Methodology for weighing ancient sources

[Leucius Charinus]

I think generation-change in memes is relevant, especially with respect to theology, myths, and legends; and two (or more) generation-change is particularly relevant.

This is an extremely important point. Hypotheses have been inherited and are often unexamined. Illogical criteria (embarrassment, etc) whose rhetoric suited the centuries old paradigm were invented.

Informative stuff thanks mac



LC

[Leucius Charinus]

Contrast the methods of Theopompus, a historian of rhetorical bent of the 4th century BCE, to those of the gospel writers (even Luke). Theopompus did not scruple to point out moral lessons as he wrote history. In my view, less trustworthy as a historian than Thucydides, more trustworthy than the evangelists.

Let me know when you get to Eusebius ficino. He might be a little late for your reckoning but his methods have been studied and he is an important source for much of early Christian history. Sometimes some ancient sources are mysteries. Contrast the methods used by the author or authors of the Historia Augusta. How are historians supposed to weigh "imperial mockumentaries"?



LC

[MrMacSon]

I think generation-change in memes is relevant, especially with respect to theology, myths, and legends; and two (or more) generation-change is particularly relevant.

This is an extremely important point. Hypotheses have been inherited and are often unexamined. Illogical criteria (embarrassment, etc) whose rhetoric suited the centuries old paradigm were invented.

Informative stuff thanks mac.

Cheers. I agree it is important.

An interesting modern day example is my teen child plays weekend sport in a team from a club historically tied to a religious primary school, though half the team (that she has been in for a few years) are not from that school. The club accepts players from anywhere, without religious criteria, including adults.

Many of the kids that went to the religious primary school now go to the local secondary school of the same religion. My teen-child says they are only going to that religious secondary school b/c of grand-parent pressure: the kids and their parents are not particularly religious, or not religious at all.

[Leucius Charinus]

Here's another important point from another thread ...

This is relevant to the Gospels:

Gottschalk says that a historian may sometimes use hearsay evidence. He writes,

"In cases where he uses secondary witnesses, however, he does not rely upon them fully. On the contrary, he asks:

• (1) On whose primary testimony does the secondary witness base his statements?
  (2) Did the secondary witness accurately report the primary testimony as a whole?
  (3) If not, in what details did he accurately report the primary testimony?

Satisfactory answers to the second and third questions may provide the historian with the whole or the gist of the primary testimony upon which the secondary witness may be his only means of knowledge. In such cases the secondary source is the historian's 'original' source, in the sense of being the 'origin' of his knowledge. Insofar as this 'original' source is an accurate report of primary testimony, he tests its credibility as he would that of the primary testimony itself."[8]

the problem is we cannot satisfactorily answer #1, #2 and #3...or can we? If you believe we can please do so.

This is relevant to the Gospels but it has relevance to practically everything related to the evidence used to reconstruct Christian origins. It also applies to any evidence where the primary evidence has "gone missing". For example, the writings of the Emperor Julian. In this case, the text of "Against Julian" written by the Alexandrian Bishop Cyril c.430 CE, is the secondary witness, and yet it being used as the primary witness for what Julian may have written. Danger, Danger. Danger.

The general answer is that we cannot satisfactorily answer #1, #2 and #3 for most secondary evidence involved with Christian origins. When we get to Eusebius, and his monumental "Church History" this specific problem becomes exceedingly acute.'

One further example for the application of this above testing in Christian origins is the role that the orthodox heresiologists play as providing secondary evidence with respect to the reconstruction of the history of the gnostic heretics. This makes a fascinating study. The orthodox heresiogists seem to have been identified as often writing "pseudo-historical narratives" about their enemies the heretics. This is really to be expected, after all, it was just standard politics.


LC

[andrewcriddle]

Glad to see Sheshbazzar and outhouse attacking the same point!

Both of the cavils that you raise are, I think, already addressed in Komarnitsky's blog piece, which is linked in Ferguson's piece.

