I would prefer to interact about my book on my own website…
Mike, When I first went to your site I went right to the book link and missed the available comments section. I’ll be happy to respond there. You’ll have to give me some time to organize and consolidate my thoughts but I’ll see you there!
More books to read now?
Colin, books are food. Without sustenance the spirit dies as surely as does the body. I’m told we live in a post-literate age. What I see is like an episode of The Walking Dead. Waves of animated corpses, marching, hungry, phosphor dots where eyes once were.
Robert, this is my response to your post #344. What’s in quotes below are cut and pasted from what you wrote.
“Maybe I need to be more direct with you in the future?”
I would welcome that.
“You’re making assumptions about the original process and then further assuming that it continued reliably thereafter for centuries.”
No, I’m accepting the descriptions of the process left us by the various church officials and writers – such as Eusebius, Athanasius, and Augustine – who participated in that process. Where their descriptions lack details we would like to have, we have to make reasonable assumptions that supplement their accounts.
“And you’ve shown no evidence that this same process eventually vouched for the seven outliers.”
Sure I am. It’s the table of contents in your New Testament – the same table of contents (TOC) we’ve all had since the disputes were resolved. If the process yielded a NT TOC on which all churches could agree, then the process obviously worked. What disputes they had, and they were on the minority of NT texts, they worked out without benefit of an ecumenical council.
“I’ve proposed that the process may have included compromise and accommodation, which is explicitly found in the authors of the third through fifth centuries.”
Agreed.
“The evidence further shows that some of these disputes were never abandoned, continuing into the Reformation, when Luther relied on evidence from the early church writers, some of the same ones to whom you have appealed, to continue some of these early disputes. And, of course, he too showed openness to the same compromise and accommodation that he found in the ancient authors.”
Yes, but when it came to the 7, those disputing were in the minority; otherwise, none of 7 would have been included with the 20.
“…I’m happy to see that you now seem willing to discuss collections, an issue you’ve avoided throughout this entire thread.”
I’ve only avoided the discussion of collections when it seemed a red herring. In this case, it did not.
“And yet you refuse to even consider the most likely possibility, based on the evidence we actually have. Your arguing for mere possibilities fails to make an actual case for a possibility being most probable.”
I don’t see it that way. I always try to rank the possibilities according to probabilities. It’s hard to be exact about that, but I certainly would never want to rank the least likely possibility as the most likely. I could guess why you and I follow the same principle but reach different conclusions, but I’d rather not.
“The persons who were the very first to write, deliver, or receive a text (in that order) are in a much better position to know who wrote that text than any later people. We do not know how many people might have been involved in a delivery process, but the earliest one in the process would have an obvious advantage over any who were later in the process”.
Agreed.
“Eusebius was up to 300 years removed from the beginning of this process.”
Yes, but if the churches that received the texts were reading them generation after generation, then each generation could testify to the next what had been passed on to them. Eusebius is merely giving us the first churchwide report of those testimonies.
“But let’s not assume that every letter was actually sent.”
Why not? (If we’re speaking about the 27 NT texts and not the more than 100 that were rejected.)
“What of letters merely contained in collections that circulated, eg, the earliest collection we know of, that of Marcion?”
I don’t see how Marcion helps us understand the process described to us by Eusebius, Athanasius, Augustine, et al. Marcion is an interesting sidebar, but I don’t see how he’s dispositive of any issue important to this thread.
“What of other letters added to later collections. What insight do we have into that process?”
We’re not interested in what comes later. We’re only interested in texts handed down from the beginning…because only those can be apostolic.
“Eusebius’ process was to rely on the opinions of his contemporaries, the apparent consensus of churches with which he was familiar and which he considered orthodox, and to read authors who wrote before him that either explicitly discussed authorship (rarely) or perhaps only quoted from some New Testament texts. Now, we no longer have direct access to the work of many of these earlier authors, eg, people like Papias (c 100), Dionysius of Corinth (c 171), Caius of Rome (c 201-219), Dionysius of Alexandria (d c 247), Alexander of Jerusalem (d c 251), etc. Having access to these earlier writings does indeed give Eusebius an advantage over us. However, from what he shares with us of these writings, we know that these earlier writers disagreed about the authorship of several New Testament and extra-canonical apostolic works as would most others who came after Eusebius would continue to do. One might read all of what Eusebius tells us about the issue and, relying on his earliest sources conclude that the author of Revelation was Cerinthus, a first century contemporary of John the Apostle, and also associated with Proclus and Jewish Christian Phrygians. You’ve highlighted the importance of Rome’s early acceptance of Revelation, but Eusebius’ earliest Roman sources undercut that decisively. Eusebius himself would take a more conciliatory, moderating, compromise position, despite his earliest evidence. If we take the writings of Eusebius and other ancient authors seriously, we see the real process that would continue to shape the growing consensus of the New Testament contents. Ancient scholars such as Didymus the Blind certainly possessed many advantages over ancient and modern scholars, but the evidence we have from him certainly does not inspire confidence in your hypothetical assumptions, as already mentioned above. In addition, he or one of his colleagues often mistaken for him explicitly called 2 Peter a fraud (cf also the evidence from Origen & Jerome).”
