The spiral argument

[Contarini]

In post 247 of the thread "Not the same God?" Portrait introduced an argument used by Catholic apologists about a century ago and popularized by Karl Keating more recently as a “spiral” rather than “circular” argument, establishing the reliability of the Gospels through purely historical means and then resting the authority of the Church on the testimony of the Gospels. I criticized this argument in #252, and Portrait replied in #257. The following post is my reply to Portrait’s #257.

Dear Edwin,

Cordial greetings and a very good day. Thankyou for the above response to my post.

When you speak of the “vast majority of scholars” you mean surely the vast majority of liberal scholars

No, I don’t mean that at all. If I were only counting liberal scholars, I would say all scholars!

who quite naturally approach the Gospels from the standpoint of their own biased philosophical presuppositions.

And conservative scholars don’t?

The argument supposedly doesn’t presuppose any kind of faith commitment. It claims to subject the Gospels to the laws of historical criticism. To then rule out all those scholars you regard as “liberal” is simply cheating, just as it is cheating when liberal scholars claim that no scholars take a conservative view.

I’m taking seriously the full spectrum of scholarly opinion.

Many of these chaps view the Gospels as nothing more than mere scissors and paste productions, mechanically peiced together from existing traditions

You’re introducing loaded language and presenting a bit of a caricature. But at any rate, this isn’t relevant if you are actually subjecting the Gospels to the “laws of historical criticism.” You can’t rule out certain kinds of conclusions beforehand if you are actually doing that.

and expend much time and energy trying to get behind the fourfold Gospel narrative to discover the “real historical Jesus”.

Exactly. In other words, they are “subjecting the Gospels to the laws of historical criticism.”

Thus these liberal scholars are by no means as entirely objective as they would have us believe, for they start out from a position of scepticism and, not infrequently, downright unbelief. Therefore their so called “assured results” must be viewed with deep suspicion.

I agree (I would probably not take this suspicion as far as you would, but I agree in principle). But the “objectivity” or “assured results” of liberal scholars are not in question here. The argument you presented requires that you give the same utter confidence to the “objectivity” and “assured results” of conservative scholars that you deny to liberals. That’s why it is not an honest argument.

The fact is that the time elapsing between the evangelic events and the writing of the Gospels is, from the standpoint of historical research, satisfactorily short. For in evaluating the trustworthiness of any ancient historical documents, one of the crucial questions is: How soon after the events took place were they actually recorded?

Yes, it’s one of the questions. I entirely agree that the time in question is relatively short, even if you grant the consensus opinion as to when the canonical Gospels were written (averaging about 50 years after the events they describe, with Mark a bit earlier and John a bit later–certainly well under a century in all cases, and perhaps as little as 30 years or so in the case of Mark). And I further agree with Richard Bauckham that this makes direct dependence of the authors on eye-witnesses a much more plausible theory than most scholars would admit.

But elapsed time is not the only consideration. Consider the number of false things that sincere people believe about events that have happened within the past 5-10 years, or even about events that have happened within a few days in one’s own town. I have had students tell me that I said something in class which was the exact opposite of what I really said. My own mother, a person of great intelligence and scrupulous honesty, tells stories about her own experiences that grow in drama with every telling. The fact that the Gospels were written decades rather than centuries after the events they describe certainly gives us good grounds for a reasonable confidence that their accounts substantively resemble what really happened, and it provides a solid probable basis for the assent of faith.

But the argument you have endorsed claims not to involve faith, and it requires certainty, not just plausibility. It also involves a very specific, detailed degree of “reliability.” For instance, the Catholic case rests heavily on Matt. 16. One can easily believe that the event described in Mark 8 and Matt. 16 occurred, while also believing that the words of Jesus recorded in Matthew but not Mark were a theological “gloss” added by the author of Matthew. I regard that as the most plausible opinion, although it’s certainly possible that Jesus actually said these words and Mark simply didn’t record them for some reason. But again, your argument requires us to be certain, on purely empirical grounds, that Jesus actually said these words. And that’s simply impossible.

 

[Contarini]

As you know, this is a huge topic and deserves thorough treatment in another thread, suffice to say that the historical reliability of the four Gospels has been demonstrated time and again and the unfounded theories of liberal critics debunked time and again.

