I post the following in good faith after having attempted multiple times to elicit advice from a New Testament scholar on its accuracy.
Historical Jesus scholarship is unlike other historical studies in the following way:
Historical Jesus scholars (or “historians”) set about applying a set of criteria (embarrassment, double dissimilarity, coherence, etc) to the Gospels for the purpose to trying to find what is factual (or “very probably factual”) about anything that Jesus actually did.
This is different from what other historians do since other historians, as far as I am aware, are much luckier. They have public records and eye-witness and contemporary accounts and documents of verifiable provenance to work with. They have sufficient data to be able to interpret to give them assurance that they have a body of “historical facts” to work with. No historian can get away with suggesting Hitler or Napoleon or Julius Caesar did not become leaders and wage wars and institute major political reforms and a host of other things that are known facts about them. I am not saying we know everything there is to know about them, or that some things we think we know may not be apocryphal, but I am saying that we have clearly verifiable substantial numbers of facts about their lives to enable historians to study them. History is not about simply recording known facts, but about explaining, interpreting, and narrating those known facts.
In the cases of ancient figures lacking a body of verifiable facts in the historical record, historians do not bother to address their lives as matters of historical inquiry at all. Their names may appear in the history of ideas, but that is quite a different matter. If it wasn’t Hillel who really did say something, it is the fact that the ideas are attributed to someone or some group that is significant, not the specific historicity per se of the name.
Historical Jesus scholars, on the other hand, do not work like this. They have no commonly agreed facts about Jesus. The only datum they seem to agree is a “fact” is that he was crucified. But as I intimated in my previous post, even that “fact” is based on circular reasoning. But scholars seek to understand his personal history (“the real Jesus”, the “historical Jesus”) by trying to FIND some facts about his life by means of criteriology.
I submit that no other historian in any other field works likes this, or at least I would be very surprised if any others do. Maybe I can be brought up to date with historical studies that work in the same way as historical Jesus studies.
Indeed, as I pointed out in another recent post, historical Jesus scholars even appear to be able to claim that they sometimes pioneer the field of history by using
- fabricated material to get to a more truthful or accurate understanding of a historical person;
- defined criteria to establish probabilities of what happened where other historians rely much more on intuition and instinct.
I suggest that no historians of ancient times use “intuition and instinct” — nor the criteria used in HJ studies — to establish a basic fundamental set of historical facts about ancient persons. There is a significant difference between using hunches and criteria to interpret data and facts on the one hand, and using criteria — particularly in the absence of any external controls — to try to find out what happened on the other.
Historians do sometimes use literary analysis of to interpret inferences about historical persons, but only in the cases where there is clear objective evidence (external controls) of the life and career of a historical person to begin with. They do not use such criteria to try to establish all that can be known about a person from the get-go. I will demonstrate how one modern historian works this way in a future post.
On the other hand, for a justifiable approach to the historical study of Christian origins see my previous post.
Neil Godfrey
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Erlend, can you point out to me where any other historical inquiry seeks to establish historical facts entirely on the basis of the sorts of criteria used by HJ scholars (Dr McGrath says New Testament scholars have merely more clearly defined or made explicit the same criteria used by other historians anyway).
There is an enormous difference between using documents of known and understood genre and provenance, and that are supported by external controls as sources of historical information (I am not saying everything in such documents is historically true, by the way) on the one hand, and the efforts of New Testament scholars (James’ term for them) to find, solely by means of criteriology, some basic historical events/persons/”probable facts” from unprovenanced writings that lack any external controls underpinning their narrative content on the other hand.
If there is any area of history where historians do anything like this then tell me. I admit I may be unaware of some such area or have overlooked it, so do inform me.
The fact is that HJ scholars have no set of ‘facts’ to begin with that other historians normally take for granted and around which they frame their inquiries. HJ scholars are preoccupied with finding some facts by this or that criterion (thanks, Bob) that they can then point to and say, Hey, I think Jesus must have done this and that so this is what I think Jesus was like.
My description of Bruce as a theologian was based directly on the statements in the Editor’s preface as I pointed out. If that was wrong then I — and the books’ editor — must stand corrected.
Yes I was more flippant in some of my writing style back in 2007 but I was certainly never sneering. That is entirely your own interpretation. One reason I was addressing Bruce’s writings in relation to the biblical studies was because some biblical scholars on a scholarly discussion list were recommending I read them to demolish anything any mythicist might argue. Dr Jeffrey Gibson (if I recall correctly) in particular advised me to read Bruce’s one page dot-points on the Testimonium Flavianum in order to supposedly “rebut” Earl Doherty’s extensive discussion of the topic.
I studied ancient history myself under a professor who was a devout catholic and his own biases when it came to any topic touching on the New Testament were clear to all in his classes. (And I was a Christian myself, then.) Bruce does not look any different.
