Corpus-Paul

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

Re: David Inglis saying:

>  Given that such rules
> do not exist, surely any attempt to apply hypothetical ones must fail, as
> we do not know what would meet such a court's standards.
> [snip]

This is a cop-out, because courts don't generally deal with "documents" that
are so ancient that no original copy of them even exists. Nor do courts
normally deal with documents that are more than twenty years old; or else
they deal so little with them that they categorize all of them as hearsay
evidence, which is the lowest evidentiary status, irrespective of what
scholars might think of the reliability of one of them.

Courts can afford to be so cavalier about these documents because they don't
have to deal with them. We have to deal with these documents, and so we
can't afford to be so cavalier. You are saying that scholars ought not to
establish evidentiary standards and rankings for our types of documents that
are as scientifically thought-out and systematic as courts have established
for their types of documents.

I don't agree, and in my book, I apply to our documents the very same
truth-seeking purposes that drive legal/forensic evidentiary rankings and
procedures, and I draw from those legal/forensic purposes equally rigorous
rankings and procedures for our documents that courts apply to theirs.

To wait for courts to do this for us is to wait forever and to wallow
forever in the existing scholarly morasses, fads,
Paul-as-anti-Semite-faith-over-Law before the Holocaust,
Paul-as-pro-Jewish-respecter-of-Law after the Holocaust; and then, what's
next and who really cares? I don't know about you, but I don't have the time
to wait until I start to become scientific in my work; I cannot afford to
wait forever to become scientific in my evidentiary standards and in my
resulting historical researches and conclusions. Nor do I want to wallow in
such fads or trends.

.
> > 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.
>
> ... But to do this we must actually *know* the datings of our source
> documents!
> [snip]

Courts do provide us, for *that* purpose, far *more* than merely their goals
in order to guide us, and here is how:

Courts make a distinction (rough, but still a distinction) between
"forensic" functions like authenticating and dating documents, and
"legal-investigative" functions like interpreting those documents after and
on the basis of these "forensic" authentications and datings.

For example, a "forensic" investigator will authenticate and date a document
as to the specific typewriter that produced it, the age of its paper, etc.;
the "legal investigator" will start his work on the basis of those
"forensic" facts and make a case on the basis of them regarding how that
given document relates to others that have been similarly investigated
forensically: this is how the legal investigator systematically reconstructs
the historical events that produced the given alleged crime.

The legal investigator needs these facts from the forensics experts in order
to be able to reconstruct the actual sequence of events that produced all of
these documents and also the crime itself.

In my book, I am accepting the scholarly consensus regarding the datings of
the various documents of the NT. I am accepting scholars, after their 200
years of work in the wake of pioneers such as F.C. Baur, and after the
consequent development of the relevant archaeology, as possessing the
expertise for authenticating and dating these documents, similar to a
forensics expert's expertise in authenticating and dating a more
contemporary document that might be used as evidence in solving a
white-collar-crime case.

As a legal investigator, I don't necessarily need to know exact dates, but I
do often need to know the sequence, the order in which the various documents
were generated. For example, I need to know that Galatians was probably
written within a few years after the conflict Galatians refers to in
2:11-21, and that that conflict occurred within just a few days after the
council in Jerusalem that's referred to in 2:6-10, and that Luke wrote Acts
much later than Paul wrote Galatians, and that Paul's account of that
council in Jerusalem was almost certainly first-person and subject to being
challenged by his letter's readers, whereas Luke's account of that council
(if he presented any account of it at all in Acts) would have been neither
first-person nor subject to such potentially adverse challenges.
Consequently, on this basis, using the scholarly consensuses dating those
documents as my forensics base, I, as the legal investigator reconstructing
those events from these documents, will use Galatians to formulate my
theory, and will use Acts (if at all) only to test that theory.

This is not the way scholars create their interpretations/reconstructions of
historical events, and so I certainly do not rely upon scholars as experts
at interpretations/reconstructions/theorizing; but I do rely upon scholars
as experts at the narowly "forensic" tasks of authenticating and dating
classical documents.

I might also point out that, in a court of law, that's precisely where
"experts" are supposed to be used--i.e., at the forensic judgments, and not
at the legal-investigative (or "interpretive") judgments. The lawyer (or his
hired legal investigator) is supposed to come up with the interpretation
himself, and the lawyer will defend that interpretation/reconstruction of
events in his presentations before the jury.

So, I am using scholars in the way that a lawyer uses forensics experts to
authenticate and to date documents, but I am ignoring scholars'
interpretations of these documents because scholars, unfortunately, are not
well trained in how to interpret documents so as to reconstruct historical
events from them.

Prior to F.C. Baur, scholars were fake "experts" even at the purely forensic
end of investigations, and it is only within fairly recent times that
scholars can reasonably be said to possess any scientific skills at all. But
now they do, and I therefore build on those specialized skills/findings,
just as a legal investigator builds on a forensian's specialized
skills/findings.

Since a legal investigator often does not need to know the exact dates on
which particular documents were generated, but only their sequence, etc., I
often have no interest in some scholarly debates regarding more precise
datings.

All of this is taking court methods and procedures as the methodological
model, but customizing those methods to deal with these documents and to
reconstruct from them the beginning of Christianity.

