Rule #1 of Historical Reasoning

[MrMacSon]

It would seem there is hardly any of the LE of Mark 16 in Irenaeus. There is supposedly a hint of Mark 16:17-18 in Adv Haers. 2.20.3 (but not explicitly), and there is Mark 16:9 in Adv Haers. 3.10.5; as much as a reflection of Ps 110.1 as anything.

One might even say that it is as much a reflection of Mark 16.19 as anything:

Also toward the conclusion of his gospel Mark says: "So then, after the Lord Jesus had spoken to them, He was received up into heaven, and sits on the right hand of God," confirming what had been spoken by the prophet: "The Lord said to my Lord, 'Sit on My right hand, until I make Your foes Your footstool.'"

I had noticed "toward the conclusion of his gospel Mark says" but, in view of Irenaeus's and other Patristics' lack of other explicit evidence of knowledge of Mark (other than Mark 1:2-3), as noted by Lunn, I'm suspicious that's someone's qualification: a later addition.

[Ben C. Smith]

It would seem there is hardly any of the LE of Mark 16 in Irenaeus. There is supposedly a hint of Mark 16:17-18 in Adv Haers. 2.20.3 (but not explicitly), and there is Mark 16:9 in Adv Haers. 3.10.5; as much as a reflection of Ps 110.1 as anything.

One might even say that it is as much a reflection of Mark 16.19 as anything:

Also toward the conclusion of his gospel Mark says: "So then, after the Lord Jesus had spoken to them, He was received up into heaven, and sits on the right hand of God," confirming what had been spoken by the prophet: "The Lord said to my Lord, 'Sit on My right hand, until I make Your foes Your footstool.'"

I had noticed "toward the conclusion of his gospel Mark says" but, in view of Irenaeus's and other Patristics' lack of other explicit evidence of knowledge of Mark (other than Mark 1:2-3), as noted by Lunn, I'm suspicious that's someone's qualification: a later addition.

Okay, that is fair. The way you write sometimes makes it comes off as if you are unimpressed with explicit references on their own merits (when it takes only one solid one to count). If you are questioning the text itself, though, then hey, have at it. Textual criticism comes first, naturally. Do you have any more than just a suspicion based on paucity?

[neilgodfrey]

Just to be clear, Rule #1 does not deny the value of "secondary evidence". Here is how Niels Peter Lemche addresses the methods in The Israelites in History and Tradition. I know, he's addressing the OT, but the principle applies to the NT, too.

First, the traditional distinction between primary and secondary sources:

According to Leopold von Ranke, the historian who intends to recreate the past should always concentrate on the acknowledged contemporary sources and delegate all other kind of information to a second place.

When von Ranke and historians since his time are referring to an acknowledged contemporary source, they indicate first of all that kind of information which can be dated without problems. They also say that the source must physically belong to the period about which it is taken to be firsthand information. A slab of stone with an inscription found in situ, that is, where it was originally placed by the person who erected the stone to commemorate some event of his own day, is without doubt a primary and contemporary source. A description of the same item found in some ancient literary source is, however, not a contemporary source except in the case where it goes back to the same time as the stone inscription. Thus Livy's description of the Second Punic War is not a contemporary source, as it is removed by about two hundred years from the days of Hannibal and Scipio. Suetonius's life of August is not a primary source because it is about a hundred years later than the time of August. The Monumentum Ancyranum can, however, be considered a firsthand piece of evidence from this period, since it relies on an official document from the days of August, and was placed on his temple in Ankara shortly after his death.

But here is the bit that addresses potential misunderstandings, p. 24, with my own bit of colour bolding for those who, like me, hate reading anything that slows up the journey to the main point:

The Old Testament is not a primary source of the history of ancient Israel, since it is not preserved in a condition that physically goes back to the time described in its historical literature. . . . .

It is very important to accept this status of the Old Testament as a secondary source to the history of Israel. . . . .

