Majority Appeal: Dismissing Evangelicals Because Of Their Minority Status

Paul Tobin has posted another response to The Infidel Delusion. He still hasn't gotten to my material in chapter 6 (or Paul Manata's), but I want to reply to some of his comments written in response to Steve Hays.

As before, Tobin frequently appeals to scholarly majorities and dismisses Evangelical sources with terms like "apologist". Keep the following in mind:

- Tobin himself holds some minority positions. I gave some examples in chapter 6 of The Infidel Delusion and in the comments section of the thread here.

- Some of the other contributors to The Christian Delusion not only hold minority positions, but even minority positions much less popular than those of Evangelicalism. Robert Price, for example, denies the existence of Jesus and, in support of that view, proposes many interpretations of ancient sources that are rejected by the vast majority of scholars. In some cases, I don't know that any other scholar holds Price's view.

- A position that's a minority view today may have been a majority view in the past. Today's conservative scholarship often holds views that were majority positions previously, even though they're minority positions today. Saying that an Evangelical position is a minority view today has some significance, but it presents us with an incomplete picture. We ought to distinguish between, on the one hand, a conservative view of the gospels, for example, that was much more popular in the past and, on the other hand, a belief that's always been unpopular, like Tobin's atheism or Price's view that Jesus didn't exist. If modern unpopularity is bad, how much worse is an unpopularity that's lasted even longer?

- In some contexts, a different type of popularity is far more significant than the one Tobin keeps focusing on. How popular was a particular view among the historical sources who were in a good position to judge it? The early enemies of Christianity did dispute the historicity of some Biblical accounts, but they also affirmed much of what modern critics deny. Richard Carrier's view of the genre of Mark's gospel, for instance, has been unpopular in Biblical scholarship, but it's even more significant that his view was unpopular among the ancient sources who addressed the subject. Similarly, Tobin makes much of modern scholarship's doubts about Luke's census, yet the census account seems to have been widely accepted in antiquity. (For a discussion of the significance of those ancient sources, see my series of posts here.) Or when both the ancient Christian and the ancient Jewish sources seem to agree that Jesus' tomb was found empty after His body had been placed there, why do critics like Tobin reject that ancient consensus? Why should we think the sort of highly speculative objections they propose weigh as much as or more than the agreed testimony of ancient Christian and non-Christian sources, who were much closer to the event in question?

- Tobin keeps criticizing Steve's citation of Evangelical scholars, but Steve hasn't just cited Evangelicals. Since Steve cited C.E.B. Cranfield, who wasn't an Evangelical, Tobin responded by categorizing him as a "theologian". Apparently, that's Tobin's way of trying to lessen the significance of a non-Evangelical scholar. If he can't dismiss that scholar as an Evangelical, an "apologist", etc., he labels him as a "theologian". But how often has Tobin referred to his own sources that way? He dismisses Cranfield as somebody "whose understanding of the historical method is suspect". Compare Cranfield's credentials to Tobin's. And what about other non-Evangelical scholars who disagree with Tobin? I cited the example of Raymond Brown in my response to Tobin in chapter 6 of The Infidel Delusion. Other non-Evangelicals have disagreed with Tobin's view of the infancy narratives as well, such as Ethelbert Stauffer (Jesus And His Story [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1960]), Jerome Murphy-O'Connor, and Joseph Kelly. In fact, as I pointed out in The Infidel Delusion, Tobin's skepticism about the infancy narratives is so radical as to place him in disagreement with the vast majority of modern scholars. If you go to Tobin's web site, you can find more examples of his disagreements with many non-Evangelical scholars.

- Tobin frequently claims that a position is held by a majority or represents "mainstream critical scholars", for example, without presenting any documentation for that conclusion. If Tobin thinks we can't trust the historical judgment of somebody like Cranfield, how much more should we not trust Tobin when he doesn't document his assertions?