The Spiral Argument Argument

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Dr. Tait-

I want to reflect more on your two-part post above before responding; however, this question has been on my mind for the past day, so, I’ll ask it now:

Would you approach the gospels (or any ancient work of history) with:
  • skepticism? The text is considered dubious until proven reliable.
  • credulity? The text is considered reliable until proven false.
  • an open mind? Evidence and historiographical criteria are used to arrive at a general presumption about the trustworthiness of the text.
I wonder if you do not approach the Gospels (and hence TSA) with a hermeneutic of skepticism. If this is incorrect, please clarify your approach.

Regarding credulity, Richard Swinburne argues for what he calls “the principle of testimony” - that in the absence of counter evidence, we should believe what others tells us they have done or seen. You can see how this might be applied to Matthew 16:18, of course. Swinburne’s argument has much in favor of it. Most of what we know comes from the testimony of others. I am confident that Beijing exists…even though I have never been there. Others have. Did Julius Caesar really cross the Rubicon? That’s been tougher to nail down. However, we have to rely on others because we cannot possibly verify EVERYTHING in life personally.

Finally, if a document is proven to be generally reliable, then it has earned the benefit of the doubt regarding matters that we cannot verify directly. The burden of proof shifts to those who wish to challenge the reliability of the author and document.

Now, I know that you reject the idea of general reliability. You say “that’s not how history is done”? Really?

I’m watching a video series right now which includes commentary from:
  • Scott M. Sullivan, PhD
  • Scott Hahn, PhD
  • Craig Evans, PhD
  • Gary Habermas, PhD
  • Peter Kreeft, PhD
  • Michael Licona, PhD
  • John Rist, PhD
  • John Bergsma, PhD
  • Craig Blomberg, PhD
  • Ronald K. Tacelli, SJ
In this series, the historical evidence for Christianity is at the heart of the apologetics argument. IOW, they are talking about exactly the same things that we are discussing, and they disagree with you completely with regard to the validity of establishing general reliability of the gospel texts by common historiographical methodologies. Further, I find that Josh McDowell has taken a similar approach in New Evidence that Demands a Verdict, and his list of quoted authors is truly a Who’s Who of NT scholarship.

So, as I work my way line by line through TSA, I will be endeavoring to lay out an unassailable case for the reliability of the NT, and I will contend that Mt. 16:18 is to be accepted as the Word of God spoken by Jesus. You may present your evidence that Jesus did not say those words, and we’ll see who has the stronger argument. 😉
 
Randy_Carson said:
Dr. Tait-

I want to reflect more on your two-part post above before responding; however, this question has been on my mind for the past day, so, I’ll ask it now:

Would you approach the gospels (or any ancient work of history) with:
  • skepticism? The text is considered dubious until proven reliable.
  • credulity? The text is considered reliable until proven false.
  • an open mind? Evidence and historiographical criteria are used to arrive at a general presumption about the trustworthiness of the text.
I wonder if you do not approach the Gospels (and hence TSA) with a hermeneutic of skepticism. If this is incorrect, please clarify your approach.
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No, if I have to choose one of the three options, of course it would be the third. And in response to a later point you make, I don’t reject the idea of “general reliability” altogether. Obviously which of these three stances one takes will depend a good deal on how much the text has shown itself to be reliable in ways that can be checked. It will also depend on how the text is being used and how much weight is to be put on the conclusions. The spiral argument tries to rest a claim about the truth of Catholicism–a claim that, if true, should change how we all live our lives–on a claim about the historical accuracy of the NT. That calls for a pretty high degree of skepticism.

In other words, most claims about history fall somewhere in the range of “may be true but probably aren’t” or “are probably true but may not be,” or even “we really don’t know but here are some possibilities.” There is a whole lot of uncertainty in history. The spiral argument and other arguments along this line can’t handle uncertainty.

