The Spiral Argument Argument

[Randy_Carson]

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

Dr. Tait-

My apologies for the delay in responding to your previous posts. That is high on my to-do list. However, I would like to take a quick moment to ask a question regarding this point you’re making.

A Notre Dame fan will understandably exhibit great enthusiasm regarding his team’s win over Duke in the ACC tournament, but does that prevent him from reporting the events of the game accurately or disqualify him as a reliable eyewitness?

Similarly, a Christian author such as Matthew, John or Luke may be firm believers in the resurrection of Christ, but does that prevent them from reporting events of the Last Supper accurately or disqualify them reliable as eyewitnesses?

And is this how you proceed with everything in your own life? If you have been married for x number of years, and in all that time, you have never known your wife to lie to you about anything, have you concluded that your wife is a trustworthy person who simply does not lie? Or do you still seek to verify each separate “story” she tells you about the debits in your check book?

It seems that we are destined to clash, ultimately, on this one point: whether general reliability of Matthew is sufficient to accept that Jesus promised to build a Church. I will say yes, and argue that there are numerous ways we can see that Jesus did intend to do this. You will say no and point to the lack of multiple attestation for Mt. 16:18. Yet others, such as Blomberg, would argue that this is NOT how historians approach other ancient texts, and from this I conclude that there is some sort of “reverse bias” at work in your thinking as seen in this statement:

“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.”

Blomberg would simply ask for a level playing field. And so do I.

 

[PRmerger]

It seems that we are destined to clash, ultimately, on this one point: whether general reliability of Matthew is sufficient to accept that Jesus promised to build a Church. I will say yes, and argue that there are numerous ways we can see that Jesus did intend to do this.

Indeed.

I don’t think we should treat the writings of Matthew any differently than we do any other ancient text in this regard.

 

[grannymh]

It seems that we are destined to clash, ultimately, on this one point: whether general reliability of Matthew is sufficient to accept that Jesus promised to build a Church. I will say yes, and argue that there are numerous ways we can see that Jesus did intend to do this.

Here are other supporting Scripture references. Matthew 28: 16-20 which affirms, via actions, that Jesus is the Founder of the Catholic Church as He directly commissions the apostles. Matthew 28: 18 affirms the power of Jesus to establish the Sacrament of Baptism which is key in the Catholic Church. The last sentence “and behold, I am with you always until the end of the age.” clearly places Jesus as the Founder of the Catholic Church because He remains as its Head.

Refer to the Mystical Body of Christ. “The mission of Christ and the Holy Spirit is brought to completion in the Church which is the Body of Christ and the Temple of the Holy Spirit.” (CCC 737)

If one accepts the Holy Spirit as being present in the Catholic Church, for example, as an Advocate during the major ecumenical Church Councils, then John 14: 26. becomes the definitive proof that Jesus established the Catholic Church.

*The proof is in the pudding. *

Is the Catholic Church in the business of teaching what its Founder taught? What did John teach Polycarp? What did Ireneaus learn from Polycarp? What did the participants in the major ecumenical Church Councils learn from the Early Church Fathers? What is the protocol of the visible Catholic Church regarding Catholic doctrines? Check the extensive information sources in the “Index of Citations”, page 689, universal *Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition. *

Is the Sacrament of the Real Presence of Jesus still the source and summit of Catholicism?

Questions.
Is there only one way that the spiral argument works?
Can the spiral argument start with the proposition that the current Catholic Church is a visible organization?
What is the objection to examining the teachings of the Catholic Church and then comparing them to the teachings found in Holy Scripture?

Posts 52 and 54 are bare bones of a possible beginning of a spiral argument which would lead to Catholic doctrines (teachings) being infallible because they are the product of the wisdom and guidance of the infallible Holy Spirit and because they are originally taught by the infallible Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity.

My experiment with the spiral argument is to start with the material physical visible presence of the Catholic Church in space and time and conclude that it is a transcendent super-natural Pure Spirit Divinity without restrictions Who is responsible for the infallibility of Catholic teachings, that is, its properly defined and duly declared doctrines.

If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck…

 

[Tomyris]

To me TSA is an attempt to shortcut the way people make decisions, among other things. We make decisions we hope are rational, but often our ‘most rational’ decisions are severely flawed. Usually we are forced to make decisions on insufficient evidence, or go with the gut (which can be remarkably a good decider). I doubt anyone has read the TSA, nodded and immediately signed up for RCIA, unless they are enormously gullible.

A premise such as,"if you read all of the ECFs, you will see they were Catholic’ is amusing. This would require a reading fluency in Latin, Greek, Aramaic, Coptic and an understanding of the historical context and cultural nuances of each author, and an accurate one at that. Such an endeavor would probably take me more than a weekend, but I am a slow reader and there are other things going on in my life.

Secondly, there is a lot of unhelpful information. I’ll leave it at that.

I don’t make fully rational decisions. I am not Spock. Picture a young woman being wooed by a millionaire. He comes up with a thousand excellent and rational reasons why she should accept his proposal, but he leaves her cold. Blecch is her reaction. The appeal to me of Catholicism is not these arguments that people are throwing around right and left, most of which have huge holes that make me think that maybe there really ISN’T a good case for Catholicism - CAF lay apologists can be, as DH said, the most effective people at convincing one the Catholic Church is wrong in its claims - and not what is sometimes described as the ‘bells and smells’. Sometimes you turn a corner on a thread and there is a flash of wisdom, or of beauty, a scent of wonder or of surprise, and I think to myself that Jesus is here, and these are His people.

