Neglected Evidence For The Authorship Of The Fourth Gospel

A neglected line of evidence for the fourth gospel's authorship is how closely John 19:35, 20:31, and 21:24 align with what Jesus said about the guidance of the Holy Spirit, the work of the apostles, and other issues in John 14-17. What the author of the document says in the passages I cited from John 19-21 seems to allude to Jesus' earlier comments in chapters 14-17. The implication is that the author of the fourth gospel is fulfilling what Jesus predicted. He's suggesting that he's one of the apostles Jesus was addressing in chapters 14-17.

Protestants Are Being Consistent About Canonical Issues

I recently came across a critic of Protestantism who made the common assertion that we need an infallible source to tell us what canon of scripture to follow. Apparently, we're supposed to think that fallibly applying some general principles from an infallible source in order to arrive at a canon isn't enough. This critic of Protestantism seemed to be suggesting that we need an infallible source to do something like list the canonical books for us. Supposedly, it's too difficult to discern a canon without such guidance. And so on.

Part of what we should keep in mind when issues like those come up is that the manner in which Protestants handle those canonical issues is substantially the same as how they handle canonical issues in contexts other than scripture and how such critics of Protestantism handle canonical issues in many contexts in their lives. We all accept canons for the writings of various historical figures (Tacitus, Justin Martyr, George Washington, etc.) without any sort of infallible ruling on the subject, for example. There are ongoing disagreements among critics of Protestantism about which extrabiblical traditions are part of the Christian rule of faith and which aren't, such as which papal teachings qualify as an exercise of papal infallibility and which don't. Those non-Protestants aren't relying on an infallible list, just as they arrive at a lot of other canons in other contexts in life without any infallible list. For further discussion of topics like these, see here and here, among other posts.

Thank God For Scripture

Last Thursday I gave a lecture on William Tyndale to a group in Washington, D. C. Tyndale translated the New Testament for the first time from the original languages into English in 1526. He paid for this with his life. He was strangled and then burned at the stake at age forty-two. There was one point where I did not expect to be moved as deeply as I was. I was listing passages in the English Standard Version that we use here at Bethlehem which trace their origin back through the Revised Standard Version to the American Revised Version to the King James Version to the Geneva Bible to the Coverdale Bible to William Tyndale.

And when I got to the blessing of Numbers 6:24-26, I realized that I use these words almost every weekend to close our services. “The Lord bless you and keep you; the LORD make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.” And it hit me, I am using the very words that William Tyndale chose five hundred years ago to translate these verses (with two tiny changes, thee to you, and merciful to gracious), and he paid for this translation with his life. He died to put these words in English….

So I will say to you what I said to those folks: Let’s not play with these precious words. These are the words of God. Christ died to confirm them and make it possible for sinners to understand them and embrace them. And thousands have died to preserve them for us to this day. Thank God this Thanksgiving for the inspired Bible.

(John Piper)

Sola Scriptura And The Departure Passages

We've written a lot about sola scriptura over the years. See the relevant posts linked here, for example. I've argued that sola scriptura can be justified by a process of elimination, much as we eventually become dependent on written sources in other contexts with the passing of time (e.g., we don't depend on ongoing oral traditions about what individuals like Josephus and Irenaeus taught). But I've cited another line of evidence that I want to highlight here. I've usually brought it up in the context of discussing the papacy, but it's relevant to sola scriptura as well. I'll quote what I wrote about it in a post last year, then expand on what I said there:

But the departure passages I've referred to elsewhere have some relevance here. When Paul and Peter are anticipating their death in 2 Timothy and 2 Peter, for example, they presumably don't know whether every other apostle will also be dead soon. So, how Paul and Peter prepare their audiences for their (Paul and Peter's) death isn't equivalent to preparing them for the post-apostolic age. But it does have some relevance. For one thing, Peter was a Pope under a Roman Catholic scenario, so any apostle who was still alive after Peter's death would have a lesser authority than Peter and his successors. And even though Paul and Peter knew that one or more of the other apostles could outlive them, their own deaths would have underscored the potential for the other apostles to die and the need for preparing for that scenario. Yet, they show no awareness of anything like a papacy or infallible magisterium. The pattern in these passages of referring to sources like past apostolic teaching and scripture without referring to anything like a papacy or infallible magisterium makes more sense under a Protestant paradigm. See my article linked earlier in this paragraph for more details. In addition to the three portions of the New Testament I discuss there (Acts 20, 2 Timothy, 2 Peter), think of the writings of John. He probably wrote in his elderly years, and, like Paul and Peter, he keeps calling on his audience to remember things like apostolic teaching and scripture, but shows no awareness of anything like a papacy or infallible magisterium.

