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? 

Gary Habermas's misunderstandings of C. H. Dodd, Part 1: Intro and Doubting Thomas

This is Part 1. Links to other posts in the series will be added as they are published.

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Introduction

It's been a long time since I wrote in blog post form, but I decided that this is a good format for this information. Eventually all parts of this series will be linked at the top of this first post.

For several years now I've been publicly criticizing the "minimal facts" approach to arguing for the resurrection. Here is my three-part series on this topic from 2021. But there are multiple different ways in which the minimal facts argument has problems. In that series I focused on the epistemological problems with the very structure of the argument. In order to claim a large scholarly consensus for the "appearance" fact in the argument, scholars have to be counted who actually deny the phenomenological kind of experiences needed actually to support the bodily resurrection. Just affirming that the disciples had some kind of experience doesn't automatically support the resurrection if (as most non-conservative scholars think) we either have no way of knowing what kind of experiences they had (or claimed to have had) or they had a kind of experience that (given that it was the only type of experience they had) would count against a bodily resurrection instead. You can read more about that in the other series.

It is important that Christians not use deeply faulty arguments, and it behoves Christians to be open to internal critique of the arguments that we use.

In the present series I'm going to explore a different, but related, problem.

Most of the claims being made by minimalists about what "the majority of scholars across the spectrum" believe are based upon literature surveys performed by other people; we don't have the raw data. Nor are these claims based on question-and-answer surveys in which scholars answer questions put directly to them. So we're dependent on those who did the literature surveys to interpret scholars' writings correctly and to represent that data correctly. Recently on my Youtube channel (here and here) I discussed a sheer mistake (a pretty big one) about the authorship of Mark that made it into Dr. Gary Habermas's recently published book on the resurrection.

An important place where problems can arise for the MFA is in Habermas's own interpretations of scholarly writings and his statistical calculations. Many (including myself in the past) are inclined just to take his word for it that he interpreted what he read correctly and found that x% of scholars think y. But as I've begun chasing down his footnotes and reading the scholars he summarizes for myself, I've found a disturbing number of cases where the scholar just doesn't seem to be saying what Habermas attributes to him. The problem has become so severe that at this point I literally do not think that Habermas's summary of what a scholar thinks has much value at all, and even when he gives a short quotation, I want to chase down the context. It's not that I think he's being deliberately deceptive. It's just that unfortunately he's not doing a good job of interpretation at all. He's highly over-optimistic. After finding so many serious mistakes of interpretation, it's impossible to avoid the impression that he deeply desires to find critical scholars who grant something exciting and helpful to an apologetic case for the resurrection. This seems to have severely compromised his ability to understand what he's reading. He seems to be skimming rapidly, sometimes quote-mining, and often summarizing in a way that gives an inaccurate impression. Believe me, it gives me no pleasure to have to come to this conclusion.

This matters because the minimal facts case is based upon aggregated data supposedly showing what a "majority of scholars across the ideological spectrum" think about something. It heavily emphasizes the allegedly surprising concessions made by non-conservative scholars.

This problem of interpretation matters even when Habermas is inconsistent in his methodology and tries to supplement claims about the "majority of scholars" by speaking confusingly of "underlying data" and using the views of selected, somewhat less-critical scholars whose views are not representative of "the majority across the critical spectrum." Nor do their views represent  "underlying data" that explains the alleged concessions made by their more skeptical colleagues. C. H. Dodd is one of these. (E.g. Dodd's form criticism is not "underlying data" that explains why, say, Gerd Ludemann thinks that the disciples had some kind of experiences after Jesus' crucifixion.) I've found minimalists inaccurately summarizing or making inaccurate implications about the views not only of very skeptical scholars like Gerd Ludemann and Norman Perrin (see here on Perrin) but also of relative "moderates" like Dodd and E. P. Sanders.

