Friday, August 14, 2015

Are Firsthand Accounts More Reliable?

In a previous career I worked with children and would attend youth-worker conferences to keep up with the Jones'. People who work with children (especially troubled children, as I did) are something less than a perfect lot. They tend to be devoted, but tired, rough-around-the-edges and—at times—uncouth people. If you ever have the good fortune to enjoy camaraderie among youth-workers you will learn to laugh to keep from crying. Sometimes you just laugh at life because all other occupations seem to be brimming with Scheiße. So believe me when I say that the sound of Scheiße is funny to most of us. FWIW, The Sound of Scheiße is my favorite Simon and Garfunkel B-side.

One of the conferences I attended was put on by a Christian organization that assumed, I suppose, that many of us would enjoy a concert from Michael W. Smith. Someone else assumed, I suppose, that we would enjoy this concert all the more if we were equipped with a thousand whoopee cushions. We did. We cheered on that poor pseudo-musician as loud as we could with a cacophony of pseudo-flatulence. I think he played two songs. Then he just left the stage laughing.

That is a true story. Or at least I think it is. I am summarizing an autobiographical experience that happened over twenty years ago. I really don’t remember much more about that experience. I don’t know who was sitting next to me or who went on before or after Mr. Smith. I’m not entirely sure whether there were a thousand whoopee cushions, two-thousand, or seven hundred. Maybe Mr. Smith played five songs and left angrily. I think I’ve got the details right. But why should I trust myself so much that I wouldn’t accept correction from someone else?

Do you know what would help my sense of accuracy considerably? I would be helped a great deal if this story had made it into an article published in The Door. Or if Michael W. Smith had told this story to his wife and she wrote it down in a biographical account. Or if Mike Licona and Bart Ehrman debated about it on youtube. In short, all of these kinds of secondhand experiences would help my memory considerably. My firsthand experience suffers from vagueness, idiosyncratic perspective, and a sense of sadistic joy that shapes the way I tell the story. If I had more detailed accounts from different perspectives from secondhand parties I would be able to measure my imperfect narrative against other imperfect narratives. I would be especially lucky if some of the folks involved in these secondhand “memories” had contradictory accounts so to generate the sort of heat required to keep the conversation going.

Today I read a nice Bible Odyssey entry by Brent Landau titled "Was Luke a Historian?"  It is a very helpful article and I might use it for my historical Jesus class. Moreover, Landau is a serious scholar who should be taken seriously (e.g. he deserves better than to be coopted within a crude story about . . . . Michael W. Smith). So my apologies to Dr. Landau, but I have a problem with this following paragraph:
When we look closely at Luke’s Gospel, we find a mix of solid historical data and imaginative reconstruction. Let’s consider Luke 13:1-5 to investigate Luke’s knowledge of historical sources. In this little-studied passage, Jesus discusses the meaning of two tragic recent events: Pontius Pilate’s shocking execution of some Galileans who were offering sacrifices at the Jerusalem temple, and the collapse of the tower of Siloam that killed eighteen people. Neither of the events mentioned in Luke 13:1-5 are attested in any other sources, but they are both very likely to have happened because they are relatively routine occurrences: Pilate behaved brutally on numerous occasions, and buildings collapse. To be aware of two quite minor events that took place in Jerusalem in the 20s C.E., Luke must have had access to some very reliable sources—perhaps even eyewitnesses. 
 On the flip side, Luke reports some events that strain his credibility. . . .
I include here the first line of the next paragraph to show that Landau is quite willing to call fiction fiction. He is not only interested in defending Luke’s status as “historian” and he knows very well the anachronism involved in projecting that category onto an ancient author. Like I said, I like this short Bible Odyssey article! That said, Landau continues the problematic assumption that “Luke must have had access to some very reliable sources—perhaps even eyewitnesses.” Luke, quite clearly, used sources. I have no problem here. I also won’t dispute the brutality of Pilate or that buildings fall down. True and true. Luke may even have a reliable source that has conveyed the specific events mentioned in Luke 13:1-5. But why *must* Luke have had access to some *very reliable* sources? I think that Landau climbs out too far on this limb. Finally, why should we imagine—as Landau seems to—that eyewitnesses provide very reliable source material?

Again, my apologies to Dr. Landau; this is something of a pet peeve of mine. I do want to point out that I don’t think that I’m nit-picking. There is a philosophical assumption and methodological tendency here that requires more conversation. 

