Evidentialism and Apostasy, Round 2

Some years ago I wrote a post on whether evidentialism requires apostasy if a Christian believer discovers that he lacks good evidence for Christianity. In that post I endorsed a couple of ministries as examples of places where someone could find evidence for Christianity. At the time I didn't have as much of my own content out on the New Testament, and I also didn't know that William Lane Craig, whose ministry is Reasonable Faith, would endorse (sadly) the idea that the Gospels contain at least some fact-changing literary devices. So, although Reasonable Faith does have a lot of good content on the site, I would now mention that as a qualification on my endorsement of the ministry as an example of where to go to find strong content if you have doubts about Christianity. Also since then Apologetics315 (which I mentioned as another example) has been acquired by another ministry so that only one part of it (the podcast, I believe) is still under the same management.  

On the plus side, the ministry TalkAboutDoubts has been launched since then, run by Jonathan McLatchie, and geared specifically to those who are either good-faith non-Christians looking for answers or Christians troubled by doubts. TAD is strongly evidentialist. Here is my playlist on evidentialism on my Youtube channel.

In the last few days I've had a discussion of evidentialism and the "internal witness of the Holy Spirit" on social media, and I decided that some comments that I made there should be presented in blog post form as well. 

My interlocutor was endorsing the idea of an internal witness of the Holy Spirit (IWHS) that, in his words, "supersedes all rational argument." (Similarly, William Lane Craig calls the IWHS "defeater defeating.") But my interlocutor made a few stipulations: He stipulated that the IWHS may work in a way that is indistinguishable from ordinary means like prayer, Christian fellowship, taking Sacraments, etc. It may, he said, just be the holistic effect of all of those. It could be, but need not be, some sort of separate, sensible or mystical experience or feeling within the person himself. 

I said that using the phrase "supersedes all rational argument" gives the impression that even if the evidence is objectively against Christianity, the IWHS can and should just swamp that fact in the mind of the believer, and I expressed disagreement with any such view. In response he said that of course the evidence, if all is known, objectively supports Christianity but that humans are fallible and limited and that all he meant by "supersedes all rational argument" is that it would supersede the fallible and limited attempts at argument in an individual believer.

He then challenged me with the hypothetical case of a believer who previously based his Christian faith strongly on the minimal facts argument for the resurrection (MFA). I've been highly critical of the force of the MFA, contending that it has been oversold to apologists, lay Christians, and skeptics. My interlocutor asked me to envisage a case in which a believer comes to recognize the weakness of the MFA but for some reason is prevented from finding any better argument. He asked rhetorically if this person should just apostasize.

With that background, here is my lightly revised answer, which I hope will be helpful to someone.

If all you mean is that it supersedes incorrect reasoning due to fallibility and/or lack of information, then this is unhelpful to the person himself in the situation. In fact, a big emphasis upon mere human fallibility and the absence of full information can just as easily (and just as (un)reasonably) undermine Christian faith even when the person does have good information and strong arguments. The Christian with good evidential arguments is still fallible and still lacks omniscience. These facts by themselves don’t justify seeking or hoping for some non-rational guidance toward the truth, and they don’t do so any more in a Christian who has realized that his former arguments for Christianity are weak than in a person who currently thinks that his evidence is strong. In fact, I’ve actually seen people paralyzed by a reflection on mere human limitation so that they are hesitant to accept good arguments. So it’s really quite pointless, and I would say pernicious, to say that there is an IWHS that “supersedes all rational arguments” and then, upon being challenged, to punt to mere human limitation and say that’s what one means.

I definitely don’t think the person in your scenario is obligated to deconvert, at least not instantaneously. But your scenario is overly simple. For example, there are evidences for theism that a person can see for himself, even if all he can articulate self-consciously is something along the lines of, “This all had to come from somewhere,” “Where does beauty come from?” “Humans are radically different from animals, so where did human minds come from in the first place?” etc.

There are also (and this is very important) ways in which the Gospels and Acts have verisimilitude that a person can see for himself. Obviously it helps a lot if he has someone else to point that out to him (which is part of why I do it), but part of the beauty of internal evidences is that they are in principle available to anyone who has the documents in question and has commonsense knowledge about what truthful testimony is like.

You’ve made your concrete hypothetical scenario include his knowing the minimal facts case for Jesus' resurrection and then realizing that it isn’t that strong. But that in itself provides him with some resources for his own investigation. He can also see, if he looks into it, that there is no evidence for merely vision-like experiences on the part of the twelve. So when we abandon the attempt to make much of the “consensus of New Testament scholars” on what the twelve experienced, we are (interestingly) freed up to recognize that scholarly consensus is very messed up, constructing experiences that are contrary to what we find in our closest original sources. He can recognize that a scholar like Allison (say) is reconstructing the resurrection accounts in a circular fashion by arguing that the physical parts were added later just because they are the physical parts. In other words, rejecting the MFA contains in itself some guidance toward the right maximalist path—recognizing the epistemic poverty of mainstream biblical scholarship and focusing on the sources we actually have. Recognizing that the MFA is weak, in large part because it relies on an “appearance fact” that is supposedly “granted by a large majority of scholars,” does not entail continuing to defer to “the consensus of scholarship.”

 The person in your scenario like all of us (I might add) should seek earnestly and sincerely after truth. And because truth in this area—how can a man be right with God, how can he be forgiven, how can his life have meaning, what happens after death, etc.—is so overwhelmingly important, he has an obligation not to settle for a shallow agnosticism. I think he should be able to see for himself the hollowness of Internet skeptics or even pseudo-Christians like Dale Allison.

 You and I both know of deconverts who claim that they “knew all the arguments,” and it’s baloney. They didn't know all the arguments, and they are without excuse, because they could quite readily have found better arguments, or made a better evaluation of the evidence they already had.

You can always dismiss all of these points one at a time by saying, “What if he doesn’t notice that? What if he ‘for some reason’ can’t see any of that? What if…” on and on, including the stipulation that our hypothetical person somehow never stumbles, even in an earnest and long search, upon anything like the ministry of Talk About Doubts or any of the stronger other books and content that are out there.

But remember (this is very important) that you can say something very similar about a person who has never heard of Jesus in the first place. What if a person, from childhood and on into adulthood, is isolated from knowledge of Christianity? What if no missionary comes to him? What if he has no Internet? What if he’s raised to be a suicide bomber? We can always stipulate extreme epistemic disadvantages vis a vis some truth, in this case, the truth of Christianity.

A person who never hears about Jesus and is entirely embedded in an incompatible religion is in a situation that we might call maximally epistemically disfavored. If he grows up and lives and dies without hearing the name of Christ, we have to trust in God’s justice and love as to his eternal destiny.

Or what if a person is somewhat mentally disabled and can’t understand much in the first place, even as an adult?

There is an Amazonian tribe that I have read about that did have missionaries come to them, but the missionaries were not able to make any headway, even after translating the Gospel of Luke into their language, because the tribe has no sense of history beyond (if I recall correctly) three removes back. They would ask, “Did you see these events happen? Did you know someone who saw them happen? Did you know someone who knew someone who saw them happen?” And if the answer to all of these questions was “no,” they immediately lost interest. The social and psychological block on the ability to know history any further back than that was so great that one of the missionaries lost his own faith as a result, because he couldn’t handle the fact that God would allow such ignorance to persist and block the knowledge of the truth of Christianity for an entire people group.

So there’s no reason not to apply a similar point about our own need to trust God concerning a person’s eternal destiny to a person who is much less epistemically disfavored, as in your scenario. (And in this case, as in cases of people who have never heard, we just have to admit that we don't know how God is going to work in this person's life.) This person in your scenario at least has the relevant historical documents and can to some degree evaluate them for himself, and he knows that historical inquiry is possible, Indeed, the very possibility that you raise of an intellectual deconversion implies that he is a thinky kind of person and intelligent and informed enough to realize that this is an important issue and that he needs to be earnestly seeking the truth about it, not settling for some kind of shoulder-shrugging or even bitter and gleeful agnosticism.

