Abuse of Ancient History by New Testament Scholars

[_huckelberry]

Thanks to both Kishkumen and Symmachus for informative and interesting posts here.

For better or worse I sat through the podcast in question. Licona did not disagree much with Bart Ehrman. He did present what he viewed as style conventions of the time for writing biography which he felt accounted for the mix of reportage and fictional construction in the Gospels. He would seem to view the various versions of discovery of resurrection as the result of authors filling in detail finer than their actual knowledge. Kishkumen could comment about whether he thought Licona was overplaying that consideration. I am unsure I want to push anybody to listen to the whole discussion however, it was not that much fun.

[_Morley]

Thanks to both Kishkumen and Symmachus for informative and interesting posts here.

I wholeheartedly agree. In walking everyone through this, you've both shown the patience and forbearance of Job.

[_Morley]

The Queen of Latin inscriptions, the first emperor Augustus’ Res Gestae divi Augusti (Deeds of the Divine Augustus), completed by Augustus in his final year of life, begins with an account of his revenge against Caesar’s assassins. Copies of this document were inscribed in stone in Turkey, and an almost complete version of the text was discovered at Ankara.

Amazing. Another example of important source information that never seems to make it into the books I read.

There's a lesson for me in this, somewhere.

[_Kishkumen]

For better or worse I sat through the podcast in question. Licona did not disagree much with Bart Ehrman. He did present what he viewed as style conventions of the time for writing biography which he felt accounted for the mix of reportage and fictional construction in the Gospels. He would seem to view the various versions of discovery of resurrection as the result of authors filling in detail finer than their actual knowledge. Kishkumen could comment about whether he thought Licona was overplaying that consideration. I am unsure I want to push anybody to listen to the whole discussion however, it was not that much fun.

Ancient biography is one reasonable comparandum for the gospels. But one must be wary of applying current standards and assumptions about modern biography to ancient biography. The careless or poorly informed listener will glow with confidence in the gospels when they hear that they are just like biographies based on their own experience of the genre. The gospels are more like ancient biographies than they resemble other things, but that does not mean we can be equally confident about all of the information they provide.

I will rely on one of my favorite examples, Suetonius' biography of Augustus. As is the case for Caesar, we have a lot of evidence for the life of Augustus, and Suetonius' biography can reliably be counted on to provide lots of excellent evidence for the first emperor's life. That said, Suetonius includes a fair amount of information that is unlikely to be true, or at least unlikely to be accurate in the way it is reported. For example, Suetonius reports the story of Augustus' conception when his mother Atia fell asleep in the temple of Apollo and woke to find a snake copulating with her. He also reports that the boy Augustus permanently silenced the frogs on his grandfather's farm merely by telling them to be quiet. He also tells us that a person who disrespected the former nursery of child Augustus was thrown out of it by a mysterious force. The final journey of Augustus is described in terms that resemble a drawn out apotheosis (deification). Many of the details of the latter are probably true, but the overall tone of Suetonius' account is fanciful.

If I were to ask a committed Christian whether she or he believed the miracle of Augustus and the frogs, that person would probably laugh in my face or say something about demons. In my mind, this is the kind of thing any non-Christian is being asked to believe about the gospels. Do I think they provide good evidence concerning the life of a man named Jesus who preached and did all of these things that resulted in a following of Jews, conflict with local authorities, and death at the hands of Roman authorities? For me, the answer is in the affirmative without question.

When it comes to judging all of the healing, miracle, and visionary stories, one must either accept all such biographical anecdotes on their face or reject them, in my opinion. Or, some methodologically consistent decision must be made regarding how to treat such things, at the very least. One cannot say that we all must believe in the resurrection but are not obliged to believe that Pythagoras bit and killed a poisonous snake. It would be logically inconsistent to do so. I choose to exclude the consideration of miraculous events, especially as interpreted to conform to later (and anachronistic) theological constructs, except to frame them as historically held beliefs and experiences. I will not join some hypothetical but altogether plausible Christians in saying Augustus did silence frogs by the power of a demon of hell as my way of explaining Suetonius' story. To do so would be absurd.

