The use (and abuse) of A. N. Sherwin-White

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The use (and abuse) of A. N. Sherwin-White

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Noticed that some blogs have covered this old chestnut.

Oral Tradition and the Game of Telephone: A.N. Sherwin-White’s Famous Quote - See more at: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/crossexami ... gkIoN.dpuf
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/crossexami ... ous-quote/
The time from the death of Jesus to the writing of the first gospel was about 40 years. An exciting story being passed along orally in a world full of supernatural characters seems bound to be “improved,” deliberately or inadvertently, as it moves from person to person.
While some epistles were written earlier, the details Paul gives about the life of Jesus can be summarized in one very short paragraph (more here). How can we dismiss the possibility that any actual history of Jesus is lost through a decades-long game of telephone?
Christian rebuttal
Apologist William Lane Craig says that 40 years is too short a period for legend to develop. He points to a claim made by A.N. Sherwin-White in Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament (1963).
According to Sherwin-White, the writings of Herodotus enable us to determine the rate at which legend accumulates, and the tests show that even two generations is too short a time span to allow legendary tendencies to wipe out the hard core of historical facts. When Professor Sherwin-White turns to the gospels, he states that for the gospels to be legends, the rate of legendary accumulation would have to be “unbelievable.” More generations would be needed. (Source)
Craig’s conclusion is quoted widely and was popularized in Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ (2008), and it sounds like a thorough slap down of the legend claim. However, when we see what Sherwin-White actually said, we find that Craig’s confidence is unwarranted.
(From this point forward, I’ll use “SW” to refer to historian A.N. Sherwin-White.)
SW never said “unbelievable”
Incredibly, the word “unbelievable,” which Craig puts into the mouth of SW, is not used by him in the relevant chapter in this book. If the word comes from another source, Craig doesn’t cite it. Craig also quotes the word in his essay in Jesus Under Fire (1995).
We all make mistakes, but it’s been almost twenty years. Where is Craig’s correction?
What did SW actually say?
From his Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament:
Herodotus enables us to test the tempo of myth-making, and the tests suggest that even two generations are too short a span to allow the mythical tendency to prevail over the hard historic core of the oral tradition. (RSRL, 190)
SW proposes an interesting experiment. If we can find examples in history where legend has crept into oral history and we have more reliable sources that let us compare that with what actually happened, we can measure how fast legendary material accumulates.
Notice the limitations in what SW is saying.
He cites several examples where historians have (hopefully) successfully sifted truth from myth, but Herodotus is the only example used to put a rate on the loss of historic truth. This isn’t a survey of, say, a dozen random historic accounts that each validates a two-generation limit.
He isn’t saying that myth doesn’t accumulate, and he’s not proposing a rate at which it does. He’s writing instead about the loss of accurate history (“the mythical tendency to prevail over the hard historic core”).
He is careful to use the word “suggest” above. William Lane Craig imagines an immutable law that SW clearly isn’t proposing.
What is SW’s point?
Here is more of what SW is saying.
All this suggests that, however strong the myth-forming tendency, the falsification does not automatically and absolutely prevail. (RSRL, 191)
The point of my argument is not to suggest the literal accuracy of ancient sources, secular or ecclesiastical, but to offset the extreme skepticism with which the New Testament narratives are treated in some quarters. (RSRL, 193)
Craig imagines that myth never overtakes historic truth in two generations. By contrast, SW says that myth doesn’t always overtake historic truth.
Consider Craig’s difficulty. He proposes what may be the most incredible story possible: that a supernatural being created the universe and came to earth as a human and that this was recorded in history. We have a well-populated bin labeled “Mythology” for stories like this. If Craig is to argue that, no, this one is actually history, SW’s statement is useless. “Well, myth might not have overtaken historic truth” does very little to keep Craig’s religion from the Mythology bin.
Limitations in SW’s statement
Though SW is confident that history can be sifted out of the myth, he gives no procedure for reliably doing so.
It’s been 50 years since his book, which is plenty of time for scholars to weigh in. If they’ve said nothing, that gives us little confidence that SW is onto something useful. But if a consensus response has emerged, that is what we should be considering, not SW’s original proposal.
The examples that SW considers—Tiberius Caesar, Alexander the Great, and others—are all important public figures. Jesus was not. Legendary drift is slow when everyone experienced the impact of the figure directly and might correct a story themselves. By contrast, only a handful of people could rein in an errant Jesus story (more here).
SW’s examples are all secular leaders. Is Herodotus a relevant example when we’re concerned about the growth of a religious tale? Consider Sathya Sai Baba, an Indian guru who died in 2011 with millions of followers. Supernatural tales grew up around him in his own lifetime. (More on the growth of legends here and here.)
SW proves too much!
William Lane Craig must walk a fine line since he can’t completely reject mythological development. Myth is his enemy when it comes to the New Testament books written 40 to 70 years after the death of Jesus. He must downplay myth to label these as history. But myth is his friend when it comes to the noncanonical books of the second century—the Gospel of Thomas, the Shepherd of Hermas, and so on. Here he imagines the mists of time separating the authors of those books from the actual history.
And, bizarrely, Craig’s own quote gives support to the skeptics’ concern about legend creeping into the gospels! Apologists don’t read SW’s chapter directly; they prefer Craig’s quote. It’s a much better data point with which to argue that the gospels are accurate—if you can get past that small issue of it being completely inaccurate.
Sticky, not accurate, is what gets passed along. This is true for Craig as it is for the gospel story.
In the beginning, God created man in his own image.
Man, being a gentleman, returned the favor.
— Rousseau
- See more at: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/crossexami ... gkIoN.dpuf
http://www.bibleinterp.com/articles/201 ... 8030.shtml
One major topic that impacts on the reliability of the Gospels is the rate at which myth or legend can grow over time and displace the historically accurate accounts of events. Some argue that the Gospels cannot be mostly legend, as many scholars have proposed, because that would require a myth growth rate that is implausibly high given their relatively early composition in relation to the events they claim to recount. For example, New Testament scholar William Lane Craig says, “One of the major problems with the legend hypothesis…is that the time gap between Jesus’ death and the writing of the Gospels is just too short for this to have happened.”1