The fact that a few different apostles are addressing these issues in so many contexts is significant. There's a cumulative effect.

It's probably not just a coincidence that so much emphasis on scripture, including the material most cited by Protestants, is found in the documents I'm focused on here (John 14:26, 2 Timothy 3:15-17, 2 Peter 1:20-21, 3:1-2, 3:15-16, Revelation 22:18-19, etc.).

And keep in mind that critics of sola scriptura, like Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox, have taken so much initiative to tell us how important it allegedly is to have guidance from an infallible church or Pope, to have a higher form of ecclesiology like what they offer to produce a certain type of unity they claim we should have, etc. They can't tell us how important such things supposedly are, then turn around and say that it isn't problematic for their position when the earliest sources keep bringing up other sources of authority, but don't even mention the Roman bishopric, let alone refer to a papal office, say nothing of looking to an infallible church after the apostles have departed, etc. You could still argue that other factors outweigh this consideration I'm mentioning, but the point I'm making is that it is a consideration that weighs against systems like Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy to some extent.

The Grapes Of Sodom You've Been Eating

"Believer! there was a delightful promise which you had yesterday; and this morning when you turned to the Bible the promise was not sweet. Do you know why? Do you think the promise had changed? Ah, no! You changed; that is where the matter lies. You had been eating some of the grapes of Sodom, and your mouth was thereby put out of taste, and you could not detect the sweetness. But there was the same honey there, depend upon it, the same preciousness." (Charles Spurgeon)

Trent Horn's Arguments About Early Recognition Of The New Testament Documents As Scripture

He recently posted a video on the subject, as an argument against sola scriptura. It came up in his debate on sola scriptura with Gavin Ortlund as well, and Gavin discussed the subject briefly in a more recent video. Here's something I posted in the comments section below that video:

How To Handle Canonical Issues

An important step in addressing objections you get from a critic is to ask how much the objection could be applied to his belief system. That can help you communicate better with that critic, help you better explain to him why his objection is problematic, or get him to abandon the objection or adjust it or his handling of it in some way, for example. The value of taking that approach is especially significant in the context of interacting with Roman Catholics, since Protestants so often interact with Catholics and since they so often raise objections to Protestantism that they should be holding against their own belief system if they were to be consistent. But you sometimes come across that sort of inconsistency with Eastern Orthodox, atheists, and other groups as well.

One of the most popular objections raised against Protestantism is its supposed inability to justify its acceptance of a canon for its rule of faith, scripture. There is no table of contents in scripture, we rely on means outside of scripture to arrive at our canon, we supposedly accept our canon because a Roman Catholic authority of some sort gave us that canon, and so on. But it's not as though Protestants are the only ones who have a canon for their rule of faith. Every rule has a canon. So, ask yourself whether the group the person you're interacting with belongs to (e.g., Catholicism) handles its own canonical issues in a way comparable to how you handle yours. Is there a table of contents within the Catholic rule of faith? No. Do Catholics arrive at their canon by means outside that canon? Yes. And so forth. In fact, since the Catholic rule is so much larger and more complicated, the process of sorting through canonical issues is more difficult for a Catholic than it is for a Protestant. There are ongoing disputes among Catholics about what qualifies as tradition and what doesn't, which papal teachings are infallible and which aren't, who's been a true Pope and who hasn't been, etc.

