Archaeological Confirmation of Acts 18:2

From Christian Cadre.

Gays won't inherit the kingdom? Was something lost in translation

Theogeek seem to think that something was indeed lost in translation in the traditional reading of this passage in  I Corinthians.

C. H. Dodd on late-dating the New Testament

For much of this late dating there is little real evidence. This point was made by C. H. Dodd, arguably the greatest English-speaking biblical scholar of the century. In a letter that serves as an appendix to Robinson’s book Redating the New Testament, Dodd wrote: “I should agree with you that much of the late dating is quite arbitrary, even wanton, the offspring not of any argument that can be presented, but rather of the critic’s prejudice that, if he appears to assent to the traditional position of the early church, he will be thought no better than a stick-in-the-mud.”5


Hostility bias, anyone? 

Levenson's definition of what it is to be a critical scholar

I went looking for a quote that Loftus used a few times about what it means to be a critical scholar. 


Jon D. Levenson, Professor at Harvard Divinity School in the Department of Near Eastern Studies and Civilizations, offered a great definition of what a critical scholar is when he wrote they “are prepared to interpret the text against their own preferences and traditions, in the interest of intellectual honesty.”


I like this definition, but I have trouble seeing how you can apply it to other people in any way that doesn't beg the question. I think we humans have a natural tendency to think that someone has done this when they agree with us, and if they disagree with us, they are following their preferences and traditions. I am thinking of people like Eta Linneamann, who went from a very liberal scholar to a very conservative one. Preferences and traditions could and should include prevailing winds in scholarship. Those can exercise as much peer pressure on scholars as can the religious tradition in which one grew up. Assuming that we call the more skeptical view left-wing, and the more believing views right-wing, can we call any move to the left a sign that one is a critical scholar, while any move to the right is a sign that one has become uncritical? That sounds a tad question-begging. 


Another example would be John A. T. Robinson, the Anglican bishop who shocked conservatives with Honest to God, then shocked conservatives with Redating the New Testament. 


I love intellectual honesty, so there is something appealing about this definition. I am just afraid that it is likely to be applied in a question-begging manner, to disenfranchise and marginalize conservative scholars. 

Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism

The well-known C. S. Lewis essay. Tim McGrew probably knows some people from the history of  apologetics who have made similar arguments.

The Anybody Who Is Anybody Fallacy

Academics have a bad habit of acting as if there is a consensus of scholarship because there is consensus within their own in-group. People will say "everybody is a materialist," and then when you point out people who aren't, it is assumed that those people are somehow marginal. It's the Anybody Who Is Anybody Fallacy. There's no principled way of deciding who to marginalize.


The same thing seems to happen amongst biblical scholars, but it doesn't mean much of anything. I asked a question in my response to John earlier which he didn't answer. If you marginalize all the evangelicals, who else are you going to marginalize? Brown? Fitzmeyer? Metzger? Wright? Bauckham? C. H. Dodd? Joachim Jeremias? Eta Linneamann? Luke Timothy Johnson? Why them and not Robert Price, who seems as marginal on the left as conservative scholars are on the right?

Further, if being a credentialed Bible scholar is so important, why are you and Richard Carrier speaking about these subjects at all? Neither of you are credentialed Bible scholars.

Many of the issues in biblical scholarship are philosophical, and not simply matters of biblical study. The problem of the antecedent probability of the miraculous is an important issue for scholarship, and yet I attended a conference of philosophers and biblical scholars in which one biblical scholar confessed complete ignorance of the debate on the subject, and who admitted that he had followed Bultmann blindly on the subject. (Bultmann's electric light argument against miracles is one of the worst arguments I have ever heard). Craig's debate with Ehrman did show that Ehrman had no understanding of the relevant philosophical issues either.

Hume, Biblical Criticism, and Wagging the Dog

A redated post. 

 A response to some discussion on Debunking Christianity.

