Much of written history is accepted with a less critical approach than critics afford to Christianity.
You already said this, and I already responded to it. Youâre just repeating your initial statement instead of responding to the response. As I said, I agree that this is so to a very limited extent, but itâs a matter of degree and timing. In other words, scholars raise critical questions about the Bible and Christian sources sooner and more intensely than about others, but thereâs no basic difference of approach.
Think about how much weight is assigned to primary sources.
First of all, primary sources include lots of things, not just texts. The general principle is that you prefer âindirectâ evidence to direct. Literary texts trying to make a particular point are treated as the most suspect kinds of sources. If an ancient author goes on and on about how great a particular ruler is and how justified all his actions were, then thatâs going to be taken with several pinches of salt. In fact, it may be evidence that the ruler in question had done some very controversial things. A hermeneutic of suspicion is just standard operating procedure. I agree that it can be taken too far and that itâs most
likely to be taken too far by secular scholars when dealing with Christian texts, but itâs a perfectly sound and necessary approach.
Ideally, you check such assertions by other sources. Itâs nice when you have textual evidence from an independent source, ideally with a different bias (for instance, we have the Assyrian side of Sennacheribâs invasion of Judah, and the Moabite side of the Israelite invasion of Moab recorded in 2 Kings 3). But that may just become âhe said/she said.â Material evidence is in one sense less misleadingâbut of course itâs often open to a lot of interpretation. (So, for instance, one can take the book of Joshua and see if the cities described as destroyed in it were destroyed during the relevant periodâbut you have to ascertain that the site is the right one, figure out the date of the conquest described in Joshua, and date the remains accurately. . . . ) Sometimes the most solid evidence is textual evidence from a text/document that is making some completely different point. Historians often prefer âdocumentsâ (i.e., written sources serving some immediate, practical purpose) to âtextsâ (artfully crafted literary works written for a general audience) on the ground that documents are less likely to mislead. (But postmodern types, at least when I was in grad school, were challenging that distinction, arguing that everything is a âtext.â)
The problem with the study of the âhistorical Jesusâ (and this also applies to Buddha and Muhammad), is that we
only have Christian sources (the few other references are late and of dubious value of independent sourcesâthe one exception, Josephus, has almost certainly been tampered with by Christian scribes). The four Gospels are obviously sacred narratives intended to promote faith in Jesus. That doesnât mean that they are inaccurate. It just means that by
normal historical methodology their affirmations have to be regarded with a certain hermeneutic of suspicion. (One can argue whether Christian scholars *ought *to treat these texts in the same way they treat other ancient textsâmy own answer would be both yes and noâbut Iâm responding to your claim that historians treat the Gospels with unreasonable and exceptional suspicion that contrasts sharply with the way primary sources are usually treated.)
If you are going to call the first Christians liars, you can also accuse many other people of being liars. Yet many people wonât do that unless they have other reasons to want to not accept history, like believing in conspiracy theories.
Itâs certainly true that people who are not historians tend to assume that stories are true unless thereâs good reason not to think they are, and they tend to assume that if stories are not true itâs because someone is deliberately lying.
But at the risk of sounding hopelessly snooty, both these assumptions are naive and unjustified. Indeed, the first is mistaken precisely because the second is. Deliberate lying, while all too common, makes up a relatively small part of human communication. Youâre right that only paranoid conspiracy theorists start out with the assumption that people are lying. Now certainly lying does occurâsometimes writers do just make stuff up with intent to deceive. A modern example familiar to many on this forum would be the âAlberto Riveraâ story promoted by Jack Chick. Mr. Rivera appears simply to be a bald-faced liar. However, even there it would be rash to assume that Mr. Chick is also a liar, rather than an extremely biased and uncritical person whose passionate anti-Catholicism makes him willing to accept as true any story that makes Catholicism look bad.
In other words, not only does deliberate lying make up a fairly small part of human communication, it makes up a fairly small part of
false human communication. Most people who say something that isnât true think it is true. They may be deceived in spite of taking great care to ascertain the truth; or they may be insufficiently careful to ascertain the truth because of a strong bias toward a certain conclusion; or they may exaggerate and distort the truth to some degree without really noticing or admitting what they are doing. (My mother, for instance, is an excellent storyteller and frequently embellishes her storiesâbut she is also an extremely honest person and does not do so deliberately. Itâs just that her imagination and her memory are not sealed off from each other.) These are very common human behaviors, and Iâm afraid that pretty much all of us on this forum (including me) fall into them from time to time. That doesnât mean that we are deliberately lying.
There have been a number of stories showing that human memory is pretty faultyâyou can have a bunch of people see an event and describe it in radically different ways. (This is actually a
support for the historicity of the resurrectionâit sounds very much like a real event reported by eyewitnesses, precisely because of the combination of many discrepancies and a fundamental agreement on the key points.)
I meant the Talmud. It would have been easier for the Jews to claim that Jesus did not exist or do any miracles than to accept it.
Easier for you or me, living in a post-Enlightenment society. I think the evidence indicates that for premodern people it was the other way round. It would seem a lot more likely that stories about a miracle-worker were true but had a malign basis than that they were simply false. For instance, early Christians didnât deny that pagan gods existed (though they sometimes argued that they were deified humans); they pretty uniformly claimed that they were demons. They didnât deny the existence of pagan miracles; they explained them as demonic.
I meant that it was nonsense at the time. God in human form would have been idiotic and a God who died such a horrible death would have been unthinkable. There is no way they would be willing to embrace martyrdom unless they had full faith. The only way to have that kind of faith given the circumstances would be to witness miracles.
Well, Iâve known enough charismatics to know that people can sincerely believe they have witnessed miracles on pretty slender grounds.
I donât entirely disagreeâI think that the best explanation for the resurrection stories is that the thing actually happened, and I think that the best explanation for the accounts of Jesus as a miracle worker is that he really was one. I just think youâre putting the case rather too strongly. When you say âthereâs no wayâ that people would have believed in the resurrection unless they had witnessed miraclesâI think thatâs way overstating the case and it actually weakens your argument.
Edwin
Wish I were. But too many things get in my way.