I think this topic is key for many people who try to assess the historical reliability of the Gospels. It was for me. And it was for another layman: Lee Strobel, an atheist whose investigations into the New Testament led him to become a Christian and author of the runaway best-selling book The Case for Christ. Strobel and I both began with the same intuitive conclusion, that the Gospels must be some kind of legendized record of Jesus. But as we each went on to look at the various factors related to Gospel reliability, we reacted differently to the myth-growth-rate argument. For me, it was the biggest challenge to my position as a non-Christian…until I looked at it closer. For Strobel, it was the “clincher” that led him to change his position:

I had wanted to believe that the deification of Jesus was the result of legendary development in which well-meaning but misguided people slowly turned a wise sage into the mythical Son of God….But while I went into my investigation thinking that this legendary explanation was intuitively obvious, I emerged convinced it was totally without basis. What clinched it for me was the famous study by A.N. Sherwin-White, the great classical historian from Oxford University, which William Lane Craig alluded to in our interview. Sherwin-White meticulously examined the rate at which legend accrued in the ancient world. His conclusion: not even two full generations was enough time for legend to develop and to wipe out a solid core of historical truth.2

Strobel and Craig are referring here to the last lecture in a 1960-1961 eight-part lecture series by the late Adrian Nicholas Sherwin-White. In 1963, all eight lectures were published as a book titled Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament. The main topic of the first seven lectures was to appraise the New Testament in light of known aspects of Roman law and social background. In the last lecture, which comprises the last seven pages of his book, Sherwin-White stepped out from the main topic of his lectures to “boldly state a case” in favor of the historical reliability of the Gospels.3

