Robert, in post 199 you said:
“You haven’t been paying attention. The first known collection of supposedly Pauline letters did not contain Hebrews, 1st and 2nd Timothy, or Titus, and it did have Laodiceans. This was early in the 2nd century, not late in the 4th century.”
What’s your point? I don’t see the relevance. I thought everyone agreed – ancient and modern – that spurious texts arose at various times and places throughout the 1st-4th centuries and beyond.
I thought Casting Lots would be a more peaceful solution than forcing all the modern scholarly and Bible publishing authorities, 144,000 people total, with swords to persuade the vote if necessary into the Vatican together to make a final decision everyone inside the Vatican agrees on. Nobody can leave the Vatican, have food or water, nothing, until after they make a final official decision on who exactly was the author of every single book. If that was actually the case, nobody of the 144,000 would care who the author was and it would be decided within an hour or never happen.
I have no need to make an argument from authority.
By I mean you are approaching the question in terms of qualifications (see the title), and you intend to answer the question by adopting the conclusion of the author(s) you determine to have the better qualifications.
Your argument boils down to this: ancient Christian authors are (for various reasons) more qualified to answer this question than modern authors. Therefore it is preposterous to adopt modern scholars’ conclusion and reject the conclusions of the better qualified ancient authors.
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.
Can you not see that you are assuming that the processes worked the way you want it to work, rather than acknowledging that there are other possibilities that you have not yet excluded? You assert as fact that errors were corrected by other congregations. How can you know that?
And we know it may not have worked so well because we can see that it failed in other cases, like the letter of Agbar. If Eusebius and many many others (who you are positioning as best qualified to answer such questions) could be misled by such a shoddy fraud and convinced that it was authentic, how do we know that Christians a couple of centuries earlier weren’t similarly deceived by the letters to Timothy or 2 Thessalonians?
You seem to think it would be impossible for a forgery to spread as authentic because the original audience would have been known and would have known whether the letter was authentic, but that is an assumption with serious problems.
First, that process can only work when there is a known original audience who continues through time as a sort of canonical authority for that work and can verify that, for example, “yes, Paul did send us that letter.” That case basically only applies to the letters of Paul (many of which are authentic). But for many books of the NT, there is no named community given as the original recipient. In the case of something like the Gospel of John there is no equivalent of just going to Corinth and asking, did Paul send you this letter? So in the case of many books of the NT, the process you propose just can’t work. There is no single canonical authority the rest could use for verification.
Second, even when there is a named audience, they themselves could be later deceived (someone “finds” a “lost letter” while cleaning out a local library; a traveler from another Christian community brings a copy of a letter addressed to them that the traveler insists was, decades earlier, copied from a now lost letter that had been held at the original city), they might even have lied. (Consider the way the Church in Edessa evidently fabricated the Agbar letter.) You are assuming that the original church communities were good at preserving records, were not easily deceived, and were not willing to lie (for example to improve their own stature among the Christian communities, or to advance their own theological agenda).
So if we are talking about qualification to authenticate the books of the NT, you need to evaluate those individual communities at the time that those works were first spreading through the broader Christian world and being received as authentic. But you know nothing about the individuals in those communities at those times, so you can’t possibly vouch for their trustworthiness. And neither, for that matter, did Eusebius, who wrote much later.
For your picture to work, you need to establish that the early Christians–those Christians especially at the time when the books of the NT were spreading and being first received–were neither gullible nor deceitful nor apt to succumb to motivated thinking. You can’t establish that because no one knows much about them.
And even then, you have only addressed the cases where there is an individual known community that could be the original audience and vouch for the works’s authenticity through time, at least until it had been sufficiently adopted that there was ample redundancy and that a single canonical source was no longer needed. But again, in many cases we don’t have any such community. What community could early Christians have turned to, when they first encountered the gospel of Matthew, to confirm that Matthew really did publish that book?
If you’ve handed down the recipe faithfully, that’s all you need.
But that is a huge “if” and everything hangs on it. How do you verify that protasis? Until you do, you are left only with speculation.
Robert, in post 206 you said:
“Mike, you’re contradicting yourself. You don’t want this thread to be about the historical Jesus but you insist on placing it in a subforum for threads about the historical Jesus. And you don’t see this blatant contradiction. Amazing.”
This thread (authorship of the NT texts) is a natural subset of a broader subject (the historical Jesus). To stay focused our subset at this time and not try to simultaneously tackle the broader subject seems only prudent. If we were to somehow achieve clarity and agreement on this thread, then proceeding to the broader subject at that time would be the next logical step because the two subjects are so vital to each other. So, no, I don’t think any reasonable person would see this as a contradiction, much less a blatant one.
“Instead you want your thread to be about people in the early church knowing who wrote the books of the New Testament. That is a question about the history of Christianity after the books of the New Testament were written, is it not? Why is this so hard for you to understand? If other members of the Readers Forum want to read or contribute to a thread about people in the early church knowing who wrote the books of the New Testament, they are going to look in a subforum about the history of Christianity after the books of the New Testament was written.”