But understand something: You have asserted that the IWHS is (at least often, for many people) not detectible but consists in the holistic effect of things like going to church, having Christian friends, taking the sacraments, and prayer. From the epistemic perspective of our hypothetical person who has realized that his former arguments for Christianity are weak and who does not have some kind of mystical, overwhelming experience, all of these factors of social and ritual activities are mirrored in religions that are incompatible with Christianity. From an epistemic perspective, he can’t say to himself, “I have a community of faith here, I have sacramental rituals here, I have prayer practices here, therefore there is some appreciably high probability that Christianity is true.” Perhaps you would agree with that. Your IWHS, especially in its indetectible form, is going to look like something that many other religions have, indeed, that almost all other religions and their practitioners have. But in that case, if you stipulate that after trying for some time to find better evidence, that’s all he has to go on, if you insist on dismissing one after another all the points I’ve made above about his ability to discover more evidence (saying “well, suppose he can’t find that” “suppose he can’t see that” etc.), then in the long run the mere fact that he’s previously been praying, meeting with other believers, confessing sin, and so forth, doesn’t give him reason to believe that their shared beliefs are true. Nor would it be right or accurate for someone to point him to these things as if their mere existence is significant evidence in itself.

If a person in that situation does deconvert, due to his love of truth, while (I will stipulate) continuing for the rest of his life to search for the truth about eternal things, not turning into a deconvert of the usual unpleasant and dismissive type, then we have to trust that God will deal with him justly and lovingly, just as we would trust that for a person raised a Muslim, a Hindu, an animist, raised on a desert island with no religion, etc. Because all of these people are, we are stipulating, evidentially disadvantaged through no fault of their own.

In all of these cases we can hope and even pray that perhaps God would grant to the person an epistemically valuable non-natural experience—for example, some kind of highly unusual dream that suddenly starts occurring, is repeated over and over again, doesn’t have the properties of ordinary dreams, and that directs the person toward a place where he can find better information. (This, I’m told, sometimes happens to Muslims.) That would have some evidential value. Or a private experience with a publicly verifiable tie-down—e.g., "Go to this place and you will meet this person, this is his name," etc., and then you go to that place and meet the person thus described, whom you never have seen before in your life. But we don’t know whether God will do that for any of these people.

So a robust evidentialism does not imply an obligation to deconversion merely upon realizing that one’s former arguments for Christianity are not strong. A person who realizes this should reflect carefully upon what resources he still has available to him and what evidential weight they have, and he should seek to find more information. If we stipulate a case where a person who realizes that is epistemically disfavored in a whole variety of ways that block his acquiring and understanding better evidence for Christianity, even while/after earnestly seeking and pondering, then there is no point in bringing up an IWHS that works “through” his Christian religious practices. And the gerrymandered scenario thus constructed really ends up being importantly similar to more radical cases of epistemic disfavor that we might stipulate, even though in those cases the person in question wasn’t a Christian in the first place. So the idea that a believer has some special anointing or presence of the Holy Spirit isn’t epistemically relevant to the person who is actually in the situation, nor is it relevant to what we should think about what God will definitely provide for him.

(The following paragraphs were not, in this form, contained in my original comment in the social media conversation.) Our own confidence about what God will or won't do for a person depends heavily upon other theological commitments. For example, suppose that you hold to a "once saved always saved" view. Then you'll hold that if this person has really at some time accepted Jesus as Savior, God definitely will do something that will bring him to heaven, even if you don't know what that "something" is. Or to take another example, if you're opposed to any sort of at-death or after-death experience to bring people the truth, then you may hold that both the person who has never heard and an earnest person who deconverts will go to hell and that this doesn't in any way impugn the justice of God. How one thinks election works out in the real world makes a big difference, too, so Calvinism vs. Arminianism come into play. 

I am concerned here mainly to argue that the "internal witness of the Holy Spirit" that "supersedes all rational arguments" really doesn't play a helpful role here. Another point (that I had made earlier in the dialogue in question) is that if you do opt for an IWHS that is detectible as some kind of overwhelming, indescribable, defeater-defeating experience, that doesn't help either, because we know for a fact that a lot of really sincere Christians (myself included) have to say honestly that we don't have such an experience. So the idea that all Christians have this is empirically refuted.

The relationship of evidentialism to the possibility of deconversion is thus complicated. It is possible to envisage a person who is so evidentially disadvantaged that his commitment to truth understandably leads him to some type of deconversion. But it is somewhat artificial to envisage a person who is really that epistemically disadvantaged, especially if he already has access to (say) the Gospels and Acts and the Pauline epistles and is intelligent enough for intellectual deconversion to be a relevant category. If one does insist upon such a scenario, then it's doubtful that God has promised an IWHS that "supersedes all rational argument" and that should prevent that person from deconverting. Instead of postulating such an IWHS, we should trust in the justice, love, and mercy of God in this person's life, just as we would in the case of someone who had never heard of Jesus, and hold the person responsible for continuing to search for evidence about the truth of these matters of ultimate importance.

Old post re-posted: "Does The Evidentialist Have to Endorse Apostasy?"

 Originally posted at What's Wrong With the World on December 10, 2015.

Long-time readers know that I call myself an evidentialist in Christian apologetics. (See also here and here.) This means that I think that Christian faith both should be and can be based solidly on available evidence. I'm eclectic in this regard. I think St. Thomas Aquinas was an evidentialist as well. While my own special area of interest and focus has been on historical arguments for Christianity (e.g., for the reliability of the Gospels and the occurrence of the resurrection), and while I am not convinced by all of the purely philosophical arguments for the existence of God that are sometimes proposed, I am by no means hostile or opposed to a priori, metaphysical arguments. To the extent that they work, they are evidence as well. The more the merrier.

But lurking in the background of the evidentialist position is the following consideration: Is there some sense in which a person should not believe something beyond its support by the evidence that he has? Do we say that a person should apportion the strength of his credence to the strength of the evidence?

Let me hasten to add that a "yes" answer to this does not preclude a) the possession of maximal, foundational evidence for some particular proposition which is not inferred from anything else (such as his own existence) or b) the possession of and reliance on evidence that is, strictly speaking, available only to oneself (such as one's sensory experiences).

Strictly speaking, stating that in some sense Christian faith "should" be based on evidence does not commit oneself to this more global statement about apportioning one's strength of belief to the strength of the evidence, but they go rather naturally together. In that case, one's opposition to all forms of fideism or belief beyond evidence in the area of religion is an instance of a broader principle.

It gets tricky to define the precise sense of this "should," and that is partly why I have used the phrase "in some sense." After all, not all belief is voluntary, and even irrational belief sometimes seems morally excusable if it has been deliberately encouraged by one's teachers from one's youth upwards. Not everyone thinks explicitly about whether he is believing things reasonably or unreasonably, and it doesn't seem like everyone ought to do so or is even capable of doing so. But there certainly seems to be something suboptimal about irrational belief.

Suppose that I water down the "should" here and, at least for now, defend only the following proposition:

If you are sufficiently reflective to realize that you have been holding some belief irrationally or arationally, with a strength of conviction beyond what is warranted by any evidence that you actually have, you ought to change your credence level for that belief.

This immediately raises the following disturbing consideration: Suppose that a person--call him Joe--has been raised in a fideistic form of Christianity. Suppose for the sake of the argument that Joe has been deliberately taught that he should believe in God "just because," that he should trust the Bible "just because it's the Bible," that he should not look for any further argument, and indeed that to do so is to show himself weak in faith. Suppose that Joe has been taught to rely on the fact that he thinks he can feel Jesus living in his heart, rather as Mormons are taught to rely upon the "burning in the bosom." Needless to say, Joe has been given no apologetics teaching whatsoever in his church or by his parents.

Now suppose that Joe wakes up one fine morning and says to himself, "This is ridiculous. I have no more reason to believe that Christianity is true than any adherent of any religion incompatible with Christianity has to believe his religion. I've been hanging on to my Christianity just because it is part of my individual identity and the identity of the community I am a part of. And I'm even willing to lay down my life for this set of theological beliefs! Why am I thinking this way, when I don't even know if any of this is true?"

Joe is having a crisis of faith, and he's having it after a lifetime (though perhaps a rather young lifetime) of being entirely unprepared for it. Indeed, one might say that he has been anti-prepared. When he goes to his pastor, let's suppose that he is told that he just needs to accept that the Bible is the Word of God, just needs to cling to Jesus more closely, and that his doubts come from Satan.

Not only is that unlikely, psychologically, to help Joe in this crisis, it is questionable as to whether it should help Joe in this crisis. His questions are reasonable, given the absence of any defense he has ever been given for belief in his community's holy book and theological commitments.

But what am I saying? It sounds for a moment here like I'm saying that Joe should apostasize!

Considering that I am, after all, a Christian, that I want Joe (which is to say, all the real-life people like Joe) to go to heaven, and that I seriously doubt that he's going to go to heaven if he just becomes an agnostic or an atheist and goes through the rest of his life explicitly rejecting belief in the existence of God and/or the tenets of Christianity, that would seem to be a pretty shocking position to take.

My answer, however, is no. I do not recommend that Joe apostasize, and I certainly don't say that he should do so.

