Wednesday, February 17, 2016

Historicity and harmonization

Lydia McGrew's comments have been piling up in response to two of my posts. I'll consolidate them and respond to them here:

On the cleansing of the Temple, your hypothesis (if I understand you correctly) seems to be that John is *not* trying to give the impression that it took place early in Jesus' ministry.

True. 

Now, I disagree with this fairly strongly, but more importantly, it must be _sharply_ distinguished between saying that John _moved_ the cleansing of the Temple *to the beginning of Jesus' ministry*. The two hypotheses are, in fact, in complete contradiction to one another! The latter says that John _was_ attempting to write as if the Temple cleansing took place at the beginning of Jesus' ministry, even though he knew that this was not the case! Your hypothesis, in contrast, interprets John as _not_ implying that the cleansing took place at the beginning of Jesus' ministry.

I don't see how that follows. In principle, John could relocate the temple cleansing without implying that it took place at the beginning of Jesus' ministry–or intended to make it look that way. Gospel writers can rearrange events without implying that their narrative sequence is chronological. 

Now, I disagree with this. For one thing, we don't have nearly the evidence for John in other, uncontroversial places, that we have for Matthew that he arranges non-chronologically, so why think he is making such a major non-chronological move here?

Because, unless we think one or more of the Gospels is either mistaken or fictional in this case, we need to harmonize their respective reports of the temple cleansing in one way or the other. And that's one option. It wasn't pulled out of thin air. 

More specifically, the narrative of the Temple cleansing in John is flanked on either side with geographical markers that are far more reasonably interpreted by holding this to be a chronological narrative. Just before, Jesus is in Capernaum, following which he goes "up" to Jerusalem (not meaning north, of course) for the Passover. In the next chapter we find him apparently still in Jerusalem and visited by Nicodemus by night, following which he has a baptizing ministry in Judea, leaving Judea only at the beginning of chapter 4. All of this makes sense as following upon the Passover recounted along with the temple cleansing in chapter 2. 

I don't see how your supporting argument selects for your conclusion. John records three passovers. The temple was in Jerusalem, so any temple cleansing would require a trip to Jerusalem from whever Jesus happened to be living or ministering at the time. 

The end of chapter 2 says that many were believing on him during that Passover because of miracles he was doing during that Passover and then only that he "did not entrust himself to them because he knew what was in man." As a description of passion week, this seems quite implausible. Mark's detailed discussion of Passion week gives no such picture. 

Well, the only recorded miracle in Jn 2 is at the wedding of Cana, not in the temple complex, so I don't see how you derive your conclusion from John's narrative. As for Mark's, you have the cursing of the fig tree. 

It seems to me extremely strained to try to make the cleansing of the Temple in John be occurring during Passion week and merely for (largely unknown and necessarily highly conjectural) thematic reasons of some kind or other narrated at this point in John's gospel. And, strangely and coincidentally enough, connected up with a Judean ministry immediately thereafter!

There are good scholars who think positing two temple cleansings to harmonize the Gospels is "extremely strained". The problem, such as it is, isn't generated by a particular harmonization, but by the data to be harmonized. Scholars didn't create that difficulty. 

However, if you _do_ take that position, you are *at least* not saying that John was *trying* to imply that this Temple cleansing happened early in Jesus' ministry. So that theory should *not* be described by saying that John knowingly and deliberately "moves the Temple cleansing to the early part of Jesus' ministry." 

Again, that's a non sequitur, which trades on an equivocation between "moving the temple cleansing to the early part of Jesus' ministry" and moving the temple cleansing to the early part of John's narrative. You illicitly conflate narrative sequence with chronological sequence, but that's the very issue in dispute. To relocate an incident doesn't ipso facto insinuate that that's when it really took place. Where it occurs in the plot and where it occurred in real time are not interchangeable concepts. Take movies with flashbacks and flashforwards. 

I'm not saying John consciously relocated the temple cleansing. I'm just saying that even if he did, your conclusion is fallacious. 

Again, that is a _much_ more problematic theory from the perspective of John's trustworthiness as a narrator.

I disagree. 

I think it would be helpful for you to disambiguate the term "relocate" as you use it between
1) John wishes to give the impression that the cleansing did take place early in the ministry, though he knows it didn't,
2) John doesn't mean to give the impression that the cleansing took place early in the ministry.