I copied this large segment to show how much space you take up on this thread documenting what is not being questioned: that 7 disputed books made it into the NT. But that’s only part of the problem. The other part is that you consistently argue as if disputes about the 7 apply to all 27.
“You’ve mentioned a few times the linguistic advantages of some ancient authors being fluent in Greek, but you’ve never addressed the objection that the types of analyses done by modern critical scholars and still being developed with ever more complex computer modeling go way beyond a casual or devotional reading of texts (and which continue to disagree). But it is still an advantage I wish I had.”
My perception is that modern scholarship had gone most or all of the way from Eusebius’ 20 undisputed texts to only 7 undisputed (Paul’s) before the sort of sophisticated tools you mention here became a factor.
“A desire to tell the truth and not be misled does not preclude the possibility of being misled by a forgery, as has been demonstrated with innumerable examples throughout centuries of church history and even in modern, secular times.”
Agreed.
“Not to mention, part of the criteria employed in the admission of material into the New Testament was the judgment as to whether or not the content was considered true and orthodox in their contemporary times. This desire for orthodox truth is an apologetic and confessional disadvantage that continues into the time of Luther.”
The issue of orthodoxy was always an adjunct to authorship for the ancients. Some people, like Jerome as Porphyry pointed out, would lean into orthodoxy as a compelling factor, but even then 1) he did not abandon interest in authorship, and 2) to the best of my knowledge he never argued for including a book in the canon that had no support whatsoever for apostolic authorship (and even if he did, his argument didn’t prevail).
“Regardless of whether or not the Council of Trent counts as a true ecumenical council (an implicit argument from authority), it still demonstrates that Luther was still able to rely on the witness of ancient authors to contest the consensus and in the West a council was convened to deal with this continuing dispute. What had changed was that Luther’s perception of the orthodoxy and value of some of these writings had changed, but he still relied on the witness of ancient authors, which he respected.”
This is yet another example, Robert, of how you continue to spill ink about the 7 disputed texts as if those disputes mean that the entire 27 were disputed. Deal with the 20 that were acknowledged without dispute and then it becomes worth focusing on the 7 at the margins.
Yes, but if the churches that received the texts were reading them generation after generation, then each generation could testify to the next what had been passed on to them.
If you are resting on the tradition–the handing down from the beginning, generation to generation–as the safeguard of accuracy, then it seems to me the elephant in the room is that it took so long (measured in centuries) to reach any sort of consensus.
Tradition–as a means of transmitting knowledge–doesn’t get clearer or stronger as time passes. It is necessarily clearest and most decisive at the beginning. When we see clarity and certainty being reached over time, we aren’t witnessing tradition; some other factor is at play giving birth to that certainty and clarity.
Maybe that other factor is trustworthy or maybe it is a source of corruption, but either way it is something other than tradition, and its reliability needs to be probed independently of any tradition.
Porphyry, I already commented briefly on your post #346, but here are some additional responses to things you wrote in that post.
“First, in my own recently mentioned crisis of faith, the critical turn was when I questioned why I trusted the early Christians.”
I, too, wonder why you made them the focus of your trust. For I agree with you that if people who believed the apostles’ testimony that Jesus rose from the dead were willing to die for that belief, it might affirm the strength of their faith but not the fact of Jesus’ resurrection per se. That said, if the apostles who preached Jesus’ resurrection were willing to die for that testimony, that’s a different matter. If their testimony was false, they could not hope it was true because they would know for a fact that it was a lie – and it’s much harder to imagine someone dying for a lie than someone dying for a belief.
