Reply to Landon Hedrick

Could I be misinterpreting Price? Well, here's what he says.

[…] Since the autographa have not survived and nobody has laid eyes on them for 2,000 years, how could anybody possibly know what was in them – much less, which copies approximate most closely to them? Since there is nothing to which existing manuscripts can be compared, the very ideas of the original manuscripts and which manuscripts approximate most closely to them are useless ideas and should be abandoned. I can judge that a photo is a good likeness of you if and only if I have seen you and know what you look like. If I have not, then I am the last person on earth to ask. The situation is not improved by assuring me that there are thousands of photos of you. The fact is that I have never seen you, so tell million photos would not help. (98-99)

VR: I don't see how you get around it. He seems to be saying that it follows directly from the fact that we don't have the autographa, that we can have no good reason to believe that any of the copies are accurate, which leads to disastrous consequences in the Lincoln case. You can patch the argument up by saying that since the likenesses of Lincoln had to have been viewed by people who had seen him before he died, we have a connection to the original person that you don't have in the case of the NT manuscripts. But you're patching.  I didn't present the Lincoln case as proof that the we have a reliable text, (although I think that, for all practical purposes we do, for reasons given in Daniel Wallace's essay on Ehrman in Contending With Christianity's Critics), but simply that Price had produced a very weak argument against that claim. 

Pedantic? Maybe. But insofar as we are expected to trust Price as an authority on the Bible, I think such pedantry is worth engaging in.  

Hostility Bias

I want to separate two questions. My main claim is that even if we have reasons to believe that there is a substantial difference between the content of the original text and the earliest manuscripts, Price's argument for that is a nonstarter, since it seems to be arguing that whenever you have one copy or a million copies, and you can't get your hands on the original, you don't have any reason to believe that the copy resembles the original. That's what I took from his argument. What I take from that is that this is another instance where hostile critics of Scripture are so hostile that they will accept any argument that undermines anything an apologist might say, no matter how bad the argument. In other words, I am suggesting that skeptical scholars can. and often do, suffer from a hostility bias toward Scripture. That was the main point of my post. The only way to rebut that would be to argument that I was taking Price out of context, (since I did just lift the post out of Arizona Atheist's response to me), and that if you read the rest of what he says, he isn't really making the claim I am attributing to him. If there are other ways of argument for doubt about the manuscripts we have, that doesn't alter the claim I was making about Price. Ehrman's arguments, I take it, are better, though I don't buy them by any stretch of the imagination.

I think a lot of "movement atheists" put confidence in people like Price and Carrier on the grounds, presumably, that they are "outsiders" (and in Price's case, he's an exbeliever), and not subject to a Christian bias. Such confidence is, I believe, unjustified. It is also possible to be biased against Christianity, a concept that is hard for some people to digest.

On Bible Manuscripts, Bad Arguments, and Honest Abe

This is from Robert Price's "The Case Against the Case for Christ." It was used in response to a discussion of the textual adequacy of the Bible in comparison to the Qur'an by Arizona Atheist. 

[…] Since the autographa have not survived and nobody has laid eyes on them for 2,000 years, how could anybody possibly know what was in them – much less, which copies approximate most closely to them? Since there is nothing to which existing manuscripts can be compared, the very ideas of theoriginal manuscripts and which manuscripts approximate most closely to them are useless ideas and should be abandoned. I can judge that a photo is a good likeness of you if and only if I have seen you and know what you look like. If I have not, then I am the last person on earth to ask. The situation is not improved by assuring me that there are thousands of photos of you. The fact is that I have never seen you, so tell million photos would not help. (98-99)

I am not claiming that rebutting Price on this point refutes AA's overall response to me, which I have been slow to respond to, even though I have meant to post on it for a long time. However, may I point out that this is a horrendous argument. I have never seen Abe Lincoln in person. I can't dig him up and see what he looked like. But his picture is on the penny and the five dollar bill, there's a statue in the Lincoln memorial, and plenty of other likenesses. By Price's logic, however, I have no idea what he looked like. In fact, since I've never seen George W. Bush, but only TV images and pictures, I have no idea what he looks like either. 

Really. This is a much-admired Bible scholar in the Infidel community, and a contributor to The Christian Delusion. How does he get away with such arrant nonsense?

Selling the Farm, or the Price is Right

Walter: I love your Robert Price quote:

For what can it profit a man if he gets all the local titles and offices right, if what he is trying to prove is that people in these locations healed the sick with their snot rags, survived the bites of poisonous serpents, brushed themselves off unhurt following fatal stonings, resurrected teenagers their sermons had bored to death, blinded some and killed others merely by a word of power?



I'm afraid that getting an 'A' on an ancient civics test is of no real help in vindicating these wonder stories.

First of all, what this doesn't give us is an explanation as to how Luke got an A on his ancient civics test.  He didn't have a civics textbook. He didn't have a library with all that information in it. He couldn't have looked it up in the Encyclopedia Romanica. He didn't have the benefit of modern archaeology, which is how I know that he got so many things right. Steven, (and notice that Price is admitting that he does merit an A in ancient civics). He couldn't look up the information on the internet. Everyone who studies the Book of Acts in Sunday School knows that it's the book that's all over the map. Luke has to know civics and geography from Jerusalem to Malta, and it's the civics of the time, not of 50 years later. So, how'd he do it? He either was an actual companion of Paul, or he had a lot of contact with Paul later, or he got it through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, which is what you're stuck with if you, like Pervo, Price and Carrier, want to put Acts in the second century.

I have yet to see any of these people explain this evidence. You say Bruce is dated. That's chronological snobbery, a rampant disease in modern biblical studies. Well, evidence is not dated. How do they deal with the evidence? How do they explain how all this accurate information got into Acts? Disparaging comments like this don't explain anything.

And why does Price think "passing a civics test" does not profit? Because he can't believe what Luke reports. Why can't he believe what Luke reports? Because Miracles Do Not Happen. Hume, not the inductive evidence, is wagging the dog. I have already admitted that people have different priors. What is sufficient evidence for some is not sufficient evidence for others. But Price has virtually admitted that he would reject any ancient evidence in favor of the miraculous, even if it bit him in the nose.

Bruce says "accuracy is a habit of mind." You don't "ace the civics test" without being a) being very interested in accuracy, and b) having access to the necessary information. Compare Luke's score on a civics test with that of Philostratus in his account of Appollonius of Tyana, who has Appollonius doing his thing in Nineveh centuries after it was destroyed. You don't find ancient annals riddled with supernatural wonders on the one hand, and accurate geography and civics on the other. If Christianity, at its founding, was attended with miracles, then we should expect the books recording its founding to be of just the character. If it all happened naturalistically, if miracles do not and did not happen, then how do we get work laden with miracle reports with so much accurate information about so many things?

In short, I think the character of Luke's work gives us very strong inductive evidence that Luke was "on board" with Paul. It also provides significant evidence in support of Luke's claims concerning the miraculous. Whether you think this evidence is sufficient depends on the prior probabilities you bring to the discussion.