Many arguments have been made with that effect. And these arguments, naturally, have persuaded those who were disposed to be persuaded, and not those who weren’t. It’s simply not true that the consensus of scholars has been won over by conservative arguments. Of course you can claim that this is because of the philosophical presuppositions of “mainstream” scholars, who won’t accept the evidence for the conservative view. But they can make the same claim about you. And your argument goes to pieces, because it claims to rest not on faith but on “the laws of historical criticism.” Therefore, those competent to judge it are those who engage in historical criticism across the spectrum of opinion, not just the conservative wing of the scholarly community.

On certain points, it is true that skeptical views once put forward have been debunked. For instance, no one today seriously questions that seven of the letters attributed to Paul were written by him. Almost no one questions that Jesus was a historical figure who was crucified under Pontius Pilate. And so on. The fact that skepticism has been refuted on these fairly limited points throws into further relief the fact that skeptical arguments are alive and well with regard to many other points critical for the success of your argument. If mainstream scholarship were committed to ignoring the evidence and maintaining skeptical views for ideological reasons, scholars would still be arguing that Paul didn’t write Romans or that John was written in the late 2nd century (as Ferdinand Christian Baur argued more than a century ago). These views have been abandoned because they don’t fit the evidence. Other positions you might want scholars to abandon have not been abandoned, because there is evidence to support them. It may not be conclusive evidence in many cases, but that’s not the point here. Your argument requires conclusive evidence on the conservative side, not merely inconclusive evidence on the liberal side!

The evidence for the entire N.T. writings is ever so much greater than the evidence for many writings of the classical authors from antiquity, the authenticity of which no man seriously dreams of questioning. Indeed, I would be so bold as to say that if the N.T. were a collection of secular writings, then their authenticity would generally be deemed beyond doubt.

Evidence for what about them? You are confusing the question of manuscript evidence with the question of the historical reliability of the original manuscript. These are not the same thing at all. We can indeed be reasonably certain that the critical text of the NT, arrived at by a careful comparison of the thousands of extant manuscripts, is substantially what the original authors wrote at some point in the second half of the first century (or maybe in the early 2nd century in a few cases).

The fact that we have far more manuscripts for the NT than for pagan writings does not, in itself, prove that the NT is more historically accurate than those other texts.

Furthermore, you’re simply wrong when you say that no one dreams of questioning the authenticity (if by that you mean reliability–and if you don’t then the point isn’t really relevant) of classical pagan writings. Scholars question the historical reliability of these writings all the time. You don’t hear about this, because there aren’t millions of people who base their lives on the historical reliability of Thucydides or Sallust or Caesar or Tacitus. It doesn’t make it into the popular press.

You’re probably right that you find a larger proportion of scholars who engage in radical skepticism with regard to the Bible than with regard to secular writings. But then, you also have conservative scholars who approach the subject with the firm intent of showing that the Bible is reliable, and whose entire systems of belief would collapse if it wasn’t. You don’t have that phenomenon to the same extent with regard to classical pagan writings either. The whole issue is less loaded.

“The interval then between the dates of the original composition and the earliest extant evidence becomes so small as to be in fact negligible, and the last foundation for any doubt that the Scriptures have come down to us substantially as they were written has now been removed. Both the au**thenticity and the general integrity of the books of the New Testament may be regarded as finally established”.

But that’s a non sequitur. A person 2000 years from now possessed of a first edition of the writings of L. Ron Hubbard would be ill-advised to conclude that his writings are true simply because the interval between the text in hand and the original manuscript was very small!

Looking at what the Gospels say, what we glean from the extra-biblical documents and what we know of human nature (and what we know of the Divine nature from natural theology), we must surely conclude that Jesus was either what He claimed to be, God, or He was completely insane. However, of one thing we can be sure of is that He was not simply a good man who was not Divine, for no merely good man would ever make the sort of claims that our Lord made.

This is a conclusion frequently made by apologists, and it certainly holds some weight. But of course the assertion that Jesus claimed to be God rests both on the reliability of the Gospel accounts and on a particular interpretation of their texts.

