Suppose they tricked Jesus.
Apostles: hey Jesus, guess what. The Sanhedrin told us they decided to finally anoint you King of Israel.
Jesus: finally, now we can get things done. Oh boy oh boy, here we go. I’m going to the Temple right now to find them.
Sanhedrin: are you the king of Israel
Jesus: you have said so
Sanhedrin: blasphemy!
Jesus: huh what!?
The NT is legal defense to cover that part up.
Robert, this is my response to your post 287:
“So, Mike, can you provide your evidence that the authors of the other seven writings were subsequently and correctly identified? What was the process used and by whom?”
I think it makes more sense to focus on where Porphyry and I agreed than on the minority of books where we all probably still disagree. Since my focus from the beginning has been history and not canon, we ought not to feel bound to find ancient agreement on authorship of every single one of the canonical books if we have agreement on 75% of them. Specifically, if by “most of the books of the NT” Porphyry means “the 20 that Eusebius identified as ‘acknowledged as genuine’ (i.e. undisputed) in CH 3.25.1-3” then I think that provides a sound basis for us to finish out answering the question that launched the thread.
When I launched the thread, I, of course, expected that there would be disagreement in answering the question, but I thought it could be fruitful for us to interact and work through it. What I did not expect was that there would be disagreement that the ancients ever took a definitive position on NT authorship. That disagreement made the question senseless. Now that we have found agreement about the ancient view at least with respect to a majority of the NT texts, the question becomes answerable – one way or the other. We’re altering the original question by substituting “the Eusebius 20” for “the NT texts.”
So, to sum up, we’d be reducing the scope of the question such that it becomes: “Who Is Better Qualified to Determine Authorship of the “Eusebius 20” – Modern Scholars or Ancient Ones?”
(For any readers without access to Ecclesiastical History by Eusebius, the Eusebius 20 = The four Gospels plus Acts plus Paul’s letters minus Hebrews plus 1 Peter plus 1 John.)
Are we all in agreement that this is a legitimate and useful way to go forward?
Robert, this is my answer to your post 291:
“I think you’re just avoiding the part of your original question where your assumptions are most obviously not working, and where your thought process is most exposed as a series of unwarranted assumptions.”
(What an off-putting sentence! It’s unworthy of a response.)
“Not the most important of questions, but: Why wouldn’t the same traditional process that guarantees that the gospel of John and 1 John were written by the apostle John, also be able to attest to the authenticity of the 2nd and 3rd letters of John and the Apocalypse of John? Shouldn’t those who vouched for 1 Peter also be able to vouch for 2 Peter?”
You at least posted my question; I’ll grant you that. But nothing in your response answers it – unless I should simply take your answer to be “no.”
The two questions you ask me are clearly off the topic I suggested we go forward with…but I’ll answer them anyway.
The answer to your two questions is the same: It was indeed the same process that identified the apostles as authors of “the Eusebius 20” texts that also identified them as authors of the 7 “the disputed books, although they are known and approved by many.” The process just took longer for the 7 than it did for the 20. (For anyone new to the thread, I am referring to Ecclesiastical History 3.25.1-3.
Have you taken the ancients so unseriously that you have not even thought through the process they followed and told us about? The apostles did not claim to have been sent on a publishing mission, but rather a preaching mission. Their writings were occasional, and generated by a variety of perceived needs. Thus, the 27 NT texts were written at various times and in various places. And there were various ways that the texts were handed over to their initial recipients. Why should we assume that the initial recipients of Peter’s second letter were the same initial recipients of his first letter? And why should we expect smaller texts to circulate as quickly and as far and wide as larger letters and collections? (Speaking of collections, do not the extant manuscript copies we have testify that the texts often traveled in collections?) Hebrews was initially received in the East, and that’s where support for Paul’s authorship was centered. Conversely, the Apocalypse was initially received in the West, and thus support for John’s authorship was strongest there. Furthermore, until the 4th century, Christianity’s lack of legal standing in the Roman Empire and its subjection to periodic persecution inhibited communication between churches. Otherwise, consensus about the 27 books might have been achieved much sooner. There are all sorts of possibilities for why 7 texts were not received as unanimously as 20. What’s really amazing is that 20 – 75% of them – were received without dispute!
