Biblical fan-fiction — not to be taken as gospel

In the same vein as Craig L. Blomberg in the previous chapter, Charles L. Quarles asks "What Should We Think About the Gospel of Peter?" (chapter 49 — the penultimate — of Dembski & Licona's Evidence for God).

We should, apparently, think that the Gospel of Peter is a knock-off of Matthew (plus part of Revelation). Quarles summarises the Gospel, then proceeds to dismiss it as fanciful embellishment of accepted canon. He mentions a theory propounded by the Jesus Seminar's John Dominic Crossan:

John Dominic Crossan, co-founder of the Jesus Seminar, which is an organization residing on the theological left, has claimed that the Gospel of Peter was the product of a complex evolution. The earliest layer of the Gospel was a hypothetical source called the “Cross Gospel.” Crossan argued that this early layer served as the only written source for the narrative of Jesus’ death and resurrection in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. After the production of the NT Gospels, a later editor inserted material from the four Gospels into the Cross Gospel. An even later editor noticed tensions between the original and newer material in this patchwork gospel and polished up the document.

Although Crossan’s theory has convinced few in the scholarly community, one scholar recently claimed “one can expect that all future research on Gos. Pet. will need to begin with a serious consideration of Crossan’s work” (Paul A. Mirecki, “Gospel of Peter,” ABD 5:278-81, esp. 280). If true, Crossan’s theory would have a devastating effect on confidence in the historical reliability of the accounts of Jesus’ death and resurrection in the four Gospels. According to Crossan’s theory, the sole source for the accounts of Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection in the four Gospels was a document that was already so laced with legend as to be wholly unreliable even before it reached the hands of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The four Gospels would be unreliable adaptations of an unreliable tradition replete with talking floating crosses and a super-sized Jesus whose head bumped the heavens when he walked out of the tomb!

Such amazing (dare one say "miraculous"?) occurrences would surely be out of place in a "Gospel" — so therefore they didn't happen. Quarles goes on to claim that the Gospel of Peter must be something written much later, based on the original(s) but including invented and incredible extra details — a biblical version of fan-fiction. As far as it agrees with canon, it's true — where it differs, it's false. This doesn't seem to be a very rigorous examination of the evidence, such as it is; the veracity of the Gospel of Peter is assessed on the basis of whether or not it confirms what is already believed — a classic case of confirmation bias.

How much of this is of any consequence? At this stage, with only one more chapter to go, it makes no difference. I've already raised my concern at the editors' decision to place The Question of the Bible at the end of their book; these final chapters do nothing to allay that concern.

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New Testament canon — a boat that must not be rocked

Craig L. Blomberg continues his exposition of scriptural arbitrariness with "What Should We Think About the Coptic Gospel of Thomas?" — chapter 48 of Dembski & Licona's Evidence for God.

The answer appears to be, "Whatever you'd like to think." Again Blomberg demonstrates the circularity of deciding what is or is not canonical. The Gospel of Thomas is taken to be "true" where it exhibits a measure of agreement with the so-called canonical gospels, and contentious where it disagrees. This inevitably makes the Gospel of Thomas not much use to anybody, because if it's only true where it agrees with the other gospels, and false otherwise, it doesn't add anything. If biblical scholars have already made up their minds, why should they give any attention to something that contradicts what they already know? This is the very essence of confirmation-bias and cherry-picking. It's as if the scholars know what the story in the New Testament is supposed to say, and therefore anything that doesn't agree with that story is excluded. If you cut out the stuff you disagree with, you will by definition be left with things you agree with. This is scholarship? Whatever else it might achieve, this doesn't inspire confidence in the Bible as a historical document.

The Bible says some outlandish things, to be sure. It may have been merely politic, therefore, to reject Thomas as a gospel that might push the entire collection over the edge of credibility:

Thomas, or Gnosticism more generally, can at first glance appear more "enlightened" from a modern (or postmodern) perspective than parts of the New Testament. But if one is going to accept a Gnostic world view, one has to take all of it. And the final saying of this enigmatic Gospel has Peter telling Jesus and the other disciples, "Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of life." Jesus replies, "I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the Kingdom of Heaven." Modern appropriations of Thomas seldom incorporate this perspective! Indeed, Thomas can appear superior to the canonical Gospels only by highly selective usage of its teachings. Despite what some may claim, it does not open any significant window into first-century Christian history and origins, only into its later corruption.

At the very least, I can't see that running well with the "women bishops" faction.

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An arbitrary collection of texts becomes "canonical"

The New Testament is a collection of books written at different times by apparently different people. (As such, by modern literary definitions it's actually part "collection" and part "anthology".) The collection has not always contained the same books, and in "The New Testament Canon" — chapter 47 of Dembski & Licona's Evidence for God — Craig L. Blomberg explains how things have changed since it was first "collected".

