Chart showing routing of evidence through undesigned coincidences and traditional authorship

 Here is the chart that I used in my Youtube video released on 2/23/25.

The connections between "literary device" views of the Gospels and the Minimal Facts Argument for the resurrection

I’ve decided to write something clarifying exactly what connection I see between the minimal facts argument (along with other broadly minimalist types of arguments for Jesus’ resurrection) and the literary device views of the Gospels. My plan is to post this content both here and (perhaps in two parts) on Facebook. (If you read this on Facebook, please go to the blog post version to get all the links in their correct place where I say "see here.")

I’m not going to say “don’t comment” on this post, but I will say this: If you and I have already had lengthy back-and-forth arguments about this very topic elsewhere on social media, or on the value of the minimal facts argument, please don’t try to start the very same argument again on this post. I think if you and I have already done that elsewhere it will just cause frustration for both of us to start making the same arguments yet again on another thread. This seems like a fair request. 

It also seems like a fair request to ask that you read carefully before commenting, especially in disagreement. For example, if you find yourself saying, “Habermas can’t be giving epistemological weight to the consensus of scholarship, because he says the minimal facts also have to have good arguments for them,” you didn’t read carefully. That comment would be confusing treating consensus as the whole story with treating it as having some type of important, valuable, positive epistemic weight. Broadly speaking, this is the difference between its being a sufficient condition and its being a necessary condition for a particular kind of positive epistemic status. Please, I beseech you of your courtesy, take your time in reading before commenting that I'm just misunderstanding, much less misrepresenting.

An indirect epistemological connection between the MFA and literary device views

There are two types of connections between minimalist approaches, including the classic MFA, and the literary device approach to the Gospels. The first type of connection is epistemological and has to do with the matter of scholarly consensus. Having a high percentage and a broad spectrum (“across the scholarly spectrum,” or at least across the scholarly label spectrum) of consensus on a proposition is taken, not only by Dr. Licona but also by Dr. Habermas, to have positive epistemic weight. The type of positive epistemic weight that it supposed to have concerns guarding against bias. 

Notice here that I am not just saying that Dr. Habermas has endorsed Dr. Licona’s book on the resurrection. I’m not even just saying that he’s endorsed a particular statement in that book. I’m saying that he’s endorsed the idea that broad-spectrum consensus guards against bias as part of the minimal facts approach. He has explicitly, closely linked the MFA with the historiographical approach in Licona’s resurrection book and has explicitly endorsed the epistemological value of consensus as part of that approach. Here are several clear quotations from a detailed review essay (not just a brief endorsement) which is actually entitled “The Minimal Facts Approach to the Resurrection of Jesus: The Role of Methodology as a Crucial Component in Establishing Historicity.” (Link will be in the first comment of the FB version.) 

First, the connection between "historical bedrock" and "minimal facts." Early on, Habermas says, “The heart of Michael Licona’s astounding and excellent PhD dissertation of some 700 pages is an application of the Minimal Facts argument to several scholars and their research on the resurrection of Jesus, in order to ascertain how these authors fare against the known historical data.” Toward the end, Habermas says, “In this essay, I have attempted to provide some elucidation of the Minimal Facts approach as a methodology for studying the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus. This included unpacking several of the relevant aspects, as well as interacting with Michael Licona’s lengthy and rewarding treatment of this approach.” (Emphasis added)

In other words, there is not the faintest doubt that Habermas is saying that the “historical bedrock” methodology described and applied at length in Dr. Licona's book The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach, is the same approach as the minimal facts argument. This is not to say that he and Licona agree on every point, but Habermas is quite clear that methodologically he regards the 2010 resurrection book as a further spelling-out of his own minimal facts approach. I note the title and these quotations in order to address a recent and very strange attempt to protect the MFA from criticisms that might be leveled against the historical bedrock approach by claiming that they are quite different things and that references to Licona’s resurrection argument methodology are off limits in any critique of the “essence” of the MFA.

Second, the special epistemological importance of consensus: Avoiding our own “horizons” (biases) is extremely important to Licona in his book, and Habermas enthusiastically echoes this concern and connects it expressly with the minimal facts method: 

In keeping with the theme of this essay, Licona’s treatment of these matters surrounding the establishing and explicating of the Minimal Facts will most occupy us here. Very early in his discussion of historiography, Licona addresses the absolutely vital matter of the scholar’s horizons (chapter 1.2.2), the glasses that everyone wears when we view the world around us, and which can color severely and restrict our conclusions. And the more central the issues at hand, the more our prejudices and other views may rear their heads. To use Licona’s very helpful example, whether or not the runner was safe at second base depends largely on whether our son is the one stealing the base or the one who tagged him (p. 38)!

Habermas further quotes a passage from Licona in which L. says that the heterogeneity of consensus is something that “we desire” because it “gives us confidence that our horizons will not lead us completely astray.” Habermas then comments: 

Licona makes an insightful comment here regarding guarding against our own horizons. We must beware of our own imported biases, as well. When discussing the Minimal Facts, I have always purposely included notes at each juncture that list representative numbers of skeptics of various stripes who still affirm the data in question. This is a significant methodological procedure that serves more than one purpose. Among others, it assures the readers that they are not being asked to accept something that only conservatives believe, or that is only recognized by those who believe in the veracity of the New Testament text, and so on. After all, this sort of widespread recognition and approval is the very thing that our stated method requires.

Notice that he refers to this search for heterogenous consensus as important for “our stated method” and says that this has the effect, among other things, of helping to guard against our own biases.

Even when Habermas comments in the article on how he himself goes back and forth on whether or not to include this or that in the minimal facts, and even when he lists "second-order" facts, such as the conversion of Jesus' brother James or the nearness in time of the disciples' proclamation of the resurrection after Jesus' death, these are evaluated and discussed in terms of consensus: How large of a consensus? How many scholars address the matter? And the like. At no point does Habermas ever so much as approach the outer edge of suggesting that it would or could be a good method for arguing for the resurrection to go all-out against scholarly consensus, to say "damn the torpedoes," and to argue for something not granted by any significant scholarly consensus as a crucial part of a resurrection argument. 

I anticipate that immediately someone will say, "That's just because it wouldn't work rhetorically." No, that is not the only reason. As the above quotations show, both Licona and Habermas regard it as important to the MFA to have some substantial and heterogenous consensus for the premises for an epistemological reason--namely, to guard against our own biases. Whether we widen our facts in the argument to include the empty tomb (which neither Habermas nor Licona chooses to do) and the conversion of James or other propositions, or whether we stick only to a more minimal set, this is evaluated in terms of a condition that there be some degree of significant scholarly consensus. For example, the empty tomb supposedly had a 75% consensus among scholars, though Habermas and Licona don't think this is enough to treat it as a minimal fact or "historical bedrock." (Even the 75% is questionable, as I argued in a recent video.) Again: Yes, I know that these facts are also supposed to have good arguments for them as another necessary condition. (Though I should add that in some discussions of historical bedrock Licona seems a little confused on whether we need independent access to those good arguments or whether we assume that strong arguments must exist simply because of the consensus. See the discussion here on "Historical Bedrock as a Category that is too loose. But waive that, since I'm sticking to what Habermas has endorsed.) There is more than one way to give epistemological weight to consensus. One way is by considering it both sufficient and necessary for some sort of positive epistemic status. Another way is by considering it sufficient but not necessary. And another way is by considering it necessary but not sufficient. Since the minimal facts premises must have a certain degree and kind of consensus, and since this is said to be important for guarding against our own biases, I conclude that for this status (well-justified by publicly available evidence, and something for which we can be highly confident that we aren't being driven by our own biases) consensus is being treated as a necessary condition, though supposedly not sufficient.

Now, what is the connection here to the literary device views about which I've written so much?

In order to reject the idea that the Gospel authors deliberately changed the facts (whether or not you call those "devices"), and in order to be confident in that judgement, you have to be very ready to go up against scholarly consensus. But more: One needs to be ready to do that not just "as a Christian" (a concept used by both Craig Keener and William Lane Craig) but as a thinking person. In other words, you likely won't have enough confidence that the Gospel authors didn't change the facts if you just say, "I reject that idea because I'm a Christian and that wouldn't fit with my view of inspiration." Rather, you should think they didn't change the facts because that's the way the evidence points. You need to be willing to say that the scholars out there who think they did do so are seeing the evidence wrong. 