The focal point of Sherwin-White’s case for the historical reliability of the Gospels was a two-generation rule he derived from his extensive experience with other ancient literature: “…Even two generations [about seventy years total] are too short a span to allow the mythical tendency to prevail over the hard historical core of the oral tradition.”4 Based on this, Sherwin-White argued that there should be enough history about Jesus in the Gospels that “the history of his mission” can be written.5 Sherwin-White did not specify how much history of Jesus’ mission should be able to be written, but for the sake of this article I am going to assume it is quite a bit, based on my own subjective reading of Sherwin-White’s lecture and based on Sherwin-White’s 1993 obituary, which refers to his “conviction of the essential historicity of the narratives in the New Testament”.6

Before continuing any further, it might be helpful to stop at this point and clarify three things. First, virtually all scholars agree that the Gospels were written within two generations (seventy years) after Jesus’ death in the early 30s CE. Second, Sherwin-White’s two-generation rule above is not primarily focused on how fast myth can grow; it is primarily focused on how fast the historical core can be erased. Sherwin-White and many others acknowledge that myth can grow very fast. It is the rate at which the historical core can be reduced or lost (due to being displaced by myth) that is in dispute. Third, everything discussed in this article is based on the Gospels not being written by firsthand eyewitnesses. Nearly all scholars acknowledge this possibility. If this is true, then the rate at which the historical core can be pushed out of the oral tradition is of interest because the Gospels are a snapshot of the oral tradition in existence at the time each Gospel was written.

Many have rejected Sherwin-White’s two-generation rule and his conclusion from it that the Gospels are essentially reliable, but few have bothered trying to explain why Sherwin-White’s two-generation rule does not hold up. However, there is one person who has done this: Peter Brunt, another classical historian and colleague of Sherwin-White. Brunt was an expert on Alexander the Great who would later be chosen over Sherwin-White for the coveted Camden Professor of Ancient History Chair in 1970. Brunt’s initial response to Sherwin-White’s two-generation rule was made in private and is captured, along with Sherwin-White’s response back to him, in a footnote at the very end of Sherwin-White’s book. Sherwin-White wrote in this footnote:

Mr. P.A. Brunt has suggested in private correspondence that a study of the Alexander [the Great] sources is less encouraging for my thesis. There was a remarkable growth of myth around his person and deeds within the lifetime of contemporaries [circa 300 BCE], and the historical embroidery was often deliberate. But the hard [historical] core still remains, and an alternative but neglected source – or pair of sources – survived for the serious inquirer Arrian to utilize in the second century A.D. This seems to me encouraging rather than the reverse.7

As can be seen in this footnote, despite Brunt saying that some of the Alexander sources were less encouraging for Sherwin-White’s thesis, Sherwin-White stood his ground. His main point in reply to Brunt was that despite a remarkable growth of myth around Alexander the Great, the hard historical core of the oral tradition still remained, and an alternative but neglected pair of sources (he is referring to Ptolemy and Aristobulus) survived for Arrian to utilize when writing Alexander’s history four hundred years later in the second century CE.

There are only two ways I can make sense of this response by Sherwin-White. One, he was simply disagreeing with Brunt that any of the early Alexander sources had a shortage of historical core in them. Two, Sherwin-White was saying that despite the shortage of historical core in some of the early Alexander sources, the historical core of the oral tradition was nevertheless still captured – in this case in the alternative but neglected pair of sources (Ptolemy and Aristobulus). If this second way of understanding Sherwin-White is what he actually intended, it is useful simply to show at this point that even the author of the two-generation rule agrees with Brunt that some of the early Alexander sources had a shortage of historical core in them. I will come back to this possibility later, but the analysis below applies no matter which way Sherwin-White intended in his response to Brunt.

