A Critique of Liberal Scholarship - Part 2 - Following liberal scholarship can lead to biased research

Jul 30

This text is from a letter written by David Gooding in 1996.

Editor's note: This article is one part of a multi-part series which David Gooding wrote to critique in a scholarly way some of the work of a number of liberal scholars. The series comprises:

Can following liberal scholarship lead to a loss of faith?

Following liberal scholarship can lead to biased research

Observations on Herman Hendrickx's 'The Accounts of the Resurrection'

Observations on the interpretation of parables given by liberal scholars

A critique of Jeremias's interpretation of the parable of the Pounds (Luke 19:11–27)

A critique of Joachim Jeremias's interpretation of Mark 4

A critique of Haenchen's attempt to use Acts 1:9–11 as support for the theory of the delayed Parousia

A critique of Jeremias's interpretation of the parable of the Widow and the Unjust Judge (Luke 18:1–8)

A critique of Beare's interpretation of the story of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19–31)

In this second article, and in the subsequent articles in the series, David Gooding is now corresponding directly with the person referred to as the friend of the correspondent in the first article.

I have received your monograph entitled Considerations on the Historical Figure of Jesus of Nazareth. Obviously you have put a great deal of time and effort into your search for the truth. Thank you for allowing me to see and to study the results of your investigations.

I find your work very interesting for this reason especially: while you spend most of your time recording your findings at the level of scholarship, you also give a short account of your spiritual pilgrimage at the beginning.

The bulk of it is at the level of scholarly biblical research; yet, from the account of your spiritual pilgrimage, I gather that, behind your biblical research, and to a great extent controlling your approach to Biblical research, is your own quest for spiritual reality. Moreover, it seems to me that your spiritual quest has very strongly coloured and motivated your scholarly research, so that one can scarcely react with your present scholarly decisions without involving your own spiritual experiences.

Let me try to explain what I mean by this. You have obviously put an enormous amount of time and effort into your research, which shows how seriously you have taken this subject and how deeply it concerns you. From what I have read of your monograph, however, I have not yet come across anything that strikes me as being original to you. The conclusions to which you have come have been known to me for a very long while, and I recognize them as coming from the particular scholars whom you have named at the beginning of your work, and of course very many other scholars who belong generally to their particular school of thought.

I am not, of course, criticizing you for not contributing to the debate anything original yourself. I suspect that you do not have the time for that amount of detailed original work. But for me the striking thing is that you seem to have limited your research to the works of this particular school. I have as yet not come across any mention of equally powerful scholars who belong to other schools of scholarly interpretation. It may be that is because you have been so convinced by the scholars of this one particular school that you feel it unnecessary, or not worthwhile, mentioning that scholars of other schools vigorously dispute the interpretations put forward by the scholars whom you have followed. Nor do you mention their arguments or give your readers any references to their works, so that your readers might for themselves look up opinions contrary to the ones given by your preferred scholars.

I ask, therefore, why this is:

Is it that you have read and studied the works that come from other schools of scholarly interpretation, and have found their arguments so unconvincing that they are not even worth mentioning?
Is it that the works of scholarship available to you in the local theological academies and in your own personal library are confined to the works of this particular school of thought?

My first reason for asking is because, on almost every page of the part of your monograph that I have already read, I want to question your facts and, more particularly, your interpretations of both history and theology. In the course of doing so, I should point you to the scholarly literature in which the views that you have espoused are questioned and seriously rebutted. Many of these views are now a little bit old fashioned, since scholarship has moved on. But there is no point in my doing this if you have already considered these contrary views, and have found reasons for deciding that they are not worth considering. I will give you some examples of what I mean before I finish this letter.

The second reason I ask your answer to these two questions is that your monograph seems to me to be not simply an account of scholarship, but an evangelistic tract in which you are keen to help people who believe in the historicity of the New Testament by putting before them ninety pages of reasons why they should doubt its historicity. But, from the way you describe your potential readers, it seems clear to me that the bulk of them will not have had access to any scholarly works at all; no access to the scholars of your preferred school of thought, nor access to scholars from opposing schools. For you, therefore, to set about undermining their faith by presenting them with the views of one particular school, but not of others, is not exactly a truly scholarly way of proceeding.