I can’t speak for what other readers of this forum would look for, but I can give you three reasons why I would not look for authorship of the NT texts in the category you suggest: “Christianity After the New Testament: Issues concerning every other aspect of early Christianity from roughly 100-325 CE.” 1) “Christianity” is too broad a subject, especially when compared to the Historical Jesus, to be the appropriate category for authorship of the NT texts. 2) Authorship of the individual NT texts came before the NT, not after it. 3) the NT authors (at least if they are the ones named by the ancients who gave us the NT) lived, and probably died, before 100 AD. (The time period “50-400 CE” would be more appropriate.)
“This is what you said: ‘I will return to this site in 24 hours. If, at that time, this thread has not been restored to its original category, I will immediately cancel my subscription without making any further comment.’ How is that not threatening to quit?”
If you isolate this statement from its context, as you just did above, I can see how someone would consider it an ultimatum. But I gave the statement considerable context (post 167), taking pains to explain my reasoning, that I was not offended, that I was not wanting to offend anyone else, that I did not think that my continued participation in the forum would be a motivator for anyone, nor did I think it should be, that I was fine with staying or with moving on – I just wanted a signal about what the go forward environment would look like. I was actually surprised when I came back to the site and you had restored the thread to my chosen category. In contrast to this situation, I associate ultimatums with coercion, and I made it very clear that I was not wanting to coerce any person or any action.
“I can’t make sense of your blatant contradictions. Not just these two, but the others I have pointed out as well. Is English not your native language? How do you explain your contradictions? I’m sorry, but I can see why we’re not making progress in this conversation when one party is constantly contradicting himself and failing to acknowledge the obvious.”
If this remains your perception of me, then you’ll only be wasting your time and frustrating yourself to interact with me further.
Porphyry, this is my response to your post 210:
“By I mean you are approaching the question in terms of qualifications (see the title), and you intend to answer the question by adopting the conclusion of the author(s) you determine to have the better qualifications.”
True, as long as you remember that I am using the term “qualifications” broadly and not narrowly. The latter would refer only to credentials and skills, while the former includes access to sources and information – as in “My parents are better qualified to report on my childhood than my children are.”
“Your argument boils down to this: ancient Christian authors are (for various reasons) more qualified to answer this question than modern authors. Therefore it is preposterous to adopt modern scholars’ conclusion and reject the conclusions of the better qualified ancient authors.”
True, and all the more so because, as I’ve been given to understand it, modern scholars are not focused on determining authorship.
“‘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.’
Can you not see that you are assuming that the processes worked the way you want it to work, rather than acknowledging that there are other possibilities that you have not yet excluded? You assert as fact that errors were corrected by other congregations. How can you know that?”
Rather than assuming a process must have been in place, I’m accepting Eusebius’s account of how various texts put forward as apostolic had been sorted into categories of acknowledged, disputed, and rejected in his “Church History,” particularly in CH 3.25. This outcome was obviously the result of a process, and a particular example of it involving a bishop – Serapion of Antioch – and how he happened to first allow and then disallow the reading of the so-called “Gospel of Peter’ in his churches, sending a letter to other bishops warning them about it, is given in CH 6.12.
“And we know it may not have worked so well because we can see that it failed in other cases, like the letter of Agbar. If Eusebius and many many others (who you are positioning as best qualified to answer such questions) could be misled by such a shoddy fraud and convinced that it was authentic, how do we know that Christians a couple of centuries earlier weren’t similarly deceived by the letters to Timothy or 2 Thessalonians?”
The letter of Agbar (supposedly sent by Jesus) is not an example of how the process failed; rather, it’s an example of how the process worked. Eusebius gives an account of this correspondence in CH 1.13 but doesn’t mention it again – and its absence from the list of acknowledged texts in CH 3.25 speaks volumes. We might wish that he had included an explanation of why he seemed to speak positively of the letter in CH 1.13 but exclude it from CH 3:25, but we can only work with the evidence we have – not what we wish we had. And it’s clear that Eusebius talks about texts that are true, genuine, and recognized, neither he nor any other source he mentions are pushing for the Agbar letter to be included. Thus did the vetting process work.
“You seem to think it would be impossible for a forgery to spread as authentic because the original audience would have been known and would have known whether the letter was authentic, but that is an assumption with serious problems.”
Forgeries are relatively easy to start – as evidenced by the fact that they outnumbered the authentically apostolic texts by roughly five to one. What made it easy for them to start was the geographically-dispersed, organizationally independent state of churches from the 1st through 4th centuries. But these same characteristics made it hard – ultimately impossible – for forgeries to finish. The vetting process that the ancients have described to us was slow but sure.
