Abuse of Ancient History by New Testament Scholars

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_Johannes
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Re: Abuse of Ancient History by New Testament Scholars

Post by _Johannes »

And on this:

Physics Guy wrote:But how sure should we really be that the end result of this chain of copying was an accurate account of what really happened a thousand years before? How unlikely is it that someone made an honest mistake, somewhere along the line of recopying, and mistook a rumor or urban legend for gospel (sorry) truth?

Frankly, if I hear that we have Brutus confessing to Cicero, "I stabbed him!", I can't help thinking Isn't this a little too good to be true? Am I really just an ignorant lay person for thinking that? Or are professional historians a little too invested in the assumptions without which their trade would be futile to admit how uncertain everything is?


Symmachus has already engaged with this, but I would add that the possibility of interpolations in ancient texts is well known and part of the ordinary work of both textual critics and ancient historians. There are numerous famous interpolations in the Bible - Google "comma Johanneum" if this sort of thing interests you. Take a look at Josephus' testimony about Jesus too (the "Testimonium Flavianum").

INterpolations can be detected by a numer of methods. A particular phrase may be absent in the earliest manuscripts or papyri. It may use language which is inconsistent with the rest of the text. Its content may be strange (or "too good to be true"). It may be suspiciously missing when other ancient authors quote the text. As I say, sifting this stuff is part of the ordinary work of the scholar.
_Philo Sofee
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Re: Abuse of Ancient History by New Testament Scholars

Post by _Philo Sofee »

Johannes wrote:And on this:

Physics Guy wrote:But how sure should we really be that the end result of this chain of copying was an accurate account of what really happened a thousand years before? How unlikely is it that someone made an honest mistake, somewhere along the line of recopying, and mistook a rumor or urban legend for gospel (sorry) truth?

Frankly, if I hear that we have Brutus confessing to Cicero, "I stabbed him!", I can't help thinking Isn't this a little too good to be true? Am I really just an ignorant lay person for thinking that? Or are professional historians a little too invested in the assumptions without which their trade would be futile to admit how uncertain everything is?


Symmachus has already engaged with this, but I would add that the possibility of interpolations in ancient texts is well known and part of the ordinary work of both textual critics and ancient historians. There are numerous famous interpolations in the Bible - Google "comma Johanneum" if this sort of thing interests you. Take a look at Josephus' testimony about Jesus too (the "Testimonium Flavianum").

INterpolations can be detected by a numer of methods. A particular phrase may be absent in the earliest manuscripts or papyri. It may use language which is inconsistent with the rest of the text. Its content may be strange (or "too good to be true"). It may be suspiciously missing when other ancient authors quote the text. As I say, sifting this stuff is part of the ordinary work of the scholar.


Not only interpolations, but entire genres invented in order to get a particular theological point in the debate anciently. I mean, the vast majority, and by vast, I mean well over 95% of all Christian and Jewish pseudepigraphic and apocryphal literature, by the assessment of scholarship, is invention and isn't actual history, which is why it supposedly was either thrown out of the mainstream or left to rot. To imagine the New Testament hasn't suffered from invention is highly improbable I would suppose. Knowing now what we do, that 95% of ancient faith literature is suspect and some truly highly incredible as in implausible as in simply invented, it ought to make us seriously pause before saying there is much to know about what happened in New Testament history. It is why all we get in New Testament scholarship and apologetics, is merely little snippets and crumbs, exactly as we see with Book of Mormon attempts to put the literature on a sure footing. It is simply not.
It's like Mormons saying we have to be careful with the Bible because of translation issues. But those are the least of the worries. Original fiction invented always remains fiction no matter how carefully one translates it, or what ancient context one brings up to justify understanding it's place in the literature. If it was invented originally as a story, a story it will always be, such as the "Good Samaritan" parable of Jesus. To try and find actual bones of the good guy is to obliviate any reality to the point of the invented story. I suspect the majority of "stories" about Jesus are in the same boat, only crafted by later writers, as Mark is known to have used extensively the Old Testament stories for his own Jesus stories. There is some astonishing evidence that Mark simply "updated" the ancient stories he possessed from the Hebrew scriptures, what we call the Old Testament. The Elijah/Elisha stories was one of his major primary base to rewrite and created a new updated "modern" version for his own audience.
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_Kishkumen
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Re: Abuse of Ancient History by New Testament Scholars

Post by _Kishkumen »

Johannes wrote:Kish, a couple of things. First, I wouldn't associate this fellow Licona's musings on Caesar's assassination with "New Testament scholars". THis is the sort of thing that you encounter in pop apologetics, not in serious mainstream scholarship.


