Corpus-Paul

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

Re; Stephen C. Carslon's:

> A letter (such as the epistle to the Galatians) is hearsay under
> the rules because it is not an in-court statement, unless it offered
> to prove something other than it asserts or it falls under one of
> the exclusions and exceptions of the hearsay rule.  (Both would be
> admissible under the ancient document exception since they are more
> than 20 years old.)
>
> So, in response to Eric Zuesse's points, *both* Galatians and Acts
> are hearsay from a legal perspective.

As I said in my immediately previous post, rules of evidence are very much
in an evolving state, especially because the prosecution of white-collar
crimes is essentially a phenomenon of only the past 50 years, and because it
is only in white-collar-crime cases that much of the evidence consists of
documentary evidence; blue-collar-crime cases, like murders, do not depend
nearly as much upon documentary evidence. Scholars of classical documents,
such as the Paulines, do, therefore, in fact, deal with documents that all
fall into a separate category from the documents that courts customarily
deal with. For example, in a courtroom case, "best evidence" consists simply
of an original of a given document as compared to a copy of that same
document (that copy being, of course, not "best evidence"), whereas, for
example, no original exists at all of any of the documents in the New
Testament.

However, when dealing with documents such as the Paulines and Acts, in which
there is no "best evidence" in that very limited forensic sense, it is quite
*wrong* to infer, as Stephen C. Carlson's post seems to, that (as he puts
it) "*both* Galatians and Acts" belong in the *same* category as evidence
(namely, simply as "hearsay," as Stephen points out, because there is no
cross-examination of their authors).

I deal with these questions at length in my book, but briefly here:

Given that there do not exist, within present, very formative and early,
legal/forensic rules of evidence concerning documentary evidence, any
distinctions between different classical documents as "evidence," such that
one classical document can be said to be "better evidence" than another,
much less "best evidence," it is incumbent upon us as historians, if we are
to have any serious aim to meet a scientific standard in our reconstructions
of ancient history from the documents that we do possess, to employ, in our
reconstruction efforts, rules of evidence that *would* meet a court's
standards *if* courts dealt with such ancient documents--which, as
mentioned, they do not.

In other words, we must be attentive not so much to existing documentary
rules of evidence, but rather to their purposes, their objectives.

A court's supreme purpose, of course, is to convict the provably guilty and
only the provably guilty; so that whomever is provably guilty will be
punished, and whomever is not provably guilty will not be punished.

That is the reason behind all of a court's rules of evidence.

A court of law prosecuting a white-collar-crime case, just like a historian,
is tasked to reconstruct, often mainly from a maze of sometimes conflicting
documentary evidence, a sequence of events, and of personal motives by their
actors, so as to explain how and why the given outcome occurred. Without
that reconstruction of events from, often, documentary evidence, a
prosecution has no case, and a court cannot explain a crime, much less
render a conviction upon it.

The hearsay rule requires an opportunity to cross-examine a given witness,
as Stephen said, in order to have an opportunity to separate lies from
truth. This rule, in other words, is predicated upon a skeptical attitude
toward testimony, not only that it might contain errors, but that it might
contain intentional falsehoods, or lies. Stephen referred to a jury's "need
to see the demeanor of every witness to determine who is lying." That is
true, but another important reason for the hearsay rule is to provide
opposing attorneys an opportunity to cross-examine a given witness, so that
the jury will then have an opportunity to make an informed judgment about
that witness's truthfulness.

In other words, the *purpose* of rules of evidence is to apply a scientific
skepticism to all "evidence," to weed out that which is bad, so as to base a
hypothetical explanation of events upon only the best, most reliably
truthful items of evidence. This also means that a court's rules of evidence
often require "bad" evidence to be excluded entirely, not presented at all
to a jury.

This is a very important principle of law and forensics. In fact, judges
often do restrict juries from hearing or seeing certain evidence, so that
verdicts will not be contaminated, which could cause them to be subsequently
overturned on appeal.

This concept of contaminated evidence restricts greatly the sheer amount of
exhibits that prosecutors present to juries. A "good case" from a
legal/forensic standpoint is not the one with the greatest number of
references or exhibits, but the one that excludes unreliable evidence and
includes only the most reliable, the solidest, evidence, in its
presentation.

