And there's a link just above to explain why it's more often than not, faulty. There's nothing intrinsically special or different about Biblical eyewitness testimony. It doesn't fall into a unique category.
It is also true to say, however, that eyewitness testimony is not uniform. In circumstances it can be relied on and in other circumstances it is much more dubious. And it can be relied on more for some things than for others. It’s not really adequate, to sum eyewitness testimony up as if it were simply one thing.
See, to me that's just an oblique way of saying that Biblical eyewitness testimony is *a special case* that should be considered apart from others.
Except @BroJames said nothing about the Bible. All he said was that eyewitness is testimony more reliable and sometimes less reliable, so a blanket statement that “eyewitness testimony is unreliable” is too much of a generalization.
I suspect BroJames was speaking from the perspective of his former career as a lawyer (if I remember correctly) rather than from a stance of defending the Bible. What he said is certainly my experience as a lawyer.
But I did when I posted in response to @Lamb Chopped.
Let’s deal with her assertion we need to start with the eyewitness accounts included in the Gospels, then. Why should it be considered a more reliable form?
You can believe it's natural for the third century AD but not for the first? On what survey of ancient texts of the first, second, and third centuries do you base that judgement?
The survey of that which has impinged on my 70 year old consciousness. Do you know of any I wouldn't? Of that unequalled power? Nobody else does. I mean, the whole world would know wouldn't it? Would have known for 20-17 hundred years..
So the answer is you don't know of anything contemporary with it two hundred years later? When you say that two hundred years of Christianity made it more possible in the third century than in the first you're just speculating about what meets your unevidenced expectations?
All he said was that eyewitness is testimony more reliable and sometimes less reliable, so a blanket statement that “eyewitness testimony is unreliable” is too much of a generalization.
Oops. Sorry, that sentence got mingled a little. It should be “All he said was that eyewitness testimony is sometimes more reliable and sometimes less reliable . . . .”
If you knew that eyewitness testimony was “sometimes more reliable and sometimes less reliable”, wouldn’t your default position be that it was unreliable until supported by other evidence? If it was uncertain, surely the sensible thing is to treat it as unreliable.
I’ve been on juries twice, my impression from that is that eyewitnesses often are very sure about details which turn out to be wrong.
A trivial example that had no real bearing in the case: a witness in one of the cases knew the alleged victim in a specific context. That context involved wearing a uniform.
On the witness stand, the witness was questioned in detail about the position of everyone, what they were doing and wearing. Anyway the witness described the victims clothing as being the uniform. Only as described by everyone else, the victim and if I recall correctly the cctv evidence, the victim wasn’t wearing the uniform.
Conclusion is that if you ask someone more than a year later about something, even when they’ve got an interest in trying to retain the information because they know they’ll be asked about it later, then they might not be as accurate as they might think they are being.
In real life, as opposed to theological debates, one often has only eyewitness accounts. It is mostly academics who have the latitude to say "we can only wait for more data".
"True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information." -- Winston Churchill
I think there are studies of when eyewitness material is more or less reliable. Stuff that people knew they should be paying attention to before it happened when they've got a clear view is more reliable than stuff that started happening while they were looking the other way.
In real life, as opposed to theological debates, one often has only eyewitness accounts. It is mostly academics who have the latitude to say "we can only wait for more data".
"True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information." -- Winston Churchill
What do you mean? Which contexts only have eyewitness accounts?
But I did when I posted in response to @Lamb Chopped.
Let’s deal with her assertion we need to start with the eyewitness accounts included in the Gospels, then. Why should it be considered a more reliable form?
@Lamb Chopped can certainly answer for herself, but I’d say that may be wrong question, at least as a starting place. To me the more appropriate question might be under what circumstances can we reasonably consider eyewitness testimony more reliable and under what circumstances can we reasonably consider it less credible? After that question has been answered, we can move to question of how to apply the answers to the first question to what we find in the Gospels?
It may also be reasonable to ask what degree of credibility we’re generally willing to give to eyewitness accounts in ancient writings other than the Gospels, and why. That may shed light on whether we’re holding the Gospels to a standard different from—whether higher or lower—than we use for other ancient writings.