A lot of biblical criticism is done by people who either accept Hume's essay on miracles, or are influenced by people who accept Hume's essay. This goes all the way back to David F. Strauss in the 19th Century. This poses a profound question as to whether the biblical-critical dog is wagging the philosophical tail, or whether the philosophical tail is wagging the biblical-critical dog. This was the point that Lewis was making when he wrote his book Miracles; A Preliminary Study. Preliminary to what? Preliminary to the actual study of the biblical documents. If you are coming to those documents thinking that miracles are maximally improbable, then you get one set of results. Bultmann was the representative figure of a scholar of that persuasion. All Bultmann said was you couldn't live in the modern world and consistently believe in the New Testament miracles. Bart Ehrman is another example of present-day vintage, as are the scholars of the Jesus Seminar.

Now if I want to know whether the New Testament miracles have occurred or did not occur, having the testimony of some expert who has claimed to have "discovered" that they didn't might be a tad suspicious unless I know that this is a scholar who would have accepted the miracle claims had the evidence been there. If we know, in advance, that miracles cannot occur, then perhaps the scholar is applying Sherlock Holmes' maxim: "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." However, if the scholar is entering the field thinking that the miraculous is not the impossible, then we are likely to get different results.

In 1990, when I was a junior fellow at Notre Dame's Center for Philosophy of Religion, I attended a conference in which a number of biblical scholars got into it with some Christian philosophers, and there it seemed to me that the biblical scholars were on the whole more skeptical than the philosophers, and that they were largely unconscious of the philosophical presuppositions underlying their own work.

I took Critical Introduction to the Bible from two professors at the liberal Candler School of Theology in the mid-1970s. The New Testament professor was Dr. Arthur Wainwright, and his overall conclusion was that you can bring anti-miraculous presuppositions into biblical scholarship and end up like Bultmann, or you can go in thinking miracles possible, in which case you end up believing in the central Christian miracles, as Dr. Wainwright in fact did.

Nothing I have read in biblical studies since has altered the perspective I took from Dr. Wainwright's course.

The sounds of silence

I have my differences with the folks over at Triablogue, but some considerable agreements as well. This post, by Paul Manata, drives a well-deserved stake through arguments from silence.

Did Matthew, Mark, Luke and John invent the novel?

Or were they trying to report the facts? People familiar with ancient myths and legends see a huge difference between the New Testament and ancient myths and legends.

“If [a man] tells me that something in a Gospel is legend or romance, I want to know how many legends and romances he has read, . . . I have been reading poems, romances, vision-literature, legends, myths all my life. I know what they are like. I know that not one of them is like this. Of this text there are only two possible views. Either this is reportage ... pretty close up to the facts ... [o]r else, some unknown writer in the second century, without known predecessors, or successors, suddenly anticipated the whole technique of modern, novelistic, realistic narrative. If it is untrue, it must be narrative of that kind. The reader who doesn’t see this has simply not learned to read.” – C. S. Lewis, “Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism” (1959)

A question for biblical skeptics

Suppose, surviving from ancient times, we found four manuscripts about the life and teachings of Rabbi Hillel. These works were all written within, oh, say, 70 years of the main events of Hillel's life. They are similar in a number of ways, although each written from a somewhat different perspective, with some differences of detail. They are all written by people who were clearly from the School of Hillel, by people who wanted others to accept the teachings of Hillel. However, they claim no miracles at all. Manuscript evidence shows goes back into antiquity and assures us that what we have today is very close to the original autographs.

Would we say "Gosh, we really do know a lot about Hillel here. There are a lot of things we can be reasonably sure of about him, especially where the accounts coincide." Or would we say "Just propaganda. We need some independent sources, from people who weren't from the School of Hillel. Then we'd have some real information."

It's hard to imagine the Bart Ehrmans and Rudlof Bultmanns of the world being so skeptical if the Gospels were about a non-miracle-working Hillel, rather than a miracle-working Jesus.

Bible-pounding atheists

Here is a typical argument used by many atheists, the argument against Scripture.


Is this just proof-texting and bad hermeneutics? Or is there some substance to this line of argumentation?

Does Archaeology Support the Bible?

I knew about these types of arguments when I was a teenager, reading Halley's Bible Handbook. But some archaeologists are arguing quite the opposite.