Are Gnostic and pagan documents part of Roman Catholic tradition?

In the mid 1990s, I met a man online named John Wallace who impressed upon me the value of hostile corroboration. He made good use of the corroboration of Christianity that we have from ancient non-Christian sources. I also read some material in Philip Schaff's church history that left an impression on me in that context. A series I wrote on the canon of scripture several years ago has a segment about hostile corroboration of the New Testament canon, and it concludes with a quote from the material in Schaff's church history I just referred to. Ever since I came across Wallace and Schaff's work, I've given a lot of attention to hostile corroboration as a line of evidence. You can find many traces of it in my work over the years.

I often think of that line of evidence when I see Catholics and Orthodox claim that Protestants are relying on Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox tradition when we accept our canon of scripture, interpret it in light of ancient sources, or some such thing. They act as though anything outside of scripture should be equated with Catholic or Orthodox tradition. I know that hostile corroboration has long been a large part of what shapes my views on matters like the canon of scripture and scripture interpretation. When Bible translators make judgments about how to render the Biblical text, Biblical commentators decide how to best interpret certain Biblical passages, and so forth, they rely partly on information they're getting from Josephus, Tacitus, Pliny the Younger, Trypho, Celsus, Porphyry, archeological artifacts, and other ancient non-Christian sources. And something like a New Testament manuscript or a catacomb inscription isn't always accompanied by an extensive statement of faith on the part of the individual(s) who produced the manuscript or inscription. Think of the absurdity of suggesting that everything from Josephus to Celsus to an ancient New Testament manuscript from a largely unknown source is equivalent to Roman Catholic Sacred Tradition.

But many Protestants are taken in by that sort of argumentation. And many Catholics and Orthodox think they're arguing well when they utilize such poor arguments. That's largely because we're such a secular, trivial culture that doesn't think and talk about issues like these nearly enough.

If a Catholic or Orthodox just wants to argue that part of what Protestants are relying on is Catholic or Orthodox tradition, then that qualifier should be added upfront rather than later in the discussion. And they should justify their claim about partial dependence on their tradition and explain why that partial dependence allegedly is problematic. A Protestant doesn't have to accept, and shouldn't accept, the assumption that all or even most of the church fathers or other early Christians were Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox. And even if they had been Catholic or Orthodox, Catholics and Orthodox often depend on information they get from Protestant or other non-Catholic or non-Orthodox archeologists, historians, Bible translators, patristic scholars, etc. So what? All of us make our historical judgments, including judgments about matters like religion and morals, on the basis of testimony or other evidence from sources outside our church, denomination, or ecclesiastical movement. Again, so what?

Unearthing the Bible

Up-to-date documentation on how archeology corroborates the Bible:

https://www.amazon.com/How-Archaeology-Confirms-Bible-Discoveries/dp/0736979158

Is the Exodus History? A Conversation with Dr. Titus Kennedy

The Historical Reliability of the Geography in the Gospels

https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/justin-taylor/simon-gathercole-on-the-reliability-of-new-testament-geography/

A Proof of Exodus

https://a15b40df-7210-4c2a-bc68-852e76a7c6b7.filesusr.com/ugd/a91655_560a07ef86b54ae692674756a576c013.pdf

DSS forgeries

Wesley Huff

Because I have had a number of people contact me and have been seeing others ask similar questions: yes the Dead Sea Scrolls from the Museum of the Bible are fake. However, this has NO BEARING ON THE RELEVANT ISSUES CONCERNING THE TEXT OF THE BIBLE.

The manuscripts the Museum of the Bible possessed were very fragmentary in nature with little to no text on them to begin with. As far as I can figure out they contained no relevant textual variation from the Masoretic Text or comparative sections in other Dead Sea Scrolls. They were a minor contribution to the picture of the overall text compared to the nearly 100,000 authentic manuscripts of the Dead Sea Scrolls that reside at the Israel Museum.

Why trust the Gospel of John?

From Facebook:

Jeff 

What is [the historicity of John] predicated on?

Hays

The eyewitness testimony of the narrator (i.e. apostle John).

Jeff

Same goes for UFOs and bigfoot?

