Merged Evidence for why we know the New Testament writers told the truth - (Part 2)

[The Don]

I don't think we can gather any truth from that story at all. As you said, a meeting of 5,000 people would have been impressive in itself, so the number is exaggerated. Naturally there wasn't a food miracle, but even a non-miracle seems implausible.
I'm not asking you to consider the NT "reliable" for anything. There isn't a single story that I would point to and say "that probably happened. The NT says it". What I am saying is that certain truth can be extracted from the sources found in the NT, just as it could from the sources for any other lore.

So because it contains words, we should consider the New Testament a source of "certain truth". The only problems are:

• We don't know which bits may be reliable - apart from the bits which are independently verifiable
• We don't know how true the "certain truth" bits are, all we can say is that they're somewhere between 0% and 100% true (inclusive)

That makes it pretty useless as a source of the truth, no ?

So in terms of the original thread title:

Evidence for why we know the New Testament writers told the truth

There is none.

And that which is unimportant surely? Also, on-message truth can still be truth, it's just harder to find good arguments for the pro-jesus stuff because there is a clear motive for exaggeration and fabrication.

So are we left with

The New Testament may be a source of information (apart from the bits about Jesus or Christianity) but that information is of doubtful provenance and accuracy

Which makes it pretty useless as a source. It can only be used as a potential corroborating source for other information. Given what a "great" source it seems to be (see above) I'm not even sure whether it's any good in that role

Correct. It just means that's all we have to work with a lot of the time.

And yet you insist that the New Testament somehow provides some kind of reliable source at some level.

Correct apart from your latter dating. The absolute latest dating for the gospels is early second century, when they start getting cited by the church fathers. Nobody actually argues for that dating either, as the gospels would have needed to have become circulated to a degree, we need a decent amount of time between Mark and Luke, and the development of theology within the books can be compared with the other sources to give us a better dating. The gospels would have been written 30-80 years after the death of Jesus. This is very very good compared to most sources from ancient history.

You're right, I was going for hyperbole but....

..... the initial drafts may have been made at that time but the earliest extant gospels are c400AD, who knows what may have happened in the interim.

 

[phelix]

So because it contains words, we should consider the New Testament a source of "certain truth". The only problems are:

• We don't know which bits may be reliable - apart from the bits which are independently verifiable
• We don't know how true the "certain truth" bits are, all we can say is that they're somewhere between 0% and 100% true (inclusive)

That makes it pretty useless as a source of the truth, no ?

We don't know from the outset which bits are reliable, but we can make cases for certain bits being more likely true than not. Also "independently verifiable" is still not enough, because any historical source will have the possibility of being faked or otherwise wrong. It is a game of assessing the probabilities.

So in terms of the original thread title:

There is none.

Well there is. I've mentioned a few times Luke's information regarding the authorities and the early church, which is in many places verified by non-Christian sources. Was Luke not telling the truth at this point?
I've mentioned a few times the claim from the NT that John the Baptist worked in the river Jordan. Where the gospel authors not telling the truth here?

The New Testament may be a source of information (apart from the bits about Jesus or Christianity) but that information is of doubtful provenance and accuracy

Change doubtful to "varying" and you have yourself a deal.

Which makes it pretty useless as a source. It can only be used as a potential corroborating source for other information. Given what a "great" source it seems to be (see above) I'm not even sure whether it's any good in that role

It is not only of use as a corroborating source. It gives us much info on the likely travels of Paul, which would otherwise be unknown to us.

And yet you insist that the New Testament somehow provides some kind of reliable source at some level.

I don't think the NT provides a "reliable" source at any level, because I would feel uncomfortable "relying" on it should other sources be available. It does, nevertheless, contain documents of historical interest, yes.

..... the initial drafts may have been made at that time but the earliest extant gospels are c400AD, who knows what may have happened in the interim.

Luckily, we know this to a very large degree of accuracy owing to the abundance of copies that were made. The most famous modern textual critic Bruce Metzger wrote that we have a high degree of certainty for the accuracy of 99.5% of today's new testament. You can get a good overview of the 0.5% disputed bits in Bart Ehrman's "Misquoting Jesus". A book which is good but for the tendency to imply the disputed bits present a problem.
The earliest fragments date from mid to late 2nd century. I'm not sure when we get our first complete documents, but you could well be right with 5th century.

