Ad 395
For argument, I’ll grant your point that the Didache was beside the point you were making.
I do not grant that Hebrews is irrelevant, let alone illegitimate to bring up; as I said, Hebrews is important precisely because it gives us some of the best insight we have into how the early Christians were thinking about authorship and canonicity.
The aphorism that hard cases make bad law doesn’t mean the proponent of a theory can dismiss as irrelevant counter-examples that pose grave problems to his thesis.
To be very explicit about its importance: in the case of Hebrews, unlike most books of the NT, we have records of early Christian authors very explicitly discussing precisely the consideration they made in determining authorship. If we want to understand how early Christians determined authorship, how they reasoned about authorship, (and how authorship relates to canonicity) you simply cannot dismiss Hebrews as “irrelevant”: in the case of Hebrews–unlike with almost any other NT text–they tell us quite precisely how they arrived at their conclusions and what considerations they made in getting to those conclusions. We have this explicit record because Hebrews was sufficiently controversial that it remained an open (and so discussed) question well into the period when patristic writings become abundant. Thus it is natural that it has been heavily mentioned here. It is heavily cited because it provides some of the best, by far, insight we have into the very topic under discussion. In fact, this is just what I said in the next paragraph, which you describe as a “non sequitur.”
As to you response to the quotation that began, “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”: it was not a non-sequitur. “Such things” referred to the examples I had given in the immediately preceding paragraph, e.g., Clement and Origin acknowledging that the Greek of Hebrews did not come from Paul, even as they support (in various ways) the attribution of the epistle to Paul. In saying this, I was responding to your prior point that we should set the controversial cases aside, and only look at the 20 works that Eusebius says were generally accepted.
I don’t see how you can accuse me of arguing from silence when I am the one trying to argue from the clearest records we have about how the early Christians determined authorship, while you are the one trying to dismiss those passages as irrelevant and illegitimate.
More later.
And for the record, while I appreciate the gesture, I do not particularly want the last word. I’d be more interested to see your response. A nice thing about this sort of venue is that if I feel I have something further that I need to add to the record, nothing prevents me from adding it.
(To all: I’m responding to this post from Robert only because he posted it without knowing the doors were about to close.)
Robert, in response to your post 390:
“Let’s recap. You made the claim: ‘No [you’re not making assumptions …], 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.’ So I asked you to quote exactly what they said about this process. You don’t.”
I had already given you Eusebius HE 3.25, Athanasius FL 39.5, and Augustine CF 33.6 as key texts, so I didn’t – and don’t – know what more you want from me.
“Instead, you ask me to quote something else.”
As I recall, you agreed that what I asked you for was information worth having, though you seemed to resent me for asking you about it.
“But you’ve already just said, “Where their descriptions lack details we would like to have, we have to make reasonable assumptions that supplement their accounts.” So, yes, you are making assumptions. Why did you try to deny it?”
Everyone makes assumptions, but not about everything. We’d be foolish to claim otherwise. I must have been denying that I was making some specific assumption or kind of assumption you were accusing me of making. I would not, for example, make an assumption about a fact I had evidence to support. Who needs an assumption where they have evidence?
“I would too, but I’ve never made any such claim. There are crucial aspects of the process that we simply do not know. The difference is that I am not willing to make unwarranted assumptions, indeed assumptions that even contain my conclusions.”
I agree that we shouldn’t make assumptions that contain our conclusions. That’s one of my main complaints about the modern view of NT authorship. See my post 396 to Porphyry.
“And those you cannot convince are apparently not open-minded.”
Not necessarily.
“Hence your description of me as blind to my own prejudices and beyond hope even if someone were to make a good case.”
I honestly think you are blind to your own prejudices, and I don’t think you would respond if someone were to make a good case. Maybe I’m wrong about that; I hope I am.
“Such a view seems to indicate your unwillingness to fully submit your views to critical questioning and analysis.”
My coming to this site (one I view as hostile to my positions), paying the subscription, and, more importantly, devoting hours to writing posts is ample evidence of my willingness to fully submit my views to critical questioning and analysis. The fact that you don’t recognize this contributes to my perception of you as not open-minded.
“Yet once again, I must ask you to stop mischaracterizing the views of others. It reflects poorly on you, and it degrades the quality of discourse on this forum. I have in fact noted their ecclesiastical contexts and indicated where this context also has liabilities.”
Whether I call a view of yours good or bad, I am not mischaracterizing you – I’m just telling you what I see. If that reflects poorly on me, so be it. I have told you the truth from my perspective. I’m open to having my view altered, but you need to give me reasons to alter it – not just say I’ve got it wrong and try to shame me for it.
“You’ve misunderstood. It is the process of the collection of Pauline letters that is crucial to this question, as I’ve emphasized from the first page of this discussion. It just so happens that the first collection we know of is that of Marcion. You assume that every letter was actually sent and consequently vouched for by the recipients and consider the collation, collection, and editing of these Pauline letters to be a red herring, but it is not.”
