Jon Curry has been hawking the views of Bobby Price on the dating of various NT books. Now, even liberal NT scholars feel the need to present a concrete alternative to the traditional attributions. Indeed, a major reason they reject the traditional attribution is because they imagine that the various NT books don’t fit the milieu to which they’ve been traditionally assigned, but, instead, fit with some later milieu.
Hence, before we can properly evaluate the evidence for his position, Jon needs to get far more specific about what his own position actually amounts to.
So, let’s ask him a few basic questions of the sort that liberal and conservative scholars alike try to answer in order to argue for their own position.
1.What are the “real” dates that you assign to each of the 27 books of the NT, and what’s your evidence?
2.Who actually composed the various books of the NT? What individual, circle, religious movement, or school of thought? And what’s your evidence?
3.Where were the various books of the NT actually composed, and what’s your evidence?
4.What concrete circumstance occasioned the composition of each NT book, and what’s your evidence?
5.What was the target audience or implied readership for each NT book, and what’s your evidence?
6.In addition to treating some or all of the NT writings as forgeries, you are also prepared to treat some of the patristic writings a forgeries. Which patristic writings do you regard as spurious?
7.Please repeat steps (1)-(5) for each patristic writing you regard as spurious.
8.When you deny the authenticity of a writing, do you also deny the historicity of the person to whom the writing is ascribed? In other words, do you deny the writer as well as the writing?
I ask because you’re apparently prepared to deny the historicity of Jesus. If so, do you extend your scepticism to the historicity of the apostles or church fathers? If so, which ones, and why?
Jon also needs to further address the application of his standards to other contexts. If the phrase “I, Paul” is a “dead give away” of forgery in the Pauline documents, then is the same standard to be applied to non-Christian literature, such as when Porphyry uses the phrase “I, Porphyry”? Jon dismisses the authorship attributions of First Clement on the basis that Clement believed a false account of the phoenix (First Clement, 25-26). Aside from the fact that Jon didn’t demonstrate a logical connection between Clement’s error regarding the phoenix and his alleged unreliability on an issue like whether Paul wrote 1 Corinthians, what about other ancient sources who accepted part or all of the phoenix account? Should we not trust their authorship attributions as well? In a previous discussion, regarding whether the writings attributed to Luke borrowed material from Josephus, Jon assumed that writings attributed to Josephus were written by him and that their dating and text are reliable. How does he know that Josephus wrote the documents in question, that the text wasn’t changed over time, etc.? Jon has suggested that the gospels that were widely distributed around the middle of the second century (as referred to by Justin Martyr and other sources) might have been significantly different from the gospels that existed later in that century, around the time of Irenaeus. How does Jon know that similar changes didn’t occur in the texts of Josephus and thousands of other ancient sources? As J.P. Holding notes:
ReplyDelete"Comparably speaking, this evidence [for the Roman historian Tacitus] is vanishingly small compared to the incredible number of attestations and attributions by patristic writers [for the gospels], some few earlier than (but many as late as) those listed for Tacitus above. How can someone dealing with the evidence fairly claim to be sure of Tacitus' authorship of his various works (where such external evidence is concerned) and dismiss the Gospels, which have far better external evidence? I have recently checked a book titled Texts and Tranmission (Clarendon Press, 1993) which records similar data for other ancient works. Throughout the book classic works from around the time of the NT whose authorship and date no one questions (though some have textual issues, just like the NT) are recorded as having the earliest copy between 5th and 9th century, earliest attributions at the same period (for example, Celsus' De medicina is attested no earlier than 990 AD, and then not again until 1300!), and having so little textual support that if they were treated as the NT is, all of antiquity would be reduced to a blank wall of paranoid unknowingness. If the Gospels are treated consistenly, there will be no question at all about their provenance, but that is clearly the last thing critics want to do." (http://www.tektonics.org/ntdocdef/gospdefhub.html)
What about modern courts of law? Should we dismiss the testimony of any witness who can be shown to believe in astrology, that the United States government arranged the terrorist attacks of September 11, or some other such thing? Should we not believe the testimony of court witnesses who desire that what they’re testifying about be true, similar to how Jon dismissively claims that the early Christians may have believed in the Pauline authorship of documents because they wanted it to be true? If a relative of a murder victim desires to see the conviction of the man he witnessed murdering his relative, should we not believe his testimony? Given the many errors in Jon’s posts, including his repetition of errors after being corrected explicitly and repeatedly, should we dismiss him in a manner similar to how he dismisses the early Christians?
One of the ways we can tell that Jon doesn’t believe in his own professed standards is that he applies those standards so inconsistently. It’s not just that he’s fallible and is occasionally inconsistent, as all of us are. Rather, he’s inconsistent to a major extent and frequently. But even if he did apply his standards consistently, we would have other reasons for rejecting those standards, such as the fact that they don’t make logical sense.
Hence, before we can properly evaluate the evidence for his position, Jon needs to get far more specific about what his own position actually amounts to.
ReplyDeleteI disagree entirely. I think this demonstrates the fundamental disagreement we have over the approach to ancient history. I think that I do not have to have answers to all questions pertaining to a text to make some claims about a text. You seem to think that if I deny what you believe, I have to have all questions about the text answered. I don't think so. You want the teddy bear of certainty to help you sleep at night, but I say it's time to put your toys away and live with the fact that in some cases you just don't know. I don't know the answers to some of your questions, and I don't have to.