But there are a lot of things that we can know about history with reasonable certainty. Unfortunately for the spiral argument, that Jesus intended to found an “infallible Church” is not one of them.
Regarding credulity, Richard Swinburne argues for what he calls “the principle of testimony” - that in the absence of counter evidence, we should believe what others tells us they have done or seen. You can see how this might be applied to Matthew 16:18, of course. Swinburne’s argument has much in favor of it. Most of what we know comes from the testimony of others. I am confident that Beijing exists…even though I have never been there. Others have. Did Julius Caesar really cross the Rubicon? That’s been tougher to nail down. However, we have to rely on others because we cannot possibly verify EVERYTHING in life personally.
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Indeed. What we all do, reasonably, is fit all the evidence we have into a kaleidoscope of beliefs whose details change constantly while the main outlines mostly stay the same. Lots of people and books and other media, from lots of different backgrounds, in lots of different contexts, have told me that there is a city called Beijing, or even more convincingly have simply assumed that there is. But if someone told me that they had visited a magical place called Shangri-La that doesn’t show up on any of the maps, I would be more skeptical. So the idea of a general “principle of testimony” as you’re presenting it strikes me as silly. I don’t know how Swinburne presents the idea, but as you’re presenting it I find it unconvincing. Swinburne may qualify it more carefully than you are doing. He is certainly an eminent philosopher. But, I note, not a historian 😛
Finally, if a document is proven to be generally reliable, then it has earned the benefit of the doubt regarding matters that we cannot verify directly. The burden of proof shifts to those who wish to challenge the reliability of the author and document.
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No. It depends on what the text is saying and how it is being used.
Now, I know that you reject the idea of general reliability. You say “that’s not how history is done”? Really?
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I reject the idea as you present it above: that you first establish the “general reliability” of a text and then trust it unless there is some direct, obvious counter-evidence. That is, indeed, not how history is done. You look at each story and each saying and apply general principles of critical thinking. Is it more probable, in each case, given all the other evidence and the nature of the text before us, that this specific text is giving us accurate information or that it is distorting the information in some way? It’s all a matter of relative probability. In the case of Matt. 16, the greater relative probability is with the view that “Matthew” added the “You are Peter” passage, rather than with the view that Mark and Luke omitted something of which Matthew had independent knowledge. (Note that the names of the Gospels are used because they are conventional, not because I think it’s historically established that these people really wrote the books in question.)

Whether a given text has been shown to be reliable on other occasions is of course one important piece of the jigsaw, but not the only one and not even the most important one. The most “generally reliable” text can lie or be mistaken (speaking in purely human, historical terms, of course). And a text that is mostly fiction may give valuable information on occasion. It isn’t that general reliability is totally irrelevant or impossible to determine, but that you put far, far too much weight on it.
 
There’s also the question of why you assume, repeatedly, that the general reliability of Matthew is good. Another huge problem with your approach is that you want to speak of the “general reliability” of the NT in general. But that makes no sense. You have to go book by book if you want to talk about whether NT texts are generally to be regarded as reliable. I think Luke is pretty reliable, though there are some problems like the census mentioned in chap. 2. (Yes, I know the standard answers to that problem. Again, they may be true.) But I don’t see a lot of historical grounds for scoring Matthew high on “general reliability.”
In this series, the historical evidence for Christianity is at the heart of the apologetics argument. IOW, they are talking about exactly the same things that we are discussing, and they disagree with you completely with regard to the validity of establishing general reliability of the gospel texts by common historiographical methodologies. Further, I find that Josh McDowell has taken a similar approach in New Evidence that Demands a Verdict, and his list of quoted authors is truly a Who’s Who of NT scholarship.
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These are rather vague claims. It’s possible that the conservative NT scholars you list (Evans, Haberman, Licona, Blomberg, and Bergsma, if we’re sticking to the ones who actually have Ph.D.'s in Biblical scholarship–Hahn of course engages in Biblical scholarship but actually earned his doctorate in systematics) do hold to a view of “general reliability” with which I disagree. But I’m not sure you have understood the nature of my disagreement. I am objecting to the way you use “general reliability” to trump specific critical questions about specific passages. I’m not of course saying that it’s irrelevant to ask whether a text is generally reliable.