More: Did someone say something about heterogenous agreement? Well, if we're just talking about labels, it is sadly the case nowadays that we have scholars who both have the "mainstream" or "skeptical" label and some who have the "evangelical" or "conservative" label who have capitulated to the idea that the Gospel authors deliberately changed the facts. I emphasize "label" because time was that endorsing such a thing would have meant by definition that you weren't an evangelical! Times change. The actual consensus can get narrower while the so-called spectrum of labels remains wide.

So the proposition, "The Gospel authors never deliberately changed the facts" is not only not granted by a heterogenous majority of NT scholars, it's denied and its contadiction is asserted by a majority of scholars, including some examples across the scholarly spectrum!

And here are you: Likely a Christian, likely a conservative Christian, maybe a devout Catholic, Baptist, or evangelical. And darn it, you may not even have a credential in the field. If you are going to disagree with this consensus, how do you know that you aren't just being driven by your biases?

Now my answer to that is robustly anti-bandwagon, anti-credentialist, and evidential. I say that you go into the arguments that are being used by the scholars who are saying these things, whatever their labels, and you find out for yourself (yes, you can tell this even if you aren't a credentialed expert) that the arguments are terrible! And you find out all the great arguments that the Gospel authors were habitually truthful.

But if you accept what Habermas and Licona see as an important epistemological value--the use of consensus to guard against your own biases--it's going to be a lot harder to take this path and a lot harder to justify doing so to yourself. A lot harder. And believe me, I've seen this time and again: There is huge credentialist and consensus-based pressure placed on those who take a supposedly "too conservative" position, which is sometimes labeled as "fundamentalism."

Now, at this point, you may say something like this: "I never knew that Habermas said that about the importance of wide and large consensus for guarding against personal bias, nor that he connected it with the minimal facts method. I disagree with him on that. I use the MFA really, really, really just as a rhetorical way of arguing for the resurrection while using only facts that my non-Christian opponent will be likely to grant because they are so widely granted. I don't buy into that idea of the need for wide consensus to guard against bias, and I don't have to in order to use the MFA in this way. I'm totally willing to go up against consensus if it's wrong." (If you say this, though, please don't try to claim that Habermas didn't say this or that he doesn't connect it with the MFA, because I've documented that clearly.)

You're right, you don't have to agree with that reason for the need for consensus in order to use the MFA. I do not say, and I've never said, that the mere use of the MFA logically requires you to adopt this epistemological view about the value/importance of consensus in NT scholarship concerning the premises of arguments, even though the originators of the method do take that view and do connect it with their method. (And as I've documented here, Dr. William Lane Craig who has a somewhat similar "core facts" approach also conflates sociology and epistemology in his statements about how we know things about Jesus and what arguments are outdated.)

The first thing I would say if you make that response is that in that case you need to move on to something even more important--namely, my argument that the MFA is a weak argument for the resurrection! It actually doesn't provide a strong argument for the resurrection, once you recognize how limited the "appearance experience" fact/premise really is. See here for more. You need to consider that very carefully. We shouldn't be making weak arguments and implying that they are strong arguments. That's not good, and it certainly is no argument for doing so to say that it "works." We aren't just salesmen. We need to have intellectual integrity.

But hey, if you're really just using the MFA because you think it's easier rhetorically, you should be willing to give that up, right? It shouldn't be too hard for you to reconsider, right? Especially since I've shown again and again that a more "maximalist" type of argument, a Paleyan argument, can be given at various lengths and levels of detail. See here and here for examples.

That brings me to another point if you insist that you, unlike Habermas and Licona, are not giving epistemological value to consensus: Do a very serious thought experiment. Try to be as honest and self-aware as possible. Ask yourself seriously what you would do if you became convinced that the MFA doesn't provide a good, strong argument for the resurrection. What would you do? Would you regroup and be willing to say, "Oh, well, in that case, the heck with consensus, I'll make the argument in a different way"? Are you even willing right now to listen carefully to the arguments that the MFA isn't very strong? Or are you shying away from that because you're so wedded to it? Because if so, just how sure are you that you're willing to damn the torpedoes and go up against consensus, that you aren't at all dependent on a feeling of epistemological security from the supposed consensus?

Or as an alternative, ask yourself: What would you do if, in your own lifetime, the consensus shifted radically so that even those minimal facts were no longer widely granted? Would you keep harking back to an artificially circumscribed earlier consensus? Would you be in denial? Or would you say, "Okay, I'll stop saying this about consensus in the present tense, and I'll make an argument without that rhetorical motif"? 

You see, I hear people all the time absolutely insist, in an almost angry way, that no, no, no this is just rhetorical. They don't even want to admit what I've documented above about what Habermas and Licona have said epistemologically about their methodology. And yet. They also don't want to pay attention to my criticisms of the strength of the argument. Sometimes it isn't even just that they don't agree with them. In many cases they don't even want to hear it! (See this post for a summary of my criticisms of the strength of the argument.) And to my mind, that casts doubt upon the "it's just rhetorical" claim in the case of that person, even though the epistemological point discussed in this section is in principle separable from the use of the argument. 

So, too, does the promotion of literary device theories without due consideration. More about that in the next section.

Sociological/psychological connections between literary device view and the MFA

People get offended when I say what I'm going to say in this section. They also mishear it. They hear it as, "Lydia is saying that if you use the MFA you don't think that the Gospels are historically reliable, just because you're not using that in the argument for the resurrection." I'm not saying that. Nothing in this section is saying that. The point I'm making here is more nuanced than that, so again, please read carefully.

It is undeniable that if the MFA or some other argument that doesn't rely on Gospel reliability (like William Lane Craig's "core facts" approach) were a strong argument for the resurrection, this would make the stakes for Gospel reliability comparatively lower than the stakes would be if Gospel reliability were needed to undergird the argument for the resurrection. Thus far, this is just a comparative point. All else being equal, if we need Gospel reliability to have a strong argument for the central miracle of Christianity, the stakes for Gospel reliability are higher than they are if we don't need that for that argument. But in principle the stakes could still be very high, and some given person who uses the MFA could still recognize that they are very high. For example, you might think that you need a good, publicly available argument (not just the "internal witness of the Holy Spirit") for high Gospel reliability to make a good case for Jesus' teaching that he was God. (As an interesting sociological point, however, Dr. Craig doesn't think this. He uses a criteriological, passage-by-passage approach, to argue for Jesus' self-conception, and he doesn't use John 8:58 or John 10:30 in the argument.) Or you might think that you need such a publicly available argument for Gospel reliability in order to have a wide variety of Jesus' teachings for a well-taught personal relationship with God.

Now, if that's your position, and if you recognize further that the notion that the Gospel authors changed facts is incompatible with high Gospel reliability, even if the changes are labeled as "devices," and if you recognize that there are strong arguments against that notion, then you might use the MFA without being susceptible to the literary device views.

There are other possibilities. Maybe you recognize that there are high stakes to Gospel reliability but you have been confused by the obfuscating statements of evangelical literary device theories into thinking that these in no way undermine Gospel reliability. The obfuscation that occurs is highly, highly unfortunate, but if you are still unaware, let me say to pique your interest that when these folks use the term "paraphrase" and soothingly tell you that they aren't saying that the Gospel authors made anything up, this is highly misleading. One view that is spoken of as "paraphrase" is that John the evangelist was, shall we say, inspired by the saying, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" to make Jesus in his own Gospel say, "I thirst," which Jesus did not historically, recognizably utter. That probably isn't what you thought was going on if you considered these views uncontroversial, am I right? Another idea is that either John invented the scene between Jesus and Mary Magdalene at the tomb, because she really met Jesus under quite different circumstances when she was running from the tomb with joy, or that Matthew deliberately made her meet Jesus in those circumstances, while knowing that she really met him alone as recorded in John. Again, this is a matter of altering facts, but that isn't what the Christian advocates of these views normally bring up (even if they believe it) when assuring fellow Christians that this is all very trivial and there is nothing for them to worry about. So, if you do recognize the high stakes of Gospel reliability, and this is all new to you, I encourage you to get hold of The Mirror or the Mask rather than passing along the ideas uncritically.

