Hey Dad, What about us? -- Part 3

This post is the third in a series.  See here and here for previous posts.  In this post I would like to begin examining arguments traditionalists could make to explain Job's silence about his children.  In each case, one of the intended outcomes of the argument will be that the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy can be maintained consistently.  I will argue that they all fail.

You noticed, of course, that I said traditionalists could make these arguments.  I am resorting to some hypothesizing because of the situation I mentioned in my last post:  hardly anyone appears to have noticed the problem.  I checked with a family member who happens to hold a Ph.D.in Old Testament Studies about what explanations are out there for Job's silence about his children, and the family member admitted she wasn't aware of many attempts to explain it.  She did offer a few explanations, some of which were (I think) off the top of her head.

The first three explanations are based on a reasonable supposition about the relationship between the poetic section of the Book and any possible historical antecedent to it.  If there really was an historical figure named Job who experienced the tragedies described in the introduction, the poetic section of the book is meant to be an artistic representation of whatever real conversations took place between Job and his friends.  It is hardly likely they actually spoke word-for-word in poetic form, using a large number of words that appear rarely in the rest of the Hebrew Bible.  The writer distilled the historical events and reworked them to hang together and support the theme of the book.    Much could have been reworded, reorganized or just left out.

Explanation 1
The Book of Job is meant to appeal to a general readership.  Therefore, the book purposely avoids dwelling on the specific circumstances of Job's suffering in order to appeal to a broader audience.  This explanation appears to be plausible early in the book.  As one commentator in the Semeia monograph points out, Job's early speeches describe his sufferings in general and metaphoric terms, allowing any number of disasters to match the description of his distress.  The commentator supposes what many others have thought:  Job is cast as Everyman.    Detailed references to Job's children would ruin this rhetorical move.

But this explanation runs aground when we reach chapters 29-31.  There, Job repeatedly and at length locates himself decisively in the upper class of an ancient Near Eastern community.   He distances himself from the rest of his culture by his insistence that lower class people were in awe of his wisdom and status, and much of his distress is caused by his loss of status and respect in this community.   This speech destroys the image of Job as Everyman far better than mention of his many children.  The number of ancient Near Eastern families with large numbers of children was certainly greater than the number of ancient Near Eastern families as wealthy and of high a social status as Job's.

In fact, whatever the ancient author(s) intentions, Job is clearly not Everyman.
1.  He is highly pious.  God singles him out to the "Satan" for this distinguishing characteristic.
2.  He is fabulously wealthy, in ancient Near Eastern terms.
3.  He is a member of the ruling class.

Job's lament over his treatment at the hands of those formerly of lower class hints at one likely reaction of many of the peasants who first heard Job's story:  schadenfreude.  Even if many of them avoided the temptation to rejoice at his downfall, they would certainly think that he at least now knows better what their lives have been like all along.   It appears to me that the author(s) of this book did not intend to reach a lower-class audience.  The fact that the book is written and in very difficult Hebrew suggests that the author was targeting an upper class audience.  These readers could certainly identify more closely with Job and his friends and would not be offended by Job's comments about the lower class people by whom he has been humiliated.

Explanation 2
The Book of Job is dealing specifically with the question of God's justice in his dealings with Job.  The fate of Job's children is a secondary consideration.  Consequently, the book leaves them out of the discussion except as their deaths highlight the depths of Job's sufferings.  This explanation runs aground rather more quickly when one considers the implications of the deaths of one's children on one's own presumed uprightness in ancient Israelite society.  That punishment for one's sins could and would fall on one's descendants is a commonplace of Israelite thought.  It can be found especially in the Pentateuch, the former prophets, and the Psalms.  Similar opinions about the fate of one's descendants appear in the book of Job.  The implication of these sentiments is clear:  Job's children died at least partly because of Job's sins.  That puts the death of his children back in dead center of the debate over Job's own status as a man of integrity.   Now, every time that one of the friends brings up the fate of the descendants of a wicked person, Job fails to defend his children or even mention their deaths.  The easiest explanation for this is, as I said before, that in the original version of the poetic section of the book the catastrophe(s) that befell Job did not include the death of his children.   But here we are working from the traditionalist presumption that the book was composed as a unity.   Therefore, Job deliberately avoids talking about his children's deaths, even when the arguments of his friends either threaten to condemn him over their deaths or offer him an opportunity to defend himself and his children from their charges.   This pretty much rules out that the book is silent because the death of Job's children is irrelevant.

Explanation 3
The Book of Job largely passes over the death of Job's children because the book is making an argument from the greater to the lesser.  If God can strike Job with disaster, he can strike anyone.  Or, put another way, if someone as upright and blessed as Job can suffer a disaster, it can happen to anyone.  I think this explanation is a plausible answer to the issue raised above about the possible negative reactions of lower class people to the character of Job.   A similar argument was used in various speeches in regard to someone's liability to punishment.  The argument went like this:  if the beings in the divine court are considered unclean in the presence of God, how much more a mere human.  See Job 4:18-21; 9:13-15 for examples of the argument.  

This explanation partly depends on the exalted status of the pater familias in ancient Near Eastern society.  Job's wife, children, servants, and possessions are all under his authority and care.  As a local ruler, he also has authority over and responsibility for the members of his community.   On the one hand, a strike against his household, family, or community is a strike against him.  On the other, a strike against him threatens his family, household, and community.

Community or family solidarity  was apparently a fundamental part of Yahweh's view of justice according to ancient Israelites.  According to the  books of Kings and Chronicles, Yahweh was quite happy to bring disaster on the entire Israelite nation due to the misbehavior of its rulers.  According to the story of Achan in the book of Joshua, Yahweh brought death to several Israelite warriors because of Achan's misbehavior, about which they knew nothing and had nothing to do.  There are plenty of cases in the Psalms and even in the book of Job of presumably pious individuals believing and/or wishing that the children of an evil person would suffer for his sins.

Wanting punishments to fall on the children of a bad person makes for good evolutionary logic.  The premature deaths of one's descendants eliminates one's genes from the gene pool and it makes good evolutionary sense to wipe out genes that appear to threaten the survival of one's own children.  Odds are, some of our deep-seated emotions that lead to revenge killings of family members of our enemies are the results of evolutionary selection pressures in our remote ancestors.   If you want to derive criteria for justice from the evolutionary process, you are welcome to do so -- from a prison cell in an institution for the criminally insane.

Modern societies reject the use of community or family solidarity in deciding questions of justice because in most cases using this criterion leads to injustices.  Children of criminals are a classic example.  1.  Children don't get to choose their parents.   It is not right to assume they are part of a criminal conspiracy.  2.  Children generally don't participate in their parents' crimes.  They may benefit from them, but often they don't even know that their parents are providing for them illegally and if they did they would disapprove.  3.  Children do not necessarily inherit their parents' criminality.  I could go on and on.  But why argue the general case?  Reader, most likely you already find the idea of punishing a criminal's children for his/her crimes revolting.  The only people who will regularly rise to defend it are apologists who want to demonstrate that the God of the Bible was justified for the various examples of summary execution the Hebrew Bible says he commanded or performed.  These people are already so committed to their position that nothing I can say in a short blog post will persuade them otherwise.

So, what crimes were Job's children guilty of?  According to some (see here, as a conjecture,  here, and this wonderful guy, who I hope stays far away from children while he takes these attitudes) they must have been guilty of something, because Bildad accuses them of wrongdoing and Job says nothing to defend them.  But this is by far a minority report, and for good reason.  For one thing, there is nothing elsewhere in the book to lend support to Bildad's supposition.  Job's sacrifices on behalf of his children are no evidence that they were engaged in gross sins.  See here for a somewhat overstated reading of Job 1 that makes this point well.  Check the standard commentaries for elaboration. 

But if Job's children (and servants) were not guilty of crimes, then their deaths ruin the community solidarity argument.  Job, the pater familias because of whom all these others died, is recompensed for his losses.  But none of the others are.  Job's servants and sons and daughters are replaced.  But for the original children and servants the loss is total and uncompensated,  and therefore the idea that the silence over Job's children is explained by Job's role as the pater familias is ridiculous.  Instead, on this explanation the reader of the book of Job ought to be jumping mad that his original children and servants are left dead and gone at the end of the book.

The examination of other explanations will have to wait for another post.

Hey Dad, What about us? -- Part 2

This post is second in a series on the Book of Job.  See here for the first post.  As I discussed in that post, there is an odd silence in the book's many discourses over the death of Job's children, servants, and livestock.  This silence is a problem no matter how one assesses the book, but it is especially problematic for traditionalists of various sorts, including orthodox Jews and Christians who hold to a traditional, "high" view of Scripture.

It is also a problem largely overlooked by people who have written on the book.  After an admittedly sparse investigation, I was unable to find a single commentator who addressed the issue at any length.  My survey included the relevant chapters in introductions to the Hebrew Bible by B. W. Anderson,  Brevard Childs, Hill and Walton, Bush, Hubbard, and LaSor, and Carol Newsom's article in the New Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible.  In addition, I checked the introductory sections of the commentaries of Gerald Janzen (Job, Interpretation) and John Hartley (The Book of Job, New International Commentary on the Old Testament) and the essays in Semeia 7:  Studies in the Book of Job

How did this (IMHO amazing) silence come about?  One huge factor is the weight of the text itself.  The introduction of the Book of Job frames the deaths of Job's children, servants, and livestock purely in terms of how it impacts Job.   To put it starkly, apart from their role in lending poignancy to the predicament in which Job is placed, Job's children don't matter  to the narrator of the introduction and conclusion of the book.  Their characters, feelings, hopes, human potential are all passed over in silence.   What counts is how they make the audience feel about what happened to Job.  The rest of the book does just about nothing to adjust the framing narrator's devaluation of Job's children.   In short, then, the narrative world of the book prejudices the reader to ignore Job's children in favor of Job himself.  We should not be surprised to find the majority of the book's readers doing precisely what the book's structure encourages them to do.