This therefore, at the present moment, leaves me a little puzzled. I take your point, if I have rightly understood it, that the evangelical group with whom you originally associated gave you the impression that the views and doctrines which they presented to you were absolutely certain, and never mentioned to you that any contrary views existed. As a third party, and a fellow scholar like yourself, it seems to me that you are now doing precisely the thing that you complained of. If you were simply an evangelist preaching the gospel of doubt, this would be understandable. Your mission would be aimed at nothing other than spreading doubt. But if you are genuinely concerned with scholarship you must be even-handed and honest, interact with the views of those with whom you disagree, and give substantial reasons why their interpretations are not valid and yours are.

It is therefore in this connection that I ask: How do you wish me to respond to your work? Do you wish me to respond with such scholarly rigour as I can, taking your work seriously as a work of scholarship and dealing with it according to the norms of academic discussion? Or is scholarship for you much more a personal matter? Is it motivated by your personal experience in the past, so that scholarship which seems to confirm your doubts appeals to you automatically as being the right answer to the historical questions that you raise; but scholarship which comes down on the other side and would tend to destroy your doubts is not of particular interest to you?

Here let me say that, in asking these questions, I am not directing any hostile criticism against you personally. I respect what you have told me about your spiritual experience. I can well understand the feelings of betrayal that you may have undergone if you accepted all kinds of doctrines as being indisputable truth, only to find that these 'truths' were not truths at all. Moreover, I count it to be very honest of you to have mentioned your personal spiritual history at the beginning of your report of your scholarly investigations. I wish therefore, as best I can, to respond helpfully, not only to your scholarly investigations but to you yourself as a person. I want to take you seriously and I would like to get to know you as a person, for I have the feeling that it is your recent spiritual experience that has motivated your scholarly research and has so deeply coloured the results of that research.

I applaud, of course, your insistence on our duty to seek, to face, and to follow the truth wherever that quest leads us. What amazes me, however—and you will forgive me for saying this, for it is not meant in any hostile sense—is not so much your doubts and doubting, but your credulity. You seem to have accepted the views of the scholars you mention so unquestioningly. You seem to regard their arguments as being valid when many of them are based on very slender evidence, and arrived at by very questionable logic. I will give a few examples of this before I end this letter, and many, many more in our subsequent correspondence.

But this leads me to ask another personal question, and I will explain my question this way: Your account of your research brought vividly to my mind a paper which the late C. S. Lewis read before a group of theologians in one of the colleges of Cambridge University. The theologians whom he was addressing belonged to the particular school of scholarship that you have espoused. C. S. Lewis, unlike you, had from his late teens and onward espoused thorough-going atheism. It was as a mature adult, and an exceedingly widely read and learned adult, that he came to believe in the historicity, true humanity and deity of our Lord Jesus Christ. His pilgrimage, therefore, was the reverse of yours. When one reads this paper that he read to the theologians, you will find that, not only as a Christian but as a scholar, he found their interpretation of the New Testament seriously defective in its presuppositions and methodology—so seriously defective that he upbraided them for their slapdash and very subjective and unscientific handling of history.

I do not know whether you have ever come across or read his paper. It was entitled Fern Seed and Elephants, and it is widely available.

But my question to you is this: from your account of your spiritual pilgrimage, it would seem that you did not come to your scholarly study of the New Testament from an initial position of atheism. You came to the scholarly study of Scripture when you had already professed to be a Christian. May I ask what your reactions were when you first came across the views which you have now espoused? Did you find it offensive and disturbing, and was it so that you eventually accepted them only because you were overwhelmed by the facts and the logic of these views? Or was it that you found these views congenial and liberating, because they seemed to set you free from what you otherwise found intellectually and morally narrow and restrictive?

One more question I would like to ask you: I gather that you have abandoned all faith in Christ. Have you also abandoned faith in God? Are you a positive atheist, or a weak atheist, or an agnostic? You do not seem to tell us in your monograph, but I shall be very interested to know, if you care to tell me.

Well now, I have asked enough questions for the present—too many, perhaps. I repeat that I do not ask them in any spirit of hostile criticism, but because I want to take your scholarship seriously, but even more importantly I want to take you seriously. I would like to get to know you. One day, perhaps, to meet you. All of us have had our doubts from time to time, and there is nothing disgraceful about having doubts. The important thing is what we do with our doubts. The same C. S. Lewis remarked to the theologians that I have mentioned, when these theologians urge us to doubt Scripture, would we not also be wise occasionally to doubt these theologians? Try occasionally doubting your doubts.