But once again, as with the problems with the cogency of the MFA, it's rather odd to find that folks who supposedly think the stakes are high for Gospel reliability often seem curiously un-curious about whether or not reliability is being undermined by the literary device views. If the stakes really are high, shouldn't you find out more before telling everybody who watches your Youtube channel (or listens to your presentations) that "Scholars like Michael Licona have found that the Gospel authors used special compositional devices and that these explain most of the apparent contradictions in the Gospels"? 

Here I think there is a major sociological/psychological effect coming from the combination of the MFA with a certain meme or saying: "If the resurrection happened, then Christianity is true, period." Hmmm. the word "period" there does tend to convey the idea that this is meant to be taken literally, though I know that some people use the saying unwarily while meaning it as hyperbole. But the more you say it, and the more you listen to some high-profile apologists, the more likely you are to mean it literally. Literally, it's false. Plenty of heretics believe that Jesus rose from the dead. Biblical unitarians, Socinians, as far as I know even Mormons. It's entirely possible logically to believe in the resurrection of Jesus and to have non-Christian doctrine.

But the constant urging from the MFA camp is, "Use this, it works. Use this, the resurrection is everything. If it's true, Christianity is true, period. We can work out all those other little details later. Use this, it will bring people to Christ." I'm sorry to say that this sort of rhetoric--the very urging one often hears from people who insist that this has no connection to anything else--encourages carelessness. It encourages intellectual laziness. It encourages putting off indefinitely that nitty-gritty examination of alleged contradictions, which are spoken of over and over and over again as unimportant, irrelevant, something we can grant for the sake of the argument. We can get to them later, always later. Somehow, though, the time never comes. The time for worrying about them or dealing with them is put off indefinitely while their importance is downplayed. How does this not give the impression that the skeptical insistence that the Gospels are full of contradictions and deliberate factual changes is no big deal and wouldn't matter much even if it were true? 

Here's another thought experiment: How many presently living, high-profile Christian leaders do you know of who both a) use the MFA regularly in public presentations and b) consciously, unashamedly, and publicly reject the fact-changing literary device views? People who combine all of these characteristics are as rare as hens' teeth. I have encountered a huge amount of behind-the-scenes stonewalling when it comes to these matters. Some don't want to hear. Some don't want to take the time. Some don't want to speak out.

For the most part, the people who have public platforms, are well-known, and make heavy use of the MFA or "core facts" approaches are the very people who don't apparently think the matter of fact-changing literary devices is important enough to be a) investigated carefully and b) publicly and unashamedly rejected after investigation. Some, like (unfortunately) William Lane Craig and Gary Habermas, have decided to endorse the literary device work of Licona, at least in general terms, though without always spelling out in detail which specific examples they endorse.

I do not think that social fact is an accident, though it's not a matter of logical entailment from the MFA. Rather, it's a matter of being so focused in one's thinking and one's ministry for so many years, on "not worrying about" skeptical claims that the Gospels are full of inventions and embellishments (ostensibly granting this just "for the sake of the argument"), in order to make an argument whose premises will be acceptable to the scholarly establishment. The strong psychological temptation is then to think that anything that one has set aside like this isn't really all that important. After all, what does it really matter if John made up "I thirst" and "It is finished"? If the resurrection happened, then Christianity is true, period! What does it really matter if John made up the sub-scene where Jesus breathes on his disciples and says, "Receive the Holy Spirit"? That doesn't change "the gist" for some meanings of "gist." ("The gist" gets broader and broader, doesn't it?) And if the resurrection happened, then Christianity is true, period! What does it really matter if Matthew created a "doublet" of two blind men healed early in Jesus' ministry, plus the two blind men healed near the end? If the resurrection happened, then Christianity is true, period! How much does it matter if the Gospel authors thought that they were licensed to make all kinds of invisible factual changes, due to the "standards of their time"? After all, if the resurrection happened, Christianity is true, period!

The MFA does tell us that we have a strong argument that the resurrection happened that would still work even if the Gospels were unreliable. That much is an undeniable part of the MFA. So, if the literary device views call in that promissory note by hypothesizing that the authors did indeed change things, perhaps we shouldn't worry too much about it.

The issue of inerrancy plays an interesting role here: The stakes if the doctrine of inerrancy is false may be different (I think they are very different) from the stakes if the Gospels are not robustly, literally, historically reliable. But in articles like this one we see these issues conflated. If you think (rightly, I would say) that we have an excellent case for Christianity even if traditional inerrancy is false, it does not follow that we have an excellent case even if literal Gospel reliability is false. The rhetoric surrounding minimalist approaches unfortunately encourages the conflation between inerrancy and robust, literal reliability, which in turn helps to convey the notion that robust reliability is a fairly low-stakes issue.

This is the sociological/psychological connection between the MFA and acceptance of the literary device views: If you think that robust, unredefined, literal Gospel reliability is a fairly low-stakes issue, you are tempted to accept too readily, without due investigation, theories that undermine it such as the view that the evangelists sometimes deliberately changed facts. And the MFA, especially taken in conjunction with the idea that if the resurrection is true, that's all that is necessary for Christianity, makes it psychologically easy to conclude that literal Gospel reliability is a fairly low-stakes issue, since it is part of the MFA to say that you can have a strong argument for the resurrection using only a small number of premises granted by a large consensus of scholars across the spectrum.

Again, I cannot repeat too often, the point in this section is not a necessary, logical connection. You can consistently be an MFA user and a fierce, intelligent defender of unredefined Gospel reliability. But I wish we saw more of those, and all the more so if they were also willing to listen to concerns about the cogency of the MFA. 

But if you're deeply invested in the kind of rhetoric and talk that constantly goes around in certain evangelical apologetic circles, you will find that enthusiastic adoption of the MFA (and even angry defense thereof) tends to go hand-in-hand with downplaying the stakes for robust Gospel reliability and also with very great openness to, if not outright advocacy of, the literary device views. And all of these positions unfortunately tend to be held with a disturbing level of closed-mindedness in which critics such as myself are constantly rebuked for daring to criticize other Christians or other Christians' arguments. "Misrepresentation" is constantly alleged even where it cannot be shown to be true, and the shallow, lazy characterizations of my own criticisms are, ironically, instances of misrepresentation! For my own part, I think it's fairly obvious that both the above epistemic issue (about consensus) and the sociological/psychological issues discussed in this section are at work, along with the sheer popularity of the MFA. Criticizing a popular position has never been popular.

Conclusion

So where does that leave us? Especially, where does it leave you if you've been using either the MFA or Dr. Craig's "core facts" approach and the idea of a problem with it is relatively new to you?

I would say that if that's where you're coming from, you should dive into other things I've produced on this, especially on the "appearance experience" claim. Consider that what is granted by a huge majority of scholars across the spectrum is not that the disciples had experiences of the kind described in the Gospels but merely that they had experiences of some kind. These could have been vague or ghostly. They could have been vision-like. They needn't have had physical aspects involving touch, or eating, or lengthy conversations. They could have even had experiences that were evidence that they were not seeing a physically risen person--for example, if Jesus appeared transparent. Perhaps they didn't even have a clear sensory experience as a group. Mainstream scholars typically think that the physical details of the Gospel accounts are later embellishments and therefore typically think that the disciples, if they had appearance experiences, had experiences of a type that could be explained in some non-physical manner. Therefore, to include these scholars in a consensus that the disciples really had appearance experiences that are best explained by the literal, physical resurrection is to gerrymander a consensus. Well, I'll leave it there for now, since I've written and talked about it quite a bit in other places. But check it out. If this is just a rhetorical matter for you, if you're really not epistemologically dependent on the comfort of using only premises granted by a large, heterogenous majority of scholars, then you should be willing to change your rhetorical strategy. And if you are epistemologically dependent on consensus, you should reconsider that!

Now, suppose that you do think that Gospel reliability is a high-stakes issue. If you are unaware or only vaguely aware of what the literary device views are that I've been talking about, or (especially) if you've already committed yourself somewhere to the idea that lots of alleged discrepancies in the Gospels are best dealt with by specialized knowledge about "compositional devices of the time," then I would strongly suggest you delve into that. I've dealt with these issues in many places, most especially in The Mirror or the Mask, in a video series , and in many other videos and blog posts.

