Saturday, August 25, 2018
MY RECURRING APPEAL
If you were watching a detective
show on TV and you saw one detective repeatedly messing up the crime scene, you
would be screaming at the TV to get that detective out of there. But make that
same detective a historical Jesus scholar and we have a totally different
reaction. Historical Jesus scholars contaminate the scenes in the New Testament
with their ideology so that no one will see what the evidence says. Instead of
screaming at them, we want them to remain on the scene and continue to obscure
the evidence.
On the TV show, along comes
another detective who sees what’s going on and fights to get that first
detective removed from the scene. He is the detective the audience will root
for. But in real life, in the case of historical Jesus studies, there is no
hero cop who comes along to keep the crime scene sacred and uncontaminated. And
if he did come around, he would immediately be dismissed. We are all still
rooting for the detectives who are introducing bias into the investigation.
Why do we root for the good cops
over the bad cops on TV? Because correctly solving the crime matters. We want
the real guilty party caught and prosecuted. We think it is an injustice to
punish the innocent for something they never did. We get itchy under our skin
if we see that this is about to happen. But we don’t think that way in
historical studies. We want traditional views about history upheld. We just
assume that scholars would never commit an injustice and if they did, we would
rather not know it.
I have brought up TV detective
shows many times before. There is no other place, in either fiction or real
life, where you will find such pure dedication to truthseeking. The writers of
these shows understand scientific method better than anyone on the planet. I
only wish some of them—how about at least one?—would use their wisdom and apply
it to history.
The first rule of good historical
study should be: Do not contaminate the scene; report the evidence accurately;
don’t let even a little bit of ideology color the way we look at the evidence.
Here are some examples:
Scholars constantly talk about
Jewish leaders putting Jesus on trial or subjecting him to some kind of
judicial procedure. But the Gospels do not say that. They never use the word
trial when describing the meeting between Jesus and Jewish leaders. All
scholarly talk of a trial or procedure is a scholarly bias which they have
injected into the evidence. An informal meeting would be a more correct
description of what is going on. The evidence should be described in such a way
(that is, in an accurate way) as to keep our minds open.
Again, we are repeatedly told
that in Mark and Matthew, Jewish leaders find Jesus guilty of some infraction
of Jewish law. But the Gospels don’t say that. All they say is that Jesus was found
deserving of death. Period. Deserving death under Jewish law or Roman law? The
Gospels do not say. Under which law is simply omitted. If scholars want to say
the Gospel authors meant Jewish law, that is their interpretation (and a bad
one it is), but it is not a piece of evidence in the Gospels. The scholarly
approach is aimed at shutting down any consideration of the possibility that
Roman law was meant. They do not want anyone to see what the uncontaminated
Gospel evidence looks like.
It should be well-known by now
that the Gospels do not use the Greek word for betray, prodidomi, to describe Judas’s deed, but a neutral word, paradidomi, which has no connotation of
betrayal. But an overwhelming majority of scholars still talk as if a betrayal
by Judas was a fact in the Gospels, when it is really an interpretation (a bad
one) of evidence in the Gospels.
Some scholars may argue that
betray is a secondary meaning of paradidomi,
which seems highly doubtful, but even if they are right, they would have to
justify why a secondary meaning should be used to translate that word when
there are no concrete details backing up that translation. There is no clear
motive given for the alleged betrayal, and no conflict between Judas and Jesus
or his fellow disciples. We just assume these things. All the evidence in
connection with Judas (with possibly only one exception) is ambiguous. Why is
there only ambiguous evidence? Scholars do not want this evidence correctly
reported, so they pretend that the betrayal is not an interpretation of the
evidence, but a piece of evidence itself. This is as bad as contaminating the
DNA evidence at a murder scene, but no one wants to see that.
That is just a handful of
examples. So once again, I appeal to any writers of detective shows who may
happen upon this lonely blog, to consider looking into this. If true scientific
acumen were applied to historical Jesus studies, what grand things we might
discover. What other interpretation might better explain the Gospel evidence
than the one that is currently imposed on the evidence?
© 2018 Leon Zitzer