The devaluation of characters is part and parcel of telling a story, but it doesn't make for good ethics in the real world.  Trouble is, the point of the book of Job as a part of sacred literature is, presumably, to educate us about how to make correct moral judgments in the real world.  This narrative devaluation can have bad consequences if not accounted for and corrected.  Ok, so who has been doing the accounting and correction?  Nobody? 

The more commentators I found overlooking this problem the more uncomfortable I got.  Is there something fundamentally wrong about my thinking?  At least some traditionalist readers of this blog are likely to be ready with an answer to this question.  But you had better consider the case of "windbag" (Elihu) in the Book of Job before you fill the comment section with rants.  Elihu's speech is one of the longest monologues in the book (Compare Job's speech in 26-31 and Yahweh's speech in 38-41).  Scholars disagree about how much Elihu contributes to the arguments in the book, but the way he introduces his speech drops plenty of hints about what we should think of it.  He essentially calls himself a windbag and admits that he can't control his anger over the failure of Job's friends to answer Job's challenges.  IMHO his original contributions to the dispute are minimal and certainly don't justify 6 chapters of verbiage.  That the book's conclusion ignores his speeches is another sign that the guy is full of hot air.  Whoever wrote the Elihu section set up this character for a fall.  If critics are right that this section of the book was inserted by a pious scribe who was convinced he could defend God's justice better than the existing form of the book, then the scribe did this to himself.   Take warning, traditionalist! don't be such an idiot as to rant in the comment section before you've thought carefully through this whole post.

"Are you so stupid," the ranting traditionalist might say, "that you completely forgot about God?  He's the creator!  He can do anything he wants to Job's children, servants, and livestock.  You have nothing worthwhile to say about the Book of Job, as your post thoroughly demonstrates.  Job was a righteous man, but you -- you are just a a God-forsaken, liberal, modernist unbeliever."  I'll admit to being a God-forsaken, liberal, modernist "unbeliever,"  but if raising the questions I've raised makes me one, then I guess I'm in good company, because Job raises the same questions about God's treatment of him.  Job may not doubt that God can do whatever he wants with us, but he sure doubts whether it's right for God to whatever he wants with us.  He just happens to leave out God's treatment of his kids.  I don't want to skip over that part.  Otherwise, we're asking the same questions. 

As I pointed out in the first post in this series, there may be better answers to my questions than the ignorant rant I tried to forestall above.  In fact, I intend to examine a whole raft of them in subsequent posts. 

Hey Dad, what about us? -- Part 1

In this new series of posts I would like to discuss a problem in the Book of Job.  According to the book's preface, Job loses all of his children in a sudden catastrophe.  About a week later he and his friends engage in a lengthy and heated debate ending in a direct confrontation between Job and God during which almost nothing is said about his children and even less about their recent deaths.  This lacuna in the discussion is highly odd for two reasons:

1. If the book is supposed to reflect an historical event, it is unusual for a newly bereaved parent to say little or nothing about his dead children, especially when he is engaged in lengthy conversations that provide socially-acceptable, relevant opportunities to talk about them.
2. Given OT teachings about the significance of the death of one's children, it is odd that neither Job, his friends, or God spend much time dealing with the implications of the fact that Job's entire progeny was wiped out in one fell swoop.

 The impetus for this  series came from reading Robert Wright's The Moral Animal.  At one point he reflects on how evolution may have shaped the way human parents grieve for dead children.  The upshot is that due to the evolutionary costs of having one's descendants die, genetic traits that encourage human beings to protect and defend their children are likely to thrive.  In humans this behavior is encouraged via parental emotions.  Consequently, one would expect that parents feel great pain when a child dies and be motivated to try to prevent losing any more children.  He cites numerous studies that support these suppositions.     This made good sense to me and explained a lot of particular behaviors I had noticed among grieving families of my acquaintance.   Sometime after reading this book I began reading the Book of Job again and was struck by how out of sync it was with what Wright had argued for.   That got me looking more closely.

Before I dig into the details of this interesting situation, please note that this is not a scholarly paper.  I don't have regular access to a library of Biblical studies and am not a specialist in Biblical literature.  I am willing to bet just about everything said here can be found in someone else's work; I just don't have the time and resources to dig it up.

Another preliminary is that this series is intended to further a larger purpose of this blog.  This blogger believes that traditional Christianity is built on a foundation of sand.  Any reasonably well-educated and open-minded person will recognize that this is the case after examining all the relevant issues and adjust his/her personal belief system accordingly.   Unfortunately, there are large numbers of traditional Christians who are not well-educated and/or not open-minded.   I was once one of these, and so this blog is among other things a  bit of personal therapy.   I am in the process of thinking my way out of a lot of idiotic beliefs.  Hopefully, this blog can help some other traditionalists think their way out as well.  So, my comments have an intentional slant against traditional views of the Bible.

Now for the "facts" of the case.  I will be basing my arguments from here on out on the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible.  The verse references will correspond to those in English Bibles except where noted otherwise.  Between the book's preface and its conclusion (Job 1-2; 42:10-16) Job's children are mentioned a grand total of 3 times:  Job 8:4; 19:17; 29:5, although every one of these references is disputed for one reason or another.   A quick review of each of these passages is in order.


Job 8:4 appears at the beginning of a speech by Bildad the Shuhite in which he exhorts Job to seek God because he rewards the righteous.  I will avoid attempting to wade deeply into Hebrew grammar and simply present the traditional reading of this verse:  If (since) Job's sons sinned against God, God killed them for their wickedness.  Many commentators who adopt this reading point out that it would cut the heart of a grieving father.  Yet, Job says nothing about it in his response to Bildad in chapters 9-10 or later on in the book.  A few have argued that Job agrees with Bildad's judgment of his children in 9:2.  This is frankly ridiculous, for the following reasons:
1.  There is no good evidence elsewhere in the book that Job's children were engaged in wicked behavior.  Job's sacrifices on their behalf are prophylactic and indicate his great piety, not their wickedness.
2.  If this were in fact the case, it would seriously undercut one major premiss of the book: that Job's sufferings are not a just punishment for personal sins.

Some critical scholars argue that this verse is an interpolation into the original poem by a later commentator. 

Job 19:17 


Not all translations understand this verse to refer to Job's sons.  Some take it as a reference to his brothers.  The Hebrew phrase can be translated woodenly as "the sons of my body" or "the sons of my womb."  Since men do not have wombs, Job's mother is read into the verse, as in "the sons of my mother's womb" -- brothers.  See also 3:10 "the doors of my womb," i.e., my mother's womb, where the context makes this translation highly probable.    But Micah 6:7 has a similar expression that clearly refers to the body of the speaker, not his mother.   Of course, there is another motive for reading Job's mother into the text, because the verse seems to imply that the "sons" are still alive to find him "loathsome."   If the "sons" are Job's natural sons, the verse contradicts the standard interpretation of the introduction (see the next paragraph for an alternative interpretation of the introduction).   So, this passage may be referring to Job's children as alive, although I think that is doubtful.


Job 29:5


Job laments the loss of God's favor, one evidence of which was the times he was surrounded by his children. Although the word used for "children" here could refer to servants, most translators prefer "children" in light of the introduction, where the same word is used both of Job's servants and his children.  Or at least that's the way most people understand the introduction.   Some people take the use of the word in the introduction to indicate that only Job's servants died.  The fate of the children is passed over in silence intentionally.  Also cited in this regard is the part of the conclusion in which Job gets double everything except children.  Possibly this is because his first set of children survived the catastrophes?  I found the clearest explanation of this view in The Hermeneutics of the 'Happy' Ending in Job 42:7-17 by Kenneth Numfor Ngwa.

It certainly is more poignant to understand the word as a reference to Job's children.  That doesn't mean Job is lamenting their deaths.  As the context makes clear, Job is lamenting loss of his social status.  That his children are no longer standing around him could be caused by many things, including the problem mentioned in 19:17:  Job has become repulsive to his own immediate family.  Of course, on the supposition that the introduction of the book is secondary, one could argue that the appearance of the word for "children" in the introduction is a forward reference to 29:5 used to tie the two pieces more closely together.  The reference in 29:5, then, may not refer to Job's children but to his servants.  That last argument is mine, not Ngwa's.


Morris Jastrow (The book of Job: its origin, growth and interpretation)
thinks this verse is an interpolation as well. 

So, out of three direct references to Job's children, one appears to imply that they are dead, one might imply that they are still alive and the third can be read either way.   These facts lend credence to the view that the poetic core of the book of Job had an existence independent of the current prologue and epilogue.  In the original debate section, Job's children were not dead.  The later editor who added the prologue and epilogue may have added a verse or two to the debates to move them closer to the issues raised in the prologue, but overall he failed to make the debates consistent with the prologue.  The book is internally inconsistent and therefore counts as evidence against the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy. 

