The Spiral Argument Argument

[Randy_Carson]

False. I’ve been reading this thread (and the previous thread) since the beginning, and I agree with Contarini on this topic.

I don’t doubt that, but that is not what I meant. If I was unclear, I apologize.

What I really was trying to say is that he is the only person that I can recall who has ever gone to such great lengths to argue against it. And I don’t even recall seeing a serious refutation of it anywhere online…though there are many anti-Catholics out there who would love to see Catholic Answers eating crow.

If Dr. Tait REALLY has the goods, he should write a paper for a peer-reviewed journal or even a book. I’ll read anything he gets published on this subject because I’m happy to be corrected if I am wrong. That process makes ME a better Catholic apologist.

I’m just not convinced by his attempts thus far.

 

[Contarini]

It’s worse than that. I don’t believe that they ARE treating the Bible any differently than historians treat any other book.

Randy, sorry to break it to you, but historians do not generally hold their jobs on condition of believing that their source materials are inerrant. In fact, they don’t believe their source materials are inerrant, period.

Inerrancy is a faith position.

Your bluster is noted, but you have not provided one single quote or article that actually demonstrates this rejection.

Nor have you provided serious scholarly support for the question actually under debate, which is that it is certain beyond reasonable doubt, by purely historical methods, that Matthew 16:18-19 was really said by Jesus.

I believe that the only actual scholarly support for this position anyone has brought so far in this discussion (not counting the PBC decisions that Abu keeps flinging at all our heads) was brought by me: Jean Galot’s argument that Jesus said the words but probably on another occasion. I am sure that there are conservative scholars who think that Jesus said them on that particular occasion, but I don’t recall you actually citing any. (This is a long and complex discussion and I may be missing something–I apologize if so.)

You keep avoiding the actual issue and going on about “general reliability.” Yet you haven’t produced any evidence for the “general reliability” of Matthew either, and you are abusing the concept as a short-cut to avoiding any serious discussion of actual texts. You simply wave it around, without actually establishing that Matthew is reliable, and announce that there’s no point discussing Matthew 16 until we agree that Matthew is reliable. That’s just plain silly and illustrates why I object to the way you are using this concept. Note that you’ve introduced another vicious circle there: by your logic we can’t ever establish reliability or unreliability, because we only do that by establishing that an author is reliable in specific instances, and you say we can’t discuss specific instances until we know the author is reliable.

Hilarious. Here you are doing the very thing that you said in your last post that you are not doing.

Sorry. I was not clear enough. What I meant was that while I did mention the fact that you rely on evangelical scholarship rather than mainstream Catholic scholarship, I was much more interested in the fact that you rely only on very conservative scholarship, rejecting most of the scholarly spectrum (you don’t even mention such conservative scholars as Bauckham and Wright, not to mention people like Brown, E. P. Sanders, John Meier, Dale Allison, W. D. Davies, etc.). And yet even then, two of your principal authorities admit that Matthew may contain non-historical elements, which is fatal to your “general reliability” argument.

I ignored most of the Catholics you mentioned because they aren’t Biblical scholars. One of them did have a Ph.D. in Biblical studies, but you haven’t cited anything from him. Nor have you actually cited Hahn, who does not actually have a Ph.D. in Biblical studies (systematic theology, just as my Ph.D. is in church history, although like Hahn’s my dissertation dealt with exegesis heavily) and self-consciously rejects most mainstream Biblical scholarship but certainly is very active in Biblical interpretation (mostly popular rather than scholarly, which is of course not a bad thing at all but doesn’t establish you as a major authority in your field). The only scholar you have cited at any length, that I remember, is Blomberg. So I was quite right to focus on him. I brought up Licona frequently to make the point that even someone you yourself respect as a scholar-apologist has fallen seriously afoul of the guardians of evangelical "orthodoxy "precisely because of his willingness to recognize the possibility of non-historical elements in Matthew. This is a point that you have consistently ignored, preferring to harp on this vague notion of “general reliability,” which you assume gets you home free without having to establish that Matthew is reliable in the first place, let alone actually dealing with Matt. 16:18-19.