I'd especially suggest this: If you feel unpleasantly surprised or even annoyed by my making any sort of connection (either epistemic or social) between those views and the MFA as discussed in this post, it would be a good thing for you to ask yourself as honestly as possible whether you yourself are a case in point of the too-ready acceptance of the literary device views or apathy about them. Are you spending way more time and energy arguing on social media that there is absolutely nothing wrong in the slightest with the MFA, that it is a strong argument and that its use has no ill effects, that anyone who criticizes it in any way must be misrepresenting it, than you are willing to spend understanding the literary device views and their spreading influence in the evangelical world? Is that a reasonable set of priorities? If you do investigate them, and you realize that the compositional device perspective is problematic, please say so. Please say so publicly. I would say that publicly saying there appears to be a problem is especially incumbent on you if you have previously publicly endorsed the compositional device views, even in broad outline and even without knowing what you were endorsing or giving a positive platform to. Wagon circling and silence when something is seriously wrong do not create a good social dynamic. 

In closing, let me say loud and clear that I fully realize that there are lay apologists all over the U.S. and probably all over the world who are sincere Christians, have picked up minimal facts or generally minimalist arguments for the resurrection, and are using them enthusiastically, who have not the slightest intention of saying that the Gospel authors knowingly changed facts. Many laymen using minimalist approaches would be opposed to the literary device views if they knew of them and (sans euphemisms) understood what those views really are. I know that. I get that. I'm not saying that you're being inconsistent if you're one of those laymen. But I also believe that the MFA is oversold as far as what it can do. And I know that some of the same high-profile people promoting generally minimalist arguments are also promoting the constant deferral of questions about robust reliability and alleged contradictions. Some are also promoting downplaying statements about what is at stake in such questions and/or promoting the unqualified slogan, "If the resurrection happened, then Christianity is true, period," or something much like it. Some are also promoting the compositional device views. No doubt the leaders saying these things have the good intention of helping people and winning people to Christ, but I think they've made some serious mistakes. 

Even though one of these perspectives doesn't follow logically from another, they fit together quite well in a meta-apologetic worldview. So those lay-level apologists who are innocently using the MFA are often in a social and intellectual position where they are potentially vulnerable to eventually follow a line of thought from minimalism in resurrection arguments to assuming pretty low stakes for robust, literal Gospel reliability to uncritical promotion of literary device views. I want to raise a warning about that.

And if you consider it important to assume good intentions whenever possible, I ask you to assume my good intentions, as well, and my sincere desire to be of help to the church and the world, to the glory of God. 

The Eye of the Beholder: Available now!

I've been working like a beaver recently on the release of The Eye of the Beholder: The Gospel of John as Historical Reportage. That is to say, I've been doing interviews and posting about it, checking to see if it's available in Australia and the UK (it wasn't for a couple of days when I expected it to be), sharing content about it to social media, making videos, and so forth, while keeping life going otherwise.

I owe a lot to What's Wrong With the World for the space to publish a lot of related material in an earlier form over the past few years. Here is the Gospel of John tag there, if you want to read some of this for free in its beta version, as it were. I believe that all of that material up through May of 2020 or so has also been copied over to this blog (Extra Thoughts), as part of the archiving project last year, but it hasn't always been tagged. At least it is archived here, though.

The Eye of the Beholder was released on March 1, 2021, just this past Monday. For those of you who get info. about this from one of my blogs and/or aren't on Facebook, here are some relevant links, with apologies for making this post mostly a link dump. But believe me: There's tons of content at the links. First, how can you get the book itself? Here's the link at Amazon and here it is at Barnes & Noble. It makes no difference to my royalties or to my publisher's profits which site you buy it from. If you are in the UK, you can search Amazon, UK, for it, and the same (now) in both Australia and Canada. This is fitting, since I have endorsements from prominent scholars in all of those countries!

Of course, high-profile endorsers don't have to mean that I'm right, but at least they should mean that the book is worth a place at the table. I'm really humbly grateful to the Lord, and the endorsers, and my publisher, Nathan Ward, for the star-studded roster we got this time, including Stanley Porter, Thomas Schreiner, philosopher Bob Larmer, Paul N. Anderson, Alan Thompson, and more. Here are the endorsements in PDF. This should lay to rest various claims to the effect that my work is unworthy of attention due to my lack of such-and-such specific credentials. Nathan went out and asked for endorsements from Johannine and New Testament scholars whom I did not think of, or whom I would have expected to ignore the request due to their eminence or busyness, and he got them. (I'm reminded of a collect about "those things which for our unworthiness we dare not and for our blindness we cannot ask.") Some scholars also contacted me spontaneously after the publication of The Mirror or the Mask expressing interest in supporting my work. And in a couple of cases scholars' names were suggested to me by their former students: "You should contact professor so-and-so. I think he might be interested in your work."

One thing that we can't seem to get to work for love or money at Amazon is the "see inside" function. (At least not until it comes out in Kindle, perhaps in a year, at which point you will be able to see inside the Kindle version.) Perhaps one has to have a rich uncle who is good friends with Bezos to get See Inside The Book to work, but that's okay, because I anticipated that, and I have free samples, with publisher permission, available elsewhere. Here is Chapter I. Here is the Conclusion. Here is the Table of contents.

If you want to get a sense of the book in just three minutes, here is a trailer, for which I thank my eldest daughter, Bethel McGrew. Feel free to tweet or share that trailer everywhere, as it's the sort of thing that is intended for precisely that context.

If you want a meatier discussion of the contents of the book, here is a content tour of about twenty-five minutes.

And if you are really into long-form discussion, here is a two-hour interview I recorded with Thaddeus of the Youtube channel Reasoned Answers just a couple of days ago. This is the first long interview I have done on this book since its release, so thanks to Thaddeus for that opportunity.

I now have a separate author page on Facebook if you are on there and want to follow me that way. (And hey, if you're annoyed by my Covid posts and just want to see stuff about the New Testament and my books, this is a great way to separate those!) Note that Facebook is a little odd: Just clicking "like" or even "follow" on my Lydia McGrew, Author, page won't automatically make my new posts from that page pop up in your newsfeed unless you interact quite a bit. So if you really want to be sure to see everything, be sure to toggle your "follow" options to "subscribe" to get notifications when I post something new.

The Eye of the Beholder has something for everyone--pastor, layman, and scholar. So if you're interested in the question of the historicity of John, be sure to get a copy. I should also mention that my publisher is offering desk copies at a reduced rate (for physical, within the continental US) and free for e-copies (not to be promiscuously shared) to professors at Bible colleges and seminaries who teach relevant courses and are considering the book for a course. E-mail info@deward.com if you fall into that category.

In the words of the late Leon Morris, God has chosen to reveal himself in history, and it is there that we must find him. And that, I would add, is why these books needed to be written, and why St. John the evangelist wrote his book, too.

An irony concerning the minimal facts approach

For some time I've been writing and speaking about the problems with a certain minimalistic approach to arguing for Christianity that has become popular in evangelical circles in the last several decades. (See, e.g., here, here, and here.) Sometimes it goes by the name of the "minimal facts" approach. But not always. The apologetics giant William Lane Craig refers to the facts in question as "core facts" rather than "minimal facts" and includes the empty tomb among them, whereas the father of the minimal facts approach, Gary Habermas, does not include the empty tomb among his set of minimal facts. But as I have pointed out, the difference there is far more terminological than substantive, since in both cases the core fact or minimal fact that the disciples had appearance experiences is kept vague in order to be able to rope in a lot of scholars and say that they accept it. This causes a lot of epistemic trouble when one tries to argue for the physical resurrection of Jesus, since it's precisely the physical details that give us reason to think that Jesus was physically raised. It shouldn't need saying, but the reason Christians think he was physically raised is because we think he appeared physically to his disciples. (Obviously.) The mainstream scholar Wolfhart Pannenberg, who thought the resurrection accounts in the Gospels were heavily embellished, apparently thought that Jesus' body really disappeared and that in that sense he was "physically raised," but that he went immediately to heaven and that the appearances to the disciples were visions sent by God to the disciples and bore little resemblance to the appearances recounted in the Gospels. I'd say that at that point the meaning of "physically raised" has been changed almost beyond recognition and also that the epistemic support for believing in anything objective at all is gravely undermined.