This view of the book's composition history has come under fire for a number of reasons.  Of course, inerrantists by and large resist it because it undercuts inerrancy.  But there are many critical scholars who find it more problematic than an alternative.  Gerald Janzen, for instance, points out in his Interpretation commentary that the poetic section hangs in the air without the prologue.  He also argues that all the supposed inconsistencies that led scholars to posit an originally independent existence for the prologue and epilogue can be explained better by treating the book as a unified composition.  Other scholars such as Robert Alter argue that the prologue and epilogue preceded the poetic section.  They represent an originally-independent folk tale that the author of the poetic section adopted in order to provide a context/foil.  These scholars are not inerrantists, and they don't necessarily agree with one another about the composition history of the book (eg., whether the speeches of Elihu were added after the rest of the book was completed).   It is important to remember this, because even though their view of the book does not lessen the problem of the silence about Job's children, it does allow them explanations that are not open to inerrantists.

Inerrantist readers, as long as they intend to remain true to their core belief in the Bible, are going to insist that the book is a true compositional unity, or at least has an internally-consistent message.  Most inerrantists take it as a requirement of their faith that Job was a real individual and the catastrophes described in the book really happened.   Furthermore, most inerrantists regard it as a nonnegotiable not only that Job was a righteous man, but that the way he handles himself in the book -- with some qualifications -- is a model for the righteous sufferer.  This set of views closes the door on many possible explanations for the silence about Job's children.  I hope to take a look at the explanations remaining to inerrantists, because their view of the book makes them uniquely vulnerable to a set of moral criticisms of the book.  If Job is truly a righteous man, why does he not speak for those under his care, whose voices were silenced through no apparent fault of their own?  Why does he let God off the hook for the deaths of his children and servants?  Why does he allow his friends to rail about the fate of the subordinates of an evil man and not point out that his subordinates were subjected to that same fate for no good reason?    Why does God himself not recompense the children and servants for their deaths as he recompenses Job for his suffering?  Why does the book as a whole completely ignore this issue?  

In the end, answers to these questions open to inerrantists fail to clear their reading of the book.   On an inerrantist reading of the book, its author and his hero wickedly fail to act on behalf of those more vulnerable than themselves.

In subsequent posts I will develop this argument in some detail.

Paul did not read Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John

In a recent article Lydia McGrew argued that Paul's references to the teachings of the earthly Jesus and events in his earthly life present evidence that Paul had access to one or more of the canonical Gospels.  Therefore, the Gospels as a whole can be reasonably dated much earlier than scholars generally allow.  Dr. McGrew's claim is bogus, as this post will demonstrate.  Instead, the evidence she provides is best interpreted as follows:  Paul had knowledge of at least some of Jesus's teachings and some of the events recorded in the Gospels but we don't know from whom he learned it and it almost certainly did not come from one of the canonical Gospels.

As a subtext Dr. McGrew challenges the integrity of the New Testament scholarly guild.  In her view scholars should never have come to consensus that the Gospels were mostly written in the last quarter of the 1st century.  There is clear evidence of extensive written sources about Jesus's life and teachings well before that.  The present consensus was arrived at by way of an unwarranted (read "prejudicial") scepticism. 

No scholarly community likes it when outsiders challenge a settled consensus and sociology tells us that in the face of such a challenge most members of the guild will tend to rally around the consensus regardless of the degree to which it can withstand sustained scrutiny.  For those of us who have reflected on how wrong scholarly guilds have been about some of their settled conclusions, a challenge like Dr. McGrew's has some built-in credibility.  And some of us pull for the underdog anyway.   

On the other hand, the history of science is also riddled with cranks and crackpots who challenged a settled consensus and turned out to be flat wrong.  I do not mean to suggest that Dr. McGrew is a crackpot, but as it turns out her challenge to the consensus fails.  In the process of arguing for it, she appears to have neglected a basic requirement for any successful consensus challenger:  understand the grounds for the consensus better than the members of the guild.   As I will now demonstrate, she overlooks key features of the texts she cites that establish the grounds for the current consensus.
    
In her post Dr. McGrew discusses to varying degrees the following texts as evidence of Paul's reliance on a written Gospel:  1 Cor 6:2; 9:14; 11:23-26; 13:2,  much more briefly 2 Cor 8:9 and 1 Tim 6:13, and some other texts that make brief notes about Jesus's earthly life.  She doesn't comment on the prevalence of texts from 1 Corinthians.  This is a matter of great interest for its own sake, but we must pass it by here.  She failed to mention 1 Cor 7:10 and 15:3-4; I assume this was an oversight. We can also add to her list 1 Thes 4:15. 

She claims that the basis for Paul's statement in 1 Cor 6:2 is Jesus's saying in Mt 19:28 or Lk 22:30.  But in fact Paul could just as easily derived it from Dan 7:13-14,28.   Furthermore, she overlooks 1 Cor 6:3.  In the written Gospels Jesus never says anything about the saints judging angels.  It is therefore highly unlikely that Paul is reflecting on a text from Matthew or Luke.

1 Cor 7:10 and 9:14 make general statements about a teaching of "the Lord" that are consistent with texts found in the synoptic Gospels, but the allusions are too vague and Paul makes no reference to a written text as the basis for his statements.

1 Cor 11:23-26 and 15:3-4 share some important characteristics in common:

1. Paul says that he passed on to the Corinthians something he received.
2. He refers in some detail to events relating to the center of Christ's saving work.
3. The only mention of written texts in reference to these events is the Hebrew Scriptures.    

It is true that 1 Cor 11:23-26 bears a close resemblance to Lk 22:19-21 but this in no way means that Paul was recollecting a text from the Gospel of Luke.  If in fact Paul learned of the events of Jesus's life and his teachings from a written text, it is rather odd that he never mentions that any of them came to him that way.  Paul is not at all vague about his dependence on the written text of the Hebrew Bible.  What, was he unwilling to vouch for the inspiration of Luke or Matthew's work?  Was he so jealous of his apostolic credentials that he didn't want to give another human being explicit credit for educating him about Jesus?  Paul's language of receiving and passing on stories about Jesus sounds awfully odd if the reality behind it is that Paul read to them from a written Gospel or put his apostolic imprimatur on a Gospel that was already being read to them in their meetings.

1 Cor 13:2 appears to resemble Jesus's saying about faith being able to move mountains, but the rhetorical force of Paul's statement appears to run in the opposite direction from Jesus's sayings in the written Gospel texts we have.  Paul's statement emphasizes the the apparent strength of this "faith."  It is not just any ordinary faith, it is the kind that can move mountains; even faith that powerful is of no value apart from love.  But in the written Gospels Jesus's point is that you don't need some special kind of faith to move mountains; even a tiny bit is enough.  The most we can say is that Paul's language has a surface resemblance to a saying of Jesus recorded in the Gospels.

Finally, 1 Thes 4:15 refers to a saying of Jesus that is not found in any of our written Gospels.   There is no Gospel text that says or implies that "the dead in Christ shall rise" before living saints are lifted up to "meet the Lord in the air" at his coming.   

I am bypassing 1 Tim 6:13 for the simple reason that Paul most likely did not write that book. 

In conclusion, the evidence we have surveyed above supports the hypothesis that wherever Paul got his information about the earthly life and teachings of Jesus, it is least likely that it came from one or more of our written Gospels. 

Why Matthew and Mark's versions of the fig tree cursing story can't be harmonized

This is a follow-up on my previous post on problems in the Gospels.  Turretinfan posted a thoughtful response to which he added some explanatory comments and a Roman Catholic reader of Turretinfan's blog directed me to comments of his own on these stories, also in defense of Biblical inerrancy. 

Right up front I need to acknowledge that both of these gentlemen have read Matthew and Mark with some care.  Each has noticed some important nuances in the text.  I will bring these up in the appropriate places below.

Here is my general contention against their defenses:  Matthew and Mark's stories each have an integral meaning when read as part of a self-contained narrative.  The chronological order of each story is part of that integral meaning.  But the chronologies of the two stories are not in agreement with each other.  Attempting to wedge the chronology of either one into the other compromises its meaning.   Therefore, one must either deny that one (or both)  chronology(ies) should be taken as an intended representation of what actually happened, relativize the significance of one (or both) story(ies) in favor of the reconstructed "real story" that comes from harmonizing the two stories, or recognize the inconsistencies of the two stories as a fundamental feature of the Gospel narratives to which they belong and revise one's understanding of the Gospels accordingly.

I favor the third approach because it fits the most likely meaning of both stories.  Here I will make my final response to the comments of the two gentlemen.  Of the two stories Matthew's most clearly requires a chronology in which Jesus's cursing of the fig tree is immediately followed by the disciples' observation and commentary on its withering.    I would like to thank Turretinfan and Pete Holter for making several of my arguments in favor of this reading for me.  For example, Turretinfan points out to one of the other commenters on his post that the word "immediately" pretty much means "instantly."  He points out that if you cut down a tree the leaves look healthy for at least a few hours afterward.  This is true.  It is also true that if you cut down a tree it usually looks at least somewhat "withered" within 24 hours.   Speaking from personal experience, even a large (i.e. 60-100 feet all.  Figs average around 23 feet) tree's leaves will have begun shriveling within a day.  In short, a fig tree appearing withered within 24 hours of having been cut down is not exceptional or worthy of note.  If somebody has evidence to the contrary, please let me know.   Of course Jesus didn't cut the tree down, he just cursed it and it still withered.  As Turrentinfan himself pointed out, this is the really noteworthy fact.  Peter's comment in Mark captures this point perfectly:  "Look, the fig tree you cursed has withered!"  But the disciples in Matthew's version are not just commenting on the fact that the tree withered at all, but specifically that it withered "immediately."  Making this comment 24 hours after the fact would be weird.  Making it right after Jesus cursed it makes much more sense. 