So to my challenge: firsthand testimony is not necessarily better and sometimes much worse than secondary or tertiary works of reflection. This is true of “quite minor events” and even more true of significant, life-changing events.


-anthony
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46 comments:

  1. Chris EyreAugust 14, 2015 at 3:10 PM

    Having examined and cross-examined rather a lot of eyewitnesses during a 30 year career as a lawyer, eyewitnesses are horribly unreliable, even if you take their testimony immediately after the event. Even then, they will have been trying to make sense of what they saw, and their account is going to take into account what they would have expected to see. In the case of immediate testimony, they are very unlikely to agree with each other. Give them a few hours to compare notes, and you will have more consistent accounts, but ones which are likely to be further from the raw facts.

    And that's on the basis that they are all reporting as honestly as they can what they thought they saw, and not (for example) exaggerating to make themselves seem more important, which not a few will do without necessarily realising that they're doing it.

    Give me forensic evidence any time...

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    1. Anthony Le DonneAugust 14, 2015 at 4:18 PM

      Chris, thanks for your comment. Very helpful. I guess that I would only want to push back against the notion of "raw facts" when dealing with memory. Maybe we could agree on something like "undercooked facts" but I don't know if human memory is ever totally raw. By nature the human mind is a pressure cooker.
      -anthony

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  2. Jonathan BernierAugust 14, 2015 at 3:34 PM

    I have been thinking about such issues as of late. I have come to two conclusions. One: in keeping with his stated aims in the Prologue Luke frequently relies upon eyewitness testimony. Two: Luke frequently misunderstands what his eyewitnesses have told him. I won't go into the few elaboration of these conclusions, mostly because it's still stuff I'm thinking through rather than a settled position, but I do think that if we think of Luke as someone who recognized the value of eyewitness testimony but did not always know how best to work with such material a lot of issues in the study of Luke-Acts resolve themselves.

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    1. Anthony Le DonneAugust 14, 2015 at 4:20 PM

      Jonathan,
      I guess that we'll need to talk about how to determine when Luke has misunderstood something rather than intentionally reworked something in order to improve it.
      -anthony

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    2. Jonathan BernierAugust 15, 2015 at 11:03 AM

      Certainly there is such reworking, no question. There are also instances in Luke-Acts wherein I think that Luke's use of what I would guess to be either written or oral sources evinces some demonstrable confusion on his part. The example that comes most readily to mind is his discussion of the encounters with Apollos and the Ephesian twelve in Acts 18:18-19:7. I don't think that it makes sense to consider these to be encounters that he has simply fabricated, as I see little contextual reason for him to do so. As such I am quite convinced that he has learned about it from someone, and my hunch is that it is from one or more of the named persons involved. Yet a lot about the story makes little sense. Apollos is very similar to the twelve, so similar in fact that we should probably suspect that the former is part of the same group as the latter: they are disciples in the same place at the same time who suffer from what Luke considers to be the same doctrinal deficiency, namely that they know only John's Baptism. Yet whilst Apollos is said to teach the things about Jesus accurately Paul must tell the twelve about Jesus. Is he trying to tell us that there were two groups that were alike? One group of Christians who held to a "primitive" notion of baptism? One group of non-Christian Baptist followers? It's really not clear, and I suspect that is because Luke himself is a bit confused. He's learned something from his source(s), he's tried to make the best sense of it that he could, and dropped the ball a little bit. It happens.

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  3. Henry NeufeldAugust 14, 2015 at 4:06 PM

    I was glad to read this. Quite frequently we hear "eyewitness" used as the equivalent of "highly reliable." I'm glad to see that view challenged.

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  4. UnknownAugust 15, 2015 at 11:57 AM

    I don't think we can know if these events that are referred to by Luke were "quite minor." That assumption seems to be nothing more than a guess. Perhaps these two events were "major" events carried on in Jewish communities for years after their occurrence, even though they failed to make into Josephus for example. The anxiety to authenticate the traditions by means of establishing eyewitness testimony seems unnecessary to me. If the Jewish Jesus movement preserved the gist of their masters words and deeds then that is good enough to satisfy epistemic requirements for the historically curious. Whether the Jesus movement preserved that tradition in it's general form or not is a point of controversy but one I think scholarship is beginning to address through research on memory and tradition. Keep up the good work Anthony!

