Intro:

This is part of my review series on the skeptical anthology, "The Empty Tomb: Jesus Beyond the Grave" (ET).  Basically I've lifted this little bit from my material on chapter 4 of that book, which is the essay, "Apocryphal Apparitions: 1 Corinthians 15:3-11 as a Post-Pauline Interpolation" written by Robert Price (which can actually be found many places online).

The reason I'm bumping this up is because J. P. Holding and Richard Carrier recently debated in person on the related topic of the textual reliability of the New Testament and I hope to build on what's gone before between skeptics and Christians.  I wanted to split my massive posts on the material into readable blog nuggets anyway rather than leaving them as book length posts.

Steve Hays from Triablogue (in the ebook, "This Joyful Eastertide") and Stephen Davis (his criticisms are in a philosophy paper you'd have to pay for) are addressing Price's arguments.  I've tried to play all their points against each other to see what the arguments amount to from an outsider perspective.

In this case, Hays tries to pit Robert Price against agnostic scholar, Bart Ehrman:

Ehrman, however, makes his case on the basis of comparative textual criticism, based on different kinds of textual variants.  But that would constitute external rather than internal evidence. So Price is citing Ehrman to support a position to which Ehrman does not subscribe.

So Hays honestly thinks Ehrman believes there are NO interpolations before the time period where manuscript comparisons are viable and that ONLY comparative manuscript evidence is viable in finding early interpolations?  That's just plain silly.  Ehrman recites the Bible Skeptics Creed just like the rest of us anti-Jesus drones (and pay no attention to his most recent book, "Forged: Writing in the Name of God--Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are").  It is as though Hays didn't read Price's note:

Ibid., 614; cf. Bart D. Ehrman, The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 277: "this study has reinforced the notion that theologically motivated changes of the text are to be anticipated particularly during the early centuries of transmission, when both the texts and the theology of early Christianity were in a state of flux, prior to the development of a recognized creed and an authoritative and (theoretically) inviolable canon of Scripture." See also pages 55 and 97.

Clearly Bart and Bob are on the same page here, despite Hays' shallow attempt to pit them against each other.  

But Hays adds:

In addition, Ehrman admits that “by far the vast majority [of textual variants] are purely ‘accidental,’ readily explained as resulting from scribal ineptitude, carelessness, or fatigue.”

If only the tug of war here in this chapter weren't over one wittle passage, that might mean something.  Hays goes on to quote Ehrman's critics and I agree with them.  Ehrman often oversells his case.  But, as I just said, this is just over one wittle passage that happens to be vastly important to conservative scholarship (truly a thin thread to hang your explanatory hat on).  And petty human politics behind some overly convenient inserted verses is more probable than something supporting a genuine historical supernatural core any day of the week (as I've explained before).   Further the "appearance" claims of 1 Corinthians 15 aren't particularly strong anyway in any event.  So it's a lot of fuss over nothing.

Stephen Davis definitely read Price's Ehrman footnote and says:

Price sympathetically quotes Bart D. Ehrman, who says: "theologically motivated changes of the text are to be anticipated particularly during the early centuries of transmission, when both the texts and the theology of early Christianity were in a state of flux, prior to The development of a recognized creed..." If we were talking about the church's theology of the incarnation or the Trinity, this claim might have some plausibility. But when we are talking about the assertion that God raised Jesus from the dead, Ehrman's argument is hardly convincing. I would have thought that everyone recognizes that this claim was bedrock in the Christian movement from the very beginning. At that point, there was a recognized creed.

But "...the assertion that God raised Jesus from the dead..." is what the entire rest of 1 Corinthians chapter 15 is about.  The premise doesn't vanish from the argument without verses 3-11.  A later Christian group may have had an interest in re-characterizing the nature of that core assertion just as Price has been arguing.  If it is just a recharacterization that doesn't destroy the argument, then there's no reason that Ehrman's argument can't apply.

