Tag: Historical Method

Jonathan Bernier has posted “three basic means by which to date a biblical text” which I think are reasonably useful but can be improved upon. His focus is primarily on the New Testament chronology.

Bernier calls his first tool “synchronization” and it’s pretty basic. If a text declares that the Temple of Jerusalem was destroyed in by Titus then obviously the text dates some time after that event. Of if the Gospel of Matthew appears to have used the Gospel of Mark then obviously GMatthew was later than GMark. (The trick here, of course, is being able to produce a convincing argument that the borrowing definitely was from Mark to Matthew and not the other way around.) And so forth.

His second tool is what he calls “authorial biography”. This device “uses what is known about the author(s) independent of the text in order to determine when she or he wrote.” Bernier says this method is “most usable in regard to the Pauline corpus, due to the existence of Acts.” Scholars are certainly on solid ground here if they can be sure they can trust Acts to provide a reliable biography and chronology of Paul. Other scholars who approach Acts with a view to understanding the character of its narrative content by means of literary criticism and comparative literary studies, and by means of determining what period of church history the theological themes most neatly synchronize with, may have doubts that Acts is so useful. Bernier acknowledges that biographical data for most authors of the NT is woefully inadequate but a critical approach must also leave a question mark over Paul’s corpus. We know that the NT contains many letters falsely attributed to Paul and I suppose we must have faith that the circular arguments we use to establish the genuine epistles are reliable. Maybe it doesn’t really matter and the only important thing is that we know what early church writers believed to be genuine.

The third method is called “contextualization”. Here is where I think Bernier and other scholars could find a little room to refine their methods of dating. Bernier explains contextualization: “contextualization uses what is otherwise known about the development of early Christianity in order to determine when a text most likely originated.”

The first question that comes to my mind is this: What sources are used to devise a model of early Christianity’s development? The answer, I have to presume, are primarily the New Testament documents. So my second question then becomes: How do we date these NT documents? And squeezed into that question come a few others: how do we establish the authorship, provenance, and literary function of those documents as historical sources?

Bernier offers a “sterling example” of dating by “contextualization”. It is James Crossley’s justification for dating the Gospel of Mark to the mid to late 30s (sic) CE. To arrive at this date for the Gospel of Mark Crossley has not begun with a literary analysis of the gospel in order to determine the function of its narrative details by means of comparison with other literature of the general period (let’s say from 30 CE to 130 CE when we first meet an apparent independently claimed awareness of the existence of the gospel). This period was rich in Greco-Roman (and Jewish) authors developing new genres by mixing and matching existing forms, and the Gospel of Mark is certainly one such innovation that was imitated and emulated by others. Instead, Crossley treats the narrative as so much dirt and rubble that needs to be cleared aside, or a window that needs to be looked through, in order to discover “the real Jesus” behind it all. Or maybe those are not quite apt analogies (though they are used by some New Testament scholars to explain their historical methods). Maybe the text of Mark is read and interpreted in a way “as if it were written before” Christians in Mark’s circle were confronted with disputes over the Jewish law.

Such a method is potentially useful but its conclusion (in this case a date as early as the mid 30s) needs to be proposed as a hypothesis and tested rigorously before it can be allowed to decide the date of the gospel. Otherwise, surely, we are guilty of dating Mark by means of a single criterion and by circular reasoning to boot.

Some tests that need to be applied in this case:

What would we expect to find in Paul’s letters if Paul were indeed influenced by the Gospel of Mark (as Crossley proposes)?

What else would we expect to find in the Gospel of Mark itself if it were indeed written so early? Compare the ways ancient biographies and histories were written back then. Their references to sources, efforts to persuade readers of the value of their work, etc.

What would such an early date imply for other questions related to the “synoptic problem”, Q, the ways later authors ignored or changed it, etc? How do our expectations or predictions pan out in the evidence?

What would such an early date imply for the subsequent history of the work, its acceptance, its authority, etc and how do our answers fit with the known history (or lack of known history)?

If it is true that early readers (as Crossley concedes) saw the potential for Mark’s gospel narrative to be interpreted as presenting a Jesus who did not conform to Jewish laws, then how do we justify our and their respective interpretations?

Are their simpler hypotheses (those with fewer constituent hypothetical entities) to explain another date range for the gospel?

So when it comes to “contextualization”, I think the method can have value if we broaden our range of evidence and data to study and not confine ourselves to but one interpretation that requires many other sub-hypotheses (sometimes called ad hoc rationalizations) to justify.