If you knew that eyewitness testimony was “sometimes more reliable and sometimes less reliable”, wouldn’t your default position be that it was unreliable until supported by other evidence?
Not necessarily. A variety of things can go into considering credibility/reliability. Corroborating or supporting evidence is one of those things, but not the only one. In line with what @Dafyd said above, for example, it is reasonable to treat my memory of my wedding (36 years ago) or the birth of my children (27 and 24 years ago) as more reliable than my memory of the color of the car that I saw run a red light last week.
But I did when I posted in response to @Lamb Chopped.
Let’s deal with her assertion we need to start with the eyewitness accounts included in the Gospels, then. Why should it be considered a more reliable form?
More reliable than what? Secondhand accounts?
Because that's your choice when you're dealing with an historical event more than 200 years in the past. You don't have video, audio, or photos. You have accounts by witnesses--or in certain rare cases, you might have physical evidence (for example, of an earthquake).
And when it comes to accounts by witnesses, eyewitnesses are clearly the best to have. They are not perfect, no; but they are better than secondhand witnesses ("Joe told me that...") and they are better than nothing at all.
But I did when I posted in response to @Lamb Chopped.
Let’s deal with her assertion we need to start with the eyewitness accounts included in the Gospels, then. Why should it be considered a more reliable form?
@Lamb Chopped can certainly answer for herself, but I’d say that may be wrong question, at least as a starting place. To me the more appropriate question might be under what circumstances can we reasonably consider eyewitness testimony more reliable and under what circumstances can we reasonably consider it less credible? After that question has been answered, we can move to question of how to apply the answers to the first question to what we find in the Gospels?
It may also be reasonable to ask what degree of credibility we’re generally willing to give to eyewitness accounts in ancient writings other than the Gospels, and why. That may shed light on whether we’re holding the Gospels to a standard different from—whether higher or lower—than we use for other ancient writings.
If you knew that eyewitness testimony was “sometimes more reliable and sometimes less reliable”, wouldn’t your default position be that it was unreliable until supported by other evidence?
Not necessarily. A variety of things can go into considering credibility/reliability. Corroborating or supporting evidence is one of those things, but not the only one. In line with what @Dafyd said above, for example, it is reasonable to treat my memory of my wedding (36 years ago) or the birth of my children (27 and 24 years ago) as more reliable than my memory of the color of the car that I saw run a red light last week.
I remember very well holding my daughter 24 years ago when she was minutes old. I’m not sure, cannot ever really be sure, which memories of that event are real. I don’t really remember any details of trivial things I did last week.
But I did when I posted in response to @Lamb Chopped.
Let’s deal with her assertion we need to start with the eyewitness accounts included in the Gospels, then. Why should it be considered a more reliable form?
More reliable than what? Secondhand accounts?
Because that's your choice when you're dealing with an historical event more than 200 years in the past. You don't have video, audio, or photos. You have accounts by witnesses--or in certain rare cases, you might have physical evidence (for example, of an earthquake).
And when it comes to accounts by witnesses, eyewitnesses are clearly the best to have. They are not perfect, no; but they are better than secondhand witnesses ("Joe told me that...") and they are better than nothing at all.
I understand that as a point of faith, whatever floats your boats, as it were.
For me, stories that claim “x person said and thought y” are most suspicious. Because a) it seems common for ancients to put names to characters in stories because it makes them sound more exciting and/or plausible b) that person would have had to explain in detail to someone what they were thinking many years before and c) the person writing it down would have had to resist the urge to edit the account to make it sound more plausible/exciting.
But I did when I posted in response to @Lamb Chopped.
Let’s deal with her assertion we need to start with the eyewitness accounts included in the Gospels, then. Why should it be considered a more reliable form?
@Lamb Chopped can certainly answer for herself, but I’d say that may be wrong question, at least as a starting place. To me the more appropriate question might be under what circumstances can we reasonably consider eyewitness testimony more reliable and under what circumstances can we reasonably consider it less credible? After that question has been answered, we can move to question of how to apply the answers to the first question to what we find in the Gospels?