“And the fact that someone–a Jerome or an Augustine–is particularly smart doesn’t alter their susceptibility to bias. There is significant body of research showing that the smarter you are the more likely you are to demonstrate biased thinking. There are two sides of this: The first is that it is–in a certain respect–quite rational to believe what your group believes. (Consider a person living in a country where apostasy means death, while piety and vigorously defending the group’s beliefs gains you influence and trust; convincing yourself of what everyone else believes is a good strategy for your own thriving.) The second is that intelligence, as often as not, just gives us better sophistical tools to defend our beliefs, not necessarily to get to the truth. Smart people–master debaters–can defend anything. And they can defend it not only to others, they can genuinely convince themselves that it is true. This is motivated thinking. We want something to be true and so we, quite reasonably, go out looking for reasons to that show it is true. It practically by definition what apologists do.”
I not only agree with this, I think it helps explain why the views of modern critical scholars hold such sway in our time that many people (whether the scholars themselves or the people who follow them) dismiss without sufficient consideration the verdict of antiquity regarding authorship of the 27 NT texts.
One other thing: Please explain the basis for your conviction that “the gospel of Matthew certainly wasn’t written by an eyewitness.” Had you said “the person who wrote the gospel of Matthew wasn’t an eyewitness to every event and conversation reported in the text,” I would have agreed with you (only adding that I think Matthew is the author in question). But your statement seems to say that you are certain that the person who wrote this gospel wasn’t an eyewitness to anything he wrote in it.
I, too, wonder why you made them the focus of your trust.
In trying to bootstrap faith, one has to start somewhere. I wanted my faith in the Christian message to be a rational and reasonable choice. God never spoke directly to me; the only access I had to Jesus and his teaching was through human intermediaries. So if I wanted to reasonably believe that Jesus was who Christians say he is, I needed to find reasons to trust their testimony about him. It doesn’t seem to me that different from the apologetical argument you are making: We have to be able to force Lewis’s trilemma, and that means we need to rule out the fourth option, that the Jesus in the NT is as much legend as history.
That said, if the apostles who preached Jesus’ resurrection were willing to die for that testimony, that’s a different matter. If their testimony was false, they could not hope it was true because they would know for a fact that it was a lie – and it’s much harder to imagine someone dying for a lie than someone dying for a belief.
There are a few things to say to this: First, we don’t know much about most of the apostles. Some are literally nothing more than a name in a list in the gospels; and even at that, the gospels can’t agree on all their names. We do know some were killed. John’s mention of Jesus prophesying Peter’s death only makes sense if Peter had already died, presumably executed. Josephus records Jame’s death.
But even if we know they were killed, we don’t know why they were killed. For their death to make them martyrs in the literal, etymological sense, they had not only to be killed for being Christians but to be given the clear choice to renounce their belief in Christ or die. Being killed for being Christian by, for example, an angry mob that took them unawares doesn’t cut it. Neither does being killed for being Christian if the judge never offered an opportunity to recant. Joseph Smith was killed for Mormonism, but I don’t think that proves that he actually believed most of what he taught. Knowing that James was executed doesn’t prove that he died because he refused to stop claiming to have conversed at length with Jesus risen from from the dead.
We just don’t know nearly enough about how the few apostles died who were executed. What precisely was their crime? What opportunity did they have to escape death? If they were executed for their belief or their preaching, what precisely did they claim?
I not only agree with this, I think it helps explain why the views of modern critical scholars hold such sway in our time
That might well be part of it.
I think another big factor is that people tend either to “trust the science” blindly or they adopt a reactionary pose of distrusting anything the experts say. Few people have the time and resources to evaluate experts’ positions on their merits, because that practically requires becoming an expert oneself. Without being able to scrutinize the arguments and evidence, they take a shortcut by trying to decide whether the experts are good guys or bad guys. They are either heros we can trust implicitly, or they are villainous liars out to control us (or they have simply been brainwashed by a system of education that is out to destroy us).
When I was a believer, I looked at the field of Biblical Studies as hopelessly corrupted. Once higher criticism attained hegemony in the field, anyone who got through a PhD program successfully was just about guaranteed to be heterodox. Of course, now I look at it and think that there was a reason that all these committed believers who devoted their lives to studying the Scriptures ended up embracing higher criticism.
Please explain the basis for your conviction that “the gospel of Matthew certainly wasn’t written by an eyewitness.”
My conviction is mainly based on the Mt’s literary dependence on Mark. Matthew is heavily dependent on Mark, and yet he freely reworks Mark, and in freely reworking Mk he sometimes introduces incoherences in the story. I can’t find any way that sort of use (or rather, “abuse”) of source material fits with a person who had any personal knowledge of what he relates.