That's a valid and useful distinction. However, I put it that way because you and Licona use "relocate" the same way, and so I preserve the ambiguity in the interests of consistency.

Do you intend to use "relocate" throughout the post to refer to #1, or might it refer to either? For example, you say that John may have "put it there simply because that's what he was thinking about on the day he dictated that section of his Gospel," but in that case by "put it there" do you mean just "put that material at that point in his narrative" or "tried to relocate the incident in his narrative so that it actually appeared to happen at that time"?


Several issues:

i) You're shadowboxing with Licona, which is fine, but that's not my position.

ii) There's a distinction between a writing giving a false impression and leaving a false impression. In the former case, he intends to create a false impression in the mind of the reader. That isn't inherently wrong, although it can be. Take the author of a Whodunit who confuses the reader by giving clues that point in the direction of the wrong suspect. To build suspense, the author tries to throw the reader off the scent with decoys. Make a reader finger the wrong character. Now, these clues aren't false. They happen to be true of the character. Yet they are intentionally misleading.

But in the course of the novel, the author will correct the reader's misimpression. By providing the reader with additional evidence, the reader will see that his initial suspicions were premature. Sometimes a writer will withhold information in order to subvert the reader's initial impressions. In a sense that's deceptive even though all the information he provides is true, and by the end of the mystery the reader will understand who did what. 

Incidentally, we have something like that in the Joseph cycle, where Joseph's premonitory dream appears to be thwarted by events, but as it turns out, the same events which initially seemed to scuttle the premonitory dream are the very means by which the dream is fulfilled. 

I'm not saying this is directly applicable to the Gospels. I'm just making a point of principle.

iii) Apropos (ii), writers don't necessarily have a duty to avoid all possibility that a reader will mistake what they meant. Indeed, any statement, however qualified, can be misconstrued. And it would be very pedantic and cumbersome to write in a way that tries to forestall the possibility of a reader drawing a false impression of what was written. 

On the one hand, the writer did not intend to give the reader a misimpression. On the other hand, a writer may not go out of his way to avoid the possibility of misconstrual, both because the effort would distract from his main point, and because the misimpression would be innocuous. No matter how careful a writer is, he can't prevent some readers from mistaking what he meant, but it may be a harmless inference, because it wasn't important for the reader to know that. 

This isn't just hypothetical. Take the way Matthew and Luke simplify Mark's Holy Week chronology. 

iv) Incidentally, putting words in the mouth of a speaker isn't necessarily fabrication. For instance, Bible translators must decide what to do with Biblical idioms that have no direct counterpart in the receptor language. If they substitute a different, but conceptually equivalent, idiom, they are putting words in the mouth of the speaker. But that's different than fabrication or falsification.

v) Likewise, if a Gospel writer summarizes a speech by Jesus, his paraphrase may use words Jesus didn't use, but so long as he accurately captures the sense of what Jesus said, that's true to what Jesus said. That's a trustworthy record. 

"It's unclear why defenders of the two-cleansings view think it's okay for Matthew and John to give the reader the impression that it happened on a different date than Mark, but misleading for John to give the reader the impression that it happened on a different date than the Synoptics."
Because a difference of a day is much easier to leave out without being willfully misleading than a difference of three years. 

Which may be a valid objection to Licona, but in general that's a prejudicial way of framing the alternatives. 

Moreover, you're guilty of special pleading. If Matthew and Luke change the Holy Week chronology, that's innocent, but if John changes the Holy Week chronology, that's willful deception which makes him historically unreliable. You have your thumb on the scales. 

Because the evidence is much stronger that John intended to say that Jesus cleansed the temple early in his ministry than that Luke and (especially) Matthew intended to say that Jesus cleansed the temple on the same day he arrived. (For example, there is also, in John, the geographical evidence that gives a sequence of Jesus' movements to and away from Judea for the Passover in which he cleanses the Temple.)

I've discussed that above.

"This, the first of his signs, Jesus did at Cana in Galilee, and manifested his glory. And his disciples believed in him. After this he went down to Capernaum, with his mother and his brothers and his disciples, and they stayed there for a few days. The Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem." One would have to postulate a completely unheralded break of *three years* at vs. 13. Moreover, get this: John gives this "beginning of miracles" (water into wine) in chapter 2. Then, not only are Jesus' movements within and then out of Judea described *after* the cleansing of the temple in chapters 3 and 4, including more material involving John the Baptist, but we have this in John 4:54: "This was now the second sign that Jesus did when he had come from Judea to Galilee." 
These are clear tie-ins of the whole sequence of events with chronology and place this whole trip to Jerusalem, which includes the cleansing of the Temple, into that chronology early in Jesus' ministry.