The cold rational arguments to me are like entering a Gothic cathedral and all the guide can talk about are the dull dead cut grey stones piled on each other, like he has no idea of the soaring height and the rush to heaven, only the art of the mason is of interest to anyone, not the dignity or the beauty or the meaning of it all. To him the church is a cold place, logic compressed into a few sentences, cut and dried, like flowers that withered long ago, and that is what it should be. Dullness appeals to him, and so it should appeal to me.

Really, after reading so many ‘arguments’ about the Catholic Church and why it is right, I suspect no one really has a good argument to become Catholic. Logic did not draw them in, yet they are attempting a logic to draw others in. The ones doing this are sometimes without the rigor that comes from formal training in logic and reasoning, something that seems scanty around here based on the posts, and perhaps they should consider why they DID become Catholic. To me many of the converts do not seem to have a good argument. So it must have been something else.

 

[Randy_Carson]

Really, after reading so many ‘arguments’ about the Catholic Church and why it is right, I suspect no one really has a good argument to become Catholic. Logic did not draw them in, yet they are attempting a logic to draw others in. The ones doing this are sometimes without the rigor that comes from formal training in logic and reasoning, something that seems scanty around here based on the posts, and perhaps they should consider why they DID become Catholic. To me many of the converts do not seem to have a good argument. So it must have been something else.

You would do well to read the conversion stories of people like:

Scott Hahn, former Presbyterian Pastor
Jimmy Akin, former Presbyterian
Steve Ray, former Baptist
Francis J. Beckwith, former President, Dallas Theological Seminary (2007)
Joshua Betancourt, Author, Is Rome the True Church? (2009)
Tony Blair, British Prime Minister (2008)
Newt Gingrich, former Speaker, US House of Representatives (2008)
Robert C. Koons, former Lutheran (2007)
Jason Reed, seminarian at Southern Evangelical Seminary (2012)

These are just a few of the many folks who might say (and have said) that good arguments for Catholicism are EXACTLY what convinced them to convert.

 

[Mystophilus]

Indeed.

I don’t think we should treat the writings of Matthew any differently than we do any other ancient text in this regard.

We should, which means** not presuming** that the corroborated historicity of one part of the narrative proves anything about the historicity of uncorroborated parts of the narrative, especially verbatim speeches which occurred decades before the writing of the text, since **that **is precisely how we treat ancient texts.

 

[Contarini]

Dr. Tait-

My apologies for the delay in responding to your previous posts. That is high on my to-do list.

No need to apologize. I am not pressing you for a response. You initiated this round of the discussion, and I’ve admitted that my earlier belligerence in pressing you was inappropriate and driven more by my own issues than anything else. I do appreciate that you’re taking the issue seriously, and I welcome your responses. But I may not always respond quickly either.

A Notre Dame fan will understandably exhibit great enthusiasm regarding his team’s win over Duke in the ACC tournament, but does that prevent him from reporting the events of the game accurately or disqualify him as a reliable eyewitness?

You keep presenting things in binaries. It’s not about “disqualifying.” It’s all about relative probability.

This is a particularly relevant analogy for me, because I went to Duke for grad school, and had almost no experience of American sports culture before that. I remember my first year watching a Duke-UNC game on TV and arguing with the other Duke students because I thought they were characterizing the UNC team’s play unfairly. This was interpreted as “rooting for UNC” (probably if you talked to someone who was there and remembers the incident, they would describe it this way), and one of the other students jokingly threatened me with deadly violence.

So I think you have picked a rather bad example for your argument, and a very good one for mine

Indeed, sports fans are not particularly known for their ability to describe a game fairly. On the other hand, their enthusiasm and knowledge leads them to pick up on things that a casual observer might not. So it’s not about “disqualifying.”

Similarly, a Christian author such as Matthew, John or Luke may be firm believers in the resurrection of Christ, but does that prevent them from reporting events of the Last Supper accurately or disqualify them reliable as eyewitnesses?

Again, it’s not about “disqualifying.” You persist in thinking of reliability in binary terms–either a source is reliable or it isn’t. That’s why I’ve disagreed with your arguments from “general reliability.” That’s not how sources work. No source (from a strictly historical point of view) can be trusted implicitly. No source should simply be thrown out as worthless. It’s all about the specifics. But if your source is clearly trying very hard to persuade you that something is true, then that is indeed a reason to be somewhat more skeptical of that particular source on that particular point. And the sports analogy makes that point very well. If a Duke fan was obviously upset about the loss and was very invested in proving to me that the umpire (is it referee or umpire for basketball? I can never remember) was unfair to Duke and that’s why Duke lost, then I would be fairly slow to believe him without further corroboration. The fact that this person was generally trustworthy would not necessarily be enough to overcome my skepticism on this particular point.

And is this how you proceed with everything in your own life? If you have been married for x number of years, and in all that time, you have never known your wife to lie to you about anything, have you concluded that your wife is a trustworthy person who simply does not lie? Or do you still seek to verify each separate “story” she tells you about the debits in your check book?