Candidly, Dr. Tait, the only person who has ever seriously questioned TSA is you. Perhaps that ought to give YOU pause. Do you see people lining up to take shots at the argument and Catholic Answers? After all, TSA has been a cornerstone argument of CA for a loooong time. Where is the refutation of it? There is none that I’m aware of and that includes my discussions with you.

Sure, it ought to give me pause in the sense that clearly this isn’t an argument amenable to scholarly critique. (Most scholars would not take it seriously enough to bother refuting. I’m the crazy guy who gets addicted to Internet forums and tries to get people on these forums to think like scholars. I get called an “elitist” for my pains, because people don’t seem to realize that the real elitists don’t think a forum like this one is worth interacting with.) As you admit just below, you will only accept the authority of scholars whom you consider sufficiently conservative (or “orthodox,” or whatever you want to call it). And for some reason you cannot see that this is fatal to the spiral argument’s claim to be treating the Bible like any other book. No one would ever say “I can show decisively by normal historical methods that the Iliad and the Odyssey were written by one person, but don’t bother citing any scholars who don’t start from that assumption to begin with.” You would see how absurd that was. Yet you have no problem making that claim about the Bible.

I have given up on persuading you. I’m making this argument for the lurkers.

 

[Contarini]

So to recap:

1. Of course “general reliability” is relevant, but it is not a substitute for careful analysis of individual texts.
2. The scholar you yourself have relied on most heavily, Blomberg, admits that the genre of the Gospels may admit non-historical elements. Another of the scholars you mentioned with respect, Licona, has created quite a controversy in evangelical circles by suggesting specific non-historical elements in Matthew. Blomberg apparently has done so as well, but doesn’t go as far as Licona. Another evangelical scholar you have not cited, Robert Gundry, has argued that Matthew contains extensive “midrash” (non-historical narratives that make a theological point). These are all people who are near the conservative end of the spectrum, inasmuch as all would claim to believe in Biblical inerrancy.
3. You have presented no evidence for the reliability of Matthew. You speak much of “general reliability,” but your arguments for it pertain to the Gospels in general, not to Matthew in particular. That obviously won’t fly–even if you refuse to go passage by passage, you need to go book by book.
4. You persistently refuse to discuss the passage actually under debate.
5. Finally and most fatally to your overall argument, you openly admit that you won’t listen to any scholar you consider “liberal.” That by itself demonstrates that you don’t treat the Bible in remotely the same way that a reasonable person would normally treat an ancient text. You quite frankly admit that you get to your conclusions by ruling out anyone whose biases make them at all likely to get to any conclusions other than the ones you want. That’s obviously circular. Anyone will obviously get the conclusions they want that way.

Edwin

 

[Contarini]

That is precisely why those described here as “everyone” are in obvious error as ambiguity and contradiction are not what the Catholic Church and real Catholics are about.

Do you or do you not understand that every post of yours is supporting my side of the argument and undercutting Keating’s claim that Catholics start by treating the Bible like any other book?

Edwin

 

[Abu]

The reliance on Raymond Brown and those who think like him is exemplified in these sorts of puerile suppositions –
**The “ignorance” and “error” of Christ
Answer by Fr. John Echert on 12-29-2001 (EWTN): **
‘The late Fr. Raymond Brown was convinced of ignorance and error on the part of Jesus Christ and the Sacred Scriptures. Here follows a small sampling of texts taken from Fr. Brown’s own works. To these texts could be added many more. I leave it to the reader to decide in the case of Fr. Brown, but personally, I find some of his operating principals and assumptions unacceptable, which puts at risk much of what he has written.
“The New Testament gives us no reason to think that Jesus and Paul were not deadly serious about the demonic world…I do not believe the demons inhabit desert places or the upper air, as Jesus and Paul thought…I see no way to get around the difficulty except by saying that Jesus and Paul were wrong on this point. They accepted the beliefs of their times about demons, but those beliefs were superstitious.” (St. Anthony Messenger, May, 1971)