 

[Contarini]

Even if we regard the Resurrection as a hoax or some “conjuring trick with bones” (David Jenkins),

Bishop Jenkins actually said that it wasn’t a conjuring trick with bones. He appeared to be saying that an insistence on the bodily nature of the Resurrection reduced it to a conjuring trick with bones, which was certainly dismissive and heretical, but not quite what you said he said!

one does not normally find men laying down their lives for a hoax, certainly not one from which their is no hope of any advantage. Thus if we take this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion, we must surely acknowledge that Christ did indeed rise from the dead and was therefore God manifest in the flesh - the Word Incarnate.

No, not surely. There are just too many leaps here: that eyewitnesses claimed to have seen an empty tomb; that they were either speaking truth or deliberately engaging in a hoax when they did so; that these same eyewitnesses laid down their lives for the faith; and that people do not die for pious fraud. Some of these are highly probable, others less so. (I’d say that the fourth assumption is the closest to certainty, followed closely by the second, and reasonably closely by the first; the third assumption is the least justified, and makes the impact of the fourth much weaker. A stronger argument would be that the authors of the New Testament generally strike one as possessed of the kind of sincere conviction and moral earnestness that would make a person lay down their life for what they believe, so that the implication remains the same.) Add up the varying levels of probability, and you have something considerably less than total certainty.

Therefore, with the historical reliabilty of the Gospels and the Resurrection firmly established as irrefutable facts

But they aren’t. The Resurrection, and the essential historical reliability of the Gospels, are highly reasonable opinions and thus entirely proper and legitimate objects for the assent of faith.

Jesus said, among other things, that He would establish a Church (not churches) and we see from the N.T. (S. Matt. 16: 18) and other ancient works that He did just that.

No, we see that by the second century many people who claimed to be led by the successors of Jesus’ first followers were claiming that He did something like that.

Moreover, we also observe that that the Church He founded had all the rudiments of what we see in the contemporary Catholic Church - papacy, hierarchy, priesthood, sacraments, teaching authority and, as a logical corollary of the last, infallibility.

Who are “we”? You see this. I see that something like each of these can reasonably be found somewhere in the NT, with a bit of imagination looking through the lens of later Catholic teaching. Many people don’t even see that.

Clearly, if the Church that Christ established was to do what He said it would do, and the gates of Hades not prevail against it, then it had to have the note of infallibility - that is surely an ineluctable conclusion.

It’s very eluctable, because many people who appear to be intelligent and sincere manage to elude it.

Edwin

 

[triumphguy]

Taking the Gospels at face value (and withdrawing from any debate or loaded language about the Gospels) we see time and again that Christ’s miracles, teachings and healings repel as many (if not more) than they attract.

If the Gospel stories are true (and I’m not doubting that they are) then the events in them must have been absolutely staggering to those who witnessed them. Dead raised, the sick cured, the possessed cleansed, the hungry fed, herds of swine drowning themselves, water changed into wine, fig trees blighted.

If actual, factual truth were all that was required in order to believe in Jesus the Christ then the whole of Judea would have surrendered their will to Jesus.

In the end he was abandoned to a humiliating execution in front of baying crowds.

Something more is required, and that something more is not provided by trying to prove the actual historicity of every event in the Bible.

Perhaps a type of magisterium was present in the early Church whereby the Life and Mission of Christ was handed on at first orally, and then in written form until these traditions became the scriptures we know today. This does not deny the presence of the Divine in the writing of the Scriptures.

In fact it represents what we already know, that Christ gave us the Eucharist and the Church, and that the Church gave us the New Testament, and later the whole Canon.

 

[PRmerger]

No, I don’t mean that at all. If I were only counting liberal scholars, I would say all scholars!

Not following this at all. Are you saying that all scholars are liberal?

 

[PRmerger]

But elapsed time is not the only consideration. Consider the number of false things that sincere people believe about events that have happened within the past 5-10 years, or even about events that have happened within a few days in one’s own town. I have had students tell me that I said something in class which was the exact opposite of what I really said. My own mother, a person of great intelligence and scrupulous honesty, tells stories about her own experiences that grow in drama with every telling.

And if there were a false story being spread we can bet that the witnesses who are still around would absolutely correct any misinformation being offered.

So how far would a lie be able to propagate about you by your students while you’re still around? Sure, there may be 1-2 students who might still be running around saying, "Professor Contarini watches ‘John and Kate Plus 8!’ " but as long as you’re around to offer the truth, that lie is not going to get very far, no?

