In Sense and Goodness without God I discuss the evidence ladder (section II.3): reason (logic and mathematics), empirical science, personal experience, historical facts, expert testimony, plausible inference, and pure faith. I show that faith is too unreliable to have any epistemic use, and that each succeeding method above it is more reliable than the one below. “Expert testimony” falls fairly low on the list because, though we need to rely on expert testimony, it still has a documented proneness to be wrong (and even more so in communities that trust it uncritically) and thus has to be subject to independent checks. Arrogance, overconfidence, error all remain problems. One of the ways to confirm an expert is unreliable is to find many instances in which fact-claims they make, which they should not be wrong about (things easy to ascertain that are directly in their field), are demonstrably false. Like a historian claiming we have more evidence for Jesus than for Alexander the Great. You do not have to be a historian to confirm that’s false; and moreover, to confirm there is no possible excuse for a historian to have gotten that wrong. You now know you can’t trust anyone who says that. Whatever expertise they might really have, they have completely abandoned it on that issue; it then counts for nothing.
I say a great deal more about how lay people can question, check, and vet expert claims in other articles here, most directly in On Evaluating Arguments from Consensus, and in various particular ways in my many running articles on Critical Thinking (I also teach an online course every month on how to get better at doing this). Sometimes it’s as simple as my last advice: pick some key claims an “expert” makes (not trivial or secondary claims, but central) that sound the most dubious, and deep dive them to see if they check out or not. Don’t fall for the fallacy “they made one mistake, ergo nothing else they said can be trusted.” Sometimes that’s not a fallacy, it depends on how large the mistake is (after all, “more evidence than Alexander” is really damningly bad), but usually you need several, and central, mistakes to confirm there is a predictable trend (as I point out in my Primer on Media Literacy). And sometimes other experts or good critical thinkers have already done this, and you can just benefit from their work if they’ve published it (even if only online), because then you can easily vet both the critic’s claims and the critiqued’s claims and see who is doing a better job of accurately telling the truth. But sometimes this may be impossible—there are, after all, things it takes years to master, and thus lay people will be stymied. Do they have to then just “trust” what the experts say? Not exactly.
It’s harder to vet such claims, but not impossible. Moreover, if they make other, more vettable claims that sound dubious or remarkable, you can always use those as your test cases, and if they don’t check out well, then you know you don’t have to heed anything else they say. Saves you time. But what if they do check out well? Then what? You may need to recruit the assistance of an expert. In which case you should do as much of the ground work as possible to prove to them you are serious and to thus also take up the least amount of their time, which will increase the odds they can spare time to help you with any final fact-check (see my advice in From Lead Codices to Mummy Gospels). For example, a long time ago Dan Barker paid me, then at least a grad student with certified translation competency in foreign languages, fifty bucks to “check” the German behind the English translation of three sentences supposedly uttered by Hitler. He set me up with as much information as he could muster; all he couldn’t do was verify the translations were sound, and not taken out of context. But I could. The rest is now history.
Another way to do it is to find out if there has been any expert debate or exchanges on the disputed point. Maybe with a reference librarian’s help at your local public; or even uni, college, or seminary library, many of which are open to the public—or at least maybe once the recent plague subsides; but in the U.S. a public library will set you up with anything through interlibrary loan, at most for a nominal fee, and often for free. But that task aside, suppose you end up confirming that some point has only been argued under peer review once, and has only been “rebutted” under peer review once, but then you find another peer reviewed work whose author not only sides with the original conclusion but even gives their reasons. What can you do then?
That is a much better situation to find than some expert just insisting you should trust their opinion, “because, expert.” In fact, unless they are actually uninterested in the subject and don’t want to waste their time, if they only ever answer such a question with “because, expert,” you might start to have sound reason to doubt them. Because a real expert can explain why they are certain of something. That is, literally, the only thing that makes them an expert. Hence a real expert who has the time and interest never needs to say “because, expert.” Because being an expert (or so they are claiming), they know what the data is and why it is convincing. Even if it requires groundwork of some kind to understand, they can articulate where to get started building that background knowledge. They can give you a meaningful bibliography. They can tell you what you could do to collect at least enough of the experience they have an abundance of to “see where that’s going.” So don’t put much trust in any expert who just keeps saying “because, expert” when asked why they are right or why they believe some thing that is being seriously debated. (And here by serious debate, I mostly but not only mean any debate whose both sides have been published under peer review by a respectable journal or press.)
The Case of Galatians 1:19
I was discussing with someone a completely different subject (how to evaluate an anthropologist’s claims about the science and history of economics, when you are not an anthropologist or an economist…long story). Thinking it over, I used the example of where sometimes lay people may be stuck: ancient languages. There often just is no way to get enough up to speed on that subject to reliably vet expert claims in it. My advice was to look for more vettable claims to test someone’s reliability by instead; leave the inscrutable ones aside. But one can also look for what experts have already said in a debate over some point, and anyone who has built their skill at critical thinking can then evaluate the debate between them. Which IMO should describe everyone: honing your expertise at critical thinking is even more important than knowing first aid or how to handle a gun, and this is coming from a strong advocate of responsible citizen soldiership. So if you aren’t there yet, get on this. It’s a skill that will improve your effectiveness in literally every single aspect of your life and thought, and is now essential to being a responsible citizen of any democracy. Preppers will just get rolled over by tanks. Genuine critical thinkers will keep the tanks from rolling.
It then ocurred to me I could teach this point with a neat example, involving—indeed!—ancient Greek language and grammar. The same way you can tackle this as a lay observer, you can deploy to vet any other expert dispute in any other field. The example I have in mind is what, actually, Paul says in Galatians 1:19. Now there are various skills and tools usable even by laypeople to get at and understand the underlying Greek (I teach those skills in my monthly online course in New Testament Studies for Everyone). But I’ll proceed here as if you haven’t mastered any of that—and rightly so I think, because this is such a difficult and esoteric matter (as you’ll soon see) that those tools and techniques probably wouldn’t help you here anyway. In any event, here’s the conundrum. The New King James (which is merely the original 17th century translation updated to 20th century English vernacular) claims Paul said “I saw none of the other apostles except James the Lord’s brother.” But the New International Version (which has been updated based on expert committee reviews of the original Greek and published scholarship thereon) claims he said “I saw none of the other apostles—only James, the Lord’s brother.”
The difference is quite important: the first is saying this James was an apostle. The second is quite explicitly saying he was not. In other words, if the NIV is correct, Paul met only one apostle that day—Peter (Cephas in the Aramaic)—and some other Christian named James who was not of apostolic rank. Now, whether this still means he was biologically a brother of Jesus or only cultically, as all baptized Christians were, I won’t discuss today. You already know or can find my complete case for that in Chapter 11.10 of my academic monograph On the Historicity of Jesus. But one of the points I make there is that the NIV translation is correct; Bible translators had been errantly rendering the verse according to their faith-based assumptions, overlooking the fact that the grammar actually rules that out. And evidently, the NIV translation committee (experts all; albeit Evangelicals) agreed.
No, this does not mean the NIV is the most reliable translation. It still makes mistakes or translates on presumption or bias. All Bibles suck. They just differ in where they suck and how they suck, and just sometimes how often. As an expert myself I independently checked this case and concluded the evidence supports the NIV committee this time. But what if you aren’t an expert? How can you tell if that’s the case or not? Maybe the NIV altered their translation here to sandbag sectarian opponents (like the Catholics or the Copts). Just Google “New International Version vs King James” for lots of discussions of how they differ and why this might matter (and why the NIV isn’t always better).
In OHJ I put the case like this:
[W]hy didn’t Paul just say ‘of them that were apostles before me [1.17] I met none except Peter and James [1.18-19]’? Why does he construct the convoluted sentence ‘I consulted with Peter, but another of the apostles I did not see, except James’? As L. Paul Trudinger puts it, ‘this would certainly be an odd way for Paul to say that he saw only two apostles, Peter and James’. To say that, a far simpler sentence would do. So why the complex sentence instead? Paul could perhaps mean that he consulted with Peter (historeō) but only saw James (eidō)—that is, he didn’t discuss anything with James. But if that were his point, he would make sure to emphasize it, since that would be essential to his argument. Yet he doesn’t. In fact, if he is saying that he saw none of the other apostles, that would entail he was claiming he did not consult with any, either.
