Credobaptism Before The Reformation

I discussed infant baptism at length in some posts here in 2006. I don't think I've addressed the subject much since then. I want to revisit it.

A Response To Trent Horn's Comments In His Recent Sola Scriptura Debate With James White

In his debate with James White on sola scriptura last week, Trent Horn repeated some sentiments he's expressed before about the alleged lateness of the recognition of the New Testament documents as scripture, their lack of prominence before the time when Irenaeus wrote, etc. I've responded to him on the subject before, in the post here. What I documented there is also relevant to something else Trent said during the debate, when he referred to how Jesus didn't tell anybody to write anything before he ascended to heaven. As my post linked above argues, Jesus' comments on the work of the Holy Spirit in John 14-16 likely anticipate the New Testament. What he said isn't limited to what the apostles would write, but it does include their writings. That's probably why John's comments about his gospel toward the end of the document parallel what Jesus said in those earlier chapters. John seems to have considered his gospel a fulfillment of what Jesus anticipated. Again, see my post linked above for further details. That post also addresses other problems with Trent's view of the New Testament.

Evidence Against Infant Baptism In Aristides

I've written about how Aristides is a neglected source on baptismal issues. A passage I didn't bring up there was the following in section 15 of his Apology:

"Further, if one or other of them [Christians] have bondmen and bondwomen or children, through love towards them they persuade them to become Christians, and when they have done so, they call them brethren without distinction."

If somebody considers infant baptism a means of making the baptized child a Christian, the testimony of Aristides is some early evidence to the contrary. You could add one or more qualifiers to Aristides' comments to reconcile what he said with the view of infant baptism under consideration (e.g., by "children", he only meant a particular subcategory of children), but that would be a less natural reading.

When Tertullian writes against infant baptism in section 18 of his treatise On Baptism, he's often thought to be making the first explicit reference to an actual practice of infant baptism in the historical record rather than to be merely responding to a hypothetical. And I agree. It's likely that infant baptism was being practiced at the time by some people, though only a minority, and that Tertullian was responding to actual people who advocated the practice. And one of the comments Tertullian makes when arguing against infant baptism is "let them [infants] become Christians when they have become able to know Christ". So, it seems that the opponents he has in mind considered infant baptism a means of making the infants Christians. If so, the contrast between their view and Aristides' comments about persuading the children of Christians to become Christians is striking. Aristides appears to be offering two contrasts to the advocates of infant baptism Tertullian is interacting with. Aristides doesn't mention making infants Christians through baptism, and he does mention persuading them to become Christians. Tertullian's comments provide a significant contextual factor in interpreting Aristides.

And a point I made in my earlier thread about Aristides should be reiterated. He was writing to a pagan audience. It's unlikely, accordingly, that he would have expected his audience to make certain unstated Christian assumptions relevant to infant baptism, would have expected them to recognize highly subtle allusions to infant baptism, etc. The best explanation for why he seems to say nothing of infant baptism when discussing relevant topics and seems to even contradict the concept of making infants Christians through baptism is that he didn't hold such a view of baptism.

The Key To History

"Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way without bothering about religion. God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing. That is the key to history." (C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity [New York, New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2021], approximate Kindle location 763)

The Departure Material In John

I've written about what I've called the departure passages in scripture and how they relate to issues like the papacy and sola scriptura. See here, for example. Acts 20, 2 Timothy, and 2 Peter have been discussed a lot, but I want to expand on John's material, which has been neglected.

Widespread Reports Of Near-Death And Out-Of-Body Experiences

Regardless of whether or not these things [near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences] veridically occur, people around the world have been reporting them throughout recorded history and regarding them as being in a separate category to everyday occurrences. This pattern of consistent ascription is an important indicator of the cross-cultural stability of such experiences….

People often also change their beliefs following their own NDE [near-death experience]. Notably, that includes atheists who neither believed in an afterlife nor expected to have an NDE….

In whatever culture it occurs, the OBE [out-of-body experience] is by definition always and unambiguously considered a dualistic state in which consciousness is separated from the body….

Not only are explicit descriptions of OBEs found in Eastern and Western narratives throughout history, but mind-body dualism, often exemplified by descriptions of OBEs, is a common element of nearly every branch of Egyptian, Ancient Near Eastern, Zoroastrian, Graeco-Roman, Hindu, Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, and numerous other theologies (see, for example, Badham 1997, Bremmer 1983, Couliano 1991, Metzinger 2005, Pilch 2011, Zaleski 1987). Dean Shiels (1978: 699) found that of the 67 small-scale indigenous societies he reviewed, 95 percent believed in OBEs, and they were consistently described in remarkably similar ways. He concluded that the most likely explanation for this wide cross-cultural occurrence of OBE belief was that it "results from a common experience of this happening" (Shiels 1978: 699). McClenon's fieldwork (1994, 2002: 106-31) provides a mass of cross-cultural evidence that demonstrates that NDEs and OBEs often lead directly to beliefs in an afterlife and in mind-body dualism.