Take my argument about Ephesians. My argument is that this text is a Pauline pastiche, and not an authentic letter from Paul that he just sat down and wrote. It contains these extremely long sentences in Greek, which is outside of the Pauline style in the earlier pseudipigraphical texts attributed to him and known to the author of Ephesians (Romans, Colossians, Philippians, etc), which are linked together with clauses. It looks to be a text that is pasted together from previous (believed to be) Pauline texts. You can critique that argument if you want, as Jason has, and you can accept his response if you like. But all these questions you have here don't change anything about the merits of the argument. I don't have to know exactly when it was complied, who did it, where it was composed, etc to be able to recognize the merits of my claims here.
Regarding your questions, I have opinions, some of which I hold with more certainty and others with less, regarding some of the texts in question, but not all. That's OK as far as I'm concerned. I don't have to have all the answers, and since I'm not constrained by dogma I'm free to think what I want and change my opinions as evidence becomes known to me. But the fact that phrases like "I, Paul" are indicative of forgery, as they are in many, many documents known to be spurious, that fact doesn't change even if I don't know what concrete circumstance occasioned a particular letter.
And I will modify my claim of "I, Paul" as a "dead giveaway" to forgery as "I, Paul" to indicative of forgery. It might be a dead giveaway, but I'm not sure. It's definitely indicative of forgery, and is a technique used by forgers frequently.
Jon also needs to further address the application of his standards to other contexts. If the phrase “I, Paul” is a “dead give away” of forgery in the Pauline documents, then is the same standard to be applied to non-Christian literature, such as when Porphyry uses the phrase “I, Porphyry”?
Yes. Porphyry is an impressive name, and we have to recognize that a non-Christian can bring a lot of clout to their critique if they present it in the name of a famous person.
Jon dismisses the authorship attributions of First Clement on the basis that Clement believed a false account of the phoenix (First Clement, 25-26).
Where did I say that the authorship attribution of I Clement is false because of the account of the Phoenix?
Aside from the fact that Jon didn’t demonstrate a logical connection between Clement’s error regarding the phoenix and his alleged unreliability on an issue like whether Paul wrote 1 Corinthians,
This statement implies that you are looking for a deductive logical connection. There is none. The connection is one that has been made so many times for you that it does become tiresome explaining this over and over again.
The issue is probability. Bayes' Theorem. You talk a lot about probabilities in beliefs, but you don't seem willing to take the time to understand Bayes' Theorem, which is critical to understanding the probability you should assign to your beliefs. There is a term in Bayes' Theorem called "initial probability." The value is based upon background assumptions. If a person makes a claim you initiate your evaluation of the claim with background assumptions. How credible is the person? In the case of a fantastic claim, is the person prone to accepting fantastic claims in a credulous manner? This affects your judgment about whether you should accept other claims from them.
what about other ancient sources who accepted part or all of the phoenix account? Should we not trust their authorship attributions as well?
This is where other terms in Bayes' Theorem begin to modify your judgment. See, I'm basically making a statement about initial probability in Bayes' Theorem, and you respond "Hey, what about the other terms in Bayes' Theorem." Of course those are relevant too, but initial probability matters, and that's why the credulous statements from I Clement are relevant.
All the terms in Bayes' Theorem must be considered. So let's apply this to a different ancient source, such as Josephus. Was Josephus a famous legendary hero of the past that people would want to write in the name of in order to bring clout to their claims and establish a wider readership? Not that I'm aware of. Whoever wrote it must have had a name. Is there any reason to be suspect of a name like "Josephus"? Not that I'm aware of.
Is this true of the name "Paul"? No. Paul was a hero of the past. His name brings clout. There is an incentive to write in Paul's name regarding theological issues. If you want to pass of your opinions as if they are the correct opinions you forge a letter in the name of Paul. You don't need to take my word for it that this was going on. The canonical Pauline texts say this repeatedly. That affects our initial probability term in Bayes' Theorem.
In a previous discussion, regarding whether the writings attributed to Luke borrowed material from Josephus, Jon assumed that writings attributed to Josephus were written by him and that their dating and text are reliable. How does he know that Josephus wrote the documents in question, that the text wasn’t changed over time, etc.?
If Josephus name and the authenticity of the text in question are not relevant to my argument, then of course I'm just going to refer to the text as from Josephus for the sake of convenience or if it's not a text in dispute I'm content to assume it is from Josephus. I do the same with the NT. I might say "as Paul says in 2 Timothy" even though I don't really think he wrote it. You're going to have to show me what specifically you have in mind if you think there is really an issue here.
What of other texts, such as Tacitus? Do I regard that as spurious? I’m open to arguments that it is. If I were to take the time to evaluate it, I’d start by looking at the copies we have. Are these being heavily modified by copyists that betray some sort of agenda, as we have with canonical texts? Well, that tells me that like the Bible, people are treating Tacitus as some sort of ventriloquist dummy, making him say what they want him to say. If I learn that a lot of people want him to say certain things in order to support some agenda that they have, well this will raise further doubt about texts for which I don’t have direct evidence that modification has occurred. This is what we have going on at least in the spurious epistles that Paul refers to in the canonical writings. If that is there, then it’s time to approach these texts with caution. I don’t know why you think that approach is so radical.
How does Jon know that similar changes didn’t occur in the texts of Josephus and thousands of other ancient sources?
I'm sure they did. We already know that at a minimum Christians tampered with the famous Testimonium Flavianum, and the whole thing may be entirely a Christian interpolation. Christians heavily modified the (supposed) writings of Ignatius, wrote texts in the name of Seneca, Porphyry, etc. And of course it isn't just Christians that forge, edit, and modify. That's not a problem for me. Remember, I'm not the one that requires the teddy bear of certainty in order to sleep at night. I don't really care if I know who wrote the book of Romans or any of these other ancient sources that you refer to, because it is not my claim that the knowledge of Jesus resurrection must be present in the ancient evidence.