Similarly, when atheists and other critics of Christianity claim that the canon of scripture was decided by Constantine or the Council of Nicaea, claim that Irenaeus gave us our canon of the gospels, or some such thing, we shouldn't just respond by explaining how erroneous their historical claims are. We should also notice that they make a lot of canonical judgments themselves and often approach those canonical issues in much the same way Christians do. In discussions about politics and matters like separation of church and state, they'll accept a canon of Thomas Jefferson's writings or some portion of that canon based on whatever they've been told by whatever scholar or other source they've consulted. They'll accept what a high school teacher, college professor, television documentary, book, web site, or some other source told them about the canon of Supreme Court rulings on a particular topic, what the Court said about the issue in question, and so on. We all do this type of thing many times and in many contexts in our everyday lives. So, when a Christian accepts a Biblical canon based on trusting various authority figures (parents, pastors, denominations, a historical consensus of professing Christians, a consensus of Bible publishers, etc.), that isn't much different than what atheists and other non-Christians do in other contexts. Whether an atheist or some other critic is being inconsistent in the objection he's raising will have to be judged case by case, but the possibility that he's being inconsistent should be considered and should be considered earlier rather than later in the discussion.

A lot more can be said about these issues, and we've said a lot more elsewhere (e.g., in my series of posts arguing for the New Testament canon and summarizing the case for the Old Testament canon here). But I want to reinforce the point that it's important to take a critic's objections and apply them to his belief system early in a discussion. That can go a long way in helping the discussion develop well. Protestants need to get better at doing that, especially with Catholics, but also with other groups.

A Historical Argument For The New Testament Canon

My last post cited Charles Hill's Who Chose The Books Of The New Testament? (Bellingham, Washington: Lexham Press, 2022). The book makes a lot of good points (e.g., the manuscript and patristic evidence that the canonical gospels were more widely accepted and viewed more highly than the non-canonical ones in the earliest centuries of Christianity).

However, his focus when discussing canonical criteria is on the self-authenticating nature of scripture, and he doesn't provide what I consider the best argument for the canon. See here for a series I wrote in 2009 that makes a historical argument for the canon on the basis of the criterion of apostolicity. Some parts of that series are somewhat dated, and you can find more recent material in our archives (e.g., I've written substantially more about 1 Timothy 5:18 since then, like here). But the 2009 series provides the general parameters and many of the relevant details.

One of the good aspects of Hill's book is that he cites the existence of our 27-book New Testament canon in Origen more than a century before it appears in Athanasius. But Hill doesn't go into much depth when discussing the subject. See here for my article on the topic, which covers a lot of details Hill doesn't mention, some of which I haven't seen anybody else bring up. As I explain in that article, there are multiple lines of evidence that the 27-book canon predates the letter of Athanasius that's typically cited. People ought to stop citing that letter or Athanasius as an individual as the first source supporting the canon.

Letters Of Gold

"Are ye ashamed to be corrected? This is the vice of the proud. It is, forsooth, a degradation for learned men to pass from the school of Plato to the discipleship of Christ, who by His Spirit taught a fisherman to think and to say, 'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Him; and without Him was not anything made that was made. In Him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.' The old saint Simplicianus, afterwards bishop of Milan, used to tell me that a certain Platonist was in the habit of saying that this opening passage of the holy gospel, entitled, According to John, should be written in letters of gold, and hung up in all churches in the most conspicuous place. But the proud scorn to take God for their Master, because 'the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.' So that, with these miserable creatures, it is not enough that they are sick, but they boast of their sickness, and are ashamed of the medicine which could heal them. And, doing so, they secure not elevation, but a more disastrous fall." (Augustine, The City Of God, 10:29)

Evidence For The Early Prominence Of The Gospels

I want to discuss some patristic evidence that corroborates and expands upon what I wrote earlier this week about the nature of the gospels and their role in early evangelism, missions, the planting of churches, etc. I'll start with a couple of passages in Justin Martyr that have some significance that's often overlooked.

In his Dialogue With Trypho, Justin is told by his Jewish opponent, "I am aware that your precepts in the so-called Gospel are so wonderful and so great, that I suspect no one can keep them; for I have carefully read them." (10) At that point in history, it was common for two or more gospels collectively to be referred to as "the gospel" (which is an indication of the earliness of Justin's Dialogue and the exchange with some Jewish opponents he recounts there). Trypho makes no such comment about other Christian sources, like the letters of Paul. And his comment above came after some remarks Justin made about Christianity in general, not the gospels or any other Christian writings in particular. It's significant that Trypho not only knew of the gospels and read them, but even took the initiative to mention them and didn't cite other early Christian literature in a comparable or greater way.