Shortly after Sherwin-White’s book was published, Brunt replied to Sherwin-White’s two-generation rule again, this time responding specifically to Sherwin-White’s footnote above:

Sherwin-White has done me the honour to cite a comparison I drew with our accounts of Alexander whom some of his own contemporaries treated as a god….[It is true that Alexander’s history was still able to be written,] but Alexander’s career was public in a sense which that of Jesus in Galilee was not….If the synoptic Gospels reflect traditions that grew and were remoulded in the changing experience of the Palestinian Church, how can we objectively distinguish between what is original and what is accretion, seeing that the Gospels themselves must be almost our only evidence for that changing experience? …Sherwin-White has not provided, as he thinks, conclusive reasons to reject the view…that the history of his [Jesus’] mission cannot be written.8

The key point in Brunt’s response above, which is where Sherwin-White went wrong in his two-generation argument, is that Alexander the Great, like almost everyone else classical historians normally investigate, was a figure of significant public interest when he was alive. Because of this, widespread knowledge of facts about him across a range of hostile, friendly, and neutral people would have limited how much the historical core could be displaced by legend in the oral and written traditions after his death. However, in the case of Jesus, this constraint would have been much less, because Jesus was very probably a figure of very little public significance except to his followers when he was alive and to his worshippers after his death.

That Sherwin-White did not fully consider the effects of public interest in a figure on the preservation of the historical core after his or her death is evident by the fact that every example he gives in his myth-growth-rate essay of people whom the historical core was preserved – Pisistratus (tyrant of Athens), Hipparchus (tyrant of Athens after Pisistratus), Gaius Gracchus (politician), Tiberius Caesar (emperor), Cleomenes (king), Themistocles (military commander), and all forty-six people in Plutarch’s Lives (every single one a statesman, general, king, emperor, lawmaker, politician, tyrant, or consul) – all are figures of significant public interest.

But what about the presence and influence of firsthand eyewitnesses on the oral tradition, someone might ask. Although a few of Jesus’ closest followers were probably eyewitnesses to a large part of his ministry (such as the Apostles), in an enthusiastic religious movement driven by belief in Jesus’ resurrection and imminent return (I think these were sincerely held beliefs that were not the result of legendary growth), these followers may by themselves have been unable to contain the growth of legend and displacement of the historical core among those in the growing church who did not know Jesus when he was alive or were not eyewitnesses of the specific events being distorted. The ability of a few of Jesus’ closest followers to contain the growth of legend would have been further hampered if the legends were growing in several different locales, for in this case they would have had the nearly impossible task of being present everywhere, stamping out all of the unhistorical legends. Eyewitnesses of Jesus’ ministry may also have viewed the correction of legends and policing of historical accuracy for events that occurred before Jesus’ death as a relatively trivial pursuit if their focus was mainly on Jesus’ future return. In this case, their priority would have been on convincing non-believers and galvanizing believers of the most important thing that they believed was true – that Jesus was the Messiah, had been raised from the dead, and would be back very soon. Any restraint a few firsthand eyewitnesses did provide would have been further diminished as they died off in the decades after Jesus’ death.

The Gospel authors may also have been part of the messianic fervor and intentionally or unintentionally added some embellishments at the cost of historical core. While Sherwin-White in his myth-growth-rate essay views the Gospel writers “quite generally as primitive historians,”9 Brunt points out that “they were not seeking to record historic incidents so much as to proclaim salvation.”10 It is human nature to embellish, and it would also be human nature if the better story became the more popular one in the growing Christian community, even if it was not the most historically accurate one. Additionally, if the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ life and death were the most popular in the growing Church, and not many outside the Church knew much about Jesus because he had not been a figure of significant public interest, it makes sense that less-legendized and less-biased records, if they were ever even written, would not survive.