I think you have a mentality that suggests that if you can persuade yourself that my arguments against authenticity don’t work, that this entitles you to just carry on as if the text is authentic. That’s not the case. Take Philippians as an example. Life imitates fiction you say, so the fact that it looks like a fictive work that takes on a genre of a last will and testament, which is an inherently pseudipigraphical genre, this doesn’t necessarily mean it is fiction. OK. But why should we take it to be authentic? You haven’t given any arguments for accepting it.
Should we dismiss the testimony of any witness who can be shown to believe in astrology, that the United States government arranged the terrorist attacks of September 11, or some other such thing?
In some cases, yes. But that is not the only factor, as again Bayes' Theorem shows. You also must consider how well alternative explanations fit the claims. If a 9/11 conspiracist tells you that he was at the gas station at 10 pm, you first evaluate whether that is the type of claim the person would be wrong about. You locate receipts that place him there at 10 pm, and his wife confirms that he was returning from a trip about that time. Since the alternative explanations make less sense of the data and since the claim is not extraordinary, you just accept it.
What if this person tells you that they have a document that shows that George Bush skipped out of his requirements for the Texas Air National Guard. Now we're in a different realm. This is an extraordinary claim. This is a prized document that presents claims that the claimant wants to hear. Even before considering type settings and dates you have got to start skeptical.
Should we not believe the testimony of court witnesses who desire that what they’re testifying about be true, similar to how Jon dismissively claims that the early Christians may have believed in the Pauline authorship of documents because they wanted it to be true?
That's a major factor as any lawyer will tell you. It's not the only factor. It relates to the initial probability term. I note again the straw man nature of your claim. I don’t claim that if a person is gullible, or if a person desires a claim to be true, that this means we “should not believe” what they say. What I claim is that this plays a role in our evaluation. More specifically, this helps us determine an initial probability value. It’s not the whole of the equation. There are other factors as the Bayes’ Theorem equation shows. Those must be considered. But so must the initial probability term. You repeatedly present me as if I claim this is the only factor to be considered. What does your repeated misrepresentation of my claims say about your ability to respond to the arguments I make?
If a relative of a murder victim desires to see the conviction of the man he witnessed murdering his relative, should we not believe his testimony?
Notice the question begging nature of this claim. You assume at the start that you know that the claimant witnessed the murder. But that of course is the very thing in dispute in the court of law. You don't know that. What you know is that a person is claiming that he witnessed the murder. How do you evaluate the claim? Well, suppose this person has no previous grudge or animosity towards the accused. This means that from an initial probability standpoint you have no reason to doubt the claim going in. If the reverse is true, then that is a factor you must consider as you evaluate the claim.
Given the many errors in Jon’s posts, including his repetition of errors after being corrected explicitly and repeatedly, should we dismiss him in a manner similar to how he dismisses the early Christians?
I am not asking you to accept my claims on the basis of my credibility. My claims are to be accepted based upon the arguments, not who I am or whether I'm credible. I could be a murdering psycho and my argument about Ephesians or Philippians would stand independently of that. So this is nothing but another failure on your part to think logically. You are asking us to accept the testimony of Papias, I Clement, and Irenaeus based upon merely the fact that they make assertions. Thus their credibility and gullibility is relevant. Papias says Judas head swelled to the width of a wagon trail, I Clement tells us about the "Phoenix" and how by checking the records the priests know it's been exactly 500 years, and Irenaeus tells us that he got the claim that Jesus lived into his 50's via apostolic tradition. That's relevant in their case, because their credibility is what we rely on for knowledge of such matters. I am not putting forward my credibility as a basis for acceptance of anything I say. I know you don't regard me as credible. You think I'm a lying, deceiving, reprobate, apostate, scumbag. If I say "I, Paul" references indicate forgery, you can go ahead and take a look at pseudonymous texts and see if you see what I'm referring to. I can give you the references also, as I have in the past, and this allows you to verify these things for yourself. So your argument is entirely illogical. Am I simply asking you to trust me when I make a claim? Do you see me appealing to my moral character when I argue about Ephesians, as you do with the early church fathers? No, because these are not the basis of my claims, but these are the basis of your claims about the early church fathers.
One of the ways we can tell that Jon doesn’t believe in his own professed standards is that he applies those standards so inconsistently.
So you say, and you've said before, but it's not true. You argued that I accept Pauline authorship on the basis of Irenaeus testimony, but as should now be apparent I don't even accept Pauline authorship attributions, let alone accepting them on the basis of Irenaeus claims. You jump the gun and make inferences that are not supported by my statements.
It’s not just that he’s fallible and is occasionally inconsistent, as all of us are. Rather, he’s inconsistent to a major extent and frequently.
