Showing posts with label Richard Bauckham. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Richard Bauckham. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 26, 2023

An Update To An Argument From The Names In The Gospels And Acts

Luuk van de Weghe is a New Testament scholar who's recently done some work on an argument for the historical reliability of the gospels and Acts based on the names that appear in the documents. I'll quote some of what Richard Bauckham has written about the argument, then quote some more recent comments from van de Weghe, updating Bauckham's material:

"Thus the names of Palestinian Jews in the Gospels and Acts coincide very closely with the names of the general population of Jewish Palestine in this period, but not to the names of Jews in the Diaspora. In this light it becomes very unlikely that the names in the Gospels are late accretions to the traditions. Outside Palestine the appropriate names simply could not have been chosen. Even within Palestine, it would be very surprising if random accretions of names to this or that tradition would fit the actual pattern of names in the general population....Onomastics (the study of names) is a significant resource for assessing the origins of Gospel traditions. The evidence in this chapter shows that the relative frequency of the various personal names in the Gospels corresponds well to the relative frequency in the full database of three thousand individual instances of names in the Palestinian Jewish sources of the period. This correspondence is very unlikely to have resulted from addition of names to the traditions, even within Palestinian Jewish Christianity, and could not possibly have resulted from the addition of names to the traditions outside Jewish Palestine, since the pattern of Jewish name usage in the Diaspora was very different. The usages of the Gospels also correspond closely to the variety of ways in which persons bearing the same very popular names could be distinguished in Palestinian Jewish usage. Again these features of the New Testament data would be difficult to explain as the result of random invention of names within Palestinian Jewish Christianity and impossible to explain as the result of such invention outside Jewish Palestine. All the evidence indicates the general authenticity of the personal names in the Gospels." (Jesus And The Eyewitnesses [Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2006], 73-74, 84)

"Simply put, these works [The Infancy Gospel Of Thomas, The Gospel Of Nicodemus, etc.] do not hold up to scrutiny based on naming patterns, and we can see the card player's bluff. From my survey of twenty-three sources in Appendix A, the only extra-biblical works that display onomastic congruence [alignment between a database of ancient name usage and the source it's being compared to] are the works of Plutarch, Suetonius, and Josephus….These authors' works are the very same ones that the biblical scholar Craig Keener suggests mark the height of historical sensitivity for the genre of Greco-Roman biography when expectations of historical reliability were at the highest. Onomastic congruence appears to be a byproduct, however unintentional, of the information-driven nature of these historiographical works.…In my 2022 PhD Dissertation (University of Aberdeen) as well as in my article, 'Name Recall in the Synoptic Gospels,' I discuss the problem that Ilan I [a database of ancient Jewish names gathered by Tal Ilan] does not provide an onomastic snapshot of Jesus' Palestine, since her database covers approximately five hundred years. This seems too broad to determine onomastic patterns. I refine Ilan's database to the years 30 BCE to 90 CE and confirm that onomastic congruence can still be demonstrated. Incidentally, Richard Bauckham is currently working on a new prosopography (50 BCE to 135 CE) with the aim of acquiring greater accuracy, correcting further errors discovered in Ilan I, and supplementing her data with new inscriptions being published by the Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaeae/Palaestinae. My thanks to Dr. Bauckham for providing his unpublished material for me to review; it is apparent that the efforts of acquiring more precise data will lead toward the further justification of onomastic congruence in the Gospels and Acts." (The Historical Tell [Tampa, Florida: DeWard, 2023], 35-36, n. 42 on 146)

Saturday, March 07, 2020

Why Did Polycrates Refer To John As A High Priest?

Critics of the attribution of the fourth gospel to John the son of Zebedee often cite Polycrates as a witness against that attribution. Polycrates referred to the Beloved Disciple as "a priest, wearing the high-priestly frontlet" (in Eusebius, Church History, 5:24:2). In an article here, I argue against Richard Bauckham's formulation of the objection. I'm not aware of any easy explanation for why Polycrates referred to the Beloved Disciple as he did. We have to choose among options that are all difficult to some degree. But I proposed some possible explanations that I consider less problematic than Bauckham's. What I want to do here is expand on one of those alternatives to Bauckham's view.