The first reason for this is that Joe should consider that he may have more reason than he realizes, and upon reflection, I think he will find that he does. The fact that those in his background have taught him to disregard evidence and to believe on subjective grounds does not mean that he does not have evidence. If a man were taught from childhood that he ought to believe that his father is loving and good without evidence, it would not mean that he would have no evidence if he stopped to think about the matter.

So it is for the existence of God. Joe knows of the existence of the world around him, and probably knows at least something of its appearance of orderliness and design. He knows of the existence of his own mind. To be sure, naturalism has its own attempts to account for the existence of these things, but perhaps Joe can see (even if only dimly as yet) for himself that these are unsatisfactory. He knows of the existence of morality and the appearance of meaning in life, which gives him a reason to think, at least, that there must be more to life than atoms bumping against each other in the void. All of these considerations tend strongly against either atheism or agnosticism concerning the existence of God himself, though they certainly (as I am envisaging it) need to be refined and strengthened in Joe's understanding.

As for the more specific doctrines of Christianity and of the monotheism of Judaism on which it was founded, the existence of the books of the Bible is, at a minimum, a datum. Without considering them at the outset as holy books, one still can ask where they came from and what the best explanation is for their contents.

At this point, things become a bit delicate, for Joe's own background, as I imagine it, has taught him nothing about how to evaluate the plausibility of such works.

But here I want to bring in the second point: Joe should not apostasize even from Christianity (much less from theism), because the evidence for Christianity is available, and Joe himself can find it.

If Joe were kept locked up on an island without access to the wider world by his pastor and parents, then he might have to pray desperately to a God about whose attributes he is now (perhaps against his own will) uncertain to help him get out and find more information. And, to be clear, I believe that God does send light to those who sincerely seek it and who, God knows, will accept that light if given it. Jeremiah 29:13 applies here, I believe: "You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart." Meanwhile, even Joe-locked-on-an-island can keep reading the Bible and can, hopefully, notice for himself some of the internal evidences that give the Gospels, for example, verisimilitude.

But things are not that dire in the real world. Joe has access to books and, presumably, to the Internet. To be sure, he could just as easily wander onto a "myther" web site on the Internet as onto William Lane Craig's Reasonable Faith site or Apologetics315, but the fact remains that information is out there on questions like, "Why should I believe that the events in the Gospels took place?" and "How is the Bible different from other putatively holy books?"

Moreover, it's a pretty safe bet that, despite his fideistic upbringing, Joe has some friends or friends-of-friends who will recommend some good evidential material to him (perhaps, e.g., Lee Strobel's popular apologetics books) if he makes his doubts known, not only to his own immediate community but to the Christian community more widely.

This brings me to the importance of the inquiry. C.S. Lewis argues,

Here is a door, behind which, according to some people, the secret of the universe is waiting for you. Either that’s true, or it isn’t. And if it isn’t, then what the door really conceals is simply the greatest fraud, the most colossal “sell” on record. Isn’t it obviously the job of every man to try to find out which, and then to devote his full energies either to serving this tremendous secret or to exposing and destroying this gigantic humbug? (“Man or Rabbit?,” in God in the Dock, 111–112. HT to John DePoe for this reference.)

Since the question of whether Christianity is true or false is of such great moment, any light abandonment of the claims of Christianity, without doing due diligence, is epistemically irresponsible. The commitment to truth itself (an important part of the evidentialist position) means that we are bound to pursue truth and, indeed, that it can be a test of character for a man to be expected to make such an investigation rather than settling for a shallow and easy agnosticism.

The evidentialist is (I believe) bound to disagree with the Pascalian recommendation that one induce oneself to believe Christianity purely for reasons of utility. But it is crucially different to say that one should vigorously seek to discover whether there is good evidence for Christianity, and that one should do so because the stakes of missing out on the knowledge of God are so high. And, since I believe that there is such evidence, and that it is not hidden, a person who (like Joe) comes to have doubts upon reflection but who then engages in such a search can be rewarded with a Christian faith that is confidently based on fact.

In the end, those of us who watch struggles of faith from the other side--that is, from within Christianity--must have independent reason to have confidence in the justice of God. That is true whether or not one is an evidentialist. Indeed, if one is not, one must nonetheless account for the fact that God apparently "gives" some people a non-evidential confidence in Christianity but does not "give" this to others, since atheists and agnostics, after all, do exist. No position on evidence and apologetics offers a "get out of questions free" card concerning divine justice and salvation, since there will always be those who, it appears, never had a "real chance," whether one construes that chance in terms of receiving the best available evidence, the right upbringing, religious experiences, or firm feelings of confidence and assurance induced by the Holy Spirit.

For the evidentialist Christian, the confidence in the ultimate justice of God comes from the reasons that we do have to believe that God, who is by definition absolutely just and good, exists, loves us, and has revealed himself to us. It is, moreover, useful to see that the position does not create an actual contradiction--for example, it does not mean that a person in Joe's position both should and should not believe in God--and does not lead us to recommend apostasy to those who have been Christians and are now in the throes of mental crisis.

Hoaxer or historical witness: The Johannine Dilemma

 

Hoaxer or historical witness: The Johannine Dilemma

by Lydia McGrew

(Originally published at What's Wrong With the World. Link to original post at 'permalink' below.)

In C.S. Lewis's exposition of his famous Liar, Lunatic, or Lord trilemma concerning Jesus Christ, he says,

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

I mean to argue for a similar dilemma for the author of the Gospel of John. As discussed in the previous post, John comes in for a lot of fashionable talk to the effect that he would have considered it completely legitimate to change things deliberately, relating non-factual claims as if they were factual, and that this would have been acceptable in his own time because the ancients were more concerned with Truth than with mere facts. In that post I gave a quotation to that effect from classicist Richard Burridge, who also does work on the New Testament. Here is a similar quotation, also about John, from New Testament scholar Michael Licona, who also does work on Roman history.

John often chose to sacrifice accuracy on the ground level of precise reporting, preferring to provide his readers with an accurate, higher-level view of the person and mission of Jesus. Why Are There Differences in the Gospels, p. 115 Emphasis added

Licona footnotes Burridge's chapter on John, from which I debunked a couple of examples in the last post, in support of this sweeping declaration. Note how strong a claim this is. This isn't just a claim that John occasionally made a slight mistake or that John didn't always make clear what chronological order he was implying or that John sometimes paraphrased people's words rather than quoting verbatim. This is a much stronger claim than any of those. And indeed Licona's own examples bear out the fact that he really is saying that John often changed things deliberately to what was non-factual in order to make a better story or a theological point.

To give only the most striking example in the book, Licona quite seriously suggests (though he does not definitely come down in favor of) the hypothesis that John invented ("crafted") the Doubting Thomas sequence "in order to rebuke those who, like Thomas, heard about Jesus's resurrection and failed to believe." (p. 177) Licona suggests this as a possible resolution to the supposed discrepancy in the fact that Luke says that Jesus appeared to "the eleven" (Luke 24:33) while John, apparently speaking of the same appearance, says that Thomas was not with the group, making only ten (out of the original twelve) present (John 20:19-24). Licona is unenthusiastic about the far simpler idea that Luke was using "the eleven" as a generic idiom for the group without intending to convey the precise number of disciples present at that moment. He does not even contemplate the also far simpler hypothesis that Luke happened not to be informed that Thomas was not there on that occasion and thus assumed from being told that "the disciples" were there that eleven disciples were present. John, on this simple theory, gives the more exact account. This, of course, would make John even more knowledgeable about precise details than Luke, a direct counterexample to the picture of John that Licona gives in the quotation above.

These sorts of claims about John are the parallel to what Lewis calls the "really foolish thing" that people say about Jesus. In the case of Jesus, people didn't want to say that he was God or that he was a liar or insane, so they invented a merely great human teacher Jesus. Lewis says, rightly, that Jesus didn't mean to leave open that option. Similarly, those who make such statements about John don't want, for some reason, to say either that John was always intending to report literal historical facts (and therefore that, if he gets something wrong, he gets it wrong while trying to get it right) or that John was a clever propagandist and liar. Instead they want to present us with a tertium quid: John had "literary license" to make things up or change things to be non-factual and put them in his Gospel (Burridge explicitly uses the word "fabricate"), without any signal to his readers that he is doing so and while appearing to give literal reportage. But this doesn't count as a deception despite the fact that it makes him unreliable "on the ground level" of literal fact, because of...literary and genre reasons rooted in the supposed different ways people thought back then, from which we can conclude that John's audience wouldn't have minded this sort of fabrication.