In his First Apology, Justin writes of Christian church services, "And on the day called Sunday, all who live in cities or in the country gather together to one place, and the memoirs of the apostles [the gospels] or the writings of the prophets are read, as long as time permits; then, when the reader has ceased, the president verbally instructs, and exhorts to the imitation of these good things." (67) Again, notice that the gospels are singled out. And they're mentioned before the books of the Old Testament.

Similarly, Celsus and his Jewish source(s) interact with Christianity based largely on the gospels, much more than Paul's letters and other sources. As Robert Wilken wrote, "Pagan critics realized that the claims of the new movement [Christianity] rested upon a credible historical portrait of Jesus. Christian theologians in the early church, in contrast to medieval thinkers who began their investigations on the basis of what they received from authoritative tradition, were forced to defend the historical claims they made about the person of Jesus. What was said about Jesus could not be based solely on the memory of the Christian community or its own self-understanding." (The Christians As The Romans Saw Them [New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984], 203) Notice how much, in these examples I'm citing and elsewhere, this Christian focus on the life of Jesus involved the gospels, not just claims about him or oral tradition, for example.

The order of the New Testament, starting with the gospels, is another illustration. That ordering of the books isn't a recent development. Discussions of the New Testament canon often give a lot of attention to the Muratorian Canon as the earliest canonical list we have, from the second century. It starts with the gospels.

Why is the Spirit the "Spirit"?

Why is the Spirit of God called the "Spirit"? I've discussed this before, but I'd like to be a bit more discriminating this time. Seems to me that "ruach/pneuma" trades on several connotations, all of which are germane to this member of the Trinity:

1. In Biblical usage, a spirit is:

i) A personal agent

ii) A discarnate agent

So one reason for the designation is to indicate both the personality and incorporeity of the Spirit. The Spirit is not a power or force. And the Spirit is not a physical being like the humanoid gods of the heathen pantheon. Put another way, Yahweh is incorporeal. 

In this regard, the designation connotes the essential identity Spirit. The name has a metaphysical or ontological connotation. 

2. It has life-giving connotations. The breath of life. So the name indicates that the Spirit is the source of biological life.

3. Apropos (2), by extension, it also connotes the Spirit as the source of inner renewal or regeneration. Figurative life as well as  biological life.

4. Finally, it has connotations of divine speech. The spoken word is breath. So it signifies the role of the Spirit as the source of inspiration, revelation, and agency of Scripture. 

In that regard, the designation connotes the economic identity of the Spirit. The name connotes his creative and recreative activity in the world, as well as his revelatory role. 

A Caution About Ben Shapiro's New PragerU Video And Book

You can view the video here. It centers around the Athens/Jerusalem distinction made by Tertullian. I haven't read Shapiro's book, though I did look up his citation of Tertullian there and read the surrounding context. I can't evaluate his book as a whole, but the video is misleading, as is the portion of the book I read. Shapiro does a lot of good work, and I suspect the book as a whole has a lot of good qualities. But the video is problematic, and what little I've seen of the book raises some concerns about it.

I wrote an article several years ago about misrepresentations of Tertullian's comments on Athens and Jerusalem and another passage in Tertullian that's often misrepresented. Go here to find an index of responses to many other misconceptions about the church fathers, including other ones about the supposed intellectual negligence of the early Christians. And here's an article I wrote about the intellectual nature of Christianity and the importance of apologetics.

Source criticism

20 years ago, Richard Gale and Alexander Pruss coauthored: (1999) "Book Review: Atheism And Theism," Faith and Philosophy: Journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers: Vol. 16 : Iss. 1 , Article 10. Available at: https://place.asburyseminary.edu/faithandphilosophy/vol16/iss1/10

The review is, by turns, incisive and entertaining. And it presents an interesting test-case for biblical source criticism and form criticism. I guessing Gale wrote the bulk of the review. Certainly the colorful, colloquial and sometimes risqué comparisons are his. 