Carrier, OHJ, pp. 588-89
And:
In fact the Greek here is quite strange, unless Paul actually meant ‘other than the apostles I saw only James’, meaning quite specifically that this James was not an apostle. Ordinarily, to say you saw ‘no other apostle’ you would write heteron ton apostolon ouk (compare Rom. 7.23; 13.9; etc.) or oudena heteron tōn apostolōn (as Paul usually does: e.g. 1 Cor. 1.14; 2.8; 9.15; etc.) or things similar. But here Paul instead chose the unusual (and for Paul, unprecedented) construction heteron tōn apostolōn. Without oudeis, the word heteron plus the genitive in this fashion more often means ‘other than’, rather than ‘another of ’. Paul would then be simply classifying a meeting with ‘Cephas’ as a meeting with ‘the apostles’ (as anticipated in 1.17), and then making sure he named all the Christians he met on that occasion (Cephas and James) in anticipation of his claim that no one in Judea had ever seen him (1.22). The latter claim would be a lie if he had met any Christian, even one who was not an apostle, during his visit to Cephas (in 1.18). So Paul has to name all the Christians he met on that occasion. And, lying or not, that number needed to be low for his argument to hold. Accordingly, Paul says there was only one other: brother James.
Carrier, OHJ, pp. 590
The points I am making here about Greek vocabulary and grammar I could confirm myself, but I first encountered them in a peer reviewed paper in Trudinger (as I mention) that lays all this out, with examples demonstrating each point. If it were important enough, you could get ahold of that paper and read it yourself: L. Paul Trudinger, “[Heteron de tōn apostolōn ouk eidon, ei mē iakōbon]: A Note on Galatians I 19,” Novum Testamentum 17 (July 1975), pp. 200-202. Not only could you use a nearby library as suggested above, you could also get an annual Google Pass subscription to JSTOR (you don’t get access to everything in JSTOR but this is among those you could), which makes sense if you find yourself wanting to read a lot of peer reviewed work in the humanities like this, as a lot of it is accessible this way.
You’d also notice I cite in a footnote here another peer reviewed scholar concurring (more or less): Hans Dieter Betz, Galatians: A Commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Churches in Galatia (Fortress Press, 1979), p. 78. Which is in the Hermeneia commentary series, in my opinion the most balanced and scholarly commentary series on the Bible that there is. Not wholly flawless or unbiased; but just compare one at a glance to any other commentary and you’ll see at once how much more academic and thorough they are, more concerned about questions of historical fact than sectarian ministry or exegesis. Betz thinks one could in theory read the text either way but he ultimately sides with Trudinger, concluding, “Apparently,” this James “was not regarded as an ‘apostle’ nor as one of the ‘twelve’.” I myself don’t think it can be read any other way, for the two reasons I cite: there are no examples in ancient Greek of the other sense in any construction suitably the same; and the sentence is inexplicably convoluted for such a sense to have been intended. If all Paul wanted to say was that he saw only two apostles, that’s what he would say. He wouldn’t employ this unusual complex grammatical construction; that he did, means he meant something by doing so. And there is only one thing he could have meant by doing so: the very thing Trudinger points out was often meant in Greek when doing so. Any other conclusion is apologetics against the grain of probability. And historians have no business arguing that way.
I searched the peer reviewed literature and found only one counter-argument to Trudinger, and duly mentioned it in OHJ: George Howard, “Was James an Apostle? A Reflection on a New Proposal for Gal. I 19,” Novum Testamentum 19 (January 1977), pp. 63-64 (also on JSTOR). Howard concedes every fact in Trudinger but argues one could and perhaps should still read this construction back the other way again, but he gives only two arguments for that, and as I remark in the corresponding footnote: “Howard’s first argument is refuted by the fact that both the apostles and James are of the same class (they are all Christians, which is precisely Paul’s point), and his second argument is refuted by relying on a premise of pure speculation that actually expects Paul to have written an even more convoluted sentence than he did.” Now this remark will really only be of use to someone who checks Howard and thus knows what I am referring to; but that was the point of it. If someone wants to check Howard and compare cases, then they’ll want to know why I am unpersuaded. Otherwise, my reasons for reaching the conclusion I do are fully stated in the main text. And not just several scholars but many translators agree with me (not just the NIV but the Berean Literal Bible, God’s Word, and Darby). So to come to a different conclusion requires more than just gainsaying or weak rebuttals. Howard is the only serious rebuttal that exists. So his arguments would have to be pretty good to overcome the arguments already presented. So if you aren’t yourself an expert, how can you know whether they are any good or not?
Applied Erisology
The study of arguments is called erisology. The basic idea is that you don’t have to be an expert in what’s being argued about; you just have to know how to evaluate arguments in general. You can think of it as a specific skill at evaluating debates. Normally people just “watch a debate” and make an intuitive decision as to who won or who was right (which many know are not the same thing). But what if you could carefully diagram what actually happened in the debate so as to see who actually presented the stronger case? That would be a function of erisology. Other functions of erisology include how to state arguments more efficiently and persuasively, how not to talk past each other in an argument, and so on. “Why did this guy fail to persuade that guy?” is a classic question erisology is all about answering. For an example, see John Nerst’s analysis of the Harris-Klein debate over whether it’s legitimate to suggest black people have on average lower IQs than white people (n.b. it may have once been legitimate to ask that question; but it’s no longer legitimate to pretend it hasn’t already been answered: see my discussion of Harris-Klein in Disarming the Motte and Bailey and of the Bell Curve argument in general in That Luck Matters More Than Talent). Rather than declare a side in that debate, Nerst wanted to analyze what happened in the debate, which is very instructive, and a good way to clear the fog for anyone who does want to know the right answer.
I went into an example of doing this for Galatians 1:19 before in Ehrman and James the Brother of the Lord. There I made the point that:
George Howard, the only person to answer Trudinger in the peer reviewed literature (OHJ, p. 590, n. 101), observed that the examples Trudinger referenced still involve “a comparison between persons or objects of the same class of things,” such as new friends and old friends belonging to the general class of friends, and indestructible elements and destructible elements belonging to the general class of elements. But that actually means Cephas and James belong to the same class (Brothers of the Lord, since Jesus is “the firstborn of many brethren…”), which entails the distinction is between Apostolic and non-Apostolic Brothers of the Lord, just as Trudinger’s examples show a contrast being made between destructible and indestructible elements and old and new friends. Howard’s objection thus actually confirms the very reading I’m pointing to. It thus does not in fact argue against Trudinger at all—who would agree both Cephas and this James belonged to the same class of things: Christians. Howard’s only other objection was to suggest Paul could have said James was not an Apostle by an even more convoluted sentence; when Occam’s Razor entails the reverse, that Paul would have said such a thing, had he intended to say such a thing, in a much simpler way, not a more complex one—after all, it would be far easier to just say “I met two apostles.” Exactly as Trudinger observes. (I discuss in OHJ several other simpler ways of saying the same thing than Howard suggests.)
Here I am spelling out my own reasoning, but this is actually something a non-expert could have done on their own, especially using my footnoted remarks on Howard in OHJ: they could read Trudinger and count the number of arguments he makes, write each down, then list the evidence he presents for each one (they don’t at this point need to know if any of these facts are true; all that’s happening here is writing down what the argument and evidence presented are); then do the same for Howard. Unlike timed debates, Howard is not prevented from including arguments and evidence by clock time, and these are serious scholars, taking each other seriously, making sober arguments in a peer reviewed publication, so you usually don’t have to worry that “something is left out.” You have the whole case Howard has to make here. Step one: cross off every point in Trudinger that Howard either agrees with or doesn’t challenge. Whatever you have left is the only material that matters going forward; that’s the only material in dispute. Notice that this “might” not be true (either scholar “could” be forgetting something or screwing something up), but all you have to go on is what these disagreeing experts do think to say, and what you want to do is evaluate which of them to trust given what you have—which is simply, what they thought to remark. That is, really, their job as experts, to make a complete case for their conclusion. So you are making use of the fact that they are experts here to leverage your own “non-expert” decision regarding their dispute.