It may also be reasonable to ask what degree of credibility we’re generally willing to give to eyewitness accounts in ancient writings other than the Gospels, and why. That may shed light on whether we’re holding the Gospels to a standard different from—whether higher or lower—than we use for other ancient writings.
If you knew that eyewitness testimony was “sometimes more reliable and sometimes less reliable”, wouldn’t your default position be that it was unreliable until supported by other evidence?
Not necessarily. A variety of things can go into considering credibility/reliability. Corroborating or supporting evidence is one of those things, but not the only one. In line with what @Dafyd said above, for example, it is reasonable to treat my memory of my wedding (36 years ago) or the birth of my children (27 and 24 years ago) as more reliable than my memory of the color of the car that I saw run a red light last week.
I remember very well holding my daughter 24 years ago when she was minutes old. I’m not sure, cannot ever really be sure, which memories of that event are real.
The question, though, is whether even given your uncertainty, your memory of holding your daughter 24 years ago is more likely to be accurate than your memory of a random, and to you insignificant, event you happened to observe a week or two ago.
But I did when I posted in response to @Lamb Chopped.
Let’s deal with her assertion we need to start with the eyewitness accounts included in the Gospels, then. Why should it be considered a more reliable form?
@Lamb Chopped can certainly answer for herself, but I’d say that may be wrong question, at least as a starting place. To me the more appropriate question might be under what circumstances can we reasonably consider eyewitness testimony more reliable and under what circumstances can we reasonably consider it less credible? After that question has been answered, we can move to question of how to apply the answers to the first question to what we find in the Gospels?
It may also be reasonable to ask what degree of credibility we’re generally willing to give to eyewitness accounts in ancient writings other than the Gospels, and why. That may shed light on whether we’re holding the Gospels to a standard different from—whether higher or lower—than we use for other ancient writings.
If you knew that eyewitness testimony was “sometimes more reliable and sometimes less reliable”, wouldn’t your default position be that it was unreliable until supported by other evidence?
Not necessarily. A variety of things can go into considering credibility/reliability. Corroborating or supporting evidence is one of those things, but not the only one. In line with what @Dafyd said above, for example, it is reasonable to treat my memory of my wedding (36 years ago) or the birth of my children (27 and 24 years ago) as more reliable than my memory of the color of the car that I saw run a red light last week.
I remember very well holding my daughter 24 years ago when she was minutes old. I’m not sure, cannot ever really be sure, which memories of that event are real.
The question, though, is whether even given your uncertainty, your memory of holding your daughter 24 years ago is more likely to be accurate than your memory of a random, and to you insignificant, event you happened to observe a week or two ago.
I suspect that if you were to ask me the colour of the towel she was wrapped in 24 years ago I’d be wrong. If you asked me the colour of a car I saw last week, I’d almost definitely be wrong.
I’m not sure what this is proving other than that my memory isn’t great.
But I did when I posted in response to @Lamb Chopped.
Let’s deal with her assertion we need to start with the eyewitness accounts included in the Gospels, then. Why should it be considered a more reliable form?
@Lamb Chopped can certainly answer for herself, but I’d say that may be wrong question, at least as a starting place. To me the more appropriate question might be under what circumstances can we reasonably consider eyewitness testimony more reliable and under what circumstances can we reasonably consider it less credible? After that question has been answered, we can move to question of how to apply the answers to the first question to what we find in the Gospels?
It may also be reasonable to ask what degree of credibility we’re generally willing to give to eyewitness accounts in ancient writings other than the Gospels, and why. That may shed light on whether we’re holding the Gospels to a standard different from—whether higher or lower—than we use for other ancient writings.
If you knew that eyewitness testimony was “sometimes more reliable and sometimes less reliable”, wouldn’t your default position be that it was unreliable until supported by other evidence?
Not necessarily. A variety of things can go into considering credibility/reliability. Corroborating or supporting evidence is one of those things, but not the only one. In line with what @Dafyd said above, for example, it is reasonable to treat my memory of my wedding (36 years ago) or the birth of my children (27 and 24 years ago) as more reliable than my memory of the color of the car that I saw run a red light last week.