I don’t see anything in the processes referred to by Eusebius et al in the key texts as hinging on what was and wasn’t in letter collections.
“If you can only make assumptions about the earliest processes, there’s obviously no way to document how these processes may have changed over time.”
The earliest process was the handing over a text by an author to recipients or to a courier who would deliver it to the intended recipients. Thereafter, there is the handing down of the text from one generation to the next. There is also the copying and passing around of said texts among churches for public reading. Why complicate this? The only other aspect of process that you and I have both expressed an interest in is more data about how the disputed 7 made the cut. You lose me when you talk about processes “changing over time.”
“But we have already seen the evidence for the process of compromise and accommodation, with writings of disputed authorship nonetheless still being considered valuable and worth reading, some of which continued to be included among other New Testament texts for a while (Shepherd of Hermas, the Letter of Barnabas, the Didache, and Letters of Clement) and others remaining until Medieval times (two independent versions of Letters to the Laodiceans). The first printed New Testament of the Reformation did not consider some of the books to be apostolic. These disputes were finally resolved for Roman Catholics by the Council of Trent and for Protestant churches by their own lights.”
This is fringe stuff. If this is worth sifting through, it’s only after having settled how the major texts were regarded. To be more specific, if you don’t think Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, what’s the point in quibbling about smaller books?
“You want to believe that this process of compromise and accommodation was only interested in determining who was the actual author of each book, but we know that is not in fact the case.”
I think it is you who are wanting to believe something. I’m just looking at the evidence. Even the Jerome quote where he explains why he can tolerate Hebrews in the canon indicates that it was authorship that got Hebrews in contention for Jerome’s approval – with its orthodoxy being the factor that got him over the hump. If not for the belief of many that Paul was the author of Hebrews, we have no reason to believe it would have ever landed in the canon because there were many texts considered orthodox that did not make it into canon and what they all of them have in common is that none of them have an authenticated apostle as its author.
“Books were allowed because they were considered orthodox and edifying, books were allowed because they were old even if they were not apostolic, books were allowed to remain because others thought they were apostolic.”
There are no books in the NT canon whose author was considered by most to be someone other than Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, Peter, James, and Jude. Nor are there any books outside the NT canon whose author was considered by most to be one of these eight men or some other apostle, co-worker, or brother of the Lord. That says something. It says a lot.
“I think its obvious to most that you’re the one swallowing camels … and elephants.”
On that important point, consider the two of us as agreeing to disagree.
“There are significant unexamined assumptions in the first paragraph above. Let us know if you are willing to examine your assumptions.”
You did not come to me; I came to you. I’ve been submitting my views to you folks daily for two months. Enough is enough.
“Occam’s razor is an epistemological principle pertaining to the unnecessary multiplication of hypothetical entities, it should not be a method for avoiding questions for which we do not have answers.”
We agree!
“With respect to the second paragraph, who are you to say what is and is not legitimate discussion topic for scholars?”
You’ve got a point. If they want to major on minors, that’s their business.
“And obviously the scholarly discussion has advanced well beyond what you yourself consider minutiae.”
Again, we agree! But I grieve to see such otherwise intelligent people waste their time counting angels, as it were, on the head of a pin.
And from another recent exchange:
MG: “Robert, I don’t think there’s enough rapport between you and I to engage further.”
Robert: “Speak for yourself, Mike.”
MG: “If you think there’s enough rapport between you and me to engage further, you know where to find me.”
(To all: I’m sending this to Porphyry because he said he’d rather have a response than the last word and there’s still 72 hours on my ticket.)
Porphry, re: your post 403
Regarding Hebrews, if you’ll go back and carefully re-read what I wrote, you’ll see that I acknowledged and spoke to most of the points you’re making here. My main point was that Hebrews is overused, and that it was being brought up too early in the discussion about NT authorship. I was clear to say that I was happy, even eager, to discuss Hebrews, but not prematurely. I was not saying that we should talk about “the Eusebius 20” INSTEAD of Hebrews; I was saying we should talk about the Eusebius 20 BEFORE we talked about Hebrews.
The only point you made in 403 about Hebrews which I did not speak to and which helps explain why a premature emphasis on Hebrews cripples the project of settling NT authorship is your statement:
“Hebrews is important precisely because it gives us some of the best insight we have into how the early Christians were thinking about authorship and canonicity.”
My view, by contrast, is that it gives us more insight into how later Christians were thinking about authorship than it does about how early Christians were thinking about it. To be more specific, Origen’s ruminations on the authorship of Hebrews, especially if we read them in full (rather acting as if “God only knows” is all he ever said about it), show the problematic nature of attempting to determine authorship from the text alone. The farther Christians got from the 1st century when the texts were first handed down and authorship was best known by the handing over process and the repeated testimony about it, the more Christians began doubting whether the generations before them had gotten it right. And that trend has continued right down to this day. In other words, I do not see how discussing Hebrews helps us understand how there came to be 20 undisputed texts. When I see no curiosity about how there came to be 20 undisputed texts, I see it as a sign of a mind that is not open. Everyone interested in reliable history ought to be curious about that.