So, I am happy to say Jesus lived. I am happy to say that some of his contemporaries believed he did miraculously heal others and rose from the dead. I am not, on the basis of the historical record, going to argue that Jesus actually healed people and rose from the dead. Nor am I going to say that Apollo slept with Atia and was thus the father of Augustus. Nor that the emperor Vespasian magically healed two Alexandrians. It seems to me that Christians who use biography to buttress the legitimacy of the gospels are guilty of stopping short of the full implications of their argument. Are they ready to accept pagan biographies as evidence of the validity of pagan beliefs? No. They are forced to reframe these events in a way that conforms to their own theology. And yet they are happy to use the genre of biography to validate the historicity of their faith without fully and honestly accepting all of the ramifications of such a decision. They wouldn't get very far if they did.

[_SteelHead]

Great analogy Rev. Kish.

[_Kishkumen]

Great analogy Rev. Kish.

Thanks, but I am not sure what you mean by analogy here. Licona is reasonably claiming we can read the gospels like biography, but he is taking advantage of modern readers’/listeners’ assumptions about biography. If he were to apply his standards for the gospels to well known ancient biographies, then he would be obliged to accept the pagan miracle claims in these texts as valid. He can’t. He must impose his own theology on these texts or reject the miracle claims altogether. Yet at the same time he asks that everyone else accept miracle claims in the gospels at face value. It is a stunning double standard that reflects poor historical methodology.

[_SteelHead]

I am mangling the language. Perhaps example would be more appropriate.

[_DoubtingThomas]

It's not that I'm particularly skeptical of ancient history or anything

Why not?

[_Gray Ghost]

There is a difference between critical scholarship and scholarship that borders on apologetics. Critical scholarship adheres more closely to objective historical criteria than does scholarship that is driven by some kind of theological commitments. That is not to say that believers can't do critical scholarship as well. But in order to be critical scholars they must put their personal faith aside and act like critical scholars when they go to work.

I believe that it would be perfectly possible for believing scholars to affirm the historicity of Jesus without dubiously pressing the examples of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar into service. I am willing to accept the fact that believers will inevitably use optimistic datings of texts, the six degrees of separation from Jesus, and what have you. The misuse of Alexander and Caesar is really just bad methodology and completely unnecessary. It bothers me that we have such a profound degree of historical ignorance and illiteracy. It really baffles me how a person could have a PhD in New Testament and yet not understand the difference between the evidences for Caesar and Jesus.

Dale Martin is a good critical scholar of the New Testament and a believer. So is John Dominic Crossan. But when someone starts exaggerating the evidence for Jesus' resurrection, or seems to always prefer the most optimistic dating for texts, as you mention, you can be sure they are letting their theological presuppositions direct their scholarship. N.T. Wright, for instance, Has done some really impressive scholarship, but his theological commitments lead him by the nose, so his work seems to border on apologetics.

[_Johannes]

What an interesting thread.

Kish, a couple of things. First, I wouldn't associate this fellow Licona's musings on Caesar's assassination with "New Testament scholars". THis is the sort of thing that you encounter in pop apologetics, not in serious mainstream scholarship.

Second, you might be interested to know that Christian scholars in the past have grappled, with some degree of sophistication, with your point about biblical and pagan miracle stories. (I make this point not because I'm interested in asserting a case for the historicity of miracles, but because it's interesting from the perspective of intellectual history.) Luke Hooke wrote on this at some length in the 18th century, and from memory I think he mentioned the Vespasian stories explicitly. John Henry Newman also wrote about them in the 19th century.

Physics Guy, there is a small but persistent tradition of hyper-critical history which you might find interesting to research. Google "Jean Hardouin", a French scholar who thought that almost all ancient literature was forged. THere was also an Italian historian called Ettore Pais who argued (with great erudition) that several centuries of early Roman history were entirely fabricated.