How plausible is it that Polycrates was referring to the son of Zebedee as a high priest in a metaphorical sense? Notice that one of the Johannine documents, Revelation, puts substantial emphasis on the theme of the priesthood of all believers (1:6, 5:10, 20:6). And notice that the theme appears early, within the first several verses, in addition to being spread out over a few segments of the book. It's a somewhat prominent theme. Similarly, both the fourth gospel and Revelation make much of Jesus' role as a sacrificial lamb, which has priestly associations, especially given the Johannine emphasis on how Jesus offered himself rather than having his life taken unwillingly. And the lamb of God theme appears early in the fourth gospel, in the first chapter (1:29). So, both of these Johannine documents put a lot of emphasis on priestly themes, even referring to them near the beginning, and Revelation emphasizes the theme of a metaphorical priesthood in particular.

If all believers are viewed as priests, it's not much of a further step to think of somebody like an apostle as a priest in a higher sense, such as being a high priest. In fact, Polycrates starts with a reference to the Beloved Disciple as a priest, then qualifies it with a reference to being a high priest. He may have had the Johannine concept of the priesthood of all believers in mind, which he then expanded into a metaphorical high priesthood for John.

Keep in mind, too, that the passage in Polycrates begins with a reference to figures like John as "great lights". There's no question that Polycrates is being metaphorical to some extent.

Much more can be said about Polycrates' comments. I'm not trying to be exhaustive here. Those who want to read more about the subject can consult my post responding to Bauckham linked above, his book, or Dean Furlong's recent book that I referred to earlier.

Friday, March 06, 2020

Was The Fourth Gospel Written By A John Other Than The Son Of Zebedee?

Steve Hays recently pointed me to a post by Michael Bird regarding the authorship of the fourth gospel. In that post, Bird refers to a White Horse Inn radio program that features interviews with several scholars commenting on the gospel's authorship (Craig Blomberg, G.K. Beale, Justin Holcomb, Richard Bauckham, D.A. Carson, Andreas Kostenberger, and Lydia McGrew). The page Bird links doesn't seem to contain the relevant audio, but Patrick Chan found it here. I looked for the program through the White Horse Inn search engine, and it appears that the program originally aired in December of 2019. Apparently, you can't listen to the program at the White Horse Inn site, but you can listen at the site Patrick found. Contrary to what Bird reported, the host who favored something like Richard Bauckham's view of the gospel's authorship was Shane Rosenthal, not Michael Horton.

Some good points are made during the program, but some of the best arguments for authorship by the son of Zebedee aren't mentioned. Here's an article I wrote in 2017 in response to the second edition of Bauckham's book, Jesus And The Eyewitnesses (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2017). In that article, I discuss a lot of New Testament and patristic evidence not addressed by the White Horse Inn program.

I should add that Dean Furlong recently published a book that's relevant, based on his doctoral thesis, The Identity Of John The Evangelist (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2020). His book doesn't say much about the New Testament, but is instead focused on the extrabiblical evidence. He argues that the John of Papias and other early sources was somebody other than the son of Zebedee. I disagree with him, for reasons like the ones referred to in my response to Bauckham linked above. But he makes a better case than Bauckham does, and I agree with some of the other points Furlong makes (the strength of the evidence for the martyrdom of John the son of Zebedee, the fact that Papias attributed the fourth gospel's authorship to his John the Elder, etc.). He provides a large amount of information on Johannine issues, and you don't have to agree with him about everything to find his book useful in a lot of contexts. It's a good resource to have, no matter what position you take on the identity of the author of the fourth gospel, who Papias' elder was, when Revelation was written, and the other issues involved.

Saturday, July 20, 2019

The imagery of Revelation

The following is an excerpt from Richard Bauckham's The Theology of the Book of Revelation (pp 17-22). I don't necessarily agree with everything.

Monday, January 14, 2019

Pauline Christology

In light of the recent debate between Michael Brown and apostate Dale Tuggy, here's a good in-depth analysis of Pauline Christology:

http://www.forananswer.org/Top_JW/Richard_Bauckham.pdf

Friday, January 11, 2019

The Prologue to John

Richard Bauckham on the Prologue to John:

John begins at "the beginning" of everything", the beginning at which Genesis and the whole biblical story began. To let his readers into the secret of who Jesus really is, John thinks it is necessary to begin at the earliest possible beginning, when God the Creator was on the brink of bringing the whole cosmos into being. For anyone who knew Genesis, the identity between the opening words of Genesis and those of John's Gospel ("In the beginning" ) would be obvious and would provide the key to the meaning of the way the prologue continues. Note that Jewish allusions to creation frequently use the words "in the beginning" or "the beginning" in allusion to Gen 1:1. [Masanobu Endo, Creation and Christology: A Study on the Johannine Prologue in the light of Early Jewish Creation Accounts (Mohr Sibeck, 2002), 206-7.]