Inconsistent to a major extent? You mean with regards to accepting Irenaeus Pauline authorship attributions, or identifying "I, Paul" statements as indicative of forgery? Since you're wrong on both counts, what do you have in mind? It is you that are inconsistent to a major extent. You accept Irenaeus apostolic traditions when you like them (authorship attributions) and reject them when you don't like them (Jesus lived to his 50's). You accept Papias claims when you like them (Mark) but reject them when you don't (Judas head). You tell Roman Catholics that early Christians can't be trusted, so we should stick with the Bible, but you tell me that they can be trusted, and this is how we know we have correct authorship attributions. You can see Roman Catholic contradictions clearly (gospel of works, Marian beliefs, contrary views from church fathers), but you fail to see the contradictions in the Bible (Mary Magdelene at the tomb of Matthew and John, day of crucifixion synoptics vs John, Jesus return claims in Matthew vs reality, etc). You say that Eusebius is trustworthy because he discusses the importance of the virtues of honesty, despite his defense of "falsehood as medicine for those that need such an approach", but you don't argue similarly for Ergun Caner, despite the fact that he also discusses the importance of honesty. With the bible, universal attribution clinches the case for authenticity, but with Plato and Ignatius this is not the case. I’m too ignorant to rationally reject Christianity, but skeptics who become Christians that are far more ignorant than I am do so and are totally legitimate, and their ignorance should not prevent their change of view. Special pleading is the name of the game for you, and yet you charge me with shifting my standards? How about some examples?
But even if he did apply his standards consistently, we would have other reasons for rejecting those standards, such as the fact that they don’t make logical sense.
It makes perfect logical sense to look at documents all sides acknowledge as spurious, notice certain techniques used by the forgers (such as I Levi, I Thomas, etc) and plug that knowledge into Bayes' Theorem. It makes perfect logical sense to recognize that the genre of a man's last dying words is a genre that is inherently pseudipigraphical, and use that claim to evaluate a text like Philippians or 2 Timothy. Where is the flaw in that logic? Seriously.
ReplyDeleteTake my argument about Ephesians. My argument is that this text is a Pauline pastiche, and not an authentic letter from Paul that he just sat down and wrote. It contains these extremely long sentences in Greek, which is outside of the Pauline style in the earlier pseudipigraphical texts attributed to him and known to the author of Ephesians (Romans, Colossians, Philippians, etc), which are linked together with clauses. It looks to be a text that is pasted together from previous (believed to be) Pauline texts. You can critique that argument if you want, as Jason has, and you can accept his response if you like. But all these questions you have here don't change anything about the merits of the argument. I don't have to know exactly when it was complied, who did it, where it was composed, etc to be able to recognize the merits of my claims here
Of course, this isn't YOUR argument at all. It's Bob Price's argument. You have a nasty habit of saying "Here's my argument" and then not actually defending it by interaction with the contrary material. Rather, you start using diversary tactics like referring to Philppians, etc.
And, as has been pointed out to you before, to say that the Pauline corpus is spurious would mean you have a standard by which to compare it - that is an authentic standard of what is Pauline. Where can we find that?
Notice here that by your own admission you find these texts "pseudipigraphical." How do you know that without having an authentic work from Paul for comparison?
What you (and Price) do is devise a general template then impute that to Paul's work.
And that's problem with appealing to Bayes Theorem. Where's the supporting argument for its use?
Where did I say that the authorship attribution of I Clement is false because of the account of the Phoenix?
ReplyDeleteJason isn't saying that you deny the attributed author of 1 Clement, rather you deny the authorship attributions within the letter - for example, 1 Corithinans is attributed to Paul. Do try to pay attention. That was, in point of fact, your argument. In case you can't keep up with it, as is often the case with you here it is:
You rely on I Clement for the authenticity of Paul's documents. Let's see what he has to say about the resurrection. We can have confidence in it. Want to know why? It's because of the Phoenix. Hey if God can raise up the Phoenix every 500 years on the button (because the priests check the registers and dates, you know) well then we can just be sure he'll raise us up. These are the type of people you just can't imagine have gotten things wrong. Here is Clement:
(Long post from the letter)
I have little confidence that such people are capable of weeding out spurious Pauline texts and only retaining the authentic ones. That's "increasinly ridiculous" you say, but you're wrong.
Also, we've been over Bayes Theorem with you before, and you glossed it right over. If you're going to start invoking it again, then it's time you deal with what's been stated:
ReplyDeleteCurry is also glossing over a number of internal difficulties with BT. To take a few examples:
***QUOTE***
The assumption of logical omniscience.
The assumption that degrees of belief satisfy the probability laws implies omniscience about deductive logic, because the probability laws require that all deductive logical truths have probability one, all deductive inconsistencies have probability zero, and the probability of any conjunction of sentences be no greater than any of its deductive consequences. This seems to be an unrealistic standard for human beings. Hacking and Garber have made proposals to relax the assumption of logical omniscience. Because relaxing that assumption would block the derivation of almost all the important results in Bayesian epistemology, most Bayesians maintain the assumption of logical omniscience and treat it as an ideal to which human beings can only more or less approximate.
The problem of the priors.
Are there constraints on prior probabilities other than the probability laws? Consider Goodman's "new riddle of induction": In the past all observed emeralds have been green. Do those observations provide any more support for the generalization that all emeralds are green than they do for the generalization that all emeralds are grue (green if observed before now; blue if observed later); or do they provide any more support for the prediction that the next emerald observed will be green than for the prediction that the next emerald observed will be grue (i.e., blue)? This question divides Bayesians into two categories:
(a) Objective Bayesians (e.g., Rosenkrantz) hold that there are rational constraints on prior probabilities that require that observations support the green-generalization and the green-prediction much more strongly than the grue-generalization and the grue-prediction. Objective Bayesians are the intellectual heirs of the advocates of a Principle of Indifference for probability. Rosenkrantz builds his account on the maximum entropy rule proposed by E.T. Jaynes. The difficulties in formulating an acceptable Principle of Indifference have led most Bayesians to abandon Objective Bayesianism.