I remember very well holding my daughter 24 years ago when she was minutes old. I’m not sure, cannot ever really be sure, which memories of that event are real.
The question, though, is whether even given your uncertainty, your memory of holding your daughter 24 years ago is more likely to be accurate than your memory of a random, and to you insignificant, event you happened to observe a week or two ago.
I suspect that if you were to ask me the colour of the towel she was wrapped in 24 years ago I’d be wrong. If you asked me the colour of a car I saw last week, I’d almost definitely be wrong.
I’m not sure what this is proving other than that my memory isn’t great.
Perhaps we should take the focus off you or me. This isn’t about your memory or my memory, but about how to gauge credibility of an eyewitness account.
The question is whether as a general rule an average person’s memory of a significant (to them) event that they were prepared for and “present in the moment” for is likely to be more accurate than that same average person’s memory of an insignificant (to them) event they had no personal stake in and that they only happened to observe. Generally speaking (meaning absent circumstances tending to show otherwise), even in the absence of supporting or corroborating evidence, more credibility would be given to the memory of the anticipated, significant event because the average person is more likely to be paying attention and noticing and thinking about details.
Right. So how does one determine which are memories of the type “I have a daughter, I was present at her birth” and which are “I held her for a long time before my wife even saw her, she was wrapped in a purple towel and I saw her open her eyes for the first time”.
The former are things I have evidence for beyond my own recollection. The latter are memories that I think are true, but as the only other person there that I could ask was a bit otherwise engaged at the time, there is no way to check.
In another 50 or 60 years it is quite possible that I couldn’t even name reliably the date or place of birth. Or even my own name unless it was clearly written down for me..
I am willing to bet if I saw someone die, and then saw them alive again three days later - it would fall in the had a baby scale of remembering. I might eventually forget if I got advanced dementia, but prior to that I’m not going to forget.
Read the first three pages of long and boring. I guess it’s not really that long to me to be honest. Or rather all I’m seeing listed is 7-9 pages or so. I read 20 pages in a forum last night just on theories about Sting the space spider ina filmography group. It’s not boring either, the evidence forum, it’s just all things that I assumed it would be. Same arguments I’ve been hearing for 20 years. Stuff that is covered in books like “evidence that demands a verdict” or “evidence for Christianity”.
So my response to the gist of the first three pages is.
1. Having a billion copies of something does not mean the original was factual or that the original , as a manuscript or recorded conversation, is proof.
2. I don’t think modern scholars are at ends with ancient scribes or commentators. I think the same people nowadays who lack contextual analysis skills misunderstand the cultural significance and meaning of dead languages and ancient cultures. Look at the work by scholars on things like how Gehenna a place of destruction became rhetoric for what we call hell after heavy Hellenistic influences. Or how Hellenic Jews overlaid their symbolism with that in the tanakh. Ancients would have for example known Jonah was fictional satire just like modern biblical scholars do.
3. Even if someone in the original manuscript believed in something, does not mean it’s the only belief. Take the work done by the document hypothesis. We can see biblical seams created by different traditions and editors. Such as with 1 Samuel 16 and 17 showcasing two different contradictory stories of how Saul and David met, and when.
So while it’s a nice read so far. None of it provides even the most basic argument as evidence for the supernatural. But I’ll continue reading it.
But I did when I posted in response to @Lamb Chopped.
Let’s deal with her assertion we need to start with the eyewitness accounts included in the Gospels, then. Why should it be considered a more reliable form?
More reliable than what? Secondhand accounts?
Because that's your choice when you're dealing with an historical event more than 200 years in the past. You don't have video, audio, or photos. You have accounts by witnesses--or in certain rare cases, you might have physical evidence (for example, of an earthquake).
And when it comes to accounts by witnesses, eyewitnesses are clearly the best to have. They are not perfect, no; but they are better than secondhand witnesses ("Joe told me that...") and they are better than nothing at all.
I understand that as a point of faith, whatever floats your boats, as it were.
