120 Things ABC CBS CNN FOX and NBC Won't Tell You" Cont..
34. Presuppositions can lead to mishandling of data, and therefore, incorrect conclusions.
Ankerberg: Ben, a lot of people watched The Search for Jesus, heard scholars that have the same kind of degrees that you have, okay, you guys have all gone to the same schools, but evangelical scholars, looking at the same evidence seem to come up with completely different conclusions than John Dominic Crossan, or Marcus Borg. How in the world can the same evidence lead to contrary opinions?
Witherington: Well, it has a lot to do both with presuppositions that you bring to the investigation of the evidence, and some of it has to do with methodology as well, so if a scholar comes to the New Testament evidence with a presupposition "miracles don’t happen," they can’t happen, then of course, that particular scholar, believing he’s got to present a particular kind of critical view of the evidence will say, well, the miracles of Jesus simply didn’t happen, and therefore we’re going to discredit these accounts as actual miracles. Maybe there was some kind of psychosomatic therapy, maybe people thought they were healed by Jesus, but if you bring a sort of anti-supernatural bias, or an anti-miraculous bias to the evidence, of course, you must conclude that these things didn’t happen as they are reported. So some of the problem has to do with presuppositions.
Now, from my point of view, it seems to me that if we are going to be fair to these documents, and since none of us are omniscient in this process, we can’t rule out in advance the possibility of things like miracles. That’s not a critical point of view, because we don’t know everything there is to know about the natural processes in this world, and therefore, and open minded person, a fair minded person would say, well I have to at least allow for the possibility that maybe Jesus did miracles. So some of the problem is presuppositional. Some of the problem is methodological.
At the methodological level the crucial question about the Jesus evidence is what happened between 30 A.D. when Jesus died, and 70 A.D. when the Gospels were written? Is it the case that the Gospel writers were struggling to find any evidence about Jesus, picking up this little shard of material, that little piece of material, and trying to put it in a narrative form in such a way that it would be compelling and attractive? Or is it rather the case that what the Gospel writers did was boil down a tremendous amount of evidence, and edit it in such a fashion that we have what we have with the gospels. Now there are plenty of scholars that think that the earliest Christians bless their hearts, had some kind of massive case of amnesia after Easter, forgot what Jesus said, and forgot what Jesus did, didn’t write it down, didn’t carry it as oral tradition in their mind, so that when we’re a generation later and the gospels were actually written, well they had actually forgotten most of this stuff, and most of it had to be reinvented from scratch.
Now from my point of view that’s highly unlikely to be the case. What we know about Jewish pedagogy, the way people learned in early Judaism, is they learned by memorization, rote memorization. They’d recite things over and over again in particular forms. All of the earliest Christians were Jews, and their pedagogy was all Jewish pedagogy. It seems to me, from a historical perspective, highly unlikely that if this was the person they believed to be the Messiah of Israel, that they would have simply forgotten about or not tried hard to remember what it was that Jesus had said and done when he walked the face of the earth. It seems to me highly more likely that they would carry on these traditions and pass them along as sacred traditions about somebody that they believed was the Messiah. Such that when we get to the Gospel writers, the gospel writers were not struggling to find evidence, they’re struggling to edit it down. Luke says this clearly in Luke 1:1-4: "Inasmuch as many have undertaken to write an account of the things that have happened among us, I felt, oh Theophilus, it would be good for me to give my own take on this." In essence that’s what Luke says. He says there were many pieces of evidence that he sifted.
Ankerberg: Marcus Borg said that if Jesus came back and read John chapter 1:1-3 that Jesus wouldn’t recognize himself. What do you think?
Witherington: Well, the interesting thing to me about that is that an equally critical and equally famous New Testament scholar, Raymond Brown, once asked this same question, and he said, I believe that if Jesus had read the Gospel of John he would smile a knowing smile and say, yes, this is a correct interpretation of the significance of who I was. And so the truth of the matter is that you have equally credible critical scholars, not pre-critical scholars, not scholars who haven’t actually done their historical homework and wrestled with the hard historical questions, coming to opposite conclusions about things like the gospel of John. Now, why is that? Again, I think it has to do with people’s presuppositions about what could be and what couldn’t be historical, and about what Jesus could have said, could not have said, and the truth is equally credible scholars come to different conclusions on that. |