I want to challenge that tertium quid and press back to the dilemma: Either John was an historical witness with the intention of being historically accurate "on the ground level of reporting" or he was a highly creative liar.

I want to start with the prima facie meaning of several statements made by John.

And he who has seen has testified, and his testimony is true; and he knows that he is telling the truth, so that you also may believe. (John 19:35)

This is the disciple who is testifying to these things and wrote these things, and we know that his testimony is true. (John 21:24)

On the question of whether John 21:24 was written about himself by the author of John or is interpolated by an editor, see this interesting post. I do not consider that the use of the third person for John or of the plural "we" is decisive here in the direction of its being added by another hand. But if it was added, it was very early and shows how John's Gospel was taken by his original audience. It is also quite strikingly similar in wording to John 19:35 and endorses the author's own view of himself in that verse.

Here is what Acts attributes to John and Peter when confronted by the Sanhedrin:

But Peter and John answered and said to them, “Whether it is right in the sight of God to give heed to you rather than to God, you be the judge; for we cannot stop speaking about what we have seen and heard.” (Acts 4:19:20)

Here is John again in his own words, using the same language of telling truthfully what he has heard and seen.

What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the Word of Life— and the life was manifested, and we have seen and testify and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was manifested to us— what we have seen and heard we proclaim to you also, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ. I John 1:1-3

And for good measure, here is Peter apparently explicitly disavowing the creation of fabrications:

For we did not follow cleverly devised tales when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of His majesty. 2 Peter 1:16

Again and again the emphasis here is upon empirical evidence and truthful testimony to what was seen and heard.

These sorts of verses are also consistent with the general consideration that the subject matter would have been extremely important to the disciples and their original audience and that it is therefore on the face of it unlikely that their audience would have taken kindly to their manufacturing incidents or deliberately altering facts.

All of this creates a consistent picture of the intention of normal, factual accuracy and a strong prima facie case that should take a lot of toppling. Burridge (as we saw in the last post) has to admit that John keeps talking about the importance of truth. Then Burridge has to dismiss that by making sweeping generalizations to the effect that it doesn't really mean what it appears on the face of it to mean. I contend that neither Burridge nor Licona has come close to satisfying the burden of proof for such dismissals of the literal meaning of these verses, and if someone wishes to press their literary dismissals, I would request that he do so with specific arguments that I can address rather than simply pointing out the credentials of those who make such claims and/or the sheer existence and popularity of such claims. Those statements about John's factual inaccuracy and about his lack of an intention of factual accuracy fly in the face of John's own words and require a complex reinterpretation of those words.

This past weekend I had the privilege of hearing J. Warner Wallace speak at a conference. In one of his presentations he talked about the statement in John that blood and water came out of Jesus' side when it was pierced with a spear. Wallace pointed out that this is well explained by the presence of fluid in the lungs which would have come out along with blood when the side, heart, and lungs were pierced. He also rather wryly discussed ancient commentaries on the text that attempted to give a purely symbolic meaning to the "blood and water," and he argued that this shows that the literal, scientific significance of the blood and water was not well understood and therefore that John apparently put them in there not to make some kind of evidential point but rather because this was really observed. This, of course, makes the evidential significance of the statement (e.g., for our confidence that Jesus was really dead) that much more striking.

While listening to this, I remembered that the "blood and water" observation comes immediately before John 19:35, where the author is so emphatic about his witness status:

So the soldiers came, and broke the legs of the first man and of the other who was crucified with Him; but coming to Jesus, when they saw that He was already dead, they did not break His legs. But one of the soldiers pierced His side with a spear, and immediately blood and water came out. And he who has seen has testified, and his testimony is true; and he knows that he is telling the truth, so that you also may believe.

The sequence in these verses is important. What we have here is a highly explicit, empirical set of observation statements, followed by an emphatic insistence that they have been attested to truthfully by a witness.

This is quite strong evidence that, when John talks about "telling the truth," he means the literal, empirical truth, not some "higher-level truth" to which literal truth could legitimately be sacrificed. And as Wallace points out, the literal accuracy of the statement is independently corroborated by its consistency with scientific fact. Also, the literal accuracy of the statement about breaking the legs of the thieves is corroborated by crucifixion practices.

In addition to the point about blood and water, here is a short list of just some of the factual details in John that are corroborated in other ways. This is only a sample:

--The five porticoes of the Pool of Bethesda (John 5:2-9), corroborated by archaeology. Loisy in the early 20th century tried to give them an allegorical interpretation, not taking the story seriously as literal reportage. Then the pool was found, and it just literally had five porticoes.

--The time of year of the feeding of the five thousand as shortly before Passover (John 6:4), corroborated by two undesigned coincidences. (See Hidden in Plain View)

--The fact that the water jars at the marriage at Cana were empty at the time when Jesus was going to perform his water-into-wine miracle (John 2:6-7). Confirmed by an undesigned coincidence, as discussed in Hidden in Plain View.

--The fact that Jesus arrived in Bethany six days before Passover, confirmed by an undesigned coincidence (John 12:1). (See Hidden in Plain View.)

--The reference to Caiaphas as "high priest that year" (John 11:49 and 18:13). Confirmed by external evidence that the Romans took upon themselves the power to depose and appoint high priests, so that the high priesthood was no longer, as in ancient Judaism, a lifelong position.

--The dialogue between Pilate and Jesus in John 18, confirmed by multiple undesigned coincidences. See Hidden in Plain View.

The confirmation of these political and empirical details gives us reason to believe two things:

1) John was trying to get it right and report accurately, in a literal sense.

2) John was quite successful in this endeavor.

What these emphatically disconfirm is the picture of an author who believed that he had literary license to invent and alter ground-level facts.

Now I invite the reader to consider the many empirical details in the Gospel of John for which we have no such independent confirmation directly. Notice how pointless these are. Nothing heavy turns on them. They're just there. The density of details is, I would estimate, higher in John's Gospel than in any other, though of course it depends on how you count, and I don't at all mean to say that the other Gospels don't also have lots of details. (Luke likes to bring up details of political fact, as in Luke 3:1, and medical details, as in Luke 8--the story of the woman with an issue of blood.)

Here are some from John:

--The precise location where John the Baptist was baptizing.--John 1:28

--The series of days on which John the Baptist made statements about Jesus as the Lamb of God--1:29, 35, see also vs. 43 and John 2:1

--The time of day (the "tenth hour") when the two disciples of John went with Jesus to his lodging.--John 1:39

--The number of water pots at the marriage at Cana (six) and their size (containing twenty or thirty gallons)--John 2:6

--Jesus' exact actions in cleansing the Temple--making a scourge out of cords, pouring out the coins of the moneychangers, and overturning their tables--John 2:15

--The number of years that the Jews said it had taken to build the Temple (46)--John 2:20.

--The time of day when Nicodemus came to visit Jesus--John 3:1.

--Another precise location where John was baptizing--3:23.

--The scrupulous qualification that Jesus himself did not actually baptize anyone, after having previously used locutions that might have been construed otherwise--John 4:2

--Jesus' precise route from Judea into Galilee--4:3-5

--The time when Jesus was sitting by the well at Sychar (the sixth hour)--4:6

--The number of days that Jesus remained in Sychar after the conversation with the woman at the well (two)--4:40

I'm just going to stop there, and I'm only through chapter 4. The Gospel of John is just like that. Fast-forwarding to the Last Supper, here is a trenchant comment about the stark phrase, "And it was night" when Judas left to betray Jesus in John 13:30.

“...Judas opened the door to leave the tense and puzzled group. An oblong of sudden darkness seen for a second stamped itself on one mind forever; and remembering, the writer comments, ‘And it was night’.” E.M. Blaiklock, Jesus Christ: Man or Myth, p. 69.

John apparently had an intensely visual memory, to which these examples attest--both those for which we're lucky enough to have independent corroboration and those we don't happen to have corroborated.

Am I saying that a clever liar never adds lots of detail to his story? No, I'm not saying that. This past weekend J. Warner Wallace was talking about liars he's known, how creative they are, and how some of them add unnecessary detail to their stories to make them sound true. Of course, I can't help pointing out that the fact that such detail makes them sound true means that such detailed discourse is in fact some evidence for truth. (Generally, as an epistemic matter, if it "makes it look like x" for a deceiver to add some property y to a situation, that is ipso facto an admission that property y is some evidence for x.)

But the point I want to press here is this: John gives no indication in the text that any of these details are not intended literally. To the contrary. The whole flow of the text and the numerous, specific details give exactly the opposite impression--namely, that John intends the reader to take him to be reporting accurately at the "ground level."

