Tuesday, August 05, 2014

Book Review of The Case For Christ by Lee Strobel Part 2: An Overview of Lee Strobel’s Argument that the Gospels are Based on Eyewitness Evidence.


See Part 1 Here
          Lee Strobel is trying to argue that the Gospels are based on eyewitness evidence, but what he means by eyewitness evidence is not at all clear.
            To illustrate how confused his arguments all, I’ll start by quoting the overview he gives to the first chapter of his book.

From Lee Strobel’s Chapter 1
            The Eyewitness Evidence: Can the Biographies of Jesus Be Trusted

            When I first met shy and soft-spoken Leo Carter, he was a seventeen-year-old veteran of Chicago’s grittiest neighborhood. His testimony had put three killers in prison. And he was still carrying a .38-caliber slug in his skull—a grisly reminder of a horrific saga that began when he witnessed Elijah Bapist gun down a local grocer.
            Leo and a friend, Leslie Scott, were playing basketball when they saw Elijah, then a sixteen year-old delinquent with thirty arrests on his rap sheet, slay Sam Blue outside his grocery store.
            Leo had known the grocer since childhood.  “When we didn’t have any food, he’d give us some,” Leo explained to me in a quiet voice. “So when I went to the hospital and they said he was dead, I knew I’d have to testify about what I saw.”
            Eyewitness testimony is powerful. One of the most dramatic moments in a trial is when a witness describes in detail the crime that he or she saw and then points confidently toward the defendant as being the perpetrator.  Elijah Baptist knew that the only way to avoid prison would be to somehow prevent Leo Carter and Leslie Scott from doing just that.
            So Elijah and two of his pals went hunting.  Soon they tracked down Leo and Leslie, who were walking down the street with Leo’s brother Henry, and they dragged all three at gunpoint to a darkened loading dock nearby.
            “I like you,” Elijah’s cousin said to Leo, “But I’ve got to do this.” With that he pressed a pistol to the bridge of Leo’s nose and yanked the trigger.
            The gun roared; the bullet penetrated at a slight angle, blinding Leo in his right eye and embedding in his head. When he crumbled to the ground, another shot was fired, this bullet lodging two inches from his spine.
            As Leo watched from his sprawled position, pretending he was dead, he saw his sobbing brother and friend ruthlessly executed at close range. When Elijah and his gang fled, Leo crawled to safety.
            Somehow, against all odds, Leo Carter lived.  The bullet, too precarious to be removed, remained in his skull. Despite searing headaches that strong medication couldn’t dull, he became the sole eyewitness against Elijah Baptist at his trial for killing grocer Sam Blue.  The jurors believed Leo, and Elijah was sentenced to eighty years in prison.
            Again Leo was the only eyewitness to testify against Elijah and his two companions in the slayings of his brother and his friend. And once more his word was good enough to land the trio in prison for the rest of their lives.
            Leo Carter is one of my heroes. He made sure justice was served, even though he paid a monumental price for it. When I think of eye-witness testimony, even to this day—more than twenty years later—his face still appears in my mind.
Testimony from Distant Time
            Yes, eyewitness testimony can be compelling and convincing. When a witness has had ample opportunity to observe a crime, when there’s no bias or ulterior motives, when the witness is truthful and fair, the climatic act of pointing out a defendant in a courtroom can be enough to doom that person to prison or worse.
            And eyewitness testimony is just as crucial in investigating historical matters—even the issue of whether Jesus Christ is the unique Son of God.
            But what eyewitness accounts do we possess?  Do we have the testimony of anyone who personally interacted with Jesus, who listened to his teachings, who saw his miracles, who witnessed his death, and who perhaps even encountered him after his alleged resurrection?  Do we have any records from first century “journalists” who interviewed eyewitnesses, asked tough questions, and faithfully recorded what they scrupulously determined to be true?  Equally important, how well would these accounts withstand the scrutiny of skeptics? (p.19-20)

            This type of story from Lee Strobel’s courtroom experiences is how each chapter begins. As you can see, it’s so much fluff, but I’ve gone through the trouble of quoting all that fluff because it’s important to see what Lee Strobel is setting up as his gold standard for eyewitness testimony in a courtroom.  Remember this introduction, because he’s not going to be able to prove anything remotely like this with the Gospels.  In fact, by identifying in the introduction what he regards as convincing courtroom evidence, he’s setting himself up to prove the opposite point.