Robert, I don’t fault you entirely for not taking ancient churches and scholars more seriously when it comes to the history of these matters because you’re only thinking about them the way you were taught by modern scholars to think about them.
I believe the point of Robert’s question was this:
If traditional knowledge yields certainty of authorship, then, given the fact that traditional knowledge is strongest nearest its source, why would certainty about authorship grow with time?
It isn’t that the church’s didn’t know the controversial works yet; they did and they disputed their authenticity.
But if the picture you are painting of how the early churches authenticated works–because as the text was passed around it was passed on with an extra-textual testimony of its authenticity (and author)–then all the churches that knew the disputed works should have already known that those works were authentic.
We already discussed this up thread. You tried to say that it took time to reach consensus because spreading texts was slow. But as I pointed out then, by Eusebius’s time, the texts had already be spread. The disputed texts were not texts as yet unknown to some churches. They were known and rejected. That seems to call into question your model of how the early churches had certainty of authorship.
Perhaps I should ask a question:
Mike, is your position that we should trust the early Christians on this topic because they were faithfuls stewards of an unbroken tradition, handing on nothing that they did not receive, or is it your position that they should be trusted because they were scholars (close to the events in question) who did their own research and came to their own conclusions about the authors of the texts?
Porphyry, this is my response to your post 295:
“I believe the point of Robert’s question was this: If traditional knowledge yields certainty of authorship, then, given the fact that traditional knowledge is strongest nearest its source, why would certainty about authorship grow with time?”
Sorry, but I don’t understand this question. For one thing, I don’t know who is claiming that certainty about authorship has grown more with time. For another, I could assume what you mean by “traditional knowledge,” but I’d rather be sure by having you tell me. There’s more, but I just wanted to tell you enough not to leave you completely in the dark about why I am in the dark.
“It isn’t that the church’s didn’t know the controversial works yet; they did and they disputed their authenticity.”
We need to understand “disputed” in the context in which Eusebius used it. He defined 20 books as accepted – meaning without any dispute.
At the other end of the spectrum, there are the unnumbered books (probably over a hundred) that were rejected – also meaning without dispute.
In between were books that were “disputed” and which could be divided into those disputed “although they are known and approved by many” on the one hand, and, on the other hand, those that are disputed but supported by only “some.” We can summarize these two subcategories as “disputed but approved by many)” and “disputed and approved by few.” To me, it sounds like the former category enjoyed majority support (as opposed to the unanimous supported enjoyed by the 20) and the latter category had only minority support. The 7 (Hebrews, Revelation, 2 Pet, 2 and 3 John, and James) fell into the former subcategory. That is, they had majority support. I assume that’s why they made it into the canon while those disputed books with minority support did not.
When you apply the word “dispute” to the 7 out of context, people can infer the connotation of “rejected” but that’s not the case at all. It’s rather they enjoyed majority, not unanimous support. Therefore, the only question for the churches as to where to draw the line – that is, whether to require unanimous support for inclusion in the canon or rather allow majority support to be sufficient. Although it is not well-documented, I think the only logical conclusion was to allow majority support to prevail. Since it’s harder to make a case for authorship than it is to make a case against it – and this was true in ancient times as well as modern ones – it makes sense to accept a claim of authenticity when it is made from conviction even though a minority of people have some doubts. Otherwise, you risk excluding authentic apostolic texts. And, besides, this only applied to 7 of the 27 texts.
“But if the picture you are painting of how the early churches authenticated works–because as the text was passed around it was passed on with an extra-textual testimony of its authenticity (and author)–then all the churches that knew the disputed works should have already known that those works were authentic.”
I don’t know why this should be so. Lack of legal standing in the empire and occasional periods of intense persecution inhibited communications between the organizationally-independent and geographically-dispersed churches until events of the 4th century (Constantine’s conversion, legalization of Christianity, and finally adoption of Christianity as the state religion) opened wide inter-church communication in ways that had been impossible in the past. Therefore, inter-church communication in the 4th century was far more public and robust than what it had been before those momentous times.