(b) Subjective Bayesians (e.g., de Finetti) do not believe that rationality alone places enough constraints on one's prior probabilities to make them objective. For Subjective Bayesians, it is up to our own free choice or to evolution or to socialization or some other non-rational process to determine one's prior probabilities. Rationality only requires that the prior probabilities satisfy relatively modest synchronic coherence conditions.
Subjective Bayesians believe that their position is not objectionably subjective, because of results (e.g., Doob or Gaifman and Snir) proving that even subjects beginning with very different prior probabilities will tend to converge in their final probabilities, given a suitably long series of shared observations. These convergence results are not completely reassuring, however, because they only apply to agents who already have significant agreement in their priors and they do not assure convergence in any reasonable amount of time. Also, they typically only guarantee convergence on the probability of predictions, not on the probability of theoretical hypotheses. For example, Carnap favored prior probabilities that would never raise above zero the probability of a generalization over a potentially infinite number of instances (e.g., that all crows are black), no matter how many observations of positive instances (e.g., black crows) one might make without finding any negative instances (i.e., non-black crows). In addition, the convergence results depend on the assumption that the only changes in probabilities that occur are those that are the non-inferential results of observation on evidential statements and those that result from conditionalization on such evidential statements.
Objective Bayesianism and Subjective Bayesianism are two opposite extremes. There is plenty of room for a compromise position that there are further rationality constraints on prior probabilities that can be added to the Bayesian framework, without supposing that the additional constraints will determine a uniquely rational prior. For some examples of some additional rationality constraints, see the next section. However, because there is no generally agreed upon solution to the Problem of the Priors, it is an open question whether Bayesian Confirmation Theory has inductive content, or whether it merely translates the framework for rational belief provided by deductive logic into a corresponding framework for rational degrees of belief.
The problem of rigid conditional probabilities.
When one conditionalizes, one applies the initial conditional probabilities to determine final unconditional probabilities. Throughout, the conditional probabilities themselves do not change; they remain rigid. Examples of the Problem of Old Evidence are but one of a variety of cases in which it seems that it can be rational to change one's initial conditional probabilities. Thus, many Bayesians reject the Simple Principle of Conditionalization in favor of a qualified principle, limited to situations in which one does not change one's initial conditional probabilities. There is no generally accepted account of when it is rational to maintain rigid initial conditional probabilities and when it is not.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology-bayesian/
JON CURRY SAID:
ReplyDelete“I disagree entirely. I think this demonstrates the fundamental disagreement we have over the approach to ancient history. I think that I do not have to have answers to all questions pertaining to a text to make some claims about a text. You seem to think that if I deny what you believe, I have to have all questions about the text answered. I don't think so. You want the teddy bear of certainty to help you sleep at night, but I say it's time to put your toys away and live with the fact that in some cases you just don't know. I don't know the answers to some of your questions, and I don't have to…Regarding your questions, I have opinions, some of which I hold with more certainty and others with less, regarding some of the texts in question, but not all. That's OK as far as I'm concerned. I don't have to have all the answers, and since I'm not constrained by dogma I'm free to think what I want and change my opinions as evidence becomes known to me.”
i) You signed on to a very ambitious thesis when you identified your position with a quasi-Marcionite dating scheme. That commits you to a very tall order.
I didn’t expect you to be able to make good on your claims. You’re in way over your head.
One of your basic problems is that you initially denied the faith, and then cast about for ex post facto arguments to justify your impetuous and precipitous apostasy. Because you had no good reason to repudiate the faith in the first place, you’re playing a breathless game of catch up to cobble together something resembling an argument.
ii) I’m simply holding you to minimal academic standards. Both liberal and conservative Bible scholars state and defend their views regarding the authorship, audience, date, destination, location, and occasion of the Biblical documents they discuss.
You can’t rise to that elementary challenge, both because you lack the requisite erudition, and because you labor under the insurmountable handicap of a historically indefensible position.
This has nothing to do with what *I* believe. Rather, it goes to an evidentiary demand that any reputable scholar must meet, viz. Ray Brown’s liberal introduction to the NT.
I agree with you that “ this demonstrates the fundamental disagreement we have over the approach to ancient history.”
For example, Bishop Lightfoot wrote a classic monograph on the Epistles of Ignatius, sifting the genuine from the spurious. Where is your detailed, point-by-point counterargument? Answer: nowhere.
There’s an approach to ancient history based on evidence, and then there’s your approach—in which you wing it from Wikipedia articles.
I’ve called your bluff, forcing you to lay your losing hand on the table, face up. Mission accomplished.
“Take my argument about Ephesians. My argument is that this text is a Pauline pastiche, and not an authentic letter from Paul that he just sat down and wrote. It contains these extremely long sentences in Greek, which is outside of the Pauline style in the earlier pseudipigraphical texts attributed to him and known to the author of Ephesians (Romans, Colossians, Philippians, etc), which are linked together with clauses.”
i) Are you a Greek scholar?
ii) Other issues aside, you could only judge a literary style to be deutero-Pauline if you had a sufficient sample of genuine Pauline prose to compare it with. Since you regard all of the Pauline epistles as pseudepigraphal, your appeal is viciously circular—as Gene has pointed out. For if every Pauline epistle is a forgery, you have no baseline to mount a stylistic argument.
iii) And if you were halfway serious, you would attempt to engage the detailed arguments of a seasoned scholar like Harold Hoehner.
“But all these questions you have here don't change anything about the merits of the argument.”
That’s quite true. Since your argument is devoid of merit, nothing can change the merits of a worthless argument.
Jon Curry wrote:
ReplyDelete"Yes. Porphyry is an impressive name, and we have to recognize that a non-Christian can bring a lot of clout to their critique if they present it in the name of a famous person."