This serious interpretive issue plagues the MFA in addition to the epistemological issues I've pointed out elsewhere. To see how these two issues work, consider the "minimal fact" about James. First we have to ask whether, as Habermas claims, a majority of scholars "across the theological spectrum" believe that Jesus' brother James was converted by what he took to be an experience of the risen Jesus. There is reason to doubt this, given the interpretive issues we find when we read some of the scholars Habermas cites as believing this.  Is Habermas including scholars in this supposed majority who don't even say that James was converted by an appearance experience? Is he including scholars who don't clearly address that question? Is he including some (like Dale Allison) who think it's just as likely, for all we know, that he converted first and had a vision of Jesus later? Beyond that, we would still have to ask what the epistemological payoff of this is within the MFA context, in which supposedly we are able to grant that the Gospels are unreliable. Are many of these scholars saying that James had a non-physical-like experience (an experience that didn't even seem like Jesus was physically present) and converted irrationally? (See here for my discussion of a maximal data use of the conversion of James, in which we do not grant the unreliability of the Gospels and Acts.)

In this series on Dodd I'm not going to discuss that James question and why I think Habermas is over-counting scholars who grant his "minimal fact" about James. I'm just using it as an example to show how the misinterpretation/overinterpretation issue dogs the MFA in addition to other problems of epistemological structure.

General Background on Dodd

C. H. Dodd's article on post-resurrection appearances of Jesus (pp. 102-133 in the anthology which you can e-borrow legally free, here) is very important to Habermas and has been for decades. Habermas treats Dodd as a famous scholar who nonetheless has supposedly detected some kind of historically interesting and helpful "core" narratives within the Gospels' resurrection stories. Since Dodd is in fact a critical scholar, Habermas sometimes speaks as though his conclusions can be used as-is by a minimal facts apologist as arguments for the resurrection, without asking whether these allegedly helpful admissions by Dodd are really "granted by the vast majority of scholars."

Classifying Dodd is a whole interesting issue in itself. As D. A. Carson notes, some scholars who are more liberal than Dodd think Dodd's too conservative, because he admits that there is some history in the Gospel of John. From an evangelical perspective, Dodd falls into the wide category of liberal scholars due to the fact that he takes it for granted that the Gospel authors felt free to make stuff up, including whole incidents--a point that we'll see illustrated repeatedly in this series. Dodd thinks several of the resurrection narratives were completely made up. It would probably be legitimate to speak of Dodd as a "moderate" on the spectrum of actual New Testament scholars. 

This means that even if Dodd says something that sounds rather conservative-ish, it cannot be automatically considered typical of what "all scholars across the scholarly spectrum" think or of what "underlies" what they think. An example that I'll be discussing later is this: He admits half-reluctantly and with many qualifications to having a "feeling," which he emphasizes can be "no more than a feeling" that there is something indefinably "first hand" about the story of Mary Magdalene meeting Jesus at the tomb, told in John 20. I seriously doubt that any scholars more liberal than Dodd himself--and there are plenty of those--have that same indefinable feeling about that specific scene. (Dale Allison, something of a moderate scholar himself, is quite explicit about this. In The Resurrection of Jesus, p. 29, he says that he does not share Dodd's feeling and that the most he thinks we can conclude is that there was probably some old tradition about a "Christophany" to Mary Magdalene after Jesus' death. Which, it must be emphasized, Allison sees as fully compatible with the entire invention of the actual scene between Jesus and Mary in John 20.)

So one shouldn't assume that, just because Dodd was a highly respected critical scholar, his positions are those held by a large majority of scholars, nor even that Bart Ehrman or some other skeptic is epistemologically obligated to accept Dodd's position if he says something helpful to the resurrection argument. 

But it seems like a rhetorical coup to find what sound like exciting admissions from a critical scholar of Dodd's standing. Habermas likes to use Dodd's article on resurrection appearances of Jesus because it is a critical scholarly article and yet says that there are some kind of early traditions that lie behind (some of) the stories in the Gospels. This is supposed to mean that we can make an argument, using Dodd, that non-conservatives at least should feel themselves obligated to accept, since Dodd is using a non-naive, critical methodology. 