The first part of the prologue (1:1-5) is set in what we might call primordial time, the time of Genesis 1, while the second part (1:6-18), which begins in the style of OT historical narrative (1:6) is set in historical time and, by featuring John the Baptist (1:6-8,15), connects with the opening section of the gospel story (1:19-34). The first part of the prologue takes the form of a retelling of Gen 1:1-5. See esp. Peder Borgen, "Observations on the Targumic Character of the Prologue of John," and "Logos was the True Light: Contributions to the Interpretation of the Prologue of John", in Logos was the True Light and Other Essays on the Gospel of John, 13-20, 95-110.

Most recent commentators on John have thought that the figure of divine Wisdom, which features in some Jewish literature in connection with creation, has influenced the prologue…but Jewish narratives of creation refer to the word of God considerably more often than they do to the wisdom of God [see the table in Endo, Creation and Christology, 163], while the two are sometimes distinguished and given different roles (God's wisdom devised the plan and his word executed it, 2 En 33:4; Wis 9:1-2]. What John says of the Word in 1:1-4 is  quite sufficiently explained on the basis of Jewish references to the role of God's word in creation, while other alleged similarities to Wisdom ideas in the rest of the prologue are possible but not compelling. We should certainly not make interpretation of the prologue depend upon detecting Wisdom somewhere behind it. “The Trinity and the Gospel of John,” in The Essential Trinity: New Testament Foundations and Practical Relevance, ed. by Brandon D. Crowe and Carl R. Trueman (London: Inter-Varsity Press [Apollos] 2016), 93-94.

Wednesday, February 28, 2018

The Trinity in John's Gospel

Some excerpts from an exposition by Richard Bauckham:

To let his readers into the secret of who Jesus really is, John thinks it is necessary to begin at the earliest possible beginning, when God the Creator was on the brink of bringing the whole cosmos into being…Here, in the beginning, before creation, there is no room for any beings other than the one God.

In the Jewish definition of the one God's exclusive divinity, as well as being sole creator of all things (as in the prologue of John), God was also understood as the sole sovereign ruler of all things. A key aspect of this was his sovereignty over life and death (Deut 32:39). God is the only living one, that is, the only one to whom life belongs eternally and intrinsically. All other life derives from him, is given by him and taken back by him. Another key aspect was his prerogative of judgment, the implementation of justice [cf. Jn 5:17-23].

…while understanding those ["I am" statements] in which an ordinary meaning is possible as instances of double entendre (a frequent literary device in John)…in the seventh of these absolute "I am" sayings, which forms an emphatic climax to the set by means of threefold repetition (18:5-6,8). Here the ordinary meaning, a reply to the soldier's question, fails to account for the soldiers' reaction. They fall prostrate on the ground, suggesting, as in 8:58-59, that Jesus has made some kind of divine claim. 

A more adequate explanation of these sayings in John is that they reflect the divine self-declaration "I am he". The LXX Greek uses the phrase ego eimi in Deut 32:39 and on several occasions in Isaiah 40-55 (41:4; 43:10; 46:4) to translate the Hebrew phrase ani hu, which is usually translated in English as "I am he". In the two cases (43:25; 51:2) where the Hebrew has the more emphatic form of the same phrase, anoki anoki hu, the LXX has the double expression ego emi ego emi. This phrase "I am he" is an extraordinarily significant one. It is a divine self-declaration, encapsulating Yahweh's claim to unique and exclusive divinity. In the Hebrew Bible it occurs first in what are almost the last words God himself speaks in the Torah, where it is an emphatically monotheistic assertion: "Behold, I, even I am he; there is no God besides me" (Deut 32:39). In the prophecies of Isaiah 40-55 this form of divine self-declaration (in Hebrew: Isa 41:4; 43:10,13,25; 46:4; 48:12; 51:12; 52:6) expresses emphatically the absolute uniqueness of the name of Israel, who in these chapters constantly asserts his unique deity in contrast with the idols of the nations, and defines his uniqueness as that of the eternal creator of all things and the unique sovereign ruler of all history. His great act of eschatological salvation will demonstrate him to be the one and only God…