You answer "yes" to my question about whether "I, Porphyry" is a "dead give away" of forgery, but you retracted the reasoning behind that conclusion just before your comments above.
You write:
"Where did I say that the authorship attribution of I Clement is false because of the account of the Phoenix?"
I've corrected you on that misrepresentation before. I didn't say that you "say that the authorship attribution of I Clement is false". I said that you dismissed Clement's authorship attributions. Dismissing an attribution isn't the same as concluding that an attribution is false. You should have known what I was referring to based on my prior explanation. And the next two sentences, after the one you quoted, use the phrases "unreliability" and "not trust". Those phrases aren't equivalent to concluding that something is false. It seems that you would rather respond to something I didn't argue than interact with what I did argue.
You write:
"The issue is probability. Bayes' Theorem. You talk a lot about probabilities in beliefs, but you don't seem willing to take the time to understand Bayes' Theorem, which is critical to understanding the probability you should assign to your beliefs."
People made reliable probability judgments for thousands of years before Bayes' Theorem was articulated, and all of us make probability judgments each day of our lives without putting our reasoning into the form of Bayes' Theorem. Your frequent references to Bayes' Theorem, as if it's "critical" in the manner you suggest above, are ridiculous attempts at diversion. I don't trust your knowledge of Bayes' Theorem, and you've rarely even attempted to present your arguments in the form of Bayes' Theorem. What you often do is mention it after one of your objections to a Christian belief has been demonstrated to be inadequate. You then act as if your objection was just one portion of what you would consider in the process of using Bayes' Theorem. If it was just one portion, then, by your own admission, it's inadequate, and your failure to present an argument that would be more adequate is your fault, not ours.
You write:
"The value is based upon background assumptions. If a person makes a claim you initiate your evaluation of the claim with background assumptions. How credible is the person? In the case of a fantastic claim, is the person prone to accepting fantastic claims in a credulous manner? This affects your judgment about whether you should accept other claims from them."
I understand the concept. I've discussed it with you in the past. But making a judgment about Clement of Rome's authorship attributions would involve more than whether he was mistaken about an account of a phoenix that he used as an illustration of the resurrection of Christians. His mistake about the phoenix account is highly inadequate as an objection to his reliability on the issue in question, for reasons I've explained, so responding to me by mentioning his error about the phoenix account, without addressing more significant issues along with it, is unreasonable.
Using your reasoning, I could object to the authorship attributions of Josephus on the basis that he sometimes commits grammatical errors, and I could do so without mentioning any more significant errors on his part. Since those grammatical errors reflect some degree of ignorance or carelessness on the part of Josephus, they can be considered relevant to an evaluation of Josephus' reliability by means of Bayes' Theorem. Therefore, if I mention Josephus' grammatical errors without mentioning anything more significant, and somebody responds to me by pointing out that my objecting to his grammatical errors is insufficient grounds for dismissing his authorship attributions, I can then reply by saying that the person responding to me needs to study Bayes' Theorem. I was just presenting one factor among others that would be included in the process of applying Bayes' Theorem to Josephus.
All that you're doing is trying to have an excuse for inadequate objections you raise against Christianity. When your objections are shown to be inadequate, you can act as if you knew all along that they were inadequate, and that you only meant to address one step in the larger process of applying Bayes' Theorem.
Maybe you did realize that your objection to Clement of Rome's authorship attributions was insufficient. It would be difficult to not realize it. But I and other readers don't have to wait for you to complete a process of making a calculation with Bayes' Theorem before we respond by discussing the insufficiency of the objections you've raised so far. Nobody was stopping you from making a better case against Clement's authorship attributions, if you had a better case to make.
You write:
"Was Josephus a famous legendary hero of the past that people would want to write in the name of in order to bring clout to their claims and establish a wider readership? Not that I'm aware of."
People frequently forged documents in the ancient world in the name of people who weren't "a famous legendary hero of the past". But if there had been a Josephus who was a Jew and who had attained an unusually high status in the Roman world, we could think of many potential scenarios in which a forger would be interested in writing in his name. Or if the historical Josephus wrote a document that was well received, then a later document in his name could be a forgery that resulted from the success of the first document. Historians accept thousands of ancient documents attributed to authors whom forgers would have had many potential reasons to imitate. They don't reject those documents as forgeries for the sort of weak reasons you've proposed for rejecting Biblical documents (the phrase "I, Paul", the references to handwriting in the Pauline documents, etc.).
You write:
"If you want to pass of your opinions as if they are the correct opinions you forge a letter in the name of Paul. You don't need to take my word for it that this was going on. The canonical Pauline texts say this repeatedly."
I've repeatedly asked you to document that claim. You've used the term "cottage industry" in the past, claiming that the Pauline letters portray a situation in which there was a cottage industry of Pauline forgeries. But, as I've explained to you before, Paul's use of a signature can be a precaution against Pauline forgery without being a reference to the existence of a cottage industry of Pauline forgeries.
You write:
"If Josephus name and the authenticity of the text in question are not relevant to my argument, then of course I'm just going to refer to the text as from Josephus for the sake of convenience or if it's not a text in dispute I'm content to assume it is from Josephus."
In the discussion I was referring to, the issue on the table was whether the Lukan documents used Josephus. For your argument to stand, you had to know what text of Josephus existed at the time. Your argument assumed the reliability of the text of Josephus. I'm asking you how you can accept that text in light of your objections to the text of the New Testament. We have far better textual evidence for the New Testament documents than we have for the writings of Josephus. If you're going to take so seriously the speculation that the gospels circulating at the time of Justin Martyr were significantly different from the gospels circulating shortly thereafter, around the time of Irenaeus, then how can you be confident about the text of Josephus?