‘With regards to Jesus’ knowledge of the future life: “Perhaps he had nothing new to say about the afterlife other than emphasizing what was already known, that God would reward the good and punish the wicked” (“Jesus, God and Man”, 1967, 101)

With regards to Jesus’ Self-knowledge: “…the ability to express this in a communicable way had to be acquired gradually.” (“Dogmatic Reflections on the Knowledge and Self-Consciousness of Christ” in “Theological Investigations”, 1966, 5)

‘With regards to Jesus’ knowledge of afterlife and the apocalypse: “…we cannot assume that Jesus shared our own sophistication on some of these questions. If Jesus speaks of heaven above the clouds…how can we be sure that he knew that it was not above the clouds?” (JGM 56)

‘Regarding Jesus’ prophetic knowledge of the destruction of the Temple: “Far from being a clear prophecy, this saying seems to have been an embarrassment in the Synoptic tradition: Jesus had spoken about the destruction and rebuilding of the Temple, but he had died without the Temple being destroyed or his rebuilding it. Luke omits the saying…Mk. Adds qualifications…Mt. reduces the prediction to a possibility…Jn. is giving us still another reinterpretation designed to remove the difficulty.” (JGM 63)

‘Regarding the time of the Coming of the Son of Man: “Since it is not reasonable to suppose that he [Jesus] knew about the Parousia but for some mysterious reason expressed himself obscurely, one is almost forced to take at face value the admission of Mark 13:32 that Jesus did not know…Is it totally inconceivable that, since Jesus did not know when the Parousia would occur, he tended to think and say that it would occur soon?” (JGM, 77-78)

‘Regarding Jesus’ knowledge of His own Divinity: “…when we ask whether during his ministry Jesus, a Palestinian Jew, knew that he was God, we are asking whether he identified himself and the Father – and, of course, he did not. Undoubtedly, some would wish to attribute to Jesus an anticipated understanding of the later broadness of the term ‘God’ (or, indeed, even expect him to speak in trinitarian terminology), but can serious scholars simply presume that Jesus could speak and think in the vocabulary and philosophy of later times?” (JGM 87).’

Such puerile suppositions, so eagerly followed by some here, expose the weaknesses of those attacking the spiral argument.

 

[Abu]

When the Gospels were written, as Fr William G Most points out, many people who had seen and heard Jesus himself would have been alive at that time. And Quadratus, an early apologist writing about 123 A.D., tells us that in his day there were still persons around who had been cured or raised from the dead by Jesus – prime witnesses.

The Gospel writers had the opportunity to get the facts. And we know that they would be careful and honest, for their own eternity depended on facts, not on fancy. As St. Paul told the Corinthians, “If Christ is not risen, your faith is vain” (1, 15:17).

Essentially we know things that the original spectators could easily observe and accurately report:
Fact 1: There was a man called Jesus.
Fact 2: He claimed to be a messenger sent from God.
Fact 3: He did enough to prove that He was such a messenger.
Fact 4: Crowds followed Jesus and He had an inner circle to whom he spoke much more.
Fact 5: He commissioned His followers to continue His teaching and founded His Church.
Fact 6: Jesus affirmed that God would protect that teaching.

The writings of these facts – the Gospels – are comparable with other ancient documents from writers such as Caesar, Tacitus, Thucydides and others, they are all reliable as history.

Historically, they prove that the messenger sent from God worked many miracles to support His mission and teaching to the extent of forgiving sins. God as Truth cannot provide such power to prove falsehood, so the claims of Jesus are true, culminating in the fact of His resurrection from the dead.

So from the reliability of the Gospels as history, we now know that:

1. An infallible Church was founded by the Son of God
2. That infallible Church teaches that the Bible, as She has given us, is the inspired Word of God.