Here are some examples taken from your work, which make me think that either your reading has been restricted to your favoured authors whom you quote, or else that you have considered the contrary opinions of many other scholars and have concluded that they are not worth mentioning. If you have already studied the views of these other scholars, there would be no point in my calling your attention to them.

All that we know is based on the laws of induction or deduction

But this is not true. You seem to have forgotten the other main element in logic, namely abduction, to which the American logician Charles S. Peirce (1839–1914) called our attention. Peirce was the inventor of the branch of science called semiotics. His theory of 'abduction' provided the basis for pragmatism. In addition, Peirce's thought provided the best philosophical basis for the modern approaches to linguistics. Professor Noam Avram Chomsky, the foremost language scientist of the twentieth century, has said that his own approach is 'almost paraphrasing . . . Charles Sanders Peirce', and in particular Peirce's 'principle of abduction'. His algebra of dyadic relations was later developed by Schröder. Ernest Nagel remarked 'there is a fair consensus of historians of ideas that Charles Sanders Peirce remains the most original, versatile and comprehensive philosophical mind this country has yet produced'.

Abduction is the principle of logic that is specially and constantly employed by historians. Neither induction nor deduction can begin to tell us the cause of unique events. For instance, whether Hannibal crossed the Alps or not is not a question that can be solved simply by collecting numbers of other examples of people crossing the Alps. Similarly, when a detective is searching for the cause of a murder, induction is of very small use. Detectives commonly make chief use of abduction. Moreover, abduction helps us to see the difference between causes and mechanisms. Induction, on the other hand, can help us formulate the laws according to which mechanisms work. For example, induction can help us understand how a pistol works and what kind of wounds it will inflict. But pistols kill nobody. It is the person who pulls the trigger that kills. Induction can show by what mechanisms the person died. Induction cannot establish who pulled the trigger.

Abduction, therefore, as I say, is that process of logic which historians most commonly use. Its relevance to the kind of studies you have been pursuing would be this: if we ask what was the cause of the coming into being of the Christian church, then not induction nor deduction but abduction would be the most useful method of logic to pursue.

What then is your position? Is it that you have considered the role of abduction in historical enquiry, and have dismissed it as being either spurious or irrelevant; or is it that you have perhaps overlooked it?

Incorrect etymology from Latin and Greek

You have made a number of incorrect statements about the etymology of certain Latin words. For example, your suggestion that the expression cavilar in Spanish comes from kabbala is mistaken. It comes from the Latin group of words cavillor, 'to practise jeering or mocking, to censure, criticize' etc. And the noun cavilla, meaning 'a jeering, raillery, scoffing'. And the other noun cavillatio, meaning likewise a 'jeering, raillery, scoffing', or else 'sophistry'.

Now, mistakes in small matters of etymology can easily be made, especially by those who are not immediate experts in the subject, and perhaps they are not very important. But linguistic mistakes do become important when they are used as the basis of serious historical and theological criticism. Take, for instance, your translation of Mark 11:14. To fit these verses into your scheme of interpretation, you inform your reader that the correct translation is, 'no one will eat more from your fruits'; that is to say, you wish to translate the verb as if it were a straightforward future indicative tense. But that is quite wrong. The verb in Greek is in the optative, and the two negatives used with this verb are not ouketi and oudeis, but mēketi and mēdeis. The theory that you build on your suggested translation is built on a completely incorrect reading of the Greek. I find myself wondering, therefore, where you got this wrong translation from. Do you yourself know Greek, or are you simply following some expositor?

Selective choice of scholars

You mention the scholars Albrecht Alt, Martin Noth and O. Eissfeldt, and you mention several other scholars whom you have found helpful. I have no doubt that they were, and are, very sincere scholars, and you rightly admire them. What puzzles me is that you do not mention the host of other scholars, such as Professors John Bright, W. Albright, G. E. Wright and, among living up-to-date scholars, the Egyptologist K. A. Kitchen, the Accadian expert A. R. Millard, and the archaeologist A. Bimson, none of whom would agree with Martin Noth and his interpretation of the things which you seem to have espoused.