This is a better analogy to help us grapple with the issue. Here’s why this doesn’t help you either:

1. Marriage is an excellent analogy for how believers relate to Scripture. It is not analogous to the way in which historians relate to their sources. When you are in a covenant relationship with someone, you have made a choice to love and trust that person. You interpret specific issues in light of that relationship. And it is right and proper for believers to do the same thing. What is not right and proper is for believers to do this while claiming to approach Scripture exactly as they approach any other ancient text. That’s like a husband saying, “judging purely objectively, without being at all biased by the fact that I’m married to her, I can say that my wife is the best, smartest, and most beautiful woman in the world.” Totally unconvincing. When husbands say that sort of thing we smile–it’s silly but harmless. When this approach is used as “the” Catholic method of apologetics it’s just as silly but no longer harmless.
2. I have been married to my wife for eleven and a half years, and I knew her for more than two years before that. No one can possibly know the character of the NT authors in that way. In the case of the Gospel writers, we have one fairly brief text for each (we do have a better sense of Paul, precisely because there’s more of him, but it’s still nothing like the way we know a good friend, let alone a spouse). And the points on which we can assess “general reliability” are relatively few.
3. In fact, while I don’t suspect my wife of deceiving me deliberately, I do know that there are ways in which her report of things I didn’t experience isn’t entirely trustworthy. For instance, she is a very sensitive person who often thinks that people are hostile to her when it turns out they didn’t intend anything of the sort. So if she says to me something like, “So-and-so was very upset about X,” I now know (after all these years) that the person quite likely wasn’t very upset at all but was perhaps mildly annoyed or maybe totally unconcerned about the issue. In other words, the more you know someone the more you know their particular biases, and you know which points they are likely to report accurately and which ones they may be interpreting in unreliable ways (without bringing deliberate deception into the picture at all).

 

[Contarini]

And that’s how “general reliability” actually works in historical inquiry, where the context of a covenantal, faith-based relationship is absent. (And yet again, I shouldn’t have to remind you that your beloved “spiral argument” claims to be operating without the assumptions of faith.) Historians don’t say, “this text is reliable so everything it says must be true.” Historians say, “this text seems to have X bias and to be generally reliable on these points but perhaps not so reliable on others.” It isn’t that historians don’t evaluate the nature of a text and take it heavily into account. My problem with your method throughout has been that you treat reliability as a simple binary, so that once you establish the “reliability” of a text you can just take it for granted. And it’s patently obvious that you and the apologists who developed the “spiral argument” are rushing as fast as you can to the triumphant conclusion that “Scripture is reliable.” You are not, in fact, treating Scripture as if it were any other text. And it wouldn’t be a virtue if you were. A husband who treats his wife as if she were any other woman isn’t a very good husband. (One of the things that maddens me about this kind of debate is that it forces me into “skeptic mode” in order to refute the absurd and harmful premises of the “spiral argument.” I do not, in fact, normally treat Scripture as if it were any other text. Indeed, I’m probably not doing so here, though I’m doing the best approximation I can.)

The other huge problem with the specific issue of Matt. 16 is that if we do take “general reliability” into account, that hurts your argument fatally. For the sake of “winning” the argument, it would probably have been prudent for me to forego my polemic against your use of “general reliability” and focus on the fact that we have no particular reasons for trusting the reliability of Matthew when uncorroborated, and quite a few reasons for mistrusting it. But this is a bigger issue that gets in the way of any serious discussion of historical evidence, and I’m a lot more interested in having a clear, constructive conversation than I am in winning an argument (not that I don’t get carried away by the desire to win arguments quite often).

But let’s look at Matthew. When you gave your list of examples of the NT’s reliability, none of them pertained specifically to Matthew. I can’t, myself, think of a single place where something found only in Matthew has been corroborated. But I may be wrong there. Matthew over and over again seems to add theological commentary and explanation to the more cryptic account in Mark, often straightening out things that might be confusing to readers of Mark. And then we have the Matthaean birth narrative. Yes, the general picture of Herod’s character is certainly borne out by Josephus and other sources, but we have a claim about a massacre that is nowhere else recorded, even though Josephus tells us about quite a few similar deeds by Herod. We have a story about magi that is, again, totally uncorroborated, and seems to stand in parallel to Luke’s completely different story about shepherds. We have no acknowledgment that Mary and Joseph came from Galilee to begin with, and no explanation of why they settled in Nazareth specifically except that the prophets said so, even though no prophet actually mentions Nazareth. In fact, one major characteristic of Matthew is that prophecy drives his narrative, and that he sees prophecies all over the place by what modern people tend to find very strange methods. (I’m not criticizing Matthew’s methods, by the way. I think they’re wonderful. But historical in our sense they are certainly not.)

In other words, Matthew is a real problem for people invested in upholding the historicity of the NT. So much so, that scholars as conservative as Robert Gundry and Michael Licona (the latter, of course, was one of the experts you yourself mentioned earlier) have brought down on themselves the wrath of the guardians of evangelical “orthodoxy” (such as Norman Geisler) by suggesting that parts of Matthew should not be read as literal history. (Gundry was kicked out of the Evangelical Theological Society for arguing that the story of the Magi, for instance, may be “midrash” and not history.) These are not scholars at the skeptical end of the NT scholarly spectrum. But their honesty as scholars compels them to acknowledge that Matthew’s unique contributions (i.e., when not following Mark or reporting Jesus’ teachings in material held essentially in common with Luke) frequently don’t seem to be “reliable” if viewed as history.

So if you really want to judge the Matthew 16 controversy by “general reliability,” you lose.

I have not pressed this point, precisely because I don’t think “general reliability” is the only thing to consider. In other words, by my method we can’t just label Matthew “unreliable.” We have to look at the specifics of the passage. But if we have to put him in one box or the other, he would pretty clearly have to go in the “unreliable” box.