From a neuroscientific perspective, Thomas Metzinger (2005: 57) also theorizes that dualistic beliefs cross-culturally originate in OBEs. He stresses that OBEs "can be undergone by every human being and seem to possess a culturally invariant cluster of functional and phenomenal core properties." They "almost invariably lead the experiencing subject to conclude that conscious experience can, as a matter of fact, take place independently of the brain and the body." Metzinger (2005: 78 n. 8) cites other studies that support his hypothesis, including one (Osis 1979) in which 73% of survey respondents claimed that their beliefs had changed as a result of their OBEs, and another (Gabbard and Twemlow 1984) in which 66% claimed that their OBEs caused them to adopt a belief in life after death.

(Gregory Shushan, The Next World [United States: White Crow Books, 2022], approximate Kindle location 3474)

Paul's Suffering And Prophecy Fulfillment

I've been thinking about Paul's comments in 2 Corinthians 11 regarding how he'd suffered as a Christian. What he says there is significant in a lot of contexts. It provides further evidence that the earliest Christians lived in a setting in which there was a large amount of potential to suffer for the claims they were making (about Jesus' resurrection and other topics). Given Jesus' crucifixion, Paul's former persecution of Christians, and Paul's references to his own suffering in 2 Corinthians 11 and elsewhere, we have multiple, independent lines of evidence that Christianity arose in that kind of atmosphere. And what Paul reports about his own experiences corroborates much of what the gospels and Acts report about such circumstances. The gospels' reports about efforts to throw Jesus over a cliff or stone him, for example, are rendered more plausible by what Paul tells us about the violent reactions he often met with. There are some undesigned coincidences between 2 Corinthians 11 and the gospels and Acts as well. These are just a few examples of the value of Paul's comments in 2 Corinthians 11. What I want to do in the remainder of this post is focus on one of the other examples, the significance of the passage in a context involving prophecy fulfillment.

The New Testament's Historicity Evidenced In The Earliest Extrabiblical Sources

It's common to cite Josephus, Tacitus, Clement of Rome, and other early sources to corroborate certain parts of the New Testament. But the extent to which they support the historicity of the New Testament is underestimated, because so many of the details seldom or never get discussed.

People Converted Through Arguments

"My colleague J.P. Moreland, out at Talbot, has taken to responding to, when people say to him, 'You can't bring anybody to Christ through argument.', J.P. says, 'Oh, yeah, you can. I've done it.' And I can say the same. We constantly get emails and testimonies coming into Reasonable Faith that people who have come to Christ after seeing a debate or a video or have come back to Christ after walking away from Christian faith through Reasonable Faith materials." (William Lane Craig, 8:04 in the audio of his November 13, 2023 Reasonable Faith podcast here)

There are Biblical examples as well (e.g., Acts 17:2-4, 19:8).

Trivializing

"Now, why are these verses [Isaiah 1:29-31] so confrontational? You can ask that question of so many passages in the Bible, especially in the prophets. Why are these verses so confrontational? God is pressing his point because we trivialize ourselves. God takes us more seriously than we take ourselves." (Ray Ortlund, 31:56 in the audio of his August 25, 2002 sermon here)

Racism, Classism, And Other Problems In Paranormal Experiences

I've been citing Gregory Shushan's comments on some aspects of paranormal phenomena that don't get discussed much and don't fit well with a lot of popular interpretations of the paranormal. I'll conclude with this post, in which I'll briefly refer to a variety of other examples that people can read more about in Shushan's book.

He often refers to separations of people in the afterlife according to their race, social class, and such in contexts like near-death experiences and mediumship (The Next World [United States: White Crow Books, 2022], e.g., approximate Kindle location 1962). He writes of how it was "common" for there to be racism in mediumistic messages in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (2096). Leslie Flint, a medium, claimed that in the afterlife, "Oscar Wilde lives a life of 'delicious sin' which in Heaven is 'natural' (ibid. 34, 82, 91-3, 102, 108-10, 112)." (1962) Shushan writes:

Racism, classism, and religious intolerance are disturbing trends in the pre-1975 narratives. This has some important ramifications for those who wish to view the afterlife descriptions as genuine, for they indicate either that the next world is truly a systemized bigoted realm, or that the spirit communicators were portraying merely their personal intolerant mind-dependent afterlife. However, the latter possibility is inconsistent with the recurring claim by the spirits themselves that death brings about spiritual transformation….The other possibility is that the information conveyed by spirits was filtered through the mediums' minds and thus overlaid with the institutionalized bigotry of their times….