Now, it may be that you have read all the other scholars and decided that their arguments are not worth mentioning. But if you are really seeking the truth, and wanting to educate your evangelical readers and urge them to seek the truth, would it not be right and proper to point out to your readers that, whereas you favour the views of some scholars, there are many first-rate scholars who hold contrary views; and would it not be better to encourage your readers to study both sets of views and make up their own minds? Otherwise you would seem to be doing what you complain that the evangelicals do, namely imposing your scholarly views on others on the basis of your preferred scholars, without even indicating to your readers that any other point of view is feasible on the basis of scholarship.

Contrary to John 9:22, not until the second century did synagogues exclude people for confessing Jesus to be the Christ

You quote John 9:22, where John tells us that the parents of the blind man were afraid of the Jews, for the Jews had already agreed that, if anyone confessed Jesus to be the Christ, he should be put out of the synagogue. You then argue that the decision to exclude anybody from the synagogue for confessing that Jesus is the Christ was not taken by the Jewish authorities before the second century.

This idea was, I presume, not one which you thought up yourself. You have taken it from the works of scholars who point to the later decision of the synagogues to insert into the actual wording of the prayers of the synagogue a curse upon the Christians. They did this, of course, as we all know, so that if any secret Christians were in fact present they would refuse to utter this curse, and would therefore give themselves away as being Christians, and would then be turned out of the synagogue. On this ground, then, many scholars have concluded that the Gospel of John was not in fact written until this curse was part of the synagogue's service, and therefore the Gospel of John must be very late.

But other scholars have pointed out that this idea rests on a misconception. Excommunication from the synagogue was not something that was only introduced in the second century; in the time of Christ it was already in existence. People like the tax gatherers were excommunicated from the synagogue. It is true that at that time there was no curse included in the prayers of the synagogue, but certainly people whom the synagogue authorities considered to be unwelcome or heretical were excommunicated. It is not, therefore, contrary to historical reality to suppose that the authorities in the synagogues of Judaea in the time of our Lord made up their minds to excommunicate anybody who should openly confess that Jesus was the Christ. They had, of course, a very real, practical, political reason for doing so, such as that Caiaphas expounded to his colleagues in the Sanhedrin (see John 11:47–50). Caiaphas felt that, if they did not take steps to dissociate themselves from a leader of what they considered was political messianism, it could have disastrous results for the Jewish nation and temple at the hands of the Romans.

My question again, therefore, is why do you not so much as mention this other interpretation, point it out to your readers, and leave them to make up their own minds? It cannot be, can it, that you are interested only in those scholars' views that would cause people to doubt the historicity of the New Testament? That would not be true scholarship.

The Hellenistic concepts in John prove it to be a late Gospel

You inform your reader that the Gospel of John is impregnated with Hellenistic concepts, like 'logos', 'world', and 'flesh', and you therefore side with those exegetes who maintain that the occurrences of these words in John's Gospel show that the Gospel must be late. It puzzles me why you so credulously and uncritically follow these particular exegetes. One of the major results of the discovery of the scrolls at Qumran has been the demonstration that, at Qumran in the time of Christ, they were themselves using this concept of the word. Moreover, as Professor Martin Hengel showed in his Judaism and Hellenism, published in 1968, Palestine was thoroughly Hellenized long before the birth of Christ. To argue, therefore, on the ground that since there are Hellenisms in the New Testament, then the New Testament must be a late production, is quite contrary to the facts of history.

If Mark had known the writings of Matthew or Luke, his grammar would not be so poor

You inform your reader that

the Greek of Mark is poorer. Sometimes he speaks of past events using the present tense . . . If Mark had known the writings of Matthew or Luke it is difficult (to think) that he would have changed a good grammatical form for another which is bad.

Your value judgment on Mark's Greek is extraordinary. The use of the present tense by historians, even in Classical Greek, in their descriptions of past events is a very common phenomenon. Have you never read Xenophon's works?

Also, have you not read the views of modern scholars who doubt the whole validity of what is normally referred to as 'the synoptic question'? See, for instance, Professor John M. Rist, On the Independence of Matthew and Mark, Cambridge University Press, 1978.