IOW: if it was a lie that Jesus cured Jairus’ daughter, and this lie was being propagated within 5-10 years of the alleged incident, we can be assured that Jairus, or his daughter, or the other Roman guards, or the servants would have offered, “No, sir! That Jesus guy did not cure Jairus’ daughter. I saw her die with my very own eyes.”

 

[Portrait]

F.A.O. Contarini

Dear Edwin,

Cordial greetings and a very good day. Thankyou for your responses to my posts.

The liberal scholars are at perfect liberty to express and propagate their opinions and far be it from me to deny them that right. However, I feel strongly that the unsuspecting should know that they are frequently not objective in their approach and this must necessarily colour their thinking. Of course not all fall into this category, but the vast majority sadly do. Alas, liberals would give us the bible as men would have it; dwarfed to the level of human intelligence, and shorn of those unfathomable mysteries which, if it really is the word of God, it must necessarily contain - the absence of which, in fact, would be sufficient to throw doubt upon the validity of its claims.

It has been my experience that, by and large, conservative scholars approach such questions as the historical reliability of the bible uncoloured by theological bias or subjective feeling, though, once again, there are exceptions, especially among the more ultra-Evangelical types. The conservatives with which I am familiar are certainly not fearful of submitting our Gospels to the laws of historical criticism. Indeed, why should they be?, since no ancient books come to us with such a weight of testimony in their favour.

The only “historical Jesus” is the One we meet with in the fourfold Gospel, thus any further search is unecessary and doomed to disappointment. Liberal criticism, in its quest for the historical Jesus, does not actually begin with history and thus try to reconstruct the real Christ. Rather it begins with its own modern novel views respecting Christ and because these do not sit comfortably with the historical records, it does not reach the conclusion that its own views are unhistorical - it contends that the really historical accounts of Christ must be legendary. Sincere objective critics who do proceed historically recognize increasingly the sterling value of the Gospels. Only in so far as they depart from the strictly historical method of research does the legendary theory gain in any importance. It is a violation of science to destroy a purely historic question in favour of a philosphic principle, but this is exactly what the liberals are guillty of. Even where their philosophy is not false, the procedure of the liberal critics would be unscientific anyway. Liberal criticism is guilty of the very error it wants to shift off on to the Gospels - it wants to tamper with history in order to adjust it to a modern agnostic world-view. Hence Bultman’s “Demythologising” nonesense.

True, the short interval of time between the events and the recording of those events is not the only consideration, but it is, nevertheless, a jolly important and compelling one - one that has held weight with even secular historians.

There has always been speculation about the Gospels being entirely set in a theological framework to serve theological purposes, but this is surely a gross exaggeration. A remarkable feature of the Gospels is their adherence to a bare delineation of facts. Even where one should expect them to make capital out of what they write, they refrain from so doing. Miraculous events are given devoid of any expressions of astonishment or triumph. The cruel ill-treatment of our dear Lord is recorded without a word of indignation. Moreover, if the writers were bent on supporting a thesis, having little regard for historical truth, they would have been unwise to invent “hard sayings” which could only but alienate men; to record that Christ’s own relatives thought Him mad; that He was weak enough to pray that the cup of suffering might pass from Him; to portray Him as a humiliated, mocked and crucified felon who they wanted men to worship; and to insist that His people rejected Him. If His own rejected Him, why on earth should others accept Him?

No. Our Evangelists chronicle what happened as if their only interest were that of disinterested observers and narrators, which adds considerable weight to their testimony as well as the historical reliability of the Gospels. That said, I would concede that the idea of a theological purpose is not without application to St. John’s Gospel, but that still does not hinder the truth of the facts given.

With respect to the Petrine Text and the assertion by some that it was added for ecclesiastical purposes, this is utterly without foundation and it is next to certain that the charge of their addition is made by those who desire to avoid submission to the authority of the Pope as successor to St. Peter. How men grasp at the flimisiest of excuses to secure their elimination!