I also note that two of the scholars you list, Blomberg and Licona, were called out by Norman Geisler in this article for questioning the historicity of various parts of Matthew. So they at least (if Geisler’s claims are correct) do not in fact agree with your approach to Matthew. They do not think that Matthew’s “general reliability” should preclude the examination of specific passages to see if they are to be taken as historical.
So, as I work my way line by line through TSA, I will be endeavoring to lay out an unassailable case for the reliability of the NT, and I will contend that Mt. 16:18 is to be accepted as the Word of God spoken by Jesus. You may present your evidence that Jesus did not say those words, and we’ll see who has the stronger argument. 😉
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Just bear in mind that the point under dispute is not whether Jesus said those words, but whether it can be shown with reasonable certainty by the normal methods of historical inquiry that he did.

I am maintaining that normal historical methods would lead us to conclude that he most likely did not, but that the point is not one on which historical method can give much certainty either way. This is, in fact, a pretty conservative position. Most NT scholars pretty much take for granted that where Matthew differs so markedly from the other Gospels, Matthew is unreliable. I’m not willing to jump to that conclusion. It might be that Matthew really does have independent sources for passages like this. But the probability of this isn’t terribly high given what we can ascertain about Matthew’s general method (that’s where “general reliability” comes into play, but not in a way that helps your case) and his relationship to the other sources.

Edwin
 
Contarini said:
I think they are thinking of non-canonical early Christian texts, and that’s a fair point. But obviously historians are even more skeptical about what Ignatius or Irenaeus have to say about what Christ did than they are about what the Gospels have to say–and they are fairly skeptical about the Gospels.
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The likes of Ignatius or Irenaeus might well attribute the founding of the Church to Jesus, but they cannot attest to it, because they did not have first-hand knowledge of it: their understanding of it came from others and does not constitute independent evidence.

The only type of document which could fit the bill of “other ancient works attest to the fact that Christ established a Church” is something like the Gospel of Peter, and I do not recall it covering that.
 
Mystophilus said:
The likes of Ignatius or Irenaeus might well attribute the founding of the Church to Jesus, but they cannot attest to it, because they did not have first-hand knowledge of it: their understanding of it came from others and does not constitute independent evidence.

The only type of document which could fit the bill of “other ancient works attest to the fact that Christ established a Church” is something like the Gospel of Peter, and I do not recall it covering that.
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Please refresh my memory.

Was Irenaeus the student of John? Someone was…
 
icamhif said:
Close. Polycarp was a student of John. Irenaeus was a student of Polycarp.
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Thank you.

At my age, close is pefect. 😃

Seriously, memories of a high school teacher who was an expert (in my opinion) on early Church History are sliding in between my ears. Back then, I gobbled up every detail of the battles within the early Church. Thank heavens for the Holy Spirit, John 14: 25-27. If I were to choose “historical” sources for the reality of Jesus as Founder, I would choose Polycarp, Irenaeus, and other early Church Fathers because their writings and actions have Jesus as their model. Actions speak louder than words is what my Irish Mother told me.

As I begin exploration of the Spiral Argument, I now find that three axioms are necessary.
  1. God as Creator exists.
  2. God is the Holy Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
  3. God as Creator interacts with His human creatures.
 
Contarini said:
And here we have the core of why the argument is appealing. It appeals to American anti-intellectualism and anti-elitism. It invites Christians with no historical training to assume that their faith-based, uncritical reading of ancient texts is just how any normal person would read any ancient text and thus has more validity than the readings of those nasty scholars who have actually spent years studying how to read ancient texts and thus are contaminated.

We need to get these assumptions out in the open. They are, it seems to me, completely untenable assumptions. But at least this thread may do the service of making people voice them.

To be clear: there are naive believing readings of texts and there are naively skeptical readings. For instance, naive skeptics typically assume that simply because the texts are ancient we can’t really be sure that they have any historical value at all. Naive skeptics come up with clever suggestions as to what might “really” lie behind the miracle stories (Jesus walked across hidden stepping stones and thus looked as if he was walking across the water, etc.). Naive skeptics jump to the assumption that if texts aren’t entirely accurate they must be deliberate frauds. And so on. Naive skeptics are easy foils for apologetics of the Catholic Answers type, and that I think is why the tract in question spends a whole paragraph on textual criticism (a typical issue raised by the naive skeptic). In short, the distinction between critical and naive reading isn’t a distinction between faith and unbelief. It’s a distinction between people jumping to conclusions based on their knowledge and experiences as modern people (believers or unbelievers), vs. people asking careful critical questions building on the inquiries made by generations of scholars before them.