Following this procedure, you’ll discover Trudinger makes yet more arguments than I mention, and they do carry some weight if not as great a weight. For example, he notes that Acts 1:14 distinguishes the brothers of Jesus from the apostles, thus demonstrating an early Christian assumption that they (who would include this James) were indeed not apostles. True enough. I could advance various reasons this could be in error or idiosyncratic or a shift in revisionist dogmas, and it doesn’t pertain to Paul’s own knowledge or the grammar he chose to employ, so it’s not that strong a point. But it is a relevant point. And it’s one to which Howard offers no reply. As another example, Trudinger cites numerous peer reviewed experts agreeing with him, which is also pertinent to note, but by itself it would simply devolve into a fallacy of argument from authority. We want to know if he and the experts he lists are right, or whether the experts (like Howard) against them are right, and we can’t decide that by merely listing scholars with like opinions. Despite Condorcet’s jury theorem, truth cannot be decided by vote—because we don’t know if everyone is voting as informedly or equitably. The very question we want to answer is which school of experts has the right end of the dispute; not that an expert dispute exists. We already know that.
But the most important information you’ll find are the two I myself rely on: it is not probable that Paul would choose a highly convoluted construction to say he met two apostles, whereas it is probable that he would do so to make a specific point that James was not an apostle (but that nevertheless he did meet him and thus must admit to the fact); and other instances of similar grammar in ancient Greek (though we have no exact parallel to assess) mean just as Trudinger finds, not as Howard wants, and thus it is the more probable that Paul means the same thing by using it here, as everyone else in ancient Greek meant by using a like construction in other contexts. Note in each case this is not saying it is impossible, but rather that it is improbable, which still carries a force you cannot pretend away. If you are asking what is the more probable, it matters what is the more probable. To act like it doesn’t is to commit the possibiliter fallacy (see Proving History, index), to argue “possibly, therefore probably,” which is a straightforward violation of logic, breaking the first law of logic, the law of identity, by falsely asserting that “possible” means the same thing as “probable.” And you do not need to be an expert to verify that.
So what does Howard have to say by way of rebuttal? He agrees with all of Trudinger’s evidence, and thus you can check that off as not in dispute. So you have both sides of experts confirming this to you; which means you don’t have to confirm it yourself, and thus you don’t need to learn ancient Greek to continue assessing this expert dispute. The two examples they both agree are being correctly presented and translated are a passage in Thucydides in which is said philous poieisthai […] heterous tôn nun ontôn, “to make friends other than the ones there are now,” and a passage in Pseudo-Aristotle in which is said stoicheion ousan heteron tôn tessarôn, on the indestructible ether “being an element other than the four” usual ones.
Now, I could tell you the reason these are correct translations of the Greek, even apart from the fact that contextually there can be no dispute as to the intended meaning in these two cases (that’s why Trudinger chose them). For instance, I could note that we have here the word heteron, “other,” followed by a statement in the genitive (the words ending in –tôn here), and the genitive in Greek takes a comparative sense in sentences that are making a comparison (see Smyth §1433 and §1434; and Liddell & Scott A.III.1.c.gen.), which is what Paul is most likely doing here. Because he did not say “x and y” (the obvious thing to say) but (oddly) “no x; but y” implying something is different between x and y, and even if that should be simply that one is Jesus’s brother and the other is not, that’s still a comparative statement, which is the grammatically relevant point here—remember, we are not here deciding whether James was or was not Jesus’s actual brother, but only whether he was at this time known as an apostle. Comparative sentence, invokes genitive of comparison. It’s therefore “other than” and not “another of.”
But that isn’t what you need here. You need to be able to evaluate whether arguments like this are sound, without yourself being expert in Greek. And what you have in this case is that Howard does not dispute any of this. And that’s all you need to know to then evaluate Howard’s actual rebuttal, which is not “Trudinger is reading the Greek wrong.” Instead, Howard’s argument is (sic): “the two examples given by Trudinger do not actually bear out the meaning which he ascribes to Gal. 1:19. Heteros in each instance makes a comparison between persons or objects of the same class of things,” e.g. as Howard explains, both objects of comparison in Thucydides are “friends,” and both objects of comparison in Ps.-Aristotle are “elements.” That is the only argument he makes from this observation. Yet it does not require you to be an expert to recognize that what I said as to this is true, that in Galatians 1:19 both objects of comparison are objects of the same class of things, “Christians.”
Cephas is also a Brother of the Lord (that appears to be Paul’s effective name for “Christians” at the time), but as all Apostles were known by definition to be Brothers of the Lord, just of rank, Paul does not need to double-identify Cephas as both. Just saying he is an Apostle, Paul’s readers already know he is also a Brother. By instead singling James out as only a Brother, he is making clear James was not an Apostle, but was still nevertheless a Christian. And this is what Paul’s convoluted grammar makes clear he was doing. Indeed that is the explicit point of the sentence: Paul needs to admit which Christians he met on that occasion, and is thereby forced to name and enumerate them—as you can determine yourself, no expertise required, by applying the same principles of erisology to the argument Paul is making throughout Galatians 1, up to and including verse 19 and after. So you can ascertain, without any expertise in Greek, that Howard’s statement about the facts is false. Cephas and James are of the same class. You therefore must cross that off as bearing no weight at all in the dispute. Score, zero.
Howard then gives two other enumerated arguments which amount to differerent variations of the same argument: that Paul could have written something else if he meant to say James was not an apostle. If you examine his wording carefully, Howard never gives any reason for supposing Paul would do so; all he does is assert the mere possibility. Which you need not be an expert to identify as a possibiliter fallacy. And fallacies are fallacies; they don’t suddenly become logical because an expert is saying them. So you could on your own already dismiss the remainder of his arguments as “non-rebttals,” as they actually contain no argumentation for the alternatives proposed, and thus do not in any actual way argue against Trudinger’s point.
This is clear even from basic logic, and therefore is clear even to a non-expert. But it is even worse for Howard, as the same principles of basic logic render this assessment even stronger when you look at what his “possible” alternatives consist of: in every single case, as you can ascertain yourself, they consist of an even longer and more convoluted sentence than Paul wrote. You again do not need to be an expert in Greek to know that no author is likely to do that (least of all a consistently efficient writer like Paul). It is already bad that Howard gave no reason to believe his alternatives were probable; it is worse that all his alternatives are in fact improbable. If Howard had given evidence that Paul consistently writes with otiose and convoluted grammar, then he could fend off that latter point, but he didn’t.
Of course, Howard didn’t, because he couldn’t: Paul’s style is actually exactly the opposite of that; in fact, the oddly convoluted structure in Galatians 1:19 is unusual for Paul, which is actually evidence that it must serve some purpose, and all published experts (including Trudinger and Betz and myself) have provided only one purpose that could be. Howard provides none, and thus he actually lacks an explanation for why Paul chose to write such an odd sentence for his usual style. But again, as a non-expert, you need not know whether what I just said about that is true to assess on which side of this dispute you should fall, because it simply remains the case that Howard gave you no reason to believe his “alternatives” are even probable, much less any reason to believe they are not improbable—and you already know it is generally improbable (and that’s again improbable, not impossible; but an improbability must still carry its force) for authors to prefer even longer and more convoluted ways of saying things. You may still find it interesting to hear from an expert like me why Howard couldn’t produce any evidence supporting his desired position on these points; but you don’t need to know that to notice he didn’t. And that’s that. Score, zero.
So, in the end, a non-expert might wonder how any English at all can render the bizarrely convoluted Greek that seems to go “other however of the apostles not did I see if not James” (heteron de tôn apostolôn ouk eidon ei mê Iakôbon). But there are many formulas in ancient Greek that have no direct one-to-one translation in modern English. We have to comprehend the sense, and then figure out in what words we would say the same thing in English. They might be quite different words, like “I didn’t see any other apostles. Only James” (i.e. “I did not [ouk] see [eidon] other [heteron] than the apostles [tôn apostolôn]; only [ei mê] James [Iakôbon]”; note that Paul employs ei mê, in a way we can render in English as “only,” in a similar sense in verse 7). But without a command of Greek you won’t know for sure who’s giving you a sound translation, especially in cases like this where the grammatical elements and their arrangement are diverse and complex.
But what you can know, even as a non-expert, is what even the experts who disagree with each other are saying: Howard does not dispute that Trudinger’s translation would be correct but for Howard’s claim that Galatians 1:19 is not comparing objects of the same class; so once we realize it is comparing objects of the same class, Howard’s only objection to Trudinger’s translation evaporates. All that remains is Howard insisting Paul could have said the same thing differently (albeit even more convolutedly), which is not really an objection to Trudinger, but a kind of speculative counterfactual about other ways Paul could have written the sentence, devoid of any actual argument that he would have or even would be likely to. Which even a non-expert can see is a non-argument. In this dispute, therefore, you can tell which expert is right—without yourself having to be an expert.
