Gary Habermas's misunderstandings of C. H. Dodd, Part 4: The "concise" narratives themselves

 Apologies for the delay after the previous post in this series. I've been considering writing a professional philosophy article in the meanwhile and also doing some presentations which have taken my time and energy. This may be the last blog post in this series.

Here are all of the earlier posts in the series.

Review of Dodd's "concise" narrative concept

As mentioned before, Gary Habermas vastly overestimates the concessions made by form critic C. H. Dodd concerning Jesus' resurrection appearances. Habermas misunderstands what Dodd means by various concepts and statements, including Dodd's distinction between Type I and Type II narratives. Habermas thinks that a narrative in Luke 24 is "probably" one of Dodd's "concise" narratives when in fact Dodd says that it is not but rather the "concis" aspects are heavily overlaid with apologetic embellishment. Habermas appears not to understand that Dodd thinks that several crucial resurrection stories are complete inventions by the evangelists. Sometimes this is because Habermas doesn't realize that Dodd classifies a narrative as a "tale." In another case it is because Habermas doesn't understand that Dodd says a story is not a tale, but only because it is less literary than a "tale" as he defines it, with a less realistic character, not because it is more historical than a "tale." All of this is explored in the earlier posts.

Now we come to the resurrection narrative class that Dodd calls "concise," which Habermas takes (with somewhat more excuse) to mean "historical." As a form critic, Dodd is focused on seeing if he can find some extremely short set of verses, some snippet clipped out of what appears to be a continuous narrative, in which he thinks he can discern a brief bit of "tradition" that goes back to the early church. 

This procedure, contra Dodd, is highly subjective and unsound, and by no means should scholars imply that Dodd really has some objective way of finding such snippets of tradition buried under layers of "apologetic" accretion.

But now we must ask: When it comes at least to these snippets, does Dodd take them to be historical? Or does Dodd at least take them to be what the original disciples (who would have been the relevant witnesses of the events they contain) claimed, while sincerely believing what they claimed?

The answer, it turns out, is no. Dodd's article can be legally checked out for free for one hour at a time (renewable) from Open Library, here.

Dodd thinks even the concise bits of narrative contain apologetic add-ons

On p. 105 Dodd lays out in parallel columns the three narrative bits that he is characterizing as "concise." These are Matt. 28:8-10, Matt. 28:16-20, and John 20:19-21. I encourage you to look up those passages and notice how extremely limited they are, to begin with. For example, the first snippet from Matthew is literally only three verses, meaning that Dodd has snipped off the previous verses that are narrated continuously with it--the women coming to the tomb and seeing an angel there and receiving the angel's message. That portion is not included in Dodd's "concise narrative." As Dodd himself notes (see later in this post), even the names of two of the women who went to the tomb are not included in these three verses.

By laying out these three snippets in parallel columns, Dodd is able to explain how he thinks that they exemplify the elements that he treats as included in a polished-down "concise" bit of tradition. These are 1) the situation (disciples bereft of their Lord), 2) the initial appearance of Jesus, 3) a greeting from Jesus, 4) their recognition of Jesus, 5) a word of command from Jesus. 

The very brevity of these snippets and of these narrowly-defined elements guarantees that any lengthy conversation with Jesus is ruled out a priori by Dodd's method of analysis, even though such a lengthy conversation or discourse from Jesus (mentioned in different contexts in both John and Luke), given in a setting where multiple people are present, provides some of the best evidence that Jesus was risen bodily. As we have seen in previous posts and will see again here, this is a feature, not a bug, of Dodd's entire approach. Dodd's approach involves a priori historical distrust of anything that is of apologetic value for the literal, bodily resurrection of Jesus, which guarantees that what is left after Dodd gets done snipping is not of any significant evidential value for that conclusion! See here for a recent video I did on the phenomenon of treating anything of apologetic value as epistemically suspect.

After laying the snippets out in columns showing how they treat the supposed elements of a concise narrative, Dodd makes the following important statement:

It is to be observed that the bare pattern is expanded at certain points, but in so brief a way as not to alter the character of the pericope. The expansions add nothing fresh, but emphasize what is already in the pattern, though scarcely explicit. Thus, in all three pericopae there is at least a hint of an element of doubt or fear. In Matt. 28:17 it is explicit: ‘some doubted’. In Matt. 28:10, it is implied in the words ‘Fear not’. In Jn. 20:20 nothing is said of any doubt in the minds of the disciples, but the Lord ‘showed them his hands and His side’, thus setting at rest, by proof tendered, a doubt which was there though unexpressed. (p. 105, emphasis added)

The importance of the first sentence could easily be missed. Dodd is saying that there are fictional details added even to these concise snippets. Dodd's assurance that these inventions "add nothing fresh" and do not alter the form-critical categorization of the pericope is not very reassuring once one realizes that Jesus' showing of his hands and side is, according to Dodd, such an add-on.