Unlike most of the “hard sciences,” history is a “club” in which “laypeople” can participate quite easily. Distinguishing between critical scholars and other people isn’t an attempt to exclude anyone. You can be part of a serious historical conversation if you want to by reading accessible surveys of the scholarship and weighing which of the various expert views makes more sense to you (this is how I, as a non-specialist in this field, do it myself, though I do have some tools and skills at my disposal that many others don’t have, such as a knowledge of Greek and of the general way in which historical inquiry into religious subjects works). But if you simply brush off the consensus of experts as irrelevant elitism and choose to “pursue other methods,” then you have declared your lack of seriousness about historical inquiry. You have disqualified yourself from making any statement about what the historical evidence shows, and thus from making the kind of argument under discussion here. Of course no one can stop you from making such statements. But you will only be putting a stumbling block in the path of those whom you wish to persuade of the reasonableness of the Faith, at least if they have any smattering of critical thinking themselves.

Edwin
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Hi Edwin

I just want to say that your posts are so great, I just had to save them on my desktop. To me, you are a model of honest apologetics. I, personally, have struggled in my faith when I learned that the case for the Resurrection is not as clear and straightforward as Josh Mcdowell and Lee Strobel made it out to be. Thankfully, I never fell away, as I never let my faith stand or fall on subject matters that are beyond my area of expertise (in this case, historicity.) God has humbled me, numerous times, that I must trust in Him, even when I don’t always have clear-cut answers. He is Wonderful and Great!

Ike
 
grannymh said:
If I were to choose “historical” sources for the reality of Jesus as Founder, I would choose Polycarp, Irenaeus, and other early Church Fathers because their writings and actions have Jesus as their model.
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So, if your grandmother told your father about a crime which she had seen, and your father told you, would you be a witness to that crime? No. And that is precisely why Irenaeus is not a historical source for Jesus’ life: he, like subsequent historians, is only a reference to those.
 
Mystophilus said:
So, if your grandmother told your father about a crime which she had seen, and your father told you, would you be a witness to that crime? No. And that is precisely why Irenaeus is not a historical source for Jesus’ life: he, like subsequent historians, is only a reference to those.
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  1. I prefer not to use Jesus as part of a “crime” analogy.
  2. I do consider that Jesus founded the Catholic Church and not a country club.
  3. It is relevant to compare Jesus’ teachings with both an established country club and an established religious organization.
  4. A currently living person should be able to distinquish a country club from a particular religious organization regardless of how many years both have existed.
  5. One does not have to have historical witnesses to the “carving” of Mount Rushmore in order to determine that Mount Rushmore exists as a memorial to four United States presidents.
What I am demonstrating is that there is more than one way to skin a cat or to use the Spiral Argument.
 
grannymh said:
This is what caught my attention.
“A Spiral Argument
Note that this is not a circular argument.”

I always wonder what happens when the two ends of a circular argument are independently true.
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Well, I think what makes an argument “circular” is that the 2 ends are one and the same.

So, starting with the proposition, for example, “A circle does not have 4 sides” and ending with “Therefore, having 4 sides does not make it a circle” would be…circular.
 
PRmerger said:
Well, I think what makes an argument “circular” is that the 2 ends are one and the same.

So, starting with the proposition, for example, “A circle does not have 4 sides” and ending with “Therefore, having 4 sides does not make it a circle” would be…circular.
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Can one start with the proposition that the Catholic Church is a visible organization?

Because the visible Catholic Church/organization follows the teachings of the prophet Jesus, Who is generally recognized as having existed in the first century AD, one can conclude that Jesus is the founder of the Catholic Church.