The "I am he" declarations are among the most emphatically monotheistic assertions in the Hebrew Bible, and if Jesus in John's Gospel repeats them he is unambiguously identifying himself with the one and only God, Yahweh, the God of Israel. Richard Bauckham, “The Trinity and the Gospel of John,” in The Essential Trinity: New Testament Foundations and Practical Relevance, ed. by Brandon D. Crowe and Carl R. Trueman (London: IVP [Apollos] 2016), chap 4.

Wednesday, February 14, 2018

Luke's nativity account

1. At the bottom of this post I'm going to reproduce an essay about Richard Bauckham. He's unduly skeptical, but still has some useful info. If we date Luke's Gospel to the late 50s or thereabouts, then I don't see why Mary couldn't be a direct source, since she may well have been a teenager when she bore Jesus. Barring that, Luke might well have access to informant like James and Jude, who'd have family lore at their fingertips.

2. An objection to Mary as one of Luke's informants is that Luke doesn't mention the flight to Egypt. Also, Lk 2:39 is pretty abrupt if Luke was aware of the intervening events. There are three potential explanations for the omission:

i) Luke doesn't report the flight to Egypt because Mary wasn't an informant

ii) Luke doesn't report the flight to Egypt even though Mary was an informant because she didn't tell him about it

iii) Even though Mary told him about it, Luke had some reason not to include it

Let's run back through these:

(i) is possible. However, assuming the historicity of the Lucan nativity anecdotes, Mary is naturally the ultimate source of information. However, this could be mediated through the siblings of Jesus. But if so, that still doesn't explain the omission of this particular incident, given the other nativity anecdotes.

(ii) When I look back on my late relatives, it's striking how little they said about their past. It usually came down to a handful of stock anecdotes which they periodically repeated. Although they had detailed recollections of their life, they rarely talked about most of what happened to them, including important things. You could get more information if you questioned them, but it takes some background information to know what to ask. 

Or they might volunteer something if a conversation happened to prompt them to relate an incident from their past. One time when we took my grandmother to church, they had a period where parishioners could mention something that happened to them that week. My grandmother seized the occasion to discuss her conversion experience. Not only was that the first time I ever heard her tell that story, even though I knew her well, that was the first time my mother heard her tell that story. My grandmother was in her mid-80s at the time, yet this is the first time she had occasion to mention that in my mother's presence. People can keep very significant things to themselves most of the time. 

In addition, as one Synoptic scholar said to me, one has to be careful on insisting what events a person might raise. Since Luke had already made clear that the family was from Galilee, there was little reason to mention the flight to Egypt. They just eventually ended up living in their homeland.

(iii) Perhaps Luke didn't include it because the flight into Egypt is politically sensitive. It raises questions about the Roman administration of Palestine. That's not a problem for Matthew's Jewish audience, but if Luke's Gospel is addressed to a Roman official, then Luke might wish to avoid opening that can of worms. 

Monday, June 19, 2017

The Excessive Skepticism Of Gospels Scholarship

"the kinds of differences we find between Plutarch and his sources are quite comparable with the differences between the Gospels, and nothing in the least like form criticism is postulated by experts on Plutarch." (Richard Bauckham, Jesus And The Eyewitnesses [Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2017], 596)

For some other examples of excessive skepticism in gospels scholarship and New Testament research in general, see here and here.

"But generally - in everyday life, in law courts, and in historical research - the normal rule of thumb is to trust what people tell us. Ordinary life would be impossible if we did not….Many New Testament scholars seem to suppose that the more sceptical of the sources they are, the more rigorously historical is their method. But this is not how historians usually work. In good historical work it is no more an epistemic virtue to be sceptical than it is to be credulous. In everyday life, we do not systematically mistrust everything anyone tells us. When someone who is in a position to know what they tell us does so, we normally believe them. But we keep our critical faculties alert and raise questions if there is specific reason to doubt. There is no reason why historical work should be substantially different in its dialectic of trust and critical assessment. Sometimes excessive scepticism goes hand-in-hand with a misplaced desire for certainty….But in historical work the desire for certainty, for any sort of total accuracy, is as misplaced as systematic scepticism. In history we only deal with probabilities (as is also the case in much human knowledge). Historians are in the business of constantly making reasonable judgments of probabilities. To believe testimony, to trust it when we have no means of verifying its content in detail, is a risk, but it is the kind of risk we are constantly taking when we trust testimony in ordinary life." (ibid., 608, 613)