For me, stories that claim “x person said and thought y” are most suspicious. Because a) it seems common for ancients to put names to characters in stories because it makes them sound more exciting and/or plausible b) that person would have had to explain in detail to someone what they were thinking many years before and c) the person writing it down would have had to resist the urge to edit the account to make it sound more plausible/exciting.
Much like how Jonah and Esther came about. Fictional stories. Even revelation, accepted around 300ad, was commonly viewed to have been attributed to John, though we are not sure which one, despite not being written by either most likely.
I certainly remember holding my newborn daughter, I remember that I wanted to do skin to skin contact but couldn't because I was wearing surgery clothes which I couldn't take off while holding her, I remember it was quite a while before I could hand my daughter over to my wife to suckle, and after a while my daughter was not best pleased about the delay.
I kind of think the surgical clothes were green but I may be making that up.
When my younger daughter was born, I was following my wife into the surgery and someone sitting behind a desk asked me if this was my first child, and when I said second, she made some kind of gesture that signified she'd guessed wrong. I couldn't tell you what that gesture was.
In short I think that my memory of the major points of what happened are probably reliable; the sensory impressions much less so.
I’ve been on juries twice, my impression from that is that eyewitnesses often are very sure about details which turn out to be wrong.
Yes. This is how human memory tends to work. We interpolate details from other contexts.
If I see a person that I recognize, I'm likely to remember that I saw that person, because at the time my brain will be identifying that person as Dave (or whoever). But now you ask me what Dave was wearing, and I'm less likely to know, because I don't usually care what Dave wears. I could tell you the sorts of clothes that Dave often wears, but not what he was wearing at the time.
In fact, here's an example. I spent about 3 hours this morning in a meeting with three colleagues, who I have known for between 3 and 15 years.
Colleague #1. His typical taste in clothing is button-down shirts in plain colors, unsurprising pants in earth tones, and colorful knitted jumpers. I think he was wearing a white button-down shirt this morning.
Colleague #2. His typical taste in clothing is black jeans and a dark-colored t-shirt, often with sci-fi / gaming related logos. This morning, he wore a black long-sleeved buttoned shirt. I remember it, because it's a bit more formal than his usual choice.
Colleague #3. Her usual taste is blue jeans and layered shirts (often an open shirt over two t-shirts). I can tell you that she wore her long hair pulled back in a pony tail this morning, but I don't remember what she wore, except that I have the impression that some of it was maroon.
If you started asking me questions about colleague #3's clothing choices this morning, I'm quite likely to fill in images from other clothes I remember her wearing.
But I did when I posted in response to @Lamb Chopped.
Let’s deal with her assertion we need to start with the eyewitness accounts included in the Gospels, then. Why should it be considered a more reliable form?
More reliable than what? Secondhand accounts?
Because that's your choice when you're dealing with an historical event more than 200 years in the past. You don't have video, audio, or photos. You have accounts by witnesses--or in certain rare cases, you might have physical evidence (for example, of an earthquake).
And when it comes to accounts by witnesses, eyewitnesses are clearly the best to have. They are not perfect, no; but they are better than secondhand witnesses ("Joe told me that...") and they are better than nothing at all.
I've merely pointed out that it has been studied and documented that eyewitness testimony -- generally speaking -- is pretty fraught. As usual, the hair-splitting has begun. I think it's pretty commonly accepted that the men for whom the Gospels were named were not, in fact, their authors. What do we have, then? And how far removed are they from the events they describe? Translated how fastidiously?
Many of the questions you raise are responded to in Richard Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses but I don’t think I can adequately summarise the case he makes within the constraints of an internet forum.
As far as I'm aware there's no reason to discount the ancient testimony as to the Gospel authorship aside from an abundance of skepticism.
The earliest ancient testimony is Mark, a companion of Peter, later and unreliably identified with John Mark mentioned in the New Testament; Luke, a companion of Paul - the writer uses the first person in some passages of the longer version of Acts; John the Elder, one of the disciples of Jesus but not the Apostle; and something hard to interpret that mentions Matthew the apostle but falls well short of calling him the author.