Hays 

From what I've seen, the footage of bigfoot is just a man in a monkey suit. UFOs are a much more complex subject.

Jeff  

I'm just talking about written testimony of those phenomena. Nothing like video.

Hays 

Is your point to dismiss eyewitness testimony out of hand? That leads to extreme and irrational skepticism, including your own firsthand experiences.

Jeff  

I prefer to externalize my knowledge claims, I know my own senses are not always reliable.

You don't have to verify anything about the author's testimony? You take it all of faith?

Hays 

To begin with, there's archeological corroboration for the Forth Gospel (as well as the Synoptics). Peter Williams has a dandy little book on that: Can We Trust the Gospels?

Moreover, there's lots of incidental internal evidence for the Fourth Gospel. It has the hallmarks of oral history, with lots of unnecessary details and digressions. 

Furthermore, there's the argument from undesigned coincidences. 

Finally, there's lots of evidence for modern miracles, which dovetail with the supernaturalism of the Fourth Gospel.

Jeff 

Well, let's say hypothetically John can be boiled down to 1,000 historical claims. What percent of John's historical claims have been verified? It would be cool to have a resource that goes verse by verse, giving the external verification if it exists.

Hays 

That's not a reasonable method of verification. It's not case-by-case verification but whether there's good evidence that the source is reliable. We don't have to revert to amnesia every time we have evidence for a particular claim, starting from scratch with each individual claim, when dealing with the same source of information.

Jeff 

How do you establish good evidence on the reliability of a source except by examining some mystery number of truth claims that source makes? I'm asking about that very criteria that would grant a piece of text handed to me the 'good evidence' label.

Hays 

There's no magic percentage. One basic principle is that if a source is accurate when we happen to have available evidence which corroborates it, then it's likely to be accurate in cases where corroborative evidence hasn't survived. 

But in addition, there are different kinds of internal evidence and a variety of individual touches that indicate firsthand recollection. So it's not reducible to a single formula. I'm mentioning general criteria, not just the Fourth Gospel.

The Real Jesus: new evidence from history and archeology

Did the Exodus really happen?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Srg_Fq9VeQU

1. This presentation is both usual and unusual. It's usual in the sense that this is the standard critical view of the Exodus. It's unusual in the sense that this isn't what the laity are normally exposed to by Catholic apologists. There's a chasm between mainstream Catholic scholarship–between what their bishops and priests privately believe–and the retrograde version of Catholicism peddled by most Catholic apologists. 

I don't really have anything new to say about the Exodus, but having brought it up, I will venture some comments:

2. What is the Exodus? That can defined more broadly or narrowly. Narrowly, it could be confined to the set of events leading to the escape from Egypt. The period spanning the time when Moses returns to Egypt and begins to have confrontations with Pharaoh and the sorcerers, through the ten plagues, and concluding with the Red Sea crossing. 

When, however, questions are raised about the historicity of the Exodus, that's often shorthand, not only for the Exodus proper, but the wilderness wandering and conquest of Canaan. So that's one way to define or frame the issue. 

3. Another way is to ask whether events happened as described in the narratives. If you stepped into a time machine, when back to the time and place described in the Hexateuch, when you step out of the time machine, could you tell where you were in the books? Would the scenes be recognizable in relation to the Biblical narratives? 

4. Another way of answering the question is what is meant by historicity. Does that mean things happened pretty much as described? Or does it mean the accounts have a historical core, buried under layers of legionary embellishment?

Is what really happened naturally explicable? Is it necessary to strip away the supernaturalism to arrive at the underlying history? 

5. The question that raises is whether there's any evidence for the existence of a prayer-answering God. Is there a God who ever intervenes in this way? Of does miraculous divine intervention only happen in pious, inspirational fiction? 

Fr. Casey is sensitive to this issue. He tries to stake a balance. He thinks something happened. But the question is whether the something that happened includes conspicuous divine involvement. If it's just something that slaves did on their own, then is there any reason to believe we can ever fall back on God in a pinch? Is there a God who sometimes intercedes in human affairs, individually or collectively–to do for us what we can't do for ourselves? Or is that just make-believe and wishful thinking? In reality, we're on our own. Was what really happened something that could happen in a Godless universe?

