Does James White have something to say?

[Maccabees]

Protestants don’t think logically on the notion of sola scriptura when they insist Moses did not receive oral tradition as part of his divine revleation.

The burning bush says I am to God of of your fathers Abraham, Issac and Jacob? If Moses didn’t receive these stories through oral tradtion how in ther word could he have a reference point to what God was talking about? Remeber Moses wrote the Torah there was no written revelation on Adam, Noah and Abraham covenants these were oral traditions until Moses wrote them down. There was no Bible during most of the ministry of Moses certainly not while he was in Egypt he was kinda busy with the Pahroah the plagues, and getting his people out of Egypt.
According to Judaic tradtion none of these fathers wrote the Torah until Moses wrote what already was apart of his peoples tradtion.
So was it for the New Testament the stories were told first as tradtion and later written. Oral tradition was the primary way to teach the faith in Judaism and early Christianity.

IF you beleive the history of revelation given to you by a protestant Moses would have told God what the heck are you talking about write these stories down then I will beleive them!

 

[JPrejean]

Great job on the Dividing Line, by the way. I thought you sounded quite articulate and you didn’t sound nervous, either. Did you participate in Speech by chance?

Thanks, and I’ll credit Pastor White for having been quite gracious himself and for asking good questions. I did speech in high school, but I’d say that being a TA is what really honed my speaking skills. There’s no experience more effective than teaching for learning how to answer questions on the fly, IMHO.

Maybe Phil will see what you see and will stop trotting out his pet clip of White. I appreciate the time Phil spent encoding the video, so I’m sure it’s tough to give up on using it.

Well, from what I know of Phil, I’m sure he has quite a few articles that demonstrate that the Catholic rule of faith was in effect at the time of the Apostles. So he can keep using the video clip, as long as he links those articles as well.

Moreover, if it could be demonstrated from Scripture that the exact words or full sense of what the apostles taught orally was to be preserved without error through an unbroken line of bishops then all Christians would be bound to these oral teachings.

Sadly, oral transmission is far more subject to change, deviation, corruption, and cultural influence than written transmission. We can go back and compare manuscripts against each other all seeking to get back to the original message itself. You can’t do this with oral transmission.

There’s nothing wrong with that as a “common sense” argument per se. As I recall, Jason Engwer has made a similar argument. But ISTM that it suffers from the same problem of all common sense arguments, i.e., that the premise that is assumed to be from common sense doesn’t necessarily hold up to scrutiny. The presumption here is that God would use the most objectively verifiable means to communicate a message, but clearly, the most objectively reliable means would be direct sensory demonstration. Yet Scripture itself provides a counter-intuitive teaching. In the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, Abraham says “If they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced if some one should rise from the dead” (Luke 16:31, see also John 10:37-38). Now, that is obviously somewhat proverbial, since the physical demonstration clearly made a difference for the Apostle Thomas and would have made a difference for those in Tyre and Sidon (Luke 10:13). As I see it, the real import of the lesson is that it’s the authentic message and not the reliability of the medium that makes a difference.

But besides that, setting a minimum threshhold for objective verifiability proves too much. By setting up your position as the default position vis-a-vis Catholicism (“The onus is on Catholics to prove…”), you’ve destroyed your own believability vis-a-vis skeptics of Christianity. If the test becomes “whoever believes less believes best,” then you could just as easily savage the inerrancy of Scripture, the historical reality of Jesus, and any other fundamental truth of Christianity, none of which have logically airtight, certain demonstrations. The Jesus Seminar, liberal theology, deism, and countless other critical movements came directly out of this “common sense” approach. Sure, Scripture may be impressively well-preserved for an ancient document, but there are plenty of well-preserved ancient documents that we don’t take as accounts of actual historical occurrences, particularly with respect to supernatural events. Also, there’s a relevant cultural community here (i.e., Jews) who know the language extremely well and who by and large consider Christianity to be absolutely contradicted by the Hebrew OT. Certainly, a skeptic would have plenty of ammunition to admit doubt.

continues…

 

[JPrejean]

…continued

What this really illustrates is that the notion of a “default position” (and the cognate that “you can’t prove a negative”) is itself logically fallacious. In an absolute sense, no statement is negative or positive. One could just as easily state your position positively (e.g., “God established sola scriptura as the rule of faith”), and our position as the negative default. It helps to remember that the “burden of proof” is an artificial construct assigned for some purpose. In criminal law, that purpose is reducing the likelihood of false convictions; in debate, it is used as a tie-breaker for people who find both sides equally persuasive. But digging into that a bit, the burden of proof really sets the degree of skepticism, which is exactly what I was discussing above. Critical thinkers reasonably ought to have some degree of skepticism, but the real question is what degree of skepticism is appropriate or reasonable (e.g., no one who says that “you can’t prove a negative” would ever be skeptical of the proposition that ancient Egyptians didn’t watch Seinfeld).

With that background, I would say that your position suffers from two serious flaws from a reliability standpoint. The first is that you are far too skeptical about oral history (in the sense of cultural succession). Oral transmission is clearly less reliable than written transmission about the same subject matter, all other things being equal. However, oral transmission is not completely unreliable either (consider the preservation of the Genesis account, the Iliad, or Beowulf). Furthermore, even if you have a written source, it would be pretty unusual to disregard the history of interpretation in the relevant community when interpreting the significance, meaning, and probable interpretation of that document, particularly when the document was preserved and cherished by that community. Indeed, that sort of thing would ordinarily be considered academic malpractice. You can look for changes and contradictions, but the reasonable default position would assume that cultural succession preserves meaning (although probably not exact verbiage), because that is, in fact, what usually happens.

This segues into the second flaw: failure to recognize a highly questionable premise in your argument. Your position starts with an extraordinary claim, i.e., that one can reliably, definitively, unambiguously, and accurately identify the systematic theology of an ancient group of people from an ancient text in a dead language using ordinary historical and interpretive methods when several cultures that preserved the text failed to do so. I wouldn’t accept that conclusion about the Egyptian Book of the Dead, nor similarly ancient Roman law texts, nor similarly ancient Greek literature (indeed, we haven’t even managed to keep interpretive principles for our own Constitution intact). So despite the constant reassurance that sola scriptura advocates simply use “ordinary and sound hermeneutics” in exegesis, I find the claimed conclusion far beyond what any “ordinary hermeneutics” would purport to provide. You mentioned being thankful that there is only 1% variation in the critical texts and that no doctrine depends on it. But with such an amazing claim, I would think that even 1% variation would be sufficient to create doubt, and the vast disparities of opinion among the critical scholars would kill it entirely for lots of reasonable people.

Honestly, based solely on historical reliability, I would consider the Greek Orthodox to have the most reasonable claim among Christian churches (preserving language and culture). But I also think that it would be unreasonable for a Christian to rely solely on those criteria as a basis for judgment, which is why I am neither Orthodox nor atheist.