Whereas Gnostic gospels are pretty much all attributed to major apostles, and later tradition tries to identify John and Mark with more prominent figures and ascribes Matthew direct authorship; the early evidence ascribes three of the Gospels to relatively minor figures, which is a point in favour of considering the attributions accurate.
Of course you all can do whatever you like and I respect that. For me, impossible things remain impossible. Strong claims need strong evidence so claims of the impossible need the highest levels of evidence.
And I’m not seeing anything that even starts to meet that.
In my view there’s a lot of special pleading, lots of assertion and lots of unverifiable attribution.
On that level it appears that the religion requires a considerable level of faith to believe the impossible and a considerable dollop more to believe the stuff that justifies the belief in the impossible. Which I do not have, for me the impossible is still impossible.
Which is probably therefore to assert that in this context at least, atheism isn’t a religion. It’s just an unbelief in impossible things.
Some people, to make the language particularly topsy-turvey, hold that unbelief in particularly religious-looking ways. I don’t particularly, I’ve not see anything to suggest I should care at all about these impossible things.
I agree @Dafyd. The perfectly forensic Bart D Ehrman notwithstanding. But that good will isn't enough for me to extend (religious) belief; faith. Although I might be in Kof's purview of holding unbelief in particularly religious-looking ways. Which I don't.
For me good will is essential to make up a natural, historically possible Jesus and his followers. Starting with an historically possible Mary, not the one of the Protevangelium of James (which, of course, even the Church of Rome condemned and rejected).
Like Kof I have no warrant to believe impossible things. Until they actually happen. The Bible and the Church aren't impossible things.
You can believe it's natural for the third century AD but not for the first? On what survey of ancient texts of the first, second, and third centuries do you base that judgement?
The survey of that which has impinged on my 70 year old consciousness. Do you know of any I wouldn't? Of that unequalled power? Nobody else does. I mean, the whole world would know wouldn't it? Would have known for 20-17 hundred years..
So the answer is you don't know of anything contemporary with it two hundred years later? When you say that two hundred years of Christianity made it more possible in the third century than in the first you're just speculating about what meets your unevidenced expectations?
Yes. Apart from that obvious, enormous, historical process of fermentation, seething initially exponentially, becoming sigmoid, with germane writings for a millennium.
(Bad form double post again, but I knew somewhere there was a loose thread that could have me accused of trolling if I didn't reply.)
Thing is that if it is sufficient for anyone else, that’s great. There’s not enough here to even really pique my interest beyond “what actually is it that these people believe”. I can’t imagine joining you in this flight of fancy.
Thing is that if it is sufficient for anyone else, that’s great. There’s not enough here to even really pique my interest beyond “what actually is it that these people believe”. I can’t imagine joining you in this flight of fancy.
Yet you seem to have a lot of energy for denying that there's anything interesting here. How come?
Thing is that if it is sufficient for anyone else, that’s great. There’s not enough here to even really pique my interest beyond “what actually is it that these people believe”. I can’t imagine joining you in this flight of fancy.
Yet you seem to have a lot of energy for denying that there's anything interesting here. How come?
Personality mostly. I tend to have a fairly short attention span and waste too much time on dead-ends that have no lasting interest for me. Don’t worry, I think I’m reaching the limit of my capacity for talking about this stuff.
Comments
I suspect BroJames was speaking from the perspective of his former career as a lawyer (if I remember correctly) rather than from a stance of defending the Bible. What he said is certainly my experience as a lawyer.
Let’s deal with her assertion we need to start with the eyewitness accounts included in the Gospels, then. Why should it be considered a more reliable form?
I’ve been on juries twice, my impression from that is that eyewitnesses often are very sure about details which turn out to be wrong.
A trivial example that had no real bearing in the case: a witness in one of the cases knew the alleged victim in a specific context. That context involved wearing a uniform.
On the witness stand, the witness was questioned in detail about the position of everyone, what they were doing and wearing. Anyway the witness described the victims clothing as being the uniform. Only as described by everyone else, the victim and if I recall correctly the cctv evidence, the victim wasn’t wearing the uniform.