This point was brought home to me recently by watching a series of video discussions between Michael Licona and Dale Allison. (Videos here, here, here, and here.) Allison is a little hard to characterize. He speaks of himself as a Christian (PCUSA), and Licona calls him a "fellow believer." He talks in the interviews about his prayer practices, which involve a yoga mat and icons. He's obviously a theist of some sort. That much I think can be said definitely. But Allison is and always has been profoundly ambivalent about the physical resurrection of Jesus and treats it very much as up in the air, and he obviously thinks it quite plausible that the resurrection narratives in the Gospels are highly embellished and that the details of those narratives, such as Jesus' eating with his disciples, were added for apologetic purposes. Licona is a strong advocate of the minimal approach and tries to do everything "through Paul," and in the interaction with Allison, it cuts no ice. Mind you, Allison is a naturally somewhat skeptical fellow. As he rather charmingly explains, there are four of him inwardly. They all get along with one another, though they disagree. What is interesting to notice is that none of these four "Dale Allisons" believes that robust, orthodox Christianity, including fully physical appearances, is historically justified by the objective evidence. So it is entirely plausible as a sociological and psychological matter that a discussion with someone who takes a more maximal approach to the resurrection would also cut no ice with Allison. But I consider Licona's attempts to counter him, most of them going "through Paul" (e.g., trying to treat Paul as our main or or even only eyewitness of the resurrection whose account has come down to us) to be objectively far weaker than the available arguments really are and hence consider it somewhat understandable that Allison bats them aside.

In reflecting on their interaction, I thought of an irony concerning the minimalist approach and the way that it bills itself, and I posted this on Facebook.

It is especially ironic that advocates of the minimal facts approach to defending Jesus' resurrection argue that they are appealing only to premises granted by a skeptical audience. Often this is portrayed as especially successful, because it appeals to common ground. I have argued in my "Minimal Facts vs. Maximal Data" webinar that this gravely weakens the case by watering down the notion of Jesus' "appearances" to something that a wide variety of scholars will accept.

But there is a more specific irony, which must be followed carefully to understand it: Due to the watering down of the "appearances," the physicality of Jesus' resurrection is cast into doubt, because the minimalist is not willing to argue that the highly physical details in the Gospel narratives (such as Jesus' eating) are really what the witnesses claimed. After all, the minimalist knows that that is not granted by a majority of scholars. How, then, to argue for the physical resurrection?

Generally the minimalist will at that point spend a fair bit of time arguing indirectly that the disciples believed the resurrection was physical. Per the minimalist's preference, this often goes "through" Paul. (There is a huge preference for doing everything "with" or "through" Paul.) E.g. Paul probably believed the resurrection was physical. Paul said that his gospel that he was preaching was approved by the other apostles. Therefore, the other apostles probably believed that the resurrection was physical. Or: The Gospel of Luke portrays the resurrection as physical. Luke was a companion of Paul and spoke to other apostles. Therefore, the apostles probably believed that the resurrection was physical. Note: This means that even if Luke invented the physical details in his narrative, this somehow doesn't matter because he invented them in order to convey what the apostles believed!

The minimalist will then try to insist that the apostles wouldn't have believed the resurrection was physical if they didn't have good evidence thereof. So, therefore, they probably had good evidence thereof. Again, this argument is supposed to circumvent concerns about the Gospels' embellishment. The idea, then, is to argue that even if those particular details were invented, something else was probably what they experienced that made them rational in believing in a physical resurrection!

So this round-the-barn approach eschews an attempt to defend the proposition that the only actual accounts we have tell us what the original witnesses claimed! It then attempts to bolster the now-weak argument for the physical resurrection by pouring energy into arguing that they probably believed it and that something-or-other convincing had to be what they experienced or they wouldn't have believed it.

Would that proposition be granted by the skeptic? Obviously not! Any skeptic or even ambivalent scholar (such as Dale Allison) is going to reject the proposition, "If the disciples believed that Jesus was physically raised, they were rational in doing so." Of course not! Such a person will point to various apparitions and visionary experiences as an analogy to the resurrection experiences (both Allison and Bart Ehrman expressly do this) and will then say that people believe a lot of things and that the apostles appear to have believed in a physical resurrection of Jesus for some other reason--e.g., because they were conditioned to so by their Jewish background, etc.

The point I am making is that at this incredibly crucial juncture the minimalist is forced to abandon his much-touted method of relying only on premises "granted by a majority of scholars" or even granted by a specific skeptical interlocutor. So even the supposed rhetorical and strategic advantage is suddenly lost.

But in that case, why not take a forward position sooner, make an actually stronger argument, and argue that the Gospels are reliable and that we have good reason to believe that the Gospel resurrection accounts tell us what the original witnesses actually claimed?

Here comes an interesting question: How many minimalists think you can do that? To what extent has the decades-long reliance on this supposed "mere strategy" given rise to a genuine loss of nerve, to an apologetics community full of people who don't think that they can argue that way, who don't think that the evidence actually supports that premise? Unfortunately, I fear that this is too true, and that this isn't really *just* a "strategy." (Indeed, I have provided quotations in the webinar that indicate as much.) That would mean that we are forced to argue in this roundabout fashion and only take a stand at the point of insisting that the disciples' belief must have been rational. But in that case, you might as well admit that that is what you're doing very openly. Just say it: "No, this isn't really a strategy that relies only on premises that the skeptic will grant. But I don't think the robust reliability of the Gospels and the unembellished nature of the Gospel accounts of the resurrection is defensible, so, I'm sorry, but this is the best we can do."

Isn't it a great thing that we have a better way?

In a comment to the Facebook post I was asked if a minimalist approach to arguing for the resurrection is/was just an excuse to bring higher criticism into evangelicalism. As I point out in my response, giving a bit of sociological history, the reality is more complicated than that. Here is what I said (very lightly edited):

I don't think it was intended to be that initially. I truly think that initially, e.g., as formulated by Dr. Gary Habermas, the minimal facts approach was meant to be a strategy for jumping off from what Habermas found to be an encouraging softening of the liberal scholarly stance, in order to to press for more. The idea was that perhaps after, say, the 1970s, the liberal scholars were admitting enough that we could grab that and use it as a set of premises and actually argue for the resurrection as an explanatory inference just from those premises. This was seen as a big advantage, a convenience, and also excellent for the popular use of debates to answer skeptics, because saying, "This is granted by so many liberal scholars" was seen as a knock-down debate tactic.

Unfortunately, a lot of things then happened. For one thing, Habermas did not consult enough epistemologists about the way he was writing and the rationale for his approach, and he confused epistemology with sociology. One finds this in several of his statements of the minimal facts case--he will speak as though a high percentage of scholars' agreeing is in and of itself helpful to strong epistemic status, which of course is not the case.

Second, the strategy took on, as it were, a life of its own so that the "muscles" that would otherwise be used for defending the more robust case tended to atrophy because Christians arguing for the resurrection were not using those muscles.

Third, Michael Licona wrote a book that was a lengthy historiographical expansion of the minimalist account, with Habermas's approval (though I don't really think Habermas fully realized what was going on) in which Licona used the phrase "historical bedrock" for a very limited set of sources. In that book he put big question marks over the resurrection accounts in the Gospels. At this point the embrace of something like "higher criticism" really did enter the "minimalist" approach, as Licona made, as it were, a virtue out of necessity (or a necessity out of an alleged virtue?): Such-and-such isn't "historical bedrock," such-and-such is unsure because we don't know how much of it goes back to the original disciples and we don't know how much liberty the evangelists felt free to take. Therefore we should try to use other methods. This approach was embraced to a disturbing extent around the same time by William Lane Craig, who in the 2008 edition of his book Reasonable Faith actually states that the more forward approach of William Paley and company has been rendered "forever obsolete" by the work of higher critics. Note that this involves, once again, confusing sociology with epistemology.

Since then, Licona's 2017 book and his many presentations have further pressed the idea that the evangelists felt free to "take liberties," and his views have been endorsed by high-level people in the apologetics world, cementing still further the unhappy union between minimalist apologetics and these higher-critical approaches, even though that wasn't the original reason for the introduction of the approach or even for its earlier popularity.