How New Testament Scholarship Has Changed Over Time

Scholarship is important, and there's a danger in underestimating it, as many people do. But there's also a danger in overestimating it:

"It also worth thinking about how different the world of New Testament scholarship was in Bultmann's time from what it has become. There were comparatively few scholars working in the field and relatively few significant books published. It was possible for Bultmann and a few others to exercise a dominance over the development of the subject that is scarcely conceivable today for any scholar or small group of scholars, however brilliant. In the overcrowded and methodologically pluralist world of Gospels scholarship today form criticism, were it a new approach now, would be unlikely to achieve the wide-ranging and long-lasting influence it has actually had. Realising this implies that less weight should be given to the feeling, which I am sure many scholars have, that form criticism must have got at least some essential things right because it has been so very widely accepted by scholars." (Richard Bauckham, Jesus And The Eyewitnesses [Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2017], 592)

The Significance Of The Repetition Of Names In The Gospels

"In passing, it is worth noting that fictional writers, for obvious reasons, usually do not have more than one character bearing the same name, even when they are well aware that some of the names they use were very popular in the context they depict. In this respect, the fact that the Gospels have several Marys, several Simons, several Judases, and several Jameses is a noteworthy feature." (Richard Bauckham, Jesus And The Eyewitnesses [Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2017], 545)

Monday, June 12, 2017

Richard Bauckham Is Wrong About John's Authorship

He thinks the fourth gospel was written by a close disciple of Jesus named John, but not the son of Zebedee. The second edition of his Jesus And The Eyewitnesses (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2017) has a new chapter that expands upon his earlier treatment of the subject.

There's some merit to Bauckham's arguments against authorship by the son of Zebedee and for the existence of another prominent early church leader named John. Like his case for the authorship of the first gospel, however, what he says about the authorship of the fourth gospel becomes much less significant when you look at it in light of the evidence as a whole. He substantially underestimates or ignores a lot of evidence against his position.

I mostly agree with the seven arguments against identifying the author as the son of Zebedee that Bauckham discusses on pages 562-71 (e.g., the gospel's focus on Jerusalem rather than Galilee; the gospel's lesser attention given to the Twelve in some contexts, in contrast to the Synoptics; the lack of attention given to James the son of Zebedee). Authorship by somebody other than John the son of Zebedee makes more sense of some of what we see in the gospel. But the arguments don't amount to much, individually or collectively. It doesn't take much on the other side to outweigh what Bauckham is offering in support of his position. That's true of not just the seven arguments he provides on the pages cited above, but also the arguments he brings up elsewhere.

Monday, May 29, 2017

Richard Bauckham Is Wrong About Matthew's Authorship

He's mostly right about gospel authorship issues. He thinks Matthew may have had some sort of role in the origins of the gospel attributed to him, accepts the traditional authorship attributions of Mark and Luke, and attributes the fourth gospel to a close disciple of Jesus named John. But he doesn't think Matthew is responsible for the first gospel as we have it today, and he thinks the John who wrote the fourth gospel wasn't the son of Zebedee. Now that the second edition of Bauckham's Jesus And The Eyewitnesses (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2017) is out, I want to revisit the issue of gospel authorship with a focus on his material on the subject in that book. This post will mostly be about the authorship of the first gospel. A later post, which I'll link here when it becomes available, will respond to Bauckham's view of the authorship of the fourth gospel.

You can search the archives for posts we've written over the years that cite some of Bauckham's comments on Mark and Luke. See, for example, here, here, and here.