Conclusion is that if you ask someone more than a year later about something, even when they’ve got an interest in trying to retain the information because they know they’ll be asked about it later, then they might not be as accurate as they might think they are being.
"True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information." -- Winston Churchill
What do you mean? Which contexts only have eyewitness accounts?
It may also be reasonable to ask what degree of credibility we’re generally willing to give to eyewitness accounts in ancient writings other than the Gospels, and why. That may shed light on whether we’re holding the Gospels to a standard different from—whether higher or lower—than we use for other ancient writings.
Not necessarily. A variety of things can go into considering credibility/reliability. Corroborating or supporting evidence is one of those things, but not the only one. In line with what @Dafyd said above, for example, it is reasonable to treat my memory of my wedding (36 years ago) or the birth of my children (27 and 24 years ago) as more reliable than my memory of the color of the car that I saw run a red light last week.
More reliable than what? Secondhand accounts?
Because that's your choice when you're dealing with an historical event more than 200 years in the past. You don't have video, audio, or photos. You have accounts by witnesses--or in certain rare cases, you might have physical evidence (for example, of an earthquake).
And when it comes to accounts by witnesses, eyewitnesses are clearly the best to have. They are not perfect, no; but they are better than secondhand witnesses ("Joe told me that...") and they are better than nothing at all.
I remember very well holding my daughter 24 years ago when she was minutes old. I’m not sure, cannot ever really be sure, which memories of that event are real. I don’t really remember any details of trivial things I did last week.
I understand that as a point of faith, whatever floats your boats, as it were.
For me, stories that claim “x person said and thought y” are most suspicious. Because a) it seems common for ancients to put names to characters in stories because it makes them sound more exciting and/or plausible b) that person would have had to explain in detail to someone what they were thinking many years before and c) the person writing it down would have had to resist the urge to edit the account to make it sound more plausible/exciting.
I suspect that if you were to ask me the colour of the towel she was wrapped in 24 years ago I’d be wrong. If you asked me the colour of a car I saw last week, I’d almost definitely be wrong.
I’m not sure what this is proving other than that my memory isn’t great.
The question is whether as a general rule an average person’s memory of a significant (to them) event that they were prepared for and “present in the moment” for is likely to be more accurate than that same average person’s memory of an insignificant (to them) event they had no personal stake in and that they only happened to observe. Generally speaking (meaning absent circumstances tending to show otherwise), even in the absence of supporting or corroborating evidence, more credibility would be given to the memory of the anticipated, significant event because the average person is more likely to be paying attention and noticing and thinking about details.
The former are things I have evidence for beyond my own recollection. The latter are memories that I think are true, but as the only other person there that I could ask was a bit otherwise engaged at the time, there is no way to check.
In another 50 or 60 years it is quite possible that I couldn’t even name reliably the date or place of birth. Or even my own name unless it was clearly written down for me..
So my response to the gist of the first three pages is.
1. Having a billion copies of something does not mean the original was factual or that the original , as a manuscript or recorded conversation, is proof.
2. I don’t think modern scholars are at ends with ancient scribes or commentators. I think the same people nowadays who lack contextual analysis skills misunderstand the cultural significance and meaning of dead languages and ancient cultures. Look at the work by scholars on things like how Gehenna a place of destruction became rhetoric for what we call hell after heavy Hellenistic influences. Or how Hellenic Jews overlaid their symbolism with that in the tanakh. Ancients would have for example known Jonah was fictional satire just like modern biblical scholars do.
3. Even if someone in the original manuscript believed in something, does not mean it’s the only belief. Take the work done by the document hypothesis. We can see biblical seams created by different traditions and editors. Such as with 1 Samuel 16 and 17 showcasing two different contradictory stories of how Saul and David met, and when.
So while it’s a nice read so far. None of it provides even the most basic argument as evidence for the supernatural. But I’ll continue reading it.
Much like how Jonah and Esther came about. Fictional stories. Even revelation, accepted around 300ad, was commonly viewed to have been attributed to John, though we are not sure which one, despite not being written by either most likely.