If there were any doubt of this interpretation, a statement later in the article makes it even clearer. In the context of this later comment, Dodd is emphasizing the absence of specific names of witnesses within the very brief snippets. He goes so far as to suggest that the names of the women stated in Matthew 28 (Mary Magdalene and the other Mary) may not have been there in the tradition originally, and brings in support of this the fact that he has separated out just a couple of verses which don't happen to include the names. What is the point of this? For Dodd, it is that these concise snippets are appealing to the audience to believe what is attested on the basis of trusting the apostolic body corporately rather than particular, named individuals.

[T]he intention in general seems to be to present the facts as attested corporately by the apostolic body (using that term in the widest sense), in the spirit of I John 1:1-3. Credence is invited, not on the testimony of a given witness, but on the authority of the apostolic tradition embodied in the Church. Where we have apologetic expansions of the narrative, they are directed towards meeting the objection that the disciples may have had insufficient grounds for making the claims they do make. (p. 128, emphasis added) 

This final sentence bears pondering. Notice Dodd's use of the phrase "apologetic expansions," which undoubtedly refers to non-factual expansions. That is always how Dodd uses the term "apologetic." This serves as a gloss on the term "expansions" in the earlier quote in the same article about these same passages. Something more is striking here: Dodd is here explicitly saying that someone who was shaping this very early tradition made up details and inserted them even into these early, concise snippets in order to convince potential believers that the disciples themselves had good reason to believe that Jesus really was risen. And apparently whoever did this, on Dodd's view, had no qualms of conscience about doing so.

Consider the fact that one of my greatest concerns about the minimal facts approach centers precisely on the question of whether or not the disciples were rational in believing that Jesus was physically risen. Here we find C. H. Dodd, one of Gary Habermas's prime exhibits of a critical scholar who supposedly makes big concessions that favor the case for the bodily resurrection, saying that the early Christians falsely inserted details even into their short, early, orally transmitted resurrection traditions in order to make potential converts think that the disciples were rational in their belief that Jesus was risen.

The implication of this, of course, is that they didn't have true details to tell that would demonstrate that the disciples were rational. Why engage in "apologetic expansion" to say that they had this or that bit of concrete evidence if you have real details that make that point? So Jesus' showing his wounds in the first appearance in John 20 and the women's grasping his feet in Matthew 28 serve this purpose. In his first discussion of these passages Dodd comments:

….[I]n [Matt.] 28.9 the fact that the women touch his feet may be held to carry an implicit assurance that there is a real Person before them. It is perhaps legitimate to say that this type of resurrection narrative carries within it, as an integral element, a suggestion that the appearance of the Lord does not bring full or immediate conviction to the beholders, who require some form of assurance: the sight of his wounds, contact with his body, or his word of authority. (p. 106) 

Taken in conjunction with the later statement about "apologetic expansions" that "are directed towards meeting the objection that the disciples may have had insufficient grounds for making the claims they do make," it is hard to doubt that Dodd is implying that the physical contact and sight of wounds, at least, are places where such "apologetic expansions" enter even the "concise" stories.

Here once again we are up against a fundamental problem with the attempt to use critical scholars' admissions to provide data that will sustain a strong resurrection apologetic. Since it is a given to such scholars that the parts of the resurrection stories that are most epistemically useful for defending the bodily resurrection (and even the apostles' own rationality in believing that proposition) are the parts that were made up, we should not expect them to allow some portion of these stories past the critical gatekeeping that will strongly support the conclusions that Christian apologists are aiming for.

A further troubling implication of Dodd on apologetic expansions

Since I have other projects and limited energy, and since I'm not sure how many people are reading, this may be the last post in this series. Therefore I'm going to include this section here so that it doesn't just get left out.

For now, one or two comments about Habermas's references to "sermon summaries in Acts," for which he cites a different piece by Dodd on apostolic preaching. (Available for check-out here.) That piece includes statements by Dodd that cause great excitement in minimalist circles, such as that (in his opinion) there are signs of an Aramaic original lying behind certain specific verses included in the speeches in Acts and that Peter's speeches in Acts represent "the kerygma of the Church at Jerusalem" (Apostolic Preaching, p. 21).

What is less well-known, however, is that in this same work Dodd strongly emphasizes that these sermons shouldn't be thought to have been spoken by Peter himself on the occasions in question. Nor is he merely referring to the idea that these may have not been verbatim records. Rather, he casts into explicit doubt the idea that it was Peter who preached these things on these recognizable occasions.