“First, that process can only work when there is a known original audience who continues through time as a sort of canonical authority for that work and can verify that, for example, ‘yes, Paul did send us that letter.’ That case basically only applies to the letters of Paul (many of which are authentic). But for many books of the NT, there is no named community given as the original recipient. In the case of something like the Gospel of John there is no equivalent of just going to Corinth and asking, did Paul send you this letter? So in the case of many books of the NT, the process you propose just can’t work. There is no single canonical authority the rest could use for verification.”
Just because we do not know when and where the Gospel of John was written, nor to whom it was first handed over, doesn’t mean that no one back then knew it. On the contrary, the person who wrote it definitely knew who he was. He also knew the party or parties to whom he handed it over. Over time, that knowledge could be lost to history…and truly has been, except for the knowledge of the author’s identity (which is, of course, the point of this thread). But if authentication of the author and original congregation was known for long enough as the text was copied and carried to other congregations to be established in multiple locations, then it’s easy to see how the authenticity could be maintained even as evidence supporting it faded away. This is the same phenomenon you described earlier in the thread when you rightly pointed out that disputes about authorship of NT texts increased once canonization took place. This is epitomized most dramatically when the lists of Athanasius and Bart are compared.
“Second, even when there is a named audience, they themselves could be later deceived (someone “finds” a “lost letter” while cleaning out a local library; a traveler from another Christian community brings a copy of a letter addressed to them that the traveler insists was, decades earlier, copied from a now lost letter that had been held at the original city), they might even have lied. (Consider the way the Church in Edessa evidently fabricated the Agbar letter.) You are assuming that the original church communities were good at preserving records, were not easily deceived, and were not willing to lie (for example to improve their own stature among the Christian communities, or to advance their own theological agenda).”
All these possibilities that you mention would have been weeded out by the vetting process I have been describing. For example, no “lost letter” could be presented because one of the qualifications that Eusebius said was applied was the need for a text to be well established – that is, read in the churches as authentic from the beginning. As for a congregation’s willingness to forge an apostolic document to improve their status with other congregations, that sounds pretty far-fetched. There would be far easier ways than that for a congregation to improve status. How could a city’s entire congregation be convinced to engage in such a charade and how would they keep potential whistleblowers silent? You need to think this through a bit more.
“So if we are talking about qualification to authenticate the books of the NT, you need to evaluate those individual communities at the time that those works were first spreading through the broader Christian world and being received as authentic. But you know nothing about the individuals in those communities at those times, so you can’t possibly vouch for their trustworthiness. And neither, for that matter, did Eusebius, who wrote much later.”
Right. Contemporaries judged contemporaries. And those judgments were passed down from generation to generation. Over time, the details would be lost but the judgments would remain, just as once a jury renders a verdict, the details of how that verdict was achieved and how each juror arrived at it gradually fade into the ether.
“For your picture to work, you need to establish that the early Christians–those Christians especially at the time when the books of the NT were spreading and being first received–were neither gullible nor deceitful nor apt to succumb to motivated thinking. You can’t establish that because no one knows much about them.”
When it comes to writing and receiving a document, I can’t figure out what makes ancient human beings that different from modern ones. As I think I’ve said, to think otherwise amounts to chronological snobbery.
“And even then, you have only addressed the cases where there is an individual known community that could be the original audience and vouch for the works’s authenticity through time, at least until it had been sufficiently adopted that there was ample redundancy and that a single canonical source was no longer needed. But again, in many cases we don’t have any such community. What community could early Christians have turned to, when they first encountered the gospel of Matthew, to confirm that Matthew really did publish that book?”
I addressed all this above.
“‘If you’ve handed down the recipe faithfully, that’s all you need.’ But that is a huge “if” and everything hangs on it. How do you verify that protasis? Until you do, you are left only with speculation.
I’m not the one speculating. I’m following the history recorded by Eusebius, Athanasius, Augustine, and others. Modern scholars, however, ignore that history and instead speculate that the four gospels circulated anonymously for a time, and later they were each assigned an author’s name that the geographically-dispersed and organizationally-independent churches all agreed to. That is a doubly far-fetched speculation.
Rather than assuming a process must have been in place, I’m accepting Eusebius’s account of how various texts put forward as apostolic had been sorted into categories of acknowledged, disputed, and rejected in his “Church History,” particularly in CH 3.25. This outcome was obviously the result of a process, and a particular example of it involving a bishop – Serapion of Antioch – and how he happened to first allow and then disallow the reading of the so-called “Gospel of Peter’ in his churches, sending a letter to other bishops warning them about it, is given in CH 6.12.
And what does EH 6,12 say about the processes? It says Serapion looked at the doctrine of the work and the doctrine of the people who read it, and having judged the doctrine heretical, he determined the book was falsely attributed to Peter and concluded that the book had been falsely handed down. He was open to the possibility that it was authentic and that it had been hand down accurately, until he studied the doctrine in it and the doctrine of the people who used it and decided it was tinged with heresy.
In other words, as I said earlier (and as you disputed) perceived orthodoxy was used as a criterion of authenticity. If a work is heterodox, it cannot be an authentic writing of an apostle.