“We already discussed this up thread. You tried to say that it took time to reach consensus because spreading texts was slow. But as I pointed out then, by Eusebius’s time, the texts had already be spread. The disputed texts were not texts as yet unknown to some churches. They were known and rejected. That seems to call into question your model of how the early churches had certainty of authorship.”
It doesn’t. For example, a church may have never heard of 2 Peter, or if they had, they may have rejected it without much exploration beyond their own locale. But once churches started meeting together – as, for example, in Nicaea in 325 – some of them might hear the positive case for 2 Peter for the first time from a church descended from one of the initial receiving churches. Since the churches were for the first 300 years interested in apostolic texts for the purpose of reading them during gatherings along with the Jewish prophets – not for the purpose of publishing a Bible with two testaments or even the purpose of filling out a list – a finalized canon was not critical. What they wanted was to read all the genuine apostolic texts available to them. Given that their distaste for forgeries was – according to Bart and others – as strong as ours, I could easily understand how the lack of information could lead to initial rejection but later change if convincing testimony came forward from trustworthy parties who were in a position to know the true provenance of a given text. And the possibility of publishing a book, put an onus on the congregations to publish a canon – an expectation they had not previously had to meet. After all, visitors to a congregation wouldn’t show up asking for the list of apostolic books from which the congregation read. Most visitors, just as most congregants, weren’t literate.
This is my response to Porphyry’s 296 post and Robert’s 297 post:
“Mike, is your position that we should trust the early Christians on this topic because they were faithfuls stewards of an unbroken tradition, handing on nothing that they did not receive, or is it your position that they should be trusted because they were scholars (close to the events in question) who did their own research and came to their own conclusions about the authors of the texts?”
This is a false dichotomy because each of the choices is too simplistic to define the relevant realities. My position is that we should trust what the early Christians say about the authorship of apostolic texts because 1) of all people, they were the people in the best position to know, and 2) they had motive to tell the truth because they would hate being caught pushing a forgery as much as we would, and 3) even they had a motive to lie, it would have been impossible to manage an empire-wide conspiracy involving hundreds of congregations that would have been required to pull off the lie, and 4) at none of the ecumenical councils was NT canon ever any issue (Trent doesn’t count because after 1054 a true ecumenical council was impossible), so obviously the consensus was achieved as a matter of investigation rather than interpretation (which surely would have led to controversy and the need for an ecumenical council), and 5) they eventually achieved a consensus which is evidenced by the uniformity of NT tables of contents for roughly a millennium and a half (I’m not saying that this time period proves authorship; only that it proves ancient consensus on authorship). How else could a consensus have been achieved unless they had access to evidence and testimony which is no longer available to us?
One aspect of this process worth noting was that it involved congregations (which, of course, includes laymen), bishops, and scholars (many of whom were bishops, too) like Eusebius, Athanasius, Augustine, and before them Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Origen, and others. I ascribe no particular valor on the one hand or degeneracy on the other to all of these people. Rather, I think they were people with motivations like ours – good and bad. The fact I’m emphasizing is that it was not isolated individuals or even an isolated group who was making these decisions on apostolic authenticity. It all happened in the open, over a long period of time, and it was only near the end that they realized they were producing a book – they had just been looking for things to read in church in the absence of the apostles themselves. And it wasn’t until the 4th century that a codex big enough to hold that book could even be made.
As for “self-correcting,” I think that term will work for this loosely-affiliated network of congregations we call the churches of the 1st-5th centuries. But it works not because anyone organized this multi-century social movement to be self-correcting. Rather, because it was mechanically impossible to pull off an empire-wide hoax regarding an individual text’s authorship and because it was socially undesirable for any congregation to be found supporting a forgery, all forgeries were eventually exposed. And there was a big pile of them once the NT table of contents stabilized into the 27 we’ve known ever since.
Much, if not most, of the evidence that proved apostolic authorship to 4th-5th century assemblies is lost to history. Most of what we know now is from the testimony of the first 500 years of Christianity and not from the evidence they had. We can reject their testimony and be ignorant or agnostic about the facts to which they testified, or we can examine their testimony asking if they – that is, hundreds of congregations, bishops, scholars from one end of the Roman Empire to the other – were collectively willing or able to lie or be deceived about the evidence they had.
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