This does not automatically mean that the historical narrative in the Old Testament is devoid of historical information. This is a common misunderstanding when a late date of this narrative is argued, that the scholar in favor of such a position will at the same time deny that any historical recollection can be preserved in such a late text. Historicity and the status of a text as a primary or secondary source are two different subjects. It can easily happen that a later source is more reliable than a contemporary one, which is often the case when we talk about modern reconstructions of ancient history that are certainly modern renditions of the past as we see it. One such example of a contemporary source that has little to do with the real circumstances surrounding a historical event is the tale of King Idrimi's ascension to the throne of Alalakh (c. 1500 B.C.E.), a tale that was commissioned by the king himself and inscribed on his statue.10 This narrative has a long time ago been shown not to tell us the realities connected with the career of this Syrian king. It is a kind of fairy tale structured according to the well-known tale of the male hero, the youngest among his brothers, who nonetheless decides to leave the house of his parents in order to win a kingdom and a princess for himself. A historical reconstruction of how Idrimi came to power in the kingdom Mukish shows that, instead of being a hero, he was obviously a foreign usurper, in fact an illegitimate king (although he may -- as maintained by himself -- have been of noble blood from the royal line of Aleppo).

[neilgodfrey]

• 1) The extant source is about 700 years after the original.
  
  2) Most extants are in a different language (Latin) than the original (Greek).
  
  3) Everyone agrees that the extant Latin was not copied from the original Latin and the degree of copying is unknown.
  
  4) Everyone agrees that with time and translation citations were moved to orthodox ones.

So by the criteria in this Thread extant Irenaeus likely fails as meeting the minimum standard for containing primary source material. So should the Skeptic exorcise it as evidence for LE? I don't think so. Just doubt it and give it less weight. Again, I get that Neil's point is presenting what specific historians say. I'm just disagreeing with what those historians say here (as presented by Neil). Sure, quality evidence is better than quantity evidence but at the same time, more quantity evidence is better than less quantity evidence. Exorcising all evidence that doesn't meet a minimum standard reminds me of Apologetics. Just adjust your conclusion or maybe don't even have one. Skepticism has to work both ways. You are Skeptical of the evidence but you are also skeptical about not using evidence.

As clarified in my previous comment, secondary sources are not "exorcised as evidence" by Rule #1.

Irenaeus is evidence for what Irenaeus knew; not for "when" the LE was introduced, from what I understand of the problem.

Further, the manuscripts of Irenaeus being 700 years after the originals highlights the importance of the historian's ability to establish provenance of whatever sources are used. Critical analysis of all sources is still the sine qua non of historical research:

Historians, argued Ranke, had to root out forgeries and falsifications from the record. They had to test documents on the basis of their internal consistency, and their consistency with other documents originating at the same period. They had to stick to ‘primary sources’, eyewitness reports and what Ranke called the ‘purest, most immediate documents’ which could be shown to have originated at the time under investigation, and avoid reliance on ‘secondary sources’ such as memoirs or histories generated after the event. Moreover, they had to investigate and subject to the critical method all the sources relating to the events in which they were interested. They should not be content, as for example Gibbon had been, to rely on printed documents and chronicles generally available in libraries. They had instead to sally forth, as Ranke did, into the archives, to work their way through the vast unpublished hoards of original manuscripts stored up by the state chancelleries of Europe. Only then, by gathering, criticizing and verifying all the available sources, could they put themselves in a position to reconstruct the past accurately. -- (Richard Evans, In Defence of History, Kindle loc 435ff

[MrMacSon]

Okay, that is fair. The way you write sometimes makes it comes off as if you are unimpressed with explicit references on their own merits (when it takes only one solid one to count). If you are questioning the text itself, though, then hey, have at it. Textual criticism comes first, naturally. Do you have any more than just a suspicion based on paucity?

My overall impression is that the Patristics are discussing or alluding to a general theology that is parallel to the synoptics (and other NT texts), or only occasionally encounters whole chapters from the synoptics. Their explicit references are mostly to a verse here or there.

[Ben C. Smith]

Okay, that is fair. The way you write sometimes makes it comes off as if you are unimpressed with explicit references on their own merits (when it takes only one solid one to count). If you are questioning the text itself, though, then hey, have at it. Textual criticism comes first, naturally. Do you have any more than just a suspicion based on paucity?