The letter of Agbar (supposedly sent by Jesus) is not an example of how the process failed; rather, it’s an example of how the process worked. Eusebius gives an account of this correspondence in CH 1.13 but doesn’t mention it again – and its absence from the list of acknowledged texts in CH 3.25 speaks volumes.
But you have assured me many times that the issue is not canonicity but authorship. Eusebius and others accepted the authenticity of the letter. That he does not reckon it canonical (indeed, doesn’t mention it at all in his discussion of purported NT Scripture) is irrelevant. My point stands: The Christian scholars of the fourth century could be and were in at least some instances deceived by forgeries. Therefore we should not blindly follow their conclusions about authorship simply because they are “better qualified”. They have demonstrated that they could fail.
Forgeries are relatively easy to start – as evidenced by the fact that they outnumbered the authentically apostolic texts by roughly five to one. What made it easy for them to start was the geographically-dispersed, organizationally independent state of churches from the 1st through 4th centuries. But these same characteristics made it hard – ultimately impossible – for forgeries to finish.
That is pure wishful thinking.
The fact is that forgeries did spread. You haven’t shown the thing in question: that they all actually got weeded out by the vetting process. Instead you simply assume your conclusion: that the final canon doesn’t contain any forgeries or falsely attributed anonymous works.
if authentication of the author and original congregation was known for long enough as the text was copied and carried to other congregations to be established in multiple locations, then it’s easy to see how the authenticity could be maintained even as evidence supporting it faded away.
Again, that is a big if, and you haven’t shown that the condition actually obtains.
On the contrary, you just acknowledged that forgeries could take hold on a local level. Well, once a forgery is accepted in one place as authentic, how do we know that that one local church didn’t then “authenticate” the forgery to other churches? I really don’t understand how you can’t see the problem. Once a false attribution has been, for whatever reason, accepted in one ancient church, it can spread through the same mechanism of handing on as authentic that you use to explain how genuine attributions spread. Once you get a few generations removed from the origin, once those details have been lost to history, the case of a traditional false attribution and a traditional accurate attribution are indistinguishable.
All these possibilities that you mention would have been weeded out by the vetting process I have been describing.
You haven’t shown that. You have not shown how a false attribution once accepted in on region would be weeded out rather than spread on the authority of those who have accepted it.
How could a city’s entire congregation be convinced to engage in such a charade and how would they keep potential whistleblowers silent? You need to think this through a bit more.
Was the entire city of Edessa complicit in the Agbar hoax? You need to look at documented and establish human conduct a bit more.
those judgments were passed down from generation to generation.
You haven’t actually shown how far back those judgements go; attributions can be handed down generation to generation, but does that chain extend continuously to a reliable origin?.
Over time, the details would be lost but the judgments would remain, just as once a jury renders a verdict, the details of how that verdict was achieved and how each juror arrived at it gradually fade into the ether.
Sure, and carrying your analogy a step further: sometimes juries get it wrong and we can show that many years later.
When it comes to writing and receiving a document, I can’t figure out what makes ancient human beings that different from modern ones. As I think I’ve said, to think otherwise amounts to chronological snobbery.
It isn’t chronological snobbery. I am very acutely aware that modern people are inclined to all sorts of biases that lead them to believe things that they should not. In fact, I’m pretty sure I tried to draw attention to this upthread. There is a danger of assuming all the early Christians were perfectly logical, to think that they are the sort of objective and fully rational agents we like (inaccurately) to think of ourselves as. But that is naive. People can and do accept things that are false, and even the most sophisticated and intelligent among us can be blind to and led stray by our own biases.
That said, there is a massive difference with the publication and reception of books, and it is the fact that today when a book is published it is published by a single publisher and thousands of absolutely identical copies can be disseminated at once from a central authority (the publisher). That is in several important respects very different from what obtained until the printing press: where copies took time to make, were never identical to one another, often were made from other copies without any direct connection to the origin or autograph, and there was no central authority ensuring the integrity. That isn’t chronological snobbery, but it is a realization the process of publication has materially changed in the last 500 years.
A short answer is that early Christians didn’t have the training and tools of modern critical scholars. And although early Christians had temporal proximity to sources they didn’t have direct knowledge of sources, nor did they have the critical savvy and resources of modern scholars to enable them to make the most of their temporal proximity to sources.
Porphyry, this is my response to your post 215:
“And what does EH 6,12 say about the processes? It says Serapion looked at the doctrine of the work and the doctrine of the people who read it, and having judged the doctrine heretical, he determined the book was falsely attributed to Peter and concluded that the book had been falsely handed down. He was open to the possibility that it was authentic and that it had been hand down accurately, until he studied the doctrine in it and the doctrine of the people who used it and decided it was tinged with heresy. In other words, as I said earlier (and as you disputed) perceived orthodoxy was used as a criterion of authenticity. If a work is heterodox, it cannot be an authentic writing of an apostle.”