And when we do find such a detail confirmed, as in the list above, we rightly take this to be support for John's reliability. But if we think of the alteration of such details as allowed by "literary license," why would we find them confirmed? We can't have it both ways. We can't triumphantly point to the confirmation of detail as support for John's reliability when we have it while elsewhere talking as if he didn't intend his details to be taken as literal reportage in the first place!

I conclude from all of these considerations that, if John was not at least attempting to be accurate in his reporting, he was a deceiver. He was in that case attempting to get his readers to accept his reports as literally true and adding detail for that purpose, even though he knew that he was changing and inventing ("fabricating," to use Burridge's word, or "crafting" to use Licona's) material that was not true.

This is the dilemma for interpreters of John. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about John's being a great literary artist who sacrifices accuracy on the ground level in the service of higher truth, which his audience would have understood and accepted. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

Posted by Lydia McGrew on September 11, 2017 8:01 AM | Del.icio.us | Permalink

Tags: (evidentialism) (Licona) (New Testament)

Faux simplicity arguments against the existence of God

 

Faux simplicity arguments against the existence of God

by Lydia McGrew

(Originally published at What's Wrong With the World. Link to original post at 'permalink' below.) 

This interview between Esteemed Husband and Dale Tuggy on the Trinities podcast contains a lot of good stuff. (Yes, I know that Tuggy is not a trinitarian. Yes, I acknowledge the irony and weirdness of having a podcast named "Trinities" hosted by a non-trinitarian. No, that isn't relevant to this post nor to the content of this particular podcast.)

I have to admit up front that I have not yet listened to the entire podcast myself but only to the first twenty minutes of it. It takes me a while to listen all the way through podcasts, for some reason.

But a really interesting issue comes up in those first twenty minutes (indeed, in the first seven minutes) that is worth highlighting in itself.

Naturalists will often try to do a kind of crude "subtraction" simplicity argument against the existence of God and for naturalism, and it just stinks as an argument. To be clear, I am saying nothing against simplicity as a criterion of theory choice. It is ubiquitous and important. It is what shows us that conspiracy theories are ridiculous. We tacitly use simplicity considerations constantly.

What Esteemed Husband is speaking out against here is a double abuse of simplicity.

1) Reduce simplicity considerations in theory choice to a crude "subtraction of entities" notion, where "entities" does not include things like thoughts, intentions, actions, and coincidences.

2) Place an irrational amount and type of weight on those crudely defined "simplicity" considerations, so that one treats it as argumentatively legitimate to dismiss or explain away positive evidence for the existence of an entity on the grounds that one's resulting "ontology" is "simpler."

Tim's Abraham Lincoln example here (in the early minutes of the interview) is particularly instructive. Suppose that I take my "ontology of entities" and simply subtract Abraham Lincoln from those entities that I believe exist. But I still have the same evidence for the existence of Abraham Lincoln. Is this reasonable to do? Can I justify the resulting bizarre lengths to which I will have to go to explain away the evidence for the existence of Abraham Lincoln on the grounds that there is one entity the fewer in the world described by these conspiracy theories and hence that they are more probable than the theory that Lincoln existed? Obviously not. "One entity the fewer" doesn't translate into "simpler overall" and certainly doesn't translate into "more probable on the evidence that I have."

In fact, any theory that tries to explain the evidence I have for the existence of Lincoln while denying his existence will be far more complex than the theory that Lincoln existed. In the place of the one man, Lincoln, I will have to hypothesize a large number of intentions to deceive, coincidental confusions and mistakes, etc., on the part of innumerable other people, all converging to appear erroneously to support the existence of Lincoln. A-Lincolnism is by no means a simpler theory, and it certainly is not more probable than Lincolnism! But, if I attribute these deceptions and errors all to persons who really existed (other than Lincoln), and if I don't consider thoughts and intentions to be separate entities in an ontological list, then the "list of ontological entities" is shorter by the absence of one entity--Lincoln. Whoop-de-do.

This is very much what the naturalist is doing. The naturalist/atheist makes a great song and dance about the "greater simplicity" of his atheism, but that is really quite meaningless and pointless in the presence of evidence for the existence of God.

Simplicity considerations are always relevant to our actual knowledge of what exists only by being comparative considerations applied to candidate explanations of existing evidence. None of us sits around in a literal evidential vacuum counting up entities.

The question of whether God exists arises because there is some putative evidence for the existence of God, just as the question of whether Lincoln exists would never have arisen in the first place if there weren't (taken to be) some reason to think that Lincoln exists. (The same argument can be applied to the existence of your mother or your best friend.)

Hence, simplicity should be thought of in actual practice as a three-place (at least) relation: Theory A is simpler than Theory B (or theories B-Z) as an explanation of evidence E, which I possess.

As Tim points out (a very important point), there is no general rule in probability theory that, relative to some body of evidence, (A & B) has lower probability than (A & ~B). People are sometimes confused about this from the fact that (A) alone is strictly more probable than (A & B). But it simply does not follow that (A & ~B) is more probable than (A & B). Asserting the negation of B is itself a theoretical commitment that takes on its own theoretical risk and may be improbable relative to the evidence at hand. (And to cover agnosticism, asserting the metalevel claim "The probability of B is no greater than some ceiling n" is also a commitment that may be wrong, given the actual evidence. It is not the same thing as merely asserting A.)

Agnostics and atheists harp on a faux simplicity argument against the existence of God, and sometimes Christians are thrown by it. I think that they may be thrown because they think that the correct way to proceed is to go back to some hypothetical pre-evidential state (that no real person is ever in), to "award points" to an hypothesis that has fewer entities than another hypothesis, then to move forward to take the evidence on board while always continuing to award these extra points (and they are usually supposed to be large amounts of points) to the hypothesis with the fewer "entities." (Again, with a very restrictive notion of "entities.")

But we would never do this in the case of the existence of Lincoln, your mother, zebras, or any other actual entity. We would never sit around in angst over how many points we should award to the hypothesis that there are no zebras, which would in turn allow us to explain away large swathes of positive evidence for zebras. We would never do that for the existence of Lincoln, either. Any consideration of additional ontological "weight" that we take on with the existence of Lincoln or zebras is obviously wholly swamped by the consideration that we would have to compass land and sea (hence radically violating simplicity norms) in order to do without Lincoln, zebras, or Mom in our ontology while still explaining the evidence.

Whether or not the positive evidence for the existence of God actually works to support God's existence is, of course, a separate matter that has to be examined by actually looking at the evidence. (A point Tim emphasizes repeatedly in the interview.) In the course of that evaluation, naturalists should not be given a free pass to keep running back to some unreal, pre-evidential situation and awarding their atheism special points for not having God in its ontology. Evidence evaluation just doesn't work that way.

Posted by Lydia McGrew on December 9, 2016 10:54 AM | Del.icio.us | Permalink

Tags: (evidentialism) (philosophy of religion)

Undesigned Coincidences in the OT: The Revolt of Libnah

 

Undesigned Coincidences in the OT: The Revolt of Libnah

by Lydia McGrew

(Originally published at What's Wrong With the World. Link to original post at 'permalink' below.) 

Jehoram, King of Judah (mid-800s B.C.), was the first king in the divided kingdom to follow wholeheartedly after false gods. What do I mean by the divided kingdom? For those of you who aren't Bible geeks, a brief history: after Solomon died, his son Rehoboam refused to lower taxes (!), and this was the immediate cause of a rebellion that had probably been brewing for a long time. A general named Jeroboam took ten of the tribes of Israel under his rule. That came to be known as the Northern Kingdom. Only Judah and Benjamin remained loyal to the descendant of David, and they became known as the Southern Kingdom or the Kingdom of Judah.

After that, until the rule of Jehoram, there was (according to the Bible) a pretty striking distinction between the kingdom of Judah and the kingdom of Israel, in that the former was ruled over by descendants of David and at least attempted to maintain the religion of the true God, while the latter went after false gods of one sort or another right from the outset of the divided kingdom period, beginning with the worship of the calves in the time of Jeroboam. But that distinction ended when Jehoshaphat, King of Judah, made a fatal error. He arranged a marriage for his son and heir, Jehoram, to Athaliah, the daughter of the wicked Jezebel, wife of Ahab, queen of Israel. (Jezebel was a pagan princess.) Led astray by his wife, Jehoram began to follow after the worship of Baal.

Here are a few verses on the matter from the book of 2 Kings, chapter 8, beginning at verse 16. (In case you're wondering about the reference here to Jehoshaphat, it looks like Jehoram began his own reign as co-regent with his father, a pretty common Ancient Near Eastern practice.)