What he writes may be a fair account of the changes over two millennia, but it's not of much consequence. None of what he writes says anything about whether on not any particular book should or should not be included. None of it is evidence. The whole enterprise seems to be no more than a series of arbitrary assertions — if not by Blomberg then by those he cites.

An arbitrary assertion begins Blomberg's second paragraph:

It is true that God's law and God's word last forever.

Aside from the irrelevance of such an unsubstantiated statement, it illustrates a mindset that's not geared towards persuading an unbeliever. Later on in this three-page chapter — after discussing why the books are in a particular order (again mostly arbitrary, it seems) — Blomberg gives criteria for deciding what's in and what's out:

Indeed, three criteria prevailed for sifting the canonical from the non-canonical. First and foremost was apostolicity—authorship by an apostle or a close associate of an apostle—which thus, for all practical purposes, limited the works to the first hundred years or so of Christian history. Second was orthodoxy or non-contradiction with previously revealed Scripture, beginning with the Hebrew Scriptures that Christians came to call the Old Testament. Finally, the early church used the criterion of catholicity—universal (or at least extremely widespread) usage and relevance throughout the church. This excluded, for example, the Gnostic writings, which were accepted only in the sects from which they emanated.

Here we see the rôle of tradition contributing to arbitrariness. "Second was orthodoxy or non-contradiction with previously revealed Scripture..." So it's an accident of chronology that determines the running here. The problem is that it's begging the question: trying to decide what should be in scripture by referring to scripture itself.

While Catholics and Protestants to this day disagree on the canon of the Old Testament, both branches of Christianity along with Eastern Orthodoxy agree on the contents of the New. For sixteen centuries there has been no significant controversy within Christianity regarding the extent of the New Testament canon. Christians are on solid ground in affirming that these twenty-seven books belong in the New Testament and that other ancient writings were excluded for good reason.

Depends what you mean by good, I suppose — not that it really matters.

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An unreliable assessment of the reliability of the Gospels

In Craig L. Blomberg's "The Historical Reliability of the Gospels" — chapter 46 of Dembski & Licona's Evidence for God — one can almost sense the rose-tinted spectacles through which the author apparently reads his Bible, carries out his research and writes this essay on how he really, really wants the Gospels to be true, and how everything discovered about them confirms that they are indeed true, or are probably true, or more likely true than false, and how any evidence that suggests the Gospels are "unreliable" cannot itself be relied on because it has come up with the wrong answer.

Can the major contours of the portraits of Jesus in the New Testament Gospels be trusted?  Many critics would argue not.  The Jesus Seminar became the best-known collection of such critics during the 1990s as they alleged that only 18 percent of the sayings ascribed to Jesus and 16 percent of his deeds as found in the four canonical Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, plus the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, bore any close relationship to what he actually said and did.  At the same time, a much more representative cross-section of scholars from about 1980 to the present has inaugurated what has come to be called the Third Quest of the Historical Jesus, in which a greater optimism is emerging about how much we can know, from the Gospels, read in light of other historical cultural developments of the day.

I can't help wondering what this "much more representative cross-section of scholars" is representative of. Most likely it's representative of scholars who believe the Gospels are reliable. The fact that Blomberg states that "a greater optimism is emerging" shows that he's not assessing the evidence from a neutral standpoint. I accept that he has a view on the matter, but his phraseology here indicates he's in the grip of confirmation bias.

He goes on to reiterate a claim that has appeared previously in Evidence for God — that the sheer number of copies of manuscripts counts towards their accuracy, which simply (and obviously) isn't the case. If I have an unreliable document and photocopy it a hundred or even a thousand times, the reliability of that document remains unchanged.

Blomberg also mentions archeological evidence, but this was dealt with in the previous chapter and is similarly unconvincing — or irrelevant — as far as the supernatural claims of the Gospels are concerned. He then discusses the differences between the Gospel accounts, attempting to have his cake and eat it. Where they agree, the Gospels demonstrate their reliability. Where they disagree, that's entirely what he would expect, given their mode of transmission. On the one hand we have variations due to the vagaries of the oral tradition, on the other we have remarkable veracity due to the reliability of the oral tradition.

But first-century Judaism was an oral culture, steeped in the educational practice of memorization.  Some rabbis had the entire Hebrew Scriptures (the Christian Old Testament) committed to memory.  Memorizing and preserving intact the amount of information contained in one Gospel would not have been hard for someone raised in this kind of culture who valued the memories of Jesus' life and teaching as sacred.