The Josephus discussion hasn't been the only context in which you've accepted ancient non-Biblical texts. You've also cited an article by Richard Carrier, for example, that relies upon the text of ancient non-Christian historians in order to compare their historical standards to those of the early Christians. You've repeatedly used arguments that depend on the acceptance of texts for which we have much less evidence than we have for the New Testament texts.
And whether a text is "disputed" doesn't matter much here. The reason why I don't dispute something like the text of Josephus is because I have different standards than you do. I don't make the same demands of a text that you do. The fact that I'm not disputing the text of Josephus doesn't explain why you aren't disputing it.
You write:
"If I were to take the time to evaluate it, I’d start by looking at the copies we have. Are these being heavily modified by copyists that betray some sort of agenda, as we have with canonical texts?"
The existence of some unreliable copyists doesn't give us reason to distrust the reliable ones. As I've documented for you in the past, even your preferred source on textual issues, Bart Ehrman, has said that most Christian copyists were honest. They weren't "heavily modifying".
For those who are interested, here, below, is a thread from last year in which I documented some of Jon's many misleading claims about the textual record and cited some more balanced evaluations of the evidence from Bart Ehrman, Daniel Wallace, and other sources:
http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2006/09/jon-currys-false-and-misleading-claims.html
You write:
"If I learn that a lot of people want him to say certain things in order to support some agenda that they have, well this will raise further doubt about texts for which I don’t have direct evidence that modification has occurred."
What do you mean by "want him to say"? We could conclude that modern Presbyterians would desire that Paul had explicitly advocated infant baptism somewhere in his letters, but that desire doesn't lead the large majority of Presbyterians to forge such a Pauline passage or letter. If the number of people who take such a desire to the point of producing a forgery is a small percentage of the population, and there are many factors in place to work against the widespread acceptance of such a forgery, then your "further doubt" doesn't carry much weight.
You write:
"This is what we have going on at least in the spurious epistles that Paul refers to in the canonical writings."
I'm aware of the reference to a forgery in 2 Thessalonians. What other Pauline reference to existing forgeries or known attempts at forgery are you referring to? Where is this "cottage industry" you keep referring to?
You write:
"If that is there, then it’s time to approach these texts with caution."
Who denied that "caution" is appropriate? You can be cautious without being so critical that you dismiss a document like Philemon because it uses the phrase "I, Paul". I explained why the phrase would be appropriate in the context in which it's used in that document, and you ignored that explanation. The "caution" you're suggesting is absurdly unbalanced.
You write:
"Remember, I'm not the one that requires the teddy bear of certainty in order to sleep at night."
You're suggesting that I'm "the one" who wants a "teddy bear of certainty", yet I've repeatedly said that my arguments are for historical probability, not certainty.
You write:
"I don't really care if I know who wrote the book of Romans or any of these other ancient sources that you refer to, because it is not my claim that the knowledge of Jesus resurrection must be present in the ancient evidence."
That's a poorly written sentence. I'm going to respond to what I think you're saying.
You're a critic of Christianity whose apostasy and whose arguments against Christianity in forums such as this one largely depend on issues such as whether Jesus rose from the dead. And authorship attributions are significant in evaluating such issues. You have an interest in justifying your apostasy, and you have an interest in trying to maintain an image of credibility in forums like this one. People don't have to be Christians in order to "care" about these things.
You write:
"I think you have a mentality that suggests that if you can persuade yourself that my arguments against authenticity don’t work, that this entitles you to just carry on as if the text is authentic."
No, that's not my mentality. And since I've repeatedly given you examples of the means by which I arrive at confidence in a text like Philippians, why would you suggest that I have the mentality you describe above? I've referred you to textual scholars whose work I've read, and I've discussed some of the factors involved in my confidence about the New Testament text. I haven't limited myself to "persuading myself that Jon Curry's arguments against authenticity don’t work".
You write:
"Life imitates fiction you say, so the fact that it looks like a fictive work that takes on a genre of a last will and testament, which is an inherently pseudipigraphical genre, this doesn’t necessarily mean it is fiction."
That's not what I said. Rather, I said that the aspects of Philippians that you mentioned don't suggest forgery. You never established your assertion that "it looks like a fictive work that takes on a genre of a last will and testament". Paul refers to his desire to die and be with Christ, but he also refers to how he expects to leave prison and continue in ministry, as I documented. The letter also addresses many other issues. The aspects of the letter that you mentioned don't lead to your conclusion that Philippians "looks like a fictive work that takes on a genre of a last will and testament".
You write:
"But why should we take it to be authentic? You haven’t given any arguments for accepting it."
I've discussed the early Christians' credibility in making such a judgment, and I've discussed some of the external evidence for the book. But I don't have to address the evidence for Philippians in depth in order to argue against your alleged reasons for rejecting the document. Arguments in support of Philippians are widely available, and I've discussed some of them.
You write:
"How do you evaluate the claim? Well, suppose this person has no previous grudge or animosity towards the accused. This means that from an initial probability standpoint you have no reason to doubt the claim going in. If the reverse is true, then that is a factor you must consider as you evaluate the claim."
You're missing the point. Earlier, you argued that a desire for a Pauline document might be sufficient to lead people to accept a Pauline forgery that didn't arise until several decades after Paul's death. You didn't just say that the desire for a Pauline document would be "a factor".