 

[Cavaradossi]

No one would ever say “I can show decisively by normal historical methods that the Iliad and the Odyssey were written by one person, but don’t bother citing any scholars who don’t start from that assumption to begin with.” You would see how absurd that was. Yet you have no problem making that claim about the Bible.

I have given up on persuading you. I’m making this argument for the lurkers.

Or perhaps a better analogy would be if somebody were to claim, “I can prove to you using standard methods of historical criticism that Herodotus never reported any tall tales about the Persians in his Histories.” But if then that same person were to turn around and express disdain for and hastily dismiss the work of every scholar who did not believe that Herodotus’ Histories were inerrant historical records, one would think that perhaps his argument rang a bit hollow.

 

[Kaninchen]

I have given up on persuading you. I’m making this argument for the lurkers.

It’s been really interesting, thanks.

 

[AbideWithMe]

Candidly, Dr. Tait, the only person who has ever seriously questioned TSA is you.

Randy, I’m among those lurkers who has seriously questioned a good portion of the logic I see repeated again and again on CAF. I’m too verbally reticent to put my time and energy into voicing my questions, and I’m willing to bet many people are like me about that. I really appreciate those articulate people like Contarini who do critique some aspects of Catholic apologetics; if they didn’t, I would frankly have an even lower opinion (which again I’d mostly keep to myself) of the apologetics I find online.

What I’m trying to get at is that I don’t believe critics like Contarini are the enemies you seem to think they are.

 

[Randy_Carson]

Nor have you provided serious scholarly support for the question actually under debate, which is that it is certain beyond reasonable doubt, by purely historical methods, that Matthew 16:18-19 was really said by Jesus.

You keep saying this.

I have only commented on the first two lines of the Spiral Argument, and I have not even BEGUN to defend Matthew as a historical author because until I see that there is common ground for accepting the reliability of a witness, no defense is really possible, is it? You will simply skate away on the excuse that we can’t trust the 100th thing that anyone tells us despite the fact that the other 99 have proven to be true.

But since this is where your argument REQUIRES me to be in error, let me ask you two questions.

1. Of the three synoptic gospels, which comes closest to meeting your personal standard of objective historical accuracy?
2. Why?

 

[grannymh]

The reliance on Raymond Brown and those who think like him is exemplified in these sorts of puerile suppositions –
The “ignorance” and “error” of Christ
**Answer by Fr. John Echert on 12-29-2001 (EWTN): **
‘The late Fr. Raymond Brown was convinced of ignorance and error on the part of Jesus Christ and the Sacred Scriptures. Here follows a small sampling of texts taken from Fr. Brown’s own works. To these texts could be added many more. I leave it to the reader to decide in the case of Fr. Brown, but personally, I find some of his operating principals and assumptions unacceptable, which puts at risk much of what he has written.

skip

‘Regarding Jesus’ knowledge of His own Divinity: “…when we ask whether during his ministry Jesus, a Palestinian Jew, knew that he was God, we are asking whether he identified himself and the Father – and, of course, he did not. Undoubtedly, some would wish to attribute to Jesus an anticipated understanding of the later broadness of the term ‘God’ (or, indeed, even expect him to speak in trinitarian terminology), but can serious scholars simply presume that Jesus could speak and think in the vocabulary and philosophy of later times?” (JGM 87).’

Such puerile suppositions, so eagerly followed by some here, expose the weaknesses of those attacking the spiral argument.

A personal thank you.

I have always wondered what was the source of the popular proposal that Jesus had to learn He was God. Matthew 3: 13-17. And by extension, some, not all, historical researchers have to learn that according to Catholicism 101, Jesus is the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity.

A tiny thought – Perhaps the Spiral Argument has to first state some foundational axioms such as God exists and God can interact with His human creatures.