Conclusion
This treatment may have been useful for assessing this one issue in Jesus and Biblical studies. But what I hope you can get from it is a general set of principles for how to evaluate any expert dispute without yourself having to be an expert. You do need some skills—basic logic, critical thinking, a command of English (or whatever language you find a debate to be in), the ability to break down an argument to its structure and essentials (to, as Galen once put it, “repeat the arguments back in your own words”)—but these are skills every citizen of the world should devote themselves to building competency in. Indeed they are skills you need in whatever subjects you yourself are an expert in anyway (whether that’s flipping burgers, knitting, or physics), and they are skills that can be applied to every domain of human knowledge, inquiry, and dispute. They are therefore the most important skills to have. But once you have them, even at a basic level, you can do what is described here, anywhere.
Which is:
- Find out what all the experts’ arguments are in a given dispute—steel-manned, which often means, look for the arguments that have survived peer-review, or failing that, look for the arguments that appear to you the best; and you can always ask around, especially of people whose judgment you already trust, where the best arguments are. (And if there are quite many arguments, start with what you deem the most important or persuasive one, and work down from there until you’re satisfied on where things are going.)
- Then, outline those arguments so you can enumerate each one separately.
- Then, under each, list the evidence cited in support of it.
- Then cross off everything neither side is disputing, and see what is left.
If what remains includes logical fallacies (like arguments from possibility passed off as arguments for probability), cross them off, too. And if what then remains is just gainsaying over some fact (“Peter and James are not members of the same class of things” against “Peter and James are members of the same class of things”; or “there is more evidence for Jesus than for Alexander the great” against “there is less evidence for Jesus than for Alexander the great”), check the fact yourself. If checking that fact requires expertise you don’t have, then you may need to get more experts involved in helping you understand who isn’t telling the truth. But often you can fact-check most plain assertions yourself. And if need be, catching one side giving false information or relying on inaccurate premises—especially if they do it more than once, or more egregiously than trivially—can be enough to distrust them in the dispute as a whole. So if that’s all you can do, then you can always pick for vetting fact-claims you can get at, so as to assess each side’s general reliability. But you’ll be surprised how often you really can fact-check and logic-check experts’ claims outside your field, if you do it competently (for some examples I think anyone could have nailed this way without my help, see, besides the one I just surveyed here, The Korean “Comfort Women” Dust-Up and the Function of Peer Review in History and Shaun Skills).
I think if nothing else, your work has exposed that the standards in Biblical studies need to be much higher. That´s the main takeaway I got from reading “OHJ” and the responses to it. I found that plenty of people just don´t seem willing to engage with your actual argument rather than just caricaturing it and that the standards of assessing evidence do seem to be really low.
I think really, and you have made this point several times yourself, it just seems there are so many assumptions floating around in the field that haven´t been questioned and people are bending the evidence to fit the assumptions. I think it´s clearly true with the “James” case as you say and I find that whenever anyone shows something is probably an interpolation, i.e the Testimonium, there just seems to be an attempt to rush “oh no it still shows Jesus existed, or it´s only partially interpolated” rather than actually investigating and checking out the arguments.
I find sadly it´s not just true in Biblical studies, I think that literature departments often use really bad methodology and ask pointless questions. There are really good literature professors, but there is so much junk in the field too, i.e people like Carl Jung taken far too seriously. I think it´s ridiculous that people can do PHDs in freudian literary criticism, or that Freud is taken like he´s the ultimate authority in human psychology (when a lot of Freud´s work was crank, and a lot is simply dated). I also find people are far too encouraged to cram together as much disparate evidence in support of their hypothesis as possible rather than trying to find evidence that falsifies it.
Just my two cents haha, but we really do need more people willing to expose bad practice in scholarship.
I concur.
History altogether is still to this day a field without well established methods or standards of argument, even despite remarkable improvements on that score since the 1950s that make its conclusions far more reliable than any history written prior (see Historians’ Fallacies by Fischer, himself a renowned historian of early modern America; on the shift after 1950, see History Before 1950, which I also include in Hitler Homer).
This is also true of philosophy (and there are growing problems now even with the sciences; the rate of garbage methodology passing peer review even in physics is alarming, and near catastrophic in softer sciences like psychology). And literature is in a worse state than them all. But as with all of the fields I’ve mentioned, there is plenty of strong, defensible methodology to be found in literary studies (just not a strong effort to restrict peer reviewed and professorial or dissertation work to such).
Which is remarkable to note because biblical studies often seems to know nothing about this—and is “shocked, just shocked” when some biblical historian or other discovers the actual methods of contemporary literary studies and starts using it on the Bible; which of course should not be shocking, but standard. Most biblical historians have no degrees in history. At best what they study in school would count as literary studies in any other subject (e.g. biblical studies is more analogous to “classics” than “ancient history,” which are distinct degrees and fields of study). And at worst, not even that (their degrees are often only in theology or “divinity”). This, plus the infestation of the field and the dominance of its inertial narrative over decades by Christian apologists, would explain why methodology in biblical studies is so inconsistent, so frequently illogical, and too often weirdly uninformed relative to other fields they should be emulating (like classics and ancient history).
As an example of what I mean, consider how long it took for Litwa to write How the Gospels Became History. That only just came out and yet its entire thesis should already have been standard in the field half a century ago. What on Earth have biblical historians been doing for decades on end until now? Similarly, Ehrman’s complete ignorance of the actual literary studies of ancient biography is inexplicable, and would flunk you out of any history degree. How can you possibly claim to study the Gospels, and know absolutely nothing about all the findings and methodology in the field of ancient biography? Do these guys never walk down the hall to chat with a classicist? Not for decades and decades? How is that possible?
There is definitely some serious and fundamental methodological reform required in the field.
P.S. I should add that even, again, when someone in biblical studies does do something correctly, surprisingly often it largely gets ignored, or “reframed” to erase what it actually contributed, thus stagnating progress in the field.
A prominent example is Burridge’s work on the Gospels as biography. You will be told, even by professors in the field, that he “proved” the Gospels “are biographies” and “therefore” histories, when in fact (if you actually read what he wrote), that is quite the opposite of what he proved. And while most Burridge studies has followed his lead and continued to show even more than he already did how the Gospels are actually mythography, that’s a rarified specialty. Most biblical historians know nothing of its contributions, and have entirely false ideas about what Burridge demonstrated. I discuss this bizarre travesty in my coverage of a recent SBL conference panel on Burridge.
One can adduce many similar examples (MacDonald’s work on Homeric mimesis in the NT; Goodacre’s work on Q; Crossan’s work on the Gospels’ overarching parabolic structure; Trudinger’s work on the grammar of Galatians; even all the times the methods touted in the field as innovative and essential have actually been debunked as unworkable even as far back as Morna Hooker’s scathing critique in 1970—literally half a century ago). If biblical scholars don’t like something, they don’t even listen to it, much less actually read it. This is quite the opposite of how historians should behave.
This fault has been called out in the field before. Crossley wrote two books on the problem (Jesus in an Age of Neoliberalism and Jesus in an Age of Terror).
Dear Richard, Apologies for bothering you with this, but hopefully a quick question.
I am wondering about the age of the “brother of the lord, James” text from the paulian epistles.
Do you know which is the oldest physical document (e.g. papyrus) which contains that section?
I know experts date the paulian epistles to cca 40-60 AD.
But I was wondering from when do we have the first actual physical document with that particlaur text.
Because even if the original paulian epistle is from the 1st century. still we don’t know if that part of the text did not change or get ‘interpolated’ between the original paulian version and the one we physically have.
The earliest attestation is 3rd century, as with pretty much all the NT (very few lines of text exist in manuscripts that can be at all plausibly dated to the late 2nd century, and that is the earliest of any there are; and all extant mss. derive from a mid-2nd century anti-Marcionite edition anyway—we have none of the original editions prior, not even a single line).
But that doesn’t help resolve your question. The probability of an interpolation in any verse is simply the observed base rate of interpolation per verse, which is at best 1 in 200 and at worst 1 in 1000. So those are your odds this is one of those interpolated lines. Not good odds. So you really can’t build a usable theory out of his. To argue for interpolation, you need specific evidence, not mere conjecture or possibility (compare the case we have for interpolation in 1 Thess. 2, for example).