Because the Catholic Church holds the mystery of the Most Holy Trinity as absolute truth, it recognizes its founder as the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity which means that Jesus has the infalibility of God.

Information source for the Most Holy Trinity begins with paragraph 232,* Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition.* Please note the diference in size of print in some of the following paragraphs.
*CCC *20
The use of small print in certain passages indicates observations of an historical or apologetic nature, or supplementary doctrinal explanations.

CCC 21
The quotations, also in small print, from patristic, liturgical, magisterial or hagiographical sources, are intended to enrich the doctrinal presentations. These texts have often been chosen with a view to direct catechetical use.

A key teaching is that the Divine Persons are really distinct from one another. The Divine Unity is Triune. CCC 254 and CCC 266-267.

Because the Catholic Church holds the mystery of the Most Holy Trinity as absolute truth, it recognizes that the Third Person, the Holy Spirit is active within the visible Catholic Church as predicted in Chapter 14, Gospel of John. This prediction is verified in Acts 2: 1-4, and in the actions of the major ecumenical Church Councils. The guidance of the Holy Spirit in defining doctrines based on Divine Revelation is the infalibility of God.

Therefore, it is the presence of the Triune God which is the source for infallible doctrines of the Catholic Church.
 
grannymh said:
Can one start with the proposition that the Catholic Church is a visible organization?

Because the visible Catholic Church/organization follows the teachings of the prophet Jesus, Who is generally recognized as having existed in the first century AD, one can conclude that Jesus is the founder of the Catholic Church…
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That’s just too much of a leap. The standard secular narrative is that there were all kinds of movements claiming to follow Jesus’ teachings, and the early Catholic Church (from which all modern Christians are descended, though Protestants have more of a radical break in their history than do Catholics or the Eastern Churches) was simply the group that wound up “winning” the power struggle.

The fact that the Catholic Church (meaning by this the early Catholic Church and leaving to one side the question of which modern Christian bodies do or do not stand in continuity with that early Church) “won” doesn’t automatically mean that it was right in its claims.

Certainly I think there are good reasons to conclude that the early Catholic Church was fundamentally correct in its interpretation of Jesus’ life and teachings (just as I think there are good reasons to conclude that the modern Catholic Church is basically right in its interpretation of the early Catholic Church). But that’s not the same thing as saying that it can be proven.

One of the basic problems with the spiral argument is that it’s cast in a deductive form. That just isn’t a valid way to argue from history in the first place. History is always about probability. Historical arguments are by nature inductive.

Edwin
 
Contarini said:
That’s just too much of a leap. The standard secular narrative is that there were all kinds of movements claiming to follow Jesus’ teachings, and the early Catholic Church (from which all modern Christians are descended, though Protestants have more of a radical break in their history than do Catholics or the Eastern Churches) was simply the group that wound up “winning” the power struggle.

The fact that the Catholic Church (meaning by this the early Catholic Church and leaving to one side the question of which modern Christian bodies do or do not stand in continuity with that early Church) “won” doesn’t automatically mean that it was right in its claims.

Certainly I think there are good reasons to conclude that the early Catholic Church was fundamentally correct in its interpretation of Jesus’ life and teachings (just as I think there are good reasons to conclude that the modern Catholic Church is basically right in its interpretation of the early Catholic Church). But that’s not the same thing as saying that it can be proven.

One of the basic problems with the spiral argument is that it’s cast in a deductive form. That just isn’t a valid way to argue from history in the first place. History is always about probability. Historical arguments are by nature inductive.

Edwin
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Thank you for your response.

You are correct. Historical arguments are by nature inductive (scientific method) of examining available evidence and determining a probable hypothesis.

In post 52, I tried to follow the principles of the deductive method of reasoning. Thus, I could eliminate some of the historical this and that. I simply accept probability and will move on to examples which compare favorably to the teachings attributed to the prophet Jesus. Once I am sure that my initial [spiral] method is somewhat productive, then I can address examples of faithfulness to the teachings of Jesus…

I prefer to explain the position of the visible Catholic Church and not “prove” Catholicism. Therefore, I use three Catholic axioms. Axiom 3. will be used when I look at examples of faithfulness to the teachings of Jesus.
  1. God as Creator exists.
  2. God is the Most Holy Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
  3. God as Creator interacts with His human creatures.
I use the term visible Catholic Church because it exists in time and space like Mount Rushmore. Most likely, I will eventually refer to the protocol of the visible Catholic Church on planet earth.