 

[Randy_Carson]

Nor have you provided serious scholarly support for the question actually under debate, which is that it is certain beyond reasonable doubt, by purely historical methods, that Matthew 16:18-19 was really said by Jesus.

I believe that the only actual scholarly support for this position anyone has brought so far in this discussion (not counting the PBC decisions that Abu keeps flinging at all our heads) was brought by me: Jean Galot’s argument that Jesus said the words but probably on another occasion. I am sure that there are conservative scholars who think that Jesus said them on that particular occasion, but I don’t recall you actually citing any. (This is a long and complex discussion and I may be missing something–I apologize if so.)

You keep avoiding the actual issue and going on about “general reliability.” Yet you haven’t produced any evidence for the “general reliability” of Matthew either, and you are abusing the concept as a short-cut to avoiding any serious discussion of actual texts. You simply wave it around, without actually establishing that Matthew is reliable, and announce that there’s no point discussing Matthew 16 until we agree that Matthew is reliable. That’s just plain silly and illustrates why I object to the way you are using this concept. Note that you’ve introduced another vicious circle there: by your logic we can’t ever establish reliability or unreliability, because we only do that by establishing that an author is reliable in specific instances, and you say we can’t discuss specific instances until we know the author is reliable.

I don’t see any reference in your response. So,

[SIGN]FOURTH REQUEST:
Please provide links to online articles from biblical scholars which explain that the general reliability of an author is insufficient for determining the veracity of unverifiable portions of the work in question.[/SIGN]

In the absence of such, you can talk to the lurkers all you wish - some of them will already be in agreement with you. But you have failed to convince me and those who are not predisposed to agree with you due to their own skepticism about the inspiration of skeptics.

IOW, Dr. Tait, you can play to your crowd if you want, but you haven’t presented an argument worthy of changing anyone’s mind.

 

[icamhif]

I don’t see any reference in your response. So,

[SIGN]FOURTH REQUEST:
Please provide links to online articles from biblical scholars which explain that the general reliability of an author is insufficient for determining the veracity of unverifiable portions of the work in question.[/SIGN]

In the absence of such, you can talk to the lurkers all you wish - some of them will already be in agreement with you. But you have failed to convince me and those who are not predisposed to agree with you due to their own skepticism about the inspiration of skeptics.

IOW, Dr. Tait, you can play to your crowd if you want, but you haven’t presented an argument worthy of changing anyone’s mind.

I am a former Evangelical who has been a fan of Norman Geisler, Josh McDowell, and Lee Strobel, so if anything, I would be “predisposed” to agree with the first line of the Spiral Argument (the line that is under discussion).

But Contarini, in my opinion, has provided us a compelling case about Matthew that no amount of appeal to “general reliability” to the four Gospels in general is going to get around.

 

[Novocastrian]

I don’t see any reference in your response. So,

[SIGN]FOURTH REQUEST:
Please provide links to online articles from biblical scholars which explain that the general reliability of an author is insufficient for determining the veracity of unverifiable portions of the work in question.[/SIGN]

In the absence of such, you can talk to the lurkers all you wish - some of them will already be in agreement with you. But you have failed to convince me and those who are not predisposed to agree with you due to their own skepticism about the inspiration of skeptics.

IOW, Dr. Tait, you can play to your crowd if you want, but you haven’t presented an argument worthy of changing anyone’s mind.

Randy, I doubt that any such articles exist, for the very simple reason that nobody has bothered to refute a position that couldn’t be held by any competent historian or biblical scholar. As Contarini has pointed out, there are obvious and immediate methodological problems with approaching any text in a hermeneutic of ‘general reliability’. That’s not how any academic - ‘conservative’ or ‘liberal’ - treats his/her sources.

 

[grannymh]

I am a former Evangelical who has been a fan of Norman Geisler, Josh McDowell, and Lee Strobel, so if anything, I would be “predisposed” to agree with the first line of the Spiral Argument (the line that is under discussion).

