Replies

I understand the high regard in which you hold the early church fathers. But do not overstate what can be established as history rather than merely tradition. For example you assert that Polycarp was a "companion and student of John." But you do not ask the obvious question.... which John? John the Presbyter? John the Evangelist? John the Apostle? Or another John of whom we have no surviving knowledge? Polycarp himself certainly did not give us the information to answer that question. In fact, the sole surviving work of his never even mentions John once.

These traditions come down to us through a several hundred year game of "telephone," and there is no real way of discerning what changes were made before they were finally recorded in documents that have survived. This is like the Muslim "science of Hadith." Muslims insist they are reliable because they know the chain of transmission. But heck, if someone can make up a hadith, they can make up a chain of transmission to make it look reliable. The argument for authenticity is completely circular.

So again, we are confronted with the difference between history and tradition. It is Roman tradition that Romulus and Remus were suckled by she wolves. It is Muslim tradition that Muhammad rose to paradise from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. It is Buddhist tradition that the Buddha attained enlightenment sitting under the branches of the Bo-tree. It is Christian tradition that Polycarp was a disciple of the Apostle John. Traditions can tell us a lot. But they do not bear automatic confidence that they are actually true.

More importantly though, it is only a selective filtering of relevant documents that enables anyone to assemble evidence that the "orthodox" foundation myths of Christianity are true. Certainly, the vast diversity of early Christian thought was almost unknown until the Nag Hammadi find introduced us to texts that had been suppressed and destroyed by the Pauline Christians; victors of the earliest Christian v. Christian conflicts. The Pauline belief in Apostolic Succession gave them something their competing Christian sects lacked; an existing martial hierarchy of command and control. So this version of Christianity (along with its corresponding NT canon) achieved orthodoxy because they were better prepared to fight, not because they were necessarily true.

I have no doubt that, as you wrote, "these people had an idea of who wrote the NT documents." Need I point out, though, that the authorship of the Gospels is hardly among the least likely to be true things that they believed?

These traditions come down to us through a several hundred year game of "telephone,"...

This comparison is a canard.

In the game of "telephone" a message is whispered once in an ear.

In Hebrew tradition, the message is taught, memorized, and continuously repeated back by the student over a life time, within in a community of people that can correct errors in each other.

Try this kind of game of "telephone":

1) Take 100 people in a room. Spend several hours working with them until you are positive they have the message correct.

2) Have 50 of them teach the same message to a room full of another room of 100 people for hours until they are convinced it is correct.

3+)Continue for a few dozen times...or if your simulating the number of generations until the NT was written you were done before step 2!

The message will be dead on. Because the mechanism is far more reliable then whispering once into an ear.

Even as someone who is no textual critic I know enough to recognize the quackery involved in the "telephone" game analogy!

” But you do not ask the obvious question.... which John? John the Presbyter? John the Evangelist? John the Apostle?”

Not an important question since all three names may refer to the same man. But assuming that each name applies to a different individual, just to give your latest straw a chance, they were still three first century Christians close to the events that had just transpired.

It’s only within the confines of your little game of telephone that it would be hard for a first generation to pass on their knowledge to the next. In the real world I’ve never seen a teacher who whispers his knowledge to a student in one sentence and then tells him to pass it on. I always experienced that as a child’s game. Your experience evidently is different, which should explain why you think that argument has any merit.