Realistically, it would be very difficult to defend my attempt at deductive reasoning according to your valid position. Personally, I prefer the
enjoyable both - and approach over the either - or approach. A “willing suspension of disbelief” is very useful. On that note, I would love to have you critique my first draft of deductive reasonsing leading to a source for infallibility in matters of faith – according to the principles of the deductive method.

I do not consider my draft as a syllogism. ??
 
grannymh said:
  1. I prefer not to use Jesus as part of a “crime” analogy.
  2. I do consider that Jesus founded the Catholic Church and not a country club.
  3. It is relevant to compare Jesus’ teachings with both an established country club and an established religious organization.
  4. A currently living person should be able to distinquish a country club from a particular religious organization regardless of how many years both have existed.
  5. One does not have to have historical witnesses to the “carving” of Mount Rushmore in order to determine that Mount Rushmore exists as a memorial to four United States presidents.
What I am demonstrating is that there is more than one way to skin a cat or to use the Spiral Argument.
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Actually, no, that is not an argument at all: it is merely a series of statements. Further, #1 and #2 are belief statements, #3 is an undemonstrated assertion of the justifiability of #2, #4 is an undemonstrated assertion about ability to discriminate present functions, and #5 is a negative assertion about the connection between knowledge of past action and knowledge of present function. You appear to be trying to use #5 as an analogy for the church, claiming that its present function demonstrates its past function, and so you seem to have left the particular example of Irenaeus behind.

If you are trying to use #5 that way, it is not relevant either to the illogical, so-called spiral argument or to the question of who initiated the function: recognising that Mt Rushmore now acts as a shrine for some American politicians is no demonstration of who set it up, or why they did so, not least because re-purposing is very common.

If you have not left Irenaeus behind, a relevant Mt Rushmore analogy for his claims about Jesus’ having founded the church would be the following: your grandmother told your father that Bob Smith oversaw the construction of the memorial; your father then told you that Bob Smith oversaw the construction of the memorial; you then say that Bob Smith oversaw the construction of the memorial.

Were you a witness of Bob Smith’s overseeing the construction of the memorial? No.
Can you serve as a historical source for Bob Smith’s overseeing the construction of the memorial? No.
Can you serve as a reference to a possible historical source for Bob Smith’s overseeing the construction of the memorial (i.e. as a reference to your grandmother)? Yes.
Does this prove anything about who oversaw the construction of the memorial? No.
 
The Procurator and the Peasant
by Jimmy Akin
jimmyakin.com/2014/10/the-procurator-and-the-peasant.html

In the book of Acts, one of the key chronological benchmarks is in Acts 24:27, when the Roman procurator who presently has Paul in custody (Felix) is replaced by his successor (Festus).

You’d think that it would be easy to simply look up in secular sources when this change of government officials took place, but we can’t do that. We don’t have the records, and dating the beginning of Festus’s tenure is tricky.

In fact, as Ben Witherington points out:

About Felix’s successor, Porcius Festus, very little can be said, for our sources are limited to what we find in Acts 25–26 and in Josephus, Ant. 20.182–97 and War 2.271 [The Acts of the Apostles: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary, 717].

Got that?

The sources we have about Festus are limited to Acts and a couple of passages in Josephus. Now, Festus was an important man. He ruled the entire province of Judaea (more than just the Southern territory of Judea). He had a huge number of subjects. He’s one of the successors of Pontius Pilate. Further, he was one of the few (some say the only) good procurator that the Romans sent to Judaea. And yet we know only a tiny amount about him.

From this, several things suggest themselves…

1) The footprint left in ancient historical sources by even as important a person as the Roman procurator of Judaea can be very slight.