Maybe not this error in particular, but I am accustomed to hearing errors in Roman history from New Testament scholars, for example, at SBL and elsewhere. It’s not their area, so I don’t expect perfection. Honestly, I wish this were more surprising than it is. Doubtless some scholars are much sharper than others. But I think you may be defending with the best in mind whereas I am criticizing with the average in mind.

Johannes wrote:Second, you might be interested to know that Christian scholars in the past have grappled, with some degree of sophistication, with your point about biblical and pagan miracle stories. (I make this point not because I'm interested in asserting a case for the historicity of miracles, but because it's interesting from the perspective of intellectual history.) Luke Hooke wrote on this at some length in the 18th century, and from memory I think he mentioned the Vespasian stories explicitly. John Henry Newman also wrote about them in the 19th century.


That is interesting. Not surprising really, especially given the polemics associated with competing miracle stories in antiquity. In my view pagan miracle stories are an insuperable problem for people who argue for the historical reality of the miracles of Jesus, unless you theologize pagan miracles in a way that is consistent with Christian belief. But once that move is made, no one but Christians will/should take the argument seriously.

Still, I have no problem treating the performance of acts perceived as miracles, just as people today interpret phenomena as miraculous. And, I don’t think this is something to be ridiculed. Seeing the Virgin Mary in panes of glass on the side of an office building is serious for believers. I just don’t think it is my business as a historian to adopt the beliefs of the people involved in the events I study.

Johannes wrote:THere was also an Italian historian called Ettore Pais who argued (with great erudition) that several centuries of early Roman history were entirely fabricated.


That is plausible, actually. Obviously the period of the monarchy is highly problematic. There’s the first 150 years. There are big questions about the consular fasti at least from 509 to 390. There’s another 120 years. Running total: 270. Fabius Pictor wrote the first history of Rome at the end of the third century.

Now some scholars accept the consular fasti as generally reliable. It would not be too surprising to find that there was a ruler named Tarquinius. The Twelve Tables are another early marker in Roman history. I think one can be overly skeptical about pre-4th-century Roman history. Still, it is difficult to know much beyond the archaeology for the first several centuries with any certainty, in my opinion.
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_Symmachus
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Re: Abuse of Ancient History by New Testament Scholars

Post by _Symmachus »

Kishkumen wrote:
That is plausible, actually. Obviously the period of the monarchy is highly problematic. There’s the first 150 years. There are big questions about the consular fasti at least from 509 to 390. There’s another 120 years. Running total: 270. Fabius Pictor wrote the first history of Rome at the end of the third century.

Now some scholars accept the consular fasti as generally reliable. It would not be too surprising to find that there was a ruler named Tarquinius. The Twelve Tables are another early marker in Roman history. I think one can be overly skeptical about pre-4th-century Roman history. Still, it is difficult to know much beyond the archaeology for the first several centuries with any certainty, in my opinion.


To the general point raised by Physics Guy and others on this thread, the real question is not whether the manuscripts of the medieval period are inaccurate or the extent to which they are inventing things (practically nil but for a few high profile instances that are rule-proving exceptions); it is whether the Roman historians themselves were accurate.

And on that, I think it is fair to say that modern historians are quite cognizant of the problems, and Kish's response here and elsewhere should give you some confidence that, if there is a kool-aid drunk, it is not the kool-aid of naïve faith in the literary sources—quite the contrary. There was a general revaluation of ancient sources from about the 1950s onward, and my sense now is that ancient historians were actually a little bit ahead of the curve on this relative to historians in other fields. I doubt any ancient historian today would subscribe to the claims of J. B. Bury made in the late 19th century that history was a science, or the confidence of F. W. Walbank in the early and mid 20th that modern disciplines like sociology and economics can be used to construct an "objective" picture of the ancient world, whatever the problems of the literary sources. Ancient historians were actually ahead of the curve in overturning the Rankean conceptions of history as a scientific endeavor developed in the 19th century, thanks to scholars like Arnaldo Momigliano. Kish is an excellent example of how ancient historians generally think about these problems and the respect for the limitations of the evidence that they have.