Pete Holter bolsters this point with his observations that Mark, who often uses εὐθύς to refer to events that take place right after other events refrains from its use in his story of the fig tree.  That makes perfect sense in his version of the story, since the cursing and Peter's comment take place 24 hours apart.  Matthew's use of παραχρῆμα as narrator and in the subsequent comment of the disciples communicates that there was no delay.  Holter insists that this use of παραχρῆμα is for a rhetorical point about the relative immediacy the Jewish nation's falling out of God's favor following the events at the end of Jesus's earthly life and is not intended to present a different fig-tree cursing chronology from that in Mark.  His argument only follows if one assumes from the start that Matthew (or, more precisely, the Holy Spirit) is effectively preventing the Gospel writers from being inconsistent with one another.  This is further illustrated by Holter's argument that παραχρῆμα expresses the disciples' faith that the fig tree had indeed withered immediately, even though they did not see the evidence until 24 hours later.   He goes on to cite Jesus's comment to Thomas:  "You believed because you have seen, blessed are those who have not seen yet believe."  Huh?  Nobody would come up with such an explanation unless they were familiar with Mark's story and felt compelled to harmonize the two. 

Holter asserts that the aorist participle ἰδόντες in Matthew 21:20 at least implies a passage of time between the time Jesus cursed the fig tree and the disciples saw it.  Not so.  It could mean that or it could not, as Turretinfan appears to acknowledge.  All it implies is that they commented after they had seen the tree withered.  Based on what Matthew's text says, that all could have happened immediately after Jesus cursed the fig tree.  And if you take the disciples' comment in the normal sense in its immediate context, that's exactly what the text conveys.  The idea of a 24-hour delay is imported from Mark's chronology.   The dirty word for this procedure is eisegesis.  Both gentlemen engage in this practice; Mr. Holter has just made it clearer what is really going on.

I think Turretinfan, following Gill, has a stronger case in his interpretation of Mark's story.  Clearly, Mark spreads the story of the fig tree cursing over 2 mornings.  But is it possible that Mark's story leaves room for an otherwise unmentioned temple cleansing prior to Jesus's encounter with the fig tree?  Yes, possible but not likely.  Here are the reasons this is possible:
1.  One common translation of Mark 11:11 presents the order of events as follows:

1. Jesus enters Jerusalem.
2. Jesus enters the temple.
3. Jesus looks around at everything.
4. It becomes evening.
5. Jesus leaves for Bethany with the twelve.

This order of events lies behind the translation found in the Vulgate and the Peshitta,  Many early English translations, including Tyndale and the KJV can easily be read to match this order as well.
2.  This chronological ordering depends on how one relates the genitive absolute dependent clause ὀψὲ ἤδη οὔσης τῆς ὥρας to the rest of the sentence.  Genitive absolute dependent clauses normally appear at the beginning of sentences.  It would not be at all surprising that a genitive absolute appearing later in a sentence would be taken to modify only the clauses which follow.  And in fact you can find just such an instance in Acts 1:9.  Furthermore, ἤδη, which often means "already," can also mean "now" in the context of passing time.  Therefore, the clause can be taken to indicate the time at which Jesus left for Bethany and furthermore that this time arrived after Jesus had looked around at everything. 

Now here are the reasons it is not likely Mark 11:11 means what Turretinfan wants it to mean.  First, although genitive absolutes usually precede the clauses they modify, there are exceptions.  Interestingly enough, one occurs in Acts 1:10, almost immediately after the example we listed above.  Another even more telling example can be found in Matthew 28:13, in which a dependent clause with an aorist participle and the following main clause are both modified by a trailing genitive absolute with present participle.  By themselves these exceptions prove nothing except that they are exceptional.

The additional factor is the initial dependent clause in Mark 11:11:  καὶ περιβλεψάμενος πάντα.  Following Gill, Turretinfan takes this clause to refer to an extended period of observation.  After all, the temple complex in Jesus's day was quite large and it would have taken a good while to navigate around to see everything, assuming that one would have to navigate around to see "everything."  It seems reasonable to assume that Mark (or his source) knew about the layout of Herod's temple.  From the little that we know, it appears that the vast majority of the outer courts could be observed from  the top of the outer temple wall.  And there were several places along the outer wall by which one could ascend and gain an overview of most of the temple complex.  Even without climbing the outer wall it appears that large sections of the outer court would be visible to an observer from ground level once you are inside the outer court.  My point?  "Having looked around at everything" can simply mean "having taken in the scene in the temple as a whole," a process that would have taken a few minutes.  Couple this with the other uses of περιβλέπω found in the New Testament and Gill's expansive interpretation appears to push the language too far.  The text is  not talking about activity that would have taken hours, or even one hour. 


When you fit this interpretation of the clause into the chronological framework given in #1 above, it hardly seems necessary to treat the genitive absolute as chronologically posterior to the initial dependent clause.  If it only took a few minutes for Jesus to "look around at everything" why bother saying that evening came afterward?  Therefore, most modern translations take the genitive absolute as the chronological timeframe within which both the looking around and the departure took place.  Furthermore, the genitive absolute then becomes an explanation for Jesus's choice of actions.  He looked around and left because evening had arrived.    Not only does this interpretation not leave time for anything more than a minimal temple cleansing, it also understands Mark to be denying that Jesus did anything else except look around and leave.

Add to this the absence of any hint on the part of any of the Gospel writers that there was more than one temple cleansing.  This is not to say that Jesus couldn't have performed multiple temple cleansings.  That is certainly possible.  But there would have been consequences to repeated attempts to perform this type of action.  We would expect heightened security, sharper confrontations, perhaps violent opposition to Jesus's "cleansing" activity, and not just on the part of temple officials.  None of the stories in the Gospels suggest that anybody in the temple was prepared for Jesus's cleansing activity.  

In sum, the reading favored by Turretinfan is for the most part grammatically defensible but not the best given the immediate context.  The intepretation of περιβλεψάμενος πάντα in particular is questionable.  It looks to me like another case of eisegesis.


For these reasons I remain convinced that the fig tree stories in Matthew and Mark present inconsistent chronologies.   I want to thank Turretinfan and Mr. Holter for challenging me on this and provoking further study and reflection.  I learned something, and I hope both of them profit from this exercise as well.

Jesus curses the fig tree: One definitive example for those in denial about problems in the Gospels

I've been wanting to write a post on the story of Jesus cursing the fig tree for some time now.  I haven't had time or an occasion until now.  The stimulus was a series of uncharacteristically ill-conceived posts (see here, here, here,  here, and here) about how stories in 1 Samuel illustrate that supposed contradictory versions of Jesus's deeds and sayings in the Gospels are really reports of separate incidents.  At the outset I must acknowledge that Turretinfan never suggested that all claims of Gospel stories containing alleged contradictions can be resolved with his "separate incidents" solution, nor did he suggest that of the stories of the fig-tree cursing.  I just want to point out one example where that type of solution -- and every other used so far -- does not work.

I understand enough about the synoptic problem to be dangerous.  That is, it would be dangerous for me to propose a solution.  I'll leave that to the professionals.   But one does not need to be a New Testament scholar to understand that the synoptic Gospels, taken together, are problematic.  In fact, recognizing problems is fairly straightforward -- unless theological precommitments force you to deny the obvious.  I would argue that this curse plagues Turretinfan.

Specifically, the synoptic Gospels outline essentially the same story about Jesus, and yet in detail they sometimes present inconsistent, even contradictory, versions of the story.   Trouble is, accepting this as an accurate account of the situation puts one at odds with Christian orthodoxy's doctrine of Scripture.  According to this doctrine the Gospels tell us the historical truth about Jesus; they cannot err, and therefore they cannot be inconsistent with or contradict one another.  Therefore, there is no real problem with the Gospels, only with the rebellious, unbelieving human readers. 

This is a separate issue from the synoptic problem proper, which is concerned with the nature of the relationship between the synoptic Gospels.   Which Gospel was written first?  Where did the authors get their source material from?  How does one explain the patterns of similarities and differences in wording, order, and content?  None of these questions implies that the Gospels are anything less than 100% truthful in what they assert.

In the process of close investigation of the patterns of similarities and differences one finds the other problem.  This second problem pops up so often that it ends up playing a significant role in many of the proposed solutions to the synoptic problem.  So, which is it?  Do the claims of inconsistencies and contradictions built into the structure of many modern approaches to the Gospels tell us more about the readers than they do about the Gospels themselves?  Or, do these claims represent the "facts on the ground"  and those who deny them tell us more about themselves than they do about the Gospels?  Yes.  IMHO both are true to some extent.

But this post is not an attempt to establish the middle ground.  There are plenty of critics who discover problems in the Gospels that vanish as soon as one reads the text with a grain of sympathy and understanding.  Not all problems can be made to disappear that easily, and some won't go away at all.   The story of Jesus cursing the fig tree is a good illustration of the latter.  All the proposals to eliminate the problem posed by this story fail.  In the end we face two contradictory versions of the story. 