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  5. Frederik MulderAugust 15, 2015 at 3:29 PM

    Interesting Anthony. Do you think Richard Bauckham - in Jesus and the Eyewitnesses - is guilty of the "philosophical assumption and methodological tendency" you highlighted in Landau?

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    1. Anthony Le DonneAugust 16, 2015 at 7:42 PM

      Yes.

      -anthony

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    2. UnknownAugust 17, 2015 at 9:09 AM

      What is routinely ignored in discussion of my Eyewitnesses book, is that in the chapter on the psychology of eyewitness memory I explained that eyewitness memory can be very unreliable, but for that reason I drew from a an extensive study of the psychological research literature conclusions about what sort of things are most likely to be remembered well and under what conditions eyewitness memory is likely to be reliable. Therefore my arguments are not refuted simply by general claims that eyewitness memory is often unreliable. It is one of many points at which my critics simply have not read my work adequately.
      Nor did I claim that direct eyewitness testimony is necessarily more reliable than eyewitness testimony at secondhand or thirdhand (which is what your examples amount to). My claim is that the way the eyewitnesses told the stories lies not far behind the text of the Gospels as we have them. With the exception of parts (not all) of John's Gospel (in my view), we have in the Gospels eyewitness testimony at second or thirdhand. My general argument was directed to showing that access to eyewitness testimony mattered in the early church and that, in a variety of ways, the Gospels do claim such access. This is quite contrary to the form critical view. People say, But that doesn't get us very far because the eyewitness testimony need not be reliable, are failing to recognise that it gets us a lot further than the form critical paradigm allows. It makes it worthwhile taking the Gospels to be potentially good historical sources and to start assessing that by appropriate means - means different from the failed criteria of authenticity that were the best that could be done if the form critical paradigm of the transmission of Gospel traditions were right. Historical method is generally about evaluating sources as generally reliable and then trusting them - or not. Even the most reliable sources will be unreliable in parts but (unless we have really ample multiple sources) we often just have to take that risk. It's what history is always like - more or less probable, never 100% certain. And that's all without taking the subjectivity of eyewitness testimony in to account, as I do in the last chapter. It still remains the case that one condition for the reliability of a source is usually that it had plausible access to eyewitness testimony.

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    3. UnknownAugust 18, 2015 at 12:59 AM

      And what is the "philosophical assumption" you accuse me of making?

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    4. Jonathan BernierAugust 18, 2015 at 6:00 AM

      Prof. Bauckham,

      Thank you for this post. This is a very helpful reflection upon your own work. I especially like your comment "People say, But that doesn't get us very far because the eyewitness testimony need not be reliable, are failing to recognise that it gets us a lot further than the form critical paradigm allows." That reminds me of my excitement when I first read your "Jesus and the Eyewitnesses": there was a level of engagement with the actual data on the Jesus tradition that was significantly beyond what we find in the abstractions of the form-critical paradigm.

      I have come to the conclusion, in large part informed by your work, that the question ought not to be a generalized "Are eyewitnesses reliable?" but rather "What was going on in the production of the canonical gospels that would tend either to enable or to inhibit their utility as sources of data for Jesus's life?" And that means close engagement with the actual textual material, which IMHO is exactly the greatest strength of "Jesus and the Eyewitnesses."

      Your last sentence BTW reminds me of Ben Meyer's argument in "Aims of Jesus" that one of the key questions one must ask about a potential source is from whence it derives its information. And I really cannot imagine a world in which anyone would argue with a straight face that access to eyewitnesses is a matter of indifference to answering that question.

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    5. Anthony Le DonneAugust 18, 2015 at 7:20 AM

      Richard,

      I cannot claim to have read all your critics. Certainly you know them better than I do. I've only read a handful of essays that criticize you on this point. At least two I can think of take you to task for building your case atop a superficial survey of psychological studies. I simply do not know the field of psychology well enough to know if this is the case. From my limited view, I would not point to this as a weakness in your work. One person’s “superficial” is another person’s “judiciously selective.” I would point, furthermore, to the first three chapters of McIver's book on the Ebbinghausian forgetfulness curve to fortify your case. My own criticism would take a different tact.