“I don’t see how you can accuse me of arguing from silence when I am the one trying to argue from the clearest records we have about how the early Christians determined authorship, while you are the one trying to dismiss those passages as irrelevant and illegitimate.”
I wasn’t “accusing” you of arguing from silence (the hundred years without extant explicit reference to the names Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John); I was just emphasizing the obvious. You have to argue modern critical scholarship’s “anonymity of the gospels until their christening” proposal from silence because there are no extant texts saying the gospels were ever anonymous. It’s a weak place to start, but that’s not your fault. Unfortunately for you, modern critical scholarship has no way to overcome that weak starting point.
Robert,
You have invited me to opine on your proposal to move this thread – titled “Who is better qualified to determine authorship of the NT texts – modern scholars or ancient ones?” from the category titled “The Historical Jesus: What can we say about what the historical Jesus really said, did, and experienced?” to the category titled “Christianity After the New Testament: Issues concerning every other aspect of early Christianity from roughly 100-325 CE.”
Only if I thought the NT texts were authored during the period 100-325 would I make this move. I think most people on both sides of the NT authorship issue think that at least most of the NT texts were written in the 1st century. Therefore, placing this thread in a category covering the 2nd through early 4th centuries would be misplacing it. Moreover, I dare say all people on both sides of the NT authorship issue agree that the NT texts were written well before the formation of the NT. Therefore, to put this thread in a category labeled “Christianity After the New Testament” seems exactly backward. Thus I think the move you propose is ill-advised both as regards the category title and its subtitle.
Back in post 212, you justified your proposal on the basis that 100-325 was when most of the ancient scholars who determined NT authorship lived. I can appreciate this rationale to some degree, but ancient scholars are only half the scholars referenced in the thread’s title. Such a move would tilt the seesaw one way. Since the thread’s center of gravity is NT authorship, I think that’s the better way to categorize it.
(Perhaps you also lean toward moving this thread to the 100-325 period because deep down you have an inner sense (unspoken and perhaps even unconscious) that NT formation was indeed driven by authorship and so in your mind the scholars who lived 100-325 had the authors on their minds as they were dealing with all the texts their movement had created.)
Removing tongue from cheek, NT authorship has everything in the world to do with the historical Jesus – and vice versa – because 1) from my viewpoint the NT texts are the primary historical sources for his life and 2) from your viewpoint they at least contain more traces of historical data about him than any other single source. Therefore, determining their authorship and determining his historicity are issues that are inextricably related for both sides.
The degree of historical value to be ascribed to each of the 27 texts with respect to the life of Jesus is a function of multiple factors, but the author’s identity is one of the most important. For those who hold the traditional view, authorship of all 27 NT texts was settled long ago; and all 8 authors were considered contemporaries of Jesus. Obviously, this implies that the NT holds significant historical value for holders of that view. By contrast, modern critical scholars hold that only 7 of the NT texts have authors that are known (“the undisputed Paulines”), though there are a minority of those scholars who hold to only 4. There are varying degrees of speculation about the authors of the bulk of the texts and the subject continues to be studied. Thus for modern critical scholarship the historical value of the NT with respect to Jesus is relatively low but also quite fluid. And even though authorship is static in the traditional view, modern views of what the ancients actually thought about that authorship are not uniform (as evidenced in many posts in this thread) and therefore not fully static either. All that adds up to a great deal of fluidity. Every time a view of NT authorship changes, it potentially alters the historical value of the NT with respect to the life of Jesus. So, not only are the issues of determining NT authorship and determining Jesus’ historicity inextricably related, it is also the case that both must be continually monitored because of the fluidity of authorship views. And this applies to both sides of the argument – traditional and modern critical.
Theology divides us, but history unites us. Not because we see history the same way, but because we both believe it’s important to get it right. And adjust it when it’s not. To detach the subject of NT authorship from the subject of the historical Jesus is to separate a tree’s roots (at least some of them) from its trunk.
I’m going to respond in what I plan to be quick, one-off notes because I’m not sure I’ll have the leisure to compose a longer and more cohesive reply:
My view, by contrast, is that it gives us more insight into how later Christians were thinking about authorship than it does about how early Christians were thinking about it. To be more specific, Origen’s ruminations on the authorship of Hebrews, especially if we read them in full (rather acting as if “God only knows” is all he ever said about it), show the problematic nature of attempting to determine authorship from the text alone. The farther Christians got from the 1st century when the texts were first handed down and authorship was best known by the handing over process and the repeated testimony about it, the more Christians began doubting whether the generations before them had gotten it right.
I’m not sure I understand how this squares with your larger position. Origen is early third century. If he is already so far removed from the initial handing over of the NT that the tradition naming the authors of the NT had faded by his time and become doubtful, which early Christian scholars are we to trust?
