Porphyry, in post #379 I answered the questions you had posed to me in post #375. Please allow me to ask you to answer those same questions.
I am sincerely curious about what scenarios you might propose for that period of history – that is, the period from the time when the 27 NT texts were written until the time when they became widely acknowledged as the collection we call the NT. There are two kinds of people that I can imagine thinking there are “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” by identifying as analogies “cases where self-selecting and mutually influencing groups have been led–by a sort of zeitgeist–to commonly embrace error.” The first kind of person who might think this way is a person unfamiliar with the history of this period; the second is a person so committed to modern critical scholarship that he just can’t open his mind to the possibility that the ancients may have gotten the authorship of those 27 texts right. I don’t, however, view you as fitting into either of those categories.
I am not trying to make a point or put you on the spot. It’s just that I literally cannot imagine what you will say, though I am sure it will be thoughtful.
I do not reject all the findings of modern critical scholars. I simply think that the tenets and findings of modern critical scholarship should not be accepted uncritically. I would hope that this stance does not make me an outlier.
Back in post #344, Robert chided me, “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.” There’s irony here and it is that I share Robert’s commitment to the principle he’s evoking. Just because a given scenario is possible does not mean it should be considered on a par with a different possible scenario that is more probable – especially one that is far more probable.
Consider the scenario commonly suggested in modern times that the four canonical gospels were initially accepted and circulated among the churches as anonymous and later assigned the individual names they bear. I don’t argue that this scenario is impossible. For one thing, it’s hard to argue that something is impossible. But I find it very, very difficult to believe that this scenario is more probable than the scenario laid out by Eusebius, Athanasius, Augustine and others – that the four gospels were understood to have come from Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John from the very beginning, and that this information was just passed down from one generation to the next in the churches where the texts were first read.
The difficulty of which I speak should be obvious, but I’ll be specific nonetheless. When I read the way the ancients of the 1st through 5th century write about Christian literature, I cannot imagine any of them ever adopting as apostolic a text that was regarded as anonymous. How could they authenticate apostolicity if the author was unknown? And it’s even harder to imagine how such a text – much less four of them – could obtain the kind of widespread currency we know these gospels had achieved even in the 2nd century (Justin Martyr, Tatian, Irenaeus, etc.). And it is most difficult of all to believe that having been widely accepted as anonymous, they could then be named Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John…with everyone around the empire accepting that naming!
By contrast, the scenario described by church writers I’ve so often cited – that the authorship of the four gospels was known from the beginning and passed down from generation to generation in the congregations where they were first read – is much easier to accept. The relative probability of the two scenarios leaves a wide gap…at least in my mind. And this is to say the least.
The latter scenario can also be plausibly filled out with the detail that 20 of the NT texts achieved acceptance as apostolic sooner and easier than did 7 of them. It makes sense that the Gospels and Paul’s letters would spread more rapidly than any of the other texts. After all, churches were looking for teaching material to read aloud in congregational gatherings and those two collections provided an abundance of it. And this would also help explain why meaty letters like 1 Peter and 1 John might find acceptance before, say, 2 John and 3 John – especially if John wrote them from different places. Of course, it’s well known that Hebrews was more widely accepted in the east than the west, and Revelation vice versa. As for the remaining five, it’s not at all difficult to imagine each of them having a long tradition but only in a small circle of churches, such that it was only when inter-church communication radically intensified in the religious-political switcharoo that occurred in the 4th century allowed the rest of the empire to hear more about these books with which many of them were not as familiar.
If I had more time, I could have written all this better and thereby do more just to this issue, but I hope this is enough to indicate that my position on this subject is based upon reliable history and, when we have to fill in the lacunae of history, the employment of reason that recognizes the difference between possibility and probability.
When I read the way the ancients of the 1st through 5th century write about Christian literature, I cannot imagine any of them ever adopting as apostolic a text that was regarded as anonymous. How could they authenticate apostolicity if the author was unknown?
First the early Christians did. at least sometimes, adopt works without knowing the author.
The Didache–though it ultimate didn’t make it into the canon–was widely read and was regarded by some as Scripture.
Hebrews, as we have seen, was accepted as canonical even thought its own greatest champions acknowledge the problems surrounding its authorship. Clement says Paul deliberately hid his identity from the recipients (how then could they have testified to his authorship?) and that the Greek of the letter is certainly not Pauline. Yet he insists on saying it was Paul’s even though he says Paul didn’t write the Greek of the epistle we have before us. Origen also says the language is certainly not Pauls, and forthrightly says that only heaven knows who wrote it, yet he still praises those who insist it is Paul’s. Origen’s position seems to be, the fact of who wrote it doesn’t matter, the theology is good. Because the theology is good, good on those who insist on attributing it to the Apostle and endowing it with apostolic authority (even though he certainly isn’t actually the author). They might be wrong about the (unimportant) fact of who wrote it, but the upshot (revering the epistle) is good.
Such things can’t be dismissed as merely the thought of one or two individuals; they give us some of the best insights we have into how the early Christian thought-leaders were approaching and reasoning about Scriptural authority and authorship. And we know that they (even taken as mere individuals rather than as representatives of the broader orthodox movement) were influential on many others.
And it is most difficult of all to believe that having been widely accepted as anonymous, they could then be named Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John…with everyone around the empire accepting that naming!
Yes, on first glance that seems like a problem, but I don’t think it really is as big a problem as it may seem. Imagine this: The gospels spread anonymously for 50 or so years. Naturally, people occasionally wonder about the authors of these critical texts. Well, assuming they are what they seem to be, it would be natural to suspect that they were written by apostles–after all who else would have been in a position to report on the whole course of Jesus’ ministry? Well, it isn’t too hard for a suspicion to turn into a fact. And once it is accepted as a fact, it is easy for that “fact” to spread.
But knowing the gospels are memoirs of the apostles is one thing. People still wonder which apostles.