 

[Contarini]

It seems that we are destined to clash, ultimately, on this one point: whether general reliability of Matthew is sufficient to accept that Jesus promised to build a Church.

We’re “destined” to clash on this point only as long as you insist on the back-to-front approach of starting with a resolute determination to defend the total historicity of Scripture while insisting, unconvincingly, that you are treating Scripture as if it were any other text.

There’s no “destiny” here. You have free will.

But if you really want to make the argument, you have a very long way to go in establishing the “general reliability” of Matthew. As I said earlier, not one of your examples of NT reliability pertained to Matthew in particular. I think you will look long and hard before you find such an example.

I will say yes, and argue that there are numerous ways we can see that Jesus did intend to do this. You will say no and point to the lack of multiple attestation for Mt. 16:18.

That’s not the only consideration at all. There is also the “general reliability” issue, although I’d prefer to call it “the nature of the text as a whole,” because it’s not just about reliability but more broadly about purpose, method, relationship to apparent sources, etc. It’s not the only consideration, as you want it to be, but it works heavily against your argument.

Also, there’s a difference between single attestation of a story with no parallel anywhere and single attestation of a specific part of a story that is found in briefer form elsewhere.

Yet others, such as Blomberg, would argue that this is NOT how historians approach other ancient texts

What, specifically, does Blomberg say about this? Here we get back into “general reliability” again. Given how often you seem to misconstrue what I’m saying, I’m afraid that I can’t assume that you are reporting Blomberg accurately.

I would be very surprised if Blomberg really thinks that historians would accept the historicity of a passage such as Matt. 16:18-19 if it were found under similar circumstances in another ancient text. But even if he does, that doesn’t make the claim true. The vast majority of NT scholars think otherwise. (Note that you have cited no scholars who don’t come from a conservative Christian perspective. You aren’t even taking seriously Catholic scholars like Fr. Raymond Brown, no doubt because you think of them as “liberal.” But if you rule out even fellow-Catholics because they aren’t ideologically pure enough, let alone non-Christian scholars, then you are admitting my point that the whole “we approach Scripture like any other text” claim is a load of bunk.)

and from this I conclude that there is some sort of “reverse bias” at work in your thinking as seen in this statement:

“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.”

Blomberg would simply ask for a level playing field. And so do I.

What is this supposed to mean? Not, surely, that Blomberg thinks all texts are equal in value. He can’t mean that. You obviously don’t mean that. So what do you mean? That one determines “reliability” for a text in general, without any regard to the specifics of the passage we are examining? That seems to be what you are arguing, and that is consistently what I’ve been arguing against. But I am not going to accept without further proof that Blomberg really approaches texts in such an impoverished and wooden way, just in order to make an apologetics point.

I see from this link that Blomberg does in fact argue that passionate commitment can lead to greater accuracy, not necessarily less. But his example isn’t a good one. The people who created Holocaust revisionism weren’t doing so because they were unconcerned with the matter, but because they were in one way or another deeply threatened by the reality of the Holocaust and/or the way the memory of the Holocaust functions politically. But obviously, as the sports example shows, passionate interest can lead to recording things that others wouldn’t notice.

Finally, you may be right that I’m guilty of “reverse bias,” in the sense that when I take out my bias as a Christian I wind up with an overly skeptical position. I have a lot of trouble pretending to treat Scripture as if it were any other book. I think I’m doing a decent job of it, but I may not be. But I don’t trust you or Karl Keating or even Craig Blomberg to do it better. I probably trust N. T. Wright to do it better than I would, but I still assume that he’s not really doing it. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I don’t think we should approach Scripture as if it were any other book. (And one of the reasons I trust Wright is that his philosophy of “critical realism” doesn’t compel him to pretend that he is.)

Edwin

 

[Randy_Carson]

No need to apologize. I am not pressing you for a response. You initiated this round of the discussion, and I’ve admitted that my earlier belligerence in pressing you was inappropriate and driven more by my own issues than anything else. I do appreciate that you’re taking the issue seriously, and I welcome your responses. But I may not always respond quickly either.

You keep presenting things in binaries. It’s not about “disqualifying.” It’s all about relative probability.

Your statement here is good news, IMO.

It means that if an author is shown to be reliable in five or six things that we can verify, it becomes increasingly acceptable for us to trust him regarding the 10-20 that we can’t. This is exactly the point that Blomberg, et al have made in the video series I’m watching and re-watching as part of prep for this thread.

Now, it may be the case that YOU as a historian prefer a hermeneutic of suspicion (though you have said you do not), but what I’m gathering from books, Internet articles and the video that I have referenced is that other scholars not only accept the validity of the principle of general reliability but they state their disagreement with YOUR unwillingness to apply the principle in no uncertain terms.

This is a particularly relevant analogy for me, because I went to Duke for grad school, and had almost no experience of American sports culture before that. I remember my first year watching a Duke-UNC game on TV and arguing with the other Duke students because I thought they were characterizing the UNC team’s play unfairly. This was interpreted as “rooting for UNC” (probably if you talked to someone who was there and remembers the incident, they would describe it this way), and one of the other students jokingly threatened me with deadly violence.

So I think you have picked a rather bad example for your argument, and a very good one for mine

Indeed, sports fans are not particularly known for their ability to describe a game fairly. On the other hand, their enthusiasm and knowledge leads them to pick up on things that a casual observer might not. So it’s not about “disqualifying.”