Hi there, Dr. Carrier. Thanks for this great and very detailted article on Galatians.
I found this review of your latest book (“Jesus from Outer Space”) recently, from the latest volume of the “McMaster Journal of Theology and Ministry”, by Chris Hanson. I believe he is currently doing his Master´s thesis, which is centered on the history of the Christ Myth theory.
He has appeared 2 times on Mythvision to speak about his work, where he claimed to be a former mythicist and former atheist, being now a “Canaanite polytheist” who believes that “all the gods exist”… In his 2nd appearance of his video, when he mentioned your work, he addressed it in a very vitriolic manner. (He acted in the same way towards Raphael Lataster)
Here is the review: https://mcmasterdivinity.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/22.MJTM_.R1-Hansen_on_Carrier.pdf
In this, he claims that your use of arguments from silence are dubious, but he does say why they are in his entire review. Besides that – and correct me if I am wrong – I believe he completely missunderstands your argument regarding Elements 6 and 40 of “OHJ” and the esoteric reading by Philo of Zechariah 6, by confusing our reading of the passage with what was Philo´s reading of the passage, and criticizing your claim from that missunderstanding.
Since NTs scholarship is not my area of expertise, I cannot comment about the rest. What do you think?
Your analysis is correct. And the rest suffers the same flaws you were able to catch. I do plan to do a write up on that article (it’s been sitting in my to-do list for awhile). Though I have addressed Hansen’s incompetence and sloppiness before (see Tim O’Neill & the Biblical History Skeptics on Mythicism).
If the analysis of Galatians is taken as an exercise in literary criticism (on the lines of the excellent demonstration in ‘Reading Josephus on James’, and wider issues put temporarily to one side, then it is apparent what the author is saying.
The tone is set by the introduction. This is more explicit and combative than in other epistles, where Saul claims a commission through being called or by the will of God, or he makes no statement. Here, Saul is saying that he has gained his status as an apostle, not from men or through men, but rather directly from God and Jesus (in revelations and visions). What Saul does, as the letter proceeds, is make a claim of at least parity with Jewish elders and in fact superiority (since his commission is more recent and more direct) over the Nazarene Jews (apostles) who were associated with Jesus in his lifetime.
Thus, Paul, having received as he claims his revelation (of God’s son in his own person!), consulted with no one and felt it unnecessary to meet with the Nazarene witnesses in Jerusalem. He went away for three years and only then did he decide to go to Jerusalem. He states that he saw only Cephas and James. Both of these are distinguished from the apostles. The former is elsewhere described as being in a separate category (1 Corinthians 9, 5 and 15, 5) and also as a leader of some kind (1 Corinthians 1, 12 and 3, 22). The latter is described as a Jewish leader with authority, (along with Cephas and John at Galatian 2, 9) and able to send certain men (thus apostles, in this general and more original sense of the word, of James) to constrain Cephas (as at Galatians 3, 12 and perhaps also 2, 4). It should be noted this is consistent with other depictions of James (in Acts, Recognitions and Hegesippus, as mediated by Eusebius).
My point is that, when Saul refers to ‘the other apostles’ in Galatians 1, 19, he means the other apostles (ones who were before him) beside himself. He saw Cephas and James, he claims; but he did not see any apostles. He is reiterating emphatically that he did not consider himself, as commissioned directly by Jesus and God, accountable to the Nazarene apostles. He’s cutting them out, so much so that he is claiming credit for the beliefs of members of their own ‘ekklesiae (churches) of Christ in Judea’ (Galatians 1, 22; also, 1 Thessalonians, 2, 14-16). These ekklesiae are likely on the lines of that operated by Simon ‘with a reputation for religious scrupulousness’ (cf early Acts and Josephus). Their members, according to Saul, glorified God merely through hearing about his conversion!
Saul goes up to Jerusalem again years later not, as would appear in the parallel description in Acts 15, because he was summoned but because he had a divine revelation that it was the very thing to do, at that moment! Again, he emphasises that he has nothing to do with the Nazarenes and their representatives but has a private consultation with ‘those who were of repute’. Saul’s contention is that these guys (Cephas and James and John) are not even his equals: they just ‘perceive’ that God has granted Saul a dispensation to have a mission to the Gentiles, and so they accept it. Not quite the outcome described in Acts, which in its turn, as a later Christian commentary, is perhaps putting its own gloss on events.
So, one overriding concern in Galatians is to affirm Saul’s claimed status of at least equality, or even superiority, to the witnesses who were before him. Casting the net, only a bit wider, shows the context that makes this concern understandable. Saul has been accused of many things: of not being a real apostle because he never met Jesus, of misappropriating for his own use the funds he has been collecting and of sexual impropriety (1 Corinthians 9, 1-7; 2 Corinthians 11, 4-5, 22 and 12, 11). He also makes (has to make) repeated denials to the claim that he is lying (Galatian 1, 20; 2 Corinthians 11, 31; Romans 9, 2; 1 Timothy 2, 7). Some of these charges may have a basis. Saul is misrepresenting what is really doing (advocating abandonment of key elements of the Torah) and is later called to Jerusalem to account for this. This third visit is post Galatians. He has fears of the possible consequences (Acts 21, 10-14). It should be noted that Saul is not yet accused of instituting a sacrilegious ceremonial meal in which the blood and body of a sacrificed God are ritually consumed nor of the equally sacrilegious belief, in Jewish eyes, in a divine Jesus. It is, as yet, a disputation among Jews. The description of the ekklesiae (Galatians 1, 22; also, 1 Thessalonians, 2, 14-16) refers to the Nazarene Jewish and not (possible subsequent) Christian communities. This relates to Saul’s second major concern, which is to claim for himself a religious jurisdiction; not just for Gentiles in the diaspora but also over these Nazarene Jewish communities, ekklesiae (Galatians 1, 22; also, 1 Thessalonians, 2, 14-16) in Judea.
The judgement is against Saul and he has to undergo a ritual purification/penance at the Temple in Jerusalem. There follows an assault by zealous Jews, rescue by the Romans and then effectively flight and exile. Saul and his follower are driven out. His claim over the Nazarene Jews in Judea fails while, in the diaspora, his followers make progress with Gentiles.
Galatians 1, 18-19 is, I agree, a highly unusual way of Saul saying that he met two persons, and no one else, certainly not any of the existing apostles.
It is hard to argue that the James that Saul first encounters in Galatians is different from the James described further on, a person as described of some standing. Both are closely associated with Cephas. The (conceivably) second James is introduced without a signal, which might be expected, that his identity is different from the one previously mentioned. There is also no reason for an elaborate sentence construction, just to put down a person of no real consequence who otherwise does not feature in the narrative.
If, on the other hand, it is conceded that the first James is the same as the James twice mentioned later, then it is hard to reconcile the evidence that Saul acknowledges James’s position as a Jewish leader with the contention that he is earlier, by an elaborate construction, casting James as a mere cultic follower. Saul wants to be seen as a person dealing with, and on a par with, the top brass – James, Cephas and John (pillars/persons of repute) – and not associating with existing apostles who should, in his view, have no precedence over him.
This is why I think that it is more probable that a later Christian editor, for his own purposes and/or intending to be helpful, wrote a marginal note to the effect that James was the brother of the Lord, and that this was subsequently incorporated in copying into the text. It is what many Christians at this time believed (and many now still believe). This is in the same manner that ‘called Christ’ was incorporated into the passage in Josephus on James (Antiquities, XX, 200).
This leaves unexplained why Saul might have adopted an unusual construction for Galatians 1, 19, ‘but I saw none of the other apostles, only James’.
Side note:
Paul never says his name was ever Saul. That only appears in Acts, and may be an invention (to emulate name changes for other Biblical heroes, e.g. Abram to Abraham, Jacob to Israel, etc., or to emulate Peter’s claim that Jesus renamed him from Simon to Peter, i.e. Cephas, which is likely to have happened even if only in a revelation, since Cephas is not an Aramaic name and so likely was a religious cult moniker, like “David Koresh” was to Vernon Wayne Howell: see OHJ, pp. 524-25). Emulating the OT, particularly in its Septuagint form, was a common practice in Luke-Acts; Acts also constructs its narrative to make Paul resemble Peter and Christ; and Acts is notoriously dishonest and fabricatory (on all these points see OHJ Ch. 9).