            So, how does Lee Strobel defend the eyewitness testimony of the Gospels?  Well, like everything, he makes a completely incoherent case.  Just a few pages later (in Chapter 2: Testing the Eyewitness Evidence), we find Lee Strobel making statements like this:

            You’ve probably played the game of telephone yourself: one child whispers something into another child’s ear—for instance, “You’re my best friend”—and this gets whispered to others around a big circle until at the end it comes out grossly distorted—perhaps, “You’re a brutish friend.”
            “Let’s be candid,” I said to Blomberg. “Isn’t this a good analogy for what probably happened to the oral tradition about Jesus.”
            Blomberg wasn’t buying that explanation. “No, not really,” he said. “Here’s why: When you’re carefully memorizing something and taking care not to pass it along until you’re sure you’ve got it right, you’re doing something very different from playing the game of telephone.”
            ….
            “Then why,” I asked “isn’t that a good analogy for passing along ancient oral tradition?”
            …”If you really wanted to develop that analogy in light of the checks and balances of the first-century community, you’d have to say that every third person, out loud in a very clear voice, would have to ask the first person, “Do I still have it right?” and change it if he didn’t.
            “The Community would constantly be monitoring what was said and intervening to make corrections along the way. That would preserve the integrity of the message,” he said. (p.44)

            Okay, I don’t want to nit-pick too much here, but this is not eyewitness testimony he’s describing.  In fact if you’re inclined to be critical, you could say he’s describing the exact opposite of eyewitness testimony.  (Go back and look at the courtroom example with which Lee Strobel opened up this section.  How well does this fit Lee Strobel’s own example of eyewitness testimony?)
            The weird thing about this section on the well preserved oral tradition is that it’s just inserted into the chapter on eyewitness testimony with no transition, or explanation of how this fits into what he was saying before.  One minute Lee Strobel is defending the eyewitness testimony of the apostles, and the next page we’re all of a sudden in the middle of his defense of the well-preserved oral tradition of Jesus. 
            This is typical of the style of which the whole book is written in.  It zooms wildly from one contradictory argument to the next.
            At first I thought Lee Strobel might be using oral tradition to supplement his eyewitness theory.  Perhaps Lee Strobel was using oral tradition to explain the parts of the Gospels where the apostles couldn’t have been eyewitnesses, such as the birth narratives.  But no, he’s not using this as a supplement.  He’s advancing two contradictory theories at once, as becomes clear in the passage below:
            “One study suggested that in ancient Middle East, anywhere from ten to forty percent of any given retelling of sacred tradition could vary from one occasion to the next.  However, there were always fixed points that were unalterable, and the community had the right to intervene and correct the storyteller if he erred on those important aspects of the story.”
            “It’s an interesting”—he paused searching his mind for the right word—“coincidence that ten to forty percent is pretty consistently the amount of variation among the synoptics on any given passage.”
            Blomberg was hinting at something; I wanted him to be more explicit. “Spell it out for me,” I said. “What precisely are you saying?”
            “I’m saying that it’s likely that a lot of the similarities and differences among the synoptics can be explained by assuming that the disciples and other early Christians had committed to memory a lot of what Jesus said and did., but they felt free to recount this information in various forms, always preserving the significance of Jesus’ oral teachings and deeds.” (p. 43-44)
           
            The birth narratives in the synoptics share no similarities.  (Matthew and Luke wrote two completely contradictory accounts of how Jesus was born).  So Lee Strobel can’t be talking about the birth narratives here.  He has to be talking about the whole story being transmitted by oral culture.