Meanwhile, lay apologetics took off as a cottage industry, and many lay apologists are simply confused about the "appearances" used in the premises of minimal facts. Indeed, sometimes the articles, etc., written by advocates of the approach are confusing at precisely this point. For example, again and again people supposedly presenting the "minimal facts" will bring into popular presentations things that are not granted by a majority of scholars, such as Jesus' appearances indoors and outdoors, to skeptics, etc. This has caused many people to embrace the minimal facts model on the mistaken assumption that a majority of scholars admit far more than they actually do admit. And they are then very reluctant to let go of this assumption. It's too much of a shock for them to absorb, because they are so sure that minimal facts or minimalism is the best way to argue. The prominence of the debate format is part of the issue, too, since people assume that you must use something like this to have a punchy debate presentation.

The demonizing of anyone who points out these issues (aka me) as doing something invidious for criticizing other Christians' work certainly doesn't help in promoting clarity and getting the word out about what the minimal facts approach is and isn't able to support. It also doesn't promote a healthy discussion of the best way to proceed. This is part of why I'm not going to stop pointing these things out, especially since I'm one of the only voices with a following who is doing so.

Miracle reports, independence, and mutual support

This is the somewhat technical post to go along with my recent video on miracles and mutual support. It's been fun for me to revisit these topics mentally in the last week or so as I've been planning the video. Since 2008 when Tim and I published our mutual support paper in Erkenntnis, I've published individually a lot more work on independence and testimony. I'm going to include below a list of some relevant publications, some of them (alas) probably available only through institutional subscriptions. But some of them may be available to independent scholars through a free JSTOR account, so do give that a try. 

First, here is the diagram that I used in the talk. (Hat tip to Esteemed Husband for making it look nice.)

As I emphasized in the video, no line of support contains a loop. The discussion is necessarily simplified, especially as regards the role of background evidence concerning the reliability of a source (such as a single Gospel) that reports both the resurrection and the other miracle. Let me say a little more about that.

First, whether you have evidence that two reports are true or false, if they truly support one another in some way, this is always one-directional, even if you think that the people involved are lying or mistaken. The possibility of fabricated reports doesn't in any way mean that you have a loop. Let me make this concrete: Suppose that Joe tells you two different stories. In both of these stories, Joe is set upon by an enemy or by enemies who try to beat him up, and he wins the fist fight. You may suspect that Joe is lying in both cases. This would mean that you think he is a braggart who is trying to make himself look tough. Even so, there would be no loops of support. Call one story Report A and the other Report B. Call their contents Fight A and Fight B. Suppose that you, based on your other information about Joe (e.g., that he's a puny little guy) decide that neither Fight A nor Fight B happened. In that case, the reports still support each other, in the sense that receiving Report A gives you some additional reason to expect Report B, since Report A supports the umbrella hypothesis that Joe is a braggart who wants to look tough by telling fight stories. Hence, you have somewhat of an expectation that he will tell another story of the same general kind. By the same token Report B gives you some reason to think you may receive Report A, via the same route in the other direction. (Here it is somewhat helpful to imagine receiving the reports at different times and imagining that you receive them in one order and then imagining that you receive them in the other order, but this is just to help keep things clear.) So the reports are mutually supporting (each raises the probability of the other) via the proposition that Joe is a particular kind of liar, and that mutual support is non-circular. 

On the other hand, if you have, or gain, information that leads you to think of Joe as truthful and humble, as a person who tells things that are embarrassing to himself and doesn't make things up, if you learn independently that Joe has studied martial arts, and the like, this will decrease the probability that he is lying. In that case, Report A will have more force for Fight A (that that fight actually occurred). By the same token, you will have support from Report A (given your other background evidence about Joe's truthfulness) for a different umbrella hypothesis concerning character and circumstances--e.g., that Joe has (or tends to attract) enemies who try to beat him up, and that when that happens he is a good fighter. This "truthful" or "positive" unifying hypothesis will give you some additional reason to expect another actual fight in the real world, won by Joe. In this way, Report A supports Fight A; Fight A supports the hypothesis that Joe is a fellow who tends to get into fights and win them, which in turn raises the prior probability of Fight B. That also increases at least somewhat the prior probability that you will receive Report B, since Joe seems to tell you about these things. In turn, if you receive from Joe the input Report B, that provides some evidence via the opposite (non-looped) route that raises the prior probability of Fight A.

This means that in these kinds of scenarios, other background evidence that supports the truthfulness of a source that tells both stories tends to focus the evidential force of each report in such a way as to support the content of the other story. To apply this to a Gospel: The more separate reason we have to believe that John the evangelist is truthful and does not make up stories that promote a theological agenda, the more reason we have to believe (all else being equal) that his story about the healing of the man born blind is true. That, in turn, helps to support the hypothesis that there is something very special about Jesus (that he is at least a prophet, if not God himself), which increases at least somewhat the prior probability of the resurrection. And vice versa. The reports can be thought of as inputs. (Technically, as a strong foundationalist, I'm going to take the inputs at any given time to be things like your apparent memories at time t of reading the reports at time t - 1 and so forth--things to which you have direct access.) The force of each input in favor both of its own content and of the content reported by the other input is increased by other evidence that supports the truthfulness of a source that contains both reports.

On the other hand, if we were to have independent evidence that John the evangelist makes up marvellous stories about Jesus, the story about the man born blind would have little force to support the resurrection of Jesus, not only because it would probably be false (would have little force for its own content), but also because it wouldn't support a positive "unifying hypothesis" (such as Jesus' deity or the idea that there is something special and supernatural about Jesus) that would in turn increase the probability that Jesus would really rise from the dead. A negative "unifying hypothesis" (that John makes up theological stories) could still unify the reports--the report of the man born blind in John might give us some additional reason to think that John would also report the resurrection--but not by way of allowing each report to support the truth of its own content and thereby to support the other event.

To put it briefly, as we come to have more and more justified confidence that this person/author doesn’t make stuff up, we get closer and closer to an uncomplicated situation in which we can reasonably say, “Well, since that event happened, that makes it more likely that this other event happened, too.”

Another point: While the testimony of an otherwise highly reliable source is itself good evidence that the next thing he tells us is true, it is of course especially helpful if the story in question contains specific marks of realism. That makes the report even stronger evidence for what it attests, and this comes on a quasi-continuum. We should not be agnostic about each report on a passage-by-passage basis. That is something I have always spoken out against and will have much more to say about in The Eye of the Beholder. On the other hand, a brief, undetailed report will in the nature of the case carry less weight that a longer report in which we can point to specific marks of truth. In the accompanying video I draw a contrast in this regard between the account in John 9 of the healing of the man born blind and Mark's account of Jesus' healing of a blind man in Mark 8:22-26. Even the latter is not a bare statement, "Jesus healed a blind man near Bethsaida" and nothing more. It contains the oddity of Jesus spitting on the man's eyes (similar to his creating a paste from saliva and mud in John 9). It contains the bit of dialogue in which the man says he sees people walking like trees and Jesus touches his eyes again, which could potentially be embarrassing to a person wanting to make Jesus look more powerful. (Yes, I know that one can make up theological meanings for this, but those are subjective and unconvincing.) And there is Jesus' attempt to get him not to tell others about the miracle, which fits with other cases in the Gospels. So even here there are indicators of truth. An example of an even more spare account would be John 2:23, which just says that Jesus performed "signs," unspecified, when he was in Jerusalem at the Passover. The healing of the man born blind in John 9, being longer and more detailed, provides more opportunity for markers of truth to come up. 

The discussion of general reliability above concerns one source that tells both stories. If you have additional evidence from another document, another person, etc., for one or both of the events or for details mentioned in the story, all the better. That, too, would be included in the direct evidence for that story as modeled in the diagram. In the video, I included a bundle of different things in E1. In the case of the resurrection, we have several different Gospel accounts, evidence for the reliability of those other Gospels, as well as other evidence (e.g., in Acts) for the disciples' early attestation of the physical resurrection under conditions of great personal danger. Undesigned coincidences between accounts help to show independence as well as truth--a twofer. Apparent contradictions help to show independence.

As I say, it's been a lot of fun to return to this material, and believe it or not, there are still more complexities that I haven't discussed here. I've been making some additional notes in a document of some other thoughts on the probabilistic issues that I'm not including here.

Below is a small bibliography, ordered from most recent on top to oldest on the bottom, of some of my professional publications on these topics, including a more recent individual publication in Erkenntnis on undesigned coincidences. At a minimum, the combination of the video and this post shows that it is possible to "keep accounts" so that we are not using loops of support when there really is mutual support between miracle accounts (or between any accounts). Evidence for Gospel reliability is highly relevant to all of these issues, though "keeping accounts" is somewhat complex.

