Robert, you said:
“You start with the assumption that there is a chain of custody going back to the original authors of everything in the New Testament, and which reliably identified the original authors, but we do not know that.”
It’s not an assumption. It’s what ancients like Eusebius, Athanasius, and others have testified. I don’t presume to have evidence that contradicts them.
“At some point someone collected some letters of Paul and they began to be copied. Were all of the letters authentic? Were they edited or conflated? The letters of Peter, John, James, Jude? Which John was the author of Revelation? Who wrote the first version or copy of what became known as the gospel according to Mark, or Matthew, or Luke, or John, or Peter, or Judas, or Nicodemus, or Joseph of Arimathea, or Mary, or Thomas, or the various versions of the Infancy gospel of Thomas, or the Proto-Gospel of James, the Birth of Mary, the Revelation of James, the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, the Latin Infancy Gospels, the History of Joseph the Carpenter, the Gospel of the Nazareans, the Gospel of the Ebionites, the Gospel according to the Hebrews, the Gospel according to the Egyptians, the Egerton Gospel, the Report of Pontius Pilate, the Handing Over of Pilate, the Vengeance of the Savior, the Death of Pilate. Who wrote the Letters of Pilate to Claudius, the letters of Pilate and Herod to each other, the Letter of Tiberius to Pilate? Did Agbar and Jesus really write letters to each other?”
You write all this out as if questions about authenticity of authorship either never occurred to the ancients or else the ancients were too stupid or lazy to ascertain the correct answers to such questions. (I know you are not literally thinking that the ancients were stupid or lazy; it’s just the only conclusion to which your attitude points.)
“These are all scholarly questions. You can’t just assume there was always a chain of custody going back to the original authors, and which reliably identified the original authors. And there’s no need to assume that scholarly questions are polemical. Apologists and others may polemicize, but scholars should not, and typically do not.”
You and I are both writing polemically. Am I the only one admitting it?
I think it’s impossible to prove who wrote what.
I went to a very small school and our teachers would learn the differences in everybody’s handwriting by the end of the year. However I don’t know that the Apostles made dozens or more copies of their own letters with their own hand so that the church could learn the handwriting style and compare it to anything new.
I suppose the early church fathers just chose the texts that had the most coherent theology throughout as a whole collection of texts. If a new letter of Paul shows up and he says oh wait hold on now, all we can eat now is locusts and honey forever and only wear the priestly garments and you must be circumcised not only once but twice, and also see what tiny scribbled letters I write with my own hand;
I suppose that would contradict what Paul had written earlier and be very suspicious.
Robert, you said:
“Aren’t you assuming that Eusebius and Athanasius were even in a position to offer reliable testimony on this matter?”
I don’t take either man to be speaking his own opinion on the subject so much as reporting the opinions of certain constituencies – the churches in and around Alexandria in the case of Athanasius and the churches throughout the Roman Empire in the case of Eusebius.
“No, it is not. You must be making inferences that I am not implying. And I know very well that some ancients were indeed very keen on an awareness of forgeries. I don’t know, however, that Eusebius and Athanasius had a sufficiently critical eye, or the requisite background information, for evaluating these issues when reading the Christian scriptures. I wouldn’t make that assumption.”
Again, I simply take each man to be reporting historical realities. In his 367 Easter letter, Athanasius reports what the churches of Alexandria regards to be the NT texts and their respective authors. In his book “Ecclesiastical History” (312-324), Eusebius reports the history of what we today would call canon formation. Of course, consensus had only been achieved on about 20 of the books at the time; in the ensuing decades consensus was achieved on the remaining 7.
“I guess so. I don’t admit it. Why specifically do you think that I’m writing polemically?”
Some people use the word “polemical” as a pejorative. I’m using it simply to describe someone advancing a certain point of view on a controversial subject. As for the pejorative sense, I don’t think anyone on this thread has spoken contentiously or argumentatively. Maybe we should retire this term for the rest of the discussion.
Colin, you said:
“I think it’s impossible to prove who wrote what.”
I can agree with you on this statement with two qualifications:
1) I think it applies to modern people, but not ancient ones.
