A theologian proclaiming the reliability of the gospel authors is like a lawyer proclaiming that first-century midwives didn’t need to wash their hands

Adapted from a comment I posted in a dialogue with “dwstroudmd,” a commenter at T19:

Setting up the analogy

Suppose that I, having only basic first-aid training, were to insist that it didn’t matter whether first-century Jewish midwives washed their hands before delivering babies. According to me (let’s suppose), the extant religious standards called for all devout Jews to wash regularly.  Surely that would have been enough to guard against infant mortality and death in childbed, right?

You, an experienced modern-day obstetrician, would smile tolerantly, or even laugh.  And rightly so:  If I’d had the benefit of your training, I’d have known that your profession has established (not without controversy) that mother- and baby-killing infections can sneak in via even the cleanest-looking unwashed hands. 

(We can’t mock first-century midwives for not knowing this, though; they lacked the necessary underlying knowledge about infectious microbes and their transmission.)

Ancient storytelling practices weren't necessarily a sufficient guard against distortion, just as ancient sanitary practices weren’t necessarily a sufficient guard against infection

Now let’s reverse the roles.  Certain modern theologians make the claim that it doesn’t matter whether the NT accounts are hearsay, or (if in fact they were eyewitness accounts) whether they were first written down decades after the witnesses’ observations, without the opportunity to dig into what the witnesses actually saw as opposed to what they claimed they saw.

According to these theologians, various first-century storytelling practices — "sanitation" practices, if you will — would have been enough to guard against distortion of the NT tales, even the most extraordinary ones.

It turns out, though, that at least so far as we can tell) these theologians have little or no training in interviewing actual, fallible human witnesses (let alone in cases having real-world consequences).

Our modern theologians apparently know little of the the vicissitudes of human perception and memory, as demonstrated convincingly by modern journalists, police detectives, and lawyers, not to mention by experimental psychologists.

That might give you an idea why I react the way I do when reasserters make such grandiose claims: When you [reasserters] make such confident assertions about first-century storytelling practices, to me it sounds just like a non-physician who claims that first-century midwives didn’t need to wash their hands.

Comments

[Paul Goings]

Dr Toedt,

I think that the classical response to this claim is that "the vicissitudes of human perception and memory" are overcome by what has been referred to as the guidance of the Holy Spirit. While you might respond that this assumes facts not in evidence, I think that you would be in danger of painting yourself into a corner epistemologically. It would, in the end, depend on what you yourself choose to assert as the definitions of "facts" and "in evidence." If your definitions are not the same as those of the reasserters, then to state that their argument--regarding the actions of the Holy Spirit--is inadequate is essentially a meaningless statement, because it proceeds from an unshared axiomatic understanding of reality.

Last Tuesday-ism, for example, is philosophically consistent and fully explains our shared understanding of reality, physical and otherwise, provided that one accepts certain first principles. To reject this understanding requires the acceptance of a different set of first principles, which by definition are themselves facts not in evidence.

Thus, to reject the claims about the veracity of the New Testament accounts is simply to prefer one set of axioms to another; there is no purely objective basis for doing so. So arguments about memory and oral tradition are seemingly secondary; the real question is one of belief or unbelief regarding divine action in this reality. If one rejects such a claim, then the reliability of the New Testament is an interesting academic question, but probably not much more than that; if one accepts the claim, then the issue of human mental frailty is easily dealt with.

[D. C. Toedt]

@Paul Goings, thanks for the thoughtful comment. You sound, however, like the kind of post-modern relativist that the reasserters love to hate.

You say:

... to state that [the reasserters'] argument--regarding the actions of the Holy Spirit--is inadequate is essentially a meaningless statement, because it proceeds from an unshared axiomatic understanding of reality.

I'd like to think I don't have a lot of axioms about reality. In fact, I've spent a good deal of time over the years trying to identify assertions that I've inappropriately made into axioms.

I guess anti-solipsism is axiomatic for me: the supposition that there is indeed a reality other than (what I think of as) my own mind.

Otherwise, I put my trust — provisionally — in observations that can be corroborated (e.g., by repeatability, or by confirming testimony from other observers). I want some reason to think it likely that a putative observation is more than just the product of someone's imagination or wishful thinking.

I also put my trust — again, provisionally — in mental models that seem successfully to explain and predict.

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You write:

... to reject the claims about the veracity of the New Testament accounts is simply to prefer one set of axioms to another; there is no purely objective basis for doing so.

I disagree completely, for reasons I've written about extensively in the Distortions category.

Thanks again for visiting.