An example: Mark’s (Mk 6:14-29) and Matthew’s (Mt 14:1-12) narratives of the beheading of John (Goodacre drew my attention to this).
In Mark, with Jesus having just sent out the twelve by twos on mission, Mark shifts to Herod as an interlude. Herod hears that some are saying Jesus is John raised from the dead. At this point in the narrative, Mark goes into a retrospective, telling how, in the past, Herod had had John killed. Mark finishes the retrospective tale of John and Herod, and then comes back to the present with the return of the twelve (v30), and Jesus invites them to retreat to the wilderness because they were tired and the crowds wouldn’t leave them alone, thus setting the stage for the feeding of the five thousand.
Matthew takes this story and reworks it, but in so doing botches the job.
Matthew, like Mark, has Herod hearing about Jesus and thinking he was John raised from the dead. Like Mark, he then goes into a retrospective tale about how Herod had (in the past) had John executed. But in his reworking, Matthew forgets he is telling a story set in the past (relative to the main narrative). So when John is executed, his disciples go and tell Jesus, who retreats to grieve, and that retreat from the crowds immediately sets up the continuation of the narrative with the feeding of the five thousand.
So Matthew here slavishly follows Mark’s order of episodes (even though Mark is explicitly relating episodes out of chronological order). But in so doing, Matthew botches the chronology and the causality of Mark’s narrative and the result doesn’t make narrative sense.
That isn’t the sort of mistake that one of the twelve, who lived through these events, would have plausibly made. It is the kind of mistake a person who is freely rewriting someone else’s story might make.
I think another big factor is that people tend either to “trust the science” blindly or they adopt a reactionary pose of distrusting anything the experts say.
An important point. Both denialism and credulity can be distinguished from a proper skepticism, which proportions its claims to the evidence. It’s a testimony to the inadequacy of our educational system that many folks (most?) simply have no idea how to properly evaluate a claim. (or for that matter, how to properly reserve judgement.)
Robert, this post is my response to some of the statements you made in your post #365.
“No, you haven’t paid close enough attention to what these ancient writers have actually said. Quote exactly what they have said about the original process, and quote where they said that this same exact process continued through the fourth and fifth centuries.”
If you have quotes that describe how so many of the churches came to an agreement that the 7 disputed writings should be included with the 20 undisputed between Eusebius’s EH and Athanasius’s FL 39, I’d love to see them. The only one I recall seeing is the one Porphyry contributed (i.e. Jerome writing about why he could live with Hebrews in the canon even though he personally did not believe it was Paul’s), and it only confirms what could otherwise be assumed, which is that people holding the minority view on a disputed book found ways to accommodate themselves to the majority position.
“I don’t share your assumptions, neither did Origen, Tertullian, Eusebius, Didymus the Blind, Jerome, or more modern, critical scholars. You can make whatever assumptions you like, and you can call them reasonable for yourself, but if you want to convince others, you’re going to have to do better than that.”
I can only convince the open-minded; I’d be a fool to think otherwise. As for Origen, Tertullian, Eusebius, Didymus the Blind, and Jerome, they agree on more than they disagree on, and I accept what they agree on, remembering they occasionally retained doubts on this or that authorial ascription.
“That there developed a relatively stable New Testament does not establish the nature and validity of the whatever processes were involved in coming to this consensus. You want to assume that the process reliably identified the authors and was still doing so in the fifth century, yet our evidence shows that other processes were at work that certainly did not rely upon your assumptions.”
Again, if you want to share documentation of how the process changed from what Eusebius, Athanasius, and Augustine followed and described, I’m all ears. Keep in mind, however, that the latter two post-date the former.
“So the process was merely that the majority rules. That works reasonably well in democracies and republics and church practice, but scholars, both ancient and modern, look for more than that.”
It’s not just that it’s likely a simple matter of the majority ruling, it’s that the majority was so large that no votes of the churches needed to be taken. The prevailing view prevailed without having to count noses.
One of the problems you have in digesting the reality of the ancient process is that you describe it as if the scholars are atomized and removed from their ecclesiastical contexts as modern scholars are – where academy and church are separate spheres. When Bart or some other modern scholar takes a position, he’s doing so as an individual; they are not bishops who have to speak for their congregations as well as themselves. The reading of these apostolic texts in congregation settings was not just a peripheral aspect of their authentication. Widespread illiteracy did not keep ancient congregations from hearing and understanding texts, and thus they were part of the process that authenticated texts in a way that modern congregations, for all their literacy, are not needed.