But the epistemological value of what Dodd really says about the Gospel resurrection narratives is, I will argue, extremely meagre. Dodd's methodology when discussing the resurrection appearance stories in the Gospels leaves very little to work with in arguing for the resurrection when one understands him accurately. And most unfortunately, Habermas doesn't realize this.

Background on Dodd and resurrection narratives

Dodd claims to be able to discern within some of the Gospel resurrection stories an earlier layer of "corporate tradition." Each one of these "concise" segments is no more than a little snippet of text--usually no more than a few verses apiece. For example, Matthew 28:8-10 (one of these "concise narratives") is only a tiny portion of the story, which Matthew tells as a continuous narrative, of the women finding the tomb and then seeing Jesus on the road. Similarly, Dodd designates John 20:19-21 as one of these "concise" narratives, even though it is continuous with Jesus' breathing on the disciples (immediately after) and the story of Doubting Thomas. Dodd claims to be able to use form criticism to pick out these tiny snippets from the rest of the story and designate them as representing "corporate tradition." It is misleading to speak of these tiny snippets as containing the "basic facts" or the "gist" of the story. After all, Jesus' breathing on the disciples is as much a part of the narrative in John as Jesus' greeting the disciples. The women's seeing the angel at the tomb is as much a part of the narrative in Matthew as their seeing Jesus a little while later. So Dodd is already cutting out most of these narratives before coming up with these snippets.

As I'll argue in a later post, even when Dodd has whittled a story down to one of these tiny snippets, he still thinks that these snippets sometimes contain "apologetic expansions"--these being (no surprise) the parts like the women grasping Jesus' feet which are most relevant to an argument for Jesus' bodily resurrection. One of Habermas's important misunderstandings of Dodd, which I'll discuss in detail later, is that he doesn't seem to realize that Dodd casts doubt on important aspects even of the "concise" snippets themselves.

But some stories don't even, in Dodd's view, have such 3-4-verse snippets of "corporate tradition" embedded within them. They don't even rate that "high," historically. Dodd calls some of these "doubtful" or "intermediate" and others "Tales," the latter being a form-critical term for a heavily fictionalized work made up by a really good story-teller who crafts a (literarily) high-quality narrative to make theological points that are important to him while entertaining his audience. As we'll see in the next post in this series, Dodd places both the story of the Road to Emmaus (Luke 24) and the story of the encounter with Jesus by the Sea of Galilee (John 21) into this category of "tales," but Habermas doesn't seem to realize that Dodd does so, nor what the designation of "tales" means for historicity.

There are a few resurrection appearance stories that Dodd says don't fall clearly into either of these categories ("concise" or "Tales"). He calls these "mixed," "doubtful" or "intermediate" in form, but as we shall see, that doesn't mean that, in Dodd's view, they are close to history. In fact, a story can, in Dodd's view, be completely made up yet fall into this so-called "intermediate" category. The Doubting Thomas story is one of these.

Let me add right here that this whole form-critical method of claiming to be able to use some kind of scholarly second sight to discern an underlying layer of tradition "behind" the actual stories we have is all nonsense. And in fact, Richard Bauckham is pretty anti-form criticism, and Habermas wants to use Bauckham's arguments elsewhere in the book, without apparently realizing that these so-called "widely-used standards" (a phrase Habermas uses for Dodd's method of approaching the resurrection stories) have come under pretty strong doubt in recent decades, and not even just from "fundamentalists." In fact, there are no legitimate "standards" involved here. There is nothing more apparently historical about John 20:19-21 than about the verses following it. Dodd's method is heavily subjective and highly dubious. Be that as it may, this is Dodds' approach, and a major problem is that Habermas doesn't understand at all how little it leaves of the Gospel resurrection stories.