For those who think all of this is irrelevant because the Gospels represent independent strands of oral tradition, which would virtually guarantee their historicity where they agree, world-renowned expert on oral transmission Jan Vansina strongly disagrees and explains why:

…We cannot assume that the testimony of two different informants from the same community or even society is really independent. This is very important. In history, proof is given only when two independent sources confirm the same event or situation, but…it is not possible to do this with oral tradition wherever a corpus exists and information flows are unstemmed (i.e., in most cases). Feedback and contamination is the norm….No one will consider the three synoptic Gospels as independent sources, even though they have different authors…they stemmed from one single oral milieu, from one corpus in one community. Once this is realized, it is easy to see that it also applies to John, the fourth Gospel…11

Given everything discussed above, it is plausible that the historical core surrounding Jesus’ life and death is both smaller and comprises a smaller portion of the Christian origins record than historians are used to seeing in other ancient records of interest. This would explain how a professional historian like Sherwin-White could mistakenly think the Gospels are essentially reliable. This would also explain the inability of many scholars who look critically at the Gospels to reach a consensus on a substantive history of Jesus’ mission beyond the most basic facts, such as his probable start as a follower of John the Baptist, eventually attracting his own following, and getting crucified by the Romans.

In conclusion, the Gospels are an understandable exception to what classical historians normally deal with, because classical historians rarely if ever deal with the written records of a highly revered religious figure who had very little contemporary significance to anyone but his followers when he was alive and to his worshippers after his death and where the entire written record comes only from those who worshipped him. Because of this, using the myth growth rates observed in other ancient records as a baseline to say what should be observed in the Gospels is a mistaken approach.

In his memoir of Sherwin-White that he wrote for the British Academy in 1994, Brunt revisited Sherwin-White’s myth-growth-rate essay from thirty years earlier with brutal honesty: “His remarks do not convince me that he had deeply considered this whole matter….He was himself a practising Church-man, and this may explain his unconvincing adventure into apologetics.”12

Brunt’s frank remarks above would be a good conclusion to this article, but there are two more points to make about Sherwin-White’s attempt to apply a two-generation rule to the Gospels.

First, despite Alexander the Great’s huge public significance, there may actually be a written source about Alexander in which the historical core of the oral tradition was very significantly displaced by legend within two generations of his death. This source is known as the Alexander Romance. However, because the earliest surviving copies of the Alexander Romance date from centuries after Alexander’s death, there is significant controversy about when the first version was written and what exactly was in it. This controversy will probably never be settled, but it is worth noting the opinion of Richard Stoneman, honorary fellow in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter, in a widely acclaimed and highly respected new book on Alexander the Great (The Landmark Arrian, 2010):

Soon after his death, Alexander’s life story was written up by an anonymous author….This work, known as the Alexander Romance, emphasized the fabulous elements of Alexander’s story and added many new fables….This work seems, however, not to have been known to the Romans until it was translated by Julius Valerius in the fourth century C.E.; this has led to the mistaken view, still shared by many, that the Greek original was not written until shortly before that date. Probably it arose much earlier, perhaps in the early third century B.C.E. The Alexander Romance is a fictional biography that…is of interest as indicating the way that the memory of Alexander was shaped a generation or two after his death.13

If Stoneman is right, then the Alexander Romance shows that even for a hugely public figure, Sherwin-White’s two-generation rule can fail in some quarters of the oral tradition and in the associated written sources. It also drives home the point that if one wanted to try salvaging Sherwin-White’s two-generation rule, the following corollary would have to be added to it: When in some sources the mythical tendency has prevailed over the hard historical core of the oral tradition in the first two generations, there will always survive another less legendized source or sources to guide the later historian.

But this just returns us to the problem of Jesus’ public insignificance. If the Gospel accounts of Jesus are similar to the Alexander Romance account of Alexander the Great, who would have written the unbiased or less legendized accounts with more of the real story? The answer is: nobody.