However, I wouldn't be able to tell even that much if all I had to go by was the review. I've read a fair amount of stuff by and about Gale–philosophical, biographical, and autobiographical. I also watched his informal debate with Plantinga. By contest, Pruss's style is cooler and drier. 

But that aside, it would be pretty much impossible for a literary critic to figure out where Gale's contribution ends and Pruss's begins. And that illustrates a problem with biblical source criticism and form criticism. 

Furthermore, there's a lot more comparative material to work with in the case of Pruss and Gale than, say, the Gospels, or Paul's letters, Isaiah, or the Pentateuch. So much biblical source criticism and form criticism is arbitrary projection. 

How To Argue For Sola Scriptura

Something I recently wrote in response to a Facebook message:

In disputes over sola scriptura like the one you're referring to, it's helpful to start by considering the larger context. That way, we have a better idea of what's at stake, what our priorities should be, and so forth.

The two biggest critics of sola scriptura within professing Christianity are Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. Given the lack of evidence for those groups and the evidence we have against their claims (http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2010/04/historical-roots-of-reformation-and.html), their authority structures aren't the most reasonable alternatives to sola scriptura. If we were to reject sola scriptura, it wouldn't make sense to become Catholic or Orthodox. Rather, the most reasonable alternative to sola scriptura would be to add material to scripture that's of a significantly different nature than what Catholicism and Orthodoxy add to scripture. If we were to conclude that some of the extrabiblical traditions of Papias and Irenaeus should be added to scripture, for example, that wouldn't be equivalent to Catholicism or Orthodoxy. If sola scriptura is false, the alternative would be far closer to Protestantism than to Catholicism or Orthodoxy. Debates over sola scriptura are often framed in terms of choosing between Protestantism, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, either Catholicism or Orthodoxy. But those aren't the only choices. And the most plausible alternatives to sola scriptura are much closer to Protestantism than they are to the two alternatives to Protestantism that are most often discussed. While there's a lot at stake in choosing between Protestantism and Catholicism, there wouldn't be so much at stake in choosing between Protestantism and a belief system in which all that's added to scripture is something like an extrabiblical tradition of Papias concerning premillennialism. We should keep in mind that accepting a Christian rule of faith that adds material to scripture isn't equivalent to accepting Catholicism or Orthodoxy.

Having said that, the primary question here isn't what our rule of faith should have been in early church history, if we had been alive then. Rather, the central question is what our rule of faith should be today. The passage you cited from Robert Sungenis refers to how the meaning of scripture doesn't change over time. But the application does change. The fact that the Corinthians possessed the letter Paul refers to in 1 Corinthians 5:9 doesn't prove that we possess it today. The fact that the Thessalonians heard Paul teach orally doesn't prove that we've heard Paul teach orally today.

People who were alive in Tertullian's day and shortly afterward would have had not only a canon of Tertullian's writings, but also would have heard Tertullian speak in some cases, would have had access to some reliable oral traditions about what Tertullian said, etc. But those of us who are alive today don't have access to all that people had access to in those earlier contexts. Few, if any, people today would go beyond the writings of Tertullian that are extant. The fact that people who lived around Tertullian's time had heard him speak and had reliable oral traditions about what he'd said doesn't prove that we today have those resources. We don't. What I'm saying about Tertullian is applicable to other historical figures as well. That includes Biblical figures, like Jesus and the apostles.

I don't think the Bible directly, explicitly teaches sola scriptura. Rather, I think sola scriptura is an implication of Biblical teaching. We limit ourselves to scripture for reasons similar to why we limit ourselves to the extant writings of Tertullian and other historical figures. I've discussed some of the evidence leading to the conclusion of sola scriptura at Triablogue. For example:

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2010/02/new-testament-documents-were-more.html

I don't think 2 Timothy 3:15-17 is saying that Timothy or anybody else at that time should have abided by sola scriptura. Rather, when we combine 2 Timothy 3 with what other sources tell us about scripture and what we know about other factors involved (e.g., ecclesiology), we arrive at the conclusion of sola scriptura. The fact that oral apostolic teaching, reliable oral traditions of what Jesus taught, and such existed at the time of 2 Timothy 3 doesn't tell us whether we have access to that material today. Similarly, Adam and Eve didn't have scripture, Abraham didn't have the Catholic magisterium, we today don't possess the letter Paul refers to in 1 Corinthians 5:9, etc. There's no reason to think the rule of faith must be or has been the same throughout history or throughout church history in particular.