************************************

“Undesigned Coincidences and Coherence for an Hypothesis,” Erkenntnis, 85 (4) (August 15, 2020), pp. 801-828. On-Line First, August 6, 2018, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-018-0050-4 Author’s accepted manuscript version archived here.

“Finessing Independent Attestation: A Study in Interdisciplinary Biblical Criticism,” Themelios 44.1, pp. 89-102 (April, 2019)

“Accounting for Dependence: Relative Consilience as a Correction Factor in Cumulative Case Arguments,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy. 95:3 (2017), 560-572, DOI 10.1080/00048402.2016.1219753. Abstract here. Does not include whole article.

“Evidential Diversity and the Negation of H: A Probabilistic Account of the Value of Varied Evidence,”  Ergo 3:10 (2016), available here.

“Foundationalism, Probability, and Mutual Support,” With Timothy McGrew, Erkenntnis 68 (2008):55-77. JSTOR entry here (does not include whole article).

Some more notes on the census in Luke

The census in Luke 2 is a gigantic topic on which much ink has been spilled. I certainly had to deal with it in my series on the Virgin Birth, but I'm trying not to write a treatise! This post contains some extra notes on the subject that I didn't include in my recent video, in the interests of keeping the video streamlined and digestible. Here also is my recent debate with atheist Jonathan Pearce on the Unbelievable show.

In my Youtube  video about the census I make the following points:

1) Luke is an historical source in himself, at least as credible (based on track record) as Josephus. The fact that we have no other source for a census in Judea at this time is thus the merest argument from silence, and an especially poor one. Luke is giving us information. There is nothing about Luke's being a Christian author that makes him likely to be unreliable about a boring historical matter like a census. This point goes beyond saying that we should "give Luke the benefit of the doubt" based on his track record elsewhere, though that's true as well. The mere absence of a census in this time and place in the relatively meager set of non-biblical historical literature that we have for that time period does not constitute a strike of any significance against Luke. We can learn about this census from Luke.

2) It's outright false that Luke and Matthew contradict each other about when Jesus' birth took place, with only Matthew placing his birth at the time of Herod the Great. Luke says the same thing. (Luke 1:5)

3) Skeptics will say that Luke's census is improbable to the point of being historically impossible, even on its own terms. They are wrong about that, and they get there by insisting on an overly wooden reading of Luke and an exaggerated idea of what the census would have involved.

4) Skeptics will say that there is only one possible meaning of Luke's reference to Quirinius in connection with the census and that all other suggested translations are attempts by Christian apologists to wriggle out of admitting that Luke was wrong. They're wrong about that, too. What Luke says about Quirinius and "the first census" is genuinely difficult to translate and interpret, which is why there is legitimate scholarly debate about it.

Here I want to add a couple of points to #3 and #4.

Concerning #3, one claim that you will here is that Rome would never order a census (either for purposes of counting or for purposes of taxation) under a client king such as Herod the Great. This is a really strong claim, and there is little to back it up. It's mostly just an assertion, based on the fact that client kingdoms did have some measure of independence. But it's not as though we have a contemporary statement anywhere that the Romans would never meddle in taxation in a client kingdom or would never order a tally of the people in a client kingdom.

On the contrary, here is some evidence that Rome would sometimes do so: In the 30s A.D., as Tacitus tells us (Annals, Book VI, 41.1), a rather war-like tribe (the Clitae) residing in the Roman client kingdom of Cilicia was "pressed to conform with Roman usage by making a return of their property and submitting to a tribute." They were originally from the mountainous region of Cappadocia, and they retreated there and fought. The client king, named Archelaus, required the help of the Roman legions to defeat them. 

As it turns out, there were several rulers about in the 1st century B.C. and 1st century A.D. named "Archelaus." This one (whom Tacitus calls "Archelaus of Cappadocia") was not the same person as the Archelaus, the son of Herod the Great, whom I've mentioned elsewhere (see Matt. 2:22). Making things more confusing, the Archelaus ruling the client kingdom of Cilicia, mentioned by Tacitus, was also not the "Archelaus of Cappadocia" who had died about 17 years previously. That was his father, who actually did rule Cappadocia. (Are you confused yet?) I bring all this up because the atheist blogger Jonathan Pearce (who debated me on the Nativity) has claimed that the Biblical Archaeology Report has blundered horribly by mentioning this tribute/census of the Clitae as evidence that you could have Roman censuses in client kingdoms. Pearce assumes that they are referring to a census made in Cappadocia after it was no longer a client kingdom, when Archelaus of Cappadocia had already been dead for years. But he's mistaken. The requirement to "conform to Roman usage" was indeed made within a client kingdom, in the year A.D. 36, when that client kingdom was ruled over by a different "Archelaus of Cappadocia," the son of the one Pearce is thinking of, and (to make matters more confusing) the client kingdom in question was actually Cilicia rather than Cappadocia! The confusion over this obscure fact partly arose because the Biblical Archaeology Report cited a secondary source rather than citing Tacitus directly. I was lucky enough to find the Tacitus reference in this really fascinating article about the census by John Thorley (hat tip to Jason Engwer for recommending it), and I chased it down from there. (Note: You can get a free on-line account with JSTOR for independent scholars that lets you read up to 100 articles per month.)

This is a cautionary tale in a lot of ways: It illustrates the complexity of historical reality (always something skeptics and some Christian biblical scholars need to be reminded of). It illustrates the plausibility of theories that there were multiple people by the same name. (This comes up in discussing other supposed Gospel "errors.") In this case, Wikipedia even calls the Clitae a "Cappadocian tribe," which is confusing and interesting. How could there be a Cappadocian tribe in Cilicia? Well, you know, history is complicated! Anyway, all of this also illustrates the value of tracing things back to original sources.

And bringing us back to the argumentative point: We absolutely should not be doing a priori history about what "wouldn't ever happen" in a client kingdom. We should discover what it meant to be a "client kingdom" in regards to tribute, census, taxation, etc., by reading historical sources (including Luke). The phrase "client kingdom" isn't some kind of talisman that automatically entails the conclusion the skeptic is going for. That's not how history is done. So...yes, Rome under Augustus could certainly have ordered that a client kingdom (or maybe even several of them) must count their people, or their property-owning people. Herod would have had to agree to carry this out or to allow a designated Roman authority to carry it out. As Biblical Archaeology Report notes, Augustus ordered after Herod's death that Samaria didn't have to pay as much tax to Archelaus, Herod's son, because they hadn't joined in a revolt. Even though Archelaus was confirmed as a ruler under Rome and was supposed to have the tribute from the Samaritans himself, Caesar altered the amount. This is indirectly relevant in that it shows how Rome tweaked taxation under client rulers.

In fact, Thorley suggests that that is what Luke is saying when he says that "in those days there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed [registered]." Thorley's idea is that this means that at that general time period Augustus decided to tell the various provinces on the edge of the Roman empire to register/count their inhabitants, this extension of census-taking to all parts of the Roman world being a new practice. Of course, there could be plenty of reasons for this. It would be useful for taxation, for one thing, even if some part of the tax went to the local client king. (Miller, link below, mentions the suggestion that Rome might have wanted to assess the region when a client king was getting older.) The story of the Clitae in Cilicia shows that this is not merely theoretical. A tribe in a client kingdom was required to make a tribute of a portion of their property according to Roman usage, which would have required that the property be counted, and the client ruler had to attempt to carry out this order. While Tacitus doesn't say whose idea this census was (it could in theory have been the idea of Archelaus II himself), he certainly doesn't say that it was not Rome's own idea, and the fact that the legions helped to enforce it certainly shows their involvement. For more on this tribe see Glenn Miller's extensive discussion here. I haven't even had time to read it all and therefore am not endorsing everything he says, but it contains a lot of information. (HT to Jason Engwer for the link.)

It's also worth pointing out that Herod's relationship with Augustus as a client king was not always strewn with hearts and flowers. Some time between 12 and 9 B.C., Herod fell into significant disgrace with Augustus over his treatment of the Nabateans. While he was supposedly reconciled to Augustus, such a reconciliation wouldn't have meant that they both forgot the recent unpleasantness, even if they were formally friends again by the time of Jesus' birth, Augustus had made it quite clear recently that he considered himself fully empowered to interfere in Herod's management of his affairs.