There is no way to know for sure, but in my opinion Sherwin-White tacitly acknowledged (in the footnote at the end of his book) that the corollary above was part of his two-generation rule. As mentioned earlier in this article, the essence of that footnote was that Brunt thought some of the Alexander sources were less encouraging for Sherwin-White’s thesis, to which Sherwin-White replied that the historical core of the oral tradition still remained and an alternative but neglected pair of sources survived for Arrian to use when writing Alexander’s history 400 years later. I think Sherwin-White may have agreed with Brunt that some of the early Alexander sources did not have the amount of historical core that he was arguing for in the Gospels, and that is why he brought up the alternative pair of Alexander sources. In doing so, Sherwin-White’s point was that the historical core of the oral tradition was captured in the written record as a whole, even if not in every piece of the written record, and so his two-generation rule still held true. He was of course right in the case of Alexander the Great, and he had every right to say that this was encouraging for his thesis rather than the reverse, but in doing so he was tacitly admitting the need for the corollary above. But as already mentioned, even with this corollary, Sherwin-White’s argument is still stuck with a big hole in it when it comes to the Christian origins record – if Jesus was not a figure of significant public interest when he was alive or to anyone but his worshippers after his death, we very likely might not have an alternative but neglected pair of sources to fill in the record for Jesus like we did for Alexander the Great.

The second and final point to make about Sherwin-White’s two-generation rule is that, as far as I can tell, it has never gathered any consensus among classical historians. If anyone were to ever try to do so, it would not surprise me if the vast majority of them either disagreed with it or gave the same response Roman historian J.J. Nicholls gave in 1964: “…the discussion, as far as it goes, is interesting, but it is too sketchy to be convincing.”14 Out of the seven reviews of Sherwin-White’s book that I could find in English that specifically addressed his myth-growth-rate essay (all from the 1960s), only two were more supportive than this toward Sherwin-White’s two-generation rule.15
http://youcallthisculture.blogspot.com/ ... white.html
Author's Note (June 29, 2013): This post deals with the manner in which Christian apologists have misrepresented the views of A.N. Sherwin-White. Kris Komarnitsky has written an excellent substantive critique of the views themselves, Myth Growth Rates and the Gospels: A Close Look at A.N. Sherwin-White’s Two-Generation Rule.


I recently looked at the argument that the thirty year period between the death of Jesus and the composition of the Gospel of Mark was too short for the accounts of the resurrection and miracles to be legends. My curiosity had been piqued by some Christian bloggers who suggested that historians generally accept the principle that legends don’t grow that quickly. The argument seems to have been developed by William Lane Craig who relies on the work of an Oxford historian named A.N. Sherwin-White. Craig writes, "When Professor Sherwin-White turns to the gospels, he states that for the gospels to be legends, the rate of legendary accumulation would have to be "unbelievable." More generations would be needed." The Evidence for Jesus. However, the popularity of the argument seems to stem from Lee Strobel who interviewed Craig in The Case for Christ. In an effort to understand this argument better, I obtained the Oxford Professor’s book Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament (Oxford 1963) and read the passages that Craig cites.

The first thing I noticed is that the book has nothing to do with the historical reliability of the resurrection accounts or any of the miracle stories. As the book’s title suggests, Sherwin-White’s interest was Roman law and society. The book addresses the procedural and jurisdictional issues that arise in the gospel accounts of Jesus’ trial and the issues of Paul's Roman citizenship that arise in the book of Acts. "[O]ne may show how the various historical and social and legal problems raised by the Gospels and Acts now look to a Roman historian. That, and only that, is the intention of these lectures." (emphasis added) (RSRLNT p. iv)

Sherwin-White’s analysis did not require him to reach any conclusions about the historical reliability of the New Testament stories. He simply offered his opinion on the extent to which the accounts reflected what historians knew about the legal system of ancient Rome. Much as a doctor might comment on the extent to which an episode of E.R. reflects real medical practice or a lawyer might comment on the courtroom scenes in Law and Order, the Oxford professor offered his opinions about the events reported in the gospels and Acts in light of contemporary scholarship (as of 1963) regarding ancient Rome. This does not mean that Sherwin-White either affirmed or denied that any particular story in the New Testament was factual or fictional. For his purposes, the question was not relevant.