6. One of Casey's assumptions seems to be that biblical records aren't evidence in their own right. Their credibility requires independent corroboration. 

7. His presentation is very one-sided. He raises stock objections that are dealt with by evangelical commentators, viz. Desi Alexander, John Currid, Duane Garrett, Robert Hubbard, Kenneth Mathews, Douglas Stuart, as well as evangelical monographs, viz., Kenneth Kitchen, On the Reliability of the Old Testament (Eerdmans 2003); James Hoffmeier, Alan Millard, and Gary Rendsburg, ed. "Did I Not Bring Israel Out of Egypt?" • Biblical, Archaeological, and Egyptological Perspectives on the Exodus Narratives (Eisenbrauns 2016).

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2017/06/did-i-not-bring-israel-out-of-egypt.html

He has some awareness of biblical archeology, but his information seems to be very dated. As a consequence, he commits several strategic blunders about the nature of the evidence, the number of Israelites, and the resultant logistics. 

8. This is a key issue in Catholicism, because it's not as if Catholicism provides a safety net in case OT narratives or NT narratives have undergone substantial legendary embellishment. For the same skepticism logically extends to the lives of the saints. Hagiographic tall tales about Catholic miracles and apparitions. 

Text and History: Reassessing the Relationship between the Bible and Archaeological Findings

https://denverseminary.edu/resources/news-and-articles/text-and-history-reassessing-the-relationship-between-the-bible-and-archaeological-findings-a-review-essay/

This is basically a critique of secular biblical archeology. The primary value lies in the correctives provided by Hess rather than the book under review.

How do details in the Old Testament confirm its historicity?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIwGpLFFYG0

Atlantis

Plato's legend of Atlantis, in the Timaeus and the Critias, captured the imagination. It's popular among New Age gurus. It may well be a myth of Plato's own devising.

However, it's intriguing to consider that one of the two candidates for the location of Eden is lower Mesopotamia, at the mouth of the Persian Gulf. Perhaps it's just coincidental, but maybe the legend of Atlantis is a dim memory of Eden, now submerged in the Indian sea. Likewise, it may just be coincidental that the Persian Gulf is a source of pearl oysters, but perhaps that's reminiscent of Gen 2:12.

The other candidate for the location of Eden is upper Mesopotamia, around Armenia or Anatolia.

Astronomy and the date of the crucifixion

We have to be cautious about these correlations. It is, however, an interesting example of how extrabiblical data might illuminate the text. That would be obvious to the observer, but not to a reader who wasn't there:

https://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/1985/JASA3-85Humphreys.html

The Best Arguments for and against the Gospels

https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/podcasts/tgc-podcast/best-arguments-gospels/

Has complete transcript.

The Last Days of Sodom and Gomorrah

Assuming this is how it happened, this would be a coincidence miracle:

https://www.timesofisrael.com/evidence-of-sodom-meteor-blast-cause-of-biblical-destruction-say-scientists/

The method employs a natural mechanism, but the timing and placement are unnaturally discriminating. A preternatural event: natural at one level but supernatural at another level. 

Museum of the mind

i) Some biblical place names are hard for modern readers to correlate with the surviving evidence. Stock examples include Gadara/Gerasa, Jericho, and Ai. That's not surprising given the vicissitudes of time. 

Critics view this issue through the wrong end of the telescope. What's striking isn't that we have a few cases like this, but that we're able to make a confident identification most of the time. 

Memory is a museum of the mind. I remember many places that no longer exist. To take some comparisons:

ii) In some cases a place name changes. It's the same site under a different name. When I was a boy back in the 60s, a shopping plaza was built nearby. The supermarket was originally called the PX. Later it was renamed Mayfair. And it changed hands a few more times before the shopping plaza was eventually demolished to make way for an upscale condo community with artsy shoppes.

Very few residents are in a position to remember what used to be there and what it was called. You had to live through that period. It's very time-sensitive information. Some long-term natives remember, but the area has undergone a tremendous turnover, due to gentrification and urbanization. Many of the locals didn't live at that time and place.