And while I agree with what you described, you are missing one key element: the fans with whom were sitting were DUKE fans…not known for their objectivity. Just kidding. I like Duke. No, the REAL weakness in your anecdote is that your friends were not trained professionals nor did they have any reason to hold their bias at bay.

Here’s a better example: here in Raleigh, I can listen to the Duke-Carolina game on the radio via the Duke Sports Network or on the Carolina Sports Network. Same game, different announcers. When one team fouls the other, the reactions from the announcers are obviously very different…but they both ACCURATE IN THEIR CALL OF THE PLAY.

The authors of the NT may have been believers, but to assume that they are not accurate in their reporting is an example of the bias fallacy…you’re assuming that their bias prevents them from being honest.

I disagree. I think that because the NT authors were believers, THEY WERE EXTRA CAREFUL to transmit the gospel accurately. They viewed their message as life-giving. Additionally, in their day, there were living eyewitnesses who could and would cry “foul” if a gospel or epistle had appeared which did not agree with what was known to be true. Both Luke and Paul mention that anyone who wants to verify their message can simply ask around. Witnesses were available for corroboration.

Finally (for now), the criterion of embarrassment gives us additional reasons to believe that the authors were telling the truth. If the authors were “trying very hard to convince us” about the divinity of Jesus Christ, then you might think they would be less inclined to include embarrassing details such as the fact that even Jesus’ own “brother”, James, did not believe in him or the fact that Jesus did not know “the day or hour” (which God should know) or that His empty tomb was discovered by women - who had no standing in a court of law (which undermines the proof of the resurrection).

So, Dr. Tait, your disinclination to believe your friend’s explanation of why the referee of the game got a call wrong BECAUSE YOU VIEW YOUR FRIEND AS A BIASED SOURCE of the explanation, cements my view that you are, by nature, a skeptic. Your friend could be EXTREMELY well-versed in the rules of the game of basketball (that’s not uncommon in this neck of the woods since basketball is almost a religion on Tobacco Road), but you suspend your willingness to accept his analysis of the ref’s error because of your assumption of his bias.

IOW, your natural skepticism caused you to presume his bias and to discount his argument.

The glass is either half full or half empty, Dr. Tait. We all have an opinion on that which affects how we go through life. I’m a half-full guy, myself. I’m not Tigger, but I have even less in common with Eeyore.



Similarly, we are all operating from a hermeneutic of trust or suspicion. It seems to me that the natural skepticism inherent in your personality causes you to demand proof of the NT documents that far exceeds the standard that a more objective scholar might require.

 

[Randy_Carson]

For anyone interested in seeing another example of the opening line of TSA being used as a starting point:

The Historicity of the New Testament
JP Moreland
bethinking.org/is-the-bible-reliable/the-historicity-of-the-new-testament

About the Author
J. P. Moreland is an American philosopher, theologian, and apologist. He is currently Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology at Biola University in La Mirada, California.

One of the central claims of Christianity is that Jesus of Nazareth was the incarnate Son of God who died on the cross to atone for the sins of humanity and rose bodily from the dead. Our acceptance of these claims depends on whether or not the New Testament documents are reliable historical sources about Jesus. It is the purpose of this chapter to argue that it is reasonable to accept the substantial historicity of the New Testament.[1]

Detailed works have been written on this topic, but such detail is not possible here. Rather, this chapter will discuss the main features of five arguments bearing on New Testament historicity. Sources for further study will be offered in the notes. I will not discuss the archaeological confirmation of the New Testament or the extra-biblical evidence for the historicity of Jesus. These important facts have been nicely summarized elsewhere.[2]

For our purposes, let us assume that the New Testament is a collection of twenty-seven separate historical sources which, in turn, may have written or oral sources behind them. We will make no assumption which takes the New Testament as a divinely inspired document, although I believe such a position can be defended.[3]

Footnote

[3] It is sometimes said that Christians use circular arguments to prove the reliability of the Bible. For an analysis and refutation of this claim, see R.C. Sproul, “The Case for Inerrancy: A Methodological Analysis,” in God’s Inerrant Word: An International Symposium on the Trustworthiness of Scripture, ed. John Warwick Montgomery (Minneapolis: Bethany Fellowship, 1974), pp.242-61. For a helpful study of circular arguments in general, especially their relationship to begging the question, see Oliver Johnson Skepticism arid Cognitivism: A Study in the Foundations of Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), pp. 226-39.

So, there you have it, folks. Dr. Moreland, an Evangelical, begins his defense of the historicity of the New Testament from the same point that Catholic Answers begins its Spiral Argument:

The Catholic method of proving the Bible to be inspired is this: The Bible is initially approached as any other ancient work. It is not, at first, presumed to be inspired.

Moreland continues:

General Tests for Historicity

Historiography is a branch of study which focuses on the logical, conceptual, and epistemological aspects of what historians do. Critical historiography studies, among other things, the different tests which should be applied to a document to determine whether or not it is historically reliable.[4] When many of these tests are applied to the New Testament documents, they show themselves to be as reliable as, or superior to, most other ancient documents.

For example, apologists have often appealed to three general tests for historicity: the bibliographical test, the internal test, and the external test. The internal test asks whether the document itself claims to be actual history written by eyewitnesses. More will be said about eyewitness testimony later. The external test asks whether material external to the document (in this case, archaeology or the writings of the early church fathers) confirms the reliability of the document. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to delve into the external test. But it should be pointed out that the New Testament has been remarkably confirmed time and again by external evidence. This is not to say there are no problems; but to the unbiased observer, little doubt can be cast on the statement that archaeology has confirmed the historical reliability of the New Testament.[5]

The bibliographical test seeks to determine how many manuscript copies we have of the document and how far removed they are in time from the originals (see table 1).