I keep waiting for James McGrath to wipe out Neil Godfrey by referencing general history textbooks where historians in non-NT fields teach budding historians how to use the criterion of embarrassment to sift history from myth.
As I understand James he explains that the difference between the study of recent history where we can cross-examine possible witnesses and ancient history where we do not have such witnesses to cross-examine is just that — that we have a narrower range of types of evidence with ancient history (no living witnesses to examine): http://vridar.wordpress.com/2011/08/08/fear-of-mythicism/#comment-18268
If my understanding of his interpretation of Tim’s parable is correct, James argues that the detective is quite within his rights to be persuaded by criteria applied to the letters and diaries that a real murder had happened in the past. The only reason he would not investigate that murder is not because it did not happen but because there are no living witnesses. But he would still be persuaded by arguments from criteria that the evidence presented to him did establish that a real murder had happened. http://vridar.wordpress.com/2011/08/08/fear-of-mythicism/#comment-18268
For convenience I copy Tim’s parable again here for reference:
Suppose I visit the police station to report a murder. As evidence I produce a few letters with cryptic references and four anonymous diaries that appear to have been written decades after the fact. Everyone mentioned in the letters and diaries is dead, so there’s no one to question. In fact, there are no public records of anyone involved. There’s no corpse. Most of the landmarks described in the diaries have been razed.
“But I need witnesses. I need evidence. A body would really help your case, too,” says the detective.
“But I do have evidence!” I spread the pages over the detectives desk and point. “These are my witnesses.”
Now to take this tortured analogy to its obvious conclusion, suppose the detective says as he tries to usher me out of his office, in the gentlest way possible, “I’m sorry — there’s nothing I can do. Try not to get too worked up over it. You know, it’s possible that the people in those old anonymous diaries never existed in the first place. Heck, they might just be forgeries.”
I stop in my tracks and swear that I’ve sorted through the “evidence” and through the use of very clever criteriology have come up with a list of sayings and deeds that are probably true. “Unless you can come up with better methodology, how dare you criticize my belief that somebody really lived and really was murdered?”
I love the allegory; it’s practically Dostoyevskian.
Though most mythicists (you can call me a “soft” one) reflexively dismiss the Talpiot “Jesus family” tomb, it suggests an obvious addendum:
After years trailing every shade of herring and goose, our undaunted amateur investigator discovers what appears to be the victim’s gravestone, in a family plot in an abandoned cemetery whose records were destroyed in the church-fire of aught-one. The grave is greatly disturbed, and the body is gone. The plot shows signs of repeated tampering, and—for good measure—is decorated with a single unique, unidentifiable, but highly suggestive design.
Our investigator’s field is still pretty much wide open. But at least he’s got a decent case that the victim actually existed, and a greater hope of finding further clues, eventually…
It further strikes me that this is the way many gospel stories developed…
I love it. You and Tim must collaborate!
We’d have to work under a suitably venerable pseudonym, then let conservative Christians edit it however they liked for the canonical version.
Neil,
If you really do think that: “This is different from what other historians do since other historians, as far as I am aware, are much luckier. They have public records and eye-witness and contemporary accounts and documents of verifiable provenance to work with. They have sufficient data to be able to interpret to give them assurance that they have a body of “historical facts” to work with. ” then you have a incredibly slight grasp of classical history outside of say, the documents surrounding the fall of the Republic. I’m not saying the points you raise don’t have merits, but your desire to create a schism between what Biblical historians and historians do wont help you- its just not accurate. Its rhetorical bluster.
I mean look at what you tried to do to F. F. Bruce in the first three paragraphs at http://vridar.wordpress.com/2007/01/16/rip-ffbruce-on-suetonius-and-chrestus/ Again you try to role out this common theme.Three times you try to set up a difference between historians and historical studies against the theologian Bruce. Only this time it patently doesn’t work. You seem oblivious to the fact that F. F. Bruce was a classicist by training, not a theologian. His recent biographer Tim Grass spends almost a whole chapter looking at why he was criticized, and why he refused, to bring theology into his historical analysis which was brought over from his classical history training!On this approach see his methodology espoused in Bruce’s article ‘The New Testament and Classical Studies’, New Testament Studies, 1976. But you disagree with his analysis (and I agree with your criticisms by the way! and it is NOT unique to Biblical history) so you take the time to (quite sneeringly) cast him as a theologian for your readers.
Erlend are you sure? From what I can tell F. F. Bruce had a Doctorate of Divinity.
