Corpus-Paul

["Stephen C. Carlson" <scarlson AT mindspring.com>]

At 09:55 PM 8/25/02 -0400, Eric Zuesse wrote:
>> 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.

It is true that the rules of evidence in legal proceedings are evolving,
but recently that has mainly to do with the introduction of scientific
evidence, starting from the Supreme Court's Daubert decision that would
intended to reduce the amount of junk science in the courtroom.  Scientific
evidence presents an interesting challenge because it is not the kind of
data that the average person, who constitutes our juries, is used to
evaluating correctly.

The rules of evidence were indeed changed back in the 1930s to permit more
documentary evidence in white-collar crimes.  This was done by creating the
rule that documents produced in the course of business are an exception to
the hearsay rule.

>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.

Under certain circumstances, if the original was not available, the
copy may be admitted.  This is yet another example that shows that the
legal rules of evidence are designed to adjudicate disputes that stem
from events in the recent past.  To ascertain what happened 2000 years
ago requires a different set of rules because the witnesses are not
available and the originals have long since perished.

>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).

They belong in the same "category" of evidence, because the rules of
evidence are all about the *admissibility* of evidence, not how they
are weighed.  Admissibility governs whether the evidence is even
looked at or considered at all by the fact-finder.  If evidence is
not admitted, it is not evaluated.  In order to be evaluated, the
evidence must be admitted.  Once evidence is admitted, it can be
evaluated almost in any way the fact-finder wants, unless there are
substantive (i.e. non evidentiary) rules for balancing the evidence
based on the specific nature of the claims in the case.

In our historical enterprise, where we try the balance the testimony
of Galatians vs. Acts, it is clear that both of them are admissible
to the historian's mind.  On the other hand, since no one uses the
Acts of Paul and Thecla (as far as I am aware) to reconstruct these
events, that document is an example of inadmissible evidence in practice.

Rather than go point-by-point on the remaining comments, I hope this
is sufficient to clarify where I'm coming from.

Stephen Carlson
--
Stephen C. Carlson                        mailto:scarlson AT mindspring.com
Synoptic Problem Home Page   http://www.mindspring.com/~scarlson/synopt/
"Poetry speaks of aspirations, and songs chant the words."  Shujing 2.35