Habermas on Dodd on Doubting Thomas

In this series I will argue that the statements Habermas makes in his recently published resurrection book represent very serious misunderstandings of what Dodd says about resurrection appearance narratives in the Gospels. Let's start with Doubting Thomas.

Here is what Habermas has to say about Dodd on Doubting Thomas (and some other stories that we'll discuss later): 

It has already been noted that Jesus’s appearance to the women in Matt 28:8–10, then to the disciples in Matt 28:16–20 and John 20:19–21, are other examples of concise texts. On the other hand, Dodd judges that Jesus’s appearance to the two men on the way to Emmaus, as well as John’s three accounts of Jesus appearing to Mary Magdalene on her return trip to the tomb, to “doubting Thomas,” and at the seashore, do not quite make the same grade of “conciseness.” Habermas, On the Resurrection, Vol. 1, 846-847.

On C. H. Dodd’s very influential grid of “concise” narratives versus the “tales” or “circumstantial” accounts already discussed in an earlier chapter, the “concise” passages indicate those Gospel texts that are “drawn directly from the oral tradition” or that “represent most closely the corporate oral tradition of the primitive Church.” The significance here is that these “concise” narratives are deemed likeliest to be reliable reports. According to these widely used standards, John 20:19–21 makes the grade as a concise narrative, while John 20:26–29 is viewed as a sort of appendage to the earlier account, in that it depends on it for much of its meaning.

Perhaps quite surprisingly, the Jesus Seminar also lists John 20:19–23 as a “concise” account, while referring to John 20:26–29 as an “intermediate” story, which is also a category used by Dodd. The Seminar employs this group of texts as those being ranked somewhere in between “concise” passages and “legends.” Brown also agrees with Dodd (given a few caveats) regarding the “concise” designation for John 20:19–23, though he concludes that John actually created the Thomas story. Still, the respect given to at least the first appearance to the disciples (and to a lesser degree the Thomas account, at least for Dodd and the Seminar) all the way across the wide range of views from Brown and Dodd to the members of the Jesus Seminar is rather amazing. Habermas, 870-871.

Page numbers throughout this series are to the Kindle version of Habermas's book.

In these passages Habermas downplays Dodd's historical dismissal of the non-concise stories and gives the impression that they are just slightly less historical (in Dodd's view) than the "concise" ones, and even that Dodd gives them some measure of historical respect. From reading what Habermas says there, one would get the impression that Dodd thinks that the stories of Doubting Thomas, of Jesus' meeting with the disciples by the seashore in John 21, and of the Road to Emmaus (in Luke) just don't quiite "make the same grade of conciseness" as other stories (and hence don't quite make the same grade of probable historicity). 

Habermas's contrast between Dodd and Brown on Doubting Thomas gives the impression that Dodd thinks that John didn't wholly invent the Doubting Thomas story. Notice that Habermas says that Brown (sort of) agrees with Dodd about the earlier appearance story of Jesus in John 20:19-21, though Brown thinks that John invented the Doubting Thomas story. 

But actually, Dodd also thinks that John invented Doubting Thomas.

What Dodd really says about Doubting Thomas

Dodd could scarcely be clearer on this matter:

The story of Doubting Thomas is a pendant to the ‘concise’ narrative of the appearance to the Disciples in 20:19-21….It hardly forms a separable pericope, for it is not fully intelligible without the connecting narrative of 20:24-25. Its theological and apologetic motives are obvious. Its broad pattern scarcely differs from that of our typical’concise’ narratives of Class I, and there is little in the way of picturesque detail (not directly demanded by the main motive) to associate it with the ‘circumstantial’ narratives of Class II. Thomas is hardly an individual as Mary Magdalen is; he is a type of the ‘some’ who ‘doubted’, according to Matt. 28:17. We should not be far wrong in saying that John has chosen to split up the composite traditional picture of a group, some of whom recognize the Lord while others doubt, and to give contrasting pictures of the believers and the doubter, in order to make a point which is essentially theological. (Dodd, "Appearances," pp. 115-116, emphasis added)

Of course, the fact that the Doubting Thomas story depends on vss. 19-21 for background context in no way implies a positive historical evaluation of the Doubting Thomas incident. But more: Habermas, as quoted above, apparently thinks that Dodd is giving at least some degree of "respect" to the Doubting Thomas story (just not as much as to the "concise" narratives), and that he is not saying (as Brown does) that John made it up. 