Further, Price challenges Davis to defend that the resurrection really was the core assertion of the original Christian movement:

Was the resurrection of Jesus the bedrock teaching of Christianity from the hour anybody first believed? We cannot assume that. (And by the way, my argument does not suppose that Christians had a loose grasp on Jesus’ resurrection, only that the list of appearances is an interpolation.) I guess Davis owes us, for the sake of the argument, an explanation of why he rejects Burton L. Mack’s rejection of the Big Bang model, held by Bultmann as well as by Calvin and Luther, i.e., that some Easter morning experience is the singularity from which all Christianity expanded. What if, instead, there were many types of Jesus or Christ belief, and that some developed resurrection faith to answer certain needs, while others (e.g., the Q community) did not? It’s at least an open question whether the resurrection doctrine was the beginning of Christianity.

Haven't seen a response to this anywhere and I'm not qualified to take this any further.

Outro:

Hays just doesn't seem to pay too close attention to the arguments he's addressing.  He was covering a lot of ground with "This Joyful Eastertide," but it seems his book length review greatly suffered for that on numerous counts as I will be demonstrating again and again (so stay tuned).  And Davis just gets things wrong in no particular pattern it seems (at least not one that I've discerned yet).

Ben

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

Atheist/historian Richard Carrier recently debated Christian apologist/librarian J. P. Holding on the "Textual Reliability of the New Testament" or more specifically, "Do we have what they had?" Tidbits are trickling through the internet, so I'll give my preliminary sentiments based on where I happen to be coming from.

There are so many debates nested around NT studies between educated believers and skeptics that no matter how dedicated you are, you simply can't dive into every single one of them in depth (and apparently this doesn't change even when you are a professional, and if you listen to others, it seems infinitely worse).  It seems I tend to be aware of many of them and at least have some idea of how the positions are argued, but the well justified clinching details that may sell one case over another are often beyond reach for practicality sake (especially if I identify upfront the end result of any given debate as having either little impact or relevance overall in any event, such as with the documentary hypothesis). 

Even having reviewed the entire dialog between skeptics and Christians over the arguments made by Robert Price in "The Empty Tomb: Jesus Beyond the Grave" (including Price's response to those critics), it didn't really go that far.  Either there just isn't very far to go, no one happens to know how to make those cases in depth, or for whatever reason the sensibilities of either party just never takes us there (or some combination).  I've read a few of Bart Ehrman's books on the topic and even those didn't seem to have a lot going for them in this regard.  I'm hopeful that Carrier has pushed that envelope as far as it can go based on the available evidence since he seemed eager to have this kind of debate.  And at least Holding seems aware enough of skeptic arguments and what actual trained historians have said on the Christian side of things to perhaps shed that kind of light the other direction.  Maybe we'll walk away with a clearer view overall.   

So...I'm just asking for more depth and intellectual honesty from both sides.  I want to see people cite the actual sources, articulate their specific claims without relying on innuendo and worldview prejudice, and be reasonable with the relative weaknesses of their cases.  It's also nice to know (here and here) that perhaps the conversation moved up out of nonsensical defensive rhetoric land and into "explaining what the deal is" land thanks to those healthy social pressures of in person debate which tend to summon their better foot forward rather than the empathy-deficient internet banter does (though some exceptions do apply).  Perhaps folks on both sides can learn to take it down a notch thanks to this event.

Intro:

This is part of my review series on the skeptical anthology, "The Empty Tomb: Jesus Beyond the Grave" (ET).  Basically I've lifted this little bit from my material on chapter 4 of that book, which is the essay, "Apocryphal Apparitions: 1 Corinthians 15:3-11 as a Post-Pauline Interpolation" written by Robert Price (which can actually be found many places online). 

The reason I'm bumping this up is because J. P. Holding and Richard Carrier recently debated in person on the related topic of the textual reliability of the New Testament and I hope to build on what's gone before between skeptics and Christians.

Chris Price from Christian CADRE, J. P. Holding from Tektonics (in an essay that was online, but is now in the book, "Trusting the New Testament"), Steve Hays from Triablogue (in the ebook, "This Joyful Eastertide"), Stephen Davis (which is in a philosophy paper you'd have to pay for), and Norman Geisler are addressing Price's arguments.  I've tried to play all their points against each other to see what the arguments amount to from an outsider perspective.

