lord’s Summary of the Law but a parody. Benign self-interest is hardly the same thing as loving one’s neighbor as oneself (and what Jesus means by “loving one’s neighbor as oneself” cannot be fully understood apart from his life, death and resurrection), and a general optimism about the direction of life is not at all the same thing as the sort of self-denying, utter trust in the Father that Jesus taught and lived.
D.C., I have to admit that I overstated myself in the last paragraph; viz., in my comment about “benign self-interest”. Your “seeking the best for others” goes charitably beyond any mere self-interest.
But I still maintain that we don’t really know what “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” means without interpreting that through Jesus’ life, death and resurrection.
Aaargh – I just clicked “submit,” whereupon a long response to Todd appears to have vanished into the bit bucket. Reconstructing as best I can, in brief:
1. The ultimate appeal to benign self-interest would seem to be the dangling of the prospect of eternal salvation. There’s nothing wrong with appealing to self-interest; as sales people, we have to “face the facts” about our prospective customers; in particular, we have to take them as they are, not as we wish they were. Perhaps some will eventually follow Jesus purely for its own sake; in the meantime, appealing to their self-interest can be an effective way of getting them in the door.
(BTW, no offense taken, Todd.)
2. Some time ago, motivated by Todd’s citations, I bought and read an edited collection of selected Newbigin writings, which if memory serves contained the quotations Todd provides above. (I’m not where I can access my books.) Newbigin’s ‘lenses’ point, quoted by Todd above, seems indisputably correct.
I don’t recall, though, that Newbigin offered (at least not memorably) any compelling reason why we should elect to view the world through the peculiar lenses of orthodox Christianity, as opposed to some other set.
3. Some people forget that the map is not the territory, the portrait is not the person, and the image in the lens is not the reality. Natural selection has a way of dealing with them.
4. Newbigin says that “[t]he lenses themselves are not seen.” Possibly; but that doesn’t mean we’re not aware of them. In both science and litigation — two areas nominally focused on the search for truth more than any other single thing — workers routinely spend a lot of time looking for possible sources of distortion in the ‘images’ we ‘see.’
[i]The ultimate appeal to benign self-interest would seem to be the dangling of the prospect of eternal salvation.[/i]
Perhaps. But the problem is that this revivalistic/evangelical misrepresentation of soteriology (admittedly with clear roots in earlier Christian soteriological understandings) and the liberal protestant reaction to it wholly misses the fact that salvation isn’t a matter of individual survival, eternal or not. It’s a matter of cosmic restoration – with redeemed humanity in the vanguard – and the reconciliation of humanity with God. The notion of self-interest is in fact the very antithesis of the Gospel – whether you accept them as reliable or not, you must admit that the New Testament scriptures in their canonical form are not particularly adulatory regarding self-interest.
[i]I don’t recall, though, that Newbigin offered (at least not memorably) any compelling reason why we should elect to view the world through the peculiar lenses of orthodox Christianity, as opposed to some other set.[/i]
I don’t think that it misrepresents Newbigin to say that he would agree that there is no intellectual disputation that can compel one to elect to view the world through that particular set of lenses – nor any other set of lenses.
[i]Some people forget that the map is not the territory, the portrait is not the person, and the image in the lens is not the reality. Natural selection has a way of dealing with them.[/i]
I’m not sure what the relevance of this statement is, but it seems to savor of a sort of soft positivism. If you’re wanting to be a critical realist, you’d make this statement and follow it with this codicil: but we can’t navigate the territory without the map, we can’t recognize the person without the portrait, and we can’t view reality except through the lens and as the image the lens brings into focus.
[i]Possibly; but that doesn’t mean we’re not aware of them. In both science and litigation — two areas nominally focused on the search for truth more than any other single thing — workers routinely spend a lot of time looking for possible sources of distortion in the ‘images’ we ‘see.’[/i]
Quite true. And, while you reject their work, that is also precisely what was going on in the early Church’s sifting through the various writings that claimed apostolic authority and in the work of the Ecumenical Councils, beginning with Nicaea I.
Todd [#66], I don’t reject the early church’s “sifting through the various writings that claimed apostolic authority ….” I assert merely that, viewed in hindsight, it’s clear those who undertook that work didn’t go far enough.
That’s not to criticize them, any more than you would criticize physicians of that era; we have to assume they did the best they knew how.