A legal investigator, since he is suspicious of everything and of everyone,
questions the motives behind every document. This means that a big part of
his historical reconstruction consists of reconstructing the motives behind
the individual who wrote the given document. To a legal investigator, it is
not enough to know whether a given assertion is truthful; one must also
determine whether it was intended to be truthful, because if it was not,
then the given writer's account will be shaped by his particular agenda,
which must therefore first be identified. Consequently, a legal investigator
carefully separates out a document's explicit assertions for one type of
analysis, and that document's logically necessary implications for a very
different kind of analysis. Often, a logically necessary implication will be
found that contradicts an explicit assertion in the same document; and
whenever this happens, it is almost invariably the case that the logically
necessary implication is true and the explicit assertion is false, but the
contradiction between the two actually tells the legal investigator a great
deal more than just this.

> >
> > 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.
>
> Regarding the Damascus road experience, we don't know what Paul's
> companions on the road saw/heard/reported, and so we can't say what was
> testable and what was not.

You missed my point there. I mentioned the Damascus road experience only as
being evidentiarily in a different category than, say, Paul's account given
in Galatians 2:11-21. The latter entailed specific words being exchanged
between opponents, such that the account of that exchange from the
perspective of Paul's opponents could very well have made its way back to
Paul's Galatian readers, and so Paul had to avoid the most blatant type of
lying there. Since this was a letter by Paul to people who, so far as Paul
would have known, might or might not have heard his enemies' account of this
event, Paul had to be careful to avoid blatant lying.

By contrast, Paul's Damascus road experience was strictly his own experience
if it existed at all. Acts 9:7-9 is, at best, a second-hand account of it,
and mentions that Paul was with companions at the time, but even Acts says
that those companions could see nothing except how Paul reacted--nothing of
Jesus at all. Consequently, the only evidentiary base for accepting Paul's
supposed "revelation" (which even he questioned in 2 Cor. 12:2)--even the
account that he might have told to Luke--of that experience is Paul's own
testimony; Paul could very well have made the entire thing up, even if there
were companions with him at the time. Indeed, in Romans 3:4&7, Paul himself
even defended his own disrespect for truthfulness.

This exemplifies what I am referring to when I say that scholars are
ignorant of how to use evidence; scholars aren't taught it. Legal
investigators are. So, too, are investigative reporters, like Woodward and
Bernstein, etc. My own background is as an investigative reporter (winner of
the Mencken Award for the year's best investigative news report, in 1982),
and Pauline studies is for me, is just my current investigation; it's not
something I specialize in; legal investigators and investigative reporters
don't specialize in this or that subject; our specialty is investigation
itself. Scholars know how to authenticate and date documents, but
reconstruction of history from documents (a field of hermeneutics) is not
something that scholars have a real expertise in--not yet, not nearly--and
when you misinterpret what I was referring to by my mention of the Damascus
road experience, that exemplifies the point.

> I don't thing we should lose
> sight of Luke 1:1-4, which in my view implies that the readers of
> Luke/Acts *could* compare the statements made in these documents with
> other written or oral reports.  In other words, I do not believe there is
> any reason to suppose that Acts was any less 'testable' to its' readership
> than were the Paulines.

Luke says there that his testimony is second-hand. You are saying that
second-hand testimony is as good as Paul's first-hand testimony of what he
did and when and who was present to confirm/disconfirm his stories/accounts.

Paul's readers could have, and probably did, speak with James's people, to
hear their accounts, and probably James even sent his men to their
congregations to present his side of these disputes and of what had
transpired in the dispute at Antioch.

We indeed know that Paul's letter was being read by a congregation who had
heard from James's people, and that at least one member of the congregation
had been persuaded so much by James's people as to become circumcised
himself (Gal. 1:6 & 5:7). Luke's account faced no such audience/test; there
is no indication in Acts that it was directed at an audience who were
receiving contrary accounts of the same events.

> I don't see why Paul should
> be treated with any more skepticism for this reason than any other NT
> author.

Again, you misread me; I never said otherwise; to an investigator,
everyone's testimony is suspect. That 's everyone. And that's what I said
before.

> > 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.
>
> Please could you explain why you think this is the case.  Are you simply
> assuming that *all* the Gospels were written much later than the Paulines,
> or is there some other reason?  If you are simply relying on the dating,
> then I think you should avoid making assumptions about the reliability of
> Paul vs. the Gospel writers until such time as the relative datings are
> certain, which (despite statements made by various people) they are not.

No, it's not only the datings, but the relative datings are very important,
even if the precise years are not. And, furthermore, there will never be
scientific "certainty" as to these datings; so your anticipation of such
certainty is a misunderstanding of science itself, which cannot offer that.

Above all, it's that Paul's letters were read by congregations who heard the
opposed presentations from Paul's enemies. That was the very context in
which these letters were written, and that's why these letters are so full
of vitriole (such as Gal. 1:8-9 and 5:2-12).

Luke's and the Gospelists' writings faced no such audience test, but were
pure propaganda to fellow-believers--a much lower grade of "evidence."

Although I agree with Hyam about the necessity to distrust Paul's
truthfulness and even honesty, I apply that same distrust to the
truthfulness and honesty of all documents, including all classical
documents, including the New Testament documents, including the Old
Testament documents, including the Quran, including Plato, etc.

However, I should point out that your early dating of Luke-Acts is not a
consensus dating, which would range from 75-90 CE. You can believe whatever
you like, and scholars do, but that doesn't constitute evidence for
anything. To the extent that scholarship possesses expertise at all, it
possesses expertise to authenticate and date such documents; and I'll go
with a consensus-scholars' date of 50-55 CE for Galatians and 71-95 CE for
Acts. But as I had said, that's not nearly as important as their relative
order: Galatians was substantially earlier than Acts; the scholarly
consensus on that temporal order is overwhelming, even though you seem to be
disinclined to accept it.

Best,
Eric Zuesse
cettel AT shoreham.net