You write:
"I am not asking you to accept my claims on the basis of my credibility. My claims are to be accepted based upon the arguments, not who I am or whether I'm credible. I could be a murdering psycho and my argument about Ephesians or Philippians would stand independently of that."
You're missing the point again. I was referring to whether you can be trusted in situations comparable to the situations the early Christians were in.
You write:
"You are asking us to accept the testimony of Papias, I Clement, and Irenaeus based upon merely the fact that they make assertions."
No, I've also discussed their backgrounds, the context in which they wrote, etc. I've cited Glenn Miller, Richard Bauckham, and other sources who discuss the credibility of these Christians at length. Your claim that I ask people to accept what these Christians say "based upon merely the fact that they make assertions" is absurd.
You write:
"Papias says Judas head swelled to the width of a wagon trail, I Clement tells us about the 'Phoenix' and how by checking the records the priests know it's been exactly 500 years, and Irenaeus tells us that he got the claim that Jesus lived into his 50's via apostolic tradition. That's relevant in their case, because their credibility is what we rely on for knowledge of such matters."
I've addressed those issues in the past, and you've repeatedly left the discussions.
You write:
"You argued that I accept Pauline authorship on the basis of Irenaeus testimony, but as should now be apparent I don't even accept Pauline authorship attributions, let alone accepting them on the basis of Irenaeus claims. You jump the gun and make inferences that are not supported by my statements."
In our initial discussions on Greg Krehbiel's board, your arguments repeatedly assumed Pauline authorship of some of the documents. That's why it wasn't until recently that we began having these discussions about whether Paul wrote documents like 1 Corinthians and Philemon. When you began giving indications that you might have been doubting the Pauline authorship of such documents, I repeatedly asked you for clarification. You kept avoiding the subject, until recently, when you told me that you reject Pauline authorship.
You write:
"You accept Irenaeus apostolic traditions when you like them (authorship attributions) and reject them when you don't like them (Jesus lived to his 50's)."
I've addressed that assertion more than once, and you've repeatedly left the discussions without interacting with what I wrote in response. For example:
http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2006/10/is-testimony-of-irenaeus-not-positive.html
You write:
"You say that Eusebius is trustworthy because he discusses the importance of the virtues of honesty, despite his defense of 'falsehood as medicine for those that need such an approach', but you don't argue similarly for Ergun Caner, despite the fact that he also discusses the importance of honesty."
I've already addressed your claims about Eusebius, and you left those discussions. My argument involved far more than you describe above, and I cited multiple relevant scholars, including ones who have specialized in the study of Eusebius, who reject your interpretation of the passages in question.
I don't know what you're referring to with regard to Ergun Caner. I've never argued against Caner in a way comparable to how you've argued against Eusebius.
You write:
"With the bible, universal attribution clinches the case for authenticity, but with Plato and Ignatius this is not the case."
Here we have another example of your ignorance. There was no "universal attribution" of the letters of Ignatius that I consider spurious. Different sources over the centuries accepted different versions of the letters. The longer versions of the authentic letters and the letters that were altogether spurious were accepted by some sources, but not "universally".
And which comments of mine on Plato are you referring to? You referred to what some scholars believe about what Plato wrote, but I didn't comment on universal attribution in the manner you've described above.
And I've repeatedly explained that factors like internal evidence and the context in which external testimony occurs are also to be taken into account. I haven't suggested the sort of simplistic approach you describe above.
You write:
"I’m too ignorant to rationally reject Christianity, but skeptics who become Christians that are far more ignorant than I am do so and are totally legitimate, and their ignorance should not prevent their change of view."
You're just repeating another argument that I refuted in yet another previous thread that you left:
http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2007/03/reworked-hallucination-theories-and.html
You write:
"It makes perfect logical sense to recognize that the genre of a man's last dying words is a genre that is inherently pseudipigraphical, and use that claim to evaluate a text like Philippians or 2 Timothy. Where is the flaw in that logic? Seriously."
As I've explained to you before, Philippians doesn't represent "a man's last dying words". The document refers to how Paul expects to leave prison (Philippians 1:25, 2:24), and the early Christians didn't place the document at the end of Paul's life. That's why they viewed 2 Timothy as his last document instead.
And given the fact that people often write something shortly before death, particularly if they've been sentenced to death and thus know that death is coming, why is 2 Timothy suspicious as "a man's last dying words"? Your claim that such a document is "inherently pseudipigraphical" is ridiculous. Are you saying that every document written from the perspective of somebody who is expecting to die soon should be rejected as inauthentic?
JON CURRY SAID:
ReplyDelete"Take my argument about Ephesians. My argument is that this text is a Pauline pastiche, and not an authentic letter from Paul that he just sat down and wrote. It contains these extremely long sentences in Greek, which is outside of the Pauline style in the earlier pseudipigraphical texts attributed to him and known to the author of Ephesians (Romans, Colossians, Philippians, etc), which are linked together with clauses. It looks to be a text that is pasted together from previous (believed to be) Pauline texts."
What Curry has done here is to simply parrot a stock, liberal objection to the Pauline authorship of Ephesians. Now, there's nothing inherently wrong with recycling old arguments if no one has ever presented a counterargument.
But many conservative scholars have addressed this objection (e.g., Bruce, Carson/Mood, Guthrie, Hoehner, O'Brien). Indeed, you even have liberals like G. B. Caird who defend the Pauline authorship of Ephesians.
So for Jon to trot out an oft-refuted objection to the Pauline authorship of Ephesians, as if he's the first one to raise this objection, or else that no one has every dealt with this objection before, is not a serious argument at all. It's merely pathetic.