 

[carlitos]

I'm not sure when we get our first complete documents, but you could well be right with 5th century.

Try 1611.

 

[GrandMasterFox]

As I have said. You see what comes up a lot.

That depends on where it comes up a lot. I'm sure Xenu comes up a lot in scientology circles.

Check whether it's plausible.

Again, even this means nothing. Supernatural elements could have a mundane explanation or they could be completely made up. How do you tell them apart?

Ask what the reason might be for it having been said.

And this is one of the major pitfalls. Most of the times people of your ilk say "X wouldn't lie about Y" they actually don't know anything about why someone would lie.

You just don't know enough about fiction to tell someone's motives. The emberassing details are a great example for that.

When it comes to the paritcular issue of the NT, or any religious text for that matter, the clear motivation was to get people to buy the story.

Therefore, if you say for any reason what so ever, that you believe the story to be true because of something they wrote, then obviously they accomplished their motives. End of story.
Their motives accomplished so even if they lie, they got the work done.

The large number of factors involved mean that arguments would often be made on a case by case basis.

When a doctor diagnoses a patient there could be a number of factors. The methodology remains the same though.
You have X sub criterias, if you score Y on at least Z of them then you have condition this or that.

Even a case by case analysis can still be objective and most important of all be given with evidence.

It does mean that the miracle never happened. The historical method wouldn't exclude her from history...

You have changed your mind every 30 seconds about what this "historical method" of yours is. Funny how earlier you said clearly that anything in greek mythology about the gods is false, huh?

I mean I've been defending the non-exclusion of Jesus from history so this doesn't square very well. In this particular case, it is indeed possible that there's a mundane explanation. This is also possible for the numerous miracle accounts of Jesus.

But only for Jesus? Not the greek gods?

This, and the fact that the account supports the narrative and author's theology, means that we cannot say with any real confidence how the accounts started out.

Great. And when we don't know one way or the other, what do we do?
Guess to whatever makes us comfurtable? Or say "we don't know"?

I'm sure you'd be happy to just say "the miracles didn't happen" and leave it there?

Nope, I'm more than happy to say "I don't believe any of this crap until I see some actual evidence it happened".

Because history is not a case of definitively ruling out possibilities, but rather seeing which the evidence supports, and giving it more weight than the others.

What evidence? You have been asked this dozens of times and presented nothing. Also I will repeat again, "more weight" is also something that requires evidence.

I've not read any of these books. It depends on how they were written, what their intent was, etc. There is stuff likely to be true in the Koran or Hadith though, or in a devout Mormon's biography of Joseph Smith.

Dynetics = Religous text of Scientology
What the bleep do we know = Religous text (movie actually) of the Ramtha cult.

Their intent is identical to the NT. Spread a religion.

Again, obviously not every single word in the NT is a lie. We don't doubt the existence of Jerusalem. The question is which parts are lies and which parts are true?

What is the default position when there is a lack of evidence?

You could extend that to every narrative text full stop.

That's BS.
The problem is you take into account as if all people on earth have an equal probability of lying which is absurd.

Let's take an early example of yours. If we find a note from some random dirt farmer saying he paid X amount of taxes today, then we have a random joe schmoe talking about mundane stuff and it is not unreasonable to accept it.

But Paul isn't a random guy. He is a man who was part of a religious cult. Almost* all known people who started a cult from Hubbard to JZ Knight to whomever are known to be lying or deluded.
(*Not even sure if the word "almost" is needed)

These people are known to be of no base in reality whether intentional or otherwise. Therefore, religous texts are less likely to contain truth.

Which claim was it that you want evidence for?

Everytime you use the word "likely" you need to support the extra probability with evidence. You don't get to just blurt it out whenever you feel like it.
Saying X is a fact requires as much evidence as X is more likely to be true.

Do you not consider it a leap of faith to believe that the 5/6 sources listed originate from one single fake historical text, when there is no good reason to believe this?