Or we can read a much simpler set of guidelines set out by a scholar specializing in Old Testament. I think his rules of thumb work equally well for the NT: Scientific and Unscientific Dating of the Gospels.

I have begun to sift through my many, many posts on historical methodology with special reference to its application to the question of Christian origins (or as some would prefer, to the question of the “historical Jesus”). They are not at all necessarily the same question.

Over the coming weeks, or probably coming months, I hope to sift through and add to the new Vridar Page,  Historical Methods (with reference to the study of Christian Origins/Historicity of Jesus)

You can see it listed under ARCHIVES by TOPIC, Annotated in the margin on the right side of this blog.

Only the most manic conspiracy theorist would question the fact that the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066, or that a man landed on the moon in 1969, or that the Holocaust took place. . . . . It is a fact that Caesar crossed the Rubicon and invaded Italy in 49 BC; going back to the sources in an attempt to prove or disprove this would be as much a waste of time as reinventing the wheel.

(Morley, 59)

When the ancient historian Neville Morley wrote those words he unfortunately made it sound tedious to go back and pore through papers and documents and books to find out “how we know” they happened. But it is not a difficult task at all, especially now that since Morley wrote we have a vastly improved internet fact-finder.

Two of Morley’s examples are not at all problematic. We know we have abundant contemporary sources to verify the moon landing and Holocaust. But what about the facts in medieval and ancient history?

Here is how we know . . . .

the fact that the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066

Search for “Battle of Hastings” and “Primary sources”. In quick time you will find the data that has long assured us that this battle happened and it was in 1066. Example: Spartacus Educational — Battle of Hastings. One sees at the top of that page a link to Primary Sources. If you haven’t already, click on it. In front of will be a list of the following and even more conveniently translations of the texts:

(1) Message sent by William of Normandy just before the Battle of Hastings took place (quoted by William of Poitiers in Deeds of the Dukes of the Normans (c. 1070)

(2) Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, D Version, entry for 1066.

(3) William of Malmesbury, The Deeds of the Kings of the English (c. 1140)

(4) William of Poitiers, The Deeds of William, Duke of the Normans (c. 1071)

A message by William of Normandy himself? Quoted by a contemporary? That looks strong evidence, but is there corroboration from another source?

A Chronicle of the time. Now that’s strong. “D Version” looks a bit baffling but a bit more searching will bring up an explanation that the particular manuscript in mind is that of Worchester.

Number (4) is a bit late so we would have to read it to check on the sources the author used. That’s not very difficult nowadays, either. Just one more click away.

That’s how we know the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066. Sources from contemporaries.

Here is how we know . . . .

that Caesar crossed the Rubicon and invaded Italy in 49 BC

Again, a little hunting and pecking on the web, or looking up a scholarly publication about the event, or asking a classicist, will quickly inform us that we have Julius Caesar’s own “memoirs” or “commentary” on the Civil War in which he tells us that (and when) he crossed over into Italy with his army, thus precipitating the Civil War.

We have Julius Caesar’s own written account of the circumstances that led him to cross into Italy in the Commentaries on the Civil War (1:8) (Don’t be put off by Caesar’s odd-sounding practice of referring to himself in the third person.) Caesar did not explicitly mention the provincial border he crossed (he only said he marched into Italy as far as Rimi or Ariminum twelve miles south of the river) but we have the explicit reference to the Rubicon in a written speech by Cicero, Caesar’s contemporary. And then we have several later historians who had access to archives writing about Caesar. But on the combined strength of Caesar’s own testimony and the testimony of his contemporary we can safely say that Caesar did indeed cross the Rubicon thus precipitating the civil war.

What we don’t know as a fact . . . .

Morley explains: Continue reading “How Historians Know Their Bedrock Facts”

In these dark times when our heads ache from the thunderous reverberations of there is no reason to doubt or we must avoid ‘hyperscepticism’, I felt my soul lifted up and filled with the purest joy when, on turning away from biblical studies publications I picked up a compendium of essays by a classicist and specialist in ancient Greek fiction to see what he had to say about Philostratus’s Life of Apollonius of Tyana.

It has been easy to dismiss them as unhistorical. There is no external evidence for any contacts between Apollonios and these emperors. The only event of this kind that is confirmed by an historical source (Dio Cassius, Roman History 67.18) is the scene in Ephesus in AD 96 when Apollonios in a vision sees Domitian being murdered in Rome and cries out in triumph (VA 8.26).

(Hägg, pp. 393f)

My god. Tomas Hägg is in a world where independent corroboration is assumed to be necessary in order to confirm the historicity of a text’s narrative.