 

[Randy_Carson]

Excerpted from: The Historicity of the New Testament by JP Moreland

Prima facie it would seem that a strong case could be made for the fact that much of the New Testament, including the Gospels and the sources behind them, was written by eyewitnesses. This is mentioned explicitly in a number of places (Luke 1:1-4; Galatians 1; 2 Peter 1:16). Further, apostolic position in the early church was widely known to include the qualification of being an eyewitness (Acts 1:21-22; Hebrews 2:3), a qualification which shows that the early church valued the testimony of eyewitnesses and believed she had eyewitnesses leading her. The early speeches in Acts refer to the knowledge of unbelieving audiences (e. g., Acts 2:22), and no historian I know of doubts that Christianity started in Jerusalem just a few weeks after the death of Jesus in the presence of friendly and hostile eyewitnesses. Finally, there is indirect testimony to eyewitness evidence in the Gospels. For example, if a number of pronouns in Mark (see 1:21, 29) are changed from the third-person plural they to the first-person plural we, they can easily be seen as eyewitness reminiscences of Peter, who gave Mark much of the material for his Gospel.

Arguments Supporting Eyewitness Influence

Several reasons can be offered for trusting these claims. First, as Gottschalk reminds us, a document should be assumed trustworthy unless, under burden of proof, it is shown to be unreliable.[11] As Immanuel Kant showed long ago, a general presumption of lying is self-refuting, since if such a presumption is universalized (one always assumes someone is lying) lying becomes pointless (lying is impossible without a general presumption of truthtelling).[12]

Footnotes:

[11] Gottschalk Understanding History, p.89.

[12] Thus, Van A. Harvey surely errs when he says that it is required of a modern historian that he adopt a standpoint of methodological skepticism. See The Historian and the Believer (New York: Macmillan, 1966), 26. For a general theory of evidence based on a prima facie burden of proof for skepticism, see Roderick Chisholm, “A Version of Foundationalism”, Studies in Epistemology, ed. Peter A. French et al., Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Vol.5 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1980), pp. 543-64. For an excellent treatment of the legal aspects of testing the trustworthiness of witnesses and the application of this testing to the New Testament, see John Warwick Montgomery Human Rights and Human Dignity (Grand Rapids: Zondervan,1986), pp.139-50.

 

[Randy_Carson]

JP Moreland writes:

New Testament critics have formulated several criteria for deciding which words of Jesus in the Gospels are actually his and which are later additions by the early church or Gospel writers.[55] By far the most accepted and most basic criterion is called the criterion of dissimilarity: an alleged saying of Jesus can be considered authentic only if it cannot be paralleled in early Judaism or the early church. In other words, if a saying of Jesus can be found in Jewish writings contemporaneous with Jesus, or in other parts of the New Testament, then the saying should not be accepted, since materials from either the Jewish or the Christian community could have been used to make up the saying. Such a criterion is surely too stringent. It is odd, to say the least, if a preacher does not preach in the idioms of his day. And it is also odd to say that such a discontinuity should be seen between Jesus and the early church.

So a great deal of material in the Gospels should be accepted as historically reliable even though it does not pass this criterion. On the other hand, if a saying does pass the criterion of dissimilarity, then it is certainly historical.

Dr. Tait denies that Jesus actually spoke the words of Mt. 16:18-19 because they have no parallel in Mark or Luke. And yet, if the “criterion of dissimilarity” is applied to the passage, he is hoisted by his own petard.

If we agree with Dr. Tait that no parallel for Jesus promising to build His church upon Peter exists in either contemporaneous Jewish writing or in other parts of the New Testament. then even the harshest critics of NT historicity would be bound to admit that Mt. 16:18-19 meets their tough standard. Thus, Dr. Tait must either admit that Mt. 16:18-19 is historical by virtue of the criterion of dissimilarity or he must demonstrate that other writings from Jewish or early Christian authors contains a similar line of thought.

However, if he attempts to provide such evidence, he risks undermining one (if not his primary) point of disagreement with TSA; namely, that Mt. 16:18-19 has no parallels and is, therefore, merely a theological insertion by Matthew and not the actual words of Jesus.

Well, Dr. Tait? Which is it?

 

[Randy_Carson]

What, specifically, does Blomberg say about this? Here we get back into “general reliability” again. Given how often you seem to misconstrue what I’m saying, I’m afraid that I can’t assume that you are reporting Blomberg accurately.

Right. You’re a skeptic, so you must conclude that I am wrong until I prove myself. Okay, Dr. Tait, here are verbatim quotes which I have transcribed from a video series:

Scott M. Sullivan, PhD

If general reliability is established, the assumption is that the whole is factual unless there is good reason to think otherwise. This is a way for a document to earn our trust. If that happens, then a historically favorable presumption prevails. Once established as a generally reliable document, a historically favorable presumption prevails at that point, and the burden of proof falls on the deniers.

Craig Blomberg, PhD

Scholars sometimes talk about a hermeneutic of suspicion. Hermeneutics is just a fancy word for an approach to interpretation, and so a hermeneutic of suspicion would mean that one begins, in the case of the Bible or in the case of some other ancient document, suspecting that what one has in front of one is likely not to be accurate until one finds enough reasons to reverse one’s position.