Again, do you understand how burden of proof works?
You are the one making a positive claim you support it with evidence.

And quite frankly, you were already given plenty of real life examples of stories that expanded religious texts in the form of fan fiction.

Heck, I'll even make it easier for you. How many drawings\stories of aliens from people who claim to be abductees do you know? How many of them are similar? Does that mean aliens are real? Or is it more likely that there was a single story that got expanded? And most liekly that this original story was fiction?

Considering that it is far more common for people to expand and have inspiration or repeat other sources, the idea of a common origination is actually the higher probability.

This is actually something that is learned on first year in anything to do with writing. Perhaps if you actually bothered learning more about fiction, you'll understand it a bit better.

 

[phelix]

Try 1611.

I laughed, but then I felt incredibly geeky for getting it.

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

For my own 2c, asking oneself if something is plausible, is the most piss-poor criterion for historicity I've ever heard.

Equally, it's entirely plausible that the story of Harry Potter is based on a real boy, but we actually know from the author that it ain't. And it's entirely plausible to billions of people across time and space that the stars would influence your destiny somehow, but that doesn't make it true. And it's entirely plausible to a lot of people that a Nigerian widow actually does have eighty millions to get out of the country, but it ain't so. Etc.

Frankly, it's like the retarded little brother of the argumentum ad populum, except this one is about what one single person finds believable. Not that I even need to call it that, because it actually has a name: wishful thinking. As in, seriously, at that point you're left with something being true just because you wish to believe that something is true, but not for any real evidence supporting it.

And in another aspect, it's like a sieve version of the argument from ignorance. You take a text, eliminate 90% for being blatant lies, but still believe that the rest must be true because it's not provably false.

But doing it like that isn't making it better. It's not some mark of skepticism if out of an email from Max I hold event E as true until proven false, although in the same email I know he lied to me about events A, B, C, D, F, G, H, I and J. It just means being more gullible, if I still take his word for E just because that sounds plausible.

I mean, seriously, it's like reading an email from a Nigerian widow, and being aware that whoever wrote that lied to me about his location (e.g., the email headers show it coming from the Ukraine not Nigeria), and lied to me about a recently deceased king of Nigeria (the last king there was in 1911), and lied to me about the bank those money are in, and so on, but deciding to still believe that they have eighty million they need transferred, because that sounds plausible.

No, it doesn't. Things coming from a source that told a metric butt-load of lies (about two thirds of an imperial arse-load) and is provably not an impartial source anyway, should be assigned a lower probability to be true unless supported by independent and more impartial data, not taken as probably true just because I wish to think about them as true.

 

[phelix]

On what level does "Harry Potter was based on a real boy" or "A Nigerian stranger needs you to help with the transfer of eighty million" sound plausible?
You are correct in that plausibility can be quite subjective. For instance, someone might consider the faith healing explanation for a recovery at Lourdes to be plausible, while someone else might not.
If we take plausibility to mean the ease with which you can hold a belief, then the number of questions that arise uniquely to that belief would be something of a benchmark as to how plausible it is. With the example of Harry Potter or the Nigerian 8million, there are quite a lot of pertinent questions associated with the beliefs, so I cannot believe you seriously consider them to be plausible.
This is still something of a subjective matter, but we at least are not totally in the dark.

 

[kmortis]

On what level does "Harry Potter was based on a real boy" or "A Nigerian stranger needs you to help with the transfer of eighty million" sound plausible?
You are correct in that plausibility can be quite subjective. For instance, someone might consider the faith healing explanation for a recovery at Lourdes to be plausible, while someone else might not.
If we take plausibility to mean the ease with which you can hold a belief, then the number of questions that arise uniquely to that belief would be something of a benchmark as to how plausible it is. With the example of Harry Potter or the Nigerian 8million, there are quite a lot of pertinent questions associated with the beliefs, so I cannot believe you seriously consider them to be plausible.
This is still something of a subjective matter, but we at least are not totally in the dark.