What I disputed was the notion that orthodoxy alone could make a text apostolic. If you do not hold that position, then my dispute was not with you. To state the matter more fully: heterodoxy alone could disqualify a text as apostolic, but orthodoxy alone could not qualify it as such. Even Jerome whom you quoted only asserted that he thought orthodoxy granted Hebrews canonical status without apostolicity – not that it granted Hebrews apostolicity. On the contrary, he said he thought it was written by “a churchman.”
“‘The letter of Agbar (supposedly sent by Jesus) is not an example of how the process failed; rather, it’s an example of how the process worked. Eusebius gives an account of this correspondence in CH 1.13 but doesn’t mention it again – and its absence from the list of acknowledged texts in CH 3.25 speaks volumes.’ But you have assured me many times that the issue is not canonicity but authorship. Eusebius and others accepted the authenticity of the letter. That he does not reckon it canonical (indeed, doesn’t mention it at all in his discussion of purported NT Scripture) is irrelevant.”
You remembered that my issue is not canonicity but authorship, but you did not remember that it is “authorship of the NT texts” – not of every text emanating from early Christianity. I have no interest in the Abgar texts because their authorship was not subject to the vetting process I learned about from Eusebius, Athanasius, and Augustine. That vetting process guarantees us knowledge of the respective authors of the 27 NT texts. Nothing else does.
“My point stands: The Christian scholars of the fourth century could be and were in at least some instances deceived by forgeries. Therefore we should not blindly follow their conclusions about authorship simply because they are “better qualified”. They have demonstrated that they could fail.”
But as I keep telling you, I am not trusting the individual judgments of Eusebius, Athanasius, and Augustine about the authorship of this or that text. Nor are they offering them in the writings I have read – the Abgar anecdote being an odd and obscure exception. Rather I’m trusting in their honesty to tell the truth about what churches since the 1st century had been saying about the authorship of the 27 texts that came to be collectively called the New Testament. They were witnesses to those texts, and they were testifying to what they had seen, heard, and read.
“‘Forgeries are relatively easy to start – as evidenced by the fact that they outnumbered the authentically apostolic texts by roughly five to one. What made it easy for them to start was the geographically-dispersed, organizationally independent state of churches from the 1st through 4th centuries. But these same characteristics made it hard – ultimately impossible – for forgeries to finish. That is pure wishful thinking.”
See “CONTRA AUGUSTINUM” at the bottom of this post.
“The fact is that forgeries did spread. You haven’t shown the thing in question: that they all actually got weeded out by the vetting process. Instead you simply assume your conclusion: that the final canon doesn’t contain any forgeries or falsely attributed anonymous works.”
In CH 3.25, Eusebius presents the piles into which over a hundred texts have been separated: accepted, disputed, and rejected. You keep expressing shock that I think they got it right, but I’m shocked that you don’t think they could even possibly have gotten it right. What I think is preposterous, you think is preposterous if reversed. You apparently think forgeries of necessity had to have slipped in – that they couldn’t possibly have successfully identified all the authors of the 27 texts. Do you also think that some authentic apostolic texts ended up in their rejected pile? Do you think they were as far off as Bart thinks – that is, only getting seven correct? Does HE think there might be genuine apostolic texts in the rejected pile? Just how futile do modern scholars think the vetting process of the ancients actually was?
“‘if authentication of the author and original congregation was known for long enough as the text was copied and carried to other congregations to be established in multiple locations, then it’s easy to see how the authenticity could be maintained even as evidence supporting it faded away.’ Again, that is a big if, and you haven’t shown that the condition actually obtains. On the contrary, you just acknowledged that forgeries could take hold on a local level. Well, once a forgery is accepted in one place as authentic, how do we know that that one local church didn’t then “authenticate” the forgery to other churches? I really don’t understand how you can’t see the problem. Once a false attribution has been, for whatever reason, accepted in one ancient church, it can spread through the same mechanism of handing on as authentic that you use to explain how genuine attributions spread. Once you get a few generations removed from the origin, once those details have been lost to history, the case of a traditional false attribution and a traditional accurate attribution are indistinguishable.”
See “CONTRA AUGUSTINUM” at the bottom of this post.
“‘All these possibilities that you mention would have been weeded out by the vetting process I have been describing.’
You haven’t shown that. You have not shown how a false attribution once accepted in on region would be weeded out rather than spread on the authority of those who have accepted it.”
See “CONTRA AUGUSTINUM” at the bottom of this post.
“‘How could a city’s entire congregation be convinced to engage in such a charade and how would they keep potential whistleblowers silent? You need to think this through a bit more.’ Was the entire city of Edessa complicit in the Agbar hoax? You need to look at documented and establish human conduct a bit more.”
The ancients’ vetting process excluded this text, and yet you keep offering it as evidence that the ancients’ vetting process is suspect.