The two versions of the story can be found in Matthew 21:18-22 and Mark 11:12-14,22-25.  Many people have struggled with the ethics of Jesus's cursing of the tree -- and even more over the implied cursing of the Jewish nation.  However challenging that may be, I intend to ignore that issue.   My interest is in the chronology of the two versions.  Here are the salient differences:

	Matthew	Mark
Chronological Order	1. Temple cleansing 2. Overnight in Bethany 3. Cursing of fig tree 4. Disciples comment on the withered fig tree	1. Overnight in Bethany 2. Cursing of fig tree 3. Temple cleansing 4. Overnight in outside of Jerusalem 5. Disciples comment on the withered fig tree
Time the tree withered	Immediately after Jesus cursed it	Unspecified but within a day
When the disciples heard the cursing	On the morning after the temple cleansing	On the morning before the temple cleansing
Who commented on the withering	discples	Peter
When the disciples saw the withered tree for the first time	By implication of their comment, immediately after Jesus cursed it.	About a day after Jesus cursed it.
Comment on disciples' frame of mind	They were amazed	Peter remembered
What they said about it	"How did the fig tree wither immediately?"	"Look, the fig tree you cursed has withered."

If we apply the type of solution suggested by Turretinfan, we would explain (away) these differences by supposing that Jesus cursed the fig tree twice or that he cursed two fig trees on separate occasions.   Neither of these solutions works well in this case.

Let's suppose Jesus cursed the fig tree twice on successive mornings.  Matthew's version of the story reflects only the second cursing and Mark's only the first.   The disciples' comment in Matthew seems odd; wouldn't they rather have asked what was different about the second cursing, or why it took two cursings to get the tree withered?  And if Peter had just heard Jesus curse the tree a second time, what is the point of Mark's mentioning that he remembered it?   Both stories make more sense if we suppose that only one cursing of the fig tree is in view.  But if there were really two cursings of the same tree, the stories don't represent the likely historical reality behind them very well.

Let's suppose, then, that Jesus cursed two different trees on successive mornings.  That means the disciples saw two withered fig trees the second morning, one that Jesus had cursed the day before and one that withered immediately after he cursed it.  Peter's comment applies to the first tree and the disciples' amazement applies to the second.   Each Gospel writer focused on the cursing of only one of the two trees.  It seems highly unlikely that if Matthew were written by one of the disciples and Mark was a precis of Peter's recollections that both of them would have forgotten or decided to leave out of the story the fact that Jesus cursed two fig trees on successive mornings and that the disciples saw both of them withered on the same day.  Was Jesus in the habit of performing such symbolic teaching acts repetetively on successive days?  From the surviving Gospel stories it seems not.  That would make this incident all the more noteworthy, but neither Gospel writer gives any hint that Jesus cursed fig trees twice.     

Another way to explain (away) the situation is to propose that one of the two versions has been dischronologized.  I found a couple of websites citing Gleason Archer on this, although the basic idea predates him big time.  Archer himself did not argue that there were two trees and/or two cursings.  Matthew simply relocated the first part of Mark's story so that it appears together with the second part.  But one could use this type of procedure to rescue the idea that there were two cursings of two different trees.  Perhaps one of the cursings took place later that week or during one of the earlier visits to Jerusalem recorded in the Gospel of John.

In a way I like this type of solution.  Why don't we try it on Genesis 1 and 2?  This could solve that sticky little problem of the story order of the creation of animals and Adam in Genesis 2 vs. the order in Genesis 1.  Rather than adopting the controversial pluperfect reading of Gen 2:19a, we can simply say that God actually created birds of the air and beasts of the field twice, once on days 5 and 6 before the creation of humans and once again in the garden on day 6 after the creation of Adam.   This solution makes 2:19 more chronologically consistent with 2:18 and 2:20-22.  Of course there are problems with the "all"s in 2:19, but hey, as Calvinists will point out, when does "all" really mean "every single one without exception?"

It seems to me that this case matches the situation of "similar stories about separate events" better than Matthew and Mark's stories of the fig tree cursing.  If  somebody really wants to argue that Jesus cursed two different fig trees they should be ready to accept that there were actually two instances of animals and birds being created.  The possibilities for this type of interpretation have barely been explored.  Harold Lindsell did some ground-breaking work along these lines in his explanation of Peter's six denials in The Battle for the Bible.   Among other things, this approach could lead to a new renaissance for the dispensationalist interpretation of prophecy.   I can hardly wait.

But what about the assertion (Archer, et. al.) that Matthew simply compressed Mark's two-stage story into a single account?  This is not a fair handling of Matthew's text.  Jesus curses the tree and it withers "immediately."  The disciples see it and wonder how it withered "immediately."  This is not dischronologization.  The narrative chronology is part of the point of the story.  And if you take the story seriously as history, then you have to take the chronology of the story seriously as history, i.e., the cursing, withering and commentary happened "immediately" after one another.    There are perfectly good words in Koine Greek for "a short time later" or "soon thereafter."  παραχρῆμα is not one of them.  It means "immediately,"  "right away."   If the commenters adopting this view were correct, we could expect Mark's Peter to also point out that the fig tree withered "immediately" when he saw it the next day.   After all, a fig tree withering in 24 hours is pretty quick! 

A straightforward reading of either Gospel leads one to place the cursing(s) in a specific chronological context.   Just because that context causes us problems doesn't mean we get to discount or ignore it.  If Matthew's or Mark's chronological framework for this story is not intended to teach us when Jesus cursed the fig tree relative to the cleansing of the temple and the disciples' realization that the tree had withered, I'd like someone to explain how they can tell the difference between chronologies that can be ignored and chronologies (e.g., Genesis 1) that can't be ignored without threat of church discipline. 

In conclusion there is no way to make Mark and Matthew's versions of this story cohere chronologically.  That datum should be combined with many other indications that the Gospel stories do not always agree with one another.  This is a starting point for understanding what the Gospels are, how they came about, what they are trying to do, and how successful they are at doing those things.

What if Eve had been a trained scientist, Part 3

This is the third and final post in a brief series.  To get up to speed, see here and here.  In the latter post I presented a series of questions a sceptical and inquiring Eve could have asked Yahweh Elohim, Adam, and the serpent.  The answers to those questions would have given her plenty of data with which to make an informed decision about eating the fruit.

But wait a minute.  Couldn't Eve have called the serpent a bald-faced liar and fled?  Studiously ignored his every comment/question?  Told him in no uncertain terms:  "I don't talk to animals, especially animals who ask me impertinent questions?"  Brought Adam over to hear the serpent's outrageous talk?  Bashed in his head?  Or, Adam could have intervened and cut off the interview.  A lot of orthodox Christians think that's what should have happened.

As far as I'm concerned, any of these could have been appropriate responses depending on what Eve knew about the serpent.  And that depends on what assumptions one brings to the story.


My approach to this story requires setting aside any of these potentially legitimate tactics.  The Eve in the Biblical story talks to the serpent -- and caves in almost immediately.  As I pointed out earlier, this Eve is almost unbelievably incurious and suggestible.  How badly she comes off can be illustrated quite easily by comparing her with C. S. Lewis's Perelandrian Eve.  Satan has to commandeer the body of a human and spend several chapters worth of clever manipulation to get that Eve close to sinning.  According to the speculations of many orthodox theologians, the pre-fall Adam had superior intellectual powers.  If that were true, Adam's initial excitement about Eve must have worn out quickly when he discovered what a dimwit she was.  No wonder he ate the fruit when she offered it.  He realized that without him she would be completely unable to cope whatever Yahweh Elohim might do to her.

In short, the Biblical Eve is a chauvinist hack job.  Christian theologians have taken this bad theology and run the faith completely off the rails.   It is for that reason I used Eve's decision to engage in conversation with the serpent as my starting point.  Once Eve listens to the serpent, she is in a position to pursue systematic inquiry into the doubts raised by the serpent rather than half-assed observation and assent.  By that means she could have secured herself from lies and deceptions.  She would not have needed "presuppositionalism" or any of the other ridiculous non-sequiturs espoused by orthodox theologians to keep the rest of us in intellectual infancy.

OK, I'm done with that brief rant.  Now to the real rant.  The more fundamental problem with this story as explicated by orthodox Christianity is that it is a setup.  Eve is supposed to eat from the fruit.  Everything is arranged so that she does so.   Her own character and actions fit all too easily into the prearranged outcome.

My Eve is intentionally uncooperative.   If Yahweh Elohim wants her to fall into the serpent's clutches he's going to have to work at it.   Now he, Adam and the serpent are faced with somebody who won't take their word on the basis of trust.  She demands explanations; she intends to gather and weigh comparative evidence.    If Yahweh Elohim wanted her to grow in wisdom, he would be jumping for joy over her probing.  Maybe somewhere in the story's prehistory that was precisely the point.

Orthodox Christian theologians will have none of this.  If they are to be consistent with their traditions, they must be chauvinists and tyrants.  Therefore, Eve's probing questions are a sign of arrogant, autonomous thinking.  How dare she ask Yahweh Elohim to explain himself?  She doesn't need this explanation and therefore will not get it.  Yahweh Elohim will refuse to answer her questions.  If Adam is wise so will he.  The woman is just that, a woman, and therefore unqualified to be given such unrestricted access to knowledge and independent judgment.  She should be comforted -- and left largely in the dark.  Over time, perhaps, she will receive answers to at least some of the questions, once she proves herself capable of resisting the serpent purely out of love for Yahweh Elohim and a desire for his glory.  Of course, since the point is for her to disobey, the period of time over which her set of queries goes unanswered can be extended as long as necessary to provoke her revolt.