Well, at that point, one or more people do some thinking. They notice the odd bit near the end of the John (Jn 21:24) and interpret it (wrongly) as claiming that the beloved disciple wrote the book. And who is the “beloved disciple”? Well, who might the beloved disciple be? He is clearly part of Jesus’s innermost group. Who is the innermost group? The synoptics tell us it is Peter, James, and John. The disciple can’t be Peter, who is named along side the mystery disciple, so it is either James or John. Some further such speculation let them exclude James.
As for Matthew, there was a belief (first seen in Papias) that Matthew wrote a gospel for the Hebrews. Well, the gospel of Matthew is the most Hebraic of the four (lots of Scripture, Jesus presented as a new Moses, and so on)–although it certainly isn’t the gospel that Papias describes. So someone identified Matthew as the author of that book.
What of Luke? Well, they knew the gospel and Acts shared an author. And based on the “we” passages in Acts, whoever wrote the gospel must have been a companion of Paul on his journeys. And based on the purity of the Greek, he must have been well educated. (pseudo-)Paul tells us in Philemon and Colossians of a companion Luke, who is a physician.
Finally, Papias also tells us that Mark wrote a gospel. So by elimination that must mean that he wrote the remaining gospel. (Though again, his description does not match the gospel that comes down to us by that name)
Putting it all together you might get something like this:
In the first decades, Christianity spreads principally through oral preaching and face-to-face interaction (though certainly there were occasional letters, some of which are preserved in the Pauline corpus). When the written gospels first spread, they would have been mysterious, fascinating, even titillating. Mysterious texts that filled in a lot of holes in the story and carried a lot of valuable information (if true). They would have been exactly the sorts of things that, the right sort of people, want to be authentic, even if they know they aren’t verified.
They are adopted–perhaps tentatively at first–because they agree with the faith particular communities already had. That is how we usually decide whether to trust new sources of information: does what they say agree with what we know to be true? So the gospels lined up with what their first adopters already believed (both ethical and theological), and has some other helpful things that filled in troublesome gaps making the faith more vivid, and at any rate it provided lots of good material to preach on. This fits a general pattern we see all over the place. People desperately want to fill in gaps, and they want things that fill in gaps to be true.
But the longer it was used in the community, the more authority it took on. (Look by analogy at how some evangelicals regard the KJV as more authoritative than any other text, despite it’s manifest inadequacies. If it was good enough for generations of my ancestors, it can’t be bad. In it’s extreme form, that eventually becomes, the KJV was inspired by God.) What may originally have been accepted only tentatively came naturally, in succeeding decades, to be something ever closer to gospel truth, inspired scriptures, the very word of God.
Moreover, as different Christianities diverged in their theologies, establishing the authority of their favored texts became important for obvious reasons. It was natural for the (proto-)orthodox to insist theirs was the authentic Gospel of Luke and Marcion’s was an heretical corruption, just as it was natural for Marcion to insist his gospel was the original, written by none other than Paul himself.
In all of this the aforementioned speculative identification of the authors takes place in degrees: at first it is just a general speculation that the authors were apostles; later people tried to identify which apostles.
It wasn’t critical to get their identities right at first. The believers already believed independently of the authority of the written gospels. Later generations accepted the anonymous gospels on the authority of those earlier generations who had judged the anonymous gospels to be good enough.
But as time went on those speculative identities were taken more as fact than as speculation (again, this happens all the time: people repeat a good story, and any original caveats get left out in the retelling). Someone says suggests something that would be interesting. “Fr. Ephraim suggested x” becomes, “Fr. Ephraim thought x.” After some time, that turns into “some say that . . . “, then it becomes “they say that,” and eventually, “they say” gets left off and it is just presented as a generally known fact.
At some point one or two heresiologists, in order to defend orthodoxy against the attacks of the heterodox, gave what had originally been speculative identities as fact. His writings in short order gained wide acceptance and proved influential. And his testimony about who wrote which gospel came itself to be taken as established. Other influential authors gave these identifications on his authority (after all he is a good guy, he is a hammer of heretics and defender of orthodoxy, on the side of God, he is one of us, the brilliant champion of all we hold most dear), and after a few generations, so many early fathers had testified in one way or another to the identities, that they were taken to be beyond dispute. It is unthinkable that so many of our forefathers in the faith got this wrong.
Thus a group of churches went (or could have gone, for this is hypothetical in its details) from a collection of anonymous gospels, to a conviction about who wrote them.
Though it is hypothetical–and I’m sure some details could be challenged or refined–this matches pretty well what we see.
The earliest Christians writings that use the gospels do not give them the traditional identifications. Justin Martyr, for example, though he knows the gospels, refers to them simply as the memoirs of the apostles, even though he usually names the authors of works he cites. No one, prior to Irenaeus, gives the traditional names, and that was not because they did not know or discuss them. By the time we get to Athanasius, he could vaguely wave his hand towards the authority of these books having been handed down from the “earliest times” and Augustine could speak of a book as authoritative because it had been cited by multitudes of Fathers before him.
Porphyry, I am surprised…and disappointed. You were indeed thoughtful, for the words and phrasings are yours, but the essence of what you’ve written here is standard fare for modern critical scholarship on this subject. I’ve heard it all before. The response it deserves is, “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.” In other words, what’s being put on offer here is a strained argument, to say the least, and thus the tribe to which you currently belong and for whom you are, in effect, speaking does not practice what it preaches about possibilities versus probabilities. Your tribe may be oblivious to its hypocrisy and thus be proud of what you’ve written here, but William of Ockham surely is not.
Just calling it strained and hypocritical doesn’t make it so.
It matches quite well with well attested human behaviors. It also matches fairly well the actual historical record such as we have (e.g., the earliest authors to cite the gospels do not give them the traditional names).