In any case, we are left with a somewhat obvious conundrum: communication difficulties cannot explain why statements about the afterlife and its denizens could not be clear, specific, accurate, and consistent while evidential information [verifying paranormality] allegedly could. (2086, 2237)

Shushan often refers to errors and apparent inconsistencies among the phenomena, even inconsistencies within the experiences of one individual. At one point, he refers to "yet another contradiction" from a well-evidenced medium (1910). That medium, Geraldine Cummins, "also credited her communicators with some frankly ludicrous statements, such as that there are monkeys in the sun, according to the spirit of Sir Walter Scott." (1879)

False Prophecies In Near-Death Experiences

Gregory Shushan's recent book on the paranormal and the afterlife discusses a negative aspect of near-death experiences (NDEs) that doesn't get as much attention as it should:

Public revelations "received" during NDEs demonstrate that even if some NDEs might have veridical content, others demonstrably do not. In the early days of NDE research, Kenneth Ring, an American psychologist and an important figure in the field, published an article called "Precognitive and Prophetic Visions in Near-Death Experiences." With data gathered from NDErs in the United States ranging from the 1940s-1970s, he found that prophecies were often conveyed to the experiencer as divine revelation, that is, occurring "in association with an encounter with guides or a being of light." Reminiscent of many historical examples, some NDErs even believed that they had been chosen by their god to deliver his message to people on Earth.

Ring (1982: 54, 6) found that the prophecies in the thirteen cases he analyzed bore remarkable consistencies, including that Earth will suffer devastation on a global scale due to a nuclear event and/or widespread natural disasters, and that this will occur sometime in the late 1980s, with 1988 being the most frequently specified year. A few years later, British psychologist Margot Grey (1985) independently replicated these findings, collecting a number of prophetic NDE visions that were astonishingly consistent with Ring's. Obviously, the prophesied events did not come to pass, demonstrating that the alleged divine revelations were false.

(The Next World [United States: White Crow Books, 2022], approximate Kindle location 714)

For more examples of such characteristics in NDEs, characteristics that support a more subjective view of the experiences, see my collection of posts here.

Support For Christianity Among Some Of The Foremost Mediums

Something that doesn't get enough attention in discussions of mediumship is how often some of the mediums with the most documented paranormal abilities have supported Christianity in one way or another. I'm not saying that their mediumship was consistent with Christianity, that these mediums were in contact with the spirits they claimed to be in contact with, or anything like that. As I've explained before, I think that there's a lot of genuine paranormal activity (along with much that's inauthentic) in mediumship, near-death experiences, and other such contexts. But I think what's often involved is human paranormal capacities, meaning that the experiences often reflect the human mind, including its fallibility, sinful tendencies, and so on. Still, it's worth noting how prominent support for Christianity and certain aspects of Christianity (e.g., monotheism, a future judgment) often have been among mediums, near-death experiencers, people who have deathbed experiences, and so forth. That doesn't sit well with the sort of religious pluralism, universalism, relativism, and such that we often hear from many advocates of the paranormal in our day.

Gregory Shushan provides some examples in his recent book on the afterlife:

One Of The Reasons Why People Overestimate Themselves

"People don't lie awake at night wrestling with the outrage of their indifference to God." (John Piper)

Irenaeus' View Of The Gospels Was Shaped By Many Sources

It's common to suggest that all or some large percentage of gospel authorship attributions among the patristic sources can be traced back to Papias. There are a lot of problems with that sort of argument, like the ones discussed here.

In that post, I discuss some of the sources who probably influenced Irenaeus' beliefs about who wrote the gospels, such as Pothinus and the gospel manuscripts Irenaeus read or heard about. Since Irenaeus was a church leader and traveled widely, think of how often he would have read gospel manuscripts, had them read by somebody else in his presence, heard other people mention the authorship of the documents in one context or another, etc. Look at how often he draws from the gospels in his writings, such as in Against Heresies. Or consider how often the gospels would have been read aloud during church services he attended or presided over. Think of how many of the doctrinal controversies, moral disputes, and such that occurred in his day involved material in the gospels and would have involved discussions of the gospels. See this post for a discussion of how Polycarp, one of Irenaeus' mentors, would have influenced New Testament authorship attributions in a variety of contexts. See here regarding a Roman source Irenaeus cited on gospel authorship. And see here for links to posts about other relevant sources. One of the ones listed there is the heretic Ptolemy, who attributed the fourth gospel to a disciple of Jesus named John and is quoted by Irenaeus doing so (Against Heresies, 1:8:5).

Irenaeus did have access to the writings of Papias, but he doesn't say that he got his gospel authorship attributions from Papias, and it's absurd to suggest that Papias was his only source on the topic. Given the nature of Irenaeus' life (when he lived, his relationship with Polycarp, his relationship with Pothinus, his roles in church leadership, his widespread traveling, his access to what Papias wrote, etc.), he had to have been influenced by a large number and variety of sources on issues like gospel authorship, and those sources are likely to have been independent of one another to some degree. There's no reason to begin with a default assumption that they all were dependent on Papias, nor is there any reason to think universal dependence on Papias is equally possible or likely. Rather, it's highly unlikely.