That partly explains the set of questions she asks the first time around.  I'm willing to let the orthodox play offense for awhile.  So, Yahweh Elohim responds first and anwers few or none of the questions directly.  Instead, he raises the point of Eve's need to trust him and seek his glory even when his purposes seem hard to understand or even unworthy.  Then Adam answers in the same vein.  Finally, the serpent answers all of Eve's questions fully, according to his lights (which, even if true as far as they go, may put Yahweh Elohim in a bad light).   Now she may have grounds to suspect that Yahweh Elohim and Adam have something to hide.  What does she do?  She approaches them with an enhanced list of questions.  In addition to the questions she asked the first time around, she also asks

1.  Yes, I understand that I would benefit from learning to trust you, but some of my questions are simply for clarification.  Won't you please at least answer those questions?    
2. What should I conclude about the serpent from the answers he gave me?
3. How long am I to wait until you answer the rest of my questions?

Most orthodox Christian theologians, or at least the ones I am personally acquainted with, are decent people.  Some are even exceptionally admirable (apart from their theology).  But when it comes to defending the ideas of God to which their theology commits them loyalty to their core convictions trumps all other considerations.   Of course, there are some who make adjustments to their core convictions due to social pressures or, more charitably, the pleadings of their own consciences.  Others are quick to point out this "trimming."  I have yet to encounter an orthodox Christian community without this type of struggle between "soft" and "hard" theologians.  Furthermore the "soft" theologians are only "soft" relative to the position(s) on which they "trim."   On other matters they can be just as "hard" as their "hard" siblings.  On the matter of Eve I doubt there are many "trimmers."  Therefore, we can expect most of them to propose that Yahweh Elohim will give Eve no answers to these questions either, including #3.

I would love to be corrected on this point.  Seriously, please correct me.  Show me how I am misconstruing Christian orthodoxy, how I am hard-heartedly thinking evil of Yahweh Elohim.   Convince me that God would have really loved a sceptical, probing Eve and all her descendants enough to condescend in a time of great danger and help her out of it.

But I'm willing to bet I get no takers.  Yahweh Elohim does not stoop to exposing himself to sceptical, autonomous thinkers.  He is not a specimen to be examined.  He will not let himself be subject to that kind of humiliation.  Therefore, Eve is to remain unanswered.  If she eats the fruit -- and she surely will -- so be it.

And with that orthodox Christian theologians make a mockery of their benevolent God.

What if Eve had been a trained scientist, Part 2

Today I am finally following up on a project I started much earlier this year in which I proposed the following thought experiment:  What would have happened in Genesis 3 if Eve had approached the "temptation" with rigorous methodological doubt and disciplined inquiry?  Please refer to that post for some context.    

Right away I will admit that this thought experiment goes against the grain of the story in Genesis 2-3.  The Eve in that story is remarkably incurious and suggestible.  Furthermore, the approach my Eve will employ is not natural to humans now and there is no reason from the Biblical story to think it was natural for Adam and Eve.  You will have to suspend disbelief.

This leads to an even more fundamental issue: What precisely did Eve know already by the time she encounters the serpent in Genesis 3? The story tells us very little. She is familiar with some form of the Genesis 2:16-17 prohibition, but we don't know how she learned it. She knows a language in common with Adam and the serpent. She has some awareness of what good food is and apparently has some conception of wisdom and its value. She knows enough about Adam to share the fruit with him. Presumably she heard Adam make his famous exclamation in 2:23, and if so she has some conception of marriage and at least a little experience at living as a wife. Presumably she has some experience with the garden itself and is aware that there are other fruit trees there. She accepts that the prohibition came from God. Her facility with language implies some kind of knowledge about a host of other matters, but it is diffcult to assess how far this would extend.

No traditional theology I know about is willing to stop at this minimalist account of Eve's knowledge. The Christian orthodoxies I've encountered will pull in the "cultural mandate" (Genesis 1:26-28) and knowledge of God as creator (Romans 1:20) as a bare minimum. 

"Why," you ask?

"Why not?  The narrator's economy is no license for unbridled minimalism.  He expects us to fill in the details, most of which are obvious to everyone but the intentionally obtuse."   Really?  OK then, but it never hurts to get things out in the open, even the "obvious."  Our Eve is going to ask Yahweh Elohim, the serpent, and Adam to humor her and repeat out loud in clear language all those unspoken, "obvious" assumptions.  In other words, once Eve has been confronted with the serpent's statements, she is going to seek clarification.  

But before we get too far into the matter of clarification, we need to ask what position Eve should take on the fundamental issue.  Under what circumstances, if any, will she act against the prohibition?   Like anyone else, Eve will begin her formal investigation with some prior experience.  She already knows Adam as a husband to some degree.  The only indication we are given of the amount of time they had already spent together is that Eve was not yet pregnant.  Most likely it hadn't been very long.  But even if for a short time we can assume some natural affections. 

What Eve knew of Yahweh Elohim is even less clear.  All we have to go by is what she tells the serpent in Gen. 3:2.  What she thought of or felt about Yahweh Elohim prior to the temptation is anybody's guess.  Did she "fear," love and trust him or was she already suspicious of him?  If the latter, "sin" in the Pauline sense would already have been at work in her heart.  Most versions of orthodoxy would resist this assumption , and making it doesn't further my case either.  Therefore, I am going to presume that Eve was predisposed by affections for Yahweh Elohim and Adam to obey the prohibition. 

Once confronted with the serpent, Eve's first order of business, then, would be to commit herself to continue to obey the prohibition until she had a very good reason to do otherwise.  How good would that reason have to be? 
1.  She would need to be convinced that Yahweh Elohim was wrong about the consequences of eating the forbidden fruit or that he was unjustified in forbidding it to her or that the benefits of eating the forbidden fruit were worth the price of dying.
2.  She would need to be convinced that eating the forbidden fruit would not break the bonds of affection between her, Adam, and Yahweh Elohim or that there is something very wrong with those affections and they should not be allowed to influence her decision.

In short, it would take overwhelming evidence in support of points 1 and 2 before she would seriously consider eating the forbidden fruit.  The serpent would have to convince Eve that Yahweh Elohim and/or Adam are either incompetent or lying.  This is a high bar for the serpent to get her over.  Furthermore, Eve has no prior relationship with the serpent and so no bonds of affection with it.  The serpent's odds of success appear to be terribly low.  Some people want to improve its odds by suggesting that "empiricism" or methodological doubt entails that Eve (or Adam) must eat the fruit to learn what will happen.  This  is patently ridiculous. 

Eve's second order of business would be to clear up the confusions confronting her after the confrontation with the serpent.  She should have been bothered by many of them before the encounter.   A simple start would be to present an identical list of questions to all the other major players in the story and weigh their answers.  The questions to be posed ought to accomplish the following:

1.  Clarify the meaning and purpose of the prohibition.
2.  Clarify the motives underlying the statements already made by the other major players.
3.  Provide enough information to develop some specific tests for each of the other players' trustworthiness and the accuracy of his statements.

Here is the list of questions:

1. Explain in some detail what "death" means?
2. What does "in the day you eat of it" mean?
3. Why should eating from the prohibited tree result in death?
4. Why would eating from the prohibited tree result in "knowledge of good and evil?"
5.  What precisely is "knowledge of good and evil?"
6.  Are any other trees in the garden of special significance?  If so, which are they and what is their significance?
7. Why was this not all explained more clearly before now?
8. Please describe in some detail who Yahweh Elohim is, where he comes from, and what he wants from me?
9. Please describe in some detail who Adam is, where he comes from and what he wants from me?
10. Please describe in some detail who the serpent is, where he comes from and what he wants from me?
11. How is it that the serpent can talk?
12. How is it that the serpent knows about the prohibition?

I will save the next steps for another post and give anyone who wants to a chance to really step in it with premature criticism. :^}

To argue or not to argue

That is the question.  Especially online.  A lot of people seem to think that trading comments in a blog combox with a user named "packersdude" who presents himself in the guise of a hunk of swiss cheese gives them a license to ignore normal rules of polite conversation.   Until we develop some kind of online equivalent to body language and social space, people will say things online that they would probably not say to someone's face.

I gained new appreciation for this after observing and being involved in a recent series of blog comment box exchanges provoked by people's differing reactions and responses to the death of Ken Pulliam, the author of http://formerfundy.blogspot.com.  In life Dr. Pulliam had come to reject the fundamentalist Christianity he was trained in and wrote numerous posts explaining why he believed Christianity was wrong.  His sudden and unexpected death took everyone by surprise.  People began posting condolences and remembrances of Ken on his facebook page and in the comment boxes on the posts that he had scheduled for release in the days after his death. 

A furor erupted over what most took as a hostile, contemptuous comment to one of the posts.  The commenter and his critics filled most of the combox with accusations and insults.  The criticism spread to at least two other blogs on the day Ken's post appeared.  The original commenter then posted commentary about Ken and a defense of his provocative comment on his own blog, and at least one other blog run by an associate of the original commenter posted a criticism of the critics.  People, including me, continued to post comments on all these blog sites either defending or criticizing the original blogger and each other.   I even traded some emails with the original commenter.