Nevertheless, after discussing legal issues for 185 pages, Sherwin-White took 7 pages to “consider the whole topic of historicity briefly and very generally, and boldly state a case.” (RSRLNT p. 186) He declared himself an amateur in the field of biblical criticism, but he questioned those skeptics who declare that “the historical Christ is unknowable and the history of his mission cannot be written.” (RSRLNT p. 187) He admitted that "a deal of distortion can affect a story that is given literary form a generation or two after the events," (RSRLNT p. 187) but his response was that the gospels were no more obviously distorted than many of the sources that historians of ancient Rome must deal with on a regular basis. He did not assert that the gospels were historically factual. He asserted that they could be used to do history.

Professor Sherwin-White noted that even the “most deplorable” sources can be read critically by historians to yield a “basic layer of historical truth.” While he did not claim that the Bible was a deplorable source, he repeatedly compared it to writings that are replete with problems. Consider the following statements: "material has not been transformed out of all recognition;" "the falsification does not automatically and absolutely prevail;" and "the historical content is not hopelessly lost." (RSRLNT p. 189,190,191) Sherwin-White did not “suggest the literal accuracy of ancient sources, ecclesiastical or secular;” (RSRLNT p.192-193 n.2) he merely rejected the view “that the historical Christ is unknowable.”

The part of Sherwin-White’s essay that has attracted the most attention from Christian apologists is his comments on the length of time it takes for mythology to displace historical fact. However, contrary to Craig, Strobel, Geisler and a host of others, he did not attempt to calculate a rate of legendary accumulation that is universally applicable. Nor did he lay out a rule that enables an historian to identify a point before which an oral tradition can still be considered historical. Indeed, Sherwin-White acknowledged that various types of bias can be present both in the original source of the oral tradition and in the writer who finally records it. He merely asserted that “historical content is not hopelessly lost” to the critical historian even after a period of two generations. (RSRLNT p. 191)

The apologetic abuse of the Oxford professor starts with William Lane Craig. His claim that Sherwin-White “states that for the gospels to be legends, the rate of legendary accumulation would have to be ‘unbelievable’" is at least a gross distortion if not an outright falsehood. Sherwin-White never classified the gospels as either legend or fact. Nor did he ever use the word “unbelievable” despite Craig application of quotation marks. Throughout his essay, the Oxford professor acknowledged that all of his ancient sources contain both fact and fiction. What he did argue is that it would usually take more than two generations for the legendary elements to so completely displace the historical facts as to make the gospels useless to the critical historian. But he made no attempt to identify where such displacement occurred in the gospels or which parts could be considered historical.

Not surprisingly, Lee Strobel is even less circumspect in his use of Sherwin-White. In his summary in The Case for Christ, Strobel bloviates
What clinched it for me was the famous study by A. N. Sherwin-White, the great classical historian from Oxford University, which William Lane alluded to in our interview. Sherwin-White meticulously examined the rate at which legend accrued in the ancient world. His conclusion: not even two full generations was enough time for legend to develop and to wipe out a solid core of historical truth. (The Case for Christ p. 264)
Contrary to Strobel’s imagination, the comments in Roman Law and Roman Society in the New Testament do not constitute a “study” and they do not reflect “meticulous” examination. No such study was required to support the rest of the book, which is why Sherwin-White described himself as considering the topic of historicity “briefly and very generally.” (RSRLNT p. 186) Most importantly, Strobel ignores the fact that it still takes critical historical methodology to identify that "solid core." Sherwin-White did not admit the possibility of accepting the gospels at face value.

Another interesting misuse of Sherwin-White comes from Gary Habermas who appears to simply alter words to meet his own purposes in Why I Believe the New Testament is Historically Reliable. According to Habermas, "The sort of thoroughgoing propaganda literature that some critics believe the Gospels to be was actually nonexistent in ancient times. Sherwin-White declares, 'We are not acquainted with this type of writing in ancient historiography.'" The only problem is that Sherwin-White did not declare that! He declared that "we are not unacquainted with this type of writing."(emphasis added)(RSRLNT p. 189) The point of Sherwin-White’s essay is that historians were familiar with this type of literature and were capable of using critical analysis to get at the historical content despite the difficulties posed by the genre.