I can't speak to the plausibility of Harry Potter, but apparently the plausibility of the 419 scams is about 1.5/1000. The only reason most people find the story of Jesus as told in the gospels to be plauible is that they're raised on it. If I were to come to you and tell you the story of John Frumm, you'd laugh in my face. Yet, there are some Pacific Islanders who would be mighty put out by that attitude. And the story of John Frumm is just about as old for us, as the Gospels would have been when they were set to paper.

 

[phelix]

I can't speak to the plausibility of Harry Potter, but apparently the plausibility of the 419 scams is about 1.5/1000.

Brilliant! See, we can put a figure on plausibility Now how to put the synoptic four source model into scam form so I can test that one out...

 

[pakeha]

Well there is. I've mentioned a few times Luke's information regarding the authorities and the early church, which is in many places verified by non-Christian sources. Was Luke not telling the truth at this point?
I've mentioned a few times the claim from the NT that John the Baptist worked in the river Jordan. Where the gospel authors not telling the truth here?

We've gone over this.
We're waiting for those non-bibical sources, phelix.
And in any case, I think you've gone on about John the Baptist quite long enough. It's one reference and as other posters have indicated, it's like the mention of Charles de Gaulle in The Day of the Jackal
phelix, you know very well this simply not in the subject matter of the thread.

It is not only of use as a corroborating source. It gives us much info on the likely travels of Paul, which would otherwise be unknown to us.

Likely travels sums it up, doesn't it.

I don't think the NT provides a "reliable" source at any level, because I would feel uncomfortable "relying" on it should other sources be available. It does, nevertheless, contain documents of historical interest, yes.

You mean details about likely travels?

Luckily, we know this to a very large degree of accuracy owing to the abundance of copies that were made. The most famous modern textual critic Bruce Metzger wrote that we have a high degree of certainty for the accuracy of 99.5% of today's new testament. You can get a good overview of the 0.5% disputed bits in Bart Ehrman's "Misquoting Jesus". A book which is good but for the tendency to imply the disputed bits present a problem.
The earliest fragments date from mid to late 2nd century. I'm not sure when we get our first complete documents, but you could well be right with 5th century.

And this is relevent for some reason?

...The only reason most people find the story of Jesus as told in the gospels to be plauible is that they're raised on it. If I were to come to you and tell you the story of John Frumm, you'd laugh in my face. Yet, there are some Pacific Islanders who would be mighty put out by that attitude. And the story of John Frumm is just about as old for us, as the Gospels would have been when they were set to paper.

Thanks for pointing that out.
THe cargo cults have taught us a lot about how cults start up.

Brilliant! See, we can put a figure on plausibility Now how to put the synoptic four source model into scam form so I can test that one out...

It's already been done, phelix.
How do you think the tele-preachers and the Vatican amassed their fortunes?

 

[zooterkin]

On what level does "Harry Potter was based on a real boy" or "A Nigerian stranger needs you to help with the transfer of eighty million" sound plausible?

As compared with someone being the son of God, walking on water, raising the dead and coming back to life himself? Hmmm, let me think about that...

 

[kmortis]

Brilliant! See, we can put a figure on plausibility Now how to put the synoptic four source model into scam form so I can test that one out...

Yeah, that might be tough. My rather flippant example is recording the number of people who respond to a 419 scammer's initial email out of 1000 emails sent. There's no break down of those who respond because they found it plausible and those who are scambusters. I would hope that it's more of the latter and an ever shrinking number of the former.

Christianity, or any religion of comparable age, would be more problematic. Since they get to beat the core of peoples' lives. The example I gave of the cargo cults (John Frumm being the most prolific and popular version) shows that any nonsense can be handed down once the initial generation has bought in. Let's face it, virgin birth, zombies, unnoticed earthquakes...all a bit unbelievable unless you were raised on it. And even some of us who were raised on it found it wanting later on.

 

[Gandalfs Beard]

This really sucks. A whole entertaining and informative segment of the thread has been split off.


GB

ETA: Oh, I get it now. We have to start anew every 500 pages. I cant wait for the 1000th page party.

 

[catsmate]

"Likely" isn't a conclusion. "Likely" is a weasel word people use when they don't have evidence.

You need a better dictionary.


GB

I prefer the term, coined I believe by Terry Pratchett, "wallpaper word", i.e. a word or phrase used to cover over and conceal a gaping hole in the users argument.