Komarnitsky spends a lot of time on objections to Sherwin-White's conclusion. For example, the Alexander Romance seems to have introduced fabulous elements into the Alexander story soon after A's death, and these persisted in later tradition/legend. Shesh, your point is addressed by Ferguson in his #7: we don't assess highly the veracity of a source that reports events of extremely low intrinsic probability.

outhouse, S-W's contention was that in the ancient world, it took on average only two generations for a historically authentic story about someone to be erased by legend. That's how fast myth outpaced history, in his view. The problem is in the word, "erased," or perhaps "historical core," in Komarnitsky's interpretation of S.-W. Komarnitsky is talking about S.-W. talking about replacement of a substantially historical account by a heavily fictionalized account, not about complete eradication from the legend of all elements of the history (no one is claiming that later romances about Alexander forgot that he was a great conqueror, etc.).

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

[neilgodfrey]

Genre, I think, is at best only a general guide to authorial intent. We will always have the questions surrounding parody, deception, etc where quite often we need some information external to the text itself to alert us to what extent we can take it at face value. (There is the added difficulty with the genre of ancient historiographical works that it was quite acceptable for authors to fabricate what they believed was "probably" true if they lacked sources.)

I also don't believe that we can usually discern from a text alone how much of its content is historically likely. We always need to bring in information external to the text.

This is needed to establish the all-important provenance or origins of a text. Self-testimony can never be sufficient. We need some sorts of external "controls" to enable us to know how to interpret what we read. We do need to know more than an author's name to know how much confidence we can place in his work. And we need to remember that a narrative voice in a piece of writing does not necessarily equate with the real author's voice -- so we can't argue in a circle and say we can learn from the text what the author was like and who he/she was, and then decide how much we can trust in the text because of whom the author is. (Bible scholars are notorious for this.)

Especially with ancient historiographical texts we need to have some external anchor to give us some assurance that a work is about real events. The more of a narrative we can confirm this way the higher our confidence will be for the remainder that we cannot confirm externally.

External supports can be "primary" sources (archaeological) and "secondary" -- other texts that we find we can have confidence in to some degree, etc etc.

[ficino]

Genre, I think, is at best only a general guide to authorial intent. We will always have the questions surrounding parody, deception, etc where quite often we need some information external to the text itself to alert us to what extent we can take it at face value. (There is the added difficulty with the genre of ancient historiographical works that it was quite acceptable for authors to fabricate what they believed was "probably" true if they lacked sources.)

I also don't believe that we can usually discern from a text alone how much of its content is historically likely. We always need to bring in information external to the text.

This is needed to establish the all-important provenance or origins of a text. Self-testimony can never be sufficient. We need some sorts of external "controls" to enable us to know how to interpret what we read. We do need to know more than an author's name to know how much confidence we can place in his work. And we need to remember that a narrative voice in a piece of writing does not necessarily equate with the real author's voice -- so we can't argue in a circle and say we can learn from the text what the author was like and who he/she was, and then decide how much we can trust in the text because of whom the author is. (Bible scholars are notorious for this.)

Especially with ancient historiographical texts we need to have some external anchor to give us some assurance that a work is about real events. The more of a narrative we can confirm this way the higher our confidence will be for the remainder that we cannot confirm externally.

External supports can be "primary" sources (archaeological) and "secondary" -- other texts that we find we can have confidence in to some degree, etc etc.

Good points, Neil. A lot has been done on genre by classicists in the last generation. Malcolm Heath has written that a genre is “a class of texts presupposing a broadly common set of assumptions” between writer and audience. Another way of phrasing this: a genre gives a frame of reference by which audiences can make sense of the texts included in the genre, and, although artists push boundaries, genre supplies boundaries to push. One problem with NT documents is that we know almost nothing about the consumers of them save what we can infer from the documents themselves, and those inferences often are shaky.

Good points about voices, too. That problem leads to a huge field - nay, perhaps, a huge swamp! How could Milton's angels ever hope to puzzle out the mysteries of predestination when they first had to puzzle out and identify "voices"?