The fact that Bible place names are often so identifiable at this great distance from events is a tribute to the accuracy of Scripture. It would be so easy to get these wrong if the document was written at a different time or place. 

iii) Once again, when I was a kid back in the 60s, there were two rival towns next to each other: Kirkland and Houghton. I remember my parents taking me to the Houghton public library when I was a very young boy. Many years later when I happened to be driving around there, I stumbled across the long-shuttered Houghton library.

Because Kirkland was more competitive, Houghton was eventually annexed by Kirkland. And Kirkland has annexed some other nearby municipalities or parts of unincorporated counties. 

As a result, some of the original place names have changed, although individual businesses may use the old place name. What "Houghton" refers to would be opaque to a resident who wasn't there at the time. It requires pinpoint knowledge to be conversant with the local historical minutiae. 

iv) This raises a dilemma for a historian. Suppose you're writing a history about that locality. Some of the place names have changed. Do you use the new place names or the old place names? If you use the new place names, that's anachronistic–but if you use the old place names, that's unrecognizable to most readers. Ideally, the place name should match the period you write about, but if a reader doesn't know what that refers to, the precision is pedantic. It fails to communicate. 

v) It may also depend on the emphasis. Is this primarily a history about that locality, or a biography, where the setting is more incidental? 

vi) Sometimes you have the opposite phenomenon, where the site changes while the name remains the same. I attended four different elementary schools, then junior high and high school. Some were built in my lifetime. All of them have since been torn down and replaced with new school facilities. They kept the same name for the school, but it has new buildings. And the campus is different to accommodate the new buildings.

I have detailed firsthand memories of the original schools. I could describe the layout of each campus and buildings. That wouldn't bear any correspondence to the current campus and floor plan. 

Then there's the school where my father taught. That's long gone. Today it's just a public park. For that matter, some of the public parks have been drastically relandscaped. 

Imagine a "Bible critic" thousands of years later reading my account, which doesn't match surviving records, and concluding that my account is either fictional or based on faulty sources. It would, however, be the critic rather than the source that has faulty information.

vii) Keep in mind, too, that due to military invasion, the Middle East has undergone tremendous change over the millennia. Cities razed and villages burned to the ground. 

viii) One more example. When I moved to a new area, I went to a supermarket. I glanced at a picture framed history of the franchise. It's a chain store that was started by a local business man in 1957. So there was that historical description on top. Below was a photograph of the store and parking lot full of cars. Since the ostensible purpose of the photo is to illustrate the history, you'd expect the photo to be taken around the time the first store opened. Like the grand opening or shortly thereafter.

But the cars in the photo were from the 1960s, not the 1950s. That's something I instantly recognize because I was born in 1959, so as a kid a saw lots of 1950s cars. And, of course, having lived through the Sixties, I saw lots of 1960s cars. I automatically know the difference. 

Perhaps the person who posted the story and the photo didn't have a period photo. Or perhaps he was too indifferent to dig around for a period photo. Or perhaps he's too young to be aware of the difference between 1950s cars and 1960s cars. Even though the anachronism is obvious, it isn't obvious to someone who wasn't alive at that time and place. Sometimes there's no substitute for firsthand knowledge. 

In relation to the history, the photo was off by about 7 years, give or take. Very narrow parameters, but enough to falsify the illustration inasmuch as it's impossible for 1960s cars to be around before a store that opened in 1957. There's no wiggle room for that chronological incongruity. 

Once again, it requires pinpoint knowledge to be aware of these things. We should be impressed by how accurate the Bible is. How rarely biblical place names are hard to identify from surviving records. These apparent discrepancies are predictable and consistent with the complete accuracy of scripture, given the spotty evidence that's survived. By contrast, the demonstrable accuracy of Scripture is very hard to explain if books were written at a later date and/or place.  

From Adam to Hobbits

http://toddcwood.blogspot.com/2018/04/seafaring-cavemen-imagine-that.html

Jesus' Burial And Empty Tomb Outside The Gospels And Acts

It's often suggested that Paul and other early Christians were unaware of, or even contradicted, much of what's said about Jesus in the gospels and Acts. Critics often object to the empty tomb accounts, for example, on the basis that Paul and other New Testament authors don't mention the empty tomb. What I want to do in this post is outline some of the evidence that what the gospels and Acts say about issues related to Jesus' tomb is corroborated elsewhere.