Still, though, we cannot pretend that the early church’s work on that score would measure up to today’s standards of investigation, any more than you would accept the work of first-century physicians as measuring up to today’s standards of patient care.
——–
Academic arguments about choices of epistemological framework sometimes bring to mind the famous bazaar chase scene in the first Indiana Jones movie. At one point during the chase, a swordsman leaps into Indy’s path and swings his weapon, around and around, in a dazzling display of facility. Well, Indy isn’t going to play that game: With a disgusted look on his face, he casually draws his sidearm and shoots the swordsman. So much for dazzling displays of facility.
That was my point about natural selection and epistemology: people who forget that the map is not the territory have a way of getting lost — or worse — when the map turns out to be inaccurate or out of date. A Navy submarine experienced a tragic example of this a few years ago.
Use a map, by all means. But remember that the map might or might not contain an accurate depiction of the relevant portion of reality. And if you pretend otherwise, the reality might up and bite you in the ass. That’s (one facet of) what I mean by “face the facts.”
My apologies for the delay in responding, D.C.
You’re correct about maps and the territory. It’s somewhat overstated, but not a bad summary of a simplistic sort of naive positivism.
The parallel that you attempt to draw between the work of, say, the Fathers at the Council of Nicaea and Galen and the originators of the humoral theory of medicine is false. Nature is not self-disclosing. God is self-disclosing, else we wouldn’t be able to know God. (We are able to imagine god – the lower-case is intentional, but what we imagine would be an idol, not God himself.) Because nature is not self-disclosing, then a progressively better-defined (though, as critical realism asserts, never completely corresponding to reality) understanding of nature is to be expected as a result of careful scientific study and analysis, a process that includes the overthrow of theories and of entire paradigms of how we understand nature. (But, it must be admitted, there is no guarantee that the process won’t go backward, with poorer understanding for a time.)
On the other hand, because God is self-disclosing, there is no reason [i]a priori[/i] to expect any “improvements” in our understanding of Who God is through the centuries. This notion of ineluctable progress applied to theology as well as to the natural sciences is another of those cherished illusions of latter-day secular (Western) culture.
God’s self-disclosure in Jesus of Nazareth would be roughly paralleled by the bacteria in Louis Pasteur’s culture flasks rising up to tell him, “This is what we are, and this is how we cause disease.”
In fact, Athanasius and others realized that the self-disclosing nature of God was at the very heart of the Arian controversy. For, they understood, if the proper relationship of God and Jesus is Unoriginate – created and not Father – Son, then Jesus, far from being the self-disclosing God incarnate, is nothing more than another creature who cannot really tell us anything about Who God really is.
Todd [#68] writes:
Assuming arguendo the premise that God self-discloses, we still have to figure out how what constitutes such self-disclosure, and what is merely the product of human imagination or wishful thinking. Different groups vehemently disagree on that point: Orthodox Christians claim that God disclosed himself in Jesus; Jews feel roughly the same way about Torah, and Muslims about the Qur’an.
The fact that these divisions persist — not to mention the continued widespread existence of nonbelievers and doubters, who don’t accept any of these views — should be enough to convince us that the available evidence doesn’t support any of these claims in a compelling way.
After all, when the available evidence is compelling in favor of one particular view, people tend to come around to that view (hardly any educated person believes the world is flat).
That fact that this hasn’t happened with respect to alleged divine self-disclosures should be an attention-grabber.
[i]After all, when the available evidence is compelling in favor of one particular view, people tend to come around to that view (hardly any educated person believes the world is flat).[/i]
Unarguably true.
My point was simply to suggest that your simple equation of theology and medicine – with the assumption of chronological superiority of later theories in both – was false. Even allowing for the attention-grabbing disagreements that you note, there is no reason [i]a priori[/i] to assume that 20th or 21st century understandings of God are superior to 1st and 4th century understandings.
At this point I think it probably best that we conclude the discussion. This thread is increasing difficult to navigate to, and we’re covering ground that we’ve covered more than once before. We have fundamentally different understandings of basic philosophical points and are unlikely to convince the other of the error of his ways. I am willing to leave it there.
Todd [#70], I’ve got a simple lash-up with del.icio.us to keep track of comment threads. I use the [url=http://delicious.com/help/tools]del.icio.us bookmarklet[/url] to tag threads I want to track with the tag “comments” (or whatever). Then I’ve got a bookmark on my browser toolbar to take me to my del.icio.us page, filtered for that tag – in my case it’s http://delicious.com/dctoedt/comments.