You have systematically excluded vast swaths of evidence:
When I give parallel examples of these behaviors, to show that people, even the early Christians themselves, do exhibit the behaviors in question, you dismiss it as irrelevant since those cases are not part of the actual formation of the NT–You treat the NT as a special case, and established patterns of behavior do not apply.
When I point out the problems we see in, for example, how they adopted Hebrews, you constrain the discussion further to only the books that were adopted so early that we have much less record of how and why they were adopted.
And at any rate, you insist, the reasons given by individual fathers is just those individuals’ thoughts, you are only interested in what the whole Church thought. But those individuals both passively demonstrate what sorts of thought were current among Christians and actively influenced that thought. If we want to understand how Christians thought, we have to look at what individual Christians said, though of course acknowledging that no one of them can speak for the whole.
When we point out cases widely accepted forgeries, you retort that the fact they didn’t end up in the NT proves the process worked (which is just circular; but lets you dismiss the evidence that the Christians of the relevant period were not so discriminating as you want them to be.)
By narrowing the conversation, you essential deprive the conversation of all the best evidence we have to go by, shrouding the part of the history you deem relevant in an impenetrable cloak of mystery, then you tell us what happened behind the cloak, but of course, your reconstruction of the history is based on your favored assumptions about what was happening.
When we point out that they are unjustified assumptions, you retort that you are just taking Athanasius, Eusebius et al. at face value when they testify what the process was. Yet Athanasius never recounted a process by which authorship was determined, and even if he did we could rightly ask whether he was himself in a position to have accurate knowledge of it, or whether he had been deceived by his tribe into accepting too readily an inaccurate origin story. Likewise, Eusebius only documents what his contemporary church’s accepted as Scripture, without claiming to document how they determined authorship (he does of course provide scattered quotations from other authors that bear on how they determined authorship of works like Hebrews, but as already noted, when we bring those passages up, you dismiss them as irrelevant.)
The only actual historical evidence I see you resting your case on is that the churches came to consensus without a council. To make that claim of course, we have to set aside the books where consensus was not reach–at least not by the close of late antiquity–and moreover we have to set aside those Christian communities that did not concur in the consensus, and of course we have to ignore the non-christian ancient authors who studied and rejected the consensus.
But even that more modest agreement is not probative. There was mutual influence that could very easily have driven a consensus. There were extremely influential figures who dominated the intellectual landscape, figures like Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, or Origen. There were also ecclesiastical authorities, bishops and patriarch–like Athanasius. These communities were not independent witnesses or judges, they directly influenced each other. By your own account of how the attribution spread, individual churches only got the attribution from other churches: that is, one church adopted the belief of another church on that other church’s word–that isn’t independent witness, and consensus arising from such interactions shouldn’t shock us. Finally, there was selection bias: those who disagreed either left or were forced out or simply never joined–which is why we cannot ignore the dissent of those outside the orthodox fold.
Now, I want to offer two concession: The writings of the NT stand out from the crowd of ancient Christian writings and apocrypha in that they are generally older than many other ancient Christian writings. The Christians did have a distinct preference for writings that had been around for as far back as they could trace them. This explains (in part) why something like the letter to Agbar was not put in the canon–even if it was widely believed to be authentic and ancient, it hadn’t been quoted early enough. The problem is, tracing a writing back to the second century isn’t adequate to authenticate its provenance (especially if the first authors using it don’t testify to it’s provenance). Moreover, the oldest heterodox writings did not generally survive because no one copied them after their original advocates lost the theological battle (in general, heterodox writings tended not to survive, for obvious reasons). So, yes, the NT writings are objectively different from most of their extant competitors, and their claims to authenticity are more plausible than the claims of most other extant writings. But that doesn’t by any means exclude early misattribution or guarantee authenticity.
A second concession is that the rise of Christianity, in general, is remarkable, and the relatively early date at which a core of the NT forms (the four gospels and the Pauline corpus, along with their traditional attributions), as part of that process, is also remarkable. But its remarkable rapidity, does not exclude, so far as has been shown or so far as I can see by my own lights, the sort of process I describe. From the writing of the works till Irenaeus first names the four evangelists is something like 80 years; it is longer still till we can speak of those attributions being widespread or generally accepted. Again, if you want to argue, based on actual evidence–either historical or sociological–,that the sort of process I describe is less probable than what you endorse, you are more than welcomed to, but simply writing it off as strained is hardly a serious reply. This rapid consensus would be a serious problem for me, if the orthodox churches were genuinely independent, but as I said, they were not.
Yet further I will concede that your account is simpler, in the sense it has fewer moving parts, than mine. But when dealing with human affairs there often are many moving parts, so that sort of simplicity doesn’t say much in its favor. Also, my account, at heart, isn’t that complicated, and relies on perfectly normal human behavior. The orthodox showed a bias towards accepting apostolic credentials for works that agreed with their prior beliefs: this is perfectly normal, people are less skeptical of things that support the conclusions they accept (we see this on interesting display in Origen–he knew Paul didn’t write Hebrews, but still, because of the content, praised those who insisted he wrote it). Individuals and churches influenced each other; if one influential church or one major writer accepted a claim it was likely to be adopted by many others, who in turn would naturally influence others. Stories tend to grow more certain in the telling; what starts as a mere theory or a suspicion, even a tall tale can quickly become a fact, and the more it is repeated, the longer it lives, the more sure people are of it. We also know that there were plenty of people in early Christianity who had no qualms about making things up–just look at all the apocrypha.
All that is perfectly normal human behavior and we can find many many examples–from the ancient world to today–of these tendencies in action. In fact, I’m fairly confident that I am witnessing at least a couple of these tendencies in your responses.
If you want to insist that the early churches were not influenced by these normal tendencies, that it is absurd to think they factored into, and perhaps even drove, the process, it seems to me the burden falls to you to show it. You can’t simply say, “that’s too complicated,” or “that contradicts the beliefs of the persons who came hundreds of years into that very process,” or dismiss it as strained and hypocritical.