Hermeneutic of suspicion is not appropriate for ancient historical works in general. If it were followed, our world civilization textbooks would be blank until we reached very recent centuries. One has to develop a global perspective on the likely reliability of a given author, of a given work, and then if there are repeated places where they can be discredited, yes, move to a hermeneutic of suspicion. But otherwise, one begins with a hermeneutic of trust or one would not have ancient history to write at all. In fact, that’s what historians regularly do…except that some, when they come to the gospels, change the ground rules which is not fair and is not going to lead to the most reliable historical results, either. We want to have a level playing field.

Michael Licona, PhD

If we just allow a methodological skepticism or a hermeneutic of suspicion, typically we allow a world-view to guide our historical investigation, and it’s the world-view of the skeptic that is guiding that historical investigation. The problem is manifest, bad philosophy corrupts good history. And so, that’s why what we should do is approach the text with neutrality and let the facts speak for themselves. If a skeptic says, “Well, I don’t believe in the gospels” and then wants to show that the gospels aren’t historically reliable, then the burden of proof is on the skeptic to show that the gospel is not historically reliable.

Craig Evans, PhD

They would never hold these standards against other writers of antiquity; it’s always thrown against New Testament writers.

 

[Contarini]

JP Moreland writes:

New Testament critics have formulated several criteria for deciding which words of Jesus in the Gospels are actually his and which are later additions by the early church or Gospel writers.[55] By far the most accepted and most basic criterion is called the criterion of dissimilarity: an alleged saying of Jesus can be considered authentic only if it cannot be paralleled in early Judaism or the early church. In other words, if a saying of Jesus can be found in Jewish writings contemporaneous with Jesus, or in other parts of the New Testament, then the saying should not be accepted, since materials from either the Jewish or the Christian community could have been used to make up the saying. Such a criterion is surely too stringent. It is odd, to say the least, if a preacher does not preach in the idioms of his day. And it is also odd to say that such a discontinuity should be seen between Jesus and the early church.

I basically agree with Moreland’s criticism here. I think he’s caricaturing when he says that dissimilarity is by far the most accepted and most basic criterion. On the contrary, it’s the most controversial, precisely for the reason he gives. An overuse of dissimilarity is one of the major flaws in the more skeptical side of the scholarly spectrum. (Contrary to what you think, my own views are moderately conservative in comparison to the spectrum of scholarly opinion. I’m a bit to the right of Raymond Brown, who was himself, if anything, right of center as a scholar.)

Multiple attestation is a far more universally accepted and solid criterion. But Moreland is right that all these criteria work positively more than negatively. That is to say, we can’t rule things out as historical if they don’t pass them. We just may not be able to be too confident that they are historical. And let me remind you, yet again, that this argument is about a claim to establish the truth of Catholicism based on the confidence we can supposedly have that the NT is historical, down to details like Matt. 16:18-19. This is not about whether we have good probable cause, as Christians, to accept the NT as historical.

So a great deal of material in the Gospels should be accepted as historically reliable even though it does not pass this criterion.

Sure, if it passes other criteria. Or we can simply say, “from a purely historical point of view, we can’t be sure if this is reliable or not.” But conservative scholar-apologists can’t stand to do that:shrug:

On the other hand, if a saying does pass the criterion of dissimilarity, then it is certainly historical.

Dr. Tait denies that Jesus actually spoke the words of Mt. 16:18-19 because they have no parallel in Mark or Luke.

This is an excellent example of why I operate with a hermeneutic of suspicion when you describe to me what other people say. Because you repeatedly misinterpret what I’m saying. Here you manage to do so twice in one sentence. I do not deny that Jesus spoke these words. I deny that we can prove (by the canons of normal historical scholarship) that Jesus spoke these words. I also do not only base this argument on the lack of multiple attestation. I base it further on the nature of the Gospel of Matthew. I.e., on the very “general reliability” argument that you tend to overuse, although it’s not just about reliability. It’s about Matthew’s general method and apparent priorities. Matthew repeatedly seems willing to add theological explanation to the more cryptic accounts found in Mark (yes, I’m assuming Marcan priority, and I know that that’s subject to some debate). As I’ve noted several times now, even one of the scholars you are citing, Licona, has gotten himself into hot water for his conclusion that Matthew’s account of people being raised from the dead at the time of Jesus’ crucifixion is probably not historical. Gundry got himself into worse trouble for similar conclusions about the birth narratives. So there’s a lot more going on here than the multiple attestation issue.

 

[Contarini]

And yet, if the “criterion of dissimilarity” is applied to the passage, he is hoisted by his own petard.

If we agree with Dr. Tait that no parallel for Jesus promising to build His church upon Peter exists in either contemporaneous Jewish writing or in other parts of the New Testament.

Yet another misinterpretation. For one thing, I never said that no parallel exists. I said that this is by far the clearest example and that the spiral argument largely rests on it. Luke 22 and John 21 contain parallels, placed in completely different contexts and not mentioning the word “church,” and of course the later epistles speak of the apostolic foundation of the Church without singling out Peter (Ephesians 2:19 is a particularly good example).

The criterion of dissimilarity, with regard to early Christianity, is solidly against the historicity of Matt. 16:18-19. It is clearly the seed of a great deal of later Christian thought, particularly in the post-apostolic period but already in the later parts of the NT. I am not sure that it “passes” the criterion even with regard to Judaism. Jews did in fact think in terms of teachers passing on their authority to their students.