Regarding Matthew, Bauckham argues (108-12) that it's highly unlikely that a first-century Jew living in Israel would have had two Semitic personal names as common as Matthew and Levi. It's very unlikely, then, that Matthew is the Levi referred to in Mark 2:14 and Luke 5:27. And if Levi were another name for one of the Twelve, Mark surely would have explained that in his list of the Twelve, where so many other details are included (108). Since the author of the gospel of Matthew uses a passage about another man to tell his readers about Matthew's calling (Matthew 9:9), the author must have been somebody other than Matthew. "Matthew himself could have described his own call without having to take over the way Mark described Levi's call." (112) Bauckham also thinks the replacement of "his house" (Mark 2:15) with "the house" (Matthew 9:10) suggests that the author of the gospel of Matthew was only applying Mark 2:14 to the apostle Matthew and didn't think the rest of the passage was applicable (111).

Saturday, May 13, 2017

Which Mark Wrote The Second Gospel?

In the recent second edition of his Jesus And The Eyewitnesses (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2017), Richard Bauckham addresses a popular objection to the traditional authorship attribution of the second gospel. Supposedly, the name Mark was common in the world of that day, which makes it more difficult for us to identify which Mark was being cited as the author. After presenting some of the evidence against that argument, Bauckham writes:

"So were there 'innumerable Marks' in the first-century Christian movement? If we exclude Roman citizens who had the name Marcus as their praenomen but would never have been known by this name alone, as the Mark to whom the Gospel is attributed clearly was, then there were probably only a few. Jewish Christians of this name would certainly have been very few. Among Jewish Christian leaders or teachers, such as could have written a Gospel or were likely to have a Gospel attributed to them, there may well have been only one Mark. This evidence about the rarity of the name Marcus among Jews also bears on the question whether the New Testament references are to three, two, or only one Mark. It is very likely that they are to only one." (541)

A post I wrote a couple of years ago discusses some of the evidence that the New Testament is referring to only one Mark. That post also discusses some of the evidence that Markan authorship of the gospel wouldn't have been fabricated. See here on gospel authorship more broadly.

Wednesday, August 03, 2016

Richard Bauckham on faith and atheism

But at this point I think it may be helpful if I go back behind my work to the deeper roots of my faith. I have always loved God. I hesitate to say that because I cannot recall hearing anyone else say it, but I am sure it must be true for lots of other people. I can't account for it, except (of course) by the grace of God. What I mean by saying I have always loved God is that, from whenever it was that the word "God" had genuine meaning for me, I loved God and wanted to live in a way that would be pleasing to him. The idea some people have that being a religious believer is about obeying arbitrary divine commands out of fear of punishment is quite alien to me.

Because I have always loved God and my life over the years has developed on that basis, I find life without God almost unimaginable. I can see how people may feel satisfied with life without God if they have never known life with God. But after knowing the incomparable depth and breadth of meaning that knowing and loving God give to everything else in life, losing faith and living without God would surely be unendurable. So in rare and transient moments when the possibility that there is no God has seemed to me a guinea possibility, it has felt like the opening of a bottomless abyss of nihilism. I can recall only brief glimpses of that abyss. Nietzsche is the postmodern prophet who descended open-eyed into it and did his best to celebrate it. He is a powerful antidote to the superficiality of the "new atheists" who seem able merely to wander along the edges of the abyss, blithely unaware of it.

I have been through some dark periods in my life, but they have not threatened my faith. Quite the opposite–they have made me feel more deeply my need of God. Suffering seems either to threaten or to deepen faith.

Good things are even better when they come to us as gifts of love. In thankfulness to God we learn to experience everything good in life as God's love. Having no one to thank for all the good of one's life is one of the inhuman deficients of atheism. I once heard an attempt at a non-theistic form of grace before a meal, which amounted to thanking the universe. To thank the universe, which doesn't care even whether we exist, is as nonsensical as thanking the microwave for the meal.

…I would find it more difficult to believe in God if I did not believe that God became incarnate as the man Jesus, who died and rose bodily from death and is alive eternally with God. (Here I differ profoundly from people who find it easier to believe in God than in the incarnation and the resurrection.) R. Bauckham, "A Life with the Bible," I (Still) Believe: Leading Bible Scholars Share Their Stories of Faith and Scholarship (Zondervan 2015), 23-24.

Friday, April 29, 2016

Why Is John So Different From The Synoptics?

In a recent response to Bart Ehrman, I addressed the common objection that the gospel of John is too different from the Synoptics for both to be historically accurate. In that post, I focused on how John and the Synoptics are more similar than critics often suggest and how John likely was intentionally supplementing the Synoptics by making his gospel largely different than the others, which offers a partial explanation for their differences. What I want to do at this point is recommend another resource that addresses the issue from another angle.