But as I said earlier, I don’t think we will reach a resolution unless we discuss our broader commitments that influence how we approach this question. I said each side would naturally look at the other as hopelessly biased, until we look to those broader convictions. And this last exchange seems to me to prove that right. You’ve told me my approach is strained and hypocritical, a manifestation of tribal affiliation. That is exactly how I see your arguments through this whole thread.
If you want to go that route, perhaps we should dig into the topic we previously mentioned in passing, Matthew’s and Mark’s accounts of John’s beheading.
I simply think that the tenets and findings of modern critical scholarship should not be accepted uncritically.
Neither do critical scholars. That’s what critical theory is. The great scholar Raymond Brown once wrote that if he got 60% of stuff right he would be happy. One longs for such humility among apologists.
Consider the scenario commonly suggested in modern times that the four canonical gospels were initially accepted and circulated among the churches as anonymous and later assigned the individual names they bear. I don’t argue that this scenario is impossible. For one thing, it’s hard to argue that something is impossible. But I find it very, very difficult to believe that this scenario is more probable than the scenario laid out by Eusebius, Athanasius, Augustine and others – that the four gospels were understood to have come from Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John from the very beginning, and that this information was just passed down from one generation to the next in the churches where the texts were first read.
And that wouldn’t be because you begin with a prior faith commitment that requires an apostolic foundation? What if you found out that none of the gospels were written by the traditional authors? Would that have any effect on your beliefs? If it would not then why is traditional authorship so important?
When I read the way the ancients of the 1st through 5th century write about Christian literature, I cannot imagine any of them ever adopting as apostolic a text that was regarded as anonymous.
Yet Eusebius can admit doubt about the authenticity of the Epistle of James while admitting it was accepted because it was popular in the churches.
How could they authenticate apostolicity if the author was unknown?
Just as we have no record of anyone questioning traditional gospel authorship we have no record of anyone making an attempt to authenticate it. These traditions arose over a period of time. Our surviving sources come from a time long after the matter had been settled. The claim that there was an unbroken, curated, apostolic tradition must be demonstrated.
Stephen, regarding your post #389,
“‘I simply think that the tenets and findings of modern critical scholarship should not be accepted uncritically.’ Neither do critical scholars. That’s what critical theory is. The great scholar Raymond Brown once wrote that if he got 60% of stuff right he would be happy. One longs for such humility among apologists.”
You are deeply and abidingly tribal in your thinking. Otherwise, you wouldn’t refer to scholars who disagree with you by an epithet. And if summarily dismissing ancient historical attestation to the authorship of ancient texts is humility, I’d hate to see what hubris looks like.
“And that wouldn’t be because you begin with a prior faith commitment that requires an apostolic foundation? What if you found out that none of the gospels were written by the traditional authors? Would that have any effect on your beliefs? If it would not then why is traditional authorship so important?”
Your tribalism is showing once again. Do you not realize, Stephen, that all such questions cut both ways? To spell it out: ‘And that wouldn’t be because you begin with a prior commitment to unbelief? What if you found out that all of the gospels were written by the traditional authors? Would that have any effect on your unbelief? If it would not then why is non-apostolic authorship so important?’
“‘When I read the way the ancients of the 1st through 5th century write about Christian literature, I cannot imagine any of them ever adopting as apostolic a text that was regarded as anonymous.’ Yet Eusebius can admit doubt about the authenticity of the Epistle of James while admitting it was accepted because it was popular in the churches.”
You say this as if it’s a problem. Eusebius was clear that 20 of the 27 were accepted without dispute and that there were 7 (James among them) that were “disputed but known and approved by many.” Should a Supreme Court verdict be considered valid only if unanimous?
“Just as we have no record of anyone questioning traditional gospel authorship we have no record of anyone making an attempt to authenticate it. These traditions arose over a period of time. Our surviving sources come from a time long after the matter had been settled. The claim that there was an unbroken, curated, apostolic tradition must be demonstrated.”
How convenient for you to put the burden of proof on men who can no longer speak for themselves and address your challenges. All we have is the history they left us, and in that history we see clearly that they rendered a verdict. Because you have less evidence than they had, you’re less likely – not more likely – to come to the correct verdict than they were. And to throw out their verdict because you have less evidence than they did is illogical, to say the least.
To all:
The series of posts below will be my last to this forum. I say this because I have promised to give you a chance to have the last word in our discussion. I’ll say more about this in my last post below.
(Stephen was going to write a review of one of my books and I was going to stay here a while longer for that, but he agreed to post it my website – ** you do not have permission to see this link ** – where there is no paywall – or, should I say, donatewall.)
The posts below between this one and the last one in the series are all directed to Porphyry. These responses to his latest posts to me are a fitting way for me to close out my participation on this thread. For while Porphyry and I have only been able to agree on a few things, we have nonetheless been able, especially since his two questions to me in post # 375, to stay focused on issues that lie at the heart of the question that launched this thread: “Who Is Better Qualified to Determine Authorship of the NT Texts – Modern Scholars or Ancient Ones?” Specifically, our focus in these recent exchanges have been on the authorship of the gospels, which is a representative microcosm of the larger question. This is why I am happy that the thread is concluding with this focus instead of ending in chaos and rancor, as is the case with so many internet discussions.
Now for my responses to Porphyry.
Porphyry, here’s a brief review of our recent exchanges that have brought the two of us to this point.
375 – You ask me two cogent questions related to the difference between the ancient verdict regarding NT authorship and the modern view of NT authorship. (A copy-and-paste of those two questions will show up below, so you don’t have to go back to 375 to find out what they were.)
379 – I answer your two questions.
382 – I ask you to answer your own questions, elaborating on why I am asking you to do this.