            Throughout the whole book, he jumps back and forth freely between the eyewitness testimony argument, and the well-preserved oral tradition argument, never seeming to realize he’s contradicting himself.
            (One of the struggles with writing a rebuttal to this book is that it’s so hard to figure out what Lee Strobel is arguing in the first place.)

            There is one hint that Lee Strobel realizes he is contradicting himself by including oral tradition in his section on “eyewitness testimony,” because he tries to insert some weasel words to cover himself.  He started the chapter off with the dramatic story about the power of eyewitness testimony, but then once he was a few pages into his analysis of the Gospels, he starts to sneak in the words “indirect eyewitness testimony.”  For example: “we can be assured that the events they [the Gospels] record are based on either direct or indirect eyewitness testimony.” (p.25)
            Or again on page 32: “It’s one thing to say that the gospels are rooted in direct or indirect eyewitness testimony…..
           
            Now, there is no such thing as “indirect eyewitness testimony”.  This is a term Lee Strobel (and Blomberg, his Christian apologist for this section) are just making up.  There is eyewitness testimony, and there is hearsay.  Lee Strobel apparently does not understand the difference between the two, but hearsay is not admitted in a court of law.  (Remember again the legal example that Lee Strobel used to set this whole section up with?  Remember how this whole book is supposed to be based on Lee Strobel’s legal expertise?) 
            By the loose definition he’s using of eyewitness testimony, anything and everything can be said to be based on “eyewitness testimony”.

            And then what makes all of this even more confusing is that near the end of the book, during the interview with William Lane Craig on page 209, a third theory is presented.
            William Lane Craig claims that:
            Mark is so extremely early that it’s simply not possible for it to have been subject to legendary corruption.”
            “How can you tell it’s early?” I asked.
            “Two reasons,” he said. “First, Mark is generally considered to be the earliest gospel.  Secondly, his gospel basically consists of short anecdotes about Jesus, more like pearls on a string than a smooth continuous narrative.
            “But when you get to the last week of Jesus’ life—the so called passion story—then you do have a continuous narrative events in sequence.  The passion story was apparently taken by Mark from an even earlier source...” (p.209)

            So in William Lane Craig’s view, the Gospel of Mark is apparently a patchwork of different sources from anonymous writers.  And not only does Lee Strobel not have any problem with William Lane Craig’s view, he even repeats William Lane Craig’s point about Mark in his conclusion when he tries to sum up all the evidence (p.263).

            It’s interesting that in Lee Strobel’s world everything seems to prove the truth of the Gospels.  If the Gospels were based on eyewitness evidence, then that “proves” they are accurate.  But if the Gospels are based on oral tradition, then that also “proves” they are accurate.  And if the Gospels are a patchwork of different anonymous sources, that also “proves” their truth.

            However for those of us who are more skeptically inclined, I think that it should be obvious that attempting to argue several contradictory arguments at once is tantamount to admitting you don’t know which one is correct, and that consequently other explanations are possible. 
           
            In all of Lee Strobel’s arguments, he’s always assuming the best of conditions.  He’s assuming that any eyewitnesses were always reliable, he’s assuming that any oral tradition always took place under the best of conditions with the most reliable of transmitters, and he’s assuming that the Gospel of Mark was always using reliable sources to put together his Gospel.
            However, we have no—absolutely no—proof of any of these assumptions.  The oral tradition could have been carefully preserved, like Lee Strobel assumes it was, or it could have gotten horribly mangled along the way.

