Corpus-Paul

["Eric Zuesse" <cettel AT shoreham.net>]

Re: David Hindley's:
>
> This is intreresting! For some while I have thought about employing legal
> methodology to this kind of evidence. Can you provide a short bibliography
> of reference material (particularly in English) that summarizes the "rules
> of evidence" used in lawcourts?
>
> Evidence type hyp. form. hyp. conf. other?

Thanks for your interest, David. I'm happy to see that someone besides
myself shares this interest. The sixth chapter of the book I'm doing deals
with the subject.

That chapter contrasts scholarly investigative methodology and
methodological assumptions versus their counterparts in legal/forensic
investigations. However, I don't give specific references to the
legal/forensic "literature" (consisting almost entirely of case law, but
also of a little of statute law from countries around the world), because
what are called "rules of evidence" are still very much in a preliminary
stage, barely being born, and very much in flux, all over the world.
Consequently, especially, everything that exists, up to the present time,
pertaining to documentary evidence, is just snippets, nothing systematic,
not anywhere. For example, even the borderlines between "forensic" and
"legal" investigative issues aren't at all clear, and the respective
professional associations on both sides of that divide constitute separate
worlds that barely communicate with each other outside of their work on
specific cases.

This is the reason why courts' investigations and analyses of documentary
evidence, up to the present time, are based on little that is systematic
except for "forensic" analysis of papers, inks, signatures, etc. The
methodologies that lawyers use to interpret those documents after "forensic"
investigators have dated and authenticated documents, are extremely
different than any scholarly methodology, and this is the area that I am
especially interested in, and which has never been applied to such things as
the Paulines, the Gospels, Plato, etc. It's somewhat like Sitz in Leben, but
still very different, especially because the latter assumes the
honesty-of-intent of any given document-writer (for example, statements in
classical documents such as the Paulines can be judged to be "false" but not
to be "lies"), whereas in any legal/forensic investigation the motives of
the writer of any document are subjected to total skepticism, and so
honesty-of-intent is not assumed (and a legal/forensian is therefore free to
discuss such issues as whether any given statement in the New Testament is a
"lie," and not only whether it is "false").

The biggest difference is that a court questions not only truthfulness but
also motives, and cannot render judgment reconstructing events on the basis
of a given body of documentary evidence unless it states a theory concerning
the motives of those writers; those motives have to be a part of the court's
explanation of how those events took place.

As I said, this is a field that is in a very early stage of evolution,
especially because most of the document-built are white-collar-crime cases,
and that is a very new area or field of law. For example, until 1934, there
was no law against insider trading, not anywhere in the world, and until
1961, no prosecution had ever been brought against the crime of insider
trading.

Best,

Eric Zuesse
cettel AT shoreham.net