383 – I add context to the two questions by acknowledging that both the ancient and modern views have to address gaps in their respective historical narratives, explaining why I think such gaps in the traditional view are easier to fill with reasonable and probable assumptions than are the gaps in the modern view.
384 – You answer the two questions.
385 – I respond to your two answers with surprise and disappointment.
386 – You respond to my response with challenges, which I will now begin addressing.
Porphyry, your first objection to my post 385 in your response (386) was that I called it “strained” without demonstrating that it was so. I had spilled enough ink here that I didn’t think an explanation of what I meant was necessary, but I will proceed to give that explanation now.
You began your post (384) by quoting a statement of mine (from post 383) you wanted to address, and then began responding. I’ll reproduce that here and then comment on it.
MG: “When I read the way the ancients of the 1st through 5th century write about Christian literature, I cannot imagine any of them ever adopting as apostolic a text that was regarded as anonymous. How could they authenticate apostolicity if the author was unknown?”
Porphyry: “First the early Christians did. at least sometimes, adopt works without knowing the author. The Didache–though it ultimate didn’t make it into the canon–was widely read and was regarded by some as Scripture.”
My statement did not say that the early Christians never adopted anonymous works. Indeed, in the broader context of Christian literature, we do find some anonymous works. Moreover, church leaders like Athanasius would sometimes recommend them – though not on a par with apostolic writings. Re-read what I wrote as I was clearly speaking of apostolically authored texts.
By the way, the words “canon” and “Scripture” are certainly related to authorship, but the meanings of these three words are not identical, whether being considered in antiquity or modernity – as you well know. I think the Didache was regarded by some as containing apostolic content, but that would not require apostolic authorship, for some regard 1 Clement as having apostolic content. After all, he was from the next generation after the apostles and is called, along with others, an apostolic father – again, as you well know. It was clear I was not using “apostolic” in this broader sense of apostolic content but rather in the specific sense of apostolic authorship. Therefore, you’re arguing against a straw man by raising the Didache.
You then move to a second irrelevancy. Hebrews is overused by your side in discussions like these. For example, a search on “Hebrews” shows that it has appeared 62 times in this thread, not counting this post I am currently writing. It reminds me of the way that abortion supporters are always invoking incest and rape as soon as the subject of abortion comes up for debate. But it is not without reason that lawmakers are periodically reminded that “hard cases make bad law,” as the aphorism goes. I grant that Hebrews was a disputed text and it deserves its day in court – but only in due time. Let us make law, as it were, on what applies to the majority of cases and then figure out how to handle the hard cases. In any case, as a response to my statement above, Hebrews is a red herring.
You then have this paragraph:
Porphyry: “Such things can’t be dismissed as merely the thought of one or two individuals; they give us some of the best insights we have into how the early Christian thought-leaders were approaching and reasoning about Scriptural authority and authorship. And we know that they (even taken as mere individuals rather than as representatives of the broader orthodox movement) were influential on many others.”
How does this paragraph flow from your statements about The Didache and Hebrews? Even if those two texts had been legitimate subjects for you to bring up in your introduction, this paragraph would still be a non sequitur.
Thus far in your response, therefore, you have not actually addressed the statement of mine you quoted. However, you do at least begin to address it in your response to the second statement of mine that you quoted, so let’s move on to that in the next post.
This post deals with the heart of your argument for the thesis of Bart Erhman and modern critical scholarship (widely accepted as fact these days). To wit: the four canonical gospels began circulating among churches as anonymous texts and were only later ascribed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John..
First, I’ll copy and paste again the statement I made that you wanted to refute.
MG: “When I read the way the ancients of the 1st through 5th century write about Christian literature, I cannot imagine any of them ever adopting as apostolic a text that was regarded as anonymous. How could they authenticate apostolicity if the author was unknown?”
And you then added this copy-and-paste:
MG: “And it is most difficult of all to believe that having been widely accepted as anonymous, they could then be named Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John…with everyone around the empire accepting that naming!”
Porphyry: “Yes, on first glance that seems like a problem, but I don’t think it really is as big a problem as it may seem. Imagine this…”
You started well with your admission of an ostensible problem, but then immediately resorted to imagination as the escape hatch. And indeed a more than muscular imagination is required to embrace the hypothetical (your term) set of scenarios you lay out. It is an interdependent series of arguments from silence. Your task is to explain how the four gospels in question could begin life circulating and being accepted in the 1st century among all the churches as anonymous but end up being clearly named and accepted as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John by Irenaeus in 180-185 AD – a period of roughly a hundred years. Yours is, at best, an argument of possibilities, not probabilities. This I will explain below. And the more possibilities you string together, the more the overall probability decreases…because that’s just the way probabilities work.
Scenario 1 (sub-argument 1) is that all the churches accepted these four gospels and accepted them as anonymous. You say this period lasts 50 or so years. (You’ve already used up half your time.) Your stated warrant is the empty space created by the fact that Ireneaus provides the first extant text we have being explicit about the four names. This is what makes your first sub-argument one of silence – and the same goes for the subsequent sub-arguments that follow it. That doesn’t by itself invalidate your argument, but it doesn’t help it either – it only allows it. This scenario might seem more plausible if you could explain why four of them achieved this status and not some other quantity, higher or lower. Or if you could explain how the four gospels became anonymous, because whoever authored each one knew his identity. Or how they came to be written around the same time. Or, more fundamentally, how congregations closer to the sources of writings could be less concerned about authorship of cherished texts than congregations that followed them. In short, as you have presented it, the adoption of four anonymous gospels is not a proposal impossible to believe, but neither is it the most obvious way to explain the absence of explicit citation of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John..
Scenario 2 (sub-argument 2) is that all the churches, though content with anonymity in their four cherished gospels for 50 years or so, in unison, across the Roman empire, decide to regard them as having been written by apostles – apostles unknown. And they hold this view for an unspecified period of time. You offer no explanation for how and why people content with anonymous texts changed into people with a conviction that they must have been written by apostles. Or why they stopped short of naming specific apostolic authors right away.