My overall impression is that the Patristics are discussing or alluding to a general theology that is parallel to the synoptics (and other NT texts), or only occasionally encounters whole chapters from the synoptics. Their explicit references are mostly to a verse here or there.

I think this may be the case up until Irenaeus. But Irenaeus goes through several key texts in order in such a way as to imply that he has pretty much our standard Western text of, say, at least three of the gospels, as well as Acts. Sure, he is a bit light on Mark, but that is to be expected, since Matthew swallows Mark virtually whole (and, in my estimation, was intended to do precisely that, among other things). It is hard to read book 3 of Against Heresies without coming away with the distinct impression that Irenaeus has a text of Matthew, of Luke, and of Acts, and probably also of John, which very close to our extant Western text of those texts. His hits are numerous, his misses very few (and some of them are explicable on grounds other than textual difference). Any individual verse which he does not reference may of course be up for debate, particularly if it is not well attested elsewhere, but it seems doubtful that the proportion of hits to misses should be so high only in those parts that he quotes for us; he is under no obligation to quote entire texts; that is what scribes are for.

As for Mark, Irenaeus has one very high profile miss and several hits. It is enough for me that internal indications seem to point to Mark preceding both Matthew and canonical Luke; Irenaeus certainly knows a gospel of Mark similar to ours. But he quotes less of it (again, understandably so, given Matthew's range and purported apostolic origins), so more Marcan verses may be questionable for reconstruction the Western text of century II. Still and all, he explicitly gives us more of Mark than anybody before him.

I think your observations about the fathers referring to things which may be parallel to the synoptics work much better for Justin Martyr. Between Justin and Irenaeus there may have been some standardization of the texts going on, and the memoirs which Justin refers to may represent a stage of the text no longer extant in the manuscript history (though even here, if there is any text which lines up with Justin's, it is the Western).

[MrMacSon]

^ Cheers Ben. Your commentary provides good context -eg. "Matthew swallows Mark virtually whole".

Do you think Justin and Irenaeus contributed to some standardization of the texts?

[Ben C. Smith]

^ Cheers Ben. Your commentary provides good context -eg. "Matthew swallows Mark virtually whole".

Do you think Justin and Irenaeus contributed to some standardization of the texts?

I am honestly not sure. I think there is a tendency to pin such things on whatever "big names" are available, and of course sometimes it is the "big names" that did those things. But we need to remember that we know very few names of the many which undoubtedly existed. This is not a claim that Christianity was any huge phenomenon at the time, but rather a recognition that it probably consisted of more than the relatively few names we know from century II.

That said, I bet Irenaeus was in a position to influence the text. I am not so sure about Justin.

Robert M. Price fingers Polycarp as the compiler of a chunk of the NT (a suggestion I am by no means rootedly opposed to), and of course Irenaeus may have continued his legacy.

But so much of this has to remain speculation, does it not? Is Irenaeus describing texts he has recently himself edited? Or is he describing texts which he received pretty much in the same fashion as he presents them? Hard to tell, really.

[neilgodfrey]

Neil

What follows is my position in the controversy before us. I understand that you disagree. It is my view that:

In order to be evidence, something must actually be observed. What is observed in the Bickerman case is Josephus' report. What the report describes is not evidence, so we never reach the question of whether it is primary or secondary evidence. It's not evidence, full stop. The description is the evidence, not what it describes.

Yes, evidence is something observed. How can it be anything else?

Yes, all we have is Josephus's description and not the original hard copies of the Hellenistic correspondence. That is the point at the heart of the discussion I have attempted to introduce.

Two distinct criteria for designation as primary have been proposed in the successive threads. Under one (the earlier thread's), Joephus' description lacks interpretation or traditional contamination. It is primary evidence. Under the other (the current thread's), it is later than the events for which the report is being used as evidence. It is secondary evidence.

I don't follow you here.

In the earlier thread I meant to point out that it was Josephus's interpretation of the correspondence that was partly responsible for Bickerman being able to argue that we were reading the original contents of the Hellenistic letters. Josephus's description does not lack interpretation.