Now in the fifth year of Joram the son of Ahab king of Israel, Jehoshaphat being then the king of Judah, Jehoram the son of Jehoshaphat king of Judah became king. He was thirty-two years old when he became king, and he reigned eight years in Jerusalem. He walked in the way of the kings of Israel, just as the house of Ahab had done, for the daughter of Ahab became his wife; and he did evil in the sight of the Lord. However, the Lord was not willing to destroy Judah, for the sake of David His servant, since He had promised him to give a lamp to him through his sons always....In his days Edom revolted from under the hand of Judah, and made a king over themselves.... So Edom revolted against Judah to this day. Then Libnah revolted at the same time.

We never do hear (that I know of) any highly specific reason why Edom revolts just then, though it is a general fact that the Edomites were vassals of the Kingdom of Judah (previously vassals of David and then Solomon) and were probably ready to revolt at the drop of a hat anyway.

But what about Libnah? Libnah was a city located within the lands of the tribe of Judah. It is mentioned in Joshua (more about that in a moment); it was won from the Canaanites when the land was first conquered. Some archeologists are convinced that they have located ancient Libnah in a dig at Tel Burna, about twelve miles southwest of Jerusalem.

Of course, many things are simply stated both in the historical books of the Bible and in other historical books, without any particular explanation, so it wouldn't be surprising if we never got any further explanation for the early revolt of Libnah, as opposed to some other Judean town, against Jehoram.

But as it happens, if we turn to Joshua, we do learn something relevant. In Joshua 21 the Levites demand their portion of the land of Israel in the form of cities. The tribe of Levi--the tribe of the priests--was not given separate lands like the other tribes, but they were supposed to be given cities. Thirteen cities were allotted to the Kohathite descendants of Aaron, an extremely important priestly lineage. Among these priestly cities (Joshua 21:13) was the city of Libnah. This fact is repeated in I Chronicles 6:57. (Chronicles summarizes much information from earlier historical books of the Old Testament.)

So a reason for the revolt of Libnah, specifically, suggests itself immediately: Libnah, being a city of the priests, was especially outraged by Jehoram's introduction of Baal worship in Judah and rose up against him.

J.J. Blunt (from whom I got this coincidence) does not leave the confirmations at that, however. He brings up a further confirmation that this was, indeed, the reason for the revolt of Libnah. Athaliah eventually (after the death of her husband and her son) sets herself up as Queen of Judah and murders (almost) all of her own grandsons in order to secure her throne (2 Kings 11). One grandson, one-year-old Joash, is saved from the massacre by his aunt and secretly raised by Jehoiada the priest, his uncle by marriage. When Joash is seven years old, Jehoiada leads a successful rebellion against Athaliah. The boy king Joash is proclaimed king, the wicked Athaliah killed, and the worship of Baal cast down.

This further history supports the proposition (not at all unlikely in itself) that the resistance to the worship of Baal and to Jehoram and Athaliah was centered in the priestly class. The revolt at Libnah, then, was a premature attempt that broke out when all was not yet ready. In particular, at that time there was not a candidate (even a boy king) for a godly ruler. Some years later (about fourteen years, by Blunt's reckoning), when the unpopular, usurping, and murderous Athaliah was sole ruler, the priestly rebellion foreshadowed at Libnah succeeded.

But see how indirect all of this is! The book of 2 Kings mentions only briefly the revolt of Libnah and gives no reason for it. For this one must turn to Joshua or to I Chronicles, either of which was definitely written by someone other than the author of 2 Kings. And the books of Kings are if anything a source for the books of Chronicles, not vice versa. Nor does the author of Kings assign any reason for the revolt of Libnah, though the author of 2 Chronicles does suggest a connection to Jehoram's idolatry.

Then Libnah revolted at the same time against [Jehoram's] rule, because he had forsaken the LORD God of his fathers. (2 Chron. 21:10)

But even here, and even though the chronicler (if we take the same person to have written or compiled all of Chronicles) has long before listed the cities of the sons of Aaron, including Libnah, he does not express that connection. Why should Libnah, particularly, be offended when Jehoram forsook the Lord God of his fathers? (Digression: This coincidence shows why it is good to have "another pair of eyes" on the details of the argument. Blunt erroneously states [p. 203] that the readers of both Kings and Chronicles would have had no way of knowing anything further about Libnah, but in fact way back in I Chronicles 6 the division of the cities is listed. Even if we were just looking at Chronicles, however, this is extremely indirect, and all the more so since 2 Chronicles 21 does not say what Jehoram's forsaking God has to do with the rebellion of Libnah. Certainly the fact that both parts of the coincidence are included far apart in Chronicles does nothing to weaken the argument from this coincidence for the historicity of Kings.)

As a confirmation of the historicity of the books of Kings, this is the kind of subtle connection that those of us who study undesigned coincidences love. The author of Kings just says that Libnah revolted at the same time as Edom. Yet when one looks into the more detailed history of the land, one finds an extremely plausible explanation which also fits beautifully with the further history of the devotion of the priests to the true God and their eventual rebellion against Athaliah.

Says Blunt,

This is the explanation of the revolt of Libnah. Yet, satisfactory as it is, when we are once fairly in possession of it, the explanation is anything but obvious. Libnah, it is said, revolts, but that revolt is not expressly coupled with the introduction of Baal into the country as a god...nor is any reason alleged why Libnah should feel particularly alive to the ignominy and shame of such an act; for where Libnah was, or what it was, or whereof its inhabitants consisted, are things unknown to the readers of Kings..., and would continue unknown, were they not to take advantage of a hint or two in the Book of Joshua. (p. 203)

Concerning the overthrow of Athaliah, Blunt argues,

But will any man say that the sacred historian [the author of 2 Kings] so ordered his materials, that such incidents as these which I have named should successively turn up--that he guided his hands in all this wittingly--that he let fall, with consummate artifice, first a brief and incidental notice (a mere parenthesis) of the revolt of a single town, suppressing meanwhile all mention of its peculiar constitution and character, though such as prepared it above others for revolt--that then, after abandoning not only Libnah, but the subject of Judah in general, and applying himself [for several chapters] to the affairs of Israel in their turn, he should finally revert to his former topic, or rather a kindred one, and lay before us the history of a general revolt, organized by the Priests; and all in the forlorn hope that the uniform working of the same principle of disaffection in the same party, and for the same cause, in two detached instances, would not pass unobserved; but that such consistency would be detected, and put down to the credit of the narrative at large? This surely is a degree of refinement much beyond belief. (p. 205)

I couldn't have said it better myself.

Posted by Lydia McGrew on December 6, 2016 9:30 AM | Del.icio.us | Permalink

Tags: (Christianity) (evidentialism) (undesigned coincidences)

But wait, there's more! Refuting a claim of discrepancy in the gospels

 

But wait, there's more! Refuting a claim of discrepancy in the gospels

by Lydia McGrew

(Originally published at What's Wrong With the World. Link to original post at 'permalink' below.) 

A friend asked me the other day to repeat my opinion, which he'd heard me give at one time, about an alleged discrepancy between Mark's and Luke's location of the feeding of the five thousand.

Here's how that concern about a discrepancy arises. Luke 9:10-12 says that the feeding of the five thousand took place near the town of Bethsaida. (It didn't take place in Bethsaida, because it was a deserted place, as verse 12 says. Some text families explicitly say in verse 10 that they went to a deserted area associated with the town of Bethsaida.) Here's a map of the region around the Sea of Galilee in the time of Christ. As you can see, Bethsaida is roughly on the northeast of the Sea of Galilee. (Yes, I'm aware that there is an archeological controversy about precisely which tell represents the location of Biblical Bethsaida. No, that doesn't affect the present discussion, because the archeological candidates are all pretty darned close together, and none of them is on the west side of the Sea of Galilee.)

Mark 6:45 says that after the feeding of the five thousand Jesus told his disciples to get into a boat and go ahead of him to the other side "to Bethsaida" (as it is usually translated).

From Mark 6:45 taken in isolation, one would naturally conclude that the feeding of the five thousand took place on, in some sense, the opposite side of the Sea of Galilee from Bethsaida--hence, on the west or northwest side. After all, Jesus is telling them to go away from the location of the feeding to the other side, and the narrator is calling this direction away from the feeding "to Bethsaida." Right?

It is from this phrase "to Bethsaida," using the Greek preposition "pros," that the entire idea of a discrepancy between Mark and Luke arises.