Since people often confuse categories when discussing these issues, keep in mind that sola scriptura is about how we should view scripture in a particular context. The sola applies in that context, not others. The fact that scripture should be alone in one context doesn't mean that it should be alone elsewhere. Sola scriptura is about the content of our rule of faith. It doesn't follow that if we use means outside of scripture to identify our rule of faith, interpret it, apply it, argue for it, etc., then we've violated sola scriptura. What the content of our rule of faith should be is a distinct issue from how we identify that rule, interpret it, and so on.

Faith and providence

The standard objection to Calvinism is that predestination implicates God in evil. I've fielded that objection on multiple occasions, so I won't rehash my arguments. I will say that it comes down to two stark alternatives:

i) Every evil happens for a good reason

ii) Evils happen for no good reason

Whichever box you check, it will be a hard truth. 

But now I'd like to draw attention to one of the practical values of predestination. Nabeel Qureshi is a Muslim convert to Christianity. He's become perhaps the most high-profile Christian apologist who specializes in Islam. Lately, he's been struggling with what, if nature takes its course, is terminal cancer. He's done a running series of videos updating his diagnosis and treatment. Here's the latest:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQ2EwVprLHo

It's painful to watch these videos in chronological order, because he starts out very upbeat and optimistic, but is forced to move the goal post as his prayer for miraculous healing goes unanswered (thus far). In earlier installments, he talked about how Scripture encourages "presumptuous" faith. (What Sam Storms calls "expectant faith"). He said in light of this that he must believe God has in fact healed him. But sadly, that hasn't happened. 

In his latest update he says Jesus healed everyone who came to him, or everyone who was brought to him. He infers from this that it is God's will to heal everyone. 

The problem with Nabeel's position is that, despite the best of intentions, his setup means faith in Scripture is bound to lose. Even though he knows in advance that God doesn't miraculously heal everyone, or every Christian, he's pitting Scripture against undeniable experience to the contrary. But that guarantees confusion and disappointment at best, and bitter disillusionment at worst.

What he needs is a more robust theology of providence. It's a false dichotomy to pit Scripture against providence. To some degree, we can infer God's will from providence. For providence mirrors God's decretive will. The past is the record of God's plan for the world, up to that point.

So there's nothing faithless about inferring that it's not God's will to miraculously heal everyone, or every Christian in particular, from the fact that God doesn't heal everyone. History in itself, is a reflection of God's will. 

I'd also point out that Nabeel's appeal to the Gospels is misleading, even thought that's not his intention. Assuming that Jesus healed everyone who came to him, or everyone who was brought to him, that's an infinitesimal fraction of all the ailing people whom he didn't heal. Most people didn't come to Jesus for healing for the simple reason that most people didn't know he existed. Outside the ambit of Judea and Samaria, he was unknown. So consider all the ailing people who never had an opportunity to seek him out for healing. Not to mention people living on other continents. 

And that's just in reference to his public 2-3 year ministry. Consider the multiplied millions of people throughout human history whom God hasn't healed, both before and after the Incarnation. So Nabeel's sample is quite unrepresentative. 

Which is not to deny that some people are miraculously healed. But he's framed the issue in such a way that faith in Scripture will inevitably be dashed by rude experience. That's a recipe for professing Christians to become alienated from the faith. They had a false expectation, based on their misunderstanding of Scripture. When that collides with unyielding reality, they lose their faith. Or, at the very least, suffer a crisis of faith. 

The Internal Testimony of the Holy Spirit

"The Internal Testimony of the Holy Spirit" by James Anderson.