- Belief in a physical resurrection of the body that died implies an empty tomb and interest in it. We've written a lot over the years about the evidence that the early Christians held that view of Jesus' resurrection. See here, here, and here regarding Paul, for example.

- We have a lot of evidence that the earliest Christians and their earliest opponents had the ability and desire to research Jesus' tomb. For example:

Ghost towns

Critics sometimes allege that some biblical place names are fictional or legendary. But this assumes that it should be easy for modern investigators to correlate literary notices with sites.

i) In the case of famous cities, their identity might be well-known. 

ii) Likewise, in the case of sites that have been continuously occupied over the millennia, although even in that case, they might have been renamed. 

iii) Also, because the Holy Land is a tourist trap and pilgrimage magnet, local traditions might invent identifications to feed pious curiosity.

iv) In the case of villages and hamlets from 2000-3000+ years ago, is there any expectation that they'd be easy to identify at our distance from events?

Nowadays, we have maps. Public records. Post office records. Libraries. Street signs. Some buildings are named after the locality. Official letterhead. 

But aside from inscriptions, I imagine most ancient villages and hamlets never had that kind of direct evidence to begin with, and even if they originally had evidence naming the locale, there's no presumption that would survive or be discovered (as of yet).

v) I've read that the state of Kanas has over 6000 ghost towns. Suppose that was 2000-3500 years ago. Even if these towns were named in historical records, how many sites would we be able to correlate with literary notices? It's not like they'd all have signs "Entering X". It's not like they'd all have artifacts that named the village or hamlet. For that matter, some artifacts with place names might be imported. 

vi) When I was a boy, back in the 60s, there were two rival towns side-by-side: Kirkland and Houghton. Eventually, Houghton was annexed by Kirkland. But even though the name "Houghton" is still attached to some local businesses, natives below a certain age don't remember Houghton as an independent municipality. And people who later moved into the area from out of state or out of town never knew the local history. Within my lifetime, that's vanished. There are historical records, if you wish to do research, but what would survive after 2000-3500 years? 

vii) What's remarkable is that we're able to identify so many place names in Scripture, and not that we're stumped by a few. 

Eruv

I used to live in a town where there was synagogue and a Jewish day school on the same street. Nothing surprising about that combination. What's interesting is the name of the street: Raoul Wallenberg Boulevard. I doubt that's coincidental. Wallenberg is, of course, forever remembered as one of the heroic and tragic figures of WWII, who saved thousands of Jews from the Holocaust, while he himself apparently died in a Russian gulag. 

It's the combination of the street name and the two Jewish establishments that invites a special explanation. In principle, there are two explanations:

i) The street was named first, then members of the local Jewish community thought that would be a good place to have a school and synagogue, given the Jewish associations with the preexisting street name. 

ii) The street originally had a different name, then local Jews lobbied to change the name. On that view, the synagogue (or eruv) might predate the name of the street, which was renamed to reflect the eruv. 

Historically, the town in question has been a Jewish haven for centuries. I don't know which came first, but there's some case/effect connection, and in principle it could go either way. If I wanted to research the issue, the answer might be obtainable. From what I've read, that particular area is an eruv or Jewish neighborhood. Here's a definition:

http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/700456/jewish/What-Is-an-Eruv.htm

So which came first: the eruv or the street name? Did the symbolism of the street name inspire local Jews to settle in that neighbored? Or did the Jewish complexion of that neighborhood result in officially renaming the street to correspond to the demographics? 

My point is that this illustrates the complexities of historical reconstruction when we read the Bible and relate some bits of information to other bits of information. All the data can be factual, but there may be more than one backstory that could account for the connections. And we don't have enough supplementary information to narrow it down to one conclusive explanation.

In addition, if something like the "coincidence" I just describe is reported in Scripture, many Bible scholars will say the correlation was creative to some degree. The narrator invented a place name to go with the corresponding details, or else he invented the corresponding details to go with the place name. Or he invented the whole thing, which is why we have this nifty correspondence. Yet the example I gave is a real life example. It's all true.