By contrast, Paul is a Roman name, and could be his given name at birth if he was born into a family with citizenship (Paul himself never mentions being a citizen, but his name entails it, and Acts does have him claim to have been a citizen from birth, which could be based on Epistles we don’t have, which we know existed, or surviving Apostolic lore). If Paul was born a citizen, he’d have been assigned his praenomen as a babe, and so Paul would always have been his name. That does not preclude a Jewish cognomen like Saul, but as neither Paul nor Acts ever gives his full trinomen, we can’t trust that to have been the case (and Acts does not say it is the case; it just suddenly switches from Saul to Paul mid-story, without any explanation why, other than to uninformatively say that he was called by both names). So I wouldn’t use Saul for Paul. It’s presumptive and unattested by any reliable source, least of all the man himself.
Likewise, there is no basis for calling the Jerusalem sect the “Nazarene Jews.” That’s anachronistic. No such moniker or connection is attested anywhere in Paul. It’s possible all Christians (Paul included) once called themselves Nazorians (as even Acts attests), but that had no connection to the town of differing name (a Nazorian is not someone from Nazareth; that connection appears to be a fabrication of the Gospels; Matthew attests the Nazorian moniker came from scripture). See OHJ, index.
But as to your argument:
It is not entirely correct to say Paul claimed “his commission is more recent and more direct.” He does imply that his revelation’s recentness matters, in terms of Jesus’s new instructions must then override or supplement old ones, but he never argues the superiority of his election; in fact he typically humbles it with references to it being last, and “as if to a monster” because he persecuted the church et al. His opportunities to claim superiority are frequent (e.g. 1 Cor 1, 3, 9; 2 Cor 12; and even here in Gal 1 and 2), yet he always declines to employ that argument.
And Paul never says “the apostles…were associated with Jesus in his lifetime.” In fact, Paul’s need to address that fact is conspicuous for its absence across all the 20,000 words we have of Paul defending himself against attacks and challenges to his and his gospel’s authority and legitimacy. It is very conspicuous for its absence here in Gal 1-2, where Paul is defending himself against exactly the opposite argument: that anyone who had not had a revelation of the Christ (per 1 Cor 15) is not an apostle. That is not his argument; that’s the argument being used against him, and to which he is responding there, and with elaborate insistences that he did not learn the gospel from a human. Which entails the first apostles also had to be going around insisting the same. Which means being “associated with Jesus in his lifetime” must have been held as of no value in determining one’s authority or status—or else no one met Jesus that way (as 1 Cor 15 seems to imply: no one “sees” Jesus until after his death and their apostolic election through the revelations Paul enumerates; compare 1 Cor 9:1 and Rom 16:25-26). Otherwise, that Paul didn’t meet Jesus in life would be the argument he had to defend himself against here. Yet it’s conspicuously not.
It is also not true that Paul distinguishes Peter “from” the Apostles, but rather only as the first of them, entailing ranking apostolic status (and as part of “the pillars,” the top three apostles, even as represented in the Gospels). When Paul lists the order of authority in the church, there is no higher position than apostle. So Peter must have been so regarded, by Paul and everyone (and accordingly Paul explicitly says Peter is an apostle in Gal. 2). This is in contrast to the grammar in Gal 1:19 which unmistakably declares this James not even an apostle (but yet still a full Christian, no mere acolyte or penitent). Which means it cannot be the same James in Gal 2 who has to be an apostle (one of the top three even).
Note that neither Acts, Recognitions, nor Hegesippus are reliable sources (nor even Eusebius). So it is not sound method to use them to reconstruct the truth of events and affairs in the first century. One must go on what’s in Paul’s letters (and perhaps 1 Clem, and Heb.), our only first-hand sources on these things, unlike those later sources which have been caught fabricating quite a great deal.
This is disallowed by the grammar in Gal 1:18-19 (heteron de entails Peter is an apostle; to indicate he wasn’t, a word connoting “any” rather than “other” would be required, e.g. tis or eis). It is also refuted in Gal 2 (which explicitly declares Peter an apostle) and 1 Cor 12 (which establishes no general rank higher than apostle, which entails Peter had to be one; so, too, James the Pillar in Gal 2; this is reinforced in Rom. 10:14-15 where, in the Greek, it is said no one can preach the gospel who is not an apostle).
Few of your other declarations have any basis in Paul’s Epistles. For example, you often conflate what’s in Paul with what’s in Acts (which repeatedly contradicts what Paul says and thus cannot be trusted). You incorrectly state that the James in Gal. 2 is not introduced distinctively (he is: he is there declared one of the three Pillars, which is conspicuously not how the James in Gal. 1 is introduced; instead, that James is indeed distinguished from the famous leader by the grammatical construction that to a Greek would signal, to anyone not apologetically inclined to fudge the text to match later legends, that this was a non-apostolic James and thus, obviously, not the Pillar). And so on.
And again, “Saul has been accused of…not being a real apostle because he never met Jesus” is false. That is conspicuously and peculiarly not the argument he is responding to in Gal. 1 (or, even more oddly, anywhere in his letters). To the contrary, he was accused of “meeting with a flesh and blood man” and thus not receiving election via revelation; hence he has to swear up and down that he met no human (which would include a pre-mortem Jesus) and was elected via revelation like all apostles were (per 1 Cor 15 and 1 Cor 9), and therefore he was an apostle (and not a fraud; though yes, he may be lying, but that’s not relevant to the point, which is why he had to tell this specific lie).
This means meeting Jesus in life was accounted nothing by anyone, least of all the Galatians or Jerusalem Pillars. To be an apostle required not merely meeting Jesus in life but having been elected as an apostle by revelation after Jesus died (this is again reinforced by 1 Cor 15 and Gal 1, and Rom 16:25-26, where we are told this is the only valid way to learn the gospel, and by Rom. 10:14-15, which again says no one could even have heard Jesus preach the gospel unless they were an apostle and thus “sent” by Jesus, which excludes Jesus having had a public ministry; hence Mark’s invention of parabolic preaching, nowhere attested in Paul, and the idea of the messianic secret, which is repeatedly a rather illogical literary device in Mark’s narrative). The point is, the Galatians regarded anyone a fraud who had not been given the gospel by revelation. That entails they thought the same of all the apostles before him as well. Which entails this was the general view.
Finally, while the marginal note interpolation is plausible, it has a low prior. The odds against it, sans specific evidence for it, are at best 200 to 1. So any theory that requires it to be an interpolation has its probability reduced at least two hundred times. So that’s not a viable hypothesis here. I have discussed this point in several places, e.g. in my coverage of 1 Thess. 2 in OHJ (see the scripture index there).
Assuming both are apostles, it doesn’t look unusual, as a non-expert, that Paul would mention Peter and James separately, since he has different things to say about Peter: he went to Jerusalem to consult Peter, not James. He stayed with Peter for 15 days, not James. He just happens to see James while there. I also noticed that the translations like the NIV that you said got it right say “other apostles” rather than make a distinction between others and apostles, as you and the other three peer reviewed scholars are saying how it should be read. Maybe I’m not understanding your argument correctly?
Even if that were what Paul meant to say, he still would not use this grammatical construction. That’s the relevant point. Hence the article you are commenting on already addresses this:
The same point follows for any other distinction Paul wanted to make (like how long a time he spent with either man, though that’s effectively already covered by the distinction between consulting and seeing).
To understand the significance of the restranslation, compare it directly with others here (the first and second examples make quite clear the difference in meaning). “I saw none of the other apostles—only James, the Lord’s brother” is a literal translation (accurate to the Greek and not interpretive or assumptive), and means what it says: Paul saw NONE of the other apostles. James is then someone else he saw. That’s what the English in that case says, just as it is what the Greek says. It is perhaps not commonly known that “except” and “only” take different conjunctive meaning in English grammar, but that difference is precisely the reason those translators switched the one for the other.
On the first point, I’m not sure if it matters or not, but I was referring to Paul’s intentions verses what he actually did (went to Jerusalem TO see Peter, but actually saw both Peter and James), not that he consulted with Peter but saw James too.