      There are two matters, it seems, that are on the table here. (1) Did the Gospel writers think that they were conveying eyewitness testimony? And if so, did they think that this was important? (2) Should we place a higher value on source material that seems to have derived from what "Mark" et al. considered eyewitness testimony? I suspect that we will agree on the first and disagree on the second.

      One point that I've tried to make in various publications is that earlier tradition is not necessarily better. In the same way that you say that history is never 100% certain (yes!) we can point to episode after episode in history wherein the first generation misunderstood the details and/or significance of their own events. Subsequent generations rewrite the narratives of their forebears because they benefit from a Wirkungsgeschichte that “eyewitnesses” can’t see. We are always revising our memories and histories. Sometimes we are able to improve our histories via revisionism. What interests me about appeals to eyewitnesses is not that they are “reliable” or generally trustworthy sources but in the way that the rhetoric promotes a perception of continuity with the past. I.e. Luke’s sources don’t need to be reliable; they only need to have distorted according to reliable patterns of memory distortion.

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    6. Anthony Le DonneAugust 18, 2015 at 7:22 AM

      Also I'm quite happy to call Luke a historian. As long as we agree that we often project anachronistic categories when we use this term.
      -anthony

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    7. Frederik MulderAugust 18, 2015 at 7:38 AM

      This comment has been removed by the author.

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    8. UnknownAugust 18, 2015 at 9:22 AM

      In response to your last paragraph, I would say,for a start, that all later revisions and reinterpretations of historical events are still ultimately dependent on accounts by eyewitnesses. We can reinterpret the significance of events, but we can't supply the information that only an eyewitness could have had in the first place. If we find reason to correct the eyewitness's information (this is sometimes possible) we are still in fact dependent on the eyewitness's account.
      Your last sentence seems to imply that you are not interested in the events (of the history of Jesus) at all but only in how later Christians perceived what they took to be the past. If you are interested in the events, then part of an assessment of Luke as a source would be precisely whether or not his sources "distorted according to reliable patterns of memory distortion." And to identify such patterns, I would say we need precisely psychological research and the sort of arguments I pursue in my book on the basis of psychological research (though of course there is scope for a great deal more work on those lines).

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    9. Anthony Le DonneAugust 18, 2015 at 6:26 PM

      I am indeed interested in historical events. But I am not comfortable divorcing the impact of said events. In order for them to become "historical" they must emerge and make sense within an/many interpretive framework/s. I.e. the interpretation is integral to the event. For more see my The Historiographical Jesus: Memory, Typology, and the Son of David (Baylor Univ. Press).

      And thanks for chiming in. This has been an unlooked for but welcome discussion!

      -anthony

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  6. Chris KeithAugust 16, 2015 at 6:12 AM

    Thanks for this, Anthony. To complement what you've said, it's also important to remember that in ancient historiography, claiming "eyewitness" status or information held an important rhetorical value irrespective of the quality of the information being transmitted. I'm always surprised at this not receiving more emphasis among those who want to stress the significance of eyewitness testimony. It was important for ancient historians to make this claim, but it didn't necessarily mean that they had more information than non-eyewitnesses.

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    1. Chris KeithAugust 16, 2015 at 6:15 AM

      My point here is simply that the value of the claim about the past has to be assessed separately from just noting the claim. I know you agree here, but just wanted to clarify my ramblings.

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    2. Anthony Le DonneAugust 16, 2015 at 7:41 PM

      word.

      -anthony

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    3. UnknownAugust 18, 2015 at 1:08 AM

      This is true in the sense that reference to eyewitness put your work in the category of serious historiography for which eyewitness testimony was regarded as essential. Therefore bad historians made fraudulent claims to access to eyewitness testimony that they didn't possess. Lucian exposes them mercilessly. But we shouldn't take "rhetorical" to mean, as it were, just rhetorical and so not fraudulent. Ancient readers cared whether the claims to eyewitness testimony were genuine or invented.

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    4. UnknownAugust 18, 2015 at 4:52 AM

      I note also in Anthony's piece this sentence: "He is not only interested in defending Luke’s status as “historian” and he knows very well the anachronism involved in projecting that category onto an ancient author." The point about anachronism will sound ridiculous to anyone who has studied the historiography of the ancient world. If he just means that they didn't do or write history in the same way as 21st century historians, that is no reason for saying they were not "historians." Thucidydes, Polybius, Josephus not historians?? Of course, there have been and still are many different sorts of history, but that is no reason to deny that people in the ancient world who enquired about the past with serious standards of evidence and method were not historians.