And as to using linguistic analysis to determine authorship: are you saying that it is simply too unreliable to be used, even by figures like Origen or Clement of Alexandria?
I do agree that we shouldn’t blindly assume that what Christians thought in the early third century is necessarily the same as what Christians thought in the late first or early second century. I may return to that point if time permits.
And reaching back to 396:
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.
Just so. And the thing is, it just doesn’t seem that difficult to me to explain how someone like Irenaeus might have been mistaken or misled about who wrote books roughly a century earlier. My hypothetical relies on perfectly unremarkable human behavior.
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.
Yes and no. There is a difference between assessing the likelihood of some precise series of events just happening and assessing the likelihood that a series of events did happen after we have the outcome. The latter is governed by Bayes’ theorem.
The odds of dealing any 5 card poker hand is roughly 1/2.6 million, so if I ask you the odds of me getting dealt the hand, ace of hearts, ace of diamonds, five of diamonds, jack of spades, two of spades, out of a well shuffled deck, the odds will be ~1/2.6 million. But if I get dealt that hand, it would be silly to assume, based only on the improbability of the dealer randomly dealing that hand, that the dealer stacked the deck.
My point is you can’t simply say my hypothetical is improbable considered in itself and therefore it can be dismissed as unlikely, my theory written off as strained, and my overarching project waved off as hypocritical. Its probability or improbability has be to assessed in light of what we know actually happened, and the relevant probability is posterior probability.
I’ll turn to that discussion, in the rest of your comment 396, next.
Porphyry, regarding your post 409:
“I’m not sure I understand how this squares with your larger position. Origen is early third century. If he is already so far removed from the initial handing over of the NT that the tradition naming the authors of the NT had faded by his time and become doubtful, which early Christian scholars are we to trust?”
I’m not saying that the tradition had faded by Origen’s time. On the contrary, he makes clear mention of it. Neither am I saying that I don’t trust Origen. His thoughts are too many and too nuanced to discuss here and now, but he did not explicitly deny Pauline authorship and did explicitly say that the thoughts were Paul’s. If a scribe was involved, which certainly is a possibility, I don’t think that justifies denying Pauline authorship. Neither did Origen.
“And as to using linguistic analysis to determine authorship: are you saying that it is simply too unreliable to be used, even by figures like Origen or Clement of Alexandria?”
I’m not saying it’s too unreliable to be used – just that it’s too unreliable to be used to the exclusion of other evidence, especially other stronger evidence. If my wife hands me a typewritten story and tells me she wrote it, I’m only wasting money and inviting doubt to have it linguistically analyzed to determine authorship.
If I did want linguistic analysis of an ancient text, I’d certainly prefer to have it done by Origen or Clement of Alexandria over any modern scholar. Conversing if the analysis was to be of modern texts, I’d prefer it to be done by modern scholars. There’s more to understanding a language than grammars and glossaries.
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.
Yes, that is an argument from silence, and it is not conclusive by itself. But given that it is only a probablistic argument, it is a pretty strong one. It is not simply that we don’t have record of people naming the four evangelists until Irenaeus, it is that we have Christian writings that use the gospels, some of those authors customarily name their sources, yet none of them name the evangelists. By itself, that doesn’t prove they didn’t think the traditional evangelists wrote the gospels, but it strongly suggests it. Given that we must content ourselves with determining what is most likely the case, given the known facts and scarcity of records, it is quite reasonable to think (unless we get further evidence suggesting otherwise) that they probably did not know the gospels with the traditional attributions.
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.
Why in heaven’s name should I have to explain why there are exactly four gospels? I can suggest a reason why there are more than one: Very early–late first and early second century–different gospels attained currency in different communities, as some of those communities developed strong and amicable relations with each other, as they came to see each other as allies in the doctrinal struggles within Christianity, they recognized and eventually adopted each other’s gospels.
Or if you could explain how the four gospels became anonymous, because whoever authored each one knew his identity.
There are any number of explanations. Sometimes authors hide their identity–like I’m doing now and like Clement thought Paul did in Hebrews. Sometimes people simply don’t keep track of who wrote a work. Anonymous manuscripts are not rare, I don’t see why I need to explain something that is fairly common. The fact you think this is a critical weakness of my account, that I bear the burden of explaining something that is pretty ordinary, suggests you have a view of how texts were created and transmitted that is not representative of the historical realities.
|Personally, I tend to think the authors of the gospels–at least the synoptics–intended them to be anonymous and so hid their identities. If the gospels weren’t written by witnesses or people close to the events, it would make sense for those authors not to advertise their identities as authors. The vividness of the narrative would be greatly diminished if the reader knew it was written by someone well removed in time and geography from the events he narrates.
Or how they came to be written around the same time.