In both threads we are dealing with the same Josephan account, and therefore in both threads we are addressing an account that is obviously later than the Hellenistic events.

What we appear to have in the secondary evidence of Josephus is a nested verbatim copy of the contents of a primary source.

Intuition suggests that the one and the same observation has the same bearing on the same hypotheses regardless of how the observation is labeled, primary or secondary. That implies that it is harmless to change the definition of those terms, which is what Bickerman did in your account.

No, according to what I tried to express in my account was that Bickerman's discussion was consistent with the traditional understanding of the nature of primary and secondary sources (as per Mark Day). If we start using the same terms for different things then we have confusion. Bickerman's argument enables us to avoid that confusion.

It is irrelevant to the value of Josephus' report that you would prefer not to characterize Bickerman's behavior that way. It is also irrelevant that you would prefer to say that Rule #1 was diluted rather than relaxed, or that you'd prefer not to say that a different heuristic was used instead, which it was. What can be distinguished are different.

Did I say rule was diluted? I thought I said the opposite. What do you mean by "heuristic", exactly? Do you mean "method" or something that could be expressed more simply and plainly?

The additional investigative work Bickerman did (for example, seeking external corroboration for the report) needs no special motivation or explanation. Rule #1 itself contemplates critical examination apart from "prioritzing."

I don't follow you here. What do you mean by "prioritizing" here? It does not appear to be used in the way I -- or Mark Day -- used the term.

If Bickerman prefers to organize his own report by mapping his investigation onto a possible interpretation of Rule #1, then that's swell. A report of the same activities organized differently (say, prefaced by a statement like "All my observations are of things made later than the events I'm investigating, nevertheless my observations bear.") would have the same usefulness for resolving the underlying uncertainty.

I don't think you have followed the argument or I simply cannot understand what you are trying to say.

Bickerman does not rely only upon Josephus to arrive at his conclusion. He relies heavily on Hellenistic sources (260 years before Josephus) in order to arrive at his conclusion. I'm not sure if you understood that part.

[Paul E.]

What historical studies (apart from biblical studies) do you know of that do not have primary sources (as defined by Mark Day) at their base?

You use what is usable as you see it. Chracterize it and prioritize it as you will, making your arguments and qualifying your conclusions, and others will ultimately judge your work. I guess I concur in your confusion about these posts.

It is that kind of laissez-faire approach that I am arguing against. I am sticking my neck out and suggesting that we cannot validly start historical reconstructions without primary sources as our foundation.

I am not trying to be difficult here. I truly do not understand your point here in light of previous statements you have made. For example, to your initial question, as to which historical studies do not have primary sources at their base, I would respond (A) the life of the Buddha and (B) the personal life of Charlemagne, both of which we have discussed before. As for your final statement, your suggestion of an inability to even start historical reconstructions without primary sources leads me to wonder what you mean by the terms you are using.

I believe you have defined "primary source" in a way which excludes the Life of Charlemagne (which was written after Charlemagne's death, not during his lifetime, and of which I believe we do not even possess the autograph). So are you saying that we cannot even start to reconstruct Charlemagne's personal life? (His public life has primary sources to start from, IIUC.) If this is not what you are saying, then how do we perform such a reconstruction (however incomplete), in consonance with your statement above, without primary sources?

For the life of the Buddha my puzzlement grows even greater, since you have now stated both (A) that historians of India trying to pin down his birth and death dates and a few of the cultural influences he must have felt during his time period is a valid exercise and (B), above, that one cannot even start an historical reconstruction without primary sources. Yet we lack anything remotely of the kind for the life of the Buddha. So are you saying that what historians of India are doing is not an historical reconstruction, but something else altogether? Because I do not see how it can be, to your mind, a valid historical reconstruction if one cannot even begin such an endeavor without primary sources. I am honestly confused.

Ben: Similar issues arise in dealing with, e.g., Scandinavian skaldic and saga materials. How do you view the stuff generally, then how do you apply it to, say, a reconstruction of a "life" of Egil Skallagrimsson or whoever. You have what you have and you do your best with it, always remaining critical in method and catious in conclusions.