I kind of think the surgical clothes were green but I may be making that up.
When my younger daughter was born, I was following my wife into the surgery and someone sitting behind a desk asked me if this was my first child, and when I said second, she made some kind of gesture that signified she'd guessed wrong. I couldn't tell you what that gesture was.
In short I think that my memory of the major points of what happened are probably reliable; the sensory impressions much less so.
Yes. This is how human memory tends to work. We interpolate details from other contexts.
If I see a person that I recognize, I'm likely to remember that I saw that person, because at the time my brain will be identifying that person as Dave (or whoever). But now you ask me what Dave was wearing, and I'm less likely to know, because I don't usually care what Dave wears. I could tell you the sorts of clothes that Dave often wears, but not what he was wearing at the time.
In fact, here's an example. I spent about 3 hours this morning in a meeting with three colleagues, who I have known for between 3 and 15 years.
Colleague #1. His typical taste in clothing is button-down shirts in plain colors, unsurprising pants in earth tones, and colorful knitted jumpers. I think he was wearing a white button-down shirt this morning.
Colleague #2. His typical taste in clothing is black jeans and a dark-colored t-shirt, often with sci-fi / gaming related logos. This morning, he wore a black long-sleeved buttoned shirt. I remember it, because it's a bit more formal than his usual choice.
Colleague #3. Her usual taste is blue jeans and layered shirts (often an open shirt over two t-shirts). I can tell you that she wore her long hair pulled back in a pony tail this morning, but I don't remember what she wore, except that I have the impression that some of it was maroon.
If you started asking me questions about colleague #3's clothing choices this morning, I'm quite likely to fill in images from other clothes I remember her wearing.
I've merely pointed out that it has been studied and documented that eyewitness testimony -- generally speaking -- is pretty fraught. As usual, the hair-splitting has begun. I think it's pretty commonly accepted that the men for whom the Gospels were named were not, in fact, their authors. What do we have, then? And how far removed are they from the events they describe? Translated how fastidiously?
The earliest ancient testimony is Mark, a companion of Peter, later and unreliably identified with John Mark mentioned in the New Testament; Luke, a companion of Paul - the writer uses the first person in some passages of the longer version of Acts; John the Elder, one of the disciples of Jesus but not the Apostle; and something hard to interpret that mentions Matthew the apostle but falls well short of calling him the author.
Whereas Gnostic gospels are pretty much all attributed to major apostles, and later tradition tries to identify John and Mark with more prominent figures and ascribes Matthew direct authorship; the early evidence ascribes three of the Gospels to relatively minor figures, which is a point in favour of considering the attributions accurate.
And I’m not seeing anything that even starts to meet that.
In my view there’s a lot of special pleading, lots of assertion and lots of unverifiable attribution.
On that level it appears that the religion requires a considerable level of faith to believe the impossible and a considerable dollop more to believe the stuff that justifies the belief in the impossible. Which I do not have, for me the impossible is still impossible.
Which is probably therefore to assert that in this context at least, atheism isn’t a religion. It’s just an unbelief in impossible things.
Some people, to make the language particularly topsy-turvey, hold that unbelief in particularly religious-looking ways. I don’t particularly, I’ve not see anything to suggest I should care at all about these impossible things.
For me good will is essential to make up a natural, historically possible Jesus and his followers. Starting with an historically possible Mary, not the one of the Protevangelium of James (which, of course, even the Church of Rome condemned and rejected).
Like Kof I have no warrant to believe impossible things. Until they actually happen. The Bible and the Church aren't impossible things.
Yes. Apart from that obvious, enormous, historical process of fermentation, seething initially exponentially, becoming sigmoid, with germane writings for a millennium.
(Bad form double post again, but I knew somewhere there was a loose thread that could have me accused of trolling if I didn't reply.)
Yet you seem to have a lot of energy for denying that there's anything interesting here. How come?
Personality mostly. I tend to have a fairly short attention span and waste too much time on dead-ends that have no lasting interest for me. Don’t worry, I think I’m reaching the limit of my capacity for talking about this stuff.
Why, what’s your excuse?