[cienfuegos]

Genre, I think, is at best only a general guide to authorial intent. We will always have the questions surrounding parody, deception, etc where quite often we need some information external to the text itself to alert us to what extent we can take it at face value. (There is the added difficulty with the genre of ancient historiographical works that it was quite acceptable for authors to fabricate what they believed was "probably" true if they lacked sources.)

I also don't believe that we can usually discern from a text alone how much of its content is historically likely. We always need to bring in information external to the text.

This is needed to establish the all-important provenance or origins of a text. Self-testimony can never be sufficient. We need some sorts of external "controls" to enable us to know how to interpret what we read. We do need to know more than an author's name to know how much confidence we can place in his work. And we need to remember that a narrative voice in a piece of writing does not necessarily equate with the real author's voice -- so we can't argue in a circle and say we can learn from the text what the author was like and who he/she was, and then decide how much we can trust in the text because of whom the author is. (Bible scholars are notorious for this.)

Especially with ancient historiographical texts we need to have some external anchor to give us some assurance that a work is about real events. The more of a narrative we can confirm this way the higher our confidence will be for the remainder that we cannot confirm externally.

External supports can be "primary" sources (archaeological) and "secondary" -- other texts that we find we can have confidence in to some degree, etc etc.

Good points, Neil. A lot has been done on genre by classicists in the last generation. Malcolm Heath has written that a genre is “a class of texts presupposing a broadly common set of assumptions” between writer and audience. Another way of phrasing this: a genre gives a frame of reference by which audiences can make sense of the texts included in the genre, and, although artists push boundaries, genre supplies boundaries to push. One problem with NT documents is that we know almost nothing about the consumers of them save what we can infer from the documents themselves, and those inferences often are shaky.

Good points about voices, too. That problem leads to a huge field - nay, perhaps, a huge swamp! How could Milton's angels ever hope to puzzle out the mysteries of predestination when they first had to puzzle out and identify "voices"?

It seems, though, that the Gospel writers deliberately based their writings on the LXX in a way that they expected consumers to understand. For example, Mark starts his Gospel referencing Elijah, and probably expected readers to recognize that. This observation is important to interpreting Bible stories. Was it important to Mark to document what he thinks are facts or is he more interested in rewriting the Covenant?

[neilgodfrey]

Was it important to Mark to document what he thinks are facts . . .

This is a curly one. Firstly, the evidence is against the likelihood that he is trying to document and persuade others to believe "facts of past events". We know that authors who wanted to do that sort of thing gave their readers reasons to trust their claims. The authors would identify themselves and their sources. They told readers how they knew certain things -- where they got their information, who contradicted it etc. Sometimes they would fabricate claims about their sources in order to persuade readers. Herodotus is believed by some scholars to have done this. (He appears even to have lied about inscriptions on monuments he supposedly read or places he had visited.) They would anticipate scepticism among readers and discuss such issues. We find none of that in the gospels, of course. (Luke's prologue notwithstanding.)

Moreover, sometimes a historian would fill out his account with what he believed made "natural sense" and call upon details from drama or epic poetry to help him create the scene. Thucydides is thought to have done this with his account of the plague in Athens.

[outhouse]

Firstly, the evidence is against the likelihood that he is trying to document and persuade others to believe "facts of past events".

.

Where did you dig this gem up?

All evidence points to the well known and established rhetorical prose it was written in.

All the of the NT authors were trained to write in rhetorical prose as the foundation to the text.

The authors would identify themselves and their sources.

Not always. This does not help you one way or the other.

Sometimes they would fabricate claims about their sources in order to persuade readers

Almost always, depending on what the message is. Even Pauls communities personal epistles were written and steeped in rhetoric.

Moreover, sometimes a historian would fill out his account with what he believed made "natural sense"

Agreed.

Take note here. These were theological text first and foremost, they were not historians writing history.

Yet they would use what made natural sense from their perspective and we see this. The authors being far removed from the actual events did the best they could with the traditions they had that had many Hellenistic accretions