Reflection on this set of incidents has led me to some definite conclusions about whether to argue or not online.  If your goals are to learn something, gain and give some respect for good thinking, and persuade somebody that your way of thinking is right every once in awhile, you have to think like a rhetorician.  There has been something of a revival of interest in rhetoric in academia over the last few decades.   This renewed interest dovetails with studies in human psychology that argue emotions often help us to think better.   Usually we associate emotions with poor thinking.  True enough, especially when emotions are intense. But people are people after all, not logic machines.  Our emotions and thoughts are part of a feedback loop; the influence goes both ways and can lead to  better results than if we were merely machines.

I find it ironic that in the recent disputes the evangelical Christians, who supposedly believe we are not machines, were far quicker to dismiss the arguments of critics as "emotional thinking," whereas the atheistic critics, who are supposed to believe that humans are chemically-powered machines (according to one blogger's tendentious reading of Richard Dawkins) expressed more emotional self-awareness and more accurate assessments of the emotional effects of the language used in the exchanges.  If the evangelicals were just as self-aware and accurate they did not express it very well.

At any event, if you want to persuade people you have to take account of the whole person of your audience, not just the coherence of your arguments and the clarity and accuracy of your language.  With that in mind, here are some of my conclusions:

To argue:

• When you and your opponent's specified intention is to arrive at the best answer to the presenting issue. One or both of you may think you already have the best answer.  That's fine.  If you believe you have already considered all the relevant evidence and arguments, or that some evidence or arguments are so overwhelmingly persuasive to you that nothing new could change your mind, then you have the opportunity to persuade someone else.   If your enemy takes that view, there is still room for useful discussion.
• She may be willing to consider counter-arguments to some of her supporting points. Consider this example:  If an opponent is totally committed to Biblical inerrancy because giving that up undermines her faith in God, she may still be willing to consider arguments against solutions to a particular problem in the Bible.  You point out flaws in all the arguments she uses to resolve an apparent contradiction in the Bible.  She may say, "You're right.  None of my solutions work.  We will just have to wait for further light."  You may think your opponent is engaging in wishful thinking, but she did give your arguments serious consideration and you won a limited victory.  Many people have abandoned a core belief system in favor of something else after a period of repeated small defeats. 
• She may persuade you too.  Just because a person is highly resistant to criticism doesn't mean she is wrong.
• When something in another person's arguments really bothers you and you think the reason it bothers you is that there is something wrong with her argument or her motives in advancing the argument.  You may be wrong.  Arguing is a good way to find out.

Not to argue:

• When you or your opponent will not admit problems in arguments even when nearly everyone else sees them and can describe them in nearly identical terms.   In this case, something else is in the way.  Better to break off the argument and deal with the interference or wait for another opportunity.
• When you present a more elaborated and better supported version of a basically valid argument others have previously made to your opponent, and your opponent rejects your argument in virtually the same terms as she rejected the previous versions.  Clearly something else is in the way.  
• When you or your opponent in the process of pointing out the other's errors makes equally or more egregious errors.   
• One or both of you has gotten in over her head and need to learn more about the issue under discussion, or
• The discussion has gotten too heated.  Break it off and give the parties a chance to gather their thoughts.
• When you and your opponent are fighting to get in the last word, and that last word is intended to put the other "in his place."  
• This is one of the most common tendencies in blog combox arguments.  Tit for tat is a highly successful negotiation strategy, but only if the parties are willing to engage in proactive gestures of good will at critical junctures.  Otherwise,  the discussion will inevitably become an insult arms race.  The main issue gets lost and people who came into the argument hostile leave with greater hostility. 
• When you feel the need to criticize someone's personal behavior, you need to be able to stand in her shoes and hear your comments from her perspective.  You may not be able to do this well at all, but you should still try.  If you want the person to act differently (and if you don't, why are you criticizing in the first place?), you have to consider what is likely motivate her to change.  
• You can awaken guilt and shame in another person and at the same time increase her self-respect.  This tends to increase the odds that she will regard your criticism as a friendly act and be motivated to change.  On the other hand, you can awaken shame in another person and at the same time humiliate her.   This tends to increase the odds that she will regard your criticism as a hostile act and strike back against you or herself.
• When, despite your best efforts to moderate the tone of an argument and keep the main point in focus, your opponent keeps running the discussion off the rails or becomes increasingly hostile.  Something else is in the way again.  Let it go.
• When you have been beaten.  If your opponent demolishes one of your arguments and you realize it, admit your error and move on.  If she demolishes all your arguments, maybe it's time to rethink your whole position. 

Since hardly anybody (nobody?) reads this blog, I post this mostly as a public witness against myself should I violate these guidelines in the future.

A "Biblical" way to escape methodological naturalism, Part 2

This post is 5th in a series.  To save time and effort, rather than reviewing what I've been doing in this series, I will simply point you to the previous posts:

• http://newchristianity.blogspot.com/2010/07/case-of-rupert-sheldrake-illustrates.html
• http://newchristianity.blogspot.com/2010/07/further-reflections-on-methodological.html 
• http://newchristianity.blogspot.com/2010/07/is-human-finitude-reason-to-abandon.html 
• http://newchristianity.blogspot.com/2010/09/biblical-way-to-escape-methodological.html 

In the last post I covered the story of Numbers 16.  Now I would like to review the story of Jesus and "doubting" Thomas found in the Gospel of John 20:24-31. 

For my purposes in this post the commonalities in these two texts are more important.  Here is a short list:

• God's servant -- by extension God himself -- is questioned or doubted.
• One of God's servants proclaims in advance the occurrence of a feat that will put beyond doubt the credentials of the one quetioned/doubted (Moses announces that earth will swallow his opponents/"Scripture" predicts Jesus will rise from the dead).
• The feat occurs as predicted.
• Manifest evidence of the feat is witnessed and the witnesses express their conviction that the feat has occurred.
• The text of the story expresses, directly or indirectly, that the proper
• reaction of a witness was/should have been conviction that the feat occurred and that God's servant is vindicated.

For the purpose of this post I am foregoing any discussion of whether seeing people swallowed alive by a sudden fault or seeing alive and touching someone you know was crucified, dead, and buried 3 days ago, both of which events were predicted to occur more or less as experienced by people claiming to speak for God -- whether such events produce enough evidence to believe 1.) the events took place and 2.) the alleged spokesperson does indeed speak for God.   Instead, I'm going to assume that they do.

Both of these stories conform to a standard argument found in numerous Biblical narratives that goes something like this:
1.  If  someone claiming to speak for God predicts that God will bring about the occurrence of an event that is
   a.  highly improbable and unknown to the experience of most/all human beings
   b.  beyond the capability of the speaker or any other individual or group of humans to bring about
 and
2.  the predicted event takes place as described by the speaker and at the time predicted by the speaker,
then
3.  God was speaking through the speaker and he caused the event to take place.

IOW, God demonstrates his existence and intelligence by predicting his performance of deeds out of our ordinary experience and then performing them as predicted.

To save time and space I am simply going to assert that many instances of this type of argumentation can be found in the Bible.   You will find it abundantly in narratives about the wilderness wanderings, the stories of conflicts involving prophets in the books of Kings, narrative portions of the Book of Isaiah, the entirety of the Book of Ezekiel, the Gospel of John, the resurrection stories, etc.  This fact partly invalidates claims that the authors of the Bible and their audiences were epistemologically naive.  The authors would not have resorted to this argument unless they felt the need.  They encountered scepticism in their target audiences and fought against it by marshalling evidence in favor of their claims.  They found this type of empirical argument useful.   How many Thomases were there in the communities amongst which the early Christians lived?  More than one or two, I'm sure.  Likewise, I suspect the stories of the wilderness wanderings take on a hostile, confrontational tone toward the people of Israel because many of the actual early hearers of these stories did not respond in awed credulity.  The "orthodox" Yahwist priests/prophets met a rough reception and paid their audiences back in kind.  Or alternatively, God and/or the human author anticipated the scepticism the story would encounter and provided an empirical argument to forestall rejection and stimulate belief.  The Thomas story puts this tactic on display big-time. 

But we must not skip over a huge qualification.  The Thomas story and all the other examples we can find in the Bible are about empirical evidence shown to characters in the story.   The characters are convinced by the evidence, but the hearing/reading audience doesn't get to experience it; we get to participate in the story by the use of our imaginations.   As a piece of scientific method, this stinks.  I can stand there with Thomas touching a thousand different apparitions in my imagination and learn absolutely nothing about their existence.

The author of the Gospel of John is apparently aware of this; he tries to finesse his way around it by providing us with Jesus's famous follow-up line:  "Because you have seen me you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed."  (John 20:29 NIV)  This statement tells us that John's audience should not expect to be given the kind of empirical evidence provided to Thomas.  Second, it implicitly casts aspersions on Thomas's scepticism.  Thomas demanded and got empirical evidence for Jesus's resurrection.  By doing so he missed out on a blessing available to the members of John's audience who believe without it.   We are not told what blessing Thomas missed out on.  We are told quite plainly throughout John's gospel what the blessing of having faith in Jesus is:  eternal life.  Putting these things together, we are presented with a clear choice:  Believe in Jesus without solid empirical evidence for the resurrection or miss out on eternal life.