Can you use the Bible to prove the Bible?

i) It's often said that you can't use the Bible to prove the Bible. Unless the Bible is true, you can't use it to prove its veracity, since that's the very issue in dispute!

ii) Sounds plausible, but is it that simple? For instance, reviewers praise some memoirs if the autobiographer was candid about his foibles and misjudgments. His transparency is mark of veracity. What would motivate him to say unflattering things about himself unless he was honest? 

That dovetails with the criterion of embarrassment. The Bible is chockfull of examples like that.

iii) But let's approach this from another angle. I think the apparent vicious circularity of using the Bible to prove the Bible is largely semantic. How can you use the same book to prove itself?

But that's deceptive. Although "the Bible" is a singular designation, it's actually an anthology of various writings by various writers. 

Suppose an editor compiled a history of WWII by soliciting accounts from Churchill, Dwight Eisenhower, Curtis LeMay, Douglas MacArthur, George Marshall, George Patten, Chester Nimitz, and Matthew Ridgeway. Could you use his history to prove his history? Sure. Although it would technically be one book, it's actually a collection of independent accounts by leading participants. To a large degree, their respective accounts would be mutually corroborative. 

You can do the same thing with the Bible. It's complicated, but there's nothing fallacious about the procedure. 

Is Scripture evidence for God's existence?

Unbelievers, as well as certain apologetic schools, say it's question-begging to cite the Bible as evidence for God's existence. Here's a book by two philosophers challenging that widespread assumption:

The Agnostic Inquirer: Revelation from a Philosophical Standpoint by Sandra Menssen and Thomas D. Sullivan. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007.

Sandra Menssen and Thomas D. Sullivan provide a straight- forward defense of using revelation to defend belief in God’s existence...Menssen and Sullivan specifically target what they call the “tacit assumption” of philosophy, namely, that one must show that God exists before one can ask whether God has revealed.

The tacit assumption is that a claim to have received a revelation can be evaluated only after the existence of God has been proved. In opposition to the tacit assumption, they make the following claim: If it is not highly unlikely that God exists, then it is reasonable to examine particular claims to revelation from God as evidence for God’s existence. It is not highly unlikely that God exists; therefore, it is reasonable to examine particular revelation claims as evidence for God’s existence. More boldly, they contend that if the existence of God is not highly unlikely, then a reasonable inquirer must actually examine a number of revelation claims before a judgment can be made that God does not exist.

Consider, they say, the proposal that a single person named Homer was responsible for the Iliad. In the course of history, many have rejected that possibility because it was believed that no preliterate person, such as Homer, could have composed such a work. Given the complexity and length of the poem, the argument reasoned, a single individual could have produced it only if that person had the capacity to write. If it were impossible for a preliterate person to produce the poem, no amount of contrary evidence internal to the poem would raise the likelihood that a single person produced it. In other words, the probability of an impossibility is zero and any evidence added to an impossibility does not improve the odds.

Suppose, however, that it were possible for a single individual, in a preliterate context, to produce such a long and complex poem. The probabilities change, and evidence for authorship does matter. Once such a possibility is recognized, then internal evidence derived from the content of the poem itself becomes relevant for judgments about authorship.

Menssen and Sullivan take revelation claims to be closely analogous to arguments about the production of the Iliad. If the possibility of God’s existence were nil, or next to nil, then no appeal to the internal content of revelation could support belief in the existence of God. On the other hand, if it is not highly unlikely that God exists, then just as it is relevant to look at the content of the Iliad to determine authorship, so is it reasonable to look at revelation claims for evidence of God’s existence.

http://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/2009/PSCF3-09Prevost.pdf

God wrote a book

A wall or a window?

(Source)

The Text and Interpretation of Scripture in the Middle Ages

Here’s more from Richard Muller, with some scintillating and not-well-known commentary from John Bugay:

The issue of text and interpretation was further complicated by the many popular Bibles of the Middle Ages, both Latin and vernacular, prose and verse, and by the interrelationship of Scripture, tradition, and legend with the medieval identification of the literal meaning of the text and the temporal sojourn of the people of God as historia.