Again, I don’t see why I need to offer an explanation for this. More broadly, we see, both before and after the gospels, scriptures being written pretty freely: See for example the Enochic literature or the intertestamental prophetic literature at Qumran, on the Jewish side, or consider Marcion’s Evangelion, or the Gospel of Thomas, or the Didache from roughly the same time as the NT, or see the avalanche of Christian apochrypha following the NT period. In that sense the gospels are not special. They are very much part of a larger and well established pattern of ongoing scripture-writing.
Considered not just as scripture but as gospels, their is something novel. We see gospels being composed more or less continuously from the time of Mark on. Luke and Matthew obviously know–and presumably were also inspired by–Mark. The only further coincidence is John who is considerably later than Mark, but who also may very well have been acquainted with one or more of the synoptics. In other words, Mark is special insofar as it seems to have formed the specific genre that we know as the “gospel”. But once we have Mark, I don’t see a further problem.
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.
I don’t think this is mysterious. It is natural that as you get farther from the oral kyrigma, you become more concerned with the text and its authority. As time passes, you have only the texts to use to settle theological disputes or give content to your faith, and so your faith becomes ever more dependent on the text’s accuracy and authority. So as Christians encounter versions of Christianity that have their own distinctive dogma and their own scriptures, it becomes imperative that you be confident your scriptures are more authoritative than theirs. “Our Scriptures are apostolic; theirs are the corruptions of heretics.” Those are exactly the assertions that we see repeatedly in the record. The problem is, those are the bare assertions of the orthodox, presented without evidence. If you choose simply to accept the polemical assertions of the orthodox against the beliefs of their theological opponents, that isn’t how one does objective history.
I also don’t need to say that the earliest adopters of the gospels were entirely ambivalent to authorship. I can perfectly well say that they were curious, even as curious as later generations, but the legend hadn’t had time to develop yet, so they just had to live with the mystery.
If my wife hands me a typewritten story and tells me she wrote it, I’m only wasting money and inviting doubt to have it linguistically analyzed to determine authorship.
Yes, but Paul didn’t hand you–or Origen–a copy of Hebrews. Matthew didn’t hand you–or Athanasius–a copy of the gospel of Matthew. Obviously if we had that sort of evidence, all of this would be irrelevant.
I’m not saying that the tradition had faded by Origen’s time. On the contrary, he makes clear mention of it.
But he, and some uncounted number of his contemporaries, were able to (and did in fact) doubt it. He knew there was a tradition, but he wasn’t ready to accept it as true.
If Origen can question the tradition of attribution, why would it be preposterous for a contemporary scholar to question it?
he did not explicitly deny Pauline authorship . . . If a scribe was involved, which certainly is a possibility, I don’t think that justifies denying Pauline authorship.
Origen is pretty clear that the Greek is not Paul’s. He gives as his own (obviously tentative) opinion that it was written later by a student of Paul who recalled his teaching. That is not just a scribe; that is an author. Just the as the traditional view takes Mark as the author of Mark though they hold he was recording what Peter told him.
Porphyry, regarding your post 410:
“And the thing is, it just doesn’t seem that difficult to me to explain how someone like Irenaeus might have been mistaken or misled about who wrote books roughly a century earlier.”
I find that sentence hard to process -both because you, aside from this sentence, seem to be a logical person and because Irenaeus’s statements about the four evangelists were so clear and bold. Besides, I thought you agreed that the end point of your scenarios was 180-185 when Irenaeus invoked the four names. Are you now moving that goal post?
“My hypothetical relies on perfectly unremarkable human behavior.”
As I took pains to explain in post 396, I don’t, generally speaking, dispute your assertions about the normalcy of behaviors you chose to describe. But I part company with you when you seem to apply them to all ancient people. Recall, for example, that I was willing to concede that there were gullible people in ancient times just as there are gullible people in our times, but I was unwilling to concede that there were no skeptical people in ancient times to balance and contain the people with gullible tendencies as there are in modern times.
I was unable to figure out how your three paragraphs that include references to Bayes’ theorem, a poker hand, and posterior probability apply to my critique (post 396) of your thesis (post 384). If you think my critique rests solely on probability comparisons, you’re underestimating it. As for the probability comparison’s themselves, I wasn’t formulating them retrospectively but rather deriving them from ancient attitudes and behaviors. And as for bringing Bayes’ theorem into our discussion, does cutting up potatoes require a surgeon’s scalpel?
Porphyry, in response to your post 412:
“Yes, that is an argument from silence, and it is not conclusive by itself. But given that it is only a probablistic argument, it is a pretty strong one. It is not simply that we don’t have record of people naming the four evangelists until Irenaeus, it is that we have Christian writings that use the gospels, some of those authors customarily name their sources, yet none of them name the evangelists. By itself, that doesn’t prove they didn’t think the traditional evangelists wrote the gospels, but it strongly suggests it. Given that we must content ourselves with determining what is most likely the case, given the known facts and scarcity of records, it is quite reasonable to think (unless we get further evidence suggesting otherwise) that they probably did not know the gospels with the traditional attributions.”