2) I would change “impossible” to “very difficult” because I think modern scholars can and have proven authorship in the case of what are called “the undisputed Paulines.”
Another relevant point is that the ancients involved did not have to be scholars. For example, if Matthew hands over his gospel explaining that it is his to a church or the elders of a church, none of them has to be a scholar – or even read the text – to know that Matthew was the author. Further to the point, I don’t think it’s reasonable to assume that any of the autographs began life anonymously. A late 1st-century elder to his wife: “Hey, Myrtle, I found a gospel on our doorstep this morning and just finished reading it; it doesn’t say who wrote it, but it sounds very orthodox to me so let’s take it to church tonight so the whole congregation can hear it read.”
I’m short on time, so just a few particularly salient notes:
First, concerning independence. The churches exerted influence on each other in reaching the canon. Augustine–a major figure in settling the canon–explicitly says that though he had doubts about authenticity still submitted to the judgement of the more esteemed churches. Substantially the same thing can be said of Jerome: he had serious doubts about authorship but submitted to authority. By the time a consensus is reached among the orthodox, the people working to universalize the canon are no longer basing their canon on an impartial examination of the factual claims, they are submitting to what they regarded as religious authorities. Even as they defended the canon on the basis of authority, they personally maintained reservations about the authorship of some of the works. They squared that incongruity precisely by distinguishing between the question of authorship and the question of canonicity: A book could be in the canon (determined by who has used it as Scripture) even if we didn’t know who wrote it.
The key points to take from this are, first, that it is demonstrably false to claim that there was consensus about authorship of the NT books: To achieve consensus on the canon, they were forced to distinguish the issue of authorship from the issue of canonicity; that allowed them to achieve consensus on canonicity while retaining their doubts about authorship.
Second takeaway: insofar as they did achieve consensus, that consensus was built on authority and mutual influence, not on an independent examination of the facts establishing authorship.
A second topic I need to address is this: orthodoxy in the example you cite was used to determine authorship, not canonicity. It’s authorship that ultimately determined canonicity; consideration of orthodoxy was only a means to that end. If you could give me an example of a text that was determined to have been authored by an apostle but that the apostle wrote contra orthodoxy in that text, and so on that basis his text was rejected, then you could say orthodoxy was a determining factor of canonicity – but history records no such case.
First of all, using orthodoxy to determine authorship is problematic. It starts with the assumption that the apostles held the same beliefs as the person who is determining the authorship. It is thus circular. It is a no-true-Scottsman fallacy. Aside from that, as I already said, by the fifth century authorship and canonicity were regarded as two distinct questions. Such towering figures as Jerome and Augustine forged consensus on the canon precisely by setting aside their doubts about authorship.
As to the challenge to produce a heterodox writing from an apostle, of course I can’t do that, if for no other reason than because I don’t have any writing that I am confident came from an apostle. But I can give you writings that were rejected as non-apostolic because they were deemed heretical, and that is all that I must do to prove my point.
A final thing I need to draw attention to has already been mentioned too briefly: There are numerous examples of known fraudulent works that were widely (not in every case universally) accepted as authentic by the Christians for centuries. Robert mentioned pseudo-Dionysius. A few others that come quickly to mind are the Agbar Letter, the Apostolic Constitutions, the letters of Paul to Seneca, the Gospel of pseudo-Matthew, the pseudo-Ignatian letters, Second Clement. One could go on at length. Even within the canon we can find whole sections that are certainly not authentic, although they were widely accepted: The Johannine logion, the pericope adulterae, the longer ending of Mark.
This is all to say that any notion that the Christian tradition, at large, was scrupulous about verifying authenticity and authorship is contradicted by the facts.
I only mentioned four of these
I’d missed your later addition were you gave more examples. I think you posted it while I was composing my subsequent post.
there are so many additional examples that could be added by anyone with the knowledge, time, and patience
Indeed. It’s overwhelming. The Christians’ propensity to accept clearly fraudulent works as authentic is staggering. One plentiful source of such examples is the lives of the saints.