To Physics Guy's concern about popularizing histories, I think Mary Beard's SPQR is very good on addressing the limitations of the sources in general, but especially for the earlier centuries you discuss here. I don't know which popular writers you have in mind, but generally the problem isn't so much that historians aren't aware of the nature of the sources as that publishers think readers would rather read something else: history that is about the psychology of powerful actors in a given historical period—maybe that is true, I don't know—so that it seems every page of Tom Holland 1) tells you about the weather on a particular day and 2) tells you about what so-and-so famous ancient person was thinking in that weather. But psychology is the area where ancient sources are the absolute weakest. We almost never any idea from ancient sources of what this or that person was really thinking or even that they were thinking. Cicero's letters are so valuable in part because they are such a relatively intimate collection of documents (not all letters were; the nearly 900 letters of Symmachus hardly ever say anything and in the most verbose style...sort of like the resident Symmachus here).

Philo Sofee wrote:Not only interpolations, but entire genres invented in order to get a particular theological point in the debate anciently. I mean, the vast majority, and by vast, I mean well over 95% of all Christian and Jewish pseudepigraphic and apocryphal literature, by the assessment of scholarship, is invention and isn't actual history, which is why it supposedly was either thrown out of the mainstream or left to rot. To imagine the New Testament hasn't suffered from invention is highly improbable I would suppose. Knowing now what we do, that 95% of ancient faith literature is suspect and some truly highly incredible as in implausible as in simply invented, it ought to make us seriously pause before saying there is much to know about what happened in New Testament history. It is why all we get in New Testament scholarship and apologetics, is merely little snippets and crumbs, exactly as we see with Book of Mormon attempts to put the literature on a sure footing. It is simply not.


Hmmm. Perhaps. The problem is that that 95% are derived from the New Testament in a very obvious way and with a fairly direct line, whereas it is not so obvious what derivation the various parts of the New Testament have, and even the parallels etc. are at best indirect (e.g. the shipwreck of Paul as a type in Greco-Roman literature, or the death of Jesus as a savior god), which is another way of saying that the parallels and connections are pretty tenuous.
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_Kishkumen
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Re: Abuse of Ancient History by New Testament Scholars

Post by _Kishkumen »

Now, consul, if there is anyone on this board who does not waste words, it is you. You say what needs to be said to achieve your purpose. I don’t see any thing in the way of filler.
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_Physics Guy
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Re: Abuse of Ancient History by New Testament Scholars

Post by _Physics Guy »

I have not read Mary Beard. My books on ancient history are themselves rather old: Edith Hamilton, and Jerome Carcopino's Daily Life in Ancient Rome. Besides those, various tomes surveying long eras of history, such as histories of technology or warfare; various coffee-table books that my parents owned, with lots of illustrations; historical notes in various Latin textbooks in high school; and of course historical fiction, which makes no claims to reliability (except that everyone enjoys the books more if they think they're accurate).

It's certainly not just history that dumps conclusions on the public without much explanation about why (or to what extent) we believe the conclusions. Evolutionary biology has been compelled by creationists to explain its methods to the public, at least to some extent, but popular physics accounts, in books or in other media, often just lay down the law sacerdotally.

My favorite example is the Martian meteorites. I read several news articles about how certain rocks found here on Earth were actually blown here from Mars by asteroid impact. That definitely sounds too good to be true, and it's not obvious how one could ever have evidence for such a claim. In fact the story is that some of these rocks are glassy things with air trapped inside bubbles from when the glass was molten, and when they broke the rocks open and analyzed the trapped air, its composition matched the Martian atmosphere as measured by the Viking probes. So okay, these rocks must be from Mars.

There are lots of examples like that, in fact, where the story of how we know what we know is probably more important than the conclusions themselves—and more interesting, to boot. I don't know why popular media are so averse to telling these methodological stories when reporting any academic discipline.

Wikipedia does seem to be helping. The Martian meteorite story is covered pretty well there, now. On subjects I know, Wikipedia generally proves pretty reliable, and its chains of links can help fill in methodological background for lay people.
_Kishkumen
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Re: Abuse of Ancient History by New Testament Scholars

Post by _Kishkumen »

Physics Guy wrote:It's certainly not just history that dumps conclusions on the public without much explanation about why (or to what extent) we believe the conclusions. Evolutionary biology has been compelled by creationists to explain its methods to the public, at least to some extent, but popular physics accounts, in books or in other media, often just lay down the law sacerdotally.


I think what is true about the material the general public finds most accessible it that it is the publishers and retailers who select what the public sees based on profit motives, not the historians based on educational motives. We would love to help people better understand how the history sausage is made, but it is tough to find a venue in which a willing and dedicated audience will give you the time and attention. Heck, it's a challenge to do it at the university, where people pay to be there and have a grade riding on their attention to what you say!
"Petition wasn’t meant to start a witch hunt as I’ve said 6000 times." ~ Hanna Seariac, LDS apologist
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