So as not to keep the reader in suspense, I will now float two relatively simple possible harmonizations concerning the phrase "pros Bethsaidan." First possibility: "Pros" should be translated here as "over against" rather than "to." This is a possible translation of the preposition. In this case, the narrator in Mark is saying that they were going to the other side which was "over against" (i.e. opposite) Bethsaida--exactly consonant with Luke's statement about the location of the feeding near Bethsaida. Second possibility: "Pros" should be translated with a more common meaning of "toward," but the feeding took place in a deserted area somewhat to the east of Bethsaida itself, so that they would pass Bethsaida as they crossed back over to the other side, going west. Hence, they might have been sent back to the other side (that is, to the region of Capernaum) and in the process traveled "toward Bethsaida."

But wait, there's more!

Much more. The reader, especially a reader impatient with harmonization in the gospels, might well sigh and say that one would consider those readings of "pros Bethsaidan" only if one were committed a priori to inerrancy, or only if one were deeply uncomfortable with contradictions in the gospels, or something to that effect. Why not just say that either Mark or Luke made a mistake?

At this point I want to emphasize the importance of considering the positive case for the reliability of the gospels and placing alleged contradictions against that backdrop. Too much focus on alleged contradictions and on possible resolutions, or even on despair of resolutions, can create a major "can't see the forest for the trees" problem. As it turns out, the location of the feeding of the five thousand, so far from being an embarrassment to the advocate of the reliability of the gospels, is a point that confirms the reliability of the gospels.

There are two undesigned coincidences related to the location of the feeding that confirm Luke's statement that it occurred near Bethsaida. I'll give them briefly, because I have more to say beyond this, but briefly, here they are:

Both Matthew (11:20ff) and Luke (10:13ff) record Jesus, in a completely different passage, calling down woe upon Bethsaida, saying that its inhabitants ignored "mighty works" done there and did not repent. But none of the gospels records anything else, other than the feeding of the five thousand, that could plausibly be regarded as a "mighty work" that the inhabitants of Bethsaida should have known about. Interestingly, the gospels record not only the feeding of the five thousand on that day but also healings among the crowd (see Luke 9:11). Hence, the feeding of the five thousand and the healings connected with it explain the "woes" against Bethsaida. (I note in passing that it is implausible that Luke engineered this deliberately within his own gospel, for the "woe" passage also mentions mighty works done in Chorazin, but Luke records no mighty work done in Chorazin at all.)

The other undesigned coincidence connected with the location of the feeding is the "Why ask Philip?" coincidence that some of my readers may have heard in talks given by my husband or others who present the argument from undesigned coincidences. John 6:5 states that Jesus asked Philip, specifically, where they can buy bread for the crowd. John never says that the feeding took place near Bethsaida. That statement is found only in Luke. But John does say elsewhere (1:44, 12:21) that Philip was from Bethsaida. This rather neatly explains Jesus' question specifically to Philip as to where bread could be purchased for the crowd.

So Luke's location of the feeding near Bethsaida, rather than on the other side of the Sea of Galilee away from Bethsaida, is independently confirmed, as well as the other details connected with those undesigned coincidences (Jesus' calling down woe on Bethsaida, Philip's home town, the fact that Jesus asked Philip where they could buy bread), and the location of the feeding thus supports the reliability of the gospels rather than undermining it.

But wait, there's more!

John's gospel also supports the conclusion that the location of the feeding was somewhere on the east side of the Sea of Galilee. John 6:16-17 says that, after the feeding of the five thousand, the disciples got into a boat and "started across the sea to Capernaum." The word translated "to" there is "eis" which can be translated in a variety of ways, including "toward." Capernaum is on the northwest side of the Sea of Galilee, so if they were going from east to west, away from the vicinity of Bethsaida on the northeast, they would indeed be going toward Capernaum.

But wait, there's more!

The very idea that Mark places the feeding of the five thousand in a different location from Luke is, as I mentioned above, based solely on the phrase "pros Bethsaidan," used for the direction the disciples were sent by boat after the feeding. If one gets a larger picture within Mark, one actually finds evidence that fits with the placement of the feeding on the northeast side of the Sea of Galilee rather than on the northwest side. This evidence confirms Luke's location of the feeding and would create a problem within Mark itself if we insisted on interpreting "pros Bethsaidan" to mean that the feeding took place on the northwest side of the Sea of Galilee. Hence it is misguided to say that Mark places the feeding in a location different from Luke's.

The first bit of evidence to this effect, not very strong in itself but suggestive, arises in another undesigned coincidence. Mark 6:31 says that Jesus and his disciples were bothered by crowds "coming and going" prior to the feeding of the five thousand and that Jesus suggested that they go away somewhere. The phrase "coming and going" suggests that these were not merely crowds following Jesus, specifically, but that there was some kind of bustle where they were. This fits with the statement in John 6:4 that the Feast of Passover was near at hand, especially if Jesus and the disciples were in or near Capernaum, a major hub. If they left Capernaum in a boat and went away, then they might well have gone along the top of the Sea of Galilee and landed somewhere in the vicinity of Bethsaida, just as Luke says.

But wait, there's more! (I've saved the best for last.)

Mark itself tells us where the disciples ended up when they landed on the other side--that is, the "other side" from where the feeding of the five thousand took place, the "other side" to which Jesus sent them after the feeding of the five thousand (Mark 6:45), the "other side" about which there was supposedly a discrepancy between Mark and Luke.

When they had crossed over, they came to land at Gennesaret and moored to the shore. (Mark 6:53)

So when they had crossed over to the other side, they landed at Gennesaret. Look at the map. Where is Gennesaret? (And by the way, the location of Gennesaret is independently known. It doesn't depend on some specific interpretation of this passage.) It's on the northwest side of the Sea of Galilee! It's also within a stone's throw of Capernaum. In other words, it's not on the same side as Bethsaida. It's approximately where we would expect the disciples to end up if they went away in the boat from the vicinity of Bethsaida, where Luke says the feeding took place, going (in general terms) toward Capernaum, as John says, across the top of the Sea of Galilee, and landed on the other side--going from the northeast to the northwest shore.

If we were to interpret "pros Bethsaidan" in Mark 6:45 to mean that the feeding took place on the same side of the Sea of Galilee as Capernaum and Genessaret and that they crossed over afterwards in a boat to Bethsaida, we would have an apparent conflict within Mark with verse 6:53, which says that when they crossed over they landed at Gennesaret.

So Mark doesn't "place" the feeding of the five thousand on the west side of the Sea of Galilee after all.

This means that we have reason within Mark itself for reading "pros Bethsaidan" in one of the ways suggested above. This does not solely arise from a desire to harmonize Mark and Luke or Mark and John. Independent evidence from multiple gospels, including Mark, consistently points to approximately the same location for the feeding of the five thousand, with the single phrase "pros Bethsaidan" in Mark being the only outlier. Hence, it is entirely rational to translate or interpret that one phrase in a way that is consistent with multiple, independent lines of other evidence. By doing so, we get a unified picture that makes sense of all of the evidence.

So far from being strained, this procedure is a careful, tough-minded way of making use of evidence and seeing if there is a reasonable picture that can explain all of it. This doesn't always work. Sometimes there may be an intransigent bit of evidence that just doesn't fit in with the rest, and there's nothing wrong with admitting as much when it happens.

But it's unfortunate that sometimes we get a picture of apparent biblical discrepancies that leaves out some evidence and hence that gives a skewed view. Even relatively conservative interpreters may sometimes feel mired in a slough of despond, slogging through discrepancies and trying to pull themselves out. Or, to change the metaphor, may feel bothered to death by claimed discrepancies like an attacking cloud of midges. It could be tempting to think that one is breaking free of that feeling by not attempting harmonization at all, by coming to disdain it. But that is not a correct evidential approach, even when we simply think of the gospels as historical documents. It is entirely common for different witness testimonies to have apparent discrepancies. Sometimes these are real, but surprisingly often they are merely apparent, and the real picture of what occurred fits both accounts when more is known.

In the present case, any casting of the issue as, "There seem to be a lot of discrepancies surrounding the geography of the feeding of the five thousand" or "Mark appears to place the feeding of the five thousand in a different location from Luke" is, frankly, incorrect. Hence it contributes unnecessarily to that feeling of being mired in or pestered by nuisance discrepancies. But in fact, there aren't a lot of apparent discrepancies surrounding the geography of the feeding of the five thousand. There is a unified picture of it as occurring on the northeast of the Sea of Galilee with one outlying phrase in one gospel. Mark and Luke do not appear to place the event in two different locations. Nor do Mark and John. Rather, Mark itself has a geographical indicator that places the feeding on the east side (namely, that afterwards they went over to the other side and landed at Genessaret) and another geographical indicator (the outlying phrase "pros Bethsaidan") that could be interpreted to place it on the west side. So Mark's own gospel contains evidence that is consonant with the united evidence of Luke, John, and with undesigned coincidences between and among them (one involving Matthew as well), placing the feeding on the northeast side.