 

[Gandalfs Beard]

I prefer the term, coined I believe by Terry Pratchett, "wallpaper word", i.e. a word or phrase used to cover over and conceal a gaping hole in the users argument.

Yes! My apologies to all the Weasels I insulted.


GB

 

[catsmate]

I think you're all tearing a bit too harsh on phelix. He's no DOC. I mean, there are three basic positions on Jesus you have to distinguish.

1) The NT is the inerrant, infallible word on Jesus Christ. Mind the Christ bit. Everything in the NT is true, especially the supernatural stuff like the Resurrection. This is DOC's position, and Geisler's, and William Ramsay's and of all those other liars for Jeebus. "Liar" here is appropriate, as they willfully lie and twist and mince words to turn the contradictions in the gospels into confirming each other.

Actually Ramsay didn't believe in the resurrection or other supernatural elements of the NT; this fact is irritating to the fundamn breed of xian so they ignore, deny, obfuscate or just lie about it. For example he said of Luke, that it stood up to scrutiny "provided always that the critic knows the subject and does not go beyond the limits of science and of justice".
DOC's been busy ignoring this gaping hole in his (mis)use of Ramsay for a long time now.

 

[catsmate]

Yes! My apologies to all the Weasels I insulted.


GB

There aren't any in Ireland (at least the four-legged variety) but I'll pass your apology on to the next stoat I encounter.

 

[Gandalfs Beard]

There aren't any in Ireland (at least the four-legged variety) but I'll pass your apology on to the next stoat I encounter.

My apologies to stoats. Clearly I've been in the US far too long.

GB

 

[phelix]

We've gone over this.
We're waiting for those non-bibical sources, phelix.

I've said what the non-biblical sources for those claims are - Josephus on John the baptist, and there are a fair few sources for a number of the claims made in Acts, such as Roman official sources and Tacitus.

And in any case, I think you've gone on about John the Baptist quite long enough. It's one reference and as other posters have indicated, it's like the mention of Charles de Gaulle in The Day of the Jackal
phelix, you know very well this simply not in the subject matter of the thread.

I don't think it is not the subject matter. There are times at which the NT writers are telling the truth, and external sources help to demonstrate this.
It is not like Charles De Gaulle in The Day of the Jackal, as much of the NT represents lore and not fiction.

Likely travels sums it up, doesn't it.

Yup. You cannot say definite travels, because "what if all the sources are fakes". History discovers the likely. With regards to Pauls travels, this is a case in which the NT writer is likely telling the truth. After all, he writes in his letter to the Corinthians that he visited them and was unhappy, so is hoping to address that. The possibility of the Corinthians standing around saying "whut. He never visited... and he thinks we're sexually deviant, what the heck is this?" is a comical one.

You mean details about likely travels?

Yes, among other things. The doings of Paul are some of the better historical sources, even though he gives us very little to work with.

And this is relevent for some reason?

I was responding to the implication that we might not know what the original versions of some of these sources said. We do know, pretty confidently.

It's already been done, phelix.
How do you think the tele-preachers and the Vatican amassed their fortunes?

Hm, I'm guessing that was light hearted, but my mention of the two-source hypothesis is very detached from religious belief. The traditional view is just Matthew to Mark and Luke, Mark to Luke. Ironically this is still defended by apologists (see Bernard Orchard if interested), and it plays into the claim of single-source-fake model much better than the critical historical mainstream view. Anyway, I was making a bit of a dig at how much modern scholarship relies on very subtle differences in what is considered "plausible". Was there a proto-mark document? Scholars arguments rest completely on whether or not they consider such a document to be plausible, and as such, academia is divided, with no hope of ever resolving such a dispute.

 

[Gandalfs Beard]

I've said what the non-biblical sources for those claims are - Josephus on John the baptist, and there are a fair few sources for a number of the claims made in Acts, such as Roman official sources and Tacitus.

It has already been explained why tattered 11th century manuscripts are unreliable evidence for events 1000 years prior.

Tacitus reports are only evidence that Christians existed, not evidence that Jesus existed.


GB