Mask or Mirror?

1. I'm going to comment on Lydia McGrew's The Mirror or the Mask (DeWard). This won't a formal review in the sense of a chapter-by-chapter synopsis followed by an evaluation. Rather, I'll concentrate on the gist of the argument, and the sections of greatest interest to me.

2. In this book, Lydia's principal foils are Craig Keener, Craig Evans, to a lesser degree Dan Wallace, and to a greater degree Mike Licona. 

It may be useful to classify them. On the pecking order. Keener is the preeminent scholar. Evans is a very capable scholar, but spreads himself too thin. He tried to bluff his way through a debate with Lydia on Unbelievable and committed basic factual blunders about the Gospels. 

Wallace is NT scholar and self-taught NT textual critic. He rose to greater prominence as a critic of Ehrman. 

Licona is a popular Christian apologist with a doctorate in NT studies. 

Evans openly repudiates inerrancy. Wallace is formally committed to inerrancy. Keener takes a largely historical approach to the Gospels, although he's a charismatic scholar with in-depth research on ancient and modern miracles, so while he doesn't seem to be committed to inerrancy, he is strong on the supernatural as well as historical components of the Gospels (and Acts).

Licona pays lip-service to inerrancy, but he talks out of both sides of his mouth, depending on the audience. His default position is to put little stock in inerrancy. Except when he's on the defensive, that's the position he naturally reverts to. 

3. Because some of these men are colleagues or move in the same professional circles, a buddy system naturally develops where they avoid public criticism.

In addition, NT studies can operate like a social contagion, where academic fads catch on and go unchallenged within the guild. 

An outsider may bring a fresh and necessary skill set to the debate. For instance, philosopher Peter van Inwagen is critical of the logically naive reasoning he finds in Bible studies:

Third, a really substantial proportion of the arguments the skeptics employ are very bad arguments. (For example: if one of the Gospels says that Jesus said thus-and-so, and if his having said thus-and-so was useful to the early church, then he probably didn't say thus-and-so.) 

Fourth, the arguments of many of the skeptics have premises that are philosophical rather than historical–that miracles are impossible, for example, or that it is methodologically essential to objective historical writing that it regard any miraculous narrative as unhistorical. These philosophical premises may be defensible, but they are rarely defended. And when they are–well, as a philosopher, I can testify that I have never seen a defense of them by a historical scholar that I would regard as philosophically competent. 

Finally, the community of skeptical critics is entirely naive and unself-critical as regards its own claims to objectivity. Its members regard the New Testament authors and the students of the Bible who lived before the advent of modern scholarship as simply creatures of their time and culture; the idea that skeptical twentieth-century scholars might be creatures of their time and culture is an idea that they seem not to have considered. 

http://andrewmbailey.com/pvi/Skeptical.pdf 

I have few of the skills and little of the knowledge New Testament criticism requires…But I do know something about reasoning, and I have been simply amazed by some of the arguments employed by redaction critics. My first reaction to these arguments, written up a bit, could be put in these words: "I'm missing something here. These appear to be glaringly invalid arguments, employing methods transparently engineered to produce negative judgments of authenticity. But no one, however badly he might want to produce a given set of conclusions, would "cook" his methods to produce the desired results quite so transparently. These arguments must depend on tacit premises, premises the reaction critics regard as so obvious that they don't bother to mention them." Peter van Inwagen, "Do You Want us to Listen to You?" C. Bartholomew et al. eds. "Behind" the Text: History and Biblical Interpretation (Zondervan, 2003), 127.

By contrast, Richard Bauckham is a maverick who conducts his own independent research and arrives at concludes without regard to status quo scholarship. 

4. There's the question of Lydia's qualifications. She's polymath. 

She doesn't read the Gospels in Greek. While that's disadvantageous in one respect it can be advantageous in other respect. To begin with, many NT scholars aren't Greek scholars like F.F. Bruce, Bruce Metzger, Stephen Baugh, Colin Hemer, and Stanley Porter. They just get by. NT commentators are often unreliable guides on the nuances of Greek. 