It is a little ironic that I am saying all of this, since I am open in principle to saying that there may in fact be places where a gospel author got some minor detail wrong. I even have candidates for such places in my own mind. In no way does my livelihood depend upon signing a statement subscribing to inerrancy. But I also think that the gospels are very, very reliable, that real witness testimony turns out to be reconcilable often when at first it appears to be irreconcilable, and that harmonization should be given a good shot before one concludes that there is an actual error. That, I believe, is not piety but merely responsible scholarship. The exciting thing is how often, when one gets a bigger picture, one finds oneself freed from that heavy sense of "so many problems," because one sees alleged discrepancies against a wider background of evidence for reliability. Sometimes, as in the present case, that wider background even helps to explain some particular alleged discrepancy. This is, to my mind, a much healthier approach than either a) becoming highly cavalier about saying that some gospel author was wrong or confused, b) becoming highly negative about harmonization, and/or c) turning to highly dubious claims of "literary device" according to which gospel authors deliberately changed details for the sake of some literary or theological effect.

None of that does justice to the real-life texture of the texts as historical memoirs.

Cross-posted

Posted by Lydia McGrew on August 16, 2016 9:33 AM | Del.icio.us | Permalink

Tags: (Christianity) (evidentialism) (New Testament)

The reticence of the evangelists

 

The reticence of the evangelists

by Lydia McGrew

(Originally published at What's Wrong With the World. Link to original post at 'permalink' below.) 

An argument for the historicity of the Gospels that deserves attention is the argument from the reticence of the evangelists. Here's, in outline, how it goes: Consider the hypothesis that the Gospels are, or include, later, legendary stories. Then look at various places where human curiosity is not gratified in the Gospels by added stories, where one might expect these if the Gospel authors were not constrained by their actual knowledge or the information they got from real sources close to the facts.

This argument is closely related to the apparent reticence of the Gospel authors to "read back in" theological interests into early material.

Here are several categories of stories that we might expect to find if the Gospel authors were not constrained by truthfulness and available information, but that we don't find:

--Later stories about Joseph, Jesus' guardian. Joseph is a very sympathetic character. Why does he just disappear after the narratives of Jesus' infancy and the one story in Luke about Jesus in the Temple at age twelve? In my forthcoming book, I argue that Joseph "disappears" because he actually did disappear--that is, that he died prior to the beginning of Jesus' ministry. But this is, at most, implied. No Gospel actually mentions Joseph's death. It would have been easy enough for the author of John, say, to come along and add stories about Joseph later on, either before the beginning of Jesus' ministry or during Jesus' ministry. But he doesn't. Joseph is also conspicuously absent from many passages that explicitly mention, in a list-like fashion, Jesus' family members. The best explanation for this combination of presence and absence (the presence of Jesus' family, listed, and the absence of Joseph) is that Joseph wasn't around at all in those scenes and that the Gospel authors are truthfully reflecting that fact.

--Accounts of Jesus' post-resurrection appearances to James and Peter. This is quite surprising, when you think about it. The much-cited creedal formula at the beginning of I Corinthians 15 shows that the appearances to James and Peter were well-known in the Christian community at a very early date and were considered important to the Christian faith. Yet the Gospels, which are sometimes treated (even by relatively conservative scholars) as less reliable than the Pauline creed in I Corinthians, do not include anywhere in their appearance accounts any scene showing these meetings. Luke contains a mention (in dialogue) of the fact that "the Lord...has appeared to Cephas," but no developed scene at all (Luke 24:33). No Gospel even mentions the separate appearance to James, Jesus' kinsman. If the Gospels contained developed, legendary tales, these scenes would be perfect for inclusion. If Christians were sitting around making things vivid to each other, or to their children, by "fleshing out" the bare bones of the claim that Jesus (somehow, sans details) appeared to his disciples, one would assume that the scene of the appearances to Peter and James would be thus fleshed out. But if that was going on, we certainly see no sign of it in the Gospels.

This makes sense if the Gospels are constrained by honest reportage. Both Peter and James had reason to keep the details of such meetings private. John records that Jesus' brothers did not believe on him (John 7:5). The first we hear of the prominence of James (this is not James the son of Zebedee but James the kinsman of Jesus) in the Bible is in the book of Acts. It seems that James may not have believed on Jesus at all until the post-resurrection appearance. Peter, of course, had denied Jesus even after insisting that he would do no such thing. Their first meeting after Jesus' resurrection would have been extremely important to Peter, personally, but he may well not have wanted to tell exactly what was said. Real people often do refuse to share particular details. Sometimes they tell others that certain details are "not for publication." The absence of accounts of Peter's and James's first meetings with Jesus is easily explained if the Gospels are accounts coming from eyewitnesses or those close to eyewitnesses who are not including anything that they don't actually know to be true or don't have authorization to publish. This reticence is much harder to explain if the Gospels are unreliable documents that include non-factual stories that "developed."

--More information about Jesus' childhood. We're all curious about Jesus' childhood. Could he do miracles? How did he come to know that he was God as he grew up? How did he and Mary talk with each other? Later documents and, more recently, movies have explored these questions, but the canonical Gospels are extremely restrained. The only scene that even touches on such questions is the Temple scene in Luke 2. Both before and after that, Jesus' childhood after his infancy is left unknown. And the same for Jesus' young manhood prior to the beginning of his ministry. Again, this restraint is far more to be expected from honest reporters who stick to what they know than from recorders (or inventors) of pious legend. The earliest chapters of Luke, which contain the scene in the Temple, have a strongly Hebraic character and style quite different from Luke's usual style, which begins in Luke 3:1. I generally hesitate to hypothesize documentary sources, but it seems plausible that in this particular case there really was an earlier document that Luke translated, possibly given to him by Mary's family. But in that case he included nothing more because this was all the reliable information he had.

Here are a few of the instances of theological reticence:

--The presence in the Annunciation of references to Jesus' reign as the heir of David, combined with the absence of any allusion by the angel to his suffering and death. See a post that discusses this further (at the end of the post) here. This is much better explained if the Annunciation is taken, by Luke, from information he actually had about what was said than if Luke made up the scene. Luke himself obviously knew that Jesus never inaugurated an earthly reign, yet the intensely Jewish expectation encouraged by the angel's message and reflected in the Song of Zechariah would most naturally be taken to refer to an earthly reign of the Messiah. The Gospel includes no comment on or qualification of this expectation in these chapters. It just records what was allegedly said. This is good evidence that these chapters are not late developments but rather very early information not at all influenced by later knowledge or preoccupations.

--The absence of the Great Commission or any other endorsement of Christian baptism in the Gospel of Luke, combined with the extreme importance of baptism in Acts, written by the same author. It is possible that Luke didn't have access to Matthew, though I myself think it is highly likely that he did. (Nor is that some kind of fringe, "conservative" opinion, though I gather scholars are not unanimous on whether Luke or Matthew was written before the other.) If Luke had access to Matthew, and if Luke were trying to include things in his own Gospel for literary or theological purposes, it is quite remarkable that he didn't include the Great Commission. It is all the more remarkable given that the author of Acts (universally acknowledged to be the same as the author of Luke, though not universally acknowledged to be Luke) is keenly aware of the importance of baptism in the early church and records its importance from the day of Pentecost onward. Similarly, the Gospel of John records in John 4 that Jesus' disciples baptized, but the Gospel of Luke never mentions any such claim. If these stories were going around, wouldn't Luke have wanted to "set up" the importance of baptism in Acts? (This argument is modified from Stanley Leathes, The Religion of the Christ, 1874, pp. 257-258. Thanks to Esteemed Husband for bringing it to my attention.)

I hasten to add that I don't mean by this to cast doubt on the historicity of the Great Commission or of Jesus' disciples' baptizing ministry recorded in John 4. My point, rather, is that it is clear that the Gospel of Luke is not trying to record everything and not even trying to record everything that could be useful theologically. For all its high Greek language, the Gospel of Luke, like the other Gospels, has the quality of reportage rather than of literary crafting.

The Gospel authors are so far from putting words into the mouths of Jesus and/or his disciples for literary, legendary, or theological purposes that there is something, in a sense, slightly random about their including some incidents and not others. This is what we expect from a writer collecting living history from witnesses, or a witness himself, and writing a memoir.

Posted by Lydia McGrew on July 18, 2016 9:21 AM | Del.icio.us | Permalink

Tags: (Christianity) (evidentialism) (New Testament)