Aromatherapy

Recently I had an impromptu exchange on Facebook with an evangelical convert to Eastern Orthodoxy.

Hays

I'd say a reasonable assumption is that wealthy Christians paid scribes to copy parts of Scripture. And literate Christians might make their own copies. So it can operate at a lay level.

Seems to me you are making an epistemic argument. To use the web of belief metaphor, most books of the Bible are strongly attested internally and externally. 

A few books are more weakly attested. I don't think there's anything wrong with admitting that we have a stronger commitment to the the four gospels than 2 Peter. Take the desert island scenario. If you had to choose...

This goes to the distinction between certainty and probability, and the role of probability in Christian faith. I don't think God requires us to have apodictic proof for the canon. We just operate with the evidence he's put at our disposal. Some books have more evidence and better evidence than others. 

And there's a certain amount of redundancy to biblical teaching. To take an extreme hypothetical, suppose Mark was lost in the late 1C and never rediscovered. But so long as we have Matthew, Luke, and John, the impact on Christian theology would be negligible. 

As you know, there are hardly any viable candidates for canonical books that were left out. 2C apocryphal gospels don't make the cut since they could not have been written by an apostle at that late date. So canonical debates come down to handful of books. 

Hamilton

"one must identify the content of scripture."

Hays

True. 

Hamilton

"The content of scripture (limiting it to the NT to avoid extraneous issues creeping in) is identified in tradition…one has to rely on tradition to identify the teaching exegeted out of scripture as divinely authoritative."

Hays

But not only in tradition. There's a strong argument to be made that the titles of the Gospels are original. So authorship is stated in the sacred text itself. Same thing with most NT epistles and Revelation. Acts is by the same author as the Gospel of Luke while 1-3 John are manifestly by the same author as the Gospel of John. There's also the way in which Acts is a bridge, linking the authors of the Gospels on the hand, and the authors of the NT epistles, on the other hand. 

So that much is already in Scripture. Which is not to disdain important lines of external corroborative evidence. 

Hamilton

"The authority of this tradition in identifying scripture is rooted in its being handed down concretely from the apostles- something which is from the apostolic deposit is authoritative and from God."

Hays

If you mean external evidence for traditional authorship, that's not directly from the apostles but by people who knew them (which may be preserved in tradition). Not the apostles themselves, but second-parties who witness to apostolic authorship.  

Hamilton

"What you said in the above comment seems to indicate to me that authority rests in a teaching coming from the apostles. The NT is of divine authority because it is from the apostles."

Hays

i) Actually, no. I was simply responding to you on your own terms. 

ii) I'd recast the issue in terms of truth rather than authority. Truth based on inspiration, revelation, and observation. That's not confined to the apostles. 

By "observation" I mean writers who knew Jesus (e.g. St. John) or knew people who knew Jesus (e.g. St. Luke). By "revelation" I mean theological interpretation (e.g. Paul). By inspiration, I mean the process of writing a NT book. 

Hamilton

"How do we know it is from the apostles? Because we can make sound historical arguments towards that end…"

Hays

Also true for non-apostolic writings. 

Hamilton

"But here's my issue. It seems to me that every aspect of the apostolic deposit must be equally authoritative. Your argument for the authoritative nature of scripture is made by appealing to historical arguments which establish the apostolic origins of scripture. But if one follows this line of logic, in principle, one could make an historical argument for an apostolic tradition, and identify it as equally authoritative with scripture simply on the basis of its apostolicity."

Hays

If we knew for a fact that a tradition was apostolic, then I don't object in principle to putting that on par with an apostolic writing. If prayer to Mary (to take one example) is an apostolic tradition in the sense that one or more apostles taught it, then it would have the same cachet as Romans. But that's hypothetical and counterfactual. If pigs could fly...

[Even in that case, there's a distinction between descriptive apostolic practice and prescriptive apostolic teaching]

Hamilton

"Sola scriptura is falsified if it can be shown that there is at least one thing not in scripture which is considered authoritative to this same degree for a reason other than its conceptual identity with something being taught in scripture."

Hays

Here's a different way to frame sola Scriptura:

1. Sola scripture is based on the primacy of (public revelation). 

By "public" I mean divine revelation for Christians in general or humanity in general. I don't rule out private revelation (e.g. a premonitory dream for an individual), but that's not for the church.

2. Nothing outranks revelation. Nothing is on a par with revelation.

3. As of now, the only place we find public revelation is in the record of Scripture.

4. There's the question of how we verify or falsify a revelatory claimant. To falsify a revelatory claimant doesn't violate the primacy of revelation since, if false, it never was revelation.

5. Does verifying a revelatory claimant mean putting what we use to verify it on a par with the thing we verify? Or even to outrank it? 

No. To take a comparison, suppose I'm an eyewitness to Jesus. I saw him perform miracles. I saw him die on the cross. I saw the empty tomb. I saw him alive again. I touched him.

I'm using my natural senses to verify the Resurrection. But that doesn't put me on a par with Jesus.

6. What if Protestants made a mistake about the canon? What if they included a book they ought to exclude or excluded a book they ought to include? Does that nullify sola scripture? 

i) To begin with, people can be mistaken even if there's sufficient evidence for something. They may have a plausibility structure that filters out sufficient evidence for something. It's not the evidence but the plausibility structure that's defective. Take atheists who automatically discount reported miracles regardless of the evidence. 

ii) Suppose Protestants made a mistake about the canon because the available evidence is insufficient. If so, why should I fret or sweat over an innocent, unavoidable mistake? It wasn't important enough to God to provide us with evidence sufficient to avoid that mistake.

7. Catholics/Orthodox might say their alternative is a failsafe against that risk. However, a fake solution is not a real solution. It's like telling a terminally ill cancer patient for whom conventional therapy is futile to switch to aromatherapy or Chinese herbal medicine. Catholics and Orthodox are in the same epistemic situation as Protestants. They just camouflage the situation.