Robert, you said:
“But you’re still assuming that Athanasius and Eusebius were basing their testimony on traditional sources of information which were accurate and reliable, having been conveyed by a community with some sort of collective critical discernment process. That’s possible, but is it so very plausible as to claim that any other presumption or scholarly opinion is preposterous?”
What I am calling preposterous is modern scholars dismissing the work of ancient scholars like Eusebius and Athanasius by seldom conveying and addressing their arguments.
“Among critical scholars this is not a controversial subject. It is only controversial among some conservative apologists who are defending a position related to their religious faith. Many believing critical scholars do not find it controversial. I would still raise the question whether there was an inherent tendency in the church tradition to provide justification for their faith and practice.”
You recognize “an inherent tendency in the church tradition to provide justification for their faith and practice,” but don’t seem to recognize that secular scholarship has its own inherent tendencies which can be likewise crippling.
“Maybe you should also retire the word “preposterous” when characterizing (over simplistically?) the position you are arguing against? It can be controversial for a genuine scholar to seek to overturn the overwhelming scholarly consensus, but polemics won’t succeed in this cause. Only meticulous and comprehensive scholarly work.”
I proposed to retire “polemically” once it became apparent to me that we on this thread might be defining the word differently. That is, I was wanting to reduce the potential for confusion. When it comes to “preposterous,” however, I don’t think we are defining it differently so I don’t see a benefit in ceasing to use it. I do not want to unnecessarily offend, but I do want to be understood. I really do think it ridiculous or absurd or whatever other synonym for preposterous you want to use for anyone to say that modern scholars can better determine NT authorship than ancient ones – especially when modern scholars write their opinions without due explanation for where and why they think the ancients got this or that authorship ascription wrong. Surely you’ve noticed that modern scholars will routinely say, for example, that Paul couldn’t have written this or that because the Greek is different from what he normally wrote without explaining why ancient scholars, who obviously had a pretty good grasp of ancient Greek themselves and hated forgeries as much as we do, didn’t take the same position. I’m not a scholar, but I’ve read enough dissertations to know that a scholar typically catalogs the literature on a topic and explains why his proposals are better than the scholars he’s parting from. If modern scholars weren’t so dismissive of ancient scholars, a word like “preposterous” might not need to be used.
Porphyry, you said:
“First, concerning independence. The churches exerted influence on each other in reaching the canon. Augustine–a major figure in settling the canon–explicitly says that though he had doubts about authenticity still submitted to the judgement of the more esteemed churches. Substantially the same thing can be said of Jerome: he had serious doubts about authorship but submitted to authority. By the time a consensus is reached among the orthodox, the people working to universalize the canon are no longer basing their canon on an impartial examination of the factual claims, they are submitting to what they regarded as religious authorities.”
The church at Thessalonica, and churches with which it was closely associated, received more respect from other churches when it came to authenticating the authorship of 1 and 2 Thessalonians, for sure. Just because one church might defer to the judgment of another on canonicity doesn’t mean the issue of authorship went out the window or that politics reigned supreme.
“Even as they defended the canon on the basis of authority, they personally maintained reservations about the authorship of some of the works. They squared that incongruity precisely by distinguishing between the question of authorship and the question of canonicity: A book could be in the canon (determined by who has used it as Scripture) even if we didn’t know who wrote it.”
When Athanasius listed the books of the New Testament, he did not comment on their orthodoxy or canonicity…but he did state their authorship.
“The key points to take from this are, first, that it is demonstrably false to claim that there was consensus about authorship of the NT books: To achieve consensus on the canon, they were forced to distinguish the issue of authorship from the issue of canonicity; that allowed them to achieve consensus on canonicity while retaining their doubts about authorship.”
If you think it’s demonstrable, demonstrate it.
“Second takeaway: insofar as they did achieve consensus, that consensus was built on authority and mutual influence, not on an independent examination of the facts establishing authorship.”
Not according to Eusebius.