Note that even the most famous Medieval writer, Thomas Aquinas, blended very much “legend” with his theology and philosophy. For example, the “global influence of Dionysius on the metaphysic of Aquinas”, according to Francis O’Rourke, “extends to such central questions as the very nature of existence, the hierarchy of beings, the nature of God, and the theory of creation” (O’Rourke, “Pseudo-Dionysius and the Metaphyics of Aquinas”, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, © 1992, 2005, pg xvi).

This is even though Aquinas (and others of his era) mistakenly thought that the fifth-century writer “Pseudo-Dionysius” was actually the companion of Paul from Acts 17.

Similarly, Aquinas’s Contra errors Graecorum, written in 1263, (commissioned by the Curia for Pope Urban IV), relied very heavily on the Symmachan forgeries, the forged “Donation of Constantine”, and the “Pseudo-Isidorean Decretals”.

You don’t find many loose copies of that major work of Aquinas lying around – a testimony to Rome’s tidiness in the face of its own profound embarrassments.

Works like the Speculum historiale of Vincent of Beauvais and the Speculum humanae salvationis of Ludolph of Saxony functioned as biblical paraphrases that mediated the sacred history of the Scriptures together with legendary additions and augmentations, some of which, in the case of the latter work, come from ancient secular history, and virtually all of which serve the underlying hermeneutical purpose of manifesting the movement through history from obscurely promised salvation under the Old Testament to clearly offered redemption under the New.

The typological interpretation of the entirety of history by means of the New Testament fulfillment is not only characteristic of these works and others of their type, it is also the basis, by way of these popular Bibles, of much of the art of the Middle Ages.

This gradual accommodation of the text to its interpretation and the “corruption” of the text through scribal errors did not pass unnoticed during the scholastic era. Virtually at the same point that the Paris text, the Glossa ordinaria, and Lombard’s Sententia became standard components of a highly organized and interrelated program of theological study, the text of the Vulgate itself became the subject of debate.

Even in the twelfth century a few theologians had raised questions about the relationship of the Vulgate to the Hebrew Old Testament: at the beginning of the century (1109), Stephen Harding, abbot of Citeaux, had excised, with the help of a convert from Judaism, passages in the Vulgate not found in the original Hebrew.

Similar efforts characterize the work of another Cistercian of the twelfth century, Nicholas Manjacoria. Nicholas had studied Hebrew and worked to remove additions that had been made to the text of the Vulgate. He specifically singled out for criticism the idea that the most elaborate version of a text was the best, and he spelled out his approach to the text at length in a treatise, the Libellus de corruptione et correptione Psalmorum (ca. 1145). Hugh of St. Victor (d. 1141) had also noted textual corruptions in the Vulgate.

In the thirteenth century, particularly in the great teaching orders, there was a concerted effort to disentangle text and gloss and even to correct the text on the basis of the Hebrew and Greek originals.

Thus, Hugh of St. Cher tested the text of the Vulgate against Jerome’s commentaries, several pre-Carolingian codices, and the Hebrew text.

So extensive was this effort that Hugh and his associates produced a supplement to the gloss—in effect, “a new apparatus to the whole Bible.”

On the one hand, Hugh superintended the production of a massive concordance organized alphabetically; on the other, he developed a new set of postils or annotations on the entire Bible in which he emphasized parallels between texts and stressed, as did his contemporaries Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, the priority of the literal sense as the basis for the examination of the other three senses of Scripture.

The thirteenth century was, moreover, responsible for the standardization of the text and its chapter divisions in the so-called Paris text, begun by Stephen Langton and carried forward in the corrections of Hugh of St. Cher and in the adept edition of William de la Mare, who knew both Hebrew and Greek.

Muller, R. A. (2003). Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise And Development Of Reformed Orthodoxy; Volume 2: The Cognitive Foundation Of Theology (2nd ed., pp. 33–35). Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic.

I’ve been publishing selections from Richard Muller’s Volume 2, dealing with the doctrine of Scripture through the Middle Ages, here at Triablogue, at the following links:


Richard Muller, “Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics”, Volume 2: Scripture, September 25, 2014

“Scripture interprets Scripture” through the centuries, October 2, 2014

The Medieval Biblical Canon Revisited, October 3, 2014

How Scripture and Tradition Became Conflated in the Middle Ages, October 13, 2014