In the comments section of the thread here, I discuss some evidence that John was written late in the first century and that the fourth gospel probably postdates the Synoptics by decades, not just years. Given the evidence that the Synoptics were written about two or three decades earlier, that difference in dating offers a further explanation for why the Synoptics and John are as different as they are. It seems likely that the similarities among the Synoptics are due in part to their having been written around the same time. John was written decades later with an intention that it be largely different than the others.

Tuesday, April 19, 2016

I forgot I had amnesia

I'm going to comment on Part 2 of the debate between Bart Ehrman and Richard Bauckham:


(I swiped the title of my post from a song by Win Corduin.)

1. I suspect Ehrman's influence is actually quite limited. Whose mind is he changing? He's not changing the minds of conservative Bible scholars–because they reject his definition of inerrancy. He's not changing the minds of moderate Bible scholars–because they reject his definition of historicity. Moreover, both groups are quite familiar with his stock examples. Both groups are quite familiar with the same data that he is. They arrived at their own explanations before he became a celebrity apostate.

Some liberal scholars agree with him, but he didn't change their minds. Rather, they already shared a similar outlook.

Apostates and atheists rubberstamp anything he says so long as he is bashing the Bible and Christianity. He could contradict himself, and they'd still root for him. 

I think the only group he has much impact on are stereotypical young people growing up in intellectually lazy evangelical churches. They make easy targets. 

2. Here's one of Ehrman's tactics: if his opponent happens to agree with him on the "phenomena" of Scripture, he acts as though they made a damaging concession. Problem is, they don't think the phenomena have the same implications that he does. 

For instance, one problem with the debate was failure to define a "story". Do Matthew and Luke change Mark's "story". 

That's equivocal. For one thing, it fails to distinguish between the underlying event and narrating the event. Although there's only one event (in any given case), it's not like there's just one right way to describe the same event. To the contrary, there are different ways to accurately present or represent the same event. 

Take the difference between expository documentaries, observational documentaries, linear narration, nonlinear narration, immersive journalism, &c. These can all be accurate depictions. Indeed, the multiplicity of viewpoints makes a variety of techniques more accurate. 

3. Apropos (2), Erhman said the Gospels are historically inaccurate because narrators provide the framework, which varies from one Gospel to the next. But that's equivocal. There's a difference between providing the framework in the sense of arranging scenes in a narrative sequence, and inventing a physical or temporal setting. 

Ehrman said the Gospel biographies not historically accurate in any modern sense of the term. Really?

What's the modern standard of comparison, exactly? For instance, I've seen hundreds–probably thousands–of documentaries in my lifetime. Is Ehrman denying that historical and biographical documentaries are selective? Use narrative compression? Nonlinear narrative (e.g. flashbacks)? Paraphrastic quotes?

There are different kinds of documentaries. For instance, you have expository documentaries with voiceover narrators. Both the narration and the narrative structure impose an editorial viewpoint. The genre may include reenactments to fill gaps in the record. They edit the raw material to form a logical rather than chronological progression that makes it flow smoothly, so that a viewer can follow the story more easily. 

At the opposite end of the spectrum are observational documentaries, where unobtrusive cameras simply record what happens spontaneously, with minimal editorial intervention. Just let events speak for themselves. Presents material from the viewpoint of participants. 

Is one more accurate than the other. Genre alone doesn't settle that question. Observational documentaries are more ostensively lifelike. More realistic. More like verbatim quotation and strict chronology. 

But that can be propagandistic. If subjects know they are being filmed, that affects how they behave. They may exploit that to influence the viewer through the image that participants consciously project. Rather than a director staging their actions, they stage their own actions to create a favorable impression. Conversely, the overtly interpretive nature of an expository documentary may be truer to events by evaluating events in light of the larger context and supporting evidence. 

Ehrman has a positivist view of historiography. Just record things as they happened. But that's simplistic and misleading. On 9/11, airplanes flew into skyscrapers. Just showing what happened is barely informative. That fails to distinguish between an accident and a calculated attack. What motivated the pilots? You have to go behind the events to explain why it happened. Ehrman has a bad habit of making oracular pronouncements that fail to consider obvious counterexamples to his confident generalities. 