Now I myself follow N. T. Wright in saying that the criterion of dissimilarity is flawed and that we should instead look for “a criterion of double similarity and dissimilarity.” That is to say, both in regard to Judaism and early Christianity, we are most confident that Jesus’ recorded words and deeds are authentic when they make sense in those contexts but also don’t look like things that members of those communities would be likely to ascribe to Jesus. With regard to the Second Temple Jewish context, I think Matt. 16:18 passes this revised criterion with flying colors. But I’m much less sure with regard to early Christianity. It does look very much like the kind of thing that late-first-century Christians might add as a theological interpretation of Jesus’ words. And please bear in mind that of course I regard it as a correct, divinely inspired theological interpretation, if that’s what it is. I don’t know for sure, and I don’t place that much importance on the matter precisely because I accept all the NT as divinely inspired. But the spiral argument, unfortunately, makes the matter important.

then even the harshest critics of NT historicity would be bound to admit that Mt. 16:18-19 meets their tough standard. Thus, Dr. Tait must either admit that Mt. 16:18-19 is historical by virtue of the criterion of dissimilarity or he must demonstrate that other writings from Jewish or early Christian authors contains a similar line of thought.

I don’t surely have to “demonstrate” something that you and everyone else here believes
But hey, take Ephesians 2:19 for starters if you really want to play skeptic in your turn. Note that this, like Matthew, is generally considered by most scholars to be a relatively late text (though of course one must always watch out for circularity in these judgments).

You really have trouble engaging with what I am actually saying, I’m afraid.

Edwin

 

[grannymh]

From post 75.
“I do not deny that Jesus spoke these words. I deny that we can prove (by the canons of normal historical scholarship) that Jesus spoke these words.”

Still, I wonder if there are other ways to verify contested Scripture verses in addition to normal historical scholarship.

 

[Randy_Carson]

This is an excellent example of why I operate with a hermeneutic of suspicion when you describe to me what other people say. Because you repeatedly misinterpret what I’m saying. Here you manage to do so twice in one sentence. I do not deny that Jesus spoke these words. I deny that we can prove (by the canons of normal historical scholarship) that Jesus spoke these words.

The distinction is noted, and you had made this point previously. I mis-spoke when I stated that you deny that Jesus spoke Mt. 16:18-19. This was a clear mis-characterization of your position caused by my haste to post. I regret the error.

 

[Randy_Carson]

You really have trouble engaging with what I am actually saying, I’m afraid.

Dr. Tait-

An idea has been forming in the back of my mind that this is really the wrong forum for you to make your argument and prove your case.

As a professional New Testament historian and free-lance writer, why waste this material on me? Instead, you should write a paper and submit it to peer-reviewed periodicals for publication.

As it is, I have Catholic Answers and a boatload of scholars arguing on one side and you taking issue with TSA on the other.

That’s not an argument you can win simply because I have to respect the number and names of scholars whose opinions are considered…um…generally reliable…over that of a single Internet forum poster. You can understand that, surely.

So, why not lay it all out and let the other big boys weigh in on your opinions. I’m sure that none of them would have any trouble “engaging with what you’re actually saying.”

Waddya think?

 

[KathleenGee]

Tomyris…

I did not know you wanted to find out why people became Catholic until this last post of yours.

I was raised Catholic. I remember the presentation of Christ by the nuns. It was most pure and clear. When I received my First Eucharist…of which I never doubted I was not receiving Christ, I felt my entire soul being scrubbed clean.

We would also hear about the lives of the saints. I remember watching this Italian film, ‘Marcellino’ when I was in second grade and I cried all the way home how the Lord showed His love to the little boy. Hearing how Our Lord loved children and animals always endeared me.

What troubled me was when the nuns would ask, ‘Could you die for Christ? Would you renounce Him for this world?’ I would go home and play…and then thought would come to me…'If I were alive in Christ’s time, would I be one of those who would not recognize Him and betray Him?" So since I did not get a clear answer, I always have seen the potential in myself to not recognize Christ or betray Him and so I try always to put Him first in all things.

I grew up in a very simple Catholic home where my father always actively cared for the poor and we lived with less. My mother would pray and light a candle next to our Lord’s statue or that of the Blessed Mother. My dad would comment on the injustices in our society and the world. He had us watch WWII movies and told us never to forget the Holocaust…and how many people died.

So I grew up in a home where I was actively raised not to be materialistic and to not trust in money…or my own ability to believe or stay faithful to the Lord. We cannot even trust our own desires to be a Christian and godly person.

When I became a mother, and my kids were down napping or it night, I began to read the works of doctors of the Church, the virtues lived out in monastic life, devotion to Mary and anything Marian. I began here to experience Christ in devotions…and the intellect.

Later I was invited into the diocesan professional ministry…and it is there I studied liturgy and the Mass and all its parts and transcendence became my favorite topic. I wish I had time to teach liturgy.

I went to a Lutheran service for almost a year with a client. I experienced the presence of Christ in the congregation. But they do not believe as we do that the Eucharist is the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Jesus Christ, and subsequently do not have the spirit of adoration, beauty, and transcedence…as well as the presence of the communion of saints who have lived before us, in their services.

I do not see myself superior to anyone. Catholics should not consider themselves better.

The best posture for us coming from a line in a psalm…66?..from the Liturgy of the Hours…is that we are most pleasing to God when we are on trembling knee.

We must place ourselves totally in God’s mercy and try to do our best for Him and His will depending on His grace.

Hope that gives you a little understanding why someone would want to become Catholic…or stay as one.