My point is that it’s not a case of the ancients and the moderns doing something either better or worse. They’re not doing the same thing at all.
Our evidence of dissenting opinions from early days is scant to non-existent. After the church attained social and political power there were significant consequences to dissent.
As soon it became possible for scholars to openly express opinions contrary to orthodox belief without censure they immediately began to point out obvious textual and historical issues. I suspect these issues were apparent much much earlier but unexpressed for obvious reasons.
What is being suggested? That the early church fathers had themselves doctored up the texts and are the authors of much of it? Someone expects to find a confession of this in a letter somewhere?
2 Kings 22:8, the NT texts were discovered in a similar way after 70AD after the Flight to Pella and Return to Jerusalem.
On that point though–as I brought up far up thread–we know that the early Christian scribes did interpolate passages in the NT–in some cases substantial passages–and that some of those interpolations did successfully spread and displace the original text.
That fact seems, delicately put, difficult to reconcile to the picture of the early churches as scrupulously handing down only what they received, only accepting as authentic what they could verify, and mutually correcting each other if any one happened to introduce or try to spread a corruption in the Scriptures.
@Robert
Wholesale authoring, invention of the texts by early church fathers is not possible in my mind. There must’ve been texts and oral traditions that existed first. I’m still 2000 light years away.
I’ve seen that 2 Peter is questioned as being authored by Peter. So why not disagree and say that 2 Peter is the actually the first and only text written by Peter, and 2 Peter 3:1 is an interpolation and 1 Peter is a forgery written in favor of the Roman Empire afterwards 2 Peter 2:15 then means that Paul was the first to send out letters. Peter must’ve read a copy or heard about it and wrote 2 Peter to clarify. Peter versus Paul conspiracy. Peter is after all the first pope. He must be first in everything. The first of the apostles called Mark 1:16 Mark 3:16 and the first to recognize Jesus as the Christ Mark 8:29 but it was a demon itself that first Mark 1:24.
Why would God allow all the first century texts to no longer exist now? Jesus and Satan got into big trouble from the Father about something important afterwards. Nobody has seen them since.
I’m just saying that known church fathers such as Irenaeus, Tertullian, Eusebius, etc, are not likely to have been authors of a large part of the New Testament.
Entirely agreed.
And that passage from Tertullian, from his Prescription against Heretics (32), has been floating around in my mind for this whole conversation. Did the apostolic churches maintain the records that Tertullian says they did? Had he seen them? Was he bluffing or perhaps just assuming that they were there and showed what he expected them to? Were they actually ancient records–like modern baptismal records in a parish, with notations made at the time–, or were they reconstructions of the early history based on memory? Do we have any other reference to such records?
Robert, this is a response to your post 170. You said:
“Unless my Catholic grade school education has once again failed me (not overall, just once again in a particular), this is indeed an ultimatum. Perhaps you have a different definition of ultimatum? No matter, I have no pretense of authority. I don’t particularly like ultimata, but I will consider it a sincere attempt at a polite request and gladly move your thread back to where you first started it. Wrongly, in my opinion, but it’s a small matter, not a major heresy. Nothing against heresies, mind you, major or minor…Both subforums are intended for historical discussions, as is the whole Readers Forum and blog, for that matter. The distinction you’re making doesn’t apply.”
I thought my post might look like an ultimatum, which is why I took pains to explain why and how it wasn’t. Since I didn’t convince you, I could explain further but since you were willing to restore the thread to its original home even though you thought I was wrong, why should I waste more time trying to convince you I was right? I’ll just say thank you for overriding your qualms.
“Apologies, I only noticed that this thread was placed in the wrong subforum yesterday, when I simply assumed that you had placed it there by accident, in ignorance of the nature of each of these subforums.”
Accepted. We’re back to where we were and that’s all I needed.
“As far as I know, the only content that has ever been removed from this Readers Forum were a few instances of a racial slur and an unsubstantiated accusation of lying. In both cases the whole of the two posts and even the original intent and nature of the offensive bits removed were still readily apparent. But you really do have other options; you could try to better understand the nature of the historical discussions that are being fostered here.”
You guys and your site are not as easy to understand as you seem to think, but I’ll keep trying.
“If you intended the point of this thread to be about the historical Jesus, you could have simply said so. Instead, I interpreted the point of this thread to have been simply about ‘who is better qualified to determine authorship of the NT texts – modern scholars or ancient ones, modern people or ancient ones who first received the texts, read them publicly, copied them, and spread them’. I didn’t realize you were primarily interested in the unmentioned ancient person of Jesus, more so than these other ancient and modern people you explicitly mentioned in your title and first post.”