“‘those judgments were passed down from generation to generation.’ You haven’t actually shown how far back those judgements go; attributions can be handed down generation to generation, but does that chain extend continuously to a reliable origin?”
Eusebius, Athanasius, Augustine and others said they did.
“‘Over time, the details would be lost but the judgments would remain, just as once a jury renders a verdict, the details of how that verdict was achieved and how each juror arrived at it gradually fade into the ether. Sure, and carrying your analogy a step further: sometimes juries get it wrong and we can show that many years later.”
1) Those are exceptions, not the rule, and 2) when a verdict is overturned, it is usually because of evidence (e.g. DNA) that the original jury did not have. Modern scholars have no knowledge of Greek vocabulary and syntax about which the ancients were ignorant. 3) The position of modern scholarship – certainly the one you are presenting here – is that the methodology used by the ancients was itself flawed, tainting all the verdicts, not just a verdict here or there.
“‘When it comes to writing and receiving a document, I can’t figure out what makes ancient human beings that different from modern ones. As I think I’ve said, to think otherwise amounts to chronological snobbery.’ It isn’t chronological snobbery. I am very acutely aware that modern people are inclined to all sorts of biases that lead them to believe things that they should not. In fact, I’m pretty sure I tried to draw attention to this upthread. There is a danger of assuming all the early Christians were perfectly logical, to think that they are the sort of objective and fully rational agents we like (inaccurately) to think of ourselves as. But that is naive. People can and do accept things that are false, and even the most sophisticated and intelligent among us can be blind to and led stray by our own biases.”
I’m glad to hear you state that as a principle, but I don’t see you applying it. You keep trying to shift the burden of proof to me – to demonstrate with evidence that the vetting process of the ancients could possibly have worked. From the things you write, I don’t get the sense that you have thought through how hard it would have been to get a forgery all the way through the process. For example, a little thought would reveal that geographically peripheral and chronologically younger churches – not the original ones established by the apostles in the 1st century, would have been the more fertile ground from which forgeries could arise. Correspondingly, they would have the least credibility with the older churches, making it extra hard to prevail in a hoax. This is but one example of how I wish you would give more thought to your thesis that the methodology of the ancients was doomed to fail.
“That said, there is a massive difference with the publication and reception of books, and it is the fact that today when a book is published it is published by a single publisher and thousands of absolutely identical copies can be disseminated at once from a central authority (the publisher). That is in several important respects very different from what obtained until the printing press: where copies took time to make, were never identical to one another, often were made from other copies without any direct connection to the origin or autograph, and there was no central authority ensuring the integrity. That isn’t chronological snobbery, but it is a realization the process of publication has materially changed in the last 500 years.”
I agree with you fully that a pre-printing press world is different from a printing press world in ways that bear on our discussion. But you’d have to show how that helps your case, because it’s not apparent to me.
*** “CONTRA AUGUSTINUM” ***
A central theme to your objections is that my thinking about the efficacy of the ancient process I have been describing is wishful. But your argument really isn’t with me – it is with the congregations and with the men who used it and relied on it. Most specifically, it is with Eusebius, Athanasius, and Augustine – especially Augustine in Contra Faustum 33.6. He makes the point that the methodology we’re discussing – and that you’re deriding – is the way authorship of ALL books are determined, not just religious ones, not just biblical ones. Is Augustine a man devoid of intellect? Is he as naive as me? Have you posed the objections you’ve made to me to him? Of course, he won’t be there to answer you, but can you not show some respect for the man’s judgment – especially since it represents the judgment of so many other of the ancients who have handed down the NT to us? Why were they confident that this methodology would serve them while you are confident that it would fail them? I can’t tell that you have really wrestled with this. I have, so I know what it’s like.
Bart has famously made the point – whether it was in “Forged” or “Forgeries” or both, I don’t recall – that the ancients didn’t want to get caught accepting a forgery any more than we do. Why then would Augustine and all the men of old have chosen to rely on a process that in your mind – ON ITS FACE – guaranteed they’d be embarrassed in the eyes of posterity?
What I disputed was the notion that orthodoxy alone could make a text apostolic.
I certainly don’t think orthodoxy alone was taken as proof a text was apostolic. That is obviously not true. Still, I think that a text that purported to be apostolic may have been too easily accepted as such provided it was orthodox and old.
You remembered that my issue is not canonicity but authorship, but you did not remember that it is “authorship of the NT texts” – not of every text emanating from early Christianity. I have no interest in the Abgar texts because their authorship was not subject to the vetting process I learned about from Eusebius, Athanasius, and Augustine.
How was the vetting process that determined authorship and that was applied to the books of the NT different in kind from the processes they used to determine the authorship of other early Christian writings? It is reasonable to think that they put more attention into the books they thought apostolic and eventually canonical than into other works they considered less important. But as far as I can tell, the same basic tools they had was the same.
In fact, that was precisely Augustine’s point in the passage from CF that you say sums up your position.