Scenario 3 (sub-argument 3) is that, again, all the churches in unison, across the empire, become discontent with the idea that these four texts were written by apostles without names and assign individual authorship of the books to the names Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. So uniform is the people’s opinion, and so long has it been reached, that Irenaeus is able to shout it from French housetops in the late 1st century. As with the transition from scenario 1 to 2, you offer no cause for the effect – that is, how and why does contentment with the unknown become discontent? And why does the transition happen to all churches across the empire? And why does this contentment to discontent transition stop there – that is, why don’t the people start getting specific about where and when each author wrote his gospel and everyone agree to these additional details empire-wide? And why, by the way, would they have chosen for two of the four names men who weren’t even technically known as apostles? And no one had counter-proposals for any of the four names? Everybody just went along? Really?
Remember also that on your thesis, all three of these stages must take place, and take place in sequence, so that by 180-185 AD Irenaeus could write what he wrote about Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Given that it took a hundred years or so to clear up just the few loose ends of the NT TOC across the empire once it was generally accepted, it’s hard to believe that your three scenarios about how the cornerstone of the NT TOC was established could have played out in a similar lapse of time. Even one of the scenarios could seem to take that long to play out. Especially in the centuries before the degree of inter-communications between churches we saw in the 4th century.
All that said, I cannot say that it’s impossible for the scenarios you describe above to have occurred between the writing of the four gospels and the first extant explicit reference to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. It just doesn’t seem probable. And, specifically, it seems less probable that the assumptions that go with the traditional view, which is that it was known from the beginning that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were responsible for the four texts. As for why we don’t have more documentation on this point during that period, 1) the people who received, passed around, and handed down those texts didn’t know how badly some of us would want them to document that information for us, and/or 2) they did document it but the tumult of the times consumed what they wrote. Net-net, the traditional view doesn’t require that we assume the custodians of the documents acted abnormally, but the modern view does.
As to the normality of action, you interspersed throughout your description of the modern view (“anonymous first, names later”) phrases such as:
– “This fits a general pattern we see all over the place.”
– “…this happens all the time…”
– “It matches quite well with well attested behaviors.”
– “…established patterns of behavior”
Your point to me is that the assumptions this view requires have to do with normal human behavior. Well, before I respond to that, let’s examine your specific descriptions of those behaviors. You used phrases such as:
– “They would have been exactly the sorts of things that, the right sort of people, want to be authentic, even if they know they aren’t verified.”
– “People desperately want to fill in gaps”
– “It is unthinkable that so many of our forefathers in the faith got this wrong.”
Do these phrases describe human behavior? Yes, but not of all humans all of the time – rather it describes some humans some of the time. To be more specific, when I read your descriptions above, words that came to my mind were gullible, naive, and so on. Are there gullible people on this earth? Of course there are, but there are also skeptical people. In fact, there is a spectrum with gullible at one end and skeptical at the other on which human beings can be plotted all along. For a person who thinks that ancient people were more gullible than modern people (and there are a lot of such modern people these days), it is easier to accept your scenarios. But for a person like me, who thinks ancient people could probably be plotted along the spectrum in the same various places we are today, I cannot easily imagine all congregations across the empire acting as you describe. Throughout history we have seen the madness of crowds at work, but even today, with millions seemingly adopting as self-evident that men can become women, there is a sizable portion of the human race (who knows the percentage?) that is just not buying it. People are not just gullible; they are gullible and skeptical and everything in between. To believe the picture you’re painting, gullibility had to have hegemony.
Another theme of your characterization of the people in your scenarios is that they move from tentativeness to certainty as a matter of course. For example::
– “Well, it isn’t too hard for a suspicion to turn into a fact. And once it is accepted as a fact, it is easy for that “fact” to spread.”
– “But the longer it was used in the community, the more authority it took on.”
– “What may originally have been accepted only tentatively came naturally, in succeeding decades, to be something ever closer to the “gospel truth.”
More people these days – you included – can personally attest to matters of faith working in the opposite direction from what you’re describing in these scenarios. Such movements ebb and flow, so that will flip once again and undulate back and forth thereafter. But an abiding reality remains: decomposition happens without human impetus, while composition only happens with it. If people’s tentativeness was turning into conviction as you described, it could not have happened as you described – that is, as a matter of course. It had to have been directed, and there is no evidence that church leaders were pushing their people to convert anonymous gospels into Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
There’s yet one other problem with the modern view…and it is a doozy. Let me return to your mind how you described the string of scenarios beginning:
“In the first decades, Christianity spreads principally through oral preaching and face-to-face interaction (though certainly there were occasional letters, some of which are preserved in the Pauline corpus). When the written gospels first spread, they would have been mysterious, fascinating, even titillating. Mysterious texts that filled in a lot of holes in the story and carried a lot of valuable information (if true). They would have been exactly the sorts of things that, the right sort of people, want to be authentic, even if they know they aren’t verified.”
Let’s slightly alter this description by amending it with the bracketed additions:
“In the first decades, Christianity spreads principally through oral preaching and face-to-face interaction (though certainly there were occasional letters, some of which are preserved in the Pauline corpus[, as well as some named and authenticated apostolic gospels]). When the [anonymous] written gospels first spread, they would have been mysterious, fascinating, even titillating. Mysterious texts that filled in a lot of holes in the story and carried a lot of valuable information (if true). They would have been exactly the sorts of things that, the right sort of people, want to be authentic, even if they know they aren’t verified.”
How would these emendations affect the probability of people accepting the anonymous gospels? And what if the emendations named Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as the “named and authenticated apostolic gospels” in existence at the time? Could the rest of the paragraph even stand as is after those emendations?