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    5. Chris KeithAugust 18, 2015 at 5:20 AM

      Richard, thanks for your comments. I think we both know that Anthony is not saying that Thucidydes, Polybius, and Josephus are not historians. I don't think it's necessary for me to respond further on that; Anthony can if he wishes. As to my point, however, I'm not sure that you and I are in disagreement here. I wasn't suggesting that we should understand "rhetorical" to mean "just rhetorical and so not fraudulent." Rather, I meant that such claims are always rhetorical, whether fraudulent or not, and thus noting their rhetorical nature underscores that observing an eyewitness claim only begins the modern historian's (or ancient historian's) work if he or she is interested in postulating "what happened"; it does not end his or her work. Again, I'm not sure this is a point with which you would disagree.

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    6. Chris KeithAugust 18, 2015 at 5:30 AM

      Richard, while we have you here, I have a question for you. In your future work, will you be doing anything more with the category of "testimony"? This was, for me, one of the more interesting aspects of Jesus and the Eyewitnesses and I think it has the capacity to serve an important role as it underscores the inherently hermeneutical nature of any presentation of the past. It has much in common, I think, with much of what Anthony and I and others have emphasized in our work.

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    7. UnknownAugust 18, 2015 at 9:32 AM

      On eyewitness claims, I wasn't necessarily disagreeing with you. I just wanted to underline that they were rhetorical only because ancient historians really thought that good history must be based closely on eyewitness testimony. They are "rhetorical" in just the same sense that footnote references to archival sources might be for readers of a modern historian.
      I am planning a sequel to Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, and I might take up testimony again if I find I have anything more to say about it. But if so, I guess I'll be mainly interested in taking issue with the epistemological scepticism about testimony that is rife in our postmodern atmosphere and insisting that testimony is a very ordinary, indeed indispensable, means of real access to the past.

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    8. Anthony Le DonneAugust 18, 2015 at 10:20 AM

      Richard, concerning this comment: "...note also in Anthony's piece this sentence: "He is not only interested in defending Luke’s status as “historian” and he knows very well the anachronism involved in projecting that category onto an ancient author." The point about anachronism will sound ridiculous to anyone who has studied the historiography of the ancient world."

      The part that you quote here was meant to point out that Dr. Landau is not primarily an apologist. I wanted to indicated that Laudau is not *only* in the business of defending Luke's reliability.

      -anthony

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  7. JimAugust 16, 2015 at 2:07 PM

    Can social memory theory outcomes be anticipated to attain a level comparable to historical criteria? ... just wait a second until I duck under my desk.

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    1. Chris KeithAugust 18, 2015 at 5:42 AM

      Just stirring the pot, eh, Jim? :)

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    2. Jonathan BernierAugust 19, 2015 at 1:33 AM

      I guess the obvious question is: what sort of "outcomes" are we talking about? Derivative of that is the question: how would we measure the level to which such outcomes have been achieved?

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    3. JimAugust 19, 2015 at 10:15 AM

      Your right Jonathon that I probably should have worded it much gooder.

      I was thinking along the lines that as more information is gained from theoretical, empirical and methodological studies on human memory (both individual and collective), this will continue to improve the understanding on how, what and why individuals/groups/societies remember (and also forget). The sociological outcomes from this growing body of knowledge are mainly derived from our current social and cultural setting, and then need to be applied (probably with some modification) to the group of Jesus followers long ago and in a galaxy far away. Presumably as much of this information is obtained from empirical studies on humans today, application of the outcomes from these studies onto historical groups will likely need to be updated periodically. The historical criteria do not seem, to armchair me, to be as fluid.

      So I guess what I was asking, was for “a prophecy” from those who are at the forefront of applying social memory to understanding Jesus and his followers, whether they foresaw a time when the value of the social memory approach might be considered on near-equal footing with historical criteria (although admittedly, the two approaches are generally aimed at two different questions). Apologize if this isn’t worded any gooder than my earlier attempt.

      Do you think that one overlap could be with the criterion of embarrassment? Social memory studies could potentially address “how embarrassing and to who?” by filling in a more precise social historical context for this criteria?