You seem to be assuming that every anecdote between chap. 2 and chap. 5 must be part of a continuous chronological sequence. That's a very novelistic approach to the Gospels, as if John's Gospel is a carefully planned, tightly integrated literary production. But I think oral history is a more realistic model of how observers remember and report incidents they witnessed. A smooth storyline with carefully coordinated plot elements is what we associate with good fiction, rather than a string of autobiographical recollections. Compare the autobiographical novels of Mark Twain with his actual autobiography. The organization of the latter is much looser than the former. 

In contrast, there are no such positive statements in Matthew concerning the second cleansing of the temple that clearly place Jesus' second cleansing on the day of the triumphal entry. There is merely a failure to relate a day's break, and this is consistent throughout Matthew's relation of Passion week that he does not bother to count off all the days like Mark does.

No one who just read Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John would have any reason to suppose there was more than one temple cleansing. No one who just read John would have any reason to think there was a temple cleansing at the end of Christ's public ministry. No one who just read the Synoptics would have any reason to think there was a temple cleansing at the beginning of Christ's public ministry. No one who just read Matthew would have any reason to think Jesus cleansed the temple the day after he arrived in Jerusalem. 

On your own view, there are multiple opportunities for readers to draw the wrong impression of when or where the incident occurred. But that's innocuous, because the Gospel writers don't intend to be exhaustive or rigidly linear. 

Notice that once we admit as remotely plausible the hypothesis that John *deliberately* implied, *though he knew it was false*, that Jesus cleansed the Temple at the beginning of his ministry, then one can simply say that all the arguments from differences in purpose, setting, etc., were part of John's clever work in moving the account! In other words, once we admit the hypothesis of deliberate falsification, John the evangelist becomes a lot like Descartes' imaginary Deceiver. Whatever one might point to as evidence that the event really happened early in Jesus' ministry is turned into so-called "evidence" of John's literary abilities in making it look like it happened early in the ministry even if it didn't!
In contrast, an approach to the text that assumes that the gospel writers are telling the truth as they remember it is able to take seriously the obvious evidential impact of considerations like the differences between the accounts. Those considerations _should_ cause us to consider that there may well have been two cleansings, but if one thinks that John was a deliberate falsifier of the timing of events, one loses the correct evidential impact of those considerations. One just says, "Yes, yes, of course that's all there, of course John is making it look like it took place at the beginning of Jesus' ministry. He's _moving_ the cleansing of the Temple to early in the ministry."
This is not only a problem theologically. It's a huge problem epistemically. Like all ad hoc theories, conspiracy theories, etc., such a theory of an (in effect) Deceiver John will make it impossible to see the effect of evidence aright.

i) You're shadowboxing with Licona, which is fine. But in doing so, you typically impose an artificial constraint on the available alternatives.

ii) Redaction criticism usually presumes that differences between Matthew and Mark (to take one example) must be theologically motivated. I think that's rarely the case. For instance, I suspect Matthew generally simplifies Mark for the prosaic reason that he needed to free up space to make room for his own independent additions, while making the narrative fit onto one scroll. Ancient books were often not preserved because they were too long, because they required two or more scrolls.

iii) Likewise, I don't assume that John consciously relocated the temple cleansing. It may just be, as I said, that that's the order in which he remembered events on the day he dictated those anecdotes to a scribe. I don't know for a fact that he used a scribe. But that's a reasonable hypothesis.

iv) Even if he did consciously relocate the temple cleansing, that doesn't necessarily (or even probably) mean he was deliberately making the reader think there was only one temple cleansing, which occurred at the beginning of Jesus' ministry. Rather, as I've said, that could function as a flashforward. A preview of the end. 

v) Matthew's simplified chronology makes it look like the temple cleansing happened on the same day as Jesus arrival in Jerusalem–even though it didn't. Mark's chronology is likely more precise at this juncture. So we need to distinguish between the effect of what he wrote and the intent of what he wrote. Which is applicable to John. 

vi) In addition, the average Bible reader doesn't engage in the kind of systematic comparative analysis of the Gospels that harmonists and redaction critics do. Indeed, that's an artificial way of reading the Gospels. They weren't designed to be read side-by-side. They were meant to be read lengthwise, not horizontally, with an eye to the other Gospels. 


vii) The problem with Lydia's Cartesian analogy is that she thinks there are probably errors in the Gospels. But if God allows undetectable mistakes to creep into the Gospel accounts, doesn't that make God a Cartesian Deceiver? Nearly all our information for these incidents comes from the Gospels. We have no independent source and standard of comparison. How is a reader is a position to distinguish truth from error under that scenario? 