Now to be perfectly fair to Dr. Habermas, it appears that he was working with a 1978 reprint of RLRSNT so it is possible that his version contained a typographical error. It is even possible that his edition corrected a typo in the original that I was using. I doubt it though because the alternate wording just does not make any sense. The original reads “We are not unacquainted with this type of writing in ancient historiography, as will shortly appear.” In the next paragraph, he discussed a history written by Herodotus and said “The parallel with the authors of the Gospels is by no means as far-fetched as it might seem.” (RSRLNT p. 190) Why would he claim that he was not familiar with that genre and that he was going to demonstrate that unfamiliarity, and then identify a historical work that parallels it? It looks like Habermas was engaged in some sloppy quote mining.

As Sherwin-White’s work gets taken up by the web’s amateur apologists, the distortions get more outrageous. Writing at tektonics.org, Ralph J. Asher attributes an express affirmation of the resurrection: “Prof. A.N. Sherwin-White writes in his book Roman Law and Roman Society in the New Testament that the appearance reports cannot be mainly legendary.” On Townhall.com, we find that “Sherwin-White, argued that the resurrection news spread too soon and too quickly for it to have been a legend.” This assertion cites an article by Craig in Jesus Under Fire, but I don’t have access to that particular book so I don’t know what Craig actually wrote there. I suspect that Townhall has exaggerated as Craig seems to be more careful than that. The references to Sherwin-White become exaggerated in the retelling just as the skeptics suspect the gospel stories did.

It is interesting the way apologists have seized upon Sherwin-White's work. The essence of his argument was not that the gospels were immune to legendary corruption. Rather, his argument was that the legendary corruption was not sufficient to render the gospels immune to critical historical analysis. It seems that he would applaud the efforts of modern scholars like Bart Ehrman, Dominic Crossan, Karen Armstrong, and John Shelby Spong who seek to identify that core of historical facts that the gospels contain.
http://youcallthisculture.blogspot.com/ ... white.html
"... almost every critical biblical position was earlier advanced by skeptics." - Raymond Brown
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Re: The use (and abuse) of A. N. Sherwin-White

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From a previous thread
I think Komarnitsky (and Richard Stoneman his source) are probably wrong in dating the Alexander Romance in anything like its present form to the third century BCE. Elements of the Alexander Romance e.g. the totally legendary birth story, probably do date from the third century BCE. but the work as a whole seems later, IMHO maybe c 100 BCE.
Andrew Criddle
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Re: The use (and abuse) of A. N. Sherwin-White

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One argument against a 3rd century BCE date for the Alexander Romance is this pasasge
And he [Alexander] offered sacrifices with the generals there and went to Sicily, and, having subdued certain elements that were in revolt there, he proceeded into the land of Italy. And the generals of the Romans sent by the hand of the general Marcus Aemilius the crown of Capitolian Zeus, set with pearls, and the message: "We present to you each year a golden crown valued at 100 coins." When he had received their allegiance, he promised that he would make them great. He took from them 1000 soldiers and 400 talents. And they said they would give him even more soldiers if they were not at war with the Carthaginians.
From there he went back and having crossed the middle sea he arrived in Africa. The generals of the Africans met him and begged him to drive the Romans out of the city. And he, well aware of their inactivity, replied: "Conquer, or pay tribute to the conquerors."
Alexander, in effect, predicting the rise of Rome and decline of Carthage seems to come from a period after the 2nd Punic war. Marcus Aemilius probably refers to Marcus Aemilus Lepidus the early 2nd century BCE Roman leader.

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Re: The use (and abuse) of A. N. Sherwin-White

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Thank you very much for this information, Andrew.
"... almost every critical biblical position was earlier advanced by skeptics." - Raymond Brown
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