Hägg, Tomas. 2004. “Apollonios of Tyana — Magician, Philosopher, Counter-Christ. The Metamorphoses of a Life.” In Parthenope, edited by Lars Boje Mortensen and Tormod Eide, 379–404. Museum Tusculanum Press.

PZ Myers is a biologist with a curiosity about how historians determine whether a person appearing in ancient records is considered historical or otherwise. He asks:

How does one assess people and events that are contradictory, vague or preserved only in stories passed on by word of mouth?

• As for figures about whom we have contradictory records, such as Socrates, we have seen whether and on what grounds his status is determined in Here’s How Philosophers Know Socrates Existed.
• As for the status of mythical persons such as Gyges we have seen How a Fairy Tale King Became Historical. (In this case the myth is determined to have a historical core.)
• As for reports of miracles, we see how historians work with the evidence in Even a Bayesian Historian Can Slip Up! (once).
• On vague rumours, such as stories about the Celts ritually killing their kings, we have considered how historians work at Doing History: Did Celts Ritually Kill Their Kings?
• When it comes to fictional accounts of something like the Exodus we have critically reviewed one work at Can we extract history from fiction?
• Or when our only written reports are by enemies, we have seen a historian at work in Doing History: How Do We Know Queen Boadicea/Boudicca Existed?
• We have also looked at general comments about methods by the renowned ancient historian M.I. Finley in An Ancient Historian on Historical Jesus Studies, — and on Ancient Sources Generally

And many more, including surveys of works by leading specialists in oral traditions such as Jan Vansina.

But if we are to ask PZ’s question as a lead in to the Jesus myth debate then it is worth pausing and taken one step back first.

Contradictory accounts? Yes. The gospels are certainly contradictory accounts of Jesus.

Vague? Yes. Some of the earliest statements about Jesus, such as some in Paul’s letters, are certainly vague.

Preserved via word of mouth before being written in the gospels? That is the general idea we encounter whenever we pick up a study of gospel origins. But how do we know that the gospel narratives were picked up from oral reports?

The reason we think they were is because this is what the stories in the gospels and Acts implies. The stories tell us that Jesus’ followers went out preaching after the resurrection, and since the first gospels were written by a subsequent generation we assume “the obvious” — that the material for these stories came to the authors from word-of-mouth preaching and traditions. But recall how this model of how the stories came to be known is circular by both New Testament and Old Testament scholars alike. We saw how the late Philip Davies pointed out this circularity with respect to the Old Testament accounts: “How did traditions of the sayings of Jesus and the events of his history reach the writers of the Gospels?”. We have also seen New Testament scholars acknowledge the same difficulty with respect to the gospels: It all depends where one enters the circle.

Yes, there is a passage in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians that speaks of a teaching being passed on, orally, about the resurrection. Nonetheless Paul also speaks of learning his “truth” through visions and the scriptures without owing any debt to a fellow human.

The truth is that the idea that oral tradition lies behind the gospels is a hypothesis. It is not a fact. Indeed, we have posted at length on the work of two scholars who have questioned that hypothesis: see the Brodie and the Henaut archives.

At the same time I think that surely all critical scholars of the gospels acknowledge that at the very least some of their narratives have been shaped by other literary narratives such as those found in the Jewish Scriptures. Some may add that the literary allusions to, say, Moses and Elijah are ways the authors have chosen to shape stories that originated in oral tradition. That’s fine, too, and it is another hypothesis that we need to consider in the light of the evidence and background knowledge of how Jewish and other authors worked.

It is often heard that the gospels are biographies, even very much like other ancient biographies. So it follows we can treat them as accounts of a genuine person. No, it doesn’t follow, unfortunately, because we even have ancient biographies that appear to be about historical persons but in fact are arguably entirely fictitious. Previous posts have demonstrated that even straightforward biographies of ancient persons, by contemporaries, such as the biography of Demonax, require historians to exercise caution: Did Demonax Exist? The Historicity Debate ‘Rages’ and Did the ancient philosopher Demonax exist? Besides, it is not a fact that the gospels are biographies. Other scholars disagree. So it is a hypothesis or an interpretation. There are other interpretations.

All of the above was written to address just a single point in the original question. If anything, I have hoped to point out that even the way we frame our questions can be an indication of our assumptions and therefore influence the answers we might find.

As we posted not so long ago, a philosopher of history reminds us that the real historical question is not: Did this event (e.g. a miracle) happen? But rather, “What is the best explanation of this set of documents that tells of a miracle of a certain kind?”

So we begin. I will in future posts comment on some of Eddie Marcus’s statements in the light of what various professional historians have written.