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    4. Chris KeithAugust 19, 2015 at 5:52 PM

      Jim, I'll take a stab at an answer. In my own humble opinion, we are already at a point where sociological approaches to memory provide a better means of asking historiographical questions. They are not alone in this, of course, as theories of history are also essentially at the same point and some streams of media-critical approaches are as well. The criterion of embarrassment is tricky because people use it differently. If it's used as a magic key to "authenticity," then I think it's highly problematic. If one is interested not in the criterion of embarrassment but rather a category of embarrassment in the sense of a means of describing a historical phenomenon that needs explanation, then, yes, there's overlap between that and what some of us using social memory theory are doing.

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    5. JimAugust 19, 2015 at 9:15 PM

      Ty for your insights that you have provided on this.

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  8. Frederik MulderAugust 18, 2015 at 7:22 AM

    Interesting qoute from Bauckham in Eyewitnesses: "Trust in the word of another, spontaneous and essential in everyday life, must in historiography coexist in dialectic with the kind of critical questioning that the archived testimony evokes. Here the need for trust is too easily overlooked because the testimony has been removed from the immediacy of the dialogical context of everyday life, where the dimension of trust in the word of another is obvious, but for testimony archived as a historical document trust is no less required, complicated but not at all replaced by critical assessment" (490).

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  9. Jonathan BernierAugust 18, 2015 at 3:18 PM

    History is a funny thing. The truth is, I don't know how I would decided specifically which if any of Jesus's healing acts recorded in the gospels describe events that actually occurred. I do know that Jesus as healer is sufficiently deep in the tradition that I have a hard time imagining how a Jesus who wasn't considered to be a healer could lead to the accounts that exist before us. That is, "Jesus as healer" is a far stronger conclusion than "Jesus performed this specific act of healing." This is part of the problem with the criteria approach, and more generally with addressing the question of "reliability" towards the level of individual pericope: it wants to begin with the least certain, and so little surprise if it yields such little historiographical fruit. The question is not "Is this pericope reliable? Is this one? This one? This one?" but rather "Why this particular assortment of pericopes and only this particular assortment in our data?"

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    1. Chris KeithAugust 19, 2015 at 9:40 AM

      I agree entirely, Jonathan. As you know, I think this focus upon individual pericopae is rooted in form criticism. I've just written an essay that argues this even further, noting that this is why form-criticism-inspired Jesus studies tend to ask questions about the historical value of individual traditions whereas more recent approaches tend to ask questions about general claims of the narratives.

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  10. UnknownAugust 19, 2015 at 2:25 PM

    I absolutely agree that the dire result of form criticism was the attempt to assess individual pericope one by one. But I'm also opposed to the retreat to generalities (Dale Allison style). For one thing, I find "Jesus was a healer" pretty uninteresting, as opposed to all the hugely interesting stuff in the stories. But I also think it was the stories that were remembered. Dale Allison seems to me to have an odd sort of memory when he says he remembers general things about his grandparents but no specific incidents. When I remember (for example) an aunt I knew quite well, what come at once to mind are a whole lot of vividly remembered occasions in which she featured, which have stuck in my memory for a variety of reasons. To come up with generalities about her, I would have to think. That would be a process of abstracting from the particulars which are what I actually remember. Am I odd in that respect?
    People remembered specific headings Jesus did that were important enough to them or unusually enough to stick in their memories - stories that they then told over and over (a condition of remembering well). Jesus was only remembered as a healer because lost of these specific stories were remembered. (After all, there's not much in the sayings traditions to tell us he was a healer.) In some cases, we can in fact find indications of eyewitness origins: names (Bartimaeus) or locations not otherwise known in the Jesus traditions (Nain, Cana). It doesn't mean that these stories are more plausibly reliable than others. It's that such cases give us reasons to suppose most of the stories are basically reliable (of course, details are often storytelling variations). That some of them may not be and we can't tell which they are doesn't bother me at all. History is like that. But if we have historical access to Jesus it is through these specific stories, as it is through specific sayings (not just - "he talked about the kingdom of God": so what?). What form criticism distracted us from was from looking at the mass of traditions in the Gospels and looking for the historical indications that make the general run of them credible. There are ways of thinking about that that have been grossly neglected for a long time.