No doubt, in his own day, there were many more literary references to him–in all kinds of works, from official government documents to private letters–but except for the references in Acts and two passages of Josephus, they have all perished.

2) This should help us calibrate our expectations regarding other people in the ancient world.

If the Roman procurator has only two ancient authors mentioning him, then we would expect the vast majority of his subjects to go completely unmentioned in historical sources–as, indeed, they do.

We know the names of only a handful of Festus’s subjects, and they are people who have significant stature, like the high priests of his day.

3) We should not make excessive demands about mentions of Jesus in ancient sources.

Jesus came from the peasant class (Luke 2:24; cf. Lev. 12:8), and we would expect the events of his early life to leave no traces at all in surviving secular sources. It was only after his ministry began that he became such a public figure that he might be expected to be mentioned in non-Christian sources, as he and the movement he founded is:
  • Suetonius, writing around A.D. 121
  • Tacitus, writing around A.D. 116
  • Pliny the Younger, writing in A.D. 110 or 111
  • The Emperor Trajan, writing back to Pliny in A.D. 110 or 111
  • And Josephus, writing around A.D. 93 (including the undisputed passage regarding his brother James the Just)
Comparing this to the single non-Christian source mentioning Festus (Josephus), the number of early, non-Christian sources mentioning Jesus is quite ample!

He left a bigger footprint on the literature of his day than did this Roman procurator!

4) We shouldn’t dismiss the historical value of biblical evidence

A historian of the Roman empire would have two early century sources to tell him about Porcius Festus: Luke and Josephus. It would be foolish to ignore either of these and, indeed, secular historians do not discount things Luke says simply because his works are in the New Testament. Only hyper-skeptical individuals dismiss the New Testament as a historical source out of hand. Sober historians treat it like they do other historical sources. One coming from a secular approach will not regard it as divinely inspired, but that does not mean it is without historical value.

The idea that everything the New Testament says should be considered false unless otherwise confirmed by outside sources is nonsense. Historical evidence found in the New Testament is just that . . . historical evidence.
 
Randy, you should invite Karl Keating and Jimmy Akin to join us in this discussion.

It would be really interesting to hear them defend their arguments!
 
Randy_Carson said:
The idea that everything the New Testament says should be considered false unless otherwise confirmed by outside sources is nonsense.
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Indeed. No disagreement there.

But it’s also nonsense to argue, as you did (on the other thread), that because some things in the NT are confirmed by outside evidence therefore everything else should be taken on trust.

As I keep saying, you have to look at the specifics of each story or saying. Of course the general nature of the text in which it’s found (the specific Biblical book, not the NT as a whole when we’re talking about historicity) is highly relevant. Mark and Luke appear to be far more interested in history than Matthew. That’s one of the reasons why a historical argument based on material unique to Matthew is such a bad one. But you cannot proceed first by proving “general reliability” and then deducing the reliability of a specific story from that. There is no shortcut for looking at each story on its own merits.

That is not the same thing as saying that the NT is unreliable unless confirmed by outside evidence.

On the other hand, texts clearly written with the explicit purpose of awakening or nurturing or defending religious faith are suspect in ways that other texts may not be. Emphasis on may–all texts have an agenda of some sort, but some agendas are more consuming than others. Historians prefer casual, matter-of-fact, indirect references in documents with other concerns, when they can get them. Any text that sets out to tell you something is regarded with suspicion on that point by a critical historian. And by definition, all the NT documents set out to tell us some key things about Jesus, in one way or another.

Thus, Acts is likely to be more trusted for what it says about Festus than for what it says about Paul, because Festus isn’t the focus and there’s no reason for him to be mentioned except that he happened to be the procurator at the time. If, on the other hand, we had a document written as an apologia for Festus’ governorship which happened to mention his dealings with a troublesome Jew named Paul, then that would be gold for historians interested in Paul.

It isn’t about “outside” evidence being more valuable than NT evidence, but about any text being open to suspicion on matters that clearly lie at the heart of the author’s agenda. That’s when you want corroboration the most, from a source that is more likely to be mentioning the point in question only incidentally, just because it happens to be true.

Edwin
 
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