“[Studying Marcion] is of absolutely critical importance when it comes to the process by which Pauline and then non-Pauline letters were accepted as authentic.”
If you expect me to accept your assertion that studying Marcion “is of absolutely critical importance when it comes to the process by which Pauline and then non-Pauline letters were accepted as authentic,” then you’re going to have to do more than repeatedly assert it. I need you to explain because I do not see its relevance to the ancient process I see no good reason not to trust it to have achieved its goal of retaining and distinguishing any and all apostolic texts.
“Of course [Jerome] did not abandon his interest in authorship, but did not always agree with your assumptions about authorship.”
Of the 26 texts besides Hebrews, which other ones did Jerome dispute authorship?
“No. I’ve already told you why I will not abandon discussion of the New Testament writings that Eusebius considered disputed. The resolution and non-resolution of those disputes is critical to understand the processes being employed.”
That’s your choice, but you’re straining out gnats and swallowing camels. Majoring on the minors. Getting lost in the weeds. Burying the lede. Pick your metaphor.
In this thread and in the broader discussion of apostolic authorship, the biggest elephant in the room by far is that the New Testament as we know it all over the world today was formed in late antiquity without benefit of an imperial decree, ecumenical council, or even a marketing campaign. One by one, Christian jurisdictions from one end of the Roman Empire to the other officially acknowledged as the New Testament the same 27 books named by Eusebius in his “Ecclesiastical History” 3.25.1-3 (c. 313-325) and by Athanasius in his “Festal Letter” 39.5 (367). As dull as it may sound, the Occam’s Razor answer to the question of how so many geographically-dispersed and organizationally-independent churches could agree on this while they were simultaneously disagreeing and voting about so many other things was that this was a matter of investigation and not interpretation. Specifically, it was investigation of the sources of the texts, not interpretation of the words in the texts that determined the outcome. For to assume agnosticism with respect to the source of a text when you have no good reason to doubt the source of the text is to invite erroneous conclusions. This has been proven repeatedly both in antiquity and modernity.
It’s legitimate to discuss what this or that juror said at this or that point in their deliberations, but such discussions should not be allowed – as they, sadly, have been – to blind us to the verdict. If there had been a hung jury, that would be one thing. But a verdict was reached – over and over again. To ignore this ancient verdict and its consequences while continuing to study the same subject is to consign oneself to minutia…at best.
Michael, do you mean to say that there is no plausible processes that would have allowed the churches to reach an erroneous and substantially incorrect but still unanimous verdict on the 27 books of the NT?
Can you not think of cases where self-selecting and mutually influencing groups have been led–by a sort of zeitgeist–to commonly embrace error?
Porphyry, this is my response to your post #366.
“If you are resting on the tradition–the handing down from the beginning, generation to generation–as the safeguard of accuracy, then it seems to me the elephant in the room is that it took so long (measured in centuries) to reach any sort of consensus.”
Why does it seem that way to you? I can only imagine it seeming that way to me if I ignored contextual factors, such as:
– In the 1st century when apostolic texts were deposited with congregations and began being read in gatherings, there was – at least insofar as the NT texts are concerned – no plan for there to be a NT and therefore no impetus to reach a consensus about its contents. There was just a single text that was to be read because the apostle couldn’t be physically present.
– These texts were not produced from a central publishing house. They were written and deposited far and wide. It would take time and a lot of hand copying to all meet together in all the churches.
– Interest in apostolic letters would grow over time, but it would take time for the living memory of an apostle’s’ teaching to become less important than a letter for teaching purposes among apostolic churches.
– The expectation of the coming day of the Lord (Parousia) would not put people in a frame of mind to make sure they’d gathered up all the apostolic texts, but its time frame passing without apparent fulfillment might.
– Not until the late 2nd and early 3rd centuries did “New Testament” appear as a category of writings (Irenaeus, Melito, and Tertullian) separate from but related to the Jewish Scriptures (what would come to be called, of course, the Old Testament). Even then, it was a conceptual category less than a literary one – because the emphasis remained what was read in the congregational gatherings, not what could be published (as if they had commercial book markets like ours).
– Inter-church communication would have been inhibited by the Jewish wars of the late 1st and early 2nd centuries. Periodic persecution in various locations would also inhibit such communications.