Your original interpretation was correct. I do not wish this discussion to be about the historical Jesus. I wish it to continue to be what I stated and what you quoted from my statements.
“Manipulation? Or merely an innocent misunderstanding of your unexpressed intent and a belated attempt at good housekeeping?”
Manipulation was something I have experienced at other sites. I was not accusing you or anyone else here of manipulating me. My point was that I didn’t want to continue on here knowing that was a possible outcome. One beneficial outcome of this bump in the road is that, having resolved it, I feel more comfortable going forward that I’m not going to regret having spent time interacting here.
Stephen, regarding your post 175, you said:
“Mike, I would regard your absence as a loss. That said, don’t you think you’re overreacting just a smidgeon?
Believe it or not, no.
“You’re entitled to your reaction of course. But does it really matter where this thread is filed?”
It does, but since the dispute has been resolved, I won’t bore you and the others further by pressing my case. Let’s get back to exchanging views more central to the thread. Thanks for the conciliatory post.
Porphyry, regarding your post 179:
I have no need to make an argument from authority. I do indeed believe that Eusebius had a better grasp of 1st-century Greek than Bart, but in the three key texts I cited – Eusebius in CH, Athanasius in FL 39.5, and Augustine CF 33.6 – none of the three scholars is making the kind of vocabulary-syntax and other arguments that Bart makes in “Forged.” These three are not even speaking for themselves as Bart speaks for himself in “Forged” (though he does, I think, say that his views reflect the general views of modern scholars. Our three 4th-century scholars are speaking on behalf of the apostolic, catholic, orthodox churches – or their particular subset of it – about the 27 writings that have been deemed authentic and selected from the more than 100 other texts under some form of consideration over the previous 300 years. It was, as far as I know, the most public vetting of an author-publisher relationship of any book or anthology ever published. We walk through libraries filled with tens of thousands of books and the primary way we know the authors’ identities for the majority of those books is because the publisher names the author on the cover…and we take the publishers’ word for it. We weren’t there when the author handed it over to the publisher, and we weren’t there when the publisher handed it down to the printer. And we weren’t there when the books were loaded on the truck. And so on. Eusebius, Athanasius, Augustine, and others before them like Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Origen were part of a process: texts being handed down like a family recipe. Modern scholars can only view that process from a distance.
Was the process flawless? Of course not. But it didn’t need to be because it was a self-correcting system. As we’ve discussed, this was not a single recipe being handed down within one family. It was being handed down by congregations – many of them, simultaneously. If one congregation got it wrong, there were ten or a hundred others to help them get it right. If you don’t accept anything else, at least notice that by the time of Eusebius, 20 of the texts were acknowledged by all as genuine (“not disputed”) – across the Roman Empire!
No matter how long we search the records of ancient scholars looking for the sort of analytical notes that modern scholars give us, we won’t find them in a quantity that would satisfy us. Such analytical notes are all modern scholars have. The trail is cold for tracing apostolic texts from their origin. For this reason, modern scholars are restricted to studying texts for internal clues of authorship. Ancient authors just handed them over to congregations who handed them down from one generation to the next. If you’ve handed down the recipe faithfully, that’s all you need. Uncle Herman ain’t comin’ back to tell us he was the one who wrote it down.
Thus the ancient scholars are not “better qualified to determine authorship of the New Testament texts” on the basis of superior intellect, greater proficiency with the ancient language and culture, or more productive analytical methods – though they have nothing to be ashamed of in any of those areas – but rather on the basis of being present and part of an extensive hands-on vetting process that can never be replicated.
Stephen, with regard to your post 181, you said:
“My point is that it’s not a case of the ancients and the moderns doing something either better or worse. They’re not doing the same thing at all.”
Now that I’ve been participating in this thread for a few weeks, I feel somewhat confident in saying that this is a statement around which all of us in this discussion could all rally…at least to some degree. I, for one, would leave off the last two words because, for one thing, both ancient and modern scholars analyzed vocabulary and syntax in the texts looking for clues of authorship. But they obviously were doing some very different things as well, which is illustrated in my most recent response to Porphyry (post 192).