But Contarini, in my opinion, has provided us a compelling case about Matthew that no amount of appeal to “general reliability” to the four Gospels in general is going to get around.

Could you please explain to me why historical research on Matthew 16: 13-18 stops at 100 AD?

 

[Contarini]

I don’t see any reference in your response. So,

[SIGN]FOURTH REQUEST:
Please provide links to online articles from biblical scholars which explain that the general reliability of an author is insufficient for determining the veracity of unverifiable portions of the work in question.[/SIGN]

In the absence of such, you can talk to the lurkers all you wish - some of them will already be in agreement with you. But you have failed to convince me and those who are not predisposed to agree with you due to their own skepticism about the inspiration of skeptics.

IOW, Dr. Tait, you can play to your crowd if you want, but you haven’t presented an argument worthy of changing anyone’s mind.

Randy, I will work on honoring your request when you post a statement from any credentialed scholar, Blomberg or anyone else, who says that “general reliability” is the sole criterion to be used when multiple attestation does not exist.

That is not what the quote you earlier cited said. Blomberg said that “general reliability” established the benefit of the doubt. That does not mean that you ignore all other internal evidence, comparison with other versions of the story, etc., as you insist on doing.

Furthermore, the entire discussion is moot until you provide an argument for the general reliability of Matthew, which you have conspicuously failed to do.

You are insisting on holding up the entire discussion until we “solve” this question of how much weight “general reliability” has. But we aren’t going to solve that. It’s too vague to solve in the abstract.

It’s hard to give you what you ask for, first of all because most scholars don’t post online articles. They write journal articles and books. I’m sure there are critical reviews of Blomberg’s work out there by more liberal scholars, but I can’t find them online. All I find (and those have been very useful in establishing that his concept of “reliability” does not exclude the possibility of non-historical elements) are tirades against him for supposedly watering down inerrancy. I’m sure I could probably find atheist websites taking him to task, but I have no interest in citing those (unless they are actual, credentialed scholars who double as atheist “anti-apologists”–and even then I’d rather cite folks from closer to the middle).

Here is the best I can do so far, and I actually think it’s pretty relevant. It’s an article by Gary Habermas, not necessarily disagreeing with Blomberg but explaining why “general reliability” is not enough on its own. (I suspect Blomberg would agree and that he’d be bemused/annoyed by the way you are using his work, but I can’t prove that–I can now prove that Habermas does not see things the way you do.)

Note that while Habermas sees value in the “general reliability” approach, he also sees the need to address specific critical issues–something you steadfastly refuse to do, and use the “general reliability” slogan as an excuse to avoid doing. Note also his “minimal facts” approach–that is to say, an apologetics case needs to be based on things that scholars across the spectrum agree on. This is exactly what I have been saying all along.

So stop using our theoretical disagreement about “general reliability” as a shield to avoid actual engagement with the questions

1. How reliable is Matthew, actually? and
2. More specifically, how confident can we be by purely historical methods that Jesus spoke the words recorded in Matt. 16:18-19?

The more you do this, the more you demonstrate the untenability of the spiral argument. You are stretching and twisting citations from one conservative scholar to justify refusing to engage these two central questions. And you are going against Gary Habermas, one of the foremost conservative evangelical scholar-apologists, in doing so. (I seriously doubt that Blomberg would disagree with Habermas on this, by the way. But I’m not going to let this discussion turn into an argument over the exegesis of the Blomberg quotes. What matters is that clearly Habermas disagrees with your refusal to engage critical issues, which you are using or misusing Blomberg to defend.)

Edwin

 

[Contarini]

Could you please explain to me why historical research on Matthew 16: 13-18 stops at 100 AD?

I don’t know what you mean by this. Do you mean “why ignore early Christian testimony?”

I don’t ignore it. The only reason to consider the possibility that an eyewitness wrote Matthew or any form of what became Matthew is the testimony of Papias and other early Christians. And I do consider that possibility very seriously–I just don’t think it can be taken for granted that Matthew wrote what we now know as Matthew in its current form.