– Not until the 4th century was it even possible to construct a codex capable of holding both an OT and NT.
– With the possible exception of the Muratorian Canon, publication of canon lists was a phenomenon that did not begin in earnest until the 4th century.
– Obviously, the empire-wide toleration of Christianity early in the 4th century and adoption of it as the state religion late in the same century was a contextual change of enormous significance.
In short, when these and other contextual factors are considered, 300 years from initial texts to final collection doesn’t seem so long after all. There was no project plan and no project team with the authority to produce one. We, looking backward, view the beginning (what was happening in the 1st century) with the end (what was happening in the 4th-5th centuries) in mind. However, those who lived during those first 5 centuries only saw the end as it gradually came in view. The longer time went on, the more important apostolic texts became to them. They may not have used the term “primary historical sources” for Jesus’ life and for the history of their movement…but that’s exactly what they were…and are.
“Tradition–as a means of transmitting knowledge–doesn’t get clearer or stronger as time passes. It is necessarily clearest and most decisive at the beginning. When we see clarity and certainty being reached over time, we aren’t witnessing tradition; some other factor is at play giving birth to that certainty and clarity. Maybe that other factor is trustworthy or maybe it is a source of corruption, but either way it is something other than tradition, and its reliability needs to be probed independently of any tradition.”
The tradition that gets clearer and stronger over time is that which applies to the final collection – not the individual texts. For example, the traditional reading of Philippians in the church of Philippi from generation to generation would start clear and strong, remaining the same over time; the tradition that would grow in clarity and strength over time in Philippi was that which had to do with the other NT texts. (And it wouldn’t be until near the end of the process that those involved would know the actual number of texts involved; in other words, none of them started out knowing there would be 27, no more and no less. The churches learned about them one, or one collection, at a time.) The same would apply in all other churches in the same way, except that an increasing majority of the churches, of course, would not have had a text of their own.
Porphyry, you begin post #369 saying, “In trying to bootstrap faith, one has to start somewhere.” The problem for you in bootstrapping your faith has been that you could get no closer to Jesus than to the first generation of those who believed the spokesmen he appointed – that is, you could not get to the spokesmen themselves.
The reason you could not get to the spokesmen was that 1) you lost confidence in the tribe that had previously given you access to them, and 2) the tribe you joined had no access to them because their methodology led them to ignore too much history. This parallels Bart’s well-known spiritual journey from the halls of Moody Bible Institute to the halls of academia under the hegemony of modern critical scholarship.
I don’t regard modern critical scholarship as worthless. If by “Goodacre” you mean Mark Goodacre, I have benefited from some of his work. But his take on Matthew misses the mark. For one thing, I don’t share his view that the two causes for seclusion were mutually exclusive. I share the view that Mark was likely written first, and that Matthew probably used Mark’s gospel to produce a more Jewish gospel, just as Luke likely used Mark to produce a more Gentile gospel. (I hold this view lightly as it’s built on inference rather than evidence.) On that assumption, Matthew probably knows the timeline better than Mark, given the view that Mark’s gospel was his remembrances of Peter’s remembrances. Even if the two causes for seclusion were mutually exclusive, there’s the possibility that one or more of the three men’s remembrances were faulty. It is not required of historical sources, whether primary or not, to be without error of any kind in order to be informative.
Porphyry, this responds to your post #375.
“Michael, do you mean to say that there is no plausible processes that would have allowed the churches to reach an erroneous and substantially incorrect but still unanimous verdict on the 27 books of the NT?”
Not that I can think of when I read the history of how the verdict was reached.
“Can you not think of cases where self-selecting and mutually influencing groups have been led–by a sort of zeitgeist–to commonly embrace error?”
Not that apply here. It’s seems to me that you have 20 texts that were unquestioned. As for what distinguished the 7 others from the scores that were rejected, it would boil down to either a group with a tradition that supported a text finally being heard by the doubting group, or else a group coming forward with evidence of forgery.
Stephen, this responds to your post #376.
“But don’t you run the risk here of begging the question? Did they need to be open-minded to be convinced or did you define them as open-minded because you convinced them?”
My reasoning becomes circular only if I apply the principle to the back-end in addition to the front-end – which I do not. In other words, on the front end when I’m trying to convince, I assume that only the open-minded will really listen to me. But on the back-end I don’t assume that only the convinced were open-minded. For one thing, I may have been deficient in the way I explained my position.
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