Yes Evan I am sure. Bruce was a classicist, he trained in classics in Aberdeen and Cambridge. He started his PhD in Roman slavery in Vienna but was appointed a lecturer in classical studies in Edinburgh from 1935-1938 (which meant he never completed a PhD) and he became a lecturer in classics at Leeds from 1938-1947. He first entered a Biblical Studies department (with no theology faculty, just historians by the way) in Sheffield in 1947. What you are thinking about is that he received a honorary doctorate in Divinity from Aberdeen ten years later.
Several years ago, I was painting a room in my house. I was apparently sleep-deprived or perhaps caffeine-deficient that morning, because when I reached behind me, I grabbed not a screwdriver, but a wood chisel. Without thinking, I placed the tip of the chisel under the lid of the paint can and pushed. A moment later, I had one unopened can of paint and one broken wood chisel.
I often think of that day with my ruined wood chisel and my utter self-disgust whenever I see NT scholars use criteriology to discover bedrock facts. If you want good results, you have to use the appropriate tool to the task.
So yes, McG. may be correct when he says that HJ scholars use the same tools that other historians use. But he fails to recognize how those tools are being inappropriately used. At the very least the tools are being pushed to the breaking point. I’m reminded of Kierkegaard’s observation:
“In sawing wood it is important not to press down too hard on the saw; the lighter the pressure exerted by the sawyer, the better the saw operates.”
Of course, if you’re trying to cut wood with a crowbar or a spanner, it doesn’t matter how much pressure you use.
For what it’s worth I copy a reply I left on ExploringOurMatrix in response to someone who thought he rebutted my argument by pointing to the way historians interpret the evidence for the battle of Kadesh with this:
Fabrizio responded with this — a post I found encouraging since I did not realize my thoughts on the matter were much known given my own often bumbling attempts to express them:
The only point I think I would add to Fabrizio’s outlilne is that the attempt to discover the details of Jesus’ life through criteria is itself a logically flawed enterprise. My response, with details specific to the exchange on the ExplodingOurCakeMix (blame Tim) blog omitted:
For sake of completeness I copy here one more comment I posted. It was in response to some confusion over the apparent difference between establishing the historicity of an event (such as the existence of Jesus) and “finding some facts” to begin with in a text. . . . .
Fabrizio’s response makes me smile.
Neil, you and McG. have gone around and around so long I’d almost given up hope. At times it almost seems that he believes in his own straw man — namely the assertion that you believe the problem is the fact that all we have are texts. So when the first guy wrote — “So, with two texts which disagree on almost every detail of an event for which there is no physical evidence whatsoever, how are facts to be determined?” — I thought, “Here we go again.
The Kadesh Peace agreement is “just text,” sure. But it’s also primary evidence, for which we have physical examples in Hittite and Egyptian forms. The fact that both sides claim contradictory outcomes explains why historians can’t agree as to exactly what happened. However, we know the battle itself took place.
If we had primary evidence for Jesus, we could possibly use the gospels to tease out authentic sayings and deeds. First we’d need a convincing argument that the Gospel of John is independent from the Synoptics and not (as I believe) a polemic against them and against Petrine and/or Thomasine Christianity. As it is we’re left with plausible stories and conjecture.
http://tomverenna.wordpress.com/2011/08/16/defining-mythicism-the-signs-gospel-and-the-figure-of-jesus/
I do not think the main problem of biblical exegesis consist in dealing with characters whose existence is not confirmed. I think the main problem is to manage mythical texts as if they were chronics. The exegesis should not learn from the historiography only but from anthropology of the myths mainly.
Agreed. I have begun to think how the gospel narratives can be understood through Claude Levi-Strauss’s model: http://vridar.wordpress.com/2011/08/05/messiahs-midrash-and-mythemes-more-comparisons-with-the-gospels/ and http://vridar.wordpress.com/2011/03/14/the-bibles-roots-in-greek-mythology-and-classical-authors-isaac-and-phrixus/ — looking forward to opportunities to do much more, as well as to inputs from others along the same lines.
“Historical Jesus scholars (or “historians”) set about applying a set of criteria (embarrassment, double dissimilarity, coherence, etc) to the Gospels for the purpose to trying to find what is factual (or “very probably factual”) about anything that Jesus actually did.”
The main problem as I see it is that “Historical Jesus” scholars never actually begin as Historical Jesus undergraduates. They begin as full-on Bible-thumping and committed Christians who have chosen ministry or theology as a career to validate the Bible. After a few years of study, they are shell-shocked from the devastating experience of being exposed to the last 175 years of critical scholarship. Nothing had prepared them for this. They are forced to realize the folly and childishness of their former selves, and have several emotional crises to overcome. Fortunately, they discover a consolation prize: the “Historical” Jesus, the one who supposedly is *not* a myth. So they have something substantive to study after all, and haven’t wasted a huge amount of time, money, and effort studying the Jewish Dionysus. There is no comparable experience or character type in any other area of the humanities.