Even if four gospels had been accepted as anonymous, the people accepting them would immediately need some way to differentiate them in order to discuss them. Why don’t those unique identifiers show up in writings during the hundred years?
“Why in heaven’s name should I have to explain why there are exactly four gospels? I can suggest a reason why there are more than one: Very early–late first and early second century–different gospels attained currency in different communities, as some of those communities developed strong and amicable relations with each other, as they came to see each other as allies in the doctrinal struggles within Christianity, they recognized and eventually adopted each other’s gospels.”
You ask a question you seem to think is rhetorical, but then go on to spell out, unwittingly, why my question was valid. That is, you explain why there could be more than one without explaining how and why the process you describe would stop at four.
“There are any number of explanations. Sometimes authors hide their identity–like I’m doing now and like Clement thought Paul did in Hebrews. Sometimes people simply don’t keep track of who wrote a work. Anonymous manuscripts are not rare, I don’t see why I need to explain something that is fairly common. The fact you think this is a critical weakness of my account, that I bear the burden of explaining something that is pretty ordinary, suggests you have a view of how texts were created and transmitted that is not representative of the historical realities.”
There is nothing “pretty ordinary” about writing anonymous texts. For one thing, it’s hard to pull off. And it’s even less ordinary for people to accept an anonymous text without curiosity. What’s ordinary is everyone wanting to know the identity of the author from the get-go.
“Again, I don’t see why I need to offer an explanation for this. More broadly, we see, both before and after the gospels, scriptures being written pretty freely: See for example the Enochic literature or the intertestamental prophetic literature at Qumran, on the Jewish side, or consider Marcion’s Evangelion, or the Gospel of Thomas, or the Didache from roughly the same time as the NT, or see the avalanche of Christian apochrypha following the NT period. In that sense the gospels are not special. They are very much part of a larger and well established pattern of ongoing scripture-writing.”
There was no established pattern for a gospel in Judaism or Christianity before the appearance of these four – no more, no less – anonymous gospels appeared, all following the same general format (especially three of them) all written around the same time according to your thesis. How can you possibly think this is easier to swallow than four contemporaries of Jesus writing what they knew of him, following the pattern of the first one who wrote?
“Considered not just as scripture but as gospels, their is something novel. We see gospels being composed more or less continuously from the time of Mark on. Luke and Matthew obviously know–and presumably were also inspired by–Mark. The only further coincidence is John who is considerably later than Mark, but who also may very well have been acquainted with one or more of the synoptics. In other words, Mark is special insofar as it seems to have formed the specific genre that we know as the “gospel”. But once we have Mark, I don’t see a further problem.”
But this is precisely one of the areas where your thesis is weak – unless you’re wanting to include in it that the four anonymous authors were not anonymous with each other and were actually collaborating. But then you’d have to explain what kind of people would construct such a conspiracy and why.
“I don’t think this is mysterious. It is natural that as you get farther from the oral kyrigma, you become more concerned with the text and its authority. As time passes, you have only the texts to use to settle theological disputes or give content to your faith, and so your faith becomes ever more dependent on the text’s accuracy and authority. So as Christians encounter versions of Christianity that have their own distinctive dogma and their own scriptures, it becomes imperative that you be confident your scriptures are more authoritative than theirs. “Our Scriptures are apostolic; theirs are the corruptions of heretics.” Those are exactly the assertions that we see repeatedly in the record. The problem is, those are the bare assertions of the orthodox, presented without evidence. If you choose simply to accept the polemical assertions of the orthodox against the beliefs of their theological opponents, that isn’t how one does objective history.”
The earliest Christianity was Jewish Christianity, and Jews were people of texts. And the texts that mattered most were those of the Jewish prophets. Indeed, orality came along with the apostles, but texts were important from the beginning.
“I also don’t need to say that the earliest adopters of the gospels were entirely ambivalent to authorship. I can perfectly well say that they were curious, even as curious as later generations, but the legend hadn’t had time to develop yet, so they just had to live with the mystery.”
This is where you’re begging the question.
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.
Do we have any particular reason to think this must have happened uniformly across the Roman empire all at the same time? I don’t think my position depends on that; I can perfectly well say that that the idea was adopted over time, spreading from one place to another over time. That said, it does seem to me to be sufficiently obvious as a step that it could well have happened spontaneously in several places or simply to have been rapidly adopted after it was once suggested.
If you accept the gospels at face value and you are convinced they are true and authentic, it seems reasonable to think they were most likely written by apostles, or at the very least by people who were intimates of the apostles. If they are what they purport to be, who would have been in a position to write them, aside from an apostle or someone closely associated with one or more apostles? Calling them–as Justin does–the memoirs of the apostles is perfectly natural once you accept them as authentic records.
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.