“A second topic I need to address is this: orthodoxy in the example you cite was used to determine authorship, not canonicity. It’s authorship that ultimately determined canonicity; consideration of orthodoxy was only a means to that end. If you could give me an example of a text that was determined to have been authored by an apostle but that the apostle wrote contra orthodoxy in that text, and so on that basis his text was rejected, then you could say orthodoxy was a determining factor of canonicity – but history records no such case. First of all, using orthodoxy to determine authorship is problematic. It starts with the assumption that the apostles held the same beliefs as the person who is determining the authorship. It is thus circular. It is a no-true-Scottsman fallacy.”
I didn’t argue that one ought to use orthodoxy to determine authorship, but rather that the use orthodoxy in ancient times was not an ipso facto indication that determination of authorship as the goal had been abandoned.
“Aside from that, as I already said, by the fifth century authorship and canonicity were regarded as two distinct questions. Such towering figures as Jerome and Augustine forged consensus on the canon precisely by setting aside their doubts about authorship.”
The majority of the NT’s contents had already been settled by the early 4th century. Augustine and Jerome were tying up loose ends. (I’ll have more to say about Augustine in another post below.)
“As to the challenge to produce a heterodox writing from an apostle, of course I can’t do that, if for no other reason than because I don’t have any writing that I am confident came from an apostle. But I can give you writings that were rejected as non-apostolic because they were deemed heretical, and that is all that I must do to prove my point.”
Your admission that you cannot produce the requested example is more persuasive than your declaration of having proved your point.
“A final thing I need to draw attention to has already been mentioned too briefly: There are numerous examples of known fraudulent works that were widely (not in every case universally) accepted as authentic by the Christians for centuries. Robert mentioned pseudo-Dionysius. A few others that come quickly to mind are the Agbar Letter, the Apostolic Constitutions, the letters of Paul to Seneca, the Gospel of pseudo-Matthew, the pseudo-Ignatian letters, Second Clement. One could go on at length.”
It is not a point of contention between us that many forgeries arose. It’s but one of the reasons that final formation of the NT took so long. The great interest in the apostles’ writings combined with the scarcity of them provided much temptation to produce more, whether with naive good intentions or downright bad. But the ad hoc, unplanned, and uncoordinated vetting process of the geographically-diverse and organizationally-independent churches was as notable for its ultimate ability to identify and root out forgeries as it was for its ability to allow them in the first place. I never supposed nor stated that ancients were so effective as to disallow the rise of any forgeries or even nip every attempted forgery in the bud. That would be preposterous.
“Even within the canon we can find whole sections that are certainly not authentic, although they were widely accepted: The Johannine logion, the pericope adulterae, the longer ending of Mark. This is all to say that any notion that the Christian tradition, at large, was scrupulous about verifying authenticity and authorship is contradicted by the facts.”
That you are throwing in the kitchen sink of textual criticism issues enlarges – but does not improve – your argument.
To all:
Regarding the book titles to which Robert linked just above, the one most pertinent to this thread is “The New Testament from a Distance,” written in 2016. Here is a link to it:
** you do not have permission to see this link **
If you’re short on time, you can go straight to chapter four ‘Ancient Writings Versus Modern Writings.’
If you’re too short of time to even read a chapter from my book, you still owe it to yourself to at least check out Augustine’s “Against Faustus” (aka “Contra Faustum”) 33.6 – that is, the sixth paragraph of Book XXXIII. Here’s a link for that:
** you do not have permission to see this link **
The view I have been expressing in this thread is no different from the one expressed by Augustine in that paragraph.
“The key points to take from this are, first, that it is demonstrably false to claim that there was consensus about authorship of the NT books: To achieve consensus on the canon, they were forced to distinguish the issue of authorship from the issue of canonicity; that allowed them to achieve consensus on canonicity while retaining their doubts about authorship.”
If you think it’s demonstrable, demonstrate it.
** you do not have permission to see this link **:
the epistle which is entitled “To the Hebrews” is accepted as the apostle Paul’s not only by the churches of the east but by all church writers in the Greek language of earlier times [which, by the way, is not accurate, see Origen], although many judge it to be by Barnabas or by Clement. It is of no great moment who the author is, since it is the work of a churchman and receives recognition day by day in the public reading of the churches.
Your admission that you cannot produce the requested example is more persuasive than your declaration of having proved your point.
There is absolutely no reason I should have to fulfill such a silly request to prove my point.