Upon the inclusion of those emendations, the modern view collapses…for who would abandon authentic apostolic gospels for anonymous ones? Do those emendations propose a scenario that is impossible? If so, they must be kept out. But to keep them out is to beg the question. Thus the modern view is reasoning in a circle.
You’re wanting me to imagine how the four gospels rose anonymously with no competition from authenticated apostolic gospels, and yet you’re not willing to imagine how they rose with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John present and in use?
When you propose a sequence of low-probability scenarios in a circular argument with a dash of special pleading thrown in, you invite a characterization of “strained.”
Porphyry, here are brief responses to your laundry list of complaints about me that you gave in post 386 following your protest of my response to the “From Anonymity to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John Thesis (i.e., the modern view).
“Just calling it strained and hypocritical doesn’t make it so.”
I explained “strained” above. If strained, then “hypocritical” follows without explanation because throughout the thread you and others have characterized my arguments as strained even though I don’t recall any of you using that exact word.
“It matches quite well with well attested human behaviors. It also matches fairly well the actual historical record such as we have (e.g., the earliest authors to cite the gospels do not give them the traditional names).”
Here, you acknowledge the silence from which you are arguing but fail to explain why your explanation for the silence is reasonable and one we ought to accept. The more reasonable explanation for the silence is that 1) we don’t have a lot of writings from that period, and 2) it was a tumultuous time for Jews and Christians. Besides, nothing in the writings we do have describe the gospels as anonymous.
In your defense, modern scholars like Bart have spent so much time “debunking” traditional authorship ascriptions that they probably feel like it’s superfluous to explain to people why we’re supposed to believe that ancient people would jump on anonymous texts to inform their knowledge and understanding of what their claimed their new “lord” wanted from them. After all, modern people tend to think ancient people were gullible – and modern people got this view from modern scholars.
“You have systematically excluded vast swaths of evidence: When I give parallel examples of these behaviors, to show that people, even the early Christians themselves, do exhibit the behaviors in question, you dismiss it as irrelevant since those cases are not part of the actual formation of the NT–You treat the NT as a special case, and established patterns of behavior do not apply.”
I do not say the NT is a special case, nor do I say that established patterns of behavior do not apply. NT authorship is simply the case in which I am intensely interested at this time, and it is counterproductive – and very easy – to get sidetracked. Maybe I just don’t have as many registers in my brain as you do and therefore can’t keep track of too many things at one time.
“When I point out the problems we see in, for example, how they adopted Hebrews, you constrain the discussion further to only the books that were adopted so early that we have much less record of how and why they were adopted.”
As I explained in one of the posts above, Hebrews is a frequent sidetrack to this discussion. Exceptions to the rule do not eliminate the rule. Hebrews belongs in the discussion about NT authorship, but not in the beginning – for the same reason that rape and incest belong in the discussion about abortion, but not at the beginning. People on your side bring up Hebrews or one of the other 7 disputed texts all the time to me; I don’t recall any of them ever bringing up the 20 undisputed texts as a group.
“And at any rate, you insist, the reasons given by individual fathers is just those individuals’ thoughts, you are only interested in what the whole Church thought. But those individuals both passively demonstrate what sorts of thought were current among Christians and actively influenced that thought. If we want to understand how Christians thought, we have to look at what individual Christians said, though of course acknowledging that no one of them can speak for the whole.”
I agree that individual views have weight…but not as much weight as individuals who speak for congregations as well as for themselves. Eusebius, Athanasius, and Augustines were all bishops speaking for the congregations they oversaw as well as for themselves.
“When we point out cases widely accepted forgeries, you retort that the fact they didn’t end up in the NT proves the process worked (which is just circular; but lets you dismiss the evidence that the Christians of the relevant period were not so discriminating as you want them to be.)”
It doesn’t prove that they got it right, but it does prove that they had a process for identifying forgeries and that it identified forgeries. If I concluded from that alone that they always got it right, then I would be circular. What leads me to conclude they were right was that they all eventually agreed, which could only happen if they all converged on the correct answer; otherwise, it would mark the most massive conspiracy or the most astounding coincidence of all antiquity and modernity put together.
I don’t suggest that every congregation was equally discriminating or was equally equipped to identify forgeries. I just say that, as Bart does, that ancient congregations didn’t like forgeries any more than we do. I also say that the system should be graded as a whole because it was the whole who signed off on the identification of the NT’s authors. You may consider the congregations too slow overall to root out every forgery, but they lacked the degree of communication with each other that we have today – especially before the 4th century. The variation of discernment among congregations could slow down the vetting process, but couldn’t prevent the whole of them from outing a rat.
“By narrowing the conversation, you essential deprive the conversation of all the best evidence we have to go by, shrouding the part of the history you deem relevant in an impenetrable cloak of mystery, then you tell us what happened behind the cloak, but of course, your reconstruction of the history is based on your favored assumptions about what was happening.”
That’s the way you see it. From my perspective, I’m just keeping a disciplined focus and thereby staying out of all the rabbit holes you’re trying to get me to go down. Again, you just may have more brain bandwidth than me. In any case, I think William of Ockham was on to something.
“When we point out that they are unjustified assumptions, you retort that you are just taking Athanasius, Eusebius et al. at face value when they testify what the process was. Yet Athanasius never recounted a process by which authorship was determined, and even if he did we could rightly ask whether he was himself in a position to have accurate knowledge of it, or whether he had been deceived by his tribe into accepting too readily an inaccurate origin story. Likewise, Eusebius only documents what his contemporary church’s accepted as Scripture, without claiming to document how they determined authorship (he does of course provide scattered quotations from other authors that bear on how they determined authorship of works like Hebrews, but as already noted, when we bring those passages up, you dismiss them as irrelevant.)”