Chris Price says:

However, Holding says:

Robert Price had quoted William O. Walker Jr. to explain himself (page 71):

...the surviving text of the Pauline letters is the text promoted by the historical winners in the theological and ecclesiastical struggles of the second and third centuries….In short, it appears likely that the emerging Catholic leadership in the churches ‘standardized’ the text of the Pauline corpus in the light of ‘orthodox’ views and practices, suppressing and even destroying all deviant texts and manuscripts.  Thus it is that we have no manuscripts dating from earlier than the third century; thus it is that all of the extant manuscripts are remarkably similar in most of their significant features; and thus it is that the manuscript evidence can tell us nothing about the state of the Pauline literature prior to the third century.

Although Hays complains:

I imagine someone like Hays would be disgruntled if we entertain both options since at this point the evidence would be compatible with either, right? Do we have to be dogmatic either way? 

Holding seems to think we do:

I don't see anyone claiming that there MUST have been interpolations. The skeptical case (as far as I can piece it together from Price, Bart Ehrman, and Carrier) seems to be: 

1.  We know such things did happen later (when it is easy to prove with manuscript evidence). 

2.  Inference to naturalism implying more modest starting conditions to any given religious movement. 

3.  Obvious political and/or religious motives given the ubiquity of such human politics. 

4.  Opportunity and our ignorance one way or the other in key early stages. 

5.  How much is on the line to believe otherwise (a worldview is making a pitch to the rest of the world). 

So, it is reasonable to assume that there *probably* were (as in at least more likely than not) and that there's no compelling reason to suppose we can rest assured there weren't.  This argument has the most force given 2 combined with 5 and it only has meaning when Christians in a positive sense wish to assert their arbitrary confidence that their religion *didn't* get tweaked in important ways when no one was looking. 

So apart from a much larger worldview and personal context, the skeptical argument doesn't seem to have much compelling force on the spot.  If this were just some random academic question between two professors of historical magic in a world filled with legitimate magical claims and we wanted to happen to know about particular instances in history where particular individuals inflated their cases, there really wouldn't be a lot to work with.  We'd just shrug our shoulders and walk away it seems. 

Holding calls Walker's line of reasoning a "fallacy of association" (as in, just because kid x hangs out with pot heads doesn't necessarily mean he smokes pot, too) as though certainties are being presented.  It is logically possible that there were no interpolations (just like it is possible you hang out with potheads and don't join in) and I don't think Price, Walker, Carrier, or Ehrman would disagree with that (though your mom probably won't buy the "fallacy of association" defense).  Why does Holding feel the need to overstate the claim?  Is it because there's no defense against these mundane uncertainties?  

Davis says that Robert Price wants to make up for the lack of manuscript evidence:

Indeed, he would no longer have to argue, along with William G. Walker, that powerful and sinister forces in the Great Church around the year 300 made sure to suppress earlier texts of 1 Corinthians that did not include 15:3-11.

Robert Price, in response to Davis, says:

Hays seems to have his doubts:

Geisler has his doubts, too, and calls it implausible speculation:

...[Price's] argument from the adage that “history is written by the winners” (71) is implausible and contrary to fact. For this is not always true. Indeed, on the accepted dates of 1 Corinthians (A.D. 55-56) by even most critical scholars, Christianity was not a political winner. In fact, it was not a winner until centuries later.

Um...I think by "political winner" Price is talking about Christian sect on Christian sect action...not Christian sect on Pagan action.

Holding asserts:

And Hays complains:

At the very least, an elementary distinction needs to be drawn between the active destruction of extant writings and the failure to preserve them.

As though Carrier were psychic, in a footnote, in another chapter of ET (that book both Hays and Holding are responding to), Carrier partially agrees with Holding and makes that necessary "elementary distinction:"

Hays admits he has no imagination:

Cf. James Robinson, “Jesus from Easter to Valentinus (or to the Apostles’ Creed),” Journal of Biblical Literature 101 (1982): pp. 5-37.

So unfortunately this "dialog" ends with a whole bunch of back and forth assertions and an even bigger reading list as though between 7 or so authors commenting we couldn't do better than that?  *sigh*

Outro:

I've been working on my review of The Empty Tomb off and on since 2007ish and have always been disappointed with the lack of detailed argument from either side.  Getting intimate and non-defensive interaction that clarifies the state of the evidence would be nice.  Let's hope we get somewhere with more info on the Carrier vs. Holding debate.

Ben