Yes. I do, and I’m not alone.
Does Blomberg do that? Does anyone with historical training do that?
That would really surprise me. And if they do, then they are wrong–they are acting as apologists rather than as scholars.
Either a document and its author are trustworthy or they are not. It’s just that simple.
No, it isn’t. You appear to be saying that a “trustworthy” author is never wrong and an “untrustworthy” author is never right, which makes no sense. People are fallible (obediently leaving divine inspiration out of the picture as the spiral argument requires us to!). We make mistakes. We interpret everything we perceive, and that means that our perceptions are never “pure.” We bring assumptions to the table, always. I don’t know how you can walk around in the world and not notice this. And heaven knows that an Internet forum like this one is one of the best places to watch human fallibility at work, including in oneself
There is therefore no reason to suppose that because a person gets some things right they get everything right, or vice versa.
Your own statement of “general reliability” actually implies that it’s on a spectrum. You say that an author who is generally reliable should be trusted
unless there’s strong evidence to the contrary. Exactly. But how strong the evidence you require depends on how trustworthy the author is. It’s on a spectrum, not an either/or.
You need to clarify your position here. I find it hard to believe that you are really arguing that (without claiming divine intervention) “trustworthy” authors are infallible. But otherwise it can’t be said to be an either/or.
There is no reason to believe that Luke was conscientious and reliable in one chapter and completely off the wall in another.
First of all, I didn’t say that. I said that people who get some things right may get other things wrong, which strikes me as obviously true (it really flabbergasts me that anyone would object to so basic and commonsense a remark), and that people are often more reliable on some things than on others.
It is possible than an author might be conscientious and reliable in one chapter and completely off the wall in another (because some prejudice or strong personal motive was at work, or maybe just because he had a really bad migraine when he wrote the second chapter), but obviously that would be an extreme example of the basic principle that reliability is relative and often uneven.
Since you brought up Luke (and I note that again you avoid Matthew, who is the main subject of dispute here
), it is possible for instance that Luke was more careful in investigating the main body of his work than he was in investigating the birth narratives. Certainly the fact that he generally seems to be a careful and honest author is a good reason to give him a good deal of the benefit of the doubt even when the birth narrative is (by normal historical standards, and leaving faith out of it) a bit hard to swallow. But it’s not inconceivable that he might be more credulous here than elsewhere, and a good historian will keep that in mind as one possibility (which isn’t the same thing as throwing Luke’s credibility out because the birth narrative offends the historian’s Enlightenment prejudices!).
His approach to his work did not change from one verse to the next.
I’m certainly not denying that there is going to be a basic consistency of approach within a work (indeed that’s key to my argument about Matthew 16). But in fact people often do use somewhat different approaches in different parts of a book, depending on their sources, their intellectual and emotional closeness to or distance from the given subject, the different roles different parts of the work play in their overall design, and so on.
If Luke (or any of the gospel writers) was trying to record an accurate account of the events, then either he did or he did not succeed in doing so.
Which would, right there, make the text radically different from any other texts.
I think you are, again, inadvertently revealing your complete inability to treat Scripture “like any other text.” Because human texts, in general, are not perfectly accurate. They are not total successes or total failures.
Nor do authors either “try to record an accurate account” or not. Very few if any authors have no purpose other than “giving an accurate account.” (Even professional, honest, well-trained modern historians are telling the particular stories they are because they think they are important or interesting for some reason.) How far historical accuracy is important to an author is, again, not an either/or. It’s going to vary.
This is incorrect; I can appreciate the distinction. However, if I speak of the “general reliability of the NT”, it is not because of any failure on my part but because of my belief that the entire NT is generally reliable. But I am aware of the fact that the NT was composed by many men over a period of many years.
Then we need to talk more specifically about the “general reliability” of Matthew (and any other specific authors on whom the spiral argument’s claims about Jesus founding an infallible Church rests–but since Matthew is the only Gospel author to use the word “church,” I think his witness is key). You keep talking about Luke–and Luke is the author of the four who is most obviously attempting to write accurate history. And Luke is right often enough that a case can be made that when he appears to be wrong (as with Quirinius) we should give him the benefit of the doubt. If we were arguing about Luke, you would have a much stronger case. Maybe still not quite enough to support the very heavy weight of the spiral argument, but that would be a very different conversation.
As it is, we are talking about Matthew.