It might be natural to identify the gospels as memoirs of the apostles, but it takes another, much bigger, step to say which apostles. Legends take time to grow and spread. And legends often develop by degrees. You seem to think that every time I suggest a mistake was made and spread that this was a concerted and unanimous choice by everyone–as though people have to decide as a group that they will adopt a new belief. (Perhaps this is why you think the lack of an ecumenical council is so telling.) That isn’t what I’m saying. I’m not saying one day all Christians woke up and spontaneously said, “I’m sick of having anonymous gospels; I’ll adopt a new and utterly unfounded belief about who wrote them,” and as it turns out they all happened to adopt the same arbitrary belief at the same time. I’m suggesting that one person makes one assumption or one leap of logic, that assumption gets reported as fact and others accept it. Then another person makes another mistake, and that mistake likewise gets reported as fact and spreads.
I really think you would do well to consider the known cases where misinformation has formed and spread. I mean, how many Catholics today think that there was a Saint John Lateran? Where did that belief come from? It is an idiotic mistake, and yet completely understandable. How many Catholics believe in the virgin martyr St. Philomena, although we know exactly the shoddy basis for thinking she ever existed? Again, the issues you are raising as problems I need to answer are of a sort that makes me question whether you are able to seriously entertain what I am suggesting, or whether you are so locked into your narrative you can’t even envision another. People can and do (on their own, without coercion) come to accept things that are not well founded. Uniformity of belief is not–pace Tertullian–a guarantee that the belief is true.
Substantially the same answer can be given to your critique of what you labeled my 3rd scenario, with the important clarification that (as I know you know) Irenaeus belongs to the late second century, not the late first.
the traditional view doesn’t require that we assume the custodians of the documents acted abnormally, but the modern view does.
As I’ve repeatedly tried to alert you, the sorts of mistakes I attribute to the early Christians in arriving at the authorship of the gospels are not abnormal. On the contrary they are entirely normal. These are just the kinds of mistakes that people have made and spread throughout history.
Which brings us to this:
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.
I do not think ancient people, on the whole, were more gullible than modern people. I do strongly suspect that the earliest generations of Christians (let’s say roughly the first century of Christians) tended to be on the gullible or fanatical end of the spectrum–just as I think faith healers and snake handlers today are on the gullible end of the spectrum. And during that same time, there were plenty of very smart people who knew the claims of Christianity and rejected it as ludicrous madness. Galen, for example, multiple times uses Christians as exemplars and paradigms of unreasonable people who can’t be argued with. So I agree ancient and modern people both run the gamut from naive and credulous to skeptical rationalists. It’s just that I tend to think it is the first Christians–the ones from whom all this develops and spreads–who were credulous, and those who mocked them as crazy were the rationalists.
Look at Paul, he thinks he has conversed with a crucified man, he thinks he has been transported (in some mystical experience) to heaven, he accepts speaking in tongues as authentic (though he knows perfectly well it makes Christian look to outsiders like they are mad). Of course, you are a believer, so you presumably take these claims at face value, and that’s fine, but I look at that and ask myself, if a random person approaches me and tells me these things about himself, what do I make of him? Well, I will be strongly inclined to think he is just another nut, like the many other religious nuts I’ve encountered in my time. And will I be convinced he is not just another nut because he has gained devoted and sincere followers? No, I will think they are credulous too. When I read the Corinthian correspondence this is the very definite impression I get.
Now, that is all suspicion, nothing is proven or definitively ruled out. But if I’m trying to decide what is most likely, given the information I have, the answer is pretty obvious to me.
Now as Christianity gets older–as people are born into it and raised drinking it from their mother’s paps–, you get people who are not generally the gullible sort but who are committed to it because they were raised on it. It has informed their worldview, and they take the truths of their faith as fixed points as they reason about everything else they know. I say this as someone who knows firsthand how dogma imbibed from childhood can cloud one’s assessment of the facts and skew one’s reasoning, making certain possibilities unthinkable.
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.
It can move both ways. In my own case, I only escaped because a fortuitous set of but-for causes all fell into place. These didn’t convince me of anything, they didn’t prove or disprove anything, but they gave me the, so to speak, emotional distance from my faith, my church, my tribe that I needed to start asking the hard questions seriously. If those things hadn’t happened to fall into place for me, I doubt I would have been able to ask the hard questions–really ask the hard questions, in a way that I was genuinely open to seeing what the answer was and not just finding a way to prove true the faith I already had. I would, in other words, still be using sophism to convince both myself and 20-year-old college kids that Catholicism is not only intellectually defensible but demonstrably true.
But again, I return to an earlier point: look at how actual legends take hold. When something gets repeated often enough it tends to take on certainty. And good stories–things that seem to make sense of things, sometimes too much sense of things, or things that confirm people’s prior convictions–tend to get repeated often. As one out of innumerable examples, look at the myth of the murder of Kitty Genovese and the bystander effect. the story was debunked long ago, yet people still cite it because it is a good story: it is shocking, memorable, and seems to make sense. Not only people, even psychology textbooks cite it incorrectly (or at least they did until recently), again, because it is too good a story not to be true. It is pedagogically effective.
