April 13, 2011
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Textual Reliability of the New Testament?
Intro:
Previously I went over the dialog between Christians and skeptics over the possibility that the early Christian churches conveniently adjusted their sacred writings for religious and/or political ends. That was a sort of a warm up to getting into the Richard Carrier vs. J. P. Holding debate. And...we're still warming up here (see my last post on expectations) with the organizer of the event's preliminary remarks on the basic cases that each party laid out.
Cameron says:
Throughout his presentation Carrier focused on the period 50-120 A.D. This is when the NT was initially written and copied; it's also the period we know the least about because we have no surviving manuscripts from this early in the NT's transmission. This is significant, according to Carrier, because the copies of the text we do have were made to agree with each other (harmonized) where they originally disagreed, contain interpolations (later additions not found in the original text) and spelling errors, some of which have serious implications.
Carrier is not completely wrong in his analysis. The text was edited in hundreds of places as it was copied, and he provided several examples for each of three kinds of changes he mentioned. But the important question is one of significance. And despite illustrating that changes were made, I think this is where Carrier failed to make his case that we can't know what was originally written. I'll look at some of these examples in the next couple of days
Significance? We'll have to see the details of course, but generally speaking there is already significance. For those of you that read apologetic rebuttals like I do, the "significance" is that skeptical explanations of the evidence do not have to take seriously every little detail of every account. When all is said and done, the "evidentialists" want to take the Bible at face value like "The Bible tells me so" is a reasonable position. Perhaps secretly they are advocating for Biblical inerrancy even when they attempt a "minimal facts" approach, or their subjective level of trust in the New Testament documents simply shines through no matter what. They may just not process reasonable doubt and this is an important level of ambiguity to point the skeptical stick at. Skeptical explanations often get portrayed as "magic bullet" explanations just because the apologist isn't willing to own up to how ridiculous it is that they won't doubt a single detail from the texts. Skeptical explanations of the naturalistic variety are necessarily more general, because we don't trust what we have for many reasons. Carrier's case here contributes to that end (or at least, is meant to).
I attempted to explain where I thought an informed skeptic is typically coming from when engaging the historical claims of Christianity on this topic and it would be a shame if Christians ignored the basic principles of the infamous "outsider test for faith" expecting a massive amount of evidence to drop out of the sky (or emerge from history in this case) and push back on their level of Christian-encultured incredulity. In any other similar circumstances, we probably wouldn't be that trusting of the origins of a religious or political movement if that movement had ample opportunity to fudge the data in various ways even if we had no definitive reason to believe they did. If these were ancients Democrats and Republicans making their case, and you were on either opposite side of that fence, would you just believe the one side of the story? Would you take their factual claims at face value? Would you believe in their assertions of sincerity? What would you make of the silence or absence of their opposition from the historical record? Etc.
Their credibility may not be guilty until proven innocent, but it won't be compelling until thoroughly scrutinized and heavily proven, either. Any historical assertions are allowed to fly otherwise as long as history just so happens not to directly bust the claims in some definitive way.
Outro:
Note, that David Fitzgerald had a pretty good comment on that post.
Video and/or audio on the debate is still unavailable, but apparently it is forthcoming.
Ben