My original point, from post 14, was “A major criterion of authenticity was theological orthodoxy: could a ‘true apostle’ (or apostolic man) have written such a work? If the work says theologically problematic things, that’s proof it is spurious.”
I provided the quotation from Eusebius, in post 19, that demonstrates that I was correct: “the thoughts and the purpose of the things that are related in them are so completely out of accord with true orthodoxy that they clearly show themselves to be the fictions of heretics.”
I’ve already proven the point I made. You can make any silly demand you want for evidence but I don’t need to meet it.
I call it “silly” because it is utterly irrelevant. My position can be right even if the thing you demand of me has never existed–a point I already made.
My inability to provide what you demand may persuade you, but that says more about your reasoning than it says of the soundness of my position.
The church at Thessalonica, and churches with which it was closely associated, received more respect from other churches when it came to authenticating the authorship of 1 and 2 Thessalonians, for sure. Just because one church might defer to the judgment of another on canonicity doesn’t mean the issue of authorship went out the window or that politics reigned supreme.
The issue was whether the churches independently reached the same conclusion about authorship. If some are deferring to the judgement of others that means they aren’t independent.
Imagine 3 witnesses who had been near the scene of a crime–Alice, Bob, and Chuck: The police ask, “can you describe the perp?”
Chuck replies, “yes, he was a white, middle-aged male with thinning blond hair, slender build, pale complexion, brilliant blue eyes, about 5’9″ wearing a grey tweed jacket and carrying a dark brown briefcase”
Then you ask Alice and Bob, and each of them gives the exact same description. But when pressed where they were standing when they saw the perp, Alice and Bob confess they didn’t actually see him, Charlie did, and they are simply deferring to his testimony. They aren’t independent witnesses, and the fact that that all three agree doesn’t improve the credibility of their testimony.
It is not a point of contention between us that many forgeries arose.
. . .
the ad hoc, unplanned, and uncoordinated vetting process of the geographically-diverse and organizationally-independent churches was as notable for its ultimate ability to identify and root out forgeries as it was for its ability to allow them in the first place. I never supposed nor stated that ancients were so effective as to disallow the rise of any forgeries or even nip every attempted forgery in the bud.
You missed a critical part of my point: it is not simply that forgeries arose. It is that those forgeries were widely accepted and accepted for centuries.
Your position is that the ancient Christians had access to relevant data that we don’t, and they used those data effectively to investigate and determine authorship, and that they did that job of determining authorship so competently that it is preposterous for us to second-guess them.
I acknowledge that they had access to very valuable data that we do not. But my point is that we have multiple examples where–despite all the advantages that they had–their investigations into authenticity failed spectacularly.
How can you insist that the result of their investigation into the authorship of the NT writings is beyond questioning, when we know that their investigations into the authorship of other works failed spectacularly? How can you insist that they not only got this right, but so certainly got it right that it is preposterous to question them, when in other cases we see them being clearly duped?
“Even within the canon we can find whole sections that are certainly not authentic, although they were widely accepted: The Johannine logion, the pericope adulterae, the longer ending of Mark. This is all to say that any notion that the Christian tradition, at large, was scrupulous about verifying authenticity and authorship is contradicted by the facts.”
That you are throwing in the kitchen sink of textual criticism issues enlarges – but does not improve – your argument.
Not really. These examples go precisely to the point I was making above. You can’t say, the early Christians were meticulous about handing down just what they were given and maintaining a continuous and redundant, self-correcting chain that guarantees accurate transmission; the early Christians had access to texts we don’t; the early XPtians spoke Greek better than anyone alive today (and so could confirm or dispute authenticity by comparing style far better than we can); therefore their judgements about what writings are and are not authentic are beyond questioning of modern scholars.
We can see even in Scripture examples where that system of transmission, despite all those advantages, failed and passed on things that are certainly not authentic. And those failures were significant: we aren’t talking about some homeoteleuton or occasional misspellings; we are talking about significant sections. And we are not talking about isolated failures of transmission that were corrected by the larger tradition: just the opposite, these are errors that spread widely and even entirely displaced the original text.
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