I dare say a scholar or rabbi could have done this, as I'm sure could Derren Brown today. But the people who are alleged to have performed this feat of recollection were not known to be rabbis or scholars. Matthew, we are told, was a tax-collector, or maybe a publican, Mark was possibly Jesus's half brother. John was a fisherman, and Luke may have been a "compendium" character used for narrative effect and who never actually existed. Not that we even know that the Gospels were authored by the men whose by-lines they bear. Given what little we do know of these characters, therefore, it's stretching a point to suggest that the reliability of the Gospels can be founded on feats of memory the authors were unlikely to be able to perform.

Taking all the above into account, it would appear that the historical reliability of the Bible can be reliably assessed as "not reliable".

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Incredible miracles require credible evidence

In my previous post in this series I answered the question, "Who do YOU say Jesus was?" with the following:

It seems likely that Jesus was an itinerant preacher who developed a considerable local following, to the extent that he annoyed the established religion of the time, which got rid of him in an effort to preserve the status quo.

It's clear that I don't think Jesus was a supernatural being. But could a non-supernatural being perform supernatural actions?

Chapter 28 of Dembski & Licona's Evidence for God is "The Credibility of Jesus's Miracles" by Craig L. Blomberg, in which he puts forward the idea that the historical record of Jesus performing miracles is a true account. Unfortunately for his thesis he employs too many assumptions in order to come to this conclusion. For example, here's part of his attempt to establish the existence of God (a necessary precursor to the divinity — and therefore miracle-workings — of Jesus):

One of the most exciting and encouraging developments in recent years in this respect is the intelligent design movement. Pointing to numerous examples of fundamental entities in the natural and biological worlds that display irreducible complexity, even some scientists who are not Christians at all have acknowledged that there must be an intelligent being behind this creation. The entire "big-bang" theory for the beginnings of the universe leads to the question of what or who produced that "bang." (p 147.)

Blomberg's implication here is not just that there must have been a cause for these things, but that the cause was necessarily divine.

For others, philosophical arguments like those of the famous seventeenth-century Scotsman, David Hume, turn out to be more persuasive. While not alleging that miracles are impossible, the claim now is that the probability of a natural explanation will always be greater than that of a supernatural one. Phenomena could mislead, witnesses could be mistaken and, besides, explanations of events must have analogies to what has happened in the past. But it is not at all clear that any of these arguments mean that the evidence could never be unambiguous and the witnesses unassailable. And if every event must have a known analogy, then people in the tropics before modern technology could never have accepted that ice exists! (p 147-8.)

I think he's misappropriating Hume here. Hume stated that reports of miracles could only be accepted as true if the alternative explanation — that the reports are false — would have to be more miraculous than the miracles themselves. That rules out most of Jesus's miracles right at the start. And arguments by analogy carry little weight. Analogies are useful in explaining the general nature of things, but eventually all analogies break down because they are only "like" the things they are analogous to, not identical to them.

Blomberg goes on to challenge the idea that there were lots of reports of miracles in myth and legend that are similar to those allegedly performed by Jesus:

It is curious how often laypeople and even some scholars repeat the charge that the Gospel miracles sound just like the legends of other ancient religions without having carefully studied the competing accounts. For example, it is often alleged that there were virgin births and resurrection stories all over the ancient religious landscape. But, in fact, most of the alleged parallels to special births involve ordinary human sexual relations coupled simply with the belief that one of the persons was actually a god or goddess incognito. Or, as with the conception of Alexander the Great, in one legend almost a millennium later than his lifetime, a giant Python intertwined around Alexander's mother on her honeymoon night, keeping his father at a discrete distance and impregnating the young woman. (p 148.)

He seems to be claiming that the Gospel miracles were of a quite different order from the examples he gives, but I don't see it. Whether a person was actually a god or not has little effect on the credibility of the story when that story is already incredible. Consciously or not, Blomberg is using special pleading to impart undeserved credibility to his preferred account. He does the same with the resurrection story, but here we begin to see a pattern emerging.

If the miracles of Jesus are similar to other miraculous events reported in ancient texts, then that similarity lends the reports credence, because those reporting them knew what they witnessed and wrote about. If the miracles of Jesus were wholly different from those other miracles, they are thereby rescued from the skepticism duly applied to those other, more mundane miracles. Blomberg wants it both ways.

But if that doesn't work, he tells us that most of those other miraculous accounts were based on the miracles of Jesus anyway, in a frenzy of "me too!" copycat miracle-working. I can't help seeing some desperation here. He wants it to be true, but the "evidence" is really thin, and frankly unconvincing.

One might fairly question my own disposition regarding these accounts. I don't think they're true, and I have a bias in my interpretation of them. But we're talking about miracles — extraordinary events that require extraordinary evidence. That evidence is not forthcoming, and until it is, I'll go with the account that fits with my experience of the natural world around me — the world for which there is evidence.

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