4. Ehrman labored to impugn testimonial evidence. But a basic problem with Ehrman's position is that even if, for the sake of argument, we say the Gospel writers had fallible memories, there's a big difference between the occasional memory lapse and systematically misremembering the life of Jesus. Unless the Gospel writers suffered from senile dementia, Ehrman cannot impugn the historical reliability of the Gospels by giving us cliches about how eyewitness testimony isn't "necessarily" trustworthy. His position requires a far more ambitious claim: observers consisitently misremembered what Jesus said and did. 

For instance, I've read reviews of biographies about C. S. Lewis which mention that Lewis is unreliable when it comes to dating events in his own life. biographers have to correct some of his dates. They go to great pains to work out a careful chronology of his life. 

It would, however, be ridiculous to conclude that since Lewis misremembered when some events happened, that he misremembered what happened. Those are two very different things.

Indeed, it's often not a case of misremembering the date, but not remembering the date in the first place. If you didn't write it down or make a mental note, then it's not a case of forgetting or misremembering the date; rather, you never took notice of what day it was.

Later, you may attempt to reconstruct the date. But that's a different process. That's about attempting to remember something else that happened around the same time, and using that as a frame of reference to fix the rough timeframe of the incident whose calendar date you can't remember directly. 

5. Bauckham noted that witnesses may misremember the details of an accident because it was unexpected. To expand on what he said, they didn't see it coming. They were surprised. Unprepared. They only focus on the accident after it happens. After the initial shock wears off. 

He also said most forgetting occurs in the first few hours or a couple of days after the incident. Memories that survive that window are likely to stick. Moreover, once we begin to rehearse what happened, it falls into a standard stable form.  

Sunday, April 17, 2016

Ehrman's Argument Against Bauckham And The Gospels Fails

The second half of the gospels debate between Bart Ehrman and Richard Bauckham is now available. Before I address that second part of the debate, I want to summarize what I've argued so far.

Ehrman's position is highly speculative and highly unlikely, relying on layer after layer of implausibility. He has no good explanation for the internal evidence for the traditional authorship attributions of the gospels, ignores most of the external evidence prior to Irenaeus and may not even be aware of much of it, doesn't have a good explanation for the evidence from Irenaeus onward, and provides no external evidence for his own position. He has Matthew and Luke using Mark as a source, yet refuses to acknowledge the likely implication that those gospels would have been given titles and/or other identifying marks involving the authors' names, so that the documents could be distinguished in contexts in which they were being used together. (Since authors' names were the widespread means of distinguishing among the gospels from the second half of the second century onward, that means of distinguishing among them is the most likely one to have been used earlier. Continuity is more likely than discontinuity.) Ehrman wants us to believe that the gospels were collected in libraries, public and private, for several decades and were used in church services during that time, all the while remaining anonymous. I've used Irenaeus as an illustration of how implausible such a scenario would be. The general principles I've applied to Irenaeus must also be applied to Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, and every other relevant source, including the many heretical and non-Christian sources who corroborated the traditional authorship attributions of the gospels. When that kind of scrutiny is applied to Ehrman's hypothesis, it breaks down again and again and again.

Thursday, April 14, 2016

Bart Ehrman Is Wrong About Papias And Justin Martyr

During his recent debate with Richard Bauckham, Bart Ehrman argued that the documents Papias refers to as having been authored by Matthew and Mark were different than the gospels we have today. He also suggested that Justin Martyr may have attributed the gospels to authors other than the traditional ones and that the Gospel Of Peter was part of Justin's collection of gospels. I've responded to such arguments in the past. See my post at 11:18 P.M. on 9/19/06 in the comments section of the thread here. My comments there include a discussion of the evidence that Papias addressed John's gospel and its authorship, not just Matthew and Mark. On Justin's alleged acceptance of the Gospel Of Peter, see Lydia McGrew's comments on the subject in a response she wrote to Ehrman last year.

The more Ehrman proposes that sources prior to Irenaeus had a different collection of gospels, the worse of an explanation he's providing for why there's such widespread agreement about the four canonical gospels from the time of Irenaeus onward. Why do the different gospel collections that allegedly were accepted earlier leave no explicit trace in the historical record and so few allegedly implicit traces?