            Similarly, once you admit that a variety of explanations are possible, you have to admit that it’s at least as likely a possibility that many of the stories in the Gospels were just made up by the writer.  The legend of Jesus almost certainly has a historical basis at its core, but a lot of the details in the Gospels could easily have just been invented.  Many of the details lack any corroboration from elsewhere in the New Testament or any outside historical source.  The birth narratives in Matthew and Luke, for example, both contradict each other, and are both unsupported anywhere else in the Bible.  Did the writers get these from oral tradition, or did they just make them up?  What about the census of the whole Roman Empire that occurs only in Luke (which no other ancient source collaborates, and which is found no where else in the Bible).  Or the incident of all the dead rising from their graves only in Matthew (which strangely enough, no other Biblical or secular writer ever seems to have noticed).  If Lee Strobel can’t make up his mind whether these are oral tradition or eye-witness testimony, then we can just as well posit that the Gospellers just made up these details in a dark room somewhere.

            So, to sum up Lee Strobel’s arguments:
            From pages 22-36, Lee Strobel is arguing that the Gospels are written by the apostles.
            From pages 42-44, Lee Strobel argues that the Gospels come from oral tradition,
            And on pages 209 and 263, he appears to argue that he Gospels are a patchwork of sources, some earlier than others.

            I don’t have the time or the energy to thoroughly debunk all three of these theories in turn.  As I said in part 1, I’m only going to focus only on debunking the argument that the Gospels are written by the apostles—the arguments advanced in pages 22-36.

            Even within pages 22-36, though, Lee Strobel manages to contradict himself.  He’s got a difficulty he needs to get around: Church tradition says that Matthew wrote his Gospel first, but modern scholarship has proven that Mark is the earliest Gospel, and that Matthew was copying out of Mark.
            So, of course, Lee Strobel argues both points at once, even though they contradict each other.
            From pages 22-26, Lee Strobel argues that Church tradition is correct, and that Matthew wrote his Gospel first (in Hebrew).  Then, from pages 27-28, Lee Strobel admits that modern scholarship has shown the Gospel of Matthew was largely copied form the Gospel of Mark, and argues this bizarre theory that the apostle Matthew was consciously copying from the apostle Mark.  It’s a bizarre amalgamation of Church tradition with modern scholarship that thoroughly perverts both, and furthermore contradicts everything Lee Strobel had just gotten done saying in the previous 4 pages.  (The assumption behind this whole book is that the reader is just not paying attention, so Lee Strobel can get away with constantly contradicting himself every few pages—yet another reason this book couldn’t possibly have been written with a skeptical audience in mind.)

            It’s very difficult to have a serious discussion of the issue, and still follow Lee Strobel’s outline, because he just goes back and forth from one contradictory statement to the other.  In order to have the discussion make any sort of sense, I’m going to try to break down Lee Strobel’s arguments into the essentials, and then look at each part of it.

            Even though Lee Strobel can’t seem to make up his mind on whether Matthew or Mark wrote first, in both cases his section defending Apostolic authorship rests on three assumptions:
1) The Apostles Matthew, Mark, Luke and John wrote the Gospels
2) Therefore, the Gospels are based on eyewitness testimony,
3) Therefore, the Gospels are 100% reliable.

            In actuality, all three of these assumptions are flawed.  Modern scholarship has shown that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John couldn’t have written the Gospels that their names are attached to.  But even if Church tradition were correct, Lee Strobel still couldn’t argue that Gospels are based on eyewitness testimony.  And even if the Gospels had been based on eyewitness testimony, that still wouldn’t prove they were 100% reliable.

            I’ll deal with each assumption systematically, in reverse order.
            In the next few sections I’ll be arguing that:



and finally….

The next section will be: Even if the Gospels Were Based on Eyewitnesses Evidence, That Would Not, Ipso Facto, Mean That They Were 100% Reliable.

[Addendum: This youtube reviewer here picks up on another problem with the courtroom example  that I initially missed.  The eyewitness evidence simply by itself would probably have not been enough to convict someone.  It was the eyewitness evidence in conjunction with the physical evidence (the bullet in the brain, the dead bodies) that sent those men to prison.  Absent any dead bodies and any bullets, the eyewitness testimony simply by itself would have been of limited value.]

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