Rome had a passion for counting people, not to mention taxing them. Augustus proudly talks about several lustrum censuses he did, including one beginning in 8 B.C., and how many Roman citizens he counted in those censuses. I should clarify here something that I was not clear enough about in my debate with Pearce: In itself, a lustrum census was for purposes of counting Roman citizens, not all inhabitants per se. There doubtless were Roman citizens in Judea, but if the census at the time of Jesus' birth was related to the 8 B.C. lustrum as it came around to Syria, that would be an extension of its independently known purpose, since Joseph was probably not a Roman citizen. But as Thorley points out, that isn't in itself implausible.

Concerning #4, here are a couple more points (which may or may not have been covered in the video):

Skeptics insist that Luke must be saying that this census took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria and that, moreover, he is saying that it was the 6 A. D. census. So there you go! Luke was wrong! Because Jesus wasn't born in 6 A.D.!

But that claim has all sorts of problems of its own. It runs afoul of Luke's clear assertion that John the Baptist was conceived during the time of Herod the Great (Luke 1:5). It runs afoul of Luke's clear knowledge of the 6 A.D. census at its own time period (Acts 5:37). It runs afoul of the fact that Luke has all kinds of definite indicators of the time of the beginning of John the Baptist's ministry and hence Jesus' ministry (Luke 3:1, 3:23), and that on these indicators Jesus would be much too young if Luke thought he was born in 6 A.D. In other words, it just doesn't make sense within Luke's own corpus as an interpretation of what Luke is saying about Quirinius and the census in 2:2. Whatever else is going on, that isn't what's going on. Even if one thinks Luke is incorrect here in some way, that isn't what he's saying just as a matter of interpretation of Luke.

Moreover, the skeptical interpretation leaves out the meaning of the word "first" in Luke 2:2. If all that Luke meant to say was that this was the census taken under Quirinius, the one and only, why didn't he just say, "This was the census made when Quirinius was governor of Syria," full stop? Why include that pesky word "first" (or whatever it should be translated as)? The skeptics apparently think it means "the first census in Judea," but that is far from being the only reasonable interpretation, even if we take "first" to be just an ordinary adjective modifying "census."

Let me also add: In order for us to be justified in thinking that Luke is accurate about the census (in particular), it isn't necessary for any one specific possibility to be probable. What is needed is for the disjunction to be probable--A or B or C. And given that each of these ideas does have some real plausibility (it isn't just barely logically possible), the probability of that disjunction is reasonably high. If one allows for Luke to be right that Jesus was born during a census or registration but wrong about the specific Roman governor/hegemon, through confusing two Roman names (see below), a minor error, then the probability of the disjunction is higher still. So when I mention in the video that this or that is possible, I am not saying either a) that being possible means being probable or b) that these are individually just barely possible. In fact, common sense shows us that many of these ideas that I've suggested about the nativity (such as Joseph's having a connection to Bethlehem stronger than just being descended from David) are entirely plausible, and they are the kind of thing that we invoke in ordinary life all the time to explain what someone says when we have incomplete information. Jonathan Pearce, my atheist opponent in my recent debate, repeatedly states that "apologists" invoke the idea that to be possible is to be probable. This misunderstands the entire point. Moreover, it's particularly ironic that he should repeat this criticism so often, since he himself invokes, and treats as highly probable, extremely implausible theories, such as the idea that Luke 1-2 were added to the Gospel later on or the idea that Luke is secretly trying to make a reference to Psalm 87:6 by making up/moving the census.

Thorley's suggestion, which I'm inclined to endorse as my "first line" of translation, is that Luke is saying that this was the first census (of two) made when Quirinius was "hegemon" of Syria. Again, that "first" has to mean something. We can't just leave it untranslated. Luke is trying to communicate something. I add, which Thorley doesn't talk about, that "hegemon" doesn't have to mean "governor" in the technical sense and that Quirinius could have been in charge of a census in Syria without being governor in the sense that Josephus talks about when he lists the governors. But Thorley, (refreshingly) taking Luke to be an historical source, also says that for all we know Luke is more accurate than Josephus here and knew of a short, earlier governorship of Quirinius wedged between those listed by Josephus, which is also possible.

There is some controversy over the suggested translation, "This census was made before Quirinius was governor of Syria," though it would certainly be a simple way to fit all the data together (always a good thing in an historical hypothesis). I find its simplicity attractive. That translation, by the way, would mean that Luke is particularly accurate here. Here is Daniel Wallace making a case against it. But N. T. Wright endorses it (Who Was Jesus? p. 89). (So did a whole roster of other scholars who were no slouches in Greek, including T.R. Birks. I owe this reference to Tim McGrew.) Maybe we should let Wallace and Wright duke it out on this one. In any event, the contemptuous skeptical dismissal of the "before" translation as a desperate apologetic expedient is unwarranted. It deserves consideration.

Another worthy contender is, "This enrollment was first completed (i.e., used) when Quirinius was governor of Syria."  This is Calvin’s suggestion, endorsed by Beard, Rawlinson, Edersheim, and numerous other scholars. As Paul Maier points out, it took forty years to complete a census in Gaul around this time, so it could well be that a count was made or begun in Judea before the death of Herod and that Quirinius only made use of it to collect tax in A.D. 6 when he came to clean up the mess after the death of Herod the Great's son, the tetrarch Archelaus. Luke 11:28, referring to a famine that at that time was merely predicted, uses the same Greek term (egeneto). Agabus predicts the famine, and Luke comments that it happened, came to pass, etc., under Claudius, in a future time. Similarly, Luke could be saying that this census came fully to fruition when Quirinius was governor of Syria, later on. (I owe information about this option to Tim McGrew.) It occurs to me that this could explain why there was a revolt later in A.D. 6 but not at this time, if this was the count and that was the taxation based on the count. This is just a conjecture but is worth throwing into the mix.

Thorley suggests that Luke may have been mistaken, but only in a narrow sense. Luke may indeed have said, "This was the first [of two] censuses made when Quirinius was governor of Syria," thinking that Quirinius was hegemon of Syria twice, based upon a mistaken memory or reading of the name Quinctilius, since the hapless P. Quinctilius Varus was, according to Josephus, governor of Syria around this time. That would indeed be an error on Luke's part, but a very limited and to some extent understandable one, and it certainly wouldn't at all mean that Luke invented the census. Indeed, Luke's very attempt to nail down the relationship of this census to the one that he knows about later under Quirinius shows an extremely Lukan concern for literal history.

In fact, the whole idea that Luke made up the census (or moved Jesus' birth to much later), as I point out in the video, is fairly absurd. It is using a steamroller to crack a nut. All that Luke had to do, if he wanted to "make" Jesus be born in Bethlehem contrary to fact, was to have Mary and Joseph start out in Bethlehem and later travel to Nazareth. There was no need for him to invent the idea that Mary was from Nazareth and that they had to travel from there, while she was pregnant, down to Bethlehem and then back to Nazareth. And to invent a Roman census for such a purpose would be a wildly exaggerated plot device. Luke's deliberately connecting it falsely with Quirinius and placing it at a date that is in great tension with all of Luke's own other date indicators is overwhelmingly implausible. Why do a thing like that? Luke didn't have to mention Quirinius at all if he was inventing a census out of thin air.

Luke shows not the slightest awareness of any Old Testament passage that is fulfilled by Jesus' birth in Bethlehem. He may or may not have known of Micah 5:2. I think it's a good principle not to attribute theological motives to the evangelists that they say nothing about. They generally aren't shy about mentioning OT parallels or fulfillments of prophecy, so why invent private intentions for which we have no textual evidence?

All of our evidence points to the conclusion that Luke sincerely believed what he said in Luke 2:1-2. And there are plenty of reasons to think that, as a reliable historian, Luke is telling us about a real census that really took place in Judea at the time, whether or not Quirinius was in charge of it. To say that we wouldn't think there had been such a census if it weren't for Luke is no real criticism. There are plenty of historical events that we wouldn't think happened if it weren't for the historical document (sometimes a single document) that mentions them! That's how history works.

Have a look at the video, and be sure to subscribe to my Youtube channel if you haven't already!