On the second point, wouldn’t the literal translation be something like “However, I saw none except James, the Lord’s brother other than the apostles,” rather than “However, I saw none of the other apostles–just James, the Lord’s brother”? Those are saying different things. The latter is saying that Peter is the only apostle he saw, plus he saw James, while the former is just saying that he only saw one non-apostle. Taking the sentence out of context, the former is open ended as to which, and how many, apostles he saw, if any, while the latter is explicitly saying he saw no more than one apostle.
I’m not sure what you mean as to the grammar. The grammar is clear: Paul did not say “I saw two apostles,” it says he saw an apostle and an exception to an apostle, whatever exception that is supposed to be. That he used a highly convoluted construction to say this makes quite clear he means to say this; this isn’t just some accidental garbage sentence Paul got tangled into when trying to just say he met two apostles. This is Trüdinger’s point. And Howard has no real objection to it. Nor has anyone since. Which is why many new Bible translations now follow Trüdinger.
Likewise, if Paul meant to say “I went to see the apostle Peter but also saw the apostle James,” again, that’s what he would say. That’s why it is relevant that he chose to say none of these obvious, simple things in Greek but chose an extremely convluted and highly uncommon grammatical construction instead. We need to explain why Paul chose to do that. And Trüdinger has the only plausible answer to that question.
Dr Carrier
Is Alford correct here please:
https://www.studylight.org/commentaries/eng/hac/james.html
I don’t comprehend the argument. I have never said Apostle meant only “the twelve” and that has no bearing on the grammatical point here. So that’s a non sequitur.
And there is no first century text that ever claims any brother of Jesus (James or otherwise) was any kind of Apostle at all. It’s conspicuously not in Acts, for example, which distinguishes “the brothers of Jesus” from “the Apostles,” including both Apostles named James, neither of which is a brother of Jesus—that Acts has no knowledge of a brother of Jesus being an Apostle is further evidence for my conclusion, as duly noted by the scholars I cite concurring. So citing legends centuries later does not actually rebut the point. You can’t circularly cite the same late legends here being refuted as evidence they weren’t late legends. The point here is that Paul says otherwise, thus refuting the legends. The existence of the legends does not answer this point.
Finally, Trudinger is refuting the likes of “Fritzsche, Neander, and Winer.” They have no arguments against Trudinger and thus cannot be cited against him. They are obsolete. Trudinger’s analysis is precisely what they overlooked. Thus citing them produces no argument against Trudinger’s analysis. Not least because the central point in Trudinger is the use of the genitive plural after heteron, and the convoluted choice of structure in the first place, neither of which they address, yet which is what changes their “possibly” into “probably not,” as illustrated by every point Trudinger makes. Otherwise, all citing them gets you is a possibiliter fallacy, and worse, one already refuted by positive evidence rendering the possibility improbable in this case.
Update: Tim O’Neill is an incompetent and a liar. So I am really loathe to waste any time on his garbage. But alas…
O’Neill has claimed that I have gotten the grammar wrong in Galatians 1:19 because Trudinger says that a century earlier J.B. Lightfoot had argued that “ἕτερον [“other”] is linked with εἰ μὴ [“if not”] and cannot be separated from it without harshness, and that ἕτερον [“other”] carries τῶν ἀποστόλων [“of the apostles”] with it” and therefore (O’Neill on his own then claims) “Trudinger’s argument depends on the ‘class of things’ in question being ‘the apostles’, not ‘brothers of the Lord’/Christians” and therefore “This means Howard’s objection to Trudinger’s reading stands.” This is not correct.
First, Trudinger’s entire paper is a refutation of Lightfoot. Trudinger says we should reject Lightfoot’s argument here—not his point about the syntax, but the conclusion he draws from it. Not mentioning that fact is kind of . . . well, lying.
But let’s assume O’Neill, as if by miracle, is actually not lying this time but only gobsmackingly incompetent.
First, Lightfoot was not responding to Trudinger. Lightfoot was long since dust and bones by then. Lightfoot didn’t know about the evidence Trudinger cites, and was basing his conclusion on his ignorance of that evidence. Once you introduce that evidence, Lightfoot’s conclusion no longer follows. That’s Trudinger’s entire point.
But secondly, and more importantly, Lightfoot did not say anything about Howard’s argument either (being, again, dead). Lightfoot is not talking about which class of object is governed by the construction Trudinger identifies. So you can’t use that to argue he was. All Lightfoot was arguing was that the object of εἰ μὴ [“if not”] must in some way refer to the ἕτερον τῶν ἀποστόλων [“other of the apostles”]. Trudinger argues that indeed that condition is satisfied by the construction he identifies (and that Lightfoot didn’t know about).
O’Neill has conflated two completely different arguments, that of Lightfoot and Howard, and gotten the Greek construction entirely backwards, mistakenly thinking that Howard said that the general class in the Trudinger construction must follow the ἕτερον [“other”]; when in fact, Trudinger and Howard both agree it does not. What follows the ἕτερον [“other”] in the Trudinger constructions is the subclass. The εἰ μὴ [“if not”] modifies the ouk eidon (“I saw not,” hence “I saw none”) that immediately precedes it, and thereby relates to the ἕτερον τῶν ἀποστόλων [“other of the apostles”] through Trudinger’s construction of comparison. This is what Trudinger explains Lightfoot did not get. So citing Lightfoot’s ignorance of this cannot argue against it.
To explain this in simpler terms:
The analogous phrases are “friends other than the ones already had” and “an element other than the four,” so the ἕτερον [“other than”] precedes the subset, not the shared class. O’Neill, being gobsmackingly incompetent, has mixed those up and gotten them exactly backwards.
Paul does not say “I saw apostles other than a Brother of the Lord,” he says “Other than the apostles I saw a Brother of the Lord” (to be more exact, “Other than the apostles I saw not, except the Brother of the Lord [named] James”). Paul has flipped the order of clauses as we find them in Trudinger’s examples, but that’s allowed in Greek; the grammar stays the same (unlike English, where moving words around can more easily change the grammar).
So to match what Paul says to Trudinger’s examples, Paul is in effect saying (through his double-negative that we can unwind as):
“I met a Brother of the Lord other than the apostles.”
The common class is Brothers of the Lord. Both Apostles and rank-and-file Christians are Brothers of the Lord (which is a fact, not a hypothesis). Apostles are the subset to that general class. And as the Trudinger comparatives all have the subset after ἕτερον [“other”], that’s what we expect to find in Paul: we should expect to see the subset, not the shared class, following ἕτερον [“other”]. And lo, that’s what we have: apostles. Hence: “the Brothers of the Lord called Apostles,” just like “friends we already have” and “the other four elements.”
That is why “apostles” goes after ἕτερον [“other”]; that’s where the subset goes. The general class, the shared class, goes outside that clause. As in Trudinger’s examples, “elements” and “friends” are the general class—the shared class Howard is talking about—and thus are outside the ἕτερον [“other”]. As in, they do not immediately follow ἕτερον [“other”]. Otherwise, where an author puts the general class in the sentence doesn’t matter, whether before, as in Trudinger’s examples, or after the whole subset clause, as in Paul’s case. The meaning is the same (because Greek grammar is less sensitive to word order in that way).
Howard entirely agrees with this. So you can’t cite Howard against this point. Howard’s mistake was not recognizing that Brothers of the Lord is a shared class with Apostles. Had he realized that, he could not (and probably would not) have raised his objection at all. He was operating under the mistaken assumption that Brothers of the Lord was another subset of Christians, not the superset of Apostles. His argument only makes sense on that presupposition. Therefore, against a hypothesis that rules out that presupposition, Howard cannot advance this argument. It simply isn’t then applicable.
Which is my entire point in OHJ.
But alas, I can’t help when critics are too incompetent to understand what my argument is, then fuck up the Greek, getting its construction exactly backwards, and then conflate different arguments a century apart, to come up with some ridiculous Frankenstein’s monster of nonsense like this. We already knew Tim O’Neill isn’t a competent or trustworthy authority. This is just one more example.
I love reading good analysis of Greek text, and I’ve really enjoyed reading this post.
I do understand that what’s being discussed in the post has to do with evaluating arguments, and using this Galatians passage as an example. But – in the process of reading the post, I got curious: does it matter for some reason whether James was (or wasn’t) seen as an apostle at that time?
I know the question is off the actual topic, but, if you have a moment, I’d sure be interested to know…
I’m not sure what you are asking. But the importance (or relevance?) of that singular question does get discussed in those Bible commentaries that cover this debate (basically, any commentary that cites or has Trudinger in its bibliography; I cite some in OHJ where this comes up, and at least one in this article, e.g. Betz).