Yes, there are always skeptics, and sometimes those skeptics manage to roll a legend back once it takes hold, but it is generally a long hard slog. The story is halfway round the world before the truth gets its shoes on.
More important than the work of the skeptic and rationalists is the inscrutable movement of social allegiances. The formation and destruction of tribes that spread their own narratives. I think the people who join and leave religions principally because of intellectual arguments is small. Most people, I’m convinced, are moved more by their allegiance to the group. Most reformed Baptists aren’t reformed Baptists because they coolly and disinterestedly assessed the five points of Calvinism and decided it was the best interpretation of Scripture; they join because their neighbors are really kind people who reached out to them when they needed friends and introduced them to a ready-made community of warm and caring people. Most people join religions because they want to be part of the group. They leave churches because they stopped feeling attached to the group. When people are in the group, they will fight hard to defend its narrative and dogma. And as people begin to feel alienated from their religious group they will likely find intellectual reasons to reject the religion’s doctrine.
I’m rambling, but the point is the rise and fall of religions has much more to do with sociology than it does with the defensibly of doctrine. That is why certain religions dominate certain areas at certain times and others dominate other areas at other times. It isn’t about the arguments. But that is a different issue than the general tendency of good stories to get more certain as time goes by.
As to your final doozy–where you add phrases to my paragraph and ask how it changes the meaning–I honestly don’t understand your point.
“And the thing is, it just doesn’t seem that difficult to me to explain how someone like Irenaeus might have been mistaken or misled about who wrote books roughly a century earlier.”
I find that sentence hard to process -both because you, aside from this sentence, seem to be a logical person and because Irenaeus’s statements about the four evangelists were so clear and bold. Besides, I thought you agreed that the end point of your scenarios was 180-185 when Irenaeus invoked the four names. Are you now moving that goal post?
I don’t understand what you find illogical. Nor do I understand how I’m moving the goal posts. I may be overlooking some blunder I made, but I don’t see it.
Porphyry, this is in response to your post 413:
“Yes, but Paul didn’t hand you–or Origen–a copy of Hebrews. Matthew didn’t hand you–or Athanasius–a copy of the gospel of Matthew. Obviously if we had that sort of evidence, all of this would be irrelevant.”
Ok, have it your way: If my parents hand me a copy of Great Aunt Millie’s recipe for German chocolate cake that has been handed down in our family for umpteen generations, I’m only wasting money and inviting doubt to have it linguistically analyzed to determine if this recipe was really hers.
“But he, and some uncounted number of his contemporaries, were able to (and did in fact) doubt it. He knew there was a tradition, but he wasn’t ready to accept it as true.”
So? My argument has never been that no one ever had any doubts about the authorship of any NT book.
“If Origen can question the tradition of attribution, why would it be preposterous for a contemporary scholar to question it?”
If a contemporary scholar held Origen’s view on authorship of all the NT texts, I would not call him preposterous. But they only seem to want to side with him when it comes to Hebrews.
“Origen is pretty clear that the Greek is not Paul’s. He gives as his own (obviously tentative) opinion that it was written later by a student of Paul who recalled his teaching. That is not just a scribe; that is an author. Just the as the traditional view takes Mark as the author of Mark though they hold he was recording what Peter told him.”
It wouldn’t have bothered me if GMark had been dubbed GPeter.
By the way, you’re demonstrating one of my earlier points that premature discussions about Hebrews run out the clock so that proper attention is never given by modern scholars to the fact that somehow, someway, the authorship of 20 texts (4 gospels, 1 Acts, 13 Paul, 1 Peter, 1 John) were undisputed no later than the time of Eusebius. (“We’ll just wear them down by talking incessantly about rape and incest; and once they’re exhausted and give up, we will allow abortion for any reason whatsoever.” I’m not suggesting this is your, or anyone else’s, intent, but it is the recurring outcome.)
Porphyry,
I was just reading your latest posts – 416 and 417. The most important thing I read was the last sentence of 416, which is:
“As to your final doozy–where you add phrases to my paragraph and ask how it changes the meaning–I honestly don’t understand your point.”
Please…don’t read or respond to anything else I have written. Go straight to the doozy section of 396, which is the last 7-8 paragraphs – that is, the section you are talking about. Just focus on that. Because if you don’t understand what I’m saying there, nothing else matters.
Let me offer this one aid in the short time I have this evening – a paraphrase and encapsulation of my point in that section:
You think your thesis is strong while I think it is weak. But there is a presupposition in your thesis – unspoken and probably unconscious. It is that you believe there were not any authentic apostolic gospels in circulation. It is that belief that allows you to think your thesis is strong. But that belief is the very position your thesis seeks to defend, and that means you’re assuming the conclusion you’re trying to prove before you even start arguing.
I myself am not going to write to you about anything else until you at least understand what I am saying in that section. I am not insisting that you agree with me – but I need you to understand me.
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert
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