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    1. Chris KeithAugust 19, 2015 at 6:12 PM

      Richard, I think we agree about the impact of form criticism upon historical Jesus studies and approaches to the Gospels in general. I also agree with your earlier comment that any interpretation is necessarily dependent, in some form or another, upon the earliest interpretations, even of eyewitnesses. I think you've undersold Dale's argument here, however. Let me ask a question that your comment here prompts and preface it by saying that, in general, I am actually in favor of a form of Gerhardsson's idea that the disciples and others actually played a role in controlling the tradition in the early stages. That notwithstanding, you've here said specific names like Bartimaeus or locations like Nain and Cana are "indications of eyewitness origins" that indicate that the stories are "basically reliable." But you also state that these indications don't necessarily mean that "these stories are more plausibly reliable than others" and that you aren't worried about the fact "that some of them may not be [reliable] and we can't tell which they are." How, then, do you get from the facts that (1) these indications don't, in and of themselves, necessarily mean that the stories are plausibly reliable and (2) we can't, at the end of the day, necessarily know which are reliable and which aren't, to the conclusion that the stories are generally reliable? Could not an ancient tradent have inserted such details (not necessarily with ill motives) in order to give the story the ring of authenticity? Stated otherwise, how does the modern historian distinguish between a usage of such details that reflects the fact that the tradition is reliable and a usage of such details that reflects the fact that the tradition is designed to look reliable? This is where I would say that the value of eyewitness testimony must be assessed separately from the claim for eyewitness status. But I'm wondering how you might deal with this historiographical issue.

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  11. UnknownAugust 20, 2015 at 2:41 AM

    My argument was too brief to be clear.
    For a start, one has to go back to the way form criticism understood the transmission of Gospel traditions in the early church and how they reached the Gospels. This meant that, if one were to identify “authentic” Jesus material, one could not proceed (as historians most often do) by a assessing the general reliability of a source containing a lot of material. One could only assess items of tradition one by one. Moreover, the nature of the transmission meant that the odds against authentic material surviving were high (more or less, depending on the scholar). So one could only proceed at all by using criteria that were thought to be highly rigorous in order to isolate a few bits of authentic stuff in this mass of very unpromising material and go on from there. This seems to me to have got Jesus scholars into a frame of mind in which they want arguments for authenticity to be foolproof in a way that one doesn’t normally either in history (so many of them have never done any other sort of history) or ordinary life. The retreat to generalities seems to me (I could be wrong) just another way of trying to deal with the same general situation and rescue something from the very unpromising pool of traditions as the form critics pictured them.
    Some people are now using memory studies to argue that, leaving form criticism aside, we are nevertheless in much the same sort of situation as the form critics left us in, because memory is unreliable. I think, as far as the psychology of memory goes, this is a mistake. The results of research tell us more detailed and interesting things about how and when memory is reliable or not. And once again, as historians, we are only looking for the degrees of reliability we ordinarily depend on all the time in ordinary life (and without which we cannot function). We’re not looking for infallibility.
    Plausible access to eyewitness testimony is one condition of a historically reliable source. Of course, not the only condition, but a hugely important one. I and others have emphasized it because the form critics denied that the evangelists had plausible access to eyewitness testimony, even at several times removed, and (importantly) said that neither the evangelists nor other tradents were at all interested in it. For the form critics, eyewitness testimony was a late apologetic claim by Luke and John. That’s why so much of my argument in the book was directed to arguing that the Gospels do, in various ways, claim eyewitness testimony and that it was important in the early church long before the Gospels. People complain: That doesn’t get us very far (claims can be false, eyewitnesses get things wrong….). But in terms of getting us back behind the whole form critical approach to a position where we can start again in a different way, actually it does get us a long way.

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    1. Chris KeithAugust 20, 2015 at 6:50 AM

      Ok. I got it and am in agreement for the most part. In my own work, I have given much attention to the way form criticism undergirds the quest for "authenticity" via criteria and have criticized this approach pretty heavily. I tend not to see the "retreat" to generalities as something of the same thing, however. I think there's a different epistemological assumption as well as a different methodology in terms of how one does "history" at work in folks like Allison, Schroeter, and, if I may say, myself. It's not an attempt to rescue bits of the tradition that can be recovered; rather, it's an attempt to account for the interpretations we see in the Gospels. In other words, it doesn't chop the narratives up but rather starts with them as what must be explained. I think this lines up with your approach in the Eyewitnesses.