If you take a process that is by nature prone to error, and you do more of it, it doesn’t just stop being prone to error. It is still an imperfect process open to error. How much, if at all, doing more of it will reduce errors depends on the kinds of errors we are talking about.
I’m trusting in their honesty to tell the truth about what churches since the 1st century had been saying about the authorship of the 27 texts that came to be collectively called the New Testament.
So you are saying that the fourth century authors we are discussing had access to records from the apostolic churches, dating back to the second century, showing which books they ascribed to which authors? And that they had such records from the 2nd century for all 27 books of the NT?
Can you quote for me those authors bearing that testimony? Where do they go through the 27 books of NT and document for us what the churches of the second century believed about their authorship?
How were these fourth century authors in a position to give reliable testimony of what the apostolic churches were saying in the second century?
I would take the traditional attributions a lot more seriously if we actually had documentation that at the turn of the second century the geographically dispersed oldest churches agreed on the authorship of the 27 books of the NT (or any of the books with disputed authorship for that matter).
Not to say that even that would be definitive. How do we know that some misattribution didn’t creep in before that second century witness began? After all, even if we knew that at the beginning of the second century (never mind if we push to the end) the apostolic churches received 2 Thess. as authentically Pauline, even if we knew they already thought Matthew was the author of the first gospel, that leaves a substantial gap from the time Paul would have written the letter and there would have been a similarly long gap from the traditional date of Matthew’s literary activity.
I’m shocked that you don’t think they could even possibly have gotten it right. . . . You apparently think forgeries of necessity had to have slipped in – that they couldn’t possibly have successfully identified all the authors of the 27 texts
I don’t think forgeries of necessity slipped in. Rather I don’t think you have a sound basis for concluding that they did not. That has been my position all along: you do not have a sound basis for implicitly trusting the fourth century orthodox authors in their judgements of the authors of the NT books.
Now, I will add that I do think they did, as a matter of fact, misattribute most of the books of the NT. But the reason for that judgement isn’t some general conviction that traditional knowledge must always be wrong and that such a process must of necessity fail in spectacular fashion.
your argument really isn’t with me – it is with . . . especially Augustine in Contra Faustum 33.6. He makes the point that the methodology we’re discussing – and that you’re deriding – is the way authorship of ALL books are determined, not just religious ones, not just biblical ones.
Indeed, and I pointed out a critical problem with his argument in post 76:
As to Augustine’s argument as a whole it proves too much. It amounts to saying that no pseudepigraphal works will spread for very long without being uncovered as a forgeries. Of course we know that isn’t true. Forgeries have spread widely and over a long time, and they have sometimes gained wide reception. The argument is simply a bad argument.
As to Augustine’s more particular observation that we know the authenticity of a work because the author himself published it widely in his own life, that point is sound in itself, yet applied to the NT, it is question-begging. We have no record of the NT books during the lives of the purported authors–nor does Augustine even claim to provide any such evidence. We have no external attestation of the books of the NT until–at the earliest–decades after they are purported to have been written. And we have no clear attestation of their authorship until later still. So we cannot say, for example, this book was widely known as the Gospel of Mark during Mark’s own life, when he and his intimates were alive to contest the attribution. Again, the argument is unsound, more rhetoric than logic.
As I pointed out above, forgeries have spread successfully, misattrinutions have been widely adopted and perdured for long periods, both in the historical period we are discussing and others. If you think, as Augustine, that we know the authors of the NT by the same method we know the authors of other works, then you have to admit that there is a very realistic possibility that some of the traditional ascriptions are wrong.
Is Augustine a man devoid of intellect?
No, Augustine was a genius, and I have tremendous respect for him.
In fact, on second thought, I want to modify my earlier assessment: I don’t think the argument that Augustine makes is so bad as I suggested in calling it simply a bad argument. I think it is bad if used to achieve the conclusion you are aiming for.
I think the part of the passage you are focused on is only one plank in a larger argument (made in a particular polemical exchange) and it isn’t meant to carry so much weight as you need it to carry.
Augustine is arguing with Christians who reject the authenticity of the NT when it doesn’t support their position–sort of like the orthodox used heterodoxy of a writing as proof it was not authentic (as you agreed and as we saw in Serapion’s rejection of the Gospel of Peter).
Augustine is not trying to argue that misattribution cannot take hold. He is not making the ludicrous claim that forgeries cannot sometimes pass undetected. On that point, his only claim is that we are accustomed to accept received attributions as accurate.
His general argument is that it is unreasonable to be a Christian and reject the writings of the NT, “The doctrine of demons which you preach is so opposed to Christian doctrine, that you could not continue, as professing Christians, to maintain it, unless you denied the truth of the apostolic writings. . . . Where will you find any authority, if not in the Gospel and apostolic writings? . . . if at the same time we acknowledge as the undoubted production of the apostles what is brought forward by heretics in opposition to the Church, whose authors, from whom they derive their name, lived long after the apostles?”