We should pause to point out that in Thomas's case one may question whether his scepticism is warranted.  As one of Jesus's travelling companions Thomas witnessed the miracle at the wedding at Cana, the feeding of the 5000, and the raising of Lazarus.  With all that accumulated evidence prior to the resurrection, the story told by the women and the other apostles should not have been so unbelievable.  But the readers of John's Gospel are not in Thomas's shoes.  We didn't get to see any of those miracles.  Are we nonetheless open to criticism for being unreasonably sceptical if we doubt the stories of the resurrection?   
 
Yes, according to John, because we have the books of the Bible!  So we have to add to this empirical argument the premiss that we know the books in which the evidence is presented are telling the truth.   Once again to save space and time I am going to simply assert that the Biblical authors stake their argument on this premiss or something similar.  Note the many times in the Book of Psalms that the psalmist mentions how he learned about Yahweh's deeds from the stories passed down from his ancestors.   There are so many examples in the NT of confidence in the truth of the Hebrew Bible that it hardly needs citation.   That the writings of the apostles were also to be granted this high degree of trust is one of the points made in 2 Peter 2:16-20, a classic text on this topic.

Here I think we can make a better case for epistemological naivety on the part of the Biblical authors.  The sceptic asks, "Why should I trust these writings to tell me the truth any better than any other ancient writings?"  They apparently did not think to provide sufficient evidence to convince sceptics raising these questions hundreds of years after they had died.    Mind you, providing the kind of case that can survive the depredations of time would be difficult in our day.  As difficult as it would have been back then, they could have secured some confirming testimony from enemies of their faith that was not embedded in their own documents and could be verified not to have been doctored by later Christian scribes, etc., etc.

But this is not their approach at all.  Instead, their strategy is to blame the victim.  The real reason sceptics don't have a high degree of confidence in the truthfulness of Biblical authors is that 1.)  they hate God, and 2.) they have already rejected abundant evidence for the reality of God and the truthfulness of the Biblical writings that testify of his existence, character, purposess, and deeds.  There is already sufficient empirical evidence to satisfy someone who was really open to persuasion and for that reason God has determined not to provide any more. (See Luke 16:31)

This strategy is still widely employed by defenders of orthodoxy.   It is also deeply flawed.  If somebody is dead-set against a belief the surest way to reveal his prejudice and defeat him is to present him with a massive amount of evidence.  Instead, this strategy attempts to blame the sceptic for the lack of greater evidence.  This will only make the sceptic more certain that he is right.

Why use this strategy then?  Maybe the Biblical authors weren't so epistemologically naive.  Maybe they knew they couldn't provide stronger confirming evidence because they didn't have any.   Hence they fall back on arguments from authority, character assassination against sceptical critics, and carrot/stick arguments such as that in John 20:29.

To sum things up, then, we see that whatever theoretical promise the "Biblical" method to escape methodological naturalism may have, it is fatally flawed in execution because it hasn't provided any real evidence, only questionable testimonies that somebody else long ago and far away had this evidence.  As a Christian, I find this conclusion disconcerting and frustrating.  IMHO, the only proper responses are 1.)  to rebuild Christian theology from the ground up from within the framework of methodological naturalism or 2.)  give up on Christianity altogether.

A "Biblical" way to escape methodological naturalism, Part 1

For those who have come upon this post from elsewhere, this is 4th in a series.  Look here, here, and here for the previous posts.  I would now like to discuss how the Bible deals with the relationship between data detectable, observable, and measurable by humans and human knowledge of God.  I have never encountered a survey of the type I am planning to undertake anywhere else.  This is most likely just another illustration of my miseducation and/or laziness.  In any case somebody somewhere with real scholarly credentials has probably written on this already.  If you know about any of these resources, please let me know!  

Let's start with enough of a review of orthodox Christian epistemologies to get us oriented to the Bible.  Epistemology is a tortured subject for Christians; there are significant areas of agreement among them, but the controversialists on the various sides usually argue that the distinctives of the opponent destroy the ability to justify one's knowledge of anything.  I am going to stick with things about which there is general agreement and leave areas of controversy aside for the most part.  OK, so from an orthodox Christian viewpoint, how do we know things?  We can start with the classic distinction between reason and revelation.

Reason here is much more comprehensive than just logical thinking; it is the set of tools and methods humans have available to learn about the world and God apart from God's specific "revelations."  It includes the use of our senses, the sciences, mathematics, intuitions. 

Revelation is typically broken up into two categories:  natural or general revelation and special revelation.  Natural revelation is what God reveals about himself in the existence, structure, character, and history of the physical universe around us and ourselves.  This has to be distinguished from our apprehension of God by experiencing ourselves and the world.   Natural revelation is an objective fact, regardless of whether any human beings have learned anything about God from it.

Special revelation is specific information not included in the categories under natural revelation that God communicates to specific human beings in one of several ways:  dreams, visions, auditory messages, miracles, via the media of prophetic messengers and inspired writers, and finally in the entire life, words and deeds, of Jesus of Nazareth.  Typically, theologians insist that God's revelation, even when miracles are involved, has a verbal component.  God "speaks" to us.    There are disagreements about how and in what forms God is still revealing himself, but there is at least general agreement among orthodox Christians of various traditions that the Bible is a revelation from God.  If we want to know what God has to say to us, we need to read or hear the Bible.

In my description of reason I managed to avoid the entire history of disputes over epistemology.   I did so intentionally.  Orthodox Christians believe that mathematics, logic,  and the empirical sciences are legitimate means to know the world, so long as they are employed under the overarching authority of God's revelation.   They believe the Bible teaches this.  I do not intend to question any of this now.  We will operate on this basis in our survey.

Natural revelation will play a relatively minor role in our survey, so I am foregoing further discussion of it.  Regarding special revelation, I would like to point out that there are two components here:  the medium and the message.  Did you happen to notice that all the means used in special revelation are empirical?  Even the most direct -- a message planted directly in the human mind by God -- has an empirical component.  I am now admittedly bringing in modern brain science, but why not?  Are we to suppose that when God revealed his laws to "Moses" or told Paul what to write that it made absolutely no difference in the pattern of their brain activity?   In other words, every act of revelation has a detectable, observable, measurable effect.

This leads us to consideration of the message.  Does the content of special revelation have a detectable, observable, measurable component?  Of course!  This is a commonplace admitted by all sides in regard to Christianity.  The Bible makes all kinds of at least theoretically testable claims about the past, present human experience, and the future.  The question I am interested in is more precisely this:  In what ways do the authors of Biblical books use their assertions of testable claims to convince readers to believe them?

For this purpose I want to look at the stories of Korah's rebellion (Numbers 16:1-50) and Jesus's post-resurrection appearance to Thomas (John 20:24-31).  I picked these stories because they include specific statements about their evidentiary value; otherwise I think they are pretty typical.   (For the story in Numbers, we can safely ignore disputes over whether it is a conflation of separate stories about a dispute over the position of the non-Aaronide levitical priests with Korah leading the pro-levites side and a dispute specifically about Moses's leadership led by Dathan and Abiram.)   In the former story a group of dissatisfied Israelites led by the Levite Korah and the Reubenites Dathan and Abiram confront Moses and Aaron with the accusation that they have usurped authority over Israel.  Moses tells the rebels to assemble themselves the next day.  The key text in Numbers reads (Num. 16: 28-34 NIV):

 Then Moses said, "This is how you will know that the LORD has sent me to do all these things and that it was not my idea: If these men die a natural death and experience only what usually happens to men, then the LORD has not sent me. But if the LORD brings about something totally new, and the earth opens its mouth and swallows them, with everything that belongs to them, and they go down alive into the grave, then you will know that these men have treated the LORD with contempt."  As soon as he finished saying all this, the ground under them split apart  and the earth opened its mouth and swallowed them, with their households and all Korah's men and all their possessions.  They went down alive into the grave, with everything they owned; the earth closed over them, and they perished and were gone from the community.  At their cries, all the Israelites around them fled, shouting, "The earth is going to swallow us too!"

 According to v. 28, the people will know God sent Moses when they see the earth split open and swallow the households of Korah, Dathan and Abiram.  We note that Moses pronounces the coming event and its interpretation in advance.  We also note that the event itself takes place immediately after Moses's speech and takes away all those and only those against whom Moses said it would be directed.  The text provides us with the eyewitnesses' terrified reaction to the predicted demise of the rebels and  their households and their later (vv. 41ff) assessment that Moses and Aaron are somehow to blame for the deaths of Korah, Dathan, Abiram, their followers and their families.

In sum we see that the eyewitnesses of this series of events were left in no doubt that Korah, et. al.  died.  We do NOT see them expressing their belief that Moses is a true prophet of God.   Instead, they blame the deaths on Moses and Aaron.  Their comment in v. 41 is not elaborated upon.  Did they think Moses and Aaron could summon God to perform murders?  Did they think that Moses and Aaron had inherent powers over nature?   The point of the text seems to be that the people were wickedly obtuse.

The basic argument of the text is abundantly clear to the reader.  The Israelites may not get it, but we do.  If someone announces a miraculous and highly improbable event is about to take place in order to verify his claim to have a word from God, the speaker has given no evidence that he possesses any independent power to bring this event to pass, and this precise event takes place immediately afterward, it is reasonable to conclude that the speaker is telling the truth about himself and God.  Were we there, we would conclude Moses is a prophet and reject the arguments and leadership of any survivors of Korah's ilk.

I will continue with the story of Thomas and Jesus in my next post.