That may not be what you mean, of course.

Edwin

 

[Contarini]

Or perhaps a better analogy would be if somebody were to claim, “I can prove to you using standard methods of historical criticism that Herodotus never reported any tall tales about the Persians in his Histories.” But if then that same person were to turn around and express disdain for and hastily dismiss the work of every scholar who did not believe that Herodotus’ Histories were inerrant historical records, one would think that perhaps his argument rang a bit hollow.

Yes, that’s a very good analogy.

Of course, nobody does believe that Herodotus is inerrant. I suppose some hypothetical Fundamentalist Hellenic Reconstructionists might believe it. But I was trying to avoid that kind of comparison with some kind of fringe group, since obviously Christian inerrantists are a large group of people with many excellent scholars among them, although typically the best scholars among them have to find ways of interpreting inerrancy that make the more hardline folks uneasy (Blomberg and Licona being excellent examples).

Edwin

 

[Contarini]

When the Gospels were written, as Fr William G Most points out, many people who had seen and heard Jesus himself would have been alive at that time. And Quadratus, an early apologist writing about 123 A.D., tells us that in his day there were still persons around who had been cured or raised from the dead by Jesus – prime witnesses.

The Gospel writers had the opportunity to get the facts. And we know that they would be careful and honest, for their own eternity depended on facts, not on fancy. As St. Paul told the Corinthians, “If Christ is not risen, your faith is vain” (1, 15:17).

Essentially we know things that the original spectators could easily observe and accurately report:
Fact 1: There was a man called Jesus.
Fact 2: He claimed to be a messenger sent from God.
Fact 3: He did enough to prove that He was such a messenger.
Fact 4: Crowds followed Jesus and He had an inner circle to whom he spoke much more.
Fact 5: He commissioned His followers to continue His teaching and founded His Church.
Fact 6: Jesus affirmed that God would protect that teaching.

The writings of these facts – the Gospels – are comparable with other ancient documents from writers such as Caesar, Tacitus, Thucydides and others, they are all reliable as history.

Historically, they prove that the messenger sent from God worked many miracles to support His mission and teaching to the extent of forgiving sins. God as Truth cannot provide such power to prove falsehood, so the claims of Jesus are true, culminating in the fact of His resurrection from the dead.

So from the reliability of the Gospels as history, we now know that:

1. An infallible Church was founded by the Son of God
2. That infallible Church teaches that the Bible, as She has given us, is the inspired Word of God.

Abu, you don’t know anything “from history” as long as you refuse to listen to scholars whom you consider heretical.

To approach the Gospels as history means to look at all the spectrum of serious scholarship, even if it’s coming from people whose views you find reprehensible theologically.

If you aren’t willing to do that–and your continual screeds about Fr. Brown indicate that you aren’t–then you aren’t capable of looking at the Gospels as history. And that’s fine–just don’t claim that that’s what you are doing.

Edwin

 

[grannymh]

I don’t know what you mean by this. Do you mean “why ignore early Christian testimony?”

I don’t ignore it. The only reason to consider the possibility that an eyewitness wrote Matthew or any form of what became Matthew is the testimony of Papias and other early Christians. And I do consider that possibility very seriously–I just don’t think it can be taken for granted that Matthew wrote what we now know as Matthew in its current form.

That may not be what you mean, of course.

Edwin

You are correct. Your response is valid, but it does not explain why historical research on Matthew 16: 13-18 stops at 100 AD?

This thread emphasizes eyewitnesses during the time or tradition of Matthew. Early Christian testimony is very valuable. However, that should not automatically exclude the testimony of 21st century Christians who do see a visible Catholic Church founded by Jesus Christ Who is True God and True Man. That is why I included verses 13-17 in my citation of Matthew 16: 13-18.

In some bibles, there is a list of popes since Peter. Surely, some historians would be curious about how these men interpreted Matthew 16: 13-18.