8 comments:

  1. Steve, in this entire post, I still can't tell if you think that the view that you say I am "shadowboxing" would be a _problem_, either historically (for the reliability of the gospels) or religiously or theologically or in any other way. I understand that you, personally, are not hypothesizing that John tried deliberately to give a false impression about the day or year when something occurred.

    But you are almost refusing to say how plausible you think it is that he would do so or whether you would resist such an hypothesis, whether you think it consistent with John's presentation of himself elsewhere as a witness, whether you think there is something problematic about such an hypothesis, or anything.

    I find that odd. You call it Licona's view. I think that's correct, though to be strictly honest Licona only mentions the temple cleansing itself in a brief footnote, so to some degree I am putting together that footnote with his more recent work on Gospel difficulties. So, are you willing to say: What do you think of that view? What do you think *in general* about a claim that John or someone else said to himself, "I know this happened in such-and-such a year, but I'll deliberately make my readers think it happened in a different year"?

    Naturally, I disagree that I have a "finger on the scales." I think it is the _best explanation_ of John's narrative in chapters 2-4, by a large margin, that they are narrated chronologically. This is a conclusion, not an a priori assumption. It makes better sense of the narrative than his jumping around while placing the Temple cleansing in the context of a visit to Jerusalem followed by a Judean ministry early in his career.

    But I'll skip most of that and address this:

    "The problem with Lydia's Cartesian analogy is that she thinks there are probably errors in the Gospels. But if God allows undetectable mistakes to creep into the Gospel accounts, doesn't that make God a Cartesian Deceiver? Nearly all our information for these incidents comes from the Gospels. We have no independent source and standard of comparison. How is a reader is a position to distinguish truth from error under that scenario?"


    Very few errors, if any, and trivial ones. But neither I nor you hold to a dictation view of inspiration. So I don't hold that God _specially made_ the gospel writers make errors. It was someone else on one of these threads who seemed to hypothesize that the Holy Spirit might have _caused_ the Gospel authors to tell what they *knew* to be falsehoods for some "literary" reason. At that point I said that while we're at it, if we are going to take that direct a view of inspiration, why not believe instead that the H.S. made the gospel authors tell _truths_ that they had no other access to?!

    If you don't have some distinction between what God allowed the gospel writers to put in and what he directly made them put in, then you have a rigid dictation theory of inspiration. I assume that you don't. (That seems a charitable assumption.) Neither do I.

    I would therefore say that God _permitted_ apparent discrepancies and _possibly_ a few _minor_ errors in the gospels because that shows that they are independent accounts, which makes them stronger evidence for what they attest. God's intent was not to convince the readers that something happened that didn't happen, and neither was that the authors' intent.

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    1. "If you don't have some distinction between what God allowed the gospel writers to put in and what he directly made them put in, then you have a rigid dictation theory of inspiration. I assume that you don't. (That seems a charitable assumption.) Neither do I."

      i) To my knowledge, there never was a dictation theory of inspiration. That was just a metaphor.

      ii) In some cases, inspiration can be a conscious process. For instance, a seer (e.g. Ezekiel) is aware of the fact that he's receiving revelatory dreams and visions. That involves an altered state of consciousness.

      However, inspiration can, in principle, operate at a subliminal level. And if one affirms the plenary inspiration of Scripture, that would be more common.

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    2. I don't know if there ever was a dictation theory of inspiration. But to Steve's point, dictation theory is not the only mode of inspiration that believes in plenary/verbal inspiration (contra Lydia). B.B. Warfield calls his view of the mode of inspiration the Theory of Concursus (Shorter Writtings II, Inspiration):
      "According to this mode of conception the whole of Scripture is the product of divine activities, which enter it, however, not by superseding the activities of the human authors, but confluently with them; so that the Scriptures are the joint product of divine and human activities, both of which penetrate them at every point, working harmoniously together to the production of a writing which is not divine here and human there, but at once divine and human in every part, every word, and every particular."