Habermas's apparent reason for this is that Dodd says that the story isn't a circumstantial narrative. ("Circumstantial" is another word that Dodd uses for "Tales.") The false assumption here (which Dodd's own words refute) is that circumstantial detail is the only type of thing that leads Dodd to claim that something is fictional. 

(It should go without saying that Dodd is completely wrong to think that circumstantial detail indicates fictionalization by a tale-teller. If anything, verisimilitude should be an indication of historicity, all the more so when, as in the Gospels, the document presents itself as historical and when its verisimilitude does not resemble the ancient fiction that we have. But this upside-down view of the epistemological importance of detail is held by Dodd.) 

What Habermas apparently doesn't see is that psychological realism and circumstantial detail are not the only routes by which Dodd concludes fictional status.  

In the case of Doubting Thomas, Dodd seems to be reasoning from (what he views as) the lack of psychological depth in Thomas to the fictional status of the story. (So it's heads John loses, tails John loses.) While Dodd doesn't think the Doubting Thomas story has the high literary quality that he attributes to the "tales," he thinks he can tell that it's made-up because, he says, Thomas is just a "type" of the doubter, and John is rebuking and rebutting that doubt by personifying it in Thomas and making up a story of how Jesus rebuked and refuted it.

(Supplementary point: Dale Allison, The Resurrection of Jesus, p. 64, thinks that Doubting Thomas is made up for apologetic purposes and quotes Dodd's words above in support of his own view.)

For good measure, if there could still be any doubt of Dodd's view here (and there shouldn't be), here is a passage saying the very same thing in slightly different words in his rather famous book on John, Historical Tradition in the Fourth Gospel.

John, it appears, has brought out this contrast of belief and unbelief by making Thomas the spokesman of the incredulous, and representing him as having been absent when Christ appeared to his disciples. HTFG, p. 145 (emphasis added)

And on that "dependent" status with the earlier verses:

The episode of Doubting Thomas in xx.26-9 is linked with the preceding episode in a way which is no less artificial than subtle. HTFG, p. 149 (emphasis added)

If the story of Doubting Thomas were true, there would be nothing artificial, nor for that matter subtle, about the link between it and the preceding verses telling about Jesus' first appearance to the male disciples. It's a very natural connection and presents itself as a simple statement of fact: Thomas wasn't there the first time, and that's why he doubts, then he is there when Jesus comes to them again a week later. The connection is only "artificial" if you think it's made up.

One more quote from Historical Tradition is relevant here:

[W]e may say that the tradition behind the Fourth Gospel, as distinct from the gospel in its present form, knew, like Matthew, only one appearance of the Risen Christ in Jerusalem...HTFG, pp. 149-150 (emphasis added)

The logic (for interpreting Dodd) is inescapable: If the only historical tradition lying behind the Gospel of John contained only one appearance in Jerusalem, then, since John narrates two appearances in Jerusalem to the male disciples, one of them must be ahistorically invented without its own separate historical tradition behind it. 

Dodd's words about Doubting Thomas make it clear that that story is the one that, in his opinion, the evangelist invented without even a historical "core." That it doesn't fall into the allegedly highly polished literary type of a "circumstantial" narrative makes no difference to that historical judgement on Dodd's part.

That Habermas does not see that Dodd considers the story a total fiction, given Dodd's clear statement about John's "splitting up the composite traditional picture of a group" in order to make a theological point, is rather disturbing.

Next up: Two "tales" discussed by Dodd, which Habermas doesn't seem to realize that Dodd considers fictional.