In addition, a focus on Greek grammar can be a distraction when reading narratives. There's value in becoming thoroughly immersed in the plot, so that you internalize the narrative flow. That enables the alert reader to notice details and interconnections that might be lost on a scholar with an eye to Greek construction. I daresay that knowing the text of the Gospels backwards and forwards, insight and out, has made Lydia very sensitive to undesigned coincidences, among other things. 

There are different, complementary ways to read the Bible. Take the narratological approach inaugurated by Robert Altar and Frank Kermode. Because so much scripture consists of historical narrative and narrative theology, it's important to use more than one tool kit. Take John Collins, Reading Genesis Well. 

A neglected approach in Gospels studies is oral history. On the one hand this can involve informants sharing anecdotes with Mark or Luke. On the other hand, this can involve John dictating his reminiscences to a scribe. 

At present, NT studies approach the Gospels from an overly-literary perspective, as if these are carefully crafted documents to further the rhetorical and theological strategy of the narrator. 

5. The issue of inerrancy crops up in Lydia's book. It's become a slippery concept. There's a distinction between abstract inerrancy and substantive inerrancy. An abstract definition stipulates that Biblical teaching is inerrant. That, however, is just a blank to fill in. The definition in itself doesn't predict or select for the inerrant intention. Is a particular account in Scripture meant to be realistic? 

Traditionally, inerrancy is shorthand for a substantive claim. Framers have specific examples in mind. The moral and theological teaching of Scripture is true. The historical narratives correspond to real events and describe them in recognizable terms. The prophecies of scripture were delivered ahead of time. 

On a traditional, robust view of inerrancy, "inerrancy" typically includes historicity, apart from standard fictional exceptions like the parables of Jesus.

What is happening in some evangelical circles is splitting inerrancy from historicity. Inerrancy stripped of historicity. So we have proponents of empty shell inerrancy. 

6. Lydia's basic position is that given a choice, it's far preferable to have a narrator who makes innocent mistakes, little slips of memory, to a narrator who creatively misrepresents what really happened to make apparent events further a theological agenda. Where theology gets ahead of the reality on the ground. There's nothing underneath the theology but the narrator's imagination. 

It reduces the Gospels to historical fiction, like a movie adaptation based on a "true story". A historical core intertwined with imaginary scenes, speeches, and characters. And there's no way to distinguish which is which because the Gospels are the primary sources. Although there's corroborative evidence for the Gospels, these are the only 1C documents we have on the life of Christ, so there's no independent source to compare them to if the narrators indulge in fabrication and legendary embellishment. We can't get back to what really happened, because we have nothing behind the Gospels. 

7. A standing irony in the current debate is the overlap between Bart Ehrman's position and the position of the scholars Lydia targets. Ehrman himself views the Gospels as historical fiction, containing residual facts about Jesus along with legendary embellishment. He has no problem with the notion that Gospel narrators resort to rhetorical devices which sacrifice historicity for theology.  

8. On p10, Lydia delineates and defines what she means by fictionalizing literary devices. 

This is followed by a list of 20 actual examples from the scholars under review. Disturbing as these examples are, I think Lydia's larger point is that once you adopt this hermeneutic, then it has no brakes to slow the momentum as it careens down the Grande Corniche. Ever more scenes and sayings in life of Christ can be relegated to confabulation and legendary embellishment. The account is not a window into what happened, but into the narrator's imagination. 

9. Lydia distinguishes between achronological narration, where the narrator bunches materially topically, from dyschronological narration, where the narrator creates an alternate sequence, deviating from the original sequence, to convey to the reader that this is how it happened. 

By the same token, Lydia critiques the rubbery, equivocal way some scholars redefine a paraphrase, where it bears no recognizable resemblance to the original statement, whether verbally or conceptually. Where it's just the narrator's gloss, or the narrator writing speech for Jesus to recite, like a character in play. 