The Aramaic genius of the wording in the Petrine Text in St. Matthew’s Gospel and the sequence of thought in the entire context forbid the notion that the passage does not belong to the original Gospel. The words appear in all the very oldest Codices and all editors of the Gospel text give them as certain and guaranteed by the rules of textual criticism. Nor can any reasonable explanation of the general acceptance of the text throughout the whole Church be given by those who wish to evade its force by the back-door method of denying its authenticity. I might remark that, by the same method, one could eliminate every single text in the bible which did not happen to fit with one’s own personal theories. In any case even if the text were not genuine, the primacy of St. Peter could be quite satisfactorily proved from many other places in Sacred Scripture. However, the text as given in St. Matthew is quite genuine, rest assured.

More to follow, dear friend.

Warmest good wishes,

Portrait

Pax

 

[Contarini]

Not following this at all. Are you saying that all scholars are liberal?

Of course not. I realized after I wrote it that it could be taken this way. Portrait seemed to be accusing me of only counting liberal scholars. My point was that I said “most scholars think . . .” If I were only counting liberal scholars, I would have said "all scholars think . . . "

In other words, when I speak of the consensus of scholars, I really mean everyone who is a credentialed member of the academic guild. When I say “most scholars,” I don’t mean “most liberal scholars.” I mean (in the particular case in question) “all liberal and middle-of-the-road scholars.” Similarly, when I say “nearly all scholars agree that Jesus really existed,” I mean “you can find one or two radical skeptics with scholarly credentials, but other than that the consensus is unanimous.” The same would be true on the other side for the consensus that Paul did not write Hebrews–you can probably find someone with scholarly credentials who thinks Paul wrote Hebrews, but even most conservative scholars agree that he didn’t.

In short, I for one don’t use “most” or “nearly all” as a slippery way of saying “one particular faction of scholarship.” I really mean “looking at the whole spectrum, from the most liberal to the most conservative, here’s what we can say.” If I were really only counting one particular group I happen to favor (and in fact I don’t favor liberal scholarship–the scholars I most trust are conservative-to-moderate scholars), I would have no problem saying "absolutely all scholars believe. . . . " Which would, of course, be dishonest and absurd.

Edwin

 

[Contarini]

Portrait,

Thanks for your reply. We agree that liberal scholars have plenty of theological bias, and that sometimes (not always) they fail to acknowledge this. Clearly where we differ is that you regard the presence of such bias as a flaw, and as something more characteristic of liberals than of conservatives. I hold, on the other hand, that everyone has theological bias, and that this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Scholars should seek to discipline their bias, and they should be honest about it. For their part, readers should guard against the bias of their favorite scholars by reading scholars who hold to a different point of view. If I read a book whose conclusions I like, my immediate follow-up is to seek out a book or article that gives a different view, or a review of the book by someone who disagrees with its conclusions.

Of course not all fall into this category

Of course all do–liberals and conservatives alike. Some do a better job than others of acknowledging and disciplining their bias.

It has been my experience that, by and large, conservative scholars approach such questions as the historical reliability of the bible uncoloured by theological bias or subjective feeling, though, once again, there are exceptions, especially among the more ultra-Evangelical types.

Well, that’s certainly not my experience, and I have to question whether you aren’t jumping to that conclusion based on the agreement between conservative scholars’ biases and your own.

I do think that conservative scholars have a bit of an advantage based on the historic dominance of the field by liberals. Conservative scholars have to take liberal scholarship seriously in order to be accepted as serious scholars themselves. But that advantage goes away when conservative scholars start ignoring liberals and just talking to each other, which your approach seems to encourage.

And back to the original point: I repeat that if one is really taking “the laws of historical criticism” seriously, as your argument claims, then you must take the entire spectrum seriously rather than ruling out scholars whose ideology differs with yours.

The conservatives with which I am familiar are certainly not fearful of submitting our Gospels to the laws of historical criticism.

That claim is belied by your statements below:

The only “historical Jesus” is the One we meet with in the fourfold Gospel, thus any further search is unecessary and doomed to disappointment.

So much for “the laws of historical criticism” and treating the Bible like any other ancient document. That’s simply not how any scholar would approach an ancient text. I can’t possibly imagine someone saying “the only historical Julius Caesar is the one we meet in the ancient literary texts.” (And certainly no one would say this of Alexander, given that centuries elapsed before the major literary sources for his life were written!)