He does make the rhetorical point that we are (reasonably) accustomed to trusting the common attribution given to works (he does not say that these are infallible). And he then argues–for theological reasons–that if we generally accept the traditional attribution of authorship, so much more should be accept the attributions the Church gives to the NT.
“no one . . . can be so blinded by passion as to deny the ability of the Church of the apostles— a community of brethren as numerous as they were faithful — to transmit their writings unaltered to posterity . . . especially when we are accustomed to see this happen in the case of ordinary writings both in the Church and out of it.”
The point is that his argument is inherently theological and polemical. He (like his opponent) assumes Christianity (of some form) is true. He takes at face value the claims that the Catholic Church is the Church of the apostles. And he criticizes Faustus for rejecting the Scriptures of the Catholics whenever those Scriptures disagree with him, while adopting instead writings that Augustine insists are clearly new and non-apostolic. As if to say, “You are being arbitrary, and arbitrary in a way that undermines the very foundation of Christianity.”
Given Augustine’s theological commitments, considering the rhetorical context, it is not a bad argument. But it is deeply theological and not principally historical. (Of course, all orthodox Christianity is, in its theology, also committed to historical claims.) If you are a Christian, you need to accept the authenticity of the NT, not dismiss them out of hand in favor of some random recent writings.
Porphyry, this is my response to your post 219:
“I certainly don’t think orthodoxy alone was taken as proof a text was apostolic. That is obviously not true.”
Glad to hear we’re on the same page regarding this point.
“Still, I think that a text that purported to be apostolic may have been too easily accepted as such provided it was orthodox and old.”
I see frequent signs (though I usually don’t comment on them, but will in this case) that you expect a level of venality and subjectivity in ancient scholars that you don’t seem to expect in modern ones.
“How was the vetting process that determined authorship and that was applied to the books of the NT different in kind from the processes they used to determine the authorship of other early Christian writings? It is reasonable to think that they put more attention into the books they thought apostolic and eventually canonical than into other works they considered less important. But as far as I can tell, the same basic tools they had was the same.”
For one thing, Eusebius reports that texts to be considered as apostolic must have been read in the churches from the beginning, which would, of course, in no way be expected of all Christian texts. This could be called “more attention” but it could also be called an additional vetting factor.
…
“So you are saying that the fourth century authors we are discussing had access to records from the apostolic churches, dating back to the second century, showing which books they ascribed to which authors?”
No, I’m saying the apostolic churches of the 4th century had institutional knowledge (in whatever forms that took) all the way back to the 1st century when the apostles first handed over their writings.
“And that they had such records from the 2nd century for all 27 books of the NT?”
I said that Eusebius said 20 of the books were accepted by all, and 7 of them (Jas, 2 Pet, 2 and 3 John, Jude, Heb, and Rev) were accepted by many. Recall that “accepted” = apostolic and orthodox, in addition to being read in the churches all that time.
“Can you quote for me those authors bearing that testimony? Where do they go through the 27 books of NT and document for us what the churches of the second century believed about their authorship? How were these fourth century authors in a position to give reliable testimony of what the apostolic churches were saying in the second century? I would take the traditional attributions a lot more seriously if we actually had documentation that at the turn of the second century the geographically dispersed oldest churches agreed on the authorship of the 27 books of the NT (or any of the books with disputed authorship for that matter). Not to say that even that would be definitive. How do we know that some misattribution didn’t creep in before that second century witness began? After all, even if we knew that at the beginning of the second century (never mind if we push to the end) the apostolic churches received 2 Thess. as authentically Pauline, even if we knew they already thought Matthew was the author of the first gospel, that leaves a substantial gap from the time Paul would have written the letter and there would have been a similarly long gap from the traditional date of Matthew’s literary activity.”
I don’t share your view that the 2nd century was critical, but the point is moot because the 4th-century claim of apostolicity had to go all the way back to the 1st century or else the claim falls flat. It is not a stretch to believe that the 4th-century Thessalonian church had enough institutional memory to know whether their 1st-century ancestors received two letters from Paul or only one.
“I don’t think forgeries of necessity slipped in. Rather I don’t think you have a sound basis for concluding that they did not. That has been my position all along: you do not have a sound basis for implicitly trusting the fourth century orthodox authors in their judgements of the authors of the NT books.”
I keep telling you again and again, yet I see no sign that you absorb the point: the key 4th-century witnesses I have been citing (Eusebius, Athanasius, and Augustine) were not reporting their individual findings, as Bart reports his individual findings (along with references to the findings of others), but rather these 4th-century witnesses were reporting the consensus view of all the churches, most notably, the apostolic ones since the 1st century.
…
As for your nuanced view of Augustine’s CF 33.6, I appreciate knowing some of its contours, but I don’t think the issue is whether he’s making a good or bad argument. Rather, it’s whether he’s describing a good or bad method for determining authorship of a text. I myself can’t help seeing the common sense – and common practice – of it, even to this day. Even the printing press didn’t change it.
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