      Elsewhere he says: "Why may we not believe that the God who brings his purposes to fruition in his providential government of the world, without violence to second causes or to the intelligent free agency of his creatures, so superintends the mental processes of his chosen instruments for making known his will, as to secure that they shall speak his words in speaking their own?" (Shorter Writtings II, Review of Three Books on Inspiration).

      And in The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible, he says: "Representations are sometimes made as if, when God wished to produce sacred books which would incorporate His will - a series of letters like those of Paul, for example - He was reduced to the necessity of going down to earth and painfully scrutinizing the men He found there, seeking anxiously for the one who, on the whole, promised best for His purpose; and then violently forcing the material He wished expressed through him, against his natural bent, and with as little loss from his recalcitrant characteristics as possible. Of course, nothing of the sort took place. If God wished to give His people a series of letters like Paul's, He prepared a Paul to write them, and the Paul He brought to the task was a Paul who spontaneously would write just such letters."

      The end result of Warfield’s view is still inspiration of the very words (verbal or plenary inspiration), but through different mode than dictation theory.

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    3. "But you are almost refusing to say how plausible you think it is that he would do so…"

      That comes across as fairly paranoid:

      i) In this very post I've given a detailed statement of my own position. I've drawn a number of crucial distinctions. That stands in implicit contrast to whatever is contrary to my position.

      ii) Regarding most of the examples under review, I only have secondhand knowledge of Licona's position, since I haven't watched the video. So I don't have in informed opinion on the particulars of his position. I won't venture specific assessments without specific knowledge of what I'm assessing. Seems responsible to me.

      iii) Since I don't consider him to be the standard of comparison, there's no reason I have to frame my position in relation to his. I can simply state my own position–which is what I've done.

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  2. And by "John or someone else," I don't mean a detective author. I mean John or one of the other evangelists, knowing that he, unlike the detective author, is not going to have a "big reveal" later on in the book.

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  3. "The problem, such as it is, isn't generated by a particular harmonization, but by the data to be harmonized. Scholars didn't create that difficulty."

    In my opinion, which you obviously don't share, there shouldn't be regarded as a difficulty in need of harmonization in the first place. *Every indication* in John's gospel is that this occurs early in the ministry, and as I have pointed out (and you have dismissed) there are multiple *positive* indications to this effect, not mere silence. There is a strong prima facie case that the two are different instances. There would be nothing remotely surprising about there being two such events. Beyond its being the same general *type* of event, there is nothing problematic about treating the event as happening twice. And as Tim has pointed out, people tend to underestimate the number of times that generally similar types of events happen more than once. In this case, why should it be at all implausible that Jesus, angered by the same thing he was angered by three years before, took a similar route to chastise and protest it?

    The objection of scholars to treating the cleansing as two arises from a _general_ resistance in NT scholarship to ever saying that the same type of thing happened more than once. This is a pathological aversion taken to extremes. It creates difficulties where none exist, and all the less so in this case where the differences are so great.

    Indeed it is almost amusing to see the differences between the accounts treated as creating a _difficulty_ in need of _harmonization_, when the "difficulty" itself arises only from the avoidance of the highly plausible and prima facie justified assumption that this type of event happened only once! What a way to create Bible "difficulties"! Assume that two prima facie _different_ events are the _same_ event and then say that now we have a difficulty and have trouble harmonizing these two accounts!

    Sure, there are cases where it really does appear to be the same event. I gave an argument concerning the precision of the dialogue to this effect in the thread below concerning the anointings in Passion week. But there is no such precision creating an argument to be made against two events here.

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  4. "trades on an equivocation between "moving the temple cleansing to the early part of Jesus' ministry" and moving the temple cleansing to the early part of John's narrative. You illicitly conflate narrative sequence with chronological sequence, but that's the very issue in dispute. "

    I can't possibly be conflating these, whether innocently or illicitly, since I go out of my way time and time again to distinguish different senses of "moving the account."

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  5. " the "difficulty" itself arises only from the avoidance of the highly plausible and prima facie justified assumption that this type of event happened only once!"

    My typo: That sentence should end "happened more than once!"

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