Historical scholarship, applied to literary texts, always questions the text with the goal of getting “behind” it, in the sense that a historian always bears in mind that a literary text “constructs” its subject in a particular way based on a particular agenda. This isn’t a question of honesty vs. dishonesty. It’s simply a recognition of the nature of texts. It doesn’t mean that you throw out the text, only that you subject it to critical analysis and never assume that the Caesar of the Gallic War or Plutarch’s *Life *or whatever, or even an amalgam of all the available literary texts, is the same thing as the historical Caesar. The more different texts you have, from different perspectives, the closer the approximation will be, of course (the criterion of multiple attestation).

 

[Contarini]

Liberal criticism, in its quest for the historical Jesus, does not actually begin with history and thus try to reconstruct the real Christ. Rather it begins with its own modern novel views respecting Christ and because these do not sit comfortably with the historical records, it does not reach the conclusion that its own views are unhistorical - it contends that the really historical accounts of Christ must be legendary.

You’re begging the question, by assuming that because the four Gospels are the only major sources for the life of Jesus therefore they must be treated as the “really historical accounts.” This doesn’t follow. And again, you’re assuming that the assumptions with which liberal scholars approach the text are distorting while those of conservatives aren’t. This is simply to assume your conclusion before you begin.

Sincere objective critics who do proceed historically recognize increasingly the sterling value of the Gospels.

This strikes me as the “no true Scotsman” fallacy. Any scholar who doesn’t acknowledge the Gospels as reliable is not a “sincere objective critic,” it would appear, so your conclusion is, again, assured in advance.

I don’t see how you could possibly substantiate your claim by some kind of objective method. How would one evaluate how objective a scholar was without one’s own assumptions getting in the way? And do you really claim to have done such an analysis? Where is the scholarship showing this (i.e., a comparative scholarly study of NT scholarship, comparing different scholars by some objective criterion)? Has this scholarship itself been checked for bias, if it exists at all? The difficulties inherent in your claim seem insuperable to me. You are making assertions that simply can’t possibly be checked by any reasonable criterion. It all boils down to “I think that scholars whose conclusions I dislike are less objective than those whose conclusions I like,” which screams subjectivity and bias.

True, the short interval of time between the events and the recording of those events is not the only consideration, but it is, nevertheless, a jolly important and compelling one - one that has held weight with even secular historians.

No dispute that it has some weight.

There has always been speculation about the Gospels being entirely set in a theological framework to serve theological purposes, but this is surely a gross exaggeration.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that the Gospels are set in a theological framework to serve theological purposes–it’s a sober, reasonable description of the kinds of texts these are. It would certainly be an exaggeration, and entirely unreasonable, to say that the Gospels are therefore historically worthless.

A remarkable feature of the Gospels is their adherence to a bare delineation of facts. Even where one should expect them to make capital out of what they write, they refrain from so doing. Miraculous events are given devoid of any expressions of astonishment or triumph.

Certainly the Gospels lack the florid rhetoric of many other religious texts. Your claim is truest for Mark and least true for John, I think–John does make capital out of the events he describes, for sure (though not the precise kind you’re talking about). But I think it’s a stretch to say that because they don’t go into over-the-top rhetoric, therefore, they are simply “delineating the facts.” The stripped-down style (particularly of Mark) could be a sign of oral transmission, for instance. It could be a deliberate rhetorical device. Many traditional stories and ballads do the same kind of thing–presenting events that move you by their very simplicity. It doesn’t necessarily follow that these stories are historically accurate. Like the question of time lapse, this is certainly a valid argument but just doesn’t bear the amount of weight you want to put on it.

Moreover, if the writers were bent on supporting a thesis, having little regard for historical truth, they would have been unwise to invent “hard sayings” which could only but alienate men; to record that Christ’s own relatives thought Him mad; that He was weak enough to pray that the cup of suffering might pass from Him; to portray Him as a humiliated, mocked and crucified felon who they wanted men to worship; and to insist that His people rejected Him. If His own rejected Him, why on earth should others accept Him?