In the mainstream debate, it matters to the question of whether any of Jesus’s family were Disciples, or whether they were given special rank in the church or in fact not even apostolic rank, or even in the movement at all; and to whether the James in Galatians 2 is the same or a different person from the James in Galatians 1; and who the James is in 1 Corinthians 15:7 (if one concludes that isn’t an interpolation) and what that verse might be referring to. Fundamental facts that require settling before constructing any history of the early church correctly. Likewise when one wants to try and test the merits of later legends about this James, for again reconstructing what is true and what is mythical about the early church. For examples of the problems see my discussion vis-a-vis MacCulloch (first here and then search the word “James” here).
It’s just an unexpected consequence of siding with Trudinger in these debates that if the James in Gal. 1 isn’t an apostle, and he thus isn’t the James mentioned in Gal. 2 or 1 Cor. 15, then he was merely a rank-and-file Christian—and rank-and-file Christians we know were all considered Brothers of the Lord, which now casts into question that phrase’s biological meaning in Gal. 1 (even a few historicist scholars have come to this same conclusion; because that Jesus didn’t really have any brothers, or that none of Jesus’s brothers joined the church, doesn’t entail mythicism).
re:
OK – I think that right there really answers my question. Thanks!
Longenecker cites Trudinger 1975, Howard 1977 and concludes:
That’s simply repeating Howard. It isn’t correct, as noted. Trudinger already refutes this attempt to read it enumeratively. That is in fact his entire argument: on why it has to be differentiative (all of Trudinger’s arguments are to that point).
It is common of Christian apologists to just repeat a refuted argument in response to the refutation, hoping (I guess?) that no one checks so as to notice that that is not a response to that refutation but just a repetition of what was refuted.
In all the commentary cited, no one seems to bring up that, any time Paul mentions Peter and a James in the same sentence, any normal reader would assume he means Apostles Peter and James. So, if Paul doesn’t want us to assume that, he has no choice but to say so. I.e., did Paul have access to any more natural way to say “and James but not one of the apostles” than he chose? If he did, we might be obliged to list other ways to interpret what he chose to write instead of it, but if what he wrote is the most economical way to express it, we can stop.
It seems worth mention in any discussion that, given how many Jameses there were, you would usually need to specify which James you mean any time you name one. As (I think) he tells us nothing further about this James, Paul must know the Galatians are aware of a non-apostle James who goes about with Peter, making what Paul did write precise enough. (We don’t need to step from there to shipping Peter / Jesus’s brother.)
Correct.
Indeed, since Paul is making a plea to an audience he has already told his story to, all his references in Galatians 1 are to things the Galatians already know the backstory to (like his trip to Arabia, which is why he gives no further details about that here). So it needn’t even have been a James who often hung with Peter; it could simply be the one James he met only the one time, as per what would have been his previous account to the Galatians in person.
I repeatedly find “expert” scholars, working over many decades, missing such gross details. Frank Hughes recently expressed utter confidence in post-80 dating of 1 Clements and in authenticity of 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16 and 2 Thessalonians, despite blatant anachronisms. Kipp Davis insists the “Lord’s brothers” getting family subsidies in 1 Corinthians 9:5 must be Jesus’s birth-siblings, with church officers apparently left to fend for themselves.
It is hard to believe the miserable condition of NT scholarship, even given the numerous examples you cite, until one digs in and finds yawning abysses not just here and there, but everywhere one looks. It seems miraculous that the spurious letters of Paul were recognized.
Here is Kipp Davis on a recent YouTube forum;
“So, if you understood the original languages and how the genitive and vocative forms function, you would also see that this is not “reaching.” In the two instances where Paul mentions the “brother of the Lord,” you cannot simply ignore the genitive qualifier, nor the significance of Paul’s decision to use it. When Paul says τὸν ἀδελφὸν τοῦ κυρίου, it IS NOT the same as saying τὸν ἀδελφὸν. Just from a practical standpoint, when Paul is addressing other Christians (other “Brother of the Lord,” in your flawed estimation), then, he would not make a point of singling out one or a handful of this group with the group qualifier. In the Galatians passage, when Paul identifies “James the Christian,” this is a completely meaningless qualifier to his audience—it adds no information at all. Also, Carrier has badly obfuscated Paul’s language of fictive kinship. Yes, he frequently calls his fellow Christians “brothers,” and “sisters” all the time, but these are always in the VOCATIVE form, meaning that the relationship is ALWAYS in from his perspective—they are “MY brothers.” Yes, part of Paul’s theology is adoption into the Family of God at baptism, and this is what secures the relationship of believers TO ONE ANOTHER. The implication is that all Christians are also brothers of Christ, the son of God, but, Paul is also careful to NEVER make this explicit claim for anyone other than James and the human family of Jesus. I know that the arguments Carrier makes seem convincing to a lot of people without much training in the languages or the literature, but if you understand the texts and how the languages work, it’s completely untenable, which is why no scholars anywhere have adopted his bad readings of these expressions.”
That’s both false and illogical.
First, Greek has no vocative case. And its vocative grammar doesn’t work the way Kipp is describing. This suggests to me he doesn’t know Greek.
Second, Kipp is confusing possessive with vocative (“my” brother is a possessive, not a vocative [compare “your brother”]). Which suggests to me that Kipp doesn’t even know grammar.
Third, it isn’t even true. Paul frequently uses fictive kinship language without the possessive or the vocative. I cite several examples in my note on this point in On the Historicity of Jesus [I just linked to many more above, there of the possessive non-vocative; there are also many non-possessive non-vocative uses in Paul, e.g. here are just a few examples; and none of these lists is at all comprehensive]. Which sugsts to me Kipp has never read the actual peer reviewed argument he is supposed to be responding to, and has done no research to even check if his claim is true (it’s not).
In fact, it is really illogical of Kipp to complain that Gal 1:19 and 1 Cor. 9:5 aren’t in some sort of possessive address. Neither passage is an address. It is a description. So why would we expect it to take the addressive format? This is nonsensical. [In other words, that sometimes (and only sometimes) Paul uses fictive kinship language in vocative position or function has no logical relevance to anything here.]
By contrast, Paul often speaks objectively about these brothers without “addressing” them, and indeed does so in the very passage where Paul explains what Kipp is trying to make go away by false, ignorant, and illogical rhetoric here (hence Romans 8:29, where Christians are “conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters”).
The genitive simply captures this fact (brothers of the Lord is just the converse of firstborn of many brethren, just as it would be the converse in a biological case: there is no difference grammatically whether the relationship is biological or ritual, the same grammar would be used to signal either).
Finally, Paul IS saying more than just brother: Brother of the Lord is a real thing, as all Christians fundamentally believed they were saved because they were adopted as sons by God and thus his Lord’s brother. This was a real brotherhood for them, with real metaphysical effects. It just isn’t trivially biological.
Kipp is simply ignoring the real issue here, which is whether Brother of the Lord means biology or adoption. The adoption explanation is all throughout Paul, who explains it in detail. The biological angle is nowhere in Paul. So…why are we insisting on biology (for which there is no evidence in Paul) rather than accepting it’s adoption (for which there is a ton of evidence in Paul)?
So it makes no sense to say you wouldn’t refer to a group this way (Paul does: it’s plural in 1 Cor. 9:5) as if on the biological theory Jesus only had one brother (he doesn’t in the legends found in the Gospels).
Whereas it does make sense that Paul needs to specify that this James is merely a Christian and not an apostle (since the only times he uses the full phrase “Brother of the Lord” is when he is doing that). That’s the same thing Kipp wants to claim: that Paul is doing this to distinguish James (and the brothers in 1 Cor. 9:5) from the apostles as a distinct class of some kind (there therefore being some special reason it matters that they are biological kin and not just believers or even apostles, since when Paul lists the ranks in the church, the top is apostle, and brothers “of the Lord” aren’t even listed).
So Kipp’s theory contradicts itself. It just as well works for the adoption hypothesis; in fact, it is in every way identical, but for whether the kinship is real or fictive in the modern sense (a mere matter of the trivia of biology), which none of the grammar Kipp is going on about can tell you. You can only work that out by context (which kind of brotherhood does Paul go on about in his letters).