I’ve noticed that you vacillate in discussions about Athanasius et al, sometimes suggesting they never took a stand on NT authorship and other times suggesting they did take a stand but were wrong when they did so. It’s hard not to get the impression that you really don’t care which it is because the position you’re 100% committed to is that the traditional NT authorial claims cannot be right.
“The only actual historical evidence I see you resting your case on is that the churches came to consensus without a council. To make that claim of course, we have to set aside the books where consensus was not reach–at least not by the close of late antiquity–and moreover we have to set aside those Christian communities that did not concur in the consensus, and of course we have to ignore the non-christian ancient authors who studied and rejected the consensus.”
I’m glad to see you finally take notice of the great church council that never was, even though you’re trying to minimize its importance by nitpicking the exact date. You’d have a hard time going anywhere in the world today and finding a NT with a different table of contents from the one we all know. You can quibble about exactly how long that’s been the case, but there’s no denying that the consensus was reached in antiquity, not modernity.
“But even that more modest agreement is not probative. There was mutual influence that could very easily have driven a consensus. There were extremely influential figures who dominated the intellectual landscape, figures like Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, or Origen. There were also ecclesiastical authorities, bishops and patriarch–like Athanasius. These communities were not independent witnesses or judges, they directly influenced each other. By your own account of how the attribution spread, individual churches only got the attribution from other churches: that is, one church adopted the belief of another church on that other church’s word–that isn’t independent witness, and consensus arising from such interactions shouldn’t shock us. Finally, there was selection bias: those who disagreed either left or were forced out or simply never joined–which is why we cannot ignore the dissent of those outside the orthodox fold.”
My next-door neighbor and I are independent of each other, but I do not mean at all that we cannot be influenced by each other. Certainly, the church of Metropolis cast a bigger shadow than the church of Smallville. But it was only in the 11th century when material numbers of churches began being deprived of their agency. Until then, they all had a vote – only when it came to the NT TOC, there was no need to vote. That’s because they all just declared what was obvious to them when it became obvious to them.
To all:
This is my final post on this forum. (For context on this statement, refer back to post 393 above.)
Of course, any of you will be able to post to this thread for as long as you want; when I say I’m giving you the last word, I’m just referring to the last words I’ll be able to read before my subscription expires. Only if I refrain from responding further will you have the opportunity to have the last word. Even though I won’t be responding to anything you write, I will read it and consider it…just as I have read and considered everything else you have written here.
Unless they cut off my access sooner, the last time I’ll attempt to look at this site will be 5 pm on December 20. So if you want me to see it, post it before then. Otherwise, you can always communicate with me at my website (** you do not have permission to see this link **). (Robert, that even includes you; I didn’t see your post 390 until I logged in to post the string you see now see following it. Having poured out my heart in concluding my presence here, I’m lacking the energy and time to give the kind of detailed response you’re looking for. But I will consider thoughtfully what you wrote even though the rapport is lacking.)
My view, to summarize, is that the NT as we know it is the verdict of antiquity on NT authorship. Although my expression of this view may be idiosyncratic, the view itself is not. On the contrary, it has long been called the traditional view. Data about the authors was the only data that those who left us the NT added to what was originally written – and they added that data only in the titles of the books and the table of contents. They did not place any data within the texts themselves. Thus, if the ancients are right, the NT texts are products of the 1st century while the titles and TOC are products of the 2nd-5th centuries. This traditional view is what Bart Erhman was, in effect, challenging with his book “ Forged: Writing in the Name of God–Why the Bible’s Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are.” By his own admission, Bart was in his book not just relating his own view but also expressing the view of modern critical scholarship. Therefore, I believe his book faithfully encapsulates the modern view, just as Eusebius in HE 3.25, Athanasius in FL 39.5, and Augustine CF 33.6 together faithfully encapsulate the ancient view.
I trust modern scholars to have a firmer grasp on modern issues just as I trust ancient scholars to have a firmer grasp on ancient issues. Therefore, when the question is “Who Is Better Qualified to Determine Authorship of the NT Texts – Modern Scholars or Ancient Ones?” I figure me or someone else is going to have to have good reason to consider ancient scholars either liars (i.e. knowingly giving us author identities they know to be false) or lunatics (i.e. not necessarily crazy, but insufficiently judicious in making decisions about author identities) if we’re going to consider them to be giving us the wrong answer concerning the origins of Aunt Millie’s recipe. For we wouldn’t even know of Aunt Mille and Uncle Herman unless those closest to them in lineage had not told us about them and their little recipe.
I never came here expecting that I would change anyone’s mind, but I did come expecting to learn things. And I learn did. The main thing I learned is that modern scholars are weaker on NT authorship than I realized. It’s not that they’re anti-faith, for, as you’ve rightly said, some of their practitioners believe. It’s that they’re anti-history and anti-logic. And it’s not that you fellows here haven’t done well in representing the modern scholarly view; it’s that the tribe that you’ve joined is held captive to a flawed methodology – specifically, a circular methodology when it comes to NT authorship.
Robert, my sense of fair play won’t leave me alone. You knew a deadline was coming, but you didn’t know exactly when. I would have been disappointed to have put in the effort to write what you did and not get a response. Therefore, I will respond to your post 390 within 24 hours. That will still leave you time to have the last word on that post. Again, I won’t be posting here anymore…with this one exception. (See? Exceptions don’t eliminate rules.)
As for what you just said about moving this thread to another subforum, I’m greatly disappointed that you’ll be moving it. Reversal of antiquity’s verdict on NT authorship is the fundamental reason that all quests for the historical Jesus have gone awry. All future quests will also go awry until and unless the traditional, historical, and correct authorial ascriptions are restored. There’s no way to get the history of Jesus right until and unless the primary historical sources are free from suppression and misrepresentation. And by my lights, there was no other category that was even close to being more relevant for that thread than the Historical Jesus. But as for how you manage your forum, I will no longer be active in your community and therefore will have no say so in – nor even any visibility into – what you do or don’t do.
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