However, any good prosecutor (and judge) knows that inferior types of
evidence, including sometimes even hearsay, second-hand, accounts or only
roughly informed opinions, can be presented to a jury if they are being
presented to that jury *only* in order to confirm or raise doubts about a
hypothetical explanation of a crime, but *not* in order to present or to
disprove that hypothetical explanation. For example, a character witness may
appear before a jury in order to tend to confirm or disconfirm whether the
accused is "the sort of person who would likely commit such a crime," but if
the case would stand or fall upon the basis of such a dubious item of
"evidence," then a judge will probably prohibit that "evidence." Also, if
better evidence exists regarding the defendant's character, then the
inferior evidence will often be excluded even for that restricted purpose of
mere confirmation/disconfirmation. Character witnesses again are a good
example of this: if a verdict was based partly upon inferior character
witnesses (for example, ones who knew the defendant only little, and largely
through the hearsay of others about the defendant), when more reliable ones
(who knew him extensively and directly) were available but were not
permitted to testify, then that will increase the likelihood of overturning
the verdict upon apeal. A judge wants verdicts that are based upon a
hypothetical explanation that's constructed from only the very best evidence
available, at each of the hypothetical explanation's points. Such verdicts
are the least likely to be overturned; that's why judges want them.

Furthermore, judges are very leery of evidence, because they do not want to
be frequently overturned, nor to have many of their juries' verdicts
overturned.

Consequently, good convictions are sometimes based on only few exhibits, and
bad convictions might have a great many exhibits, including some that
contaminate or "prejudice" the verdict.

Therefore, if we are to be scientific in our reconstructions of historical
events from the available documentary evidence, we will, indeed, be very
attentive to the respective datings of the various documents. We will not be
satisfied to be guided by Stephen's "*both* Galatians and Acts are hearsay
from a legal perspective." And the 20-year-rule likewise does not apply to
the work we do.

Instead, taking our guidance from the *purposes* that are intended to be
served by such rules of evidence, I would infer the following guidance to us
from courts:

Paul wrote his letters to congregations of people who, in a sense,
constituted a jury, who could--and who might reasonably be assumed to have
done so--cross examine him, in the sense, that is, that anything he said in
his letters that *explicitly* contradicted what those people knew or
possibly might have known or be able to come to know concerning the people
and events he described, could have destroyed his credibility with them; and
Paul can not reasonably be expected to have been able to afford that risk.

Consequently, overt and explicit falsehoods, which would have been
disconfirmable by such an audience, would simply not have appeared in his
authentic letters. Any falsehoods from him would have been of the implict
kind, or else would have referred to matters (such as his Damascus road
experience) that they wouldn't have been able to test by other sources
available to them. For example, in Galatians, it is clear that Paul's
audience has been hearing from his opponents, who believe that no member of
God's people can be permitted to violate Genesis 17:14. Paul's audience
therefore had access to the opposing point of view and arguments.

This is a very different situation than for Acts, which faced no such
opportunity for such a proxy cross-examination function. Acts was written at
a later time, by which time there might have been no, or virtually no, such
opportunity for its readers to "test out" the truthfulness of its
assertions.

I accept and agree with Hyam Maccoby's statement that Paul nonetheless
should also be taken with great skepticism, because Paul had his own axe to
grind. Where I differ from Hyam is in my recognizing that the scope of
Paul's ability to get away with any lying on his part was much more severely
restricted than was Luke's or any other of the Gospel writers, all of whom
had vastly greater license to lie than did Paul.

Consequently, my book applies strict rules of evidence to its task of
reconstructing the event that created Christianity. These rules are entirely
in the spirit of legal/forensic rules, but are appropriate for the different
type of documentary evidence that we have to work with, which courts do not.
Essentially, I reconstruct Christianity's founding using Paul's seven
authentic epistles for hypothesis, and employing the later-created New
Testament documents only for purposes of confirmation. Furthermore, I treat
very differently allegations that a given document overtly explicitly
states, than allegations that the given document logically-necessarily
implies. For example, after a best-evidence ranking of documents, I conclude
from the *implicit* evidence of Galatians 2:12 that James was Peter's boss,
and I confirm this by Acts 15:19-22 and by Gospel of Thomas 12;
consequently, the *explicit* Matthew 16:18, and the traditional (e.g., Roman
Catholic) "historical" view that Peter was James's boss, I count as both
false and a lie. I then explain that lie, this being necessary to do in
order to come up with a scientific hypothetical explanation of the NT.

I end this note here, because the present forum demands brevity. However,
anyone who wishes to pursue further the important question of rules of
evidence, I shall be happy to communicate with about this matter in more
detail, either on-list or off.

Eric Zuesse
cettel AT shoreham.net
Vermont