10. Another problem with this approach is that Gospel accounts frequently involve statements or dialogues embedded in a setting which supplies the occasion for the statements and dialogues. A particular incident gives rise to the conversation. Speakers respond to each other, in a conversation thread. 

But on the compositional device theory, was there a precipitating event that gave rise to subsequence statements and actions? Or does the whole thing unravel? Did the scene ever happen, or is the scene concocted to provide a backstory for a theological lesson? Are the speakers real participants or fictional mouthpieces? 

11. Lydia has a very useful section on the argument from unnecessary details,viz. 306-16. Her monograph isn't just a critique of the deficiencies in Licona et al., but here she begins to systematize a positive, but neglected line of evidence for the historicity of the Gospels. 

12. Likewise, Lydia proposes her own harmonizations. In some cases these may include her husband's harmonizations. This provides a counter to Bart Ehrman's dogeared list of contradictions. 

13. Lydia's position isn't primarily that we should reject the approach of the scholars in question between it leads to skeptical consequences. Her position, rather, is that the approach generates gratuitous skepticism unjustified by the historical evidence we have. These are bad solutions. Bad solutions obscure good solutions. And the effect is to divert attention away from multiple lines of evidence for the historicity of the Gospels. 

14. In the case of secular writers like Plutarch, Lydia makes what ought to be the obvious point that a mistake is often the most plausible explanation, rather than a compositional device. Speaking for myself, there's also the question of how seriously to take Plutarch. He's writing to entertain his wealthy patrons. So he's not a historian in the strict sense. We'd expect him to indulge in great literary license. How does humoring his clients make him comparable to the authors of the Gospels? 

15. The question of whether the Gospels are Greco-Roman bioi. Of the four Gospels, Luke is the only one who writes with any sense of self-conscious literary culture and tradition. And even that's not a style he sustains. As commentators routinely note, his prologue seems to be modeled on the LXX, but he doesn't maintain that rhetorical register. Either he lacks the literary ability to consistently write at that level or he else just doesn't care. He wrote the introduction that way to gain a hearing, but what he really cares about are the events themselves, so that interest quickly takes over. He's a part of this. That's what excites him. To see God at work. It's not a detached account. Luke is field missionary. It's a gripping experience.

Moreover, as commentators note, his style is uneven because he absorbs the style of his sources or informants. That shows you how close he is to his evidence. He doesn't put it into a blender to produce a smooth homogenous style. 

16. One question is whether the Gospels are even written in a self-conscious literary genre. Which comes first? You pick a genre and then shoehorn the material into the genre–or you write what you know about someone, which has the incidental rather than premeditated effect of prodding a biography? Consider oral histories in which the informant has no literary culture. They just talk about their life and experience. Or a reporter who interviews informants. It isn't in the first instance directed towards by a preconceived genre. Rather, they just set out to record whatever informants tell them. The genre will be the incidental outcome of the process. Keep in mind that none of the Gospel authors are professional writers. 

17. To the extent, moreover, that Gospel authors had historical and biographical models in mind, wouldn't OT narratives furnish more immediate precedents? All four Gospel authors were steeped in the OT. 

18. I'd add that writing has changed over the years. For instance, the Puritans have a choppy style because they didn't write everything out at one sitting. They wrote for a while, got up, did something else, resumed writing. Their writings often contain maddening digressions. But that's because they don't go through drafting process. Or just consider how long it took for Augustine to write The City of God. All the interruptions. 

19. Harmonistic debates over the number of angels at the tomb are complicated by the fact that some commentators don't believe in angels. They regard them as part of the genre, like the supernatural denizens of the Odyssey, Argonautica, Beowulf, or Dante's Inferno. So the whole harmonistic question is artificial or ridiculous if taken seriously from their standpoint. 

In addition, even for commentators whose abstract theology includes a realm of angels, how many have given much through to the nature of angelic apparitions? So this limits the harmonistic resources.