We may with some confidence take these speeches to represent, not indeed what Peter said upon this or that occasion, but the kerygma of the Church at Jerusalem at an early period. (Apostolic Preaching, p. 21, emphasis added)

In this context we should probably take special note of the exceedingly restrained, understated phrasing of Dodd's wording concerning the speech to Cornelius' household, and this despite his suggestion of an Aramaic original for a portion of this speech:

We may perhaps take it that the speech before Cornelius represents the form of kerygma used by the primitive Church in its earliest approaches to a wider public (p. 28). 

Note that again this is cast in terms of "the kerygma used by the primitive church in its earliest approaches" rather than something Peter said on a concrete occasion. 

Notice too that even though a very brief reference to the apostles eating and drinking with Jesus does occur in this speech to Cornelius (Acts 10:41), every single instance in a Gospel resurrection story where Jesus is portrayed as eating and drinking with his disciples is treated as an invention in Dodd's other work on resurrection appearances, whether we're talking about the scene in Emmaus, on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, or in Jesus' first appearance in the upper room. If Jesus really ate and drank with them (or seemed to do so) in his appearances, we shouldn't be surprised to find at least one narrative of his doing so, containing more detail than the brief mention in Acts 10:41. Yet Dodd dismisses all of the eating and drinking narratives.

Along these same lines, Dodd also airily suggests (p. 20) that the entire second arrest of the apostles in Acts 5:17-40 is a "doublet" invented out of whole cloth and thus that what the apostles say to the Sanhedrin on that alleged occasion is also invention that merely doubles an earlier speech. 

None of these qualifications and assumptions of invention appear to be noted by Habermas.

But there's more: Consider the point made in the previous section--that Dodd appears to think that very early Christians thought nothing whatsoever of inventing and adding details to make it appear that the apostles were justified in believing what they preached. While it blunts the rhetorical edge of this a bit to attribute it vaguely to the early church or to anonymous formers of the earliest "concise" traditions, one wonders how much of a conscience Dodd thinks the "apostolic body" itself had.

Dodd certainly doesn't say that these inventors did not include members of the twelve, or Mary Magdalene and the other Mary. In fact, the whole question of whether there was any conscientious scruple about such wholesale invention of apologetically important details (or even of Gospel stories like Doubting Thomas) never seems to occur to Dodd. Or perhaps it would be most accurate to say that for Dodd, it's already settled: Not only the evangelists but the tradents of the early church had no such scruples. 

That being the case, does Dodd allow for the very real possibility that even the apostles themselves sometimes knowingly lied in order to add details that never happened, to convince potential converts? Dodd doesn't address this question directly, because he keeps referring to the "kerygma" and the "Jerusalem church," but I see nothing whatsoever in Dodd that pulls against this conclusion, and a great deal that fits with it. 

Here is a supreme irony: Supposedly the one thing that the minimal facts argument definitely does is to show that the vast majority of critical scholars at least admit that the apostles themselves were sincere about whatever-it-was that they told people. The big question then becomes, what do they think the apostles themselves told people?

But this deep dive into Dodd suggests that even that assumption may be insufficiently nuanced. It may be that scholars like Dodd think that the apostles were sincere about some kind of "big picture" that they told the people but had no qualms about making the evidence for a bodily resurrection look better than it was by lying additions, things that they knew were not part of what they actually experienced, like Jesus eating with them, showing his wounds, or allowing them to touch him.

If that is correct, then we have not even gained from the admissions of critical scholars the bare assumption of sincerity in everything that the disciples told people about their experience. Yes, some, perhaps many, liberal scholars will agree that they believed that Jesus was physically risen. But did the disciples themselves sometimes fictionally "improve upon" the evidence on which that conclusion was based? Even for Dodd, rather a moderate among critical scholars, that possibility is lurking in the wings.

Of course, I think such a suggestion is ludicrous. But then, I am willing to argue that the Gospels and Acts represent definitely what the earliest apostles, the people actually involved in the events, claimed. And I am willing to argue that Acts is historically reliable (not, for example, making up a "doublet" of the Apostles being arrested a second time), making clear the context in which they testified. And I'm willing to argue that multiple lines of evidence support the idea that the early church didn't think literal truth was dispensible. These include, for example, taking seriously the introductory verses of Luke and the Beloved Disciple's protestation of truthfulness in John 19:35.

Scholars like Dodd seem to call into very strong question the possibility of knowing the content of the disciples' claims. In fact, they pretty much unanimously dismiss the most important details of the Gospel resurrection stories as inventions by someone-or-other. And it now looks to me like they aren't all that convinced of the disciples' own sincerity either.

That being the case, remind me again: How does a case based solely upon what the majority of critical scholars grant supply strong evidence for the resurrection?