On Bart Ehrman's blog (of which I am a Member) he tells this incident which I think is illustrative of
how the most obvious points can be completely overlooked.
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A couple of years ago, I was teaching my New Testament class for undergraduates. We had spent several weeks talking about the historical problems posed by the Gospels – how they were not written by eyewitnesses or by anyone claiming to be eyewitnesses, but by later authors living decades after the events they narrate; these are unknown authors living in different countries speaking a different language from Jesus, writing accounts that they had heard, as these had circulated for all those years in the oral tradition. We had talked about numerous discrepancies in the Gospels, in minor details, in details of things that really matter, in big points, and in their overall portrayals of Jesus.
On the basis of this information, we began to reconstruct what we could say about what the historical Jesus actually said and did, on the basis of the various criteria that historians have devised and that, I insisted, we have to use rigorously. After about a week on this topic, I gave a lecture in which, among other things, I indicated that I did not think, using these criteria, that Jesus ever spoke about himself as a divine being, God on earth.
After the lecture an earnest looking student came up to me and said she couldn’t agree with me about that. When I asked her why, she said that it was because of the things that Jesus says about himself, for example in John 10:30 “I and the Father are one,” and John 8:58, “Before Abraham was I am.”
I had trouble for a minute understanding what she was saying, and then I realized what it all meant. And so I asked her how she knew that Jesus really said these things. It was then her turn to look puzzled. She said, that it was written right *there*, in the New Testament. I replied that the whole point of what we had been doing for the past few weeks was to show that a number of the stories about Jesus’ words and deeds in the NT were not historical but were later legendary additions to the stories about him, and that one had to apply historical criteria to the sources in order to know what sayings of Jesus actually went back to him. (I was doing my best to be gentle but to explain what I thought we had been talking about for weeks.)
She looked confused and said “But if you don’t accept *these* sayings, then you’d have to question *all* the sayings!” She took this to be a refutation of my position. But I responded, “Yes, that’s exactly right.” She suddenly had a far-off look in her eyes and then, after a few seconds, it looked like a light bulb finally came on. “Oh,” she said.
Yes indeed. Just because an ancient source *says* something doesn’t make it historically accurate. You have to examine each and every source critically. You have to consider the biases of the sources. You have to check what a source says against what you know on other grounds to be historically right. Your “other grounds” have to be rooted in a critical evaluation of the *other* sources that you use to establish those grounds. Just because a source says something, doesn’t make it so. That’s true of the Talmud, of Tacitus, of Livy, of the Gospel of John, of Paul, of Dio Cassius, of Thucydides, of all ancient sources. Including Josephus. That makes history much harder than any of us would like. What we would *like* to do is to show what really happened in the past simply by pointing to a source and saying “See, it says so!” But the question is not only what the source says, but also whether it is probably right – based on everything else we know.
The student I was talking with would have probably not had a problem with challenging what Tacitus, Thucydides, or the Talmud had to say (to pick on Roman, Greek, and Jewish sources); she did, however, have a problem with challenging what the Gospel of John had to say. Sometimes people are selectively critical, approving sources that say what they want them to say and challenging them otherwise. But history cannot be done prejudicially. All sources need to be critically examined."
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Amateurs take the written word unskeptically for an "as is" and regard it as a "given" and proceed to build into that "given" layers and layers
of parsed interpretations. (Eisegesis, it is called, technically speaking.)
William Miller did this as a lay preacher. He took his Bible and commentaries and his prayers and amateur "skillset" and launched
an undying obsession in Adventists. That obesssion started a fire that burnt the conscience of Charles Russell, Judge Rutherford and millions of others.
There is a lesson to learn, all ye amateurs out there!!