Robert, regarding what you wrote in post 182:
I acknowledge all the challenges to the canon and authorship that have been made since the 4th century, including the examples you mention. As for authorship, such challenges began as early as the late 4th century with Jerome adroitly pulling Hebrews out of its traditional place in the Pauline order and placing it last among Paul’s letters in the Vulgate so that it conveniently sat in a place that could seem appropriate both to those who thought it was Paul’s and to those who thought it instead belonged with the general epistles. Those challenges have continued to be made right up to the present day. As skepticism about Paul’s authorship of Hebrews has increased over the centuries, modern Bible publishers, being adroit themselves, have trended toward single-word titles for Bible books so that they simply show “Hebrews” instead of the fuller titles normally seen in the King James version (“The Epistle of Paul, the Apostle, to the Hebrews”). Single word titles also work well to downplay dissension about the disputed Paulines – not to mention the Gospels and so on. And so, going back to a point made by Porphyry early in this thread, consensus on authorship began to fray once the canon was finalized.
As for the canon since the 4th century, however, it has held entirely firm. Sure, there are modern scholars, including Luther whom you cited, who would have a smaller or larger canons for the New Testament, but the bulk of Bible publishers have stuck with the 27 books listed by Athanasius in FL 39.5 for Easter 367 simply because they know the public won’t buy them. As I said earlier in this thread, if some publisher did break ranks it would simply create a New Coke, Classic Coke situation. But canon doesn’t matter to most scholars today and it doesn’t matter to me – except that canon formation was a sign of the consensus that had been achieved across Christendom about authorship in the 4th century by churches who never needed to address it in an ecumenical council when they were having to address all sorts of other things. And the only reason that canon could form without hierarchical oversight was that those who revered the texts had been focused on authorship for 300 years – many of years without a thought that there would ever be something called the New Testament – and had, over that time, ironed out what differences they had.
Can you put the most probable choices together a Cast Lots as the decision ?
Casting lots. I’m exactly sure how it works but you put some rocks in a bag made of ram skin and somebody reaches inside the bag and grabs only one stone and that’s the final decision. You have to butcher a ram and make the bag yourself or else it won’t work right. And the rocks have to be soaked in the ram blood before it’s burned on an alter while you’re casting lots. If the casting of lots is not necessary an angel will appear to stop everyone.
Porphyry, in post 185 you said:
“That fact seems, delicately put, difficult to reconcile to the picture of the early churches as scrupulously handing down only what they received, only accepting as authentic what they could verify, and mutually correcting each other if any one happened to introduce or try to spread a corruption in the Scriptures.”
1. I haven’t claimed that the churches were as zealous about every jot and tittle as they were the author and source of the manuscript.
2. The corruption of Scripture has proven more than manageable. We can probably get closer to the exact wording of every NT text than we can that of any other ancient text.
Robert, in post 187 you said:
“Clement of Rome is an interesting test case for Mike’s presumption of how well the various churches maintained the earliest records of apostolic succession. Tertullian said Clement was ordained by Peter himself as his immediate successor. Jerome said that most of the Romans of his time thought Clement was the second after Peter, but he also mentions the opinion of Irenaeus (also followed by Eusebius) that Peter was followed first by Linus, then by Anacletus, and only then by Clement.”
My view includes no presumption about how well the the various churches maintained the earliest records of apostolic succession, although I accept Eusebius’s claim that the line of bishops in the apostolic churches was generally well known. My view is about something more fundamental and more related to the text. To be specific, that Thessalonica, Corinth, Ephesus, etc. were apostolic churches and they were the best sources of information about authors of the texts respectively addressed to them.
Porphyry, in post 191 you said:
“I’m very confused. If you don’t intend for this thread to be about the historical Jesus, why threaten to quit unless it remains filed wrongly under the subform devoted to discussing the historical Jesus?”
1. C’mon, Porph! I didn’t “threaten to quit.” Please don’t make me take the time to explain in even more detail why and how it wasn’t a threat or ultimatum.
2. I put it in that category because I reviewed all the categories listed and – at least in my mind – none of the other nine categories came anywhere near as close to being appropriate. I’ve reviewed that list again several times and my conviction only grows stronger each time.
3. It’s been hard enough to keep this thread focused on history; it would only be harder in some other context.
4. I don’t want to rile Robert up. He thinks I’ve got it in the wrong category, but he resolved the matter without the two of us having to go 15 rounds about it. Let’s let a sleeping dog lie and focus our time on the question of the thread.
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert
2 Guest(s)