Craig Evans Tries to Make Stupid Look Respectable

[Secret Alias]

http://www.bricecjones.com/blog/craig-a ... a-response

[perseusomega9]

If the NT autographs are later than consensus dating, at least in their post-Marcion edited form, then Evans may be right, just not for the reasons he would want to be.

[Secret Alias]

Agreed but that's not his point. He's got an obvious agenda like the guy at the club who offers to buy the dancer a new car. He's not just trying to make sure she has a safe ride to work.

[toejam]

Great article.

[Peter Kirby]

It doesn't really matter how long the autographs were still around if (a) people didn't know they were autographs or (b) people doing the copying preferred other exemplars.

The style of argument reminds me of the old chestnut about grandpa speaking up if the Gospel of Mark got anything wrong--because some people lived that long. (I'm sure some people combine both arguments to get an airtight case for the reliability of the gospels!)

[MrMacSon]

.
It's special-pleading by Evans; and dog-whistling for others to come and repeat his views, or to espouse similar views eg.

"New Testament scholar Michael Kruger read Evans’ article and concluded that 'this makes the gap between our copies and the autographs shrink down to a rather negligible size'."

Brice addresses that in the next sentence -

In reality, however, not a single thing has changed. Evans has not discovered new evidence: he has invented it.

and of course this is tied to the "early" issue, which Brice addresses

"Like Evans, many scholars continue to overemphasize the “early” in order to argue for textual stability, but this method is flawed."

... As J.K. Elliott has rightly warned, “to emphasize their [i.e., the papyri] early dates is deceptive. The age of a manuscript is of no significance when assessing textual variation, unless we know how many stages there were between the autograph and that copy and also what changes were made at each of the intervening stages. No one has such information” (223).

And then there is the canonical v gnostic argument, which Brice also addresses -

"According to Evans, the “Gnostic” writings were less numerous and less sacred than the New Testament texts, were read and studied in private, and were not taken as seriously as New Testament texts ..."

Brice asks

how in the world can we know that the Nag Hammadi texts were considered less sacred?

.

[MrMacSon]

It's like Evans is muddying the waters or trying to protect against investigations for or of intermediate 'processes' such as Marcion, Ignatius, Tatian, etc and the texts associated with them.

[Blood]

All in all, I—and a whole slew of other scholars—am baffled as to how this article, full of faulty assumptions and claims, came to see the light of day.

The writer of the article is ignorant. He seems to think "faulty assumptions and claims" is an exception rather than the norm in New Testament "scholarship."

[Secret Alias]

how in the world can we know that the Nag Hammadi texts were considered less sacred?

People like Evans mistake their own assumptions for those of others.

[ericbwonder]

One of Evans' students made a similar claim, and also appealed to a possible reference to autographs in Tertullian, Prescription Against Heresies, 36 (Gregory Monette 2014, The Wrong Jesus, 79-81).