Teaching from fiction and teaching from fact II
(Originally published at What's Wrong With the World. Link to original post at 'permalink' below.)
I've decided to add some further reflections on the topic of my last post.
It might be argued that a person of sufficient authority can teach something entirely new using fiction. If Jesus taught by way of a parable that the Gentiles are to be accepted into the people of God, while this would be a new teaching (hence, not recognized from our independent experience), we should accept it because of Jesus' teaching authority.
This is certainly true.
It's important to realize several things in that case:
1) If the truth in question is really new and does not resonate with our other knowledge, then it is the authority of the teacher that is doing all of the epistemic work. The fictional vehicle of his teaching does not add to the epistemic force of what is taught. It merely provides a memorable and vivid way of making the point. The fiction itself, then, is not teaching. Rather, the teacher is teaching, and he is using a made-up story for that purpose. We should believe what he teaches in direct proportion to the authority we are justified in giving his teaching, not in proportion to his skill as a story-teller. I argued in the previous post that fiction teaches by reminding. In other words, fiction by a "mere" fictional author teaches by causing us to meditate on and making vivid to us what we already know in another way. Here I add the qualification that fiction can be used by an authoritative teacher to teach without reminding--that is, to teach something new, just on his own credibility. But that is not a distinctive way in which fiction qua fiction teaches.
2) A good teacher (in both senses of the word) will not confuse his hearers about whether he is teaching using a fictional vehicle. Jesus never did. His parables are clearly marked out as such by their form, their non-specificity, and by introductory phrases such as "a certain man," and indeed the fact that the Gospels and his immediate audience explicitly identify them as parables makes it clear that there was no ambiguity in the original context about whether he was teaching using a fictional form or telling a literally true story. A teacher who presents fiction as if it is fact, blurring that line knowingly, undermines his own authority by calling into question his own moral compass.
To elaborate further: Sometimes one gets the odd feeling (I have mentioned this in comments threads before) that literary device theorists want to make use of a theory of apostolic authority that is extreme and warped by its extremeness. Such a theory would hold that we must simply believe that an evangelist has such enormous teaching authority that his words must be treated as equivalent in authority to the words of Jesus, even if the evangelist made them up and put them into Jesus' mouth. Such a theory would hold that the evangelist did not in any way undermine that authority by deliberately writing in a way that confusingly mingled fact and fiction. This approach is extremely hard to sustain when, as in the case of Craig Evans, one speaks freely of "the Johannine community." Why in the world should we give the authority to teach us to the "Johannine community"--neither Jesus himself or a specific Apostle? Still more, why should we give them so much authority that we accept their teaching even when they make up stories that never happened and relate them as if they did happen and even when they place words in Jesus' mouth that he never uttered in any recognizable fashion whatsoever? But even if a theorist asserted that a Gospel was written by an Apostle, such a theory of Apostolic authority is simply not sustainable. It does not even follow from the strongest Catholic theory of the teaching magisterium.
Moreover, there is a very serious self-refutation issue involved in an attempt to give such authority to the evangelists. For what is the excuse supposed to be? Why, verses like the words of Jesus about sending the Paraclete to teach them (John 14:26). Or perhaps Jesus' statements that he would build his church and the power of binding and loosing (Matt. 16:19). Or, if you are Craig Evans, a wild eisegesis of Matthew 13:52 about old treasures and new treasures.
But these verses are themselves supposedly records of Jesus' teachings. If the argument that the evangelists had the authority to teach by fiction-dressed-as-fact and to invent words of Jesus that he never said and place them into his mouth rests upon words placed into Jesus' mouth in the Gospels, how do we know that Jesus said those things in any recognizable form as recorded? Of course, it is highly questionable that those verses mean that the evangelists had such authority. The text does not appear to be saying that at all. And an additional way that we can see that they don't mean that is because, if they did, the argument would refute itself. It wouldn't go back to a justified premise that Jesus actually recognizably said these things and that therefore we should accept this authority of the evangelists. That premise would be undermined by the conclusion--that they were "licensed" to extrapolate and then to state these extrapolations realistically as if they were uttered by Jesus.
So, while it is true that a highly authoritative teacher can use recognizable fiction as a vehicle for teaching an entirely new truth, in no way does this support the literary device theorists' views. The Gospel authors taught by writing down historical facts that showed what they wanted to convince their readers of--that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of God, that he was the Savior of the world, and so forth. If they had done otherwise, commingling fact and fiction to the confusion of the reader, they would not in so doing have been teaching with the authority of Christ, who gave them no such commission.
As Julius Africanus says,
Nor shall an assertion of this kind prevail in the Church of Christ against the exact truth, so as that a lie should be contrived for the praise and glory of Christ....For if...all has been stated only with the view of establishing the position of Him who was to be born—to confirm the truth, namely, that He who was to be would be king and priest, there being at the same time no proof given, but the dignity of the words being brought down to a feeble hymn,—it is evident that no praise accrues to God from that, since it is a falsehood, but rather judgment returns on him who asserts it, because he vaunts an unreality as though it were reality.
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