Why doesn't Justin Martyr name the gospel authors?

Critics of the traditional gospel authorship attributions make much of the fact that Justin doesn't name the authors of the gospels. And he fails to name the authors even though he cites the documents so often (or similar documents, depending on your view of what he was citing).

Problems For The Anonymous Gospels Hypothesis

I've argued elsewhere that Papias was a disciple of John the son of Zebedee, that the elder he cites when discussing a document by Mark was John, and that the Markan document is our gospel of Mark. Notice, though, that even if we grant the skeptic's position on all three of those issues, the fragment of Papias in question (cited in Eusebius, Church History, 3:39:15) is still problematic for the idea that the gospels circulated anonymously until sometime in the second century. Even under the skeptic's scenario, we have two individuals (the elder and Papias) who lived at least part of their lives in the first century and were likely at least contemporaries of the apostles showing interest in the authorship of a document similar to our gospels. That's problematic for the notion that authorship attributions for our gospels didn't originate until the second century. Furthermore, just after the passage in Eusebius cited above, he goes on to quote some comments from Papias on something Matthew wrote. Again, even if we reject Papias' status as a disciple of John the son of Zebedee (or another disciple of Jesus named John) and assume that the Matthean document in question isn't our gospel of Matthew, we still have Papias showing interest in identifying the author of a gospel-like document.

Mishandling The Demonic Hypothesis

I recently watched an interview Ross Coulthart did with Garry Nolan about UFOs. Here's a segment in which both refer to "religious fundamentalists" in the government handling UFO issues poorly. I've written about this subject before. I won't repeat everything I said there. I agree with Nolan that not only has the demonic hypothesis not been justified, but even if it were correct, we shouldn't therefore conclude that we shouldn't do any further research on UFOs.

There's a larger problem here with Christians being immature and irresponsible about paranormal issues more broadly. It isn't just a problem in the UFO context.

The Edge Of Reality

I recently read a new edition of The Edge Of Reality (Newburyport, Massachusetts: MUFON, 2023). It originally came out in 1975. It's largely a record of some discussions about UFOs between two of the foremost researchers in the field, J. Allen Hynek and Jacques Vallee. I didn't read the 1975 version, and I don't know how different the update is. I think it's the same or almost the same aside from a new foreword (by Hynek's son) and a new introduction (by Vallee). The bulk of it doesn't discuss the developments of the last half century, since it was published so long ago, but it has a lot of relevance and significance anyway. I still think the best overall introduction to the topic that I've read is Leslie Kean's UFOs: Generals, Pilots, And Government Officials Go On The Record (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2010). The Edge Of Reality is a good supplement to Kean's book. It addresses a lot of issues not covered or not covered as much by Kean, like issues of interpretation and the history of research. And it's written by two giants in the field whose experience and inside knowledge are more significant than Kean's. Hynek has a lot to say about his experiences with the United States' government's incompetence and corruption in handling UFO issues, for example. The book covers a wide range of subjects related to UFOs, though their comments are often brief. Vallee (rightly) rejected the extraterrestrial explanation for UFOs, and Hynek seems to me to have leaned in that direction as well. He gives some attention to views like mine, that UFOs are produced by human paranormal activity. He even draws a comparison to poltergeists at times, as I have. Neither Hynek nor Vallee goes into as much depth as I'd like about these issues, but there's a lot that's helpful in what they do say.

Another book by Vallee, Dimensions (San Antonio, Texas: Anomalist Books, 2008), opens with a dedication to his friend:

This book is dedicated to the memory of Dr. J. Allen Hynek.

As a scientist, he was the first to grasp the significance of the problem. As a thinker, he understood its relationship to other deep mysteries that surround us. As a teacher, he shared freely his data and his insights.

As a man, he wondered.

What would be the significance of the gospel authors' illiteracy, lack of literary experience, etc.?

It's often suggested that the illiteracy or low level of literacy of the large majority of individuals in the ancient world is evidence against the traditional authorship attributions of the gospels. There are a lot of problems with that objection. We have information about people like Matthew and John that puts them well above the average person in antiquity. For example, not only was John an apostle, which would have provided him with far more motivation than the average person would have had to become more educated, but we also have good evidence that he lived an unusually long time and had a role as a sort of patriarchal figure toward the end of his life. Then there's the fact that there are widespread reports in antiquity that John did compose some documents, which is further evidence we have to take into account rather than just going by how many people in general would be able to produce such a document, how many fishermen in general would be able to, etc. We have much more than such statistics to go by.