This “embarrassment factor” is certainly one of the strongest points in favor of the historicity of the Gospels. I think it’s one of the main reasons why almost all scholars grant them some historical validity, and its an excellent reason to favor a more conservative, respectful approach on historical grounds alone. However, again it just won’t bear the weight you want to put on it, and again it works better for Mark than for the other Gospels. For instance, if you look at how the four Gospel writers treat the story of Jesus’ baptism by John the Baptist–certainly one of those points that no one would have made up (because on the face of it, it made Jesus look like the lesser figure), you find that Mark and Luke recount the story most simply, while Matthew adds an incident in which John doesn’t want to baptize Jesus and Jesus has to talk him into it, and the Fourth Gospel carries this denigration of John compared to Jesus even further. To most historical critics this looks very much as if Matthew and John were concerned to deal with this “embarrassment” by telling the story in such a way as to emphasize Jesus’ superiority to John. Normal canons of historical criticism thus would lead us to treat Matthew and John as relatively less reliable, by the same argument you use to show that the Gospels as a whole are reliable.

 

[Contarini]

I would also not say that the general theme of Jesus being rejected by the Jewish leaders is something that people wouldn’t be likely to make up. On the contrary, if the Gospels were written at a time when Jesus’ followers were engaged in conflict with the Jewish leaders after the fall of the Temple, it would be very likely that the Gospel writers would emphasize/exaggerate the extent to which that conflict already existed in Jesus’ own lifetime. If you’re talking specifically about the rejection at Nazareth, I think you have a better case.

No. Our Evangelists chronicle what happened as if their only interest were that of disinterested observers and narrators

With all due respect, that’s an extremely naive and uncritical way to read the texts. And I say this by the normal “laws of historical criticism”–it’s just not how a critical scholar reads any text.

That said, I would concede that the idea of a theological purpose is not without application to St. John’s Gospel, but that still does not hinder the truth of the facts given.

I would certainly agree that it’s more obvious in John (and that John can’t be rejected as unhistorical on that ground), but it clearly exists in all four Gospels.

With respect to the Petrine Text and the assertion by some that it was added for ecclesiastical purposes, this is utterly without foundation

No, it’s the result of the application of the “normal laws of historical criticism.” If you find two sources, one probably earlier than the other; and if (as I noted above), the text that is most likely written later also shows a general tendency to elaborate on the stories it tells and to soften “embarrassing” points; and if that later text also happens to be the only one of the four Gospels that uses the word “ecclesia”; then I think it’s entirely reasonable to speculate that the text in question may well be a theological elaboration.

The Aramaic genius of the wording in the Petrine Text in St. Matthew’s Gospel

I certainly agree that the use of Aramaisms in Matthew is an argument in favor of the authenticity of the passages in which they occur, and of the First Gospel generally. But it’s not certain, since the Aramaisms could result from the Aramaic-speaking context of the community that produced the text. As with so many of your points, it’s not that I necessarily disagree, but that it simply won’t bear the weight you want to put on it.

and the sequence of thought in the entire context

I don’t know what this means.

forbid the notion that the passage does not belong to the original Gospel. The words appear in all the very oldest Codices and all editors of the Gospel text give them as certain and guaranteed by the rules of textual criticism.

Textual criticism is irrelevant here–we aren’t talking about whether these words occurred in the original text of “Matthew,” but about whether they were spoken by Jesus.

I might remark that, by the same method, one could eliminate every single text in the bible which did not happen to fit with one’s own personal theories.

That’s simply untrue. There are many stories which are multiply attested and meet other criteria. This one is fairly weak, if you apply the standard “laws of historical criticism.”

In any case even if the text were not genuine, the primacy of St. Peter  could be quite satisfactorily proved from many other places in Sacred  Scripture.

There are three texts I can think of that seem to point to Petrine primacy–this one, the one in Luke’s account of the Last Supper about Peter’s faith not failing, and the “feed my sheep” episode in John. I agree that the multiple attestation (though in completely different contexts, so clearly not referring to exactly the same story) does point to a pretty strong conclusion that Peter had some kind of primacy. But it’s interesting that none of these passages occur in Mark. (One can explain this by the traditional argument that Mark represents Peter’s own perspective, and he wouldn’t aggrandize himself. I like that explanation, but it’s hardly an assured one–it’s also quite possible, by the “laws of historical criticism,” that the other three Gospels all reflect a slightly later period, when ideas about Petrine primacy were beginning to circulate, and that each of them finds a different way to read that idea back into the time of Jesus.)

Edwin