The massacre of the innocents would have caused a zealot uprising

You cast doubt on the historicity of the so-called massacre of the innocents on the ground that, had it actually happened, it would have caused a serious uprising among the zealots.

This is a view commonly held by the older critics. But have you not read the comments of such scholars as Professor W. F. Albright and C. S. Mann in their edition of Matthew for the Anchor Bible series? They and many other modern scholars, on the grounds of population statistics, point out that the number of infants in Bethlehem at the time would scarcely have exceeded twenty, and in terms of Herod's known and frequent brutality, murders, assassinations and so forth, this would have been a very minor incident.

The Gospel of John's use of the term 'Jews' to distinguish Jews from Christians proves that it is a late Gospel

You argue as follows:

The use of the term 'Jews', in contrast with the term 'Christians', when in fact many of the Christians were also Jews, is a phenomenon that occurred in the later decades of the first century, and then in the second century AD.
That John used the term 'Jews' in the fourth Gospel in this sense to distinguish Jews from Christians.
But in the time when Jesus was here on earth, all believers in Jesus—that is, Christians, if we use the later term—were Jews.
That shows that the Gospel of John must be a very late document, for an early document would not have used the term Jews to distinguish one group of Jews who did not believe in Jesus from another group of Jews who did believe in Jesus.

This argument shows a complete misreading of history that comes about when one adopts the equally unhistoric theory that John's Gospel is a late product. When John uses the term 'Jews' in his Gospel, he is often using it in the sense of the inhabitants of Judaea and Jerusalem. The Spanish word for 'Jew', that is to say, Judio, like the Greek and Latin words from which it is derived, shows very clearly that it originally meant the inhabitants of Judaea. In the time of Christ, Palestine, as you know, was divided into three parts. In the south were the Judeans, that is to say, the Jews; in the middle, the Samaritans; and in the north, the Galileans. When in John 7:1 John says, 'and after these things Jesus walked in Galilee, for he would not walk in Judaea because the Jews sought to kill him', he is obviously using the term 'Jews' to mean the inhabitants of Judaea. It was they who were intent on killing Christ, not the Galileans, and this is further indicated in John 7:19–24, where Jesus refers to his healing of the paralytic man in Jerusalem on the occasion of a religious festival earlier held in that city (see chapter 5).

Now, of course the people who lived in Galilee were, in our modern sense, Jews—though there was also a great mixture of Gentiles in Galilee. The apostles were all Galileans, but they were all also Jews. It is altogether true to the early decades of the first century AD that Jews who were born and brought up in Galilee should be distinguished from Jews who were born and brought up in Judaea. Jews from the north were called Galileans. In John 7:41–42, 52 and Matt 26:69, Jesus himself is called a Galilean by the southern Judeans; and in Matthew 26:73, Peter's dialect shows to the Judeans that Peter is a Galilean.

The critical theory, therefore, which you have followed that supposes on the ground of John's usage of the term 'Jews' that his Gospel is a very late document, is not only mistaken, but it leads you to misinterpret the actual historical situation in the time of Jesus. In other words, John's usage of the term 'Jew' to denote Jews who lived in Judaea, as distinct from Jews who lived in Galilee, is a very powerful indication that John is correctly conveying to us the actual situation that obtained in the time of our Lord.

Once more I say, why do you not point this out to your readers? Is it that, in all innocence, you are not aware of these things because you have confined yourself to the works of one particular school of biblical critics and have not had the works of other scholars at your disposal? In this case, we could certainly have a long and profitable conversation over these scholarly matters in the ensuing months, and I would certainly engage in such a correspondence with you. Or is it that your whole point and purpose is to undermine the faith of evangelicals by showing them that there does exist a large group of scholars who consistently develop theories that cast doubt on the historicity of the New Testament; and that for you is enough? Are you not interested in considering the views of other scholars? So long as some scholars doubt the historicity of the New Testament, do you feel your own unbelief is justified, and that you are justified in causing other people to take the same pathway of doubt as you have taken? If this latter is true, then in addition to discussing things at the scholarly level, we would need to go to far deeper levels.

I have not yet read all your monograph; but from the things that I have already read you seem to be adopting an agnostic, or even maybe an atheistic, position. If that is so, that would involve us in a discussion not only of scholarly matters but of things more profound and basic.

Yours sincerely,

Literary Criticism

David Gooding