      You're right that some people are using memory studies in order to argue that we are in the same position as form criticism left us. I think that's a misuse of the theory, in particular sociological approaches to memory but also many cognitive approaches to memory. I think the theory shows that memory is capable of being both reliable and unreliable, but the theory itself does not demonstrate any given instance to be either . . . it's up to the historian to do that, in my opinion. You're absolutely right, though, that this puts us regardless in a much different position that form criticism left us.

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  12. UnknownAugust 20, 2015 at 2:41 AM

    Part 2:
    So now we can look holistically at the contents of the Gospels and ask for general historical indications that these are good sources or not. Bear in mind that, especially in ancient history, one can more or less always come up with SOME sort of alternative possibility to explain the evidence. Was Julius Caesar really assassinated by Brutus and Cassius? Maybe our sources had reasons for suppressing the real truth. But we’re looking for reasonable probabilities and the case for the Gospels is going to be cumulative, based on a whole lot of different considerations. The form critics inculcated a methodologically fragmented way of looking at all this stuff. Fragments are particularly vulnerable to historical scepticism. Good history, in my view, is about a whole lot of things coming coherently together.
    On the healings (my computer keeps changing this to headings – why?) my point about names is part of an argument I can’t repeat now, that does make it stronger than you take it to be, Chris. But what I meant was: There may be some stories that have particular features that especially favour their authenticity. But that doesn’t mean other stories are less likely to be reliable. It increases the probability that the healing stories in general are reliable. Then I made a separate point that there could have been some inauthentic accretions to the general stock of such stories and we may not be able to distinguish these. You are pressing me to put the two points together, and I guess it means the stories with particular indications of authenticity can be exempted from this possibility of being legendary accretions or have a lower such possibility. If there’s an inconsistency there it’s because I’m trying to say (a) the general grounds for treating the general run of these stories as reliable are increased by the presence of particular indications in some (I was guarding against the view that the marks of authenticity in some stories implies the unreliability of the other stories), (b) as a general principle a degree of agnosticism is built into such arguments because – this is what history is like!

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    1. Chris KeithAugust 20, 2015 at 6:57 AM

      I agree entirely that what we should really be about is "a whole lot of things coming together coherently" and that, of course, there is much we cannot know. I apologize if I portrayed your comments as less potent than the full argument, with which I am very familiar and find incredibly thought-provoking, but I was indeed trying to parse through what you just said on the blog and get you to connect your two points. I may be drastically misreading you (I hope not), but in my opinion your argument isn't as far away from Allison's argument about gist as you may think. I should add, though, that I do not think we always have to be content just with assessing generalities, though they are perhaps the places where we can have the most confidence. I do think that, on occasion, we can deal with specific details.

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  13. UnknownAugust 20, 2015 at 7:58 AM

    Thank you, Chris, for your detailed attention to my arguments. I'm glad that we are in agreement about a lot of things. As you know, I esteem your work. We are both (and Anthony) facing up squarely to the key question: Where do we go now that form criticism has collapsed?

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  14. Frederik MulderAugust 20, 2015 at 9:21 AM

    Chris, David Catchpole: "we turn to the need to face the reality - the brutum factum, as one might say - that our main sources consists of documents that in whole and in part promote resurrection-focused understandings of Jesus ... the stories and sayings in them have often been coloured and condotioned - maybe sometimes created - by a set of convictions about Jesus as he had come to be acknowledged and experienced after Easter. Those convictions about Jesus have also brought fundamental change in the presentation of the followers of Jesus, who have been made to react to him as someone who belongs to the transcendent world of divine beings ... So the material the gospel writers provide has often grown in the telling, both quantitatively and qualitatively. It must therefore be sifted carefully by the historian, using defensible criteria. The criteria of authenticity have of course to be used on the earliest version of any material, not material at a later stage of growth and development".

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    1. Chris KeithAugust 20, 2015 at 11:47 AM

      Yes, Ferdie, I'm well aware that many people still find value in the criteria of authenticity. I doubt that I need to repeat my view of the matter any more than I already have in multiple publications and blog posts.

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  15. Frederik MulderAugust 20, 2015 at 11:56 AM

    Sure Chris. I thought of Catchpole in light of